Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet (shoe dog free ebook .txt) 📕

on a garish tie-dye and paint-splattered overalls. They ate their dinner with wool blankets draped over their shoulders, muddy feet wrapped in donated towels beneath the table.

Ben ate two helpings of the spaghetti. He ate buttery garlic bread and a heap of salad, relishing all of it. The low hum of conversation in the background was a lullaby for tired legs and arms, for the end of a long climb, and no one said much.

After dinner Oppenheimer smoked a cigarette, since his pipe had fallen off the porch rail and broken. He announced he was going to take a shower and walked back into the building; and a few minutes later Ben wandered past the shower room on his way to the outhouse. Turning his head he caught a glimpse of Oppenheimer sitting hunched on a bench beneath a showerhead, naked and thin, the water coursing over him.

On the tiled floor knelt a woman, washing his feet. Wet dirt streamed down into the round grate of the drain and Ben watched the brown grit carried, swirling. He thought he could hear the woman crying, but he was not sure.

Not stopping, walking past and seeing this only in a quick flash of perception, embarrassed by the intimacy, Ben was thinking only a few seconds later that he must have imagined it. After all Dory had been on the cabin porch, reading with a sharp-scented citronella candle burning on a small wicker table beside her.

On his way back from the outhouse he peered into the shower room again, but this time it was dark and both Oppenheimer and the washing woman had disappeared.

Over breakfast Szilard announced they would tour the eastern seaboard before turning back and making their way to the capital.

He insisted on bacon with his pancakes and the bus was filled with smoke and the smell of bacon grease. Ann opened the door for fresh air and saw Big Glen approaching at a rapid clip, sweating, with four Huts arrayed behind him.

—We got problems, he said, stepping up into the bright-white vinyl kitchen.

—What problems, man? asked Larry, who was rolling a joint.

—There’s a situation developing with the Christians.

All of them looked up at him then, waiting.

—Which Christians? asked Szilard.

—The Fundamentalists, said Big Glen. —They sent a representative to bring a message to us. I just met with him. Guy with a prosthetic arm?

—Go on, said Szilard, forking up bacon.

—They want, uh, what did they say. “A Christian voice in the leadership.”

—What? asked Szilard.

—They say they make up 85 percent of the followers. That’s what they claim. And they say that as the majority they deserve representation in the leadership of the campaign. Which they call the mission.

—Tell them if that’s what they want they can just leave, said Szilard. —They can clear out today. There’s no way.

—But it’s most of the followers, said Glen, and pulled a small notepad out of his breast pocket. He flipped it open and traced a finger down some figures scrawled on the page, Ann craning her neck to see over his arm. His printing was careful and labored, all in capital letters. —According to them, it’s now about twenty-three hundred out of three thousand. And they say the percentage is growing.

—I will not be blackmailed, said Szilard.

—At least meet with them, said Ann. —Show them some respect.

—Exactly, said Tamika. —People just want to feel included, Dr. Leo. You know? It’s probably a cry for help.

They went down the mountain at dawn while the mob was still asleep. With the weakly lit sky below them they crossed a bog by teetering on rotting logs between hummocks and jumping from mound to mound, feet sinking into the wet turf.

Ben looked into the brown water and saw insects dimpling the surface with their hair-thin feet. Then he glanced up at the trees on a ridge in front of them, where the ground would be dry again. When the mud sucked at his feet and he had to pull them loose from the suction he looked ahead to the dry ground and tried to think he was already there.

Later he sat on a damp tree stump batting at mosquitoes while they waited for Dory to finishing peeing, just out of their line of sight.

—Robert, he said into the silence, —excuse me, but I want to know if something I saw was real. Was there a woman in the shower with you last night? Kneeling on the floor and washing your feet?

—I think there was! said Oppenheimer, as if it had just occurred to him as a possibility. He pondered the question further and nodded vaguely, at a memory far too ancient to be clearly recalled.

2

The Christians had set up a large, square pavilion of pale orange. Walking up to the tent with Szilard, Huts marching alongside, Ann thought of medieval battlefields she had seen in movies, of the French Foreign Legion, the temporary quarters of generals and sheiks.

In front of the tent coolers of drinks were arrayed, and fabric folding chairs with cupholders built into the arms.

The door of the tent was furled open, and they went in single-file. At a table sat a row of white men in sweatpants and pastel-colored windbreakers, pasty-faced and middle-aged.

—Please, Dr. Szilard, have a seat. And y’all other folks too.

—Ann, said Ann, reaching out her hand, —and this is Larry and Glen, and they shook hands it in turn.

—Steve Bradley, said the man in the center, who had a fat, ruddy face and a comb-over on his balding pate. He was the one with the prosthetic arm, and it did not have a hook. Ann looked at the prosthetic fingers discreetly. —I’m with the Love of Christ Redeemer. This is Rob with Sixth Pentecostal, and then the fella with the Confederate flag tattoo on his arm—

—Indiscretion of youth!

—that’s Denny with the Baptist Collective. There are almost five hundred Baptists with us today. We are richly blessed with Baptists!

The men laughed heartily.

—So, said Szilard. —You wanted to talk to me?

—We