“She saidwhat?”
“She said it would be an honor to be executed unjustly, like Jesus.”
“Well, well. If that don’t beat all! I’d sure like to meet this woman.”
“Yeah, the two of you’d get along real well, putting the pope to one side for a while.”
“You think she was serious?”
“I guess. That was the saint part talking, though. There’s another part in there that’s not so nice.”
“That don’t signify,” said Barlow dismissively. “There’s demons in us all. Go ahead, what happened then?”
Paz finished his tale, adding the business about Wilson and Packer and Cortez and the material from the first volume of the diaries. After that, Barlow thought for a while, leaning his ladderback chair up against the side of his house and chewing on a toothpick, staring into space. Paz knew better than to interrupt him at this juncture.
They were called to supper.
Barlow let his chair go forward with a thump. “It don’t work, Jimmy,” he said. “I can’t say for sure without seeing this girl, but she didn’t do it. The frame’s too obvious and sloppy. I think she was telling the plain truth. She was set up and she just walked into that room like she said. They knew you’d be up, and they knew you’d find her, and the murder weapon, and they knew you’d believe she was crazy. Uh-huh, I see you’re confused. That’s cause we always look at the victim, why was he killed, who were his enemies, what was he doing in the twenty-four hours before he died and so forth.”
“Boys!” from the house. Barlow opened the screen door.
Paz followed him in. “And…?”
“It ain’t him, it’s her. She was why he was killed. He was just a convenience. They wanted her, not him. Well ain’t this nice!”
The table was spread with food, steaming platters of mashed potatoes oozing butter, chicken-fried steaks the size of hubcaps, chunks of corn bread, enough bean salad to flatulate Orlando. Barlow went to wash up and Paz drew Lorna aside.
“And did you help cook all this?” he asked.
“Oh, right! I was put in a corner like a porcelain doll while Edna did all. She considers herself lucky not to have to castrate bull calves too.”
“You disagree, obviously. I hope you gave Edna the full feminazi treatment.”
“I know you’re loving this. In fact, I personallywould like to castrate bull calves. According to any number of my boyfriends I’ve been doing it figuratively for some time.”
“You shared that point with Edna, of course.”
“What is this, some kind of test? You’ve brought the whole University of Girl through here to bounce them off Edna?”
Paz thought about this. With some surprise in his voice he said, “No, you’re the first one.” Lorna did not know what to say to that.
They sat down, Cletis at the head of the table, and he said grace. Lorna had heard grace said at the Waitses’ house before this, but it was a routine, with one of the children rushing through it. But here there was a silence before, and Cletis Barlow really seemed to be communicating his thanks to God. As always, Lorna was faintly embarrassed. She looked over at Paz, who seemed to be in a trance. Grace concluded, she turned to the food. She was unfortunately not at all hungry, although she had been too upset by Emmylou’s fit to think about lunch. There was something wrong with her gut, and it was an effort to get down enough food to avoid insult. The Barlows, who obviously ate such meals all the time, were all lithe and gnarly as vines. Maybe God kept them thin. It was a possibility. Paz was eating like a machine. Bright chitchat was apparently not expected at the Barlow table.
Paz was eating hard so as to avoid unprofitable mental excursions. Of course it was the girl, or woman, Dideroff, and not the hapless Sudanese official. He had discussed that very thing with Oliphant, but as one of a number of baffling possibilities, and had Cletis still been his partner, they would have nailed it the first day, and of course Cletis would’ve taken one look at the woman, had a nice talk about Jesus and the saints, and come up with the right answer in about six minutes. He had to talk to Cletis some more, but not just now; Barlow placed a Chinese wall between home and work, not that it was his work anymore, but still….
The clattering of cutlery and other eating noises slowed. Mrs. Barlow urged further consumption. They tried, faltered, failed. Mrs. Barlow sighed, observed they would just have to throw it away, and stood up, casting a meaningful eye on Lorna, who felt herself pulled to her feet by tidal prefeminist forces. She began to help clear, although when collecting Paz’s things, she was inspired by his self-satisfied grin to pour a little iced tea onto his lap. Oops! He had the nerve to laugh.
Dessert was pineapple upside-down cake sweetened fully as much as the laws of physical chemistry allowed and thin sour coffee. Talking was apparently allowed during dessert. James was on Lorna’s right, and he told all about his recent Boy Scout trip. He was an Eagle and an assistant scoutmaster. Lorna had never sat next to a Boy Scout before. Waves of wholesomeness wafted from him, and he blushed whenever Lorna spoke. Then Cletis said, “Lorna, Jimmy here tells me you saw a lady drive out a demon.”
Now it was her turn to blush. “I’m not sure what I saw,” she said.
“I take it you don’t believe in demons.”
“I don’t believe that’s the cause of mental illness, no.”
“What’s the cause then, would you say?”
“A variety of things. If you’re talking about frank psychosis, schizophrenia, most authorities believe it’s a chemical imbalance in the brain.”
“And what causes them?”
“Genetics in some cases, maybe environment; it’s not clear. They used to think it was bad families, but they don’t think that anymore.”
“Hmm. So what’s your explanation of what you saw?”
“I don’t know. It all happened so fast. I might have been confusing what I observed after the orderlies sedated him with what happened just before, when Emmylou was touching him.”
She saw a look pass between Barlow and Paz, a sly smile from the former, and on the face of the latter an expression that could have been embarrassment.
“Yeah, you might’ve been confused. Witnesses sometimes are. But what’re you going to think when you go back to that hospital and find what’s-his-name, Masefield, is as sane as you are?”
“That’s really unlikely.”
“But just suppose.”
“Well, in that case, I’d have to put it down to spontaneous remission. It’s rare but it does happen.” She paused. Everyone was watching her, not like a gang of inquisitors, but like a family watching to see baby try something new. “But I still wouldn’t believe in demons.”
“Well, that’s interesting. So you’re closed off to any way of accounting for what your eyes see and your ears hear, except where it fits into your kind of explanation, even when that explanation doesn’t make a lot of sense. Spontaneous remission? Why, that sounds like a fancy way of saying ‘Heck, it beats me!’ “
“It beats believing in demons,” snapped Lorna, her temper rising.
Barlow said, ” ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.’ Isaiah, 55:9. Let me tell you a story, explain where I’m coming from. One time there was a wild young man. He cursed, he drank, he committed acts of violence and fornication, he broke every commandment but number six. He hadn’t killed anyone yet, but that was just because he hadn’t met anyone who he thought wanted killing. Well, one day that changed. He’d run a load of moonshine down from Georgia for this fella, and the fella had paid him some money and promised him more at delivery. Well, he delivered it all right, but the fella said he didn’t owe him nothing more, and he just kind of grinned and passed looks around at all the men who were there waiting to get their liquor, and our young man couldn’t do a thing, on account of the fella was armed and so were all the other men, they were that kind of men. So he was angry as a kicked-up nest of hornets and he goes running back to his truck, and takes his sixteen-gauge shotgun down from the rack and loads it up and he’s got his hand on the door on the way to murder, when he sees that he ain’t alone in that pickup truck. Lord Jesus is sitting right there on the passenger seat, looking just like a regular man. And Jesus looked that young man in the eye and all the love and forgiveness in the world flowed into him and he heard the voice of Jesus say, ‘Son, put up your weapon and go on home and sin no more.’ And he did. Well, that’s a true story and that young man was me, praise the Lord.”