Page 48 of Blood Hymn

He isn't looking at me. He's looking at Silas.

"You came back," he breathes.

Silas lifts his head against the plaster.

"You said you would. You said it with your knife in my throat." Judah shakes his head slowly. "Six years I've slept with a pistol under my pillow. Six years, and every night I told myself you were dead in the marsh, and every morning I knew you weren't. And look at you now." Something like pity crosses his face. "Bleeding on my father's floor for a Price girl. My daddy made you, Silas. He made you the finest thing this family ever had, even though your mother was a whore. You could've been beside me. You were ours."

"I was never yours," Silas answers. "I was his. And he's dead."

He doesn't say anything else. He turns his head against the wall and looks at me. That's all. He looks at me, and I understand it the way I've understood everything he's told me without words since the barn. He's waited six years to stand where I'm standing. He's giving it to me.

This one's mine.

I walk up the aisle.

My bare feet leave wet prints on the old pine boards. The hymn on the turntable is still playing, scratchy and far away. Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine. The river water drips off the hem of the white dress. I hold the Glock down along my thigh.

Judah watches me come. His hands stay on the Bible.

"Evie Price," he says. "You have your mama's walk. Did anybody ever tell you that?"

I don't answer. I stop at the altar rail.

"She walked right up that same aisle," he goes on, "the night Daddy sent for her. Walked in thinking she was going to talk sense to us. Head up, just like you." He sighs. "I'll tell you what I told her. What I told your sister, too, though I wasn't there for the end of that. This isn't cruelty. You think it's cruelty, because you're young and you've been out in the world, and the world has told you that's what it is. It's order. It's how a parish holds together. A family keeps a place, and the place keeps its peace, and once a year the Lord asks us to prune what's gone wild before it spreads. My great-granddaddy knew it, and his before him, and on back. Your mama's people knew it once, before she forgot. It's an old, hard mercy. But it's mercy."

"Mercy," I repeat.

"Your sister was called, Evie. She was called, same as you. There's no shame in it. There's grace in it, if you'll let there be." He opens one hand toward me, palm up, the way Douglas used to at the end of a sermon. "You can still lay it down. Right here. Put that gun on the altar, and kneel, and it can be quiet. Charlotte's here. She'll witness for you. You won't be alone. Nobody ever is. That's the whole point of it."

Behind him, in the doorway of the vestry to the left of the altar, a small white-haired shape stands in a cranberry cardigan, clutching the frame with one spotted hand.

Charlotte.

She came to witness. Of course she did.

I look back at Judah. He's still holding out his hand.

"Every sister," I tell him. "Every mother. Every girl on that wall under Front Street."

I raise the Glock and fire.

The first round goes into his chest and knocks him back a step against the cross. The second goes in beside it. He grabs the edge of the altar, and his face is surprised. I keep firing, and I keep saying names. Delilah. Marianne. Hazel. Doris. Kaylee Guidry. Tammy Fontenot. Sarah Beth Oubre. Rose Harlowe. I say every name I read on that wall that I can remember, one name for every trigger pull, and I don't stop when he falls behind the altar, and I don't stop when he stops moving. I walk around the altar and stand over him and keep going until the slide locks back and there's nothing left to fire.

The hymn plays on. The needle has reached the end of the record, and it's skipping, the last chord repeating over and over, scratchy and soft.

I lower the gun.

"Evie." It's barely a whisper. "Evie, baby."

Charlotte has come out of the vestry doorway. She's standing at the corner of the altar in her cardigan and her good church shoes, shaking, her hand pressed flat against her chest where my mother's cross used to hang. Her eyes are wet and enormous.

"Baby," she breathes. "Look what you've done. Look at you. You're just like I always said. You're exactly what I always knew you'd be." She reaches for me with a trembling hand. "It's all right now. It's all over. Let's go home. We'll go home, and I'll run you a bath, and we'll never speak of it again. I cleaned it up before. I can clean it up again. Let me take care of you."

I look at her hand.

It's the hand that checked my mother's spelling. The hand that held hers at the end. The hand that phoned in my sister's depression and penciled my pew and poured sweet tea for me with something bitter in it.

I don't take it. I take her by the wrist instead, gently, the way you'd lead an old woman across a street, and I walk her backward into the vestry.