Joe Hill - Horns

When the aisle was clear, Ig stepped out and aside, to let his father and mother and brother go on ahead. But instead of following them, he turned and walked toward the altar and the chancel. When his mother shot a look at him, he pointed in the direction of the back hall, where there was a restroom. You could only pretend you needed to tie your shoe so many times. She went on, her hand on Terry’s arm. Terry was looking back at Ig with narrow-eyed suspicion but allowed himself to be marched away.

Ig hung out in the shadowy back hall that led to Father Mould’s office, watching for her. She returned soon enough, and by then the church was practically empty. She looked around the nave but didn’t see him, and he remained in the darkness, watching her. She walked to the altar of repose and lit a candle and crossed herself and knelt and prayed. Her hair fell to hide her face, and so Ig did not think she saw him as he started forward. He did not feel as if he was walking toward her at all. His legs were not his own. It was more like being carried, as if he were on the shopping cart again; there was that same giddy but nauseating feeling of plunge in his stomach, of dropping off the very edge of the world, of sweet risk.

He did not interrupt her until she lifted her head and looked up.

“Hey,” he said as she rose. “I found your cross. You left it. I was worried when I didn’t see you last Sunday that I wouldn’t have a chance to give it back.” He was already holding it out to her.

She tugged the cross and its slender chain of gold from his hand and held it in hers.

“You fixed it.”

“No,” Ig said. “My friend Lee Tourneau fixed it. He’s good at fixing things.”

“Oh,” she said. “Tell him I said thanks.”

“You can tell him yourself if he’s still around. He goes to this church, too.”

“Will you put it on?” she asked. She turned her back to him and lifted her hair and bent her head forward, to show him the white nape of her neck.

Ig smoothed his palms across his chest to dry them and then opened the necklace and gently pulled it around her throat. He hoped she wouldn’t see that his hands were shaking.

“You met Lee, you know,” Ig said, so he’d have something to say. “He was sitting behind you the day it broke.”

“That kid? He tried to put it back on me after it snapped. I thought he was going to strangle me with it.”

“I’m not strangling you, am I?” Ig asked.

“No,” she said.

He was having trouble linking the clasp to the chain. It was his nervous hands. She waited patiently.

“Who were you lighting a candle for?” Ig asked.

“My sister.”

“You have a sister?” Ig asked.

“Not anymore,” she said in a clipped, emotionless sort of way, and Ig felt a sick twinge, knew he shouldn’t have asked.

“Did you figure out the message?” he blurted, feeling an urgent need to move the conversation to something else.

“What message?”

“The message I was flashing you. In Morse code. You know Morse code, don’t you?”

She laughed-an unexpectedly rowdy sound that almost caused Ig to drop the necklace. In the next moment, his fingers discovered what to do, and he fastened the chain around her throat. She turned. It was a shock how close she was standing. If he lifted his hands, they would be on her hips.

“No. I went to Girl Scouts a couple times, but I quit before we got to anything interesting. Besides, I already know everything I need to know about camping. My father was in the Forest Service. What were you signaling me?”

She flustered him. He had planned this whole conversation in advance, with great care, working out everything she’d ask and every smooth reply he’d give her, but it was all gone now.

“But weren’t you flashing something to me?” he asked. “The other day?”

She laughed again. “I was just seeing how long I could flash you in the eyes before you figured out where it was coming from. What message did you think I was sending you?”

But Ig couldn’t answer her. His windpipe was bunching up again, and there was a dreadful suffusion of heat in his face, and for the first time he realized how ridiculous it was to have imagined she had been signaling anything, let alone what he had talked himself into believing-that she was flashing the word “us.” No girl in the world would’ve signaled such thing to a boy she had never spoken to before. It was obvious, now that he looked at it straight on.

“I was saying, ‘This is yours,’” Ig told her at last, deciding that the only safe thing to do was to ignore the question she had just asked him. Furthermore, this was a lie, although it sounded true. He had been signaling her a single short word as well. The word had been “yes.”

“Thanks, Iggy,” she said.

“How do you know my name?” he asked, and was surprised at the way her face suddenly colored.

“I asked someone,” she said. “I forget why, I-”

“And you’re Merrin.”

She stared, her eyes questioning, surprised.

“I asked someone,” he said.

She looked at the doors. “My parents are probably waiting.”

“Okay,” he said.

By the time they reached the atrium, he had found out they were both in first-period English together, that her house was on Clapham Street, and that her mother had signed her up to be a volunteer at the blood drive the church was holding at the end of the month. Ig was working the blood drive, too.

“I didn’t see you on the sign-up sheet,” she said. They walked three more steps before it occurred to Ig that this meant she had looked for his name on the sheet. He glanced over and saw her smiling enigmatically to herself.

When they came through the doors, the sunshine was so bright that for a moment Ig couldn’t see anything through the harsh glare. He saw a dark blur rushing at him and lifted his hands and caught a football. As his vision cleared, he saw his brother and Lee Tourneau and some other boys-even Eric Hannity-and Father Mould fanning out across the grass, and Mould was shouting, “Ig, right here!” His parents were standing with Merrin’s parents, Derrick Perrish and Merrin’s father talking cheerfully, as if their families had been friends for years. Merrin’s mother, a thin woman with a pinched colorless mouth, was shading her eyes with one hand and smiling at her daughter in a pained sort of way. The day smelled of hot tarmac, sun-baked cars, and fresh-cut lawn. Ig, who was not at all athletically inclined, cocked back his arm and threw the football with a perfect tight spin on it, and it cut through the air and dropped right into Father Mould’s big, calloused hands. Mould lifted it over his head, running across the green lawn in his black short-sleeved shirt and white collar.

Football lasted for most of half an hour, fathers and sons and Father chasing one another across the grass. Lee was drafted as a quarterback; he wasn’t much of an athlete either, but he looked the part, falling back to go long with that look of perfect, almost icy calm on his face, his tie tossed over one shoulder. Merrin kicked off her shoes and played, the only girl among them. Her mother said, “Merrin Williams, you’ll get grass stains on your pants and we’ll never get them out,” but her father waved his hand in the air and said, “Let her have some fun.” It was supposed to be touch football, but Merrin threw Ig down on every play, diving at his feet, until it was a gag that cracked everyone up-Ig wiped out by this sixteen-year-old girl built like a blade of grass. No one thought it was funnier, or enjoyed it more, than Ig himself, who went out of his way to give her chances to cream him.

“You should drop your butt on the ground as soon as they snap the ball,” she said, the fifth or sixth time she wiped him out. “’Cause I can do this all day. You know that? What’s funny?” Because he was laughing.