Vandal Love (10 page)

With time she and Levon had learned to coexist, and while he rambled—extraterrestrial civilizations, theories of Atlantis and invisible planets—she put on silence like an armour. These, what she was reading, were the real books, and she knew him to be a dabbler. But he possessed the longevity of a fool, and though each year he thinned, withered, hardened, he stayed true to the phonetics of his name: (lĭv) (ôn). He might become some stiff, scary looking thing from an import shop, bought on a whim, propped in a corner, but he would never stop talking. And while he diminished towards that far line of horizon, Isa crowded the foreground, and the unsketched space around her she filled first with words and history, then food. Soon Levon’s savings went as much to annotated additions as to jars of marinated artichoke hearts, caviar, fancy breads and cardboard boxes loaded with pastries, chocolate-filled croissants. Her horses sighed under her weight and stood spraddle legged, sad eyed and mugging about like old dogs. She rarely rode them though occasionally took them on walks.

But evenings she spent in regret, looking out at the dark landscape, the seismic shift of night. Downstairs Levon watched TV and reviewed his stocks. The economy was bustle and freight, and he was doing well, laughing at sitcoms. Only her size loosened his grip. She
was no longer the proud possession, the showpiece, and though occasionally he still sat next to her, he appeared to consider her less as a romance than as a frontier he might someday brave. But well after he’d put away his lunar charts and star maps and gone to bed, or on those evenings when he stood by the stream, waiting to be killed—when he’d come up the pasture and nodded his still-living head in her door before retiring—she sat in her study and, quite simply, wished. She read her favourite poems as if casting spells, testing how she might sound in another place or age. She put her books on the floor, cleaned dust from the shelves, alphabetized. She cried. One night she saw a bud of firelight on a nearby pasture.

The next morning, as she was leaving the house, she noticed a few ratty camping tents on the adjoining property. They’d been pitched between the trampled bull’s-eye of a bonfire and a brown van, a trail of crushed grass behind it, JESUS painted in bulky white letters on its sides. And that afternoon, as she was leaving the grocery store in town, she saw the van again, parked at the far end of the plaza, near the Blockbuster Video. A small crowd had formed and a man dressed in black like a Plymouth pilgrim and wearing a dark, wide-brimmed hat was preaching. She opened the hatch of her Honda and put her groceries inside, then crossed the parking lot. The man gesticulated. His white, uneven hair bristled at the brim of his hat. Because she stood a head taller than the crowd, she had an easy view. He looked at her, then again, his glance tangible, like a spark from a wire. She
thought she had imagined it, yet, in the moment, she was certain he’d recognized her. He watched her even as he spoke.

And Jesus will walk among you, he was saying, as he himself began to walk into the crowd, … and touch you one by one on the shoulder …, which he did just then with a gentleness unlike the strength in his voice, … and you will kneel and take his name into your heart.

Soon so many were on their knees that those still standing looked conspicuous and crept away. Though Isa had missed the sermon, she knelt, caring nothing for religion but curious.

We are men of God, he said. We are carrying God’s message to a country that is losing its values, to the children of a country polluted with sex and drugs. But we depend on you to want us, to tell us to continue our mission saving souls.

He gestured towards the van, to where a man sat on the asphalt with a boy on either side. Then she realized that the boys were in fact young men, that the man between them was enormous.

The message of the Gospel can go deep, the preacher said as the giant stood.

With a grabbing sense in her gut Isa felt his size. It was a bodily motion like gravity. He appeared even larger because everyone was kneeling. He wore jeans and a sweat-stained oxford, his face broad as a shovel, dark, uneven sideburns halfway down his jaw. His chest and throat and even the backs of his hands were matted with hair. He ducked his head and glanced about at the crowd.

Barthélemy, the man said, is an orphan from the far north. As a boy, he was found wandering in a blizzard. His parents had frozen to death, and only because of his sheer size and strength, and truly because of the will of God, did he not perish. For years no foster home would take him. He terrified people. Nor could he speak. The doctors believed that the cold had destroyed his vocal cords or that perhaps the sheer terror of seeing his parents die shocked him to silence. When I met him he was still illiterate. I took him with me, and it was with the Bible, the true Gospels of our Saviour Lord Jesus Christ, that he learned to read. This child had been seeking a home, and as a man he has found it in the word of God.

Until then the crowd had seemed interested enough, but now all eyes were riveted on the giant, who stepped forward hesitantly, each of his hands as big as a man’s head.

Barthélemy will go among you, the preacher said. He will seek your aid so that we may continue our mission.

The preacher then took a felt bag from his jacket and handed it to the giant, who withdrew slightly, looking about him, his fear evident now, his eyes wild. Isa could see the waves of compassion and worry pass through the crowd.

Be calm, my boy, the preacher said. Seek the Christian generosity of these good citizens.

Isa was amazed that such things still happened. People emptied their wallets. The way the giant pulled his mouth taut with nervous fear and averted his eyes as
he held out the bag touched her. Only when he stood above and she gave a few dollars did she sense the element of threat, that she might not want to know what this fear could become at its limit.

Afterwards the preacher began a lengthy exhortation. The two young men at the van went among the audience to whisper prayers. Isa received and repeated her own, then another, that she composed just then, invoked silently, eyes on the giant.

It rained that evening, the fire in the nearby pasture extinguished, and when the storm had blown over, insects began to whir and faint steam rose from the ashes into the washed and moonlit sky. Isa sat on the porch. Levon had come up from the stream early. His vigil was occasional now, more a means of keeping appearances. He’d spoken a bit about new research on biological engineering that disproved evolution and showed that every plant and walking thing had been concocted then set upon the earth as if into a showcase. She listened, smiled, and he’d gone to his room. His light had clicked off exactly one hour after the official time of sunset, Most appropriate —he liked to say—and most in concordance with the circadian rhythms. She’d waited, then went in and took two bags of soft cookies from the cabinet.

The road glistened, and as she crossed into the pasture, her pant legs grew heavy with moisture. One of the young men was coaxing the fire, and the other, who’d taken out a guitar, tuned and strummed it and sang
softly, Jesus. Then Barthélemy appeared from the direction of the forest, his arms loaded with sticks.

Hello, she called as the fire lifted into the dead wood. The man in black wasn’t there, just the two who’d gone among the crowd offering salvation, one seated on a plastic bucket, the other on a stool.

Hello, they both said, and God bless and words of thanks as she passed the cookies around, and one sang—For you, he told her—about Galilee. But Barthélemy sat in the open door of the van and began reading a dog-eared Bible though every cookie passed his way he devoured and only when she stood near and held the bag did he look up with a veiled if not indifferent expression.

I’m Isa, she told them.

My name’s Andrew, said the guitarist, a young man with a pale complexion that the firelight made hysterical. He introduced Morris, the other, then pointed and said, That’s Barthélemy. We’re in town a week or so. We’ll be giving a service this Sunday at the Lower Macedonia Baptist Church. You should come.

I will, she told them. What you’re doing is wonderful. Well, goodbye.

They waved and said God bless again, the too-happy, Archie-faced youths, though the giant only glanced at her, a little too long but still indifferent.

That Sunday the man in black —Reverend Diamondstone, the minister introduced him—gave the most
compelling and strange sermon Isa could have imagined, of archangels and wrecking balls and his personal narrative of failure and loss and finally salvation, how he’d gone from being a sinner to a man of the cloth. He described a dream in which he ascended a narrow mountain road in a ’57 Chevy convertible. Everyone in the car was laughing so hard they could barely lift their heads.

Then I looked up, he said, and a black eighteen-wheeler was coming down that road, honking and honking, and we didn’t slow down and there wasn’t even space to turn around. I woke up to honking and saw the archangel Michael. I knew then that I had to leave my wealth for the kingdom of heaven.

The rain started again, drumming the peaked roof. It lasted through the barbecue and singalong and a congregational jubilance that undoubtedly would have finished in starlit prayers without it. Musical instruments and Bibles were held under jackets, white bread soggy, gravy thinning out, the fire hissing like an angry audience.

Though Isa tried to manoeuvre herself near Barthélemy, he stayed close to Diamondstone, who —she could no longer believe she was imagining it—kept an eye on her tack from buffet to picnic table to church porch when the rain battered down, drilling up the loose earth. She might have gone home sooner had she not seen that the giant, too, was watching.

All the while the congregation gathered around Diamondstone, and she wondered at his power. She
could sense him as if he occupied a place of greater density, drawing her gaze the way a black widow on a wall once had when she was cleaning. His prayers were at times long and Byzantine, at others as simple and hokey as country songs, but they always seemed appropriate. He had the ability to slip formidable lines into casual conversation:

In the future we will turn to Jesus as our one sure link to the past. Otherwise we will get lost in the chaos of time.

The fear is not that the earth is invaded by inhuman aliens but that with technology we become those very insectlike invaders ourselves.

Hearing Diamondstone’s coreligionists applaud, Isa doubted her intentions. She was educated, falsely married, and Barthélemy was mute, perhaps half mad and among loony spiritual company. She’d had crushes, once a towering professor, another time a linebacker whom she later saw with his girlfriend propped on his knee. She never passed big men without glancing up, in department stores or in the street, measuring their heft, matching them against her own, against Jude’s. Barthélemy dwarfed any she’d seen.

Only once was she able to get close to him. The clouds had temporarily blown past, sunlight glittering in the late-afternoon sky as if vast and invisible cobwebs had caught raindrops. The congregation strolled the lawns, discussing politics and the Rapture and even guns, though the preferred subject was the eternal sanctity of marriage and its threats. Diamondstone was working the crowd like a socialite, and she wondered what he had to
gain. Then the thundering of an approaching storm resonated in the earth.

Her patience was almost exhausted. She’d been listening in on one circle of conversation after another and decided it was time to leave. But the rain came suddenly, and while others ran for the porch, she found herself beneath the shelter of a gazebo. A second later Barthélemy stepped in next to her.

The downpour shut them off. It was as if they stood in a round windowless room. He opened and closed his hands, his musty odour not unlike that of dry fields in the first minutes of a long-awaited rain. He no longer appeared afraid, his gaze distinct and measuring.

I’m Isa, she said.

In the dark of falling water his eyes shone. Her head barely reached his shoulder and she considered the size of a heart that would suffice for such a man, that could push blood through so much body. What might it want? Desperately, she wondered what to say or do, but he was already turning, stepping through the wall of rain.

That night Isa woke suddenly. She’d been dreaming of Jude though had no one image of him, just a sense of immensity, the way someone might recall the mountains where she’d been born. It took her a moment lying in the quiet dark before she realized that something else had roused her, not the dream. The night was calm and without wind, and she listened until she heard the low
creaking of the porch beneath her window. She got up and looked out. After a few seconds a swatch of shadow shifted near the driveway. A black bear was nosing around the shed where she kept the trash. Often enough in the spring, they came down from the mountains, hungry after the winter. She should have known it was this to begin with. But lying in bed again, an hour passed and it was one in the morning before she admitted to herself that she wouldn’t be able to sleep. The horses had begun to whinny in the pasture, and their skittish hoofbeats were oddly loud. She got up and dressed and went down to the porch. The bear was gone, and she crossed the yard to the stables. Only when she neared the door did she smell the heat of another body. She’d been downwind of bears after hibernation, and she thought of this. Then all at once she placed it.

What do you want? she managed to say, trying to catch her breath.

He came into the moonlight, the edges of his eyes pale.

I’m Isa, she pronounced carefully, considering whether she should run. She pointed to herself.

I can speak, he said. He took a step closer. His face was calm enough. I’m sorry I scared you.

Her heart clamoured in her chest. What are you doing here?

I followed the stream up. I’ve been going into the forest for firewood, and I found a path here. I really didn’t mean to scare you.

It’s okay, she said. Her fear had given way to a sudden, breathless sense of hilarity. And how about French? Do you speak French?