Page 14 of Blood Hymn

I photograph the whole board and then each pumpkin one at a time, and I'm tucking the phone away when shoes squeak on the tile behind me.

"Those are the kids," Tyler Guidry offers. "For the gathering."

"They're sweet."

"Brother Nate does it every year. The youth carry candles down to the water." He's standing too close with his hands jammed in his pockets. "You coming? To the gathering?"

"Wouldn't miss it."

He holds my eyes a second too long, then nods and heads back up the hall.

I find Charlotte in the parking lot, plead a headache, and promise to call her this week. She holds me for a long time by the truck door and tells me she's praying for me. When I climb in, Silas is exactly where I left him, and he doesn't make a sound until we're a mile down the highway.

"How many?”

"Eleven." I pass the phone back over the seat. "Eleven kids with pumpkins. One of them has 302 written on it. That's the number in the hymnal they set in front of me."

He's quiet for a while, scrolling.

"Roach. Her mama married Wendell Pruitt a few years back."

"I don't know him. I don't know her. She'd have been around ten or so when I left."

"She works at the diner on 8. I've watched her on the lunch shift."

It's twelve-fifteen on a Sunday. Every church in the parish is emptying onto the highway, and every one of them is headed to the same place.

The Pecan House is packed. We park around back by the dumpster, and Silas stays in the truck while I walk in through the kitchen door like I'm hunting the restroom. Nobody stops me, because on a Sunday after church nobody stops anybody in the Pecan House. I sit at the end of the counter and order sweet tea. It takes forty minutes for Nellie Roach to come off the floor for her break, and I know her the second she pushes through the kitchen doors with her apron over her arm, because she walks like she's apologizing for taking up room.

She's small, with mousy brown hair in a ponytail and a scrunchie and a cross on a chain. She goes out the back to sit on an overturned bucket by the dumpster and eat a biscuit wrapped in a napkin. I follow her out and sit on the step beside her.

"You're Evie Price." She gets there before I can open my mouth. "You're Dee's sister."

"You knew Dee?"

"She trained me." Her face crumples and then smooths back out fast, like she's been practicing that too. "She was nice to me. She was nice to everybody. I'm really sorry."

"Thank you."

We sit there. She picks at the biscuit. A log truck roars by on 8, and the wind blows a paper cup across the gravel.

"Brother Nate tells me you've been called."

Her mouth falls open. "How'd you know that?"

"I saw your pumpkin."

"Oh." She laughs, embarrassed, and ducks her head. "It's not a big deal. It's just the candles. We walk down to the water at the gathering and sing. Only he picked me to lead this year, to go first. He told me the Lord put my name on his heart." She pulls the scrunchie out and twists it back in, a nervous habit. "Mama cried. She claims it's the biggest honor a girl in this church can get. She was never picked."

"Did he tell you what happens after the candles?"

"There's a special prayer. Just for the called ones. Out at the far end of the cemetery where it's quiet." She hesitates. "I'm not supposed to tell anybody. Not even Mama. He made me promise it stays between me and the Lord."

I think about Delilah on the tile floor of her bathroom with the pen tearing through the paper.

"Nellie. Did Dee ever get picked?"

The biscuit stops halfway to her mouth.