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Over the Plain Houses. Julia Franks
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isbn 9781938235221
Автор произведения Julia Franks
Издательство Ingram
OVER THE PLAIN HOUSES
Copyright © 2016
Julia Franks
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Cover and book design: Meg Reid
Proofreaders: Beverly Knight & Rachel Richardson
Cover painting: J. Chris Wilson
Spillway at Highlands Country Club, 2005
oil on canvas
in situ Highlands Country Club, Highlands, N.C.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Franks, Julia, 1964-
Over the plain houses / Julia Franks.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-938235-21-4 (alk. paper)
1. Married people—Fiction.
2. Farm life—North Carolina—Fiction.
3. Fundamentalists—North Carolina—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3606.R422575O84 2016
813’.6—dc23
2015032618
186 W. Main Street
Spartanburg, SC 29306
864.577.9349
CONTENTS
HER KIND
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
—ANNE SEXTON
PART ONE
End of March
CHAPTER ONE
IT WAS THE WEEK BEFORE EASTER WHEN THE LADY agent first showed up to church. When the gray coupe rolled past, the first thing Irenie Lambey noticed wasn’t that a woman was driving but that a sculpted angel leapt straight out from the grill, her head raised and her back arched, silvery wings sweeping behind her as if she were about to take flight.
Later, after the agent and her husband were dead and the Department of Agriculture had closed its extension office for good, there were those who held out that her first day had been sometime in the summer.
But Irenie knew different. She knew on account of the birds. It was that moment in the year when winter still tightened the earth but spring snuck in from overhead. Robins and warblers and purple martins were back, and the flax birds had switched out their gray feathers for yellow. The trunks of the sassafras and sourwood ran wet and black with sap, and the fingers of the service trees had swelled but not budded. It had to be the Last Supper service because her sister wore her blue muslin, and there were those who turned out for the first time since the fall, and the whole fray about