Cloudmaker. Malcolm Brooks

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      She smirked and tried to stick her tongue at him at the same time. She could only get the pink tip out.

      “Hold your cards close,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

      Annelise watched him drive down the rough lane to the county road. Even from a distance she saw white exhaust on the early air. She hugged her arms, realized she was freezing in her bare feet and pajamas.

      The noise of the REO trickled away and she heard something else, some fanlike whirring. Too cold to be the wings of an insect, surely. She cocked her head and tried to locate the source. In another moment she heard a metallic creak at the house, assumed a hinge on the door, and assumed Aunt Gloria had come out on the porch. She felt something lift in pace with the rate of her heart, indignation or petulance, or both.

      But when she steeled herself and turned, no one was there. The door on the porch indeed gaped open, and the whine she’d heard came again, not from the door but from what she now identified as the source of the whirring. Some sort of elaborate weather vane mounted to the ridge of the roof. It looked from a distance like one of her cousin’s model airplanes, with a propeller spinning out front and a tail fin in back to turn the thing into the prevailing wind. Hence the whine.

      She could hear the murmur of the radio from inside. Maybe she’d at least catch an update on Amelia’s progress. Undoubtedly she’d left Honolulu by now. Annelise hugged her arms in her thin pajamas. She walked forward.

      “She’s a powerful, powerful woman. And that scares people, you know. Scares a lot of men, scares them to the soul, even if they’re drawn right to that power at the very same time, because it’s a force bigger than they are. Ordained to be so, before ever she was born. They have no power in the face of it, and they know it. That’s God’s honest truth.”

      Aunt Gloria in her house shift and limp buttoned sweater and tired slippers, creaking around the little kitchen. “They see that sort of passion, that sort of fire, and they envy it and resent it at the same time. They want to possess it and destroy it. Because it’s a mirror to their own weakness. That is the plain truth. Fetch me another pail?”

      Sister Aimee’s voice crackled out of the little Philco on the table beneath the window, half siren’s song and half rising tide even through the static, and as familiar to Annelise as the smell of the orange trees outside the windows of another, starkly better and starkly brighter kitchen, two days and half a continent away.

      This kitchen smelled of wood smoke. Or coal smoke. The house in San Marino had a gas range and modern plumbing and three or four radio sets, including a glimmering Zenith Stratosphere in the sitting room that made the entire lower floor seem like the nave of Angelus Temple itself, or maybe the orchestra pit of the Vienna Philharmonic.

      Annelise stood from the table. Her cropped curls had already dried from the roaring blast of the stove. Sister Aimee had a voice like no other, and she used it now to recall the days of her famous Gospel Car, to illustrate the two-sided sword of progress, with its treacherous roads and broad highways to sin, undercut nonetheless with unswerving opportunities for faith.

      “She was the first person to drive from one coast to the other,” Aunt Gloria told her. “Not to set a record or to gain for herself, but for the glory of Jesus. Your mother and I, we were touched by that car ourselves when we were girls. Moved by it, you might say, even though we never actually laid eyes on it.”

      “The first woman, you mean. She was the first woman to drive across the country.”

      To Annelise’s bafflement, Aunt Gloria had laid out a pair of her cousin’s overalls and a flannel work shirt after her bath, both heavily patched and smelling, like most everything in the house, of stove smoke and lamp oil. She had to roll the legs with cuffs the size of a bucket, and her slim form fairly swam in them otherwise. With her short hair, Annelise knew that from any distance, she must surely look more boy than girl.

      “That’s right. The first woman.” Aunt Gloria held her hands over the hot plate of the stove. The massive Angelus Temple pipe organ had started up behind Sister’s voice and, in a moment of simultaneous fadeaway and crescendo, replaced it altogether. “People accuse her of theatrics or sensation. But how do you question the results? She’s healed thousands. And saved probably millions.”

      She rubbed her hands over the heat, and Annelise realized that despite the kitchen’s swelter, her mother’s sister was actually cold. Something else struck her: Aunt Gloria was not so old as she appeared, although she may well have been exactly as frail. Though her hair had years ago turned snowflake white, she was younger than Annelise’s mother, herself just barely forty and though blonde-headed, a ringer for Myrna Loy.

      The pipe organ faded out in turn and the Angelus Temple choir started in. Annelise knew the song well—one of Sister’s originals called “I Ain’t A-Gonna Grieve.” Sister sang lead. Annelise gave up hope of hearing any news out of Hawaii. She took the pail and went out to the yard.

      She walked off the porch and around the side of the house to the well pump and its concrete pad. She heard that odd weather vane, humming and humming at the ridge of the roof.

      She’d already fetched one bucket earlier, to replenish the galvanized water dispenser in a corner of the kitchen. She noticed then that this side of the house, unlike the whitewashed front, was more weather-beaten, with paint peeling like sunburned skin and bare gray siding showing through in patches and streaks. But the pump handle levered and plunged with little more than a squeak, and she could see where grease had been applied to the joints and shaft not long before.

      Annelise had always had a vague notion of Gloria’s health troubles. Blinding headaches since she was a girl, problems with her back and hips. A near-deadly bout with the Spanish flu at age eighteen that, among other lingering effects, turned her hair permanently the color of raw cotton.

      Her sister, Annelise’s mother, was by contrast a study in Teutonic vigor, throwing herself tirelessly at luncheons and causes and committees and hardly seeming to sleep. Annelise worked the lever and watched the gush of water splash into the pail and considered with some irritation that under different circumstances, her mother would herself have made quite a distance flier, at least so far as general constitution went.

      It was common family knowledge that Aunt Gloria had always been the frail one. The sisters were still close, in a fashion, though they hadn’t seen each other in years. They did write back and forth and spoke by telephone every month or so, always on a Sunday afternoon and no doubt, it occurred to Annelise only now, when Aunt Gloria went to Big Coulee for church and thus had available service.

      So how on earth could the Philco radio work? Kerosene lamps and a wood-burning stove, although now that she thought about it, a single bare bulb did hang from the kitchen ceiling. Annelise finished filling the pail and left it beneath the pump. She marched in Houston’s overalls around the back of the house.

      She faintly heard the pulse of the song again from indoors, the lyrics jingling in her head by familiarity more than anything truly audible through the walls.

      You can’t get to heaven in a rocking chair

      The Lord won’t have any lazy folks there . . .

      The outhouse stood a little way off, amid a cluster of thorn-­studded shrubbery. Earlier when she made her first inglorious trip to the thing, an enormous cock pheasant erupted out of the brush like a Chinese rocket, just about the time she mustered the resolve to reach for the door. She’d practically wet herself then, and the memory now made the pressure in her bladder balloon yet СКАЧАТЬ