Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

Back upstairs, she sat down in a wicker chair with the mail in her lap and leafed through it again. The clumsiness of the resealing, the absurdity of the dirty tape made her shake her head in contempt.

You bastard, she thought, enlarge your lousy life. Egan’s ancient mother, my worn-down sister — they have no secrets from you. But the provincial’s letter might be another matter.

The letter columns of Fellowship were filled with a controversy over whether or not the antiwar movement in the States should use its supposed influence with the Provisional Government in Saigon to implore a degree of clemency for the new regime’s enemies. The An Quang pagoda had been closed. Justin put the magazine aside. Her long tanned fingers, clipped and scrubbed, tore the wads of tape from Veronica’s daisy-patterned envelope and she lifted out the letter inside, handwritten on personalized stationery in the same design. The letters from Veronica arrived, or at least went forth, about once every two months. Often when pictures had been enclosed, the letters arrived with the pictures removed. During her best years there, Veronica’s letters had sometimes made her feel like crying for the two of them; on this particular morning she was certain that she would never get through the three daisy-dappled sheets without coming apart. But she read.

Veronica had at last joined the Purple Sage Cowbelles. She was not the only Catholic woman in the Cowbelles — there were two Basque ladies who went to the same church, Our Lady of Mercy in Tatum, eighty miles away. Veronica drove the children there and back each Sunday morning. The stock were, for the most part, healthy and thriving in their winter pasture. But the coyote problem was bad, their population had increased and with calving time coming up the darn things would be a menace. Morton had shot eight of them one day, contrary to federal law, but they were prowling the edges of the spread as though they knew that calves were soon due. She herself had shot a few.

The winter was fairly mild, with the temperature above zero most of the day and fairly little snow. Down south, the ski resorts were hurting and the summer pasture might be drier than it should be. But the sunny days made you gay instead of gloomy; she and the younger children had done some Nordic skiing and Morton and the boys were enjoying their snowmobiles.

The library in Arrow had spent the last of its budget getting its collection of Star Trek books up to date — it was enough to make you scream the way that library wasted its funds on trash books and detective stories and the blandest best sellers. Their collection of Dickens was falling to pieces, they had no Stendhal, not a single Thomas Hardy, no Thomas Wolfe, no F. Scott Fitzgerald and Joyce, forget it. There was nothing worthwhile for the kids to read, to cut their teeth on in a literary way. The kids watched crap on television, and it was really crap too.

The trouble with the library, Veronica said, was partly old Mrs. Rand’s ignorance and partly the blessed Mormons and their vigilant censorship. As if the television wasn’t bad enough, they used their influence in Boise to force the really interesting network shows off the local stations. Justin could be sure they weren’t waning in power in that part of the country; still they weren’t as bad arid as bigoted as they’d been in the old days, in their parents’ days. And even if everything that people said about Catholics were really true about the Mormons, it shouldn’t be forgotten that they had their good points, that there were plenty of fine decent people among them, no one should ever call them hypocrites, though some did.

Like most of the Gentiles in Idaho, Veronica was forever damning the Mormons with one breath and commending their rectitude with the next. Justin herself had not been so even-handed. It had been her habit at home to refer to the tablets presented to Joseph Smith by the angel Moroni as the Moronic tablets; in her junior year of high school a girl named Ada Bengstrom had had the wit to punch her in the mouth for saying it once too often. Ada Bengstrom, Justin reflected, was Veronica’s nearest neighbor now. Her name was Ada Parsons and she belonged to the Purple Sage Cowbelles.

When the stock were in summer pasture, if they took on help, Veronica hoped she might get Morton to take two weeks off and they might go to New York, which she loved — if not there then to Palm Springs, where they had spent their honeymoon, or even to Maui, where she had always dreamed of going.

It had been two years since Justin had seen her sister — during the last trip home. And Veronica had looked lovely with her tanned country face and her horsewoman’s slow grace and an expression of such despair in her light eyes that Justin could hardly speak to her without stammering. It was self-pity really, Justin thought, that made Veronica’s letters so oppress her. The forlornness she read into her sister’s life was as much her own.

Of the two of them perhaps Veronica was the plainer, the less ambitious, certainly the less arrogant. But it was she who had more knowledge of the world, at least in its North American manifestation.

She had worked in New York, as a publisher’s reader after college; she had spent three years working for a community newspaper in Los Angeles. But she was back home now — a rancher’s wife with too many kids, married to a good-natured incipiently alcoholic Finn whom she pestered toward Catholicism. Arrow’s own culture vulture who would drive most of the night to see a dance company, drive as far as Salt Lake for the national company of an O’Neill or a Chekhov play or a touring opera.

She could, Justin thought, indulging her own fantasies, have got herself a newspaperman. Or even a doctor, some kind of professional capable of conversation beyond cursing out the posy pickers in the Sierra Club or the price of feed.

Little enough she herself knew about that kind of thing. On one of the visits home, when Justin had been lecturing — handing out threadbare pastoral advice and textbook family counseling — Veronica had turned on her. “Christ, I wish I knew as little about it as you do,” Veronica had said.

Justin put the letter aside.

And what did either of them know and where had it gotten them? The promising, brainy Feeney sisters — May now called Justin playing Sister of Mercy in the crocodile isles and Veronica playing Carol Kennicott in Arrow, pop. 380.

Before her, the ocean rolled lightly against white sand, the plantain leaves hung still. The inaction after such elation, the delay, most of all Godoy’s intrusion into and subsequent disappearance from her life weighed her down. How stupid it was, she thought, how adolescent and egotistical to invest such promise in a single man when the suffering of Tecan had been before her so long and she had done nothing but simmer in indignation and go by the book: But she was lonely too, on one level it was as simple as that, she needed a friend, a guide. The blank soulless world she had confronted at twenty lay again before her like the limitless unmoving sea; she would have to reconcile herself to it again, as she had then, to find in it meaning and self-transcendence, to make the leap of faith. Again.

There had been child murders along the coast, cruel and gruesome. Local children called the undetected killer The Bad Monkey and that was what the cries of “ mono malo ” were about. Someone was killing children. She was alone, the sun rose and set over the ocean. She picked up Egan’s mail and went inside to his quarters.

You can go along for years, she thought, walking dreamily across the kitchen toward Father Egan’s door, and you think you’re there — then sooner or later you realize you’ve got to make the jump. And this one — toward man or history, the future — call it whatever — was harder for her. She accepted the revolution, she had for years — but she was critical, arrogant, better at the forms of humility than the substance, not so good a lover of her neighbor as herself. So there it was at her feet, another death-defying leap.