“He’s nine years younger than me,” Martha blurts.
The woman looks pleased rather than appalled. “Good for you!” she says.
They reach the place where Stuart told them to wait for him. He is talking now about rivers in the caves but Martha could care less. The Reverend has his head bent, leaning toward Stuart, gobbling up all this useless information. Like at Gettysburg, where he had to stop at the visitors’ center and get brochures before they left. Then he kept reading to her from them. The next night, in bed, he’d recited the Gettysburg Address from memory in the voice she guessed he used for preaching. Remembering this, Martha feels a pang of something from long ago. A feeling that she cannot name. Unexpectedly, she thinks of Boo and how he used to wrap himself around her neck like a stole.
Martha moves closer to the Reverend, but he doesn’t look at her. Everyone is looking up at the ceiling.
“Many people see the face of Jesus there,” Stuart says in his deep voice.
Almost everyone is saying ah, and pointing.
Martha clutches the bag of fireworks in her hands. Despite the colder weather down here in the cave, her hands are sweating. When she presses the bag close to her chest she feels the cool hard bottle inside.
Reverend Dave is looking up too. Martha follows his gaze and tries hard to see the face of Jesus, but there is just more of the fake rock. This morning at the motel, the Reverend ran out of the bathroom, naked and wet, took Martha by the hand, and brought her to the small sliver of window by the shower. “Look! “ he said, awed. Martha had to stand on tiptoe to see.
“What?” she said.
The Reverend put his hands around her waist and lifted her so that she could see. Framed like a small painting were the Blue Ridge Mountains and the rolling hills below them. In the early morning mist, they seemed wrapped in gauze.
“Isn’t that one of the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen, honey pie?” he said in a soft voice, holding her there in place so that she was forced to look.
Martha squirmed out of his grasp. “I like the view from the bedroom better. Parking lot, strip mall, ribbon of highway.” She’d hoped he would know that she stole that phrase—ribbon of highway—from Woody Guthrie.
Now Martha stares hard at the spot where Stuart is shining his flashlight. She doesn’t want to make another wisecrack; she wants desperately to find something there. But before she has a chance, Stuart says, “Total cave darkness,” and turns off the light. They are left in a dark that is so thick, Martha cannot see the fingers she holds up to her own eyes. She finds herself leaning into the darkness. The bag she has been holding drops, and in the stillness there comes the shattering of the bottle and the yeasty smell of the beer.
“Oops,” someone says, and the group titters.
“In total cave darkness,” Stuart booms—like God, Martha decides, “you would go blind and crazy in just two weeks.”
Martha wants the lights on again. She wants to find a face in the cave ceiling. She is certain if given another chance she will see it. In the darkness, she reaches out, not certain what she will find. Through the beer and the musty cave smell, Martha smells the Reverend beside her. Until this instant she did not know she could recognize his scent. And then her hand finds his, warm and familiar. Martha cranes her neck and lifts her face upward. There is something there, she decides. The longer she stands like this, squeezing the Reverend’s hand and staring into the total cave darkness, the more that something begins to take shape. It is the blurry face of a stranger in a bar, promising her vodka if she will go home with him. It is the back of his New England Patriots sweatshirt as she stumbles across the parking lot toward his car, gagging on the smell of fresh sea air. She remembers peeling paint, sour sheets, a stranger’s body. She remembers that for three days last spring she did anything for her next drink.
Without warning, the lights come back on. They all squint at each other in the brightness. Martha sees the Reverend looking at her.
“Or maybe you like the darkness better?” Stuart asks, grinning. He snaps off the lights again.
Someone behind Martha gasps. But instead of panicking her, the darkness wraps itself around Martha and soothes her. It is as if she is falling, like the game she played as a child where you fall backward, hoping someone will be there to catch you.
THE RIGHTNESS OF THINGS