Shelter (1994) by Jayne Anne Philips Page A

gained the path. The woods stretched before them, dense, connected shapes surprisingly the same, but the color of the night had altered.

PARSON: THE GIRL WHO WAS A FISH
    He awakens in witch's light, the light of the Devil's love, night light made luminous by moon glow and mist rising off the water. Now the night is coolest and T\irtle Hole, warmed by the sun, drifts a moist, low-lying cloud. Moonsmoke, Preacher had called it, smelling the air in Calvary, where a stream behind the rickety wooden porch of the house charged the air with a similar languid wet on summer nights. Where was Preacher now? Dead and rotted, and Parson wakes at this hour, always, near midnight, rolling up toward consciousness the way words rolled up on the bottom of the plastic 8 ball Preacher had kept at the house. It's how prayer moves, he'd say, cloudy and clear, come and go; waking those years, Parson would often hear him reading aloud, conversing with a heavenly ghost. Later, in prison, Parson woke to nothing, dead air, the men rocked shut in acres of separate cells. Here the air is so alive it tingles, alive with all of them, all the children breathing their milky sleep, pearling the night with their breath. It's a kind of heaven he's found, and the evil that could hurt such innocence was great, it wouldbe an evil unafraid of good, an evil thriving as shadow of every gesture and desire, every future. Time moved that way, and disease, and fire ate that way, catching the edge and burning toward the center. Burning to follow Carmody, find him, Parson had waited a week after Carmody's parole, then walked off a work detail, easily, carefully, overlooked after seven years as a slow and powerful child, content, dementedly religious, afraid of the outside. He'd walked off with just the clothes he wore, his Bible strapped to his stomach under his shirt, walked the first few miles, his prison blues not so different from any laborer's clothes. A trucker at a gas station gave him a ride straight out of Carolina, gave him a map. Parson found a half-familiar cluster of names and marked those names with the cross of the Lord—Winfield, Bellington, Gaither, town names printed smaller and smaller, and the camp, Camp Shelter, set off as a small pastel square, a forest preserve, yes, preserved, in the northern part of the state. Carmody had said he lived at Shelter, hell no, wasn't no town, just a dirt road and a few hicks, each with a couple of acres, and a church full of crazies down the bend. The women yelling and rolling, Carmody had laughed, fuck Jesus blind if they could, and Parson thought, in the jostle and roar of the truck cab, of Jesus, the mystery, taking a woman to Him as Preacher had taken women, sometimes in Parson's little room, on Parson's cot, pious women feverish with guilt or want. Preacher was a big man, heavy, clothed in black and the dark woolen coat he wore in winters; beneath him the women seemed prostrate as he worked over them, performing a sacrament that elicited the heavy breathing of hard labor. Sent out for wood, Parson looked in the window near the foot of the bed and watched, seeing only Preacher's backside and the women's white legs straddling the edges of the narrow cot or flung up over Preacher's behind. He was too big to hold in his bulky clothes and their flimsy, imploring limbs seemed useless. Parson could see nothing, really, the women saw nothing, it was fast and hard and Preacher got inside them without taking off their clothes, without removing his own, then he sat up over them, still panting, pulled them upright and prayed over them. It wasn't the young girls who came around but the older women, thin ones, dried out and wan like something had left them too long in the sun. Left for dead, Preacher would say, and they never told, only never came back, or returned when they couldn't stay away. They needed that punishing comfort, the sharp heat of it, Preacher said, and he was a grievous sinner tempted by need, a sinner as