Rebecca Makkai: Music for Wartime

The following Sunday, most of them returned. They sang along with the hymns and closed their eyes to pray, and one of them put poker chips in the communion plate. The fire eater sat in the rear next to Stella. They looked down at something below the pew back, giggling, passing whatever it was back and forth.

Over the past week, the smell of the elephant had crept from the tent and over the center of town. It was a strangely sweet smell, at least at first, more like rotting strawberries than rotting meat.

Reverend Hewlett had planned a sermon on the beatitudes, but when the time came for prayer requests, Larry Beedleman asked everyone to pray for enough food to last his guests (all five trapeze artists were living in the Beedlemans’ attic), and Mrs. Thoms asked them to pray for the Lord to take away the stench of the elephant. Gwendolyn Lake wanted them all to beg forgiveness for the sins that had brought this trial upon them. So Reverend Hewlett preached instead about patience and forbearance.

After the service, he caught Mayor Blunt’s arm. He said, “Isn’t it time we used the pool?”

Blunt was a large man who tucked his chin into his neck when he spoke. He said, “I’ll lose the vote of every child’s mother.”

“Have you seen,” Hewlett said slowly, “the way your daughter looks at that boy?”

“We’ve taken him into our home,” the mayor said. As if that were definitive and precluded the possibility of teenage love.

“Joe,” the Reverend said. “You’ll lose more votes to scandal than to a hole in the ground.”

And so on Tuesday fifty men and women dragged the elephant to the town pool on waxed tarps and lowered her until she rolled in with a thud and a sudden release of the smell they’d all been gagging against to begin with. They covered her with cartloads of hay — everyone had a lot of hay that summer whether they wanted it or not — and they covered the hay with the gravel Tom Garrett had donated, and they covered that all with fresh tarps, held down by bricks.

Reverend Hewlett gave the funeral service right there, with the locals and circus folk in a ring around the pool. The elephant trainer sobbed into his small, calloused hands. He did not have the stick with him, for once.

Afterward, when the other circus workers went to take apart the tent, to fold up the benches and load things into their trailers, the elephant trainer stayed behind. He put his hand on Reverend Hewlett’s arm, then drew it back. And, as if it choked him, he said, “I can’t leave her here.”

“Will you pray with me?”

“I’m saying I don’t think I can leave this town.”

“My son, I won’t let anything happen to the grave.”

“I’m saying that my parents were drifters, and I’m a drifter, and I’ve never had a part of myself in the soil of a place before. And now I do, and I think I ought to stay here for the rest of my life.”

Hewlett marveled at the ways he’d misread this man. Perhaps it hadn’t been grief he’d seen in the man’s face, but thirst.

He said, “Then it must be God’s will.”

The tarp stayed put through the dry fall and the dry winter, and the smell subsided.

Before Christmas, Stella Blunt came to Reverend Hewlett for help. The fire eater was long gone, but her stomach had begun swelling and she was panicked.

The Reverend arranged, to her parents’ naive delight, for Stella to spend the spring semester doing work at the VA hospital downstate. Only she didn’t really go there; he set her up in the vestry with a bed and a little library. She wrote her parents postcards, which Reverend Hewlett would mail in an envelope to Reverend Adams down in Landry, just so Adams could drop them in the postbox and send them back to Little Fork.

Hewlett visited her three times a day, and Sheila Pipsky, who used to be a nurse and could keep a secret like a statue, stopped by twice a week. The Reverend would sit on the floor while Stella sat on the bed, legs folded. If he had time, he ate with her. They spoke French together, so she wouldn’t grow rusty. When the church was locked up for the night, he’d turn out the lights and let her know she was safe — and she’d walk around and around the pews, up to the little choir loft, down the hall to the Sunday school classrooms. As she grew bigger, less steady on her feet, he’d hold her arm so she wouldn’t trip in the dark. If he closed his eyes — which he let himself do only for a second at a time — he could believe he was walking down a Chicago street with Annette, the breeze on their chests, her hair in a clip.

“It’s funny,” Stella said to him once. They were standing in the nursery, the rocking horses and dollhouse lit with moonlight. “I thought I loved him. But if I loved him, I’d remember him better. Wouldn’t I?”

Hewlett had the utterly inappropriate urge to touch Stella’s cheek, the top of her white ear. He slowed his breath.

Stella giggled.

“What is it?” he said.

“Your shoes. They’re untied, like a little kid’s.”

In May, the doctor came in the middle of the night and delivered a healthy baby girl, and Reverend Hewlett called the Millers, who had come to him praying for a child that fall, and they were given the baby and told she came from Shearerville. They named her Eloise. Hewlett had looked away when Stella said good-bye to the baby. He muttered a prayer, but it was a pretense — he couldn’t absorb her pain just then. He chose, instead, to think of the Millers. He chose to thank the Lord. Stella stayed two more weeks in the vestry, and then she went home. Hewlett continued his nighttime circuits of the church, though. They’d become habit.

The elephant trainer worked on one of the farms, tending the cows and horses, until he decided to open a restaurant in the space left empty when Herman Burns had gone to war. He used to cook for the circus folk, after all, and he missed it. He served sandwiches and soup and meatloaf. Soon they were calling him by his name, Stanley Tack, and by June he had fallen in love with the Beedleman girl, and she with him.

It made Reverend Hewlett think, briefly, of writing home to Chicago, to Annette. He worried she was waiting for him, the way her girlfriends were waiting for their boys to return, battle-scarred and strong and ready to settle down. But the war abroad would eventually end; Hewlett’s war never would. And Annette would not join him on this particular battlefield. She’d made that clear. She would stay in Chicago, in her brownstone, and type for a firm, until he came to his senses and moved home to teach history. That she never doubted this would happen broke his heart doubly: once for himself, and once for her. She hadn’t written in three months. And he did not write to her. To do so would be to punch a hole in his own armor.

As soon as summer hit, there was torrential rain — as if all the town’s prayers from last year got to heaven at once, far too late. The bridge flooded out, and Stanley Tack’s restaurant flooded, and nearly everyone you passed, if you asked how things were, would respond, “I’m building an ark!”

There were drowned sheep and missing fences at one farm, where the river now came to the barn door. An oak toppled in the park, roots exposed, like a loosened weed. Stella Blunt, lining up with the choir and looking through the stained glass, said, “It’s like someone’s trying to tear apart the world.”