Page 24 of Devil

Out through the doorframe, nearly knocking me over, and I could see the whole house was filled with water up to my waist as I stumbled backward in the flood. My twin mattress floated on the dark water like a raft. Clothes and old magazines caught on my legs like seaweed as they flowed past.

I had no idea that a house could flood from the inside out. I had no idea what someone even did when that happened. I stared and stared and stared, standing stupefied in the rain, watching as the water endlessly rushed out through the doorframe. It only had to go a handful of yards before it met the churning train of the creek, too rough and choked with debris to shimmer when I pointed my flashlight at it.

I could stop.

I could wade into this dark and muddy house and shut myself inside with the ghost of my unhappy mother. I could sit here in the rain and wait for the water to find me. I might be too cold to do much when that happened.

I closed my eyes, throat tight, and quietly begged God to—to—I didn’t even know. Extinguish me like a burning wick between a finger and a thumb. Give me permission to walk right into the creek.

He didn’t do either.

I walked back to my car without closing the door to the house; there didn’t seem to be much point, since it was determined to flood either way. I looked up the hill to where the light on the utility pole glinted against the wet windows of the old farmhouse. The barn would be just past it, with its Gothic arched roof and sliding entrance doors. My great-great-grandparents paid a group of Mennonites to build it out of oak, and it had come down through the years even better than the farmhouse. It was where I’d put my unfinished carvings when I got them back from Evelyn tomorrow.

My carvings. I opened the door and sat inside the car for a moment, not even registering the absence of rain sluicing down my face and neck. My hands flexed as they remembered the feel of the chisel in my hand, the heft of my mallet in the other. The satisfying sound of a gouge sending up an unbroken scroll of wood.

The feeling of warmth and breath andrightnessas I worked, like God was in the air and seating himself inside my lungs with every breath, his happiness with me vivid and palpable.

I couldn’t walk into the creek tonight because I’d already agreed to pay Jim Holsinger for the use of his forklift tomorrow. Because that block of wood with an angel’s hand would sit in the studio unused until it was sold to someone who didn’t know the tree it came from, who hadn’t climbed in its branches and smiled up into the sunshine there.

I shut the car door and drove up to the farmhouse. It wasn’t watertight, and the barn was, so I grabbed my phone and a hoodie that had escaped the bags of clothes I’d dragged into the hill house earlier and walked through the rain to the barn’s massive sliding door. When I rolled it open, the light from the pole outside showed a space long emptied of anything valuable. But there were some old vinyl cushions from an outdoor patio set that my grandparents had once owned, and I dragged those into the center of the room. I swatted off the dust as best as I could, pulled the hoodie on over my wet clothes, and then lay down on my makeshift bed. I had three hours before I’d need to wake up and take Jim’s truck and forklift to Evelyn.

The rain pounded on the roof of the barn and just outside the still-open door. Farther down the hill, my childhood house was filling with water. My stomach rumbled from hunger, and I had to accept that the three remaining granola bars were all I could eat until I could get the electricity and water turned on to the farmhouse so I could cook the ingredients I’d taken from Kaitlyn’s. I’d spent the last of the money not earmarked for Jim Holsinger on the gas to get to the lake and back.

Paxico might let me eat something if I went over and explained things. He might even let me sleep on his couch—although his couch was stacked with clutter, and so was his one bedroom. He slept in his armchair and lived off canned pasta and frozen pizzas from the gas station. He also wasn’t the kind of person who would offer help indefinitely. Life had been hard on him, so he was hard back on it, on the other people living it. He believed in bootstraps and quiet suffering.

I guessed so did I.

I would be hungry and muddy and jobless for a while, maybe a long while, and all because I didn’t resist a pomegranate left on my desk. Because I didn’t know what to do with a rushing pulse and stuttering breath when someone touched me. Because I’d allowed pleasure to brush my lips for once in my silent, lonely life.

Because of Bell.

And now I had nothing. I’d lost my only friend, my reputation, and my job. I had the barest amount of shelter, barely any food, no change of clothes, and a sister who hated the sight of me.

I had a bruise on my jaw, and tomorrow I’d have a block of wood with an angel’s hand beckoning from it.

Lying on the crackled vinyl cushions in the barn was when I finally let myself cry—thick, racking sobs that rivaled the rain outside, sobs that hurt my ribs and throat, sharp, desperate inhales and keening exhales and tears that came so thickly that my eyes were swollen in minutes.

I had nothing.

I had no one.

I had paid for those pomegranates with the entirety of my tiny, miserable, sawdust-scented life.

PART2

NOW

10

BIRDIE

I livein a place called Stranger, Kansas, which isn’t really a place, not anymore. But it was a real place when the Volga Germans started settling along the Kansas Pacific rail line and a real place when several families decided to stay in Topeka rather than travel out to Victoria or Hays. Somehow my own family drifted eastward to Stranger.

That was over 150 years ago now. Kopper became Cooper, my grandfather was the last Cooper to speak a shred of meaningful German, and only the old-timers call this stretch of fields Stranger. But the name still lingers in the steep-sided stream that runs through the farm on its way to the Kansas River: Stranger Creek.

The farm’s address now says Tonganoxie, the town about five miles away. Growing up, Tongie was as small and closed as a curled fist, but over the past few years, things have started to change as the nearby cities have gotten more expensive.Slowlychanging—they’re hardly throwing up Costcos and twenty-four-hour gyms—but enough that they’ve expanded the high school. They built a new Casey’s—a nice one with a separate fuel bay for semitrucks. There’s even a new coffee shop downtown. For as long as I can remember, the only thriving business was the funeral home and the florist shop the undertakers also owned, and now there’s a feeling almost like optimism in the air.

The optimism feels far away from me, though, like it’s happening to another town or to this town but in another life. Maybe it just hasn’t rippled out to Stranger yet. There have been rumors of developers sniffing around land, but nothing concrete, and anyway, it wouldn’t matter much for people like Paxico and me. Even if I could sell the scrappy acres I had left, then what? Prices are up everywhere, and I’d still have to find a place to live. A place I’d have to pay cash for because not even the shadiest bank would approve me for a mortgage.