Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, Lydia Millet [top romance novels .txt] 📗

praying and crying, climbed into their black jeeps and drove noisily off down the street.

The rest of the travelers from the buses perched in and around the limousine with the doors standing open, wiping their faces with paper towels and napkins and thirstily gulping water from the bottles in Szilard’s cooler. Their eyes were red and puffy and still streaming from the tear gas, and they held ice from the cooler against their faces. They were quiet.

—Who did all that shooting? asked Tamika, but no one knew the answer.

Without Szilard no one knew what to think. He had been the source of all information, and now he was gone and there was no more. They turned on the radio and sat there waiting, and Ann laid her head down and fell asleep on Ben’s knees.

But the radio reported nothing.

The scientists could not be found, and Larry’s men came back alone. It was dark when the limousine pulled away from the curb and Ann felt closed off, extinguished. She had nothing to say and she wanted no one to talk to her. She wanted only to sleep in the dark hearing nothing; she wanted the past to be changed.

—There’s gotta be news reports on TV, said Larry, aggrieved. The car moved through the dim streets, stragglers crossing in front of them and slowing their progress, and Ann gazed up into the glow of yellow and orange fall trees as the streetlights winked on. —We can watch the news in the hotel, he went on. —Whoever did this, they can’t get away with it. There had to have been arrests. There’s probably reporters all over the story now.

Maybe the scientists had been arrested, maybe they would call in later, maybe they would have to be bailed out, said Larry. Maybe they had been jailed as insurgents. The men who had murdered Szilard, the men who had shot and killed Bradley’s soldiers and brought down cranes, where were they now and why were they free?

—Where is Dr. Leo’s body? asked Webster, teary-eyed. —He deserves to be buried.

—How could this be allowed to happen? said Tamika, and shook her head in wonder.

None of them had any comment after that. Finally someone changed the radio station and country music played. They sat stunned, barely speaking. Now and then someone fumbled with a water bottle or a shoelace.

As Ann was dozing off again, her head still aching from the effects of the gas, Father Raymond turned and whispered into her ear. Before she heard him she had not even realized he was beside her: she was barely noticing anything.

—They still don’t know what happened, he murmured. —Any of them.

She opened her eyes with an effort, looked at him and saw his face was solemn. As she looked she felt a jarring in the world, in her position, as though she had not moved but magnetic fields were shifting and her coordinates were uncertain.

It did not matter. It had no consequence.

What a baby she had been, she thought sadly, about meaning.

—The birds were beautiful, though, she said dreamily.

—You thought they were birds? asked Father Raymond.

She sat there without moving as he stroked the Bible on his lap with trembling fingers, gently, comforting. He was kind: she had always liked him.

When other things were gone, that was all there was left.

—What do you mean?

—Such a hopeful book, in its own angry way, he said, and smiled fondly.

—The Bible?

—Always hopeful that at least some of us would be saved. But when all was said and done none of us were, were we?

—What are you—

—None of us.

She sat looking at him, his bowed head, thinning hair and double chin.

—Saved, saved, saved, he murmured. —We never knew what it meant but we wanted it anyway. For our children and our parents if not for ourselves.

—It had to mean something good, she said vaguely, too tired to converse.

They sat there for a minute.

—Those were not birds, he said, and looked up at her with watery eyes. —Or put it this way: they were not only birds.

—What do you mean? she whispered.

—They brought us a message, he said sadly. —Didn’t you know? The end has already come and gone. And here we are.

Ben looked around the tired circle, their collapsed and inward faces suffused with failure, and thought how less they seemed than they had been. Without the scientists they were only strays, gathered together for warmth.

When they reached the hotel Father Raymond sat without moving while the others filed out of the car. She reached out and his touched his hand but if she was waiting for something it never came. He did not look up at her so she slowly roused herself to step out the open door of the limousine after Ben.

—Was it a moral failure? he asked as she stood up. —Did the spirit fail us? Or was it never in us at all?

She could tell he was talking only to himself.

—Ann? called Ben from the motel door, holding it open as he looked back at her. —Coming?

She said goodbye to Father Raymond, who sat shaking his head as though he had not heard. Then she turned and slogged across the parking lot in a tired daze, noticing nothing but her own exhaustion.

Later she woke up thinking: But they were birds. They were gone birds, gone birds who had taken the gone men.

The birds had forgiven them.

He buried the dead crane in the woods the next morning, beside a trail in a state park a few minutes off the highway. He had nothing to dig with but a crowbar he found in the trunk of their car, so he used it to hack away at the dirt at the foot of a dead tree. When the hole was deep enough he laid the crane inside, filled in the hole again and covered the freshly turned earth with rocks and dry leaves.

Ann was watching him from a boulder a few feet away, where she sat drinking beer and smoking a