Thursday, March 8, 2012

Excerpt from Companions of the Garden, Chapter 22

     He engaged the clutch and the stockade walls swung outward and they moved through the rain, out of Jackson, out past Clinton, southwest to the Natchez Trace Parkway and down toward the ocean, Cassie plunging forward through the green and gushing woods, through trees swollen with rain-coaxed fertility, bent in submission . . . southwest down a highway transformed by storm into the likeness of a culvert, green-domed roof and watery base, everything flowing in perfect uniformity downhill to the river, to the Mexican Gulf . . . 
     A sign said Bayou Pierce Presbyterian Church, 1807.
     They turned off the road and wound up the hill to the shack. They parked outside and they stepped through the door, into a totality of veteran wood . . . smells of dirt, impressions of consummate weathering . . . the place just big enough for ten people, maybe twelve . . . all of it abandoned and empty, consigned to history, but not to sterility.  
     Still spirit in the wood.  In the dust.  In the rain on the roof.
     They sat on a bench in the corner and listened to the drips overhead.  
   He put his hand on the bench, wondering – inevitably – how many people had sat there before him; what isolated precession of the faithful had braved the storms of centuries past to stand in prayer on this muddy little leaf-strewn knoll.
    “I can feel it,” said Abida, and the objects of her feeling – the spirit, and the belief that chased it – were left comfortably unspoken. 

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