Light of the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

stunning. “I appreciate that, Dave,more than you can know. Thanks for inviting me, Mr. Hollister,” she said.
    I couldn’t remember when I had felt so small.
    I WENT INTO THE kitchen, where my wife, Molly, was slicing tomatoes on a breadboard. “Gretchen Horowitz is here,” I said.
    The knife slowed and stopped. “Oh,” she said.
    “I told Albert of her background. I told him maybe it would be better if Gretchen moved on. I actually told him to say that to her.”
    “Don’t give yourself too much credit, Streak. Albert has two ways of doing things. There’s Albert’s way. Then there’s Albert’s way.”
    Molly had the shoulders and hands of a countrywoman, and an Irish mouth and heavy arms and white skin dusted with sun freckles. Her hair was a dull red and silver on the roots; though she kept it cut short, it had a way of falling in her eyes when she worked. She was my moral compass, my navigator, my partner in everything, braver than I, more compassionate, more steadfast when the storm clouds started rolling. She had been a nun who never took vows; she worked with the Maryknolls in El Salvador and Guatemala during a time when Maryknoll women were raped and killed and the administration in Washington looked the other way. Former Sister Molly Boyle should have been running the Vatican, at least in my view.
    She looked through the window at the horses grazing down the slope in the shade, their tails slashing at the insects that were starting to rise from the grass as the day warmed. I knew she was thinking about Gretchen and the violence we thought we had left behind in Louisiana.
    “Gretchen saw a man looking at her from the hillside,” I said. “Albert says there’s no reason for anybody to be up there.”
    “You think it’s the rodeo guy Alafair had trouble with?”
    “I’m going to take a walk up there now.”
    “I’ll come along.”
    “There’s no need for you to. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
    She wiped her hands on a dish towel. “My foot,” she said.
    We climbed up the trail behind the house, through pine and firand larch trees widely spaced in an arroyo that stayed in deep shade most of the day. At the top of the trail was the old Plum Creek logging road, shaped like a horseshoe and partially eroded and caved in and dotted with seedlings and heaped in places with piles of barkless and worm-eaten trees that had slid down from the bluff during the spring melt. The incline at the top of the trail was steep, and I was perspiring and breathing harder than I wanted to admit when we gained the road near the ridge. The wind was cold on my face, the sun shining through the canopy like shafts of light in a cathedral, my head reeling. When I looked back down at the valley, Albert’s three-story house looked like it had been miniaturized.
    “You okay, skipper?” Molly said.
    “I’m fine,” I said, my heart pounding. I looked in both directions on the road. I expected to see oil and brake fluid cans and lunch trash left behind by loggers, but the road was clean and the slopes below it carpeted with pine needles, the outcroppings of rock gray and striated by erosion and spotted with bird droppings.
    It was an idyllic scene, one that seemed to have healed itself after years of clear-cutting and neglect. It was one of the moments when you feel that indeed the earth abideth forever, and that all the industrial abuse we’ve done to it will somehow disappear with time.
    At the place where the logging road dead-ended in a huge pile of dirt and burned tree stumps, I saw the sunlight flash on a metallic surface. “Stay behind me,” I said.
    “What is it?” Molly asked.
    “Probably nothing.”
    I walked ahead of her along the base of the bluff, through a low spot in the road where the soil was dark from the morning rain and marked by the tracks of someone wearing needle-nosed cowboy boots. The tracks were deep and sharp-edged and beaded with moisture in the center, as though the soil under the