Page 43 of Blood Hymn

"If I knew that, I wouldn't be standing in this goddamn basement."

A pause, long enough that I think they've switched channels. Then a third voice, calm and soft and heavy, that I know from a hundred Sundays in the back pew.

"Nobody says a word to anybody," Judah Harlowe tells them. "The gathering goes forward. Double the men at the fellowship hall until the procession. He wants us to panic. We're not going to panic."

He. Not she. He knows exactly who it is.

"And the Price girl?" somebody asks.

"The Price girl will come to us." Judah sounds almost gentle. "Charlotte says she will. Charlotte's never been wrong about a girl."

The radio goes quiet.

Silas is awake. I don't know how long he's been listening. He's lying on his back looking at the tin roof with his jaw set.

"More men at the hall," I tell him. "That means fewer at the water."

"Until you show yourself." He turns his head. "When they see you, somebody gets on that radio. Every man at that hall hears it. And Judah wants you more than he wants to keep nine girls under guard for another half hour. He'll pull them down to the water to take you."

"You're sure."

"I've worked for that family my whole life. I've never been surer of anything."

I leave the girls at five-thirty with a pistol, a flashlight, a water jug, and the steel door padlocked from the inside. I show Nellie how to rack the slide and where the safety is, and I make her promise that if anybody comes through the reeds who isn't one of us, she shoots first and doesn't stop until they're down. She nods with her chin up. Lacey clings to the back of her pajama top and doesn't look at the gun.

"If we're not back by morning," I tell Nellie, "wait for full daylight, then follow the planking north. It comes out at a road. Walk east until you find a house that isn't in Harlowe Parish, and tell them everything."

"You'll be back."

"If we're not."

She holds my eyes. "You'll be back."

Silas makes it through the water. I don't know how. He moves slower than he did last night, with one hand pressed flat to his left side and the AR slung across his back, and twice I hear his breath catch. But he doesn't stop, and he doesn't let me take his arm. At the lease road, he climbs into the Chevy's passenger seat and sits very still with his eyes closed while I drive.

We come up the ridge the back way, on the gravel road to the reservoir, and I leave the Chevy beside the welding truck behind the cedars. From there he goes on alone, down through the trees on the church side of the bowl toward a stand of live oaks above Harlowe Chapel, where he can see the whole basin and the church steps and the gatehouse on the far slope.

Before he goes, he takes my face in his hands and kisses me, hard and brief, tasting of salt.

"Ten o'clock," he reminds me.

"Ten o'clock."

"Run for the steps."

"I know."

He goes. I watch him until the dark between the oaks takes him.

I wait on the ridge until nine-thirty. Below me, the gathering fills the bowl with light. I've seen it before, as a child, from the long tables beside the church, but never from above, and never knowing. Three bonfires roar on the upper rim, twenty feet high, throwing sparks into the black. The long tables are crowded with casserole dishes and pies and sweating pitchers of tea, and families mill between them in the firelight, children in plastic masks chasing each other between the tombs, old men in lawn chairs, women laughing. Someone has strung paper lanterns along the iron fences of the old family plots. Somebody's playing a guitar near the church. Down at the bottom of the basin, where the ground is lowest and the newest graves lie in flat rows, it's dark and empty and still.

At ten o'clock, the families start to leave.

They go the way they've always gone, without being told, as though a bell has rung that only they can hear. Mothers gather up pie plates and children. Men fold lawn chairs. Headlights come on in the field beyond the church and swing away toward the road one after another, until the long tables stand empty with their paper cloths lifting in the wind and the bonfires burn with nobody around them.

The men who stay are wearing masks.

I watch them come out of the dark along the rim, in twos and threes. A wolf. Another wolf. A goat with curling horns. A white-faced angel with painted gold tears. A pig. A thing with a long black beak like a plague doctor. They gather near the bonfires and stand there without talking, twenty, thirty of them, and the firelight makes their shadows reach down the slope into the graves.