You read in the Bible about the voice of God shaking leaves and commanding bushes to burst into flame, about trumpets making walls fall, about the songs that can sweep waves across the planet’s face, but it is quite a different thing to stand in the heat of July, the smell of damp lace and pine sap and other people’s bodies all around you, and know those words to be true.

By the time they got to “What Ya Gonna Do When Ya Lamp Burn Down,” the crowd joined in—men, women, and children, singing and slapping hands and the bark of the trees—Experience and Louisa in the middle, still hand in hand, their voices rising above it all. I think it is the closest I have ever come in my life to seeing true love, and for a moment my sadness and anger were gone. I only felt the warmth of something fulfilled, and I closed my eyes to make it stop, because it felt too much.

The rest of the afternoon was the bazaar and the feast—long tables brought out and set with cake. Plates of oysters, too, which Experience and Louisa had never seen before.

“You tip them back, like this.” I showed them, and when I held one up to Louisa’s lips, she began to giggle. “That smell!” she cried. Experience pinched her elbow and then blushed hard, and they would not tell me anymore what it was about, so I drifted away from them, alone again.

Emmanuel Chase kept his distance from me, walking among the crowd, talking to the prettiest women and girls, laughing with the men. I thought, Had we really stood under those trees and talked of marriage? I could not believe, would not have believed it, to look at him.

“You are in-fat-u-a-ted.” It was Lucien who sang this. There was a slight weave in his step as he moved toward me, slapping the rhythm on his thigh. When he reached me, he smelled the same as Madeline Grady’s barrels of beer.

“You know this place is temperate,” I said.

“Not over there it’s not.” He pointed behind the trees, where a man was making his way gingerly out of the underbrush, passing another who was stepping in. “They have one barrel there, not too much, just enough to keep us all toasty.”

“You disrespect our mothers.”

“You keep acting so sour, Dr. Chase will never look your way,” he said, and then began to laugh.

“You should leave, Lucien, before your mother discovers you.”

“You never leave their skirts.”

“You do not seem too interested in that either.”

“You shouldn’t run after the first man who makes your blood roll like a river, Libertie.”

“I will see you this evening, when you’ve sobered up a bit,” I said.

I did not like to admit it, but Lucien had troubled me. I walked through the rest of the bazaar, stopping to look at the tables with things for sale. Some of the younger girls had knitted a set of fingerless gloves, and I spent time pulling them on and off my hands, becoming angrier and angrier at Lucien’s presumption. My feelings toward Emmanuel could not be so obvious as he wished to imply. I was not anything that a person like that could easily know—a man who looked to make his mother laugh first, a man who couldn’t hold his own after one mug of beer drunk under the trees.

I opened my purse and took the piece of paper out of it again. There was my own hand, writing out the events of this day. And on the back, the other script, the one I’d seen that morning.

To My Libertie

This is a note to declare my undying affection for you. I wish, above all, for you to become my wife. I think, if you are being honest with yourself, you would wish it, too.

Yours,

Emmanuel Chase

Not even a bit of poetry, I thought. I admired him for that. For speaking plainly. For avoiding some terrible simile about my eyes, as someone as low as Lucien would have done.

“You are back,” I heard, and then I turned and saw it was Miss Hannah, standing with Miss Annie, both of them looking at me with a friendly weariness.

“Yes,” was all I could say.

In the years since her brother left us for the water, Miss Hannah had grown smaller, so that now she stood at Miss Annie’s shoulder, Her back was still straight, but her eyes were nearly colorless. I had thought her old when I was a girl, but more or less the same age as my mother. Now, I saw she was much older.

“Studies suit you well,” Miss Hannah said, and I reached out to grab her hand.

“I have thought of you and Mr. Ben often,” I said.

It was the wrong thing. Miss Hannah’s face broke, and she lowered her eyes, and Miss Annie looked at me, exasperated. But Miss Hannah held my hand in hers so tight that my fingers tingled, and she would not let go.

“Have you seen?” she said. “He’s here, with us.”

She would not let go. I put my other hand on top of hers, and she clasped her other hand over that, so that we were bound together. She led me away from the table before I could snatch up again my slip of paper from where I’d stuffed it, underneath the pile of empty gloves.

“Here,” she said.

It was a wooden marker. It was painted with the name BENJAMIN SMITH—the name Miss Hannah had chosen for him and herself. Someone had painted wings on either side, but they were so clumsy they looked like crescent moons.

The church, at least, had given him a prized space, in the middle of the yard between two larger stones. Miss Hannah gazed at the plot as if her brother’s body was really underneath it, as if he could rise up through the grass to be with us.

“I am saving up for stone,” she said. “I had this put up last year.”

She still held my hands in hers. “You are a good sister,” was all I could manage to say, but she did not seem to wish for more. She only wanted me to stand in her fifteen years of grief, beside the play grave of her brother.

It was colder and almost dusk by the time Miss Hannah let my hand go and I could leave the graveyard. By then, the celebration had quieted. Some men and women lingered, eating the last of strawberries that had been set out. A few children, waiting for their parents, slept in a pile underneath one of the tables.

There was no sign of Emmanuel Chase. When I went back to the table to try and find his letter, it was gone. I told myself, even though I knew it wasn’t true, that maybe someone had swept it away with the dirty rushes or packed it with their extra pairs of gloves. I tried to find Louisa or Experience to help, but I was told they had already headed back to my mother’s house. So I started the walk from the church alone, my hands still pressed from Miss Hannah’s grip.

The lightning bugs were out already. They darted all around me, sometimes deep into the fields, sometimes just a few steps ahead. The light was almost purple, and it made me wish that Emmanuel was beside me—if only to be able to remark on how strange and beautiful it was, if only to have a testimony. I slowed, as if I was walking arm in arm with a companion. It did not seem fair that this whole night was stretched before me and I was its lone witness.

I was thinking about this, about the ghost of Emmanuel beside me, when I came to my mother’s house and I saw her, standing in the open doorway, the light from inside blazing behind her.

“Hello,” I said, startled.

And she said, “You’re lying to me, Libertie.”

“IT’S NOT ENOUGH,” she said, “that my only daughter has not spoken a word to me since she has come home. That she has hidden behind friends and acquaintances. That she has not even given me a report of her year—”

“I wasn’t—”

“It is not enough that she has not come to visit our clinic, has ignored my letters for months. But above all of that, I find she has kept her worst secret from her own mother.”

How could she know? I thought. Who could have told her that I had failed, that I was cast out of Cunningham College? Briefly, I flashed in anger upon Experience and Louisa. But I had not shared my disgrace even with them. Who could have told my mother?

“You’ve lied to me. How long have you been lying to me?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Mama.”

“Stop! It makes me sick to hear it.”

She had not moved from the door. She would not let me pass, I realized with terror. I stood out in that night air that had seemed so beautiful, so magical, just a minute ago. If only she would let me into the house.

I started up the stairs, but she moved from the door to meet me at the top step.

“How long? That’s all I ask. I put the blame on you. How long?”

“Please, Mama, let me inside.”

“I cannot trust you in this house anymore. How can I trust you even to sleep under this roof?”

I began to cry. “I am sorry, Mama. Please forgive me.”

“I can’t even trust those,” she said, her voice thick. I realized, with a start, she was crying herself. “Your tears are lies, too.”

“Please, Mama, just let me inside, and I will explain. I will explain everything.”

“You cannot sleep here,” she said.

“Please!”

“I cannot trust you underneath this roof.”

I do not know how I managed to be on the ground, but I was. I had sunk all the way down into the earth, and could only double over and cry. I knelt like that until I heard the swing of her skirts as she came down off the porch, as she stood over me. I could smell her perfume, the smell of the lemon juice she used to bathe her lily petals and keep her skin soft and bright, the hot cotton of her waistcoat—my mother’s good graces in the air around me.