Time passed, and winter did indeed turn eventually into spring, soggy and swollen and ravaged, which is almost always the case with New Hampshire springs. Renewal seems almost impossible, except as survival alone indicates a potential for it. Noni saw no more of Jesus during these months, but she thought of Him frequently, and she read her Bible, and along about the end of March she started attending services at a small white building located on one of the side streets in town. It was a single-story building that once had been a paint store, just a half-block off Main Street, and the two large windows facing the street had been painted over dark green and a sign in white, wobbly letters had been made in each of them. The one on the right said: CHURCH OF THE NEW HAMPSHIRE MINISTRY OF JESUS CHRIST; on the other side were the words, FOR WHERE TWO OR THREE ARE GATHERED TOGETHER IN MY NAME, THERE AM I IN THE MIDST OF THEM. The people who attended prayer meetings and listened to sermons here were all local people, about twenty in all, and except for Noni, working people. Noni didn’t work because she was supported by her mother who, in turn, was supported by her dead husband who, in his turn, had been supported by the selling of life insurance. Nevertheless, she felt comfortable with these people, mostly because they had been unhappy once, too, and now they were not, and when they talked about their time of unhappiness she knew they had felt then just as she felt now, stupid and unimaginative, with no gifts for the world and no belief that her love was worth giving. It was Jesus, they said, who had changed their lives, for He had found their love to be of infinite worth and their gifts, no matter how slight, to be of great value, and their intelligence and imaginative powers to be apocalyptically superior to the intelligence and imagination of the rest of the people in town. They said to her, when she wept, “Did you never read in the Scriptures, ‘The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner. This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes’?” And then in mid-April, shortly after Easter, Noni saw Jesus a second time, this time in the form of a body of light. He appeared to her one night late while she lay in her bed and tried to sleep. Since joining the Church of the New Hampshire Ministry of Jesus Christ she had given up smoking marijuana, along with alcoholic beverages, sex, cigarette smoking, cursing and cosmetics. All her anxieties and grief fell immediately away, and she came to be filled with the light of Jesus, and when He had passed through her and had gone from her room, she remained filled — but filled now with love, her love of Jesus Himself, and the inescapable logic of that love. From then until now Noni Hubner was a different person. That much was obvious to anyone who knew her, and that much, of course, she told the police when they interrogated her.
She did not quote Him directly, and not just because they didn’t happen to ask her what, exactly, Jesus had asked her to do for Him. It was at the Wednesday evening prayer services, while Brother Joel was preaching, that she had received her instructions, or what she regarded as instructions. Brother Joel was in the front of the room, holding the open Bible in one hand, pointing at the ceiling with the other, shouting and beseeching, berating and explicating, imploring and excoriating to the assembled group of about seventeen or eighteen persons, mostly women of middle age and a few men of various ages, and several of the women were shaking their bodies up and down and rolling their heads back and around, as Brother Joel, a young man from Maine who had settled here last year to commence his ministry, moved to the text of Matthew, chapter eighteen, and read the words of Jesus that begin, “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven,” and when he reached the place where Jesus says, “For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost,” Noni felt herself leave her body behind, watched it fall like an emptied husk to the floor next to her chair, as she ascended into a rosy cloud, where she saw the outstretched hand of Jesus, and into His hand she placed her own, while He pointed with His other hand beyond the cloud and down. She thought for a second to check for the wounds in His hands, as Thomas had done, and a cold wind blew against her and took the doubting thoughts with it. She let her gaze flow to where Jesus indicated, beyond the cloud and down, and in the far distance she saw her father’s grave. It was a summer afternoon, just as it had been when they had buried him, and she knew it was her father’s grave, all right, even though it was covered with grass now and the stone, a common gray granite stone, was too far away for her to read the inscription, for she knew the location, even though she had not been out to his grave in the cemetery on the hill above the river since the afternoon of his burial. Nor had her mother. His grave was at the top of the hill, near a grove of young maple trees, and when the service had been completed by Reverend Baum, her mother’s Congregational minister, Noni and her mother had turned and had got quickly into her mother’s Japanese fastback coupe, and they had driven away and had not come back. From that day till now, almost five years later, Noni’s mother had spoken of her dead husband as if he were merely absent, as if he had driven downtown to get the paper, and Noni had screamed at her several times that first year, “He’s dead! Face it, Mother, Daddy’s dead! Dead! Dead!” And then, after the first year, Noni had ceased screaming, had ceased correcting her mother, had ceased even to reflect on it, and in the end had ceased to observe that, to her mother, the man was neither dead nor alive, for to Noni that’s how it was also — her father was neither dead nor alive. But when she came back to her body lying there on the wood floor of the Church of the New Hampshire Ministry of Jesus Christ, she knew her father was waiting for her, his hand reaching out to her, so she rose to her feet, and she left the building.
At the cemetery, standing with the shovel in the circle of light cast by her mother’s coupe, she waited and listened and heard Jesus moving in the darkness behind her, heard His bare feet press against the wet grass, while He watched over her, and when the policemen came forward and crossed into the circle of light, walking over her father’s grave to her, one of them taking the shovel from her hands, the other holding her arms tightly, as if she might run away, she had no fear. The one holding her arm asked what she thought she was doing, and she told him that she had come to show her mother that her father was dead, so that her mother could be free, as she was free. When they asked where her mother was, Noni was silent for a second and heard Jesus shift His weight in the shadows, and then she told them. While the second policeman went to the coupe and released Noni’s mother from her bonds, Noni silently thanked Jesus for His guidance.