The floor might as well have opened under us. I had a sudden urge to hang onto my mother’s skirt, so she could pull me along behind her when she walked away, our game when I was small. But she left the room without me, nightdress swishing, Daddy following with the lamp.
“God’s with us, right now in this room,” Dale murmured. “It’s His power, alive all around us, bringing the glory of an electrified city into your own home!” She spoke as if she were in love.
From beneath the scarf in my wardrobe, Mrs. Wolf’s book applauded me, its pages like so many hands. From expression comes splendor, she said. No one heard her but me.
LIGHTS HYPNOTICALLY BLUE PULSED BEHIND MY closed eyelids, inside the farthest reach of a soft black cave. They were like the soul of a flame, and I wanted to capture them in my hand. If my head hadn’t hurt so much, I might have laughed. The lights receded and returned at their own will, their glowing blue a fixed pinpoint in a miasma of splintering pain.
The headaches had started to come on once a month sometime last year; at first tentative and not every time, but by now I could expect them the third week of every month, along with the rags that I washed out in private, the pain like rodents gnawing my hip bones, and a relentless need for sleep. Sleeping, I dreamed of sunflowers turning their pocked faces to the sky. I dreamed of starved, blighted ground absorbing water as fast as it could flow.
The worst headaches kept me in bed. I couldn’t stomach the cup of broth or tea that Momma brought upstairs. Toasted bread might as well have been tree bark on a flowered plate. Momma learned quickly not to waste butter on the bread. The oily smell made me weep with disgust.
At first, Momma lay cold cloths on my head. They were too heavy, and when she left I tossed them to the floor. I tried to dress but reaching for my clothes made me want to run for the basin. I buttoned my dress unevenly and left my hair prickled like an angry cat’s back. Shaken by the effort, I lay back on the bed. Cold, I pulled the covers up. Hot, I peeled them back.
“Momma,” I wept, but my wail emerged in a whimper.
“Momma,” I tried again, gathering effort.
Momma was downstairs. Daddy had stayed away, made nervous by the physical demands of femaleness.
“Rub my back,” I whispered to the empty room. Momma’s cool hand and strong grip would help, but she didn’t hear me. I inched my arm behind my head and pressed my fingertips into the rigid muscles at the root of my neck. My headache receded, but the blue flame danced vividly in my sightline, the color somewhere between indigo and cobalt, the texture a mix of satin and velvet.
Electricity pulsed in the air between my body and the world beyond. I slept.
When I woke, night had fallen. My curtains and the window over the wash basin were open to the air. Momma must have come in. I heard the sounds of supper downstairs; low conversation, a chair scraping the floor. Leo laughed, a dish clanked.
I went to the open window. Hands on the sill, I leaned my head against the wooden mullion. I was muscle-sore and drowsy, but my head no longer hurt, and my stomach was still. The air drifting in over my hands was warm from the day and smelled like cut hay and wet dirt. I caught the distant rich scent of manure, and the remainder of cooking smells: fat and boiled greens.
What if the view out this window wasn’t darkness, but streaked blue with electrical light? How far could I see with electricity? If I rode a streetcar with blue light crackling out of wires overhead, how far would I go?
A WEEK HAD PASSED since Dale’s departure, and The Truth of Mesmeric Influence was still in my room. I read every night and went about my business during the day as if I weren’t learning far beyond my school work. Still, Mrs. Wolf occupied my thoughts so much that one morning I nearly stepped on Daddy’s boot when I backed out of the chicken coop.
“Missy, you and I will speak privately,” he said, flat. “Put the eggs in the kitchen. You have five minutes.” Anger shimmered around him.
He turned and stalked into the house, his back rigid, his hands balled into fists. I never took a book from your shelf, I could say. I’d been so careful putting everything back and covering the slim empty space on his shelf. This might not be about the book at all.
The walk to the back door, up the steps, and into the kitchen helped me count off what else might cause his anger. Right foot down; Leo was with Momma, so there was no neglect there. Left foot down; Mr. Campbell might have found the courage to tell him what I’d done in Sunday school, but Mr. Campbell wasn’t the type of person to admit something he didn’t understand. With each step a new idea arose, with the next, the idea was discounted. In the kitchen, the eggs went into a bowl, and I covered them with a cloth. They’d go into bread dough later. I left the kitchen door open. I could always run.
My father’s chair creaked in his study, and he called my name.
Wishing I were so small that my steps were silent, I went to his doorway. He didn’t look up from his ledgers. The way he sat, I could see his blond hair thinning on the top of his head, and I wanted to look away. He kept writing in his ledger. When he finally looked up, his mouth was set in a tight line. My stomach sank.
“Give it,” he said.
For a long second, I tried to convince myself that I didn’t know what he meant. But I knew. On the shelf, the space where The Truth of Mesmeric Influence had been was blank as a missing tooth. If I spoke up and pointed out that the very fact that I’d picked that single title from the shelf meant that it was destined for me, Daddy would have laughed.
“My book, Lulu.” His voice was steel. “Leo certainly didn’t take it.”
I hated when he dug at Leo.
“The Truth of Mesmeric Influence is mine, Lulu. You know I don’t go in for that stupidity, but that book belongs to me and it’s not here. I didn’t lose it and your mother doesn’t care for it, which leads to the obvious deduction that you took it.”
Daddy slapped a ledger shut, a smack I could feel on my face. All I could say was that I was sorry. I was sorry. I wished that I had stayed blessedly beside Leo that afternoon, untroubled by a cousin, or myself, or anything at all.
He took a sheet of paper from his desk drawer and pushed it toward me. He pointed to his bottle of ink and his pen. His pocket watch ticked. I was on the high end of a seesaw in mid-lift, bracing myself to slam to the ground. Daddy sighed. He acted as if I were a child incapable of forming clear sentences, untrustworthy in my intentions. His word for what I’d done was “took.” Not my word. Mine would be “borrow.”
“You’ll apologize to your cousin,” he said. “Right here, you’ll write a letter to Dale explaining how you made her act the fool and how sorry you are to have upset her.”
She’d come in here a fool, and a vicious one, too. That wasn’t my doing. Daddy had never said one word to her about her rude remarks at supper the night I did what I did with the pin. A person who didn’t know him would think he’d forgotten it, but I didn’t see how he could have.
“Write.” He pushed the paper toward me. “Dale left out of here sure we were experiencing the work of the Lord first-hand. You need to set that girl right and not have her telling a lie before God and everyone.”
“Dear Dale,” I wrote. This was as far as I got for several minutes. Dear Dale.
Dale would show this letter to girls I’d never meet. They would pass it among themselves, and who knows where gossip would take it after that. I’d be the butt of their jokes, and I wouldn’t be there to captivate