The winds had died down by the time Olfstead arrived. Still, he made a show of the trials of his travel. An hour earlier and we might’ve cared. If he’d swung wide the great-wood door, soggy with the storm behind him and launched into his story of spooked horses and no-good assistants, of the roofs of houses spiraling skyward, their subsequent groundward falls, and of walls of impenetrable cold we would’ve sat at seats’ edges in anticipation of the next detail. Instead, it was the door swung wide, Olfstead dry and warm, and a sunlit backdrop that belied the week of wind and rain we’d come to loathe and fear during his absence. And he blathered through the details. And we tapped feet, checked watches, and imagined finer moments as we awaited the point to which it was all preamble.

“Get on with it, old man,” shouted one among us more bold than most.

Olfstead froze at that, mid-pantomime of a chimney’s collision with a derelict freightliner. “This,” he said, “is it. If there’s to be anything, it begins with this.”

So we twiddled. We tolerated. We absently swallowed, panicking in those moments when our throats would freeze due to excessive, pointless use, relaxed and allowed the panic to pass, and swallowed, again, to know we could.

The tale of the return journey went on for nearly two hours. Olfstead would stop, during that time, to request water for his throat or camphor for his joints. Our numbers thinned in that second hour. The women were the first to leave, using the noisiness of their bored children as their excuses. The men, resenting their lacks of excuses, tried to hold, but even tradition couldn’t mask their disgust with Olfstead. Their numbers thinned, in time, so much so that as Olfstead recalled the final minutia of his return, he did so to an audience of three: myself, Mr. Napp, and Sandy Wallace, the Larkings’ eldest.

Mr. Napp ventured, “So, that’s it, then?” as Olfstead wiped his forehead with the damp cloth he’d requested. I was glad for the question, my attention so invested in the crinkled skin above Olfstead’s wavering Adam’s apple that I could think of nothing else until Napp’s words broke the spell.

“Yes,” said Olfstead.

“So?” I said, the question rising without a thought to support it.

“So?” He repeated.

“News,” said Mr. Napp. “Now that you’ve prattled away the night at the cost of our town’s patience.”

Olfstead frowned. “Ah,” he said. “News. Well, it’s… He said no.”

“No?” said Napp. “Just no?”

Olfstead nodded. “I showed him the portrait. I spoke her name. I offered proofs of parentage. I even mentioned the swears. I did it all, just as I always have.”

“And he said no?” said Napp.

“He said, my dear fellows, that she was not clean. He said that even her portrait stank of corruption, that the swears weren’t fit for the paper that held them. He said there would be no stay, that he would continue to seed the clouds in preparation for the coming night, that the offering was rejected, that all would move ahead.”

Sandy said, “But he’s never said no, has he?”

“No,” said Olfstead, cutting his eyes at Mr. Napp. “He never has.”

“Then what,” said Sandy, “can we do?”

I looked the room over, unsure of the moment. My voice made itself known without my assistance. “He said no.”

Olfstead grunted at that. “Jasper gets it,” he said. “He said no. There’s nothing else.”

Napp was unable to meet our eyes, Elizabeth being his daughter and all. Sandy filled the silence with, “It’s good news, in a sense, for you, Jasper. Not that you’d have her, though.” Reflecting on a passing thought, he added, “Not that any of us’ll be around for the wedding.”

“He’s wrong,” said Napp.

Olfstead made His sign above his head and said, “That isn’t possible.”

“If he can be wrong—” Sandy whispered.

“He can’t,” said Olfstead.

“But—” said Sandy.

“No,” said Napp. “No. This is the purest of insults. It was more than I could bear to offer her. That this insult should—”

My voice, again, rose. Though my mind considered the arrangements of the men in the room, Olfstead’s superior position on the middle stair of His altar, it said, “I’d still have her.”

“The hell you would,” said Olfstead. “A man to a dog? By no means, boy.”

“Take that back,” said Napp.

“I’ll not,” said Olfstead. “Besides, there’s the matter of finding a suitable girl. A clean girl.”

Sandy was quick to break apart the scuff that followed, Mr. Napp lunging at Olfstead, Olfstead stumbling and knocking the candles with his elbows and backside.

“And this blasphemy,” said Olfstead. “Here! It’s no wonder the girl has crimed us. See the family, what it counts for respect.”

“Enough,” I said.

“No,” said Olfstead. “There is no enough. Unfit. As the girl, so the father, and, by their deeds, so, too, us in His eyes.”

I eyed His relief above the altar, the teeth, the cunning eyes. “Is he kind?” I said. “Olfstead, is he just?”

“He,” said Olfstead, the ruckus set aside for matters of truth and saying, “is neither kind nor just. He is. He demands. We kneel to offer. He judges. There is no room for kindness or justice. The ones before us understood.”

“He isn’t real,” said Napp.

If anybody had ever said it before, I hadn’t heard. It was too much to hear, leaving silence as the only possible response. The moment stretched long into the night, voiceless and without tick or span. The men returned, seeking news, perhaps, but were wrapped into and accepting of our silence without initiation. Then came the women, the children having been put to bed, and it was only with the arrival of the last of them, of Elizabeth, that Olfstead granted release, filling the quiet with purpose beyond truth.

“Do you suppose,” he said, “Mr. Napp, that he hasn’t heard? Do you think he awaits repetition of your blasphemy? It’s not enough that you submit your whore of a daughter. No, you choose to expedite our downfall with your…your fantasies.”

“How,” I said, realizing the arc of the thought in my mouth and helpless to stop its completion, “do we know he’s real?”

Olfstead spat at the words. He spat on the ground at the sound of them and into his hands, that he could rub the spit into his ears for having heard them. “And the simpleton speaks,” he said. “Again and again, the idiot forms words for all to hear.”

I flushed, at that, the hot of my head spreading to the tips of my ears and the skin of my arms, but I said nothing as he continued.

“The whore has infected his simple mind. Forgive him,” he said to the altar, “he knows—”

“Whore?” said Elizabeth.

“Yes,” said Napp. “Whore. He says it. You hear him say it, don’t you? You’ve shamed us if—”

Olfstead interrupted. “No ‘us,’” he said. “No ‘us’ at all, Mr. Napp. You’ll not bring fire upon us twice in a night. You speak for yourself, you and yours, alone. Your claims to ‘us’ are in forfeit, sir. Take your whore and her simple lover with you to die in the fields. There is a matter for men to consider, a matter—”

I hit him. I heard the words and my arm pulled back at the sound of them. It was unintentional, at best, a reflex, but he fell on the altar stairs like he meant it.

One of the women, in defense of Olfstead, said, “Do you think he sits in the smoke of the Vanagon and hears nothing all day? You think you know better His will?”

They ran us out. If Olfstead was present, I can’t recall. I like to think he was, but I figure I hit him hard enough that he wasn’t. Elizabeth didn’t say much. It helped that Mr. Napp couldn’t look at her and that my voice showed no interest in speaking up on her behalf.

“I think you should know,” she later told me, after Mr. Napp had fallen asleep by the old chopping stump to the bleating of the sheep in the southern field, “that I was with Tamie Rowls before he died. I loved him, Jass, but I loved you more.”

“Loved?” I said.

“Love,” she said. “I love you more. You believe me?”

I smiled, I think. “Don’t suppose it matters much. I love you’s what matters. Don’t know a way out of that.”

“You could pretend,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I’ve never been any good at that.”

Laying with her in the grooves of the fallow field, I thought about Him. I tried to imagine the fire and the wing, but I could only see the words. “I don’t think he’s real,” I said. She was asleep by then, white in the moon’s glow, but I said it anyway. “If he is, though, I don’t care if he kills the lot.”

How the days that followed landed our feet on the walk to his peak, I can’t say. There was a conversation with Mr. Napp the first morning of our exile, but I was no part of it. It was theirs, their raised voices and their sadness. I was lost in the wave of the grass, I think. There was something in the lay of the heavily blown stalks and those that kept their upright shapes, a question of which were stronger. I was preparing to offer voice to the thought when Napp said, “So we’ll see,” and, so, we went.

The bones were real enough, ages of sacrifice discernable in their adornments of charms and fine cloth. I held Elizabeth close to my chest as we walked, stepping over what we could, but crushing so much, still, underfoot. There was no stink of sulfur, though, no shed of tooth or scale.

“Tell me,” said Mr. Napp to his daughter. “Is it true?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Then it’s all for nothing?”

“Yes,” she said.

I smelled it, then, the sulfur, a sting in the nostril. “It’s OK,” I said. “I love her. She loves me. It’s OK.”

She smiled, I think.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Napp. “Not anymore, it doesn’t. OK’s back there.”

The sky was yellow, that morning. The sky was the loveliest shade of yellow.

Timestamp: 04.02.08 at 12:10 AM. Filed under: Fiction.