Prologue

Spiritus Monday

Rachel Loomis tries not to breathe. She stiffens her arms and wills herself to shrink, grow thin as paper. She imagines soon she'll be able to see her soul showing through, a faint glimmer near the jut of the hipbone, between her ribs; she'll wipe away the remaining tarnish of flesh and there she'll be all silvery with spirit, spit-polished and pure. She takes in only enough air to keep what's inside her afloat.

Ruby Tuesday watches her mother billow in the fragrant air, a handkerchief caught on a limb. When she grows up, she'll put her mother in her pocket. It will be warm and dark and tight in there and she thinks her mother will like the confinement. Until then she will sit in her front yard and listen to the rabbits singing. They loaf beneath the lilacs and juniper and hum when the wind blows. Ruby lies on her stomach and looks for a foot, a flash of fur. She knows they're in there, multiplying, multiplying! The singing grows louder every day.

Down the street, Zero Loomis lies in the field across from the house where he grew up, the grass sprouting around him. His mother sits on the porch and waits for his body to rise, waits for him to come back to her so she can feed him brisket, clean the grass stains from his trousers. He stares up at the sky, wavy with a smear of clouds and thatched with contrails. They are both suddenly reminded of the day he left the ground. He was flying a kite, a sturdy box kite he'd built himself, and it sailed so high it became a speck, a faint blemish against the watery blue, and he thought he might snare the moon if the wind held up until dark. His mother, Nedra, looked on and smiled, nodded when he looked at her, and in his mind she appeared in balloon-legged satin pants and curly-toed shoes, tassels and brocade, a veil that swelled when she exhaled like a magic carpet revving its engine, and he imagined she was a genie girl granting him a wish, ready to sate his longing to walk on the blue blue air. Then a puddle-jumper began to churn the air above them, and it loped along and descended to an altitude that caused Zero and his mother to look from sky to ground to sky to try to factor the difference. When the kite snagged itself on a wing and lifted Zero into the air, he faced his usual quandary from a new vantage point: he couldn't decide which was more threatening, earth or firmament. He thought perhaps he ought to let out his line as though he were just reeling in a giant trout, but he simply held tight and wafted across the plain. He watched the ground race beneath him then closed his eyes. Nedra looked on as her little boy was pulled up into the gauzy atmosphere, watched as his body became smaller, remote, eventually a matter of faith. When he touched down miles from where he'd been, he stood up on skinned legs throbbing with the onus of gravity and wondered when he'd ever rise again.

As Ansel Dorsett listens to his neighbor serenade the flowers in her garden, he has a vision: he looks up and sees the sky split, part its lips, a hidden mouth suddenly yawning, and out of the interrupted blue flaps a whiteness, a snapping sheet, the leaf of a blank book, a winged shape, a great bird, fierce dove, the Spirit descending upon him! It dips and drifts, does loop-de-loops, then dives full throttle and zooms toward Earth, aimed directly at him. He imagines the quadrants of his stunned face fixed by the crosshairs of a maniacal radar. Out of this breach in the sky comes a voice, soothing but stern, a voice toned to allay well-founded fears, and it says, Please be seated as we begin our descent, and prepare to receive Me, and then the engine chugs and buzzes, cuts out, and there is a rumbling explosion as the earth splits at the seams and rattles, the sound of metal tearing. Ansel crosses his arms in front of his face and is knocked to his knees, covered in a dusty radiance that eclipses all else in his sight. He gingerly offers his hands up to the light, reaching toward the sky that has only just been there and blue, loses his fingers in the burning white, but when he feels wings thrash his body, hears them beat the air, he draws his arms to his chest. He blinks slowly and surveys the wreckage around him: smoldering light piled everywhere, ragged light draping the limbs of trees, and he imagines a smoking black box, the indestructible Word, later stumbled upon by investigators, imagines them listening to exhortations from the cockpit, those last rasping words: Behold, I come quickly. Ansel falls to the ground, lies face down in the grass, and implores God not to devour the flesh from his limbs, sear him to spirit, leave him only with the afterthought of bones!

Ivy Engel watches her neighbor reach his hands into the air and then drop to the ground. She walks toward the gate and calls to Mr. Dorsett, asks him if he needs help, then remembers being scolded before for just such a charitable gesture. She steps behind the sycamore and hopes she isn't being a poltroon for letting a sleeping deacon lie with his face buried in his well-groomed fescue. Perhaps, she thinks, he's just quaking with Spirit. He is known to do that from time to time. Ivy stares at the petals of fungus growing from the bark of the tree. It looks to her like a mutant rose blooming from the sun-wizened cheek of an ancient elder. She thinks of the lightly fuzzed skin of her Grandmother Engel's face, the satisfying creases in the skin, well worn. Grandma Engel would say to Ivy, Ich pflanze hier ein Küßchen, and she'd lightly scratch the skin of Ivy's cheek, deep enough for the seed of her kiss to take root, give her a peck, and tamp down the skin's soil. There, maybe it grows. Ivy imagines the future of her face, sees it aging with time-lapse haste, folding and loosening, the faint scar on her cheek the only hint of a reckless youth. In this moment, Ivy feels as though she understands the outstretching of Mr. Dorsett's arms, like a plant yearning toward a meal of light, and she wishes she believed in or feared something enough to prompt her to do the same. She looks at Mr. Dorsett lying in the grass and thinks she sees tiny flowers pushing through the skin of his arms, blooming on the backs of his hands, in his hair, on his moving lips, blue and red and yellow petals covering him like a flowered suit of armor.

Mrs. McCorkle walks among her flowers, and she hums a song whose words evaporate in a mist as she tries to recall them. She hums all the more vigorously to compensate for the missing lyrics. In the yard next door, her neighbor stands still and stares pie-eyed into the sky, God's moony and smirking face dangling just beyond his grasp, she thinks, tormenting him. Mrs. McCorkle looks up at the sky and remarks that it is that curious shade of blue that threatens to gray at the slightest provocation. A little precipitation would not be unwelcome, would slake the thirst, she thinks as she regards the parched petals of her tulips, arid red and yellow tongues awaiting a whetting, the arousal that drink is. Drink to me only hm-mm hm hm-mm. When her neighbor falls to his knees, she looks again to the sky to discern what might have precipitated this penitent posture. The sky has in fact darkened, though it appears also eerily bright, like a harsh revelation, and the clouds seem to rush across the charred blue toward an invisible exit in the ether. When she looks again to her garden, Harlan stands before her, his big feet rendering violence to her sweet william, suddenly martyred beneath his heavy brogans. He motions her toward him, and as she takes a step, in his face flash the lives of other people, their histories and destinies churning kaleidoscopically, obscuring the comforting blue of her husband's eyes. Harlan's palsied hands reach toward her, and she singles out among the pictures twisting his face that of a flying boy, wispily gliding through the air like the seed of a milkweed. Then Harlan begins to dim and wither, a slight condensation warming the air and rising toward the brooding sky, and she misses him.

Elsewhere in What Cheer, silver disks spin in the air and glint in the occasional sunlight. Martin LaFavor wipes the drops of water from his glasses and watches his father disassemble the lawnmower. He wonders why his father has chosen to attend to Sunday's yard work today, why he's not out knocking on the doors of doctors and hospital administrators, pitching the wonders of pharmaceutical advancements. The lawnmower's guts are spread around him on the lawn, and Martin feels queasy when he gazes on the carnage. The lawnmower lies on its side like a tranquilized beast unaware that it will awake to its own messy dispersion, fragments unable to coalesce. Martin cannot help but be moved by the plight of the lawnmower. Periodically, Martin's father looks up and growls at the helplessness that his son's hands dangling at his sides confirm. Martin knows his father thinks he is a squandering of genes, genetic dross, Martin's very presence an excess, knows the story his father tells himself, that his own stout and indomitable sperm was seduced by the come-hither blandishments of a crafty egg concealing corruption within. Martin sees his mother standing at the window in his bedroom, looking vaguely aggrieved as her eyes follow a formation of geese pointing toward the other side of the sky.

Thin clouds prowl across the sky like cats stalking sparrows, and all the residents of What Cheer who stand in their greening yards, hands reaching out toward a trickle of sun, look above to see the sky eddy with the gauzy ylem of imminent consequences, kneel beneath the heft of sins they've yet to commit.