Abandoning his experiment, he returned to worshiping with his fellow Mennonites in camp, but he felt no great fellowship with them. The truth was, he missed the mesa, the immanence of God in every rock, every bush, every insect. He took to hiking up the forest road, alone, on Sunday mornings. There he did sometimes sense God’s presence, but it was feeble, like sun hidden by winter clouds.
One afternoon in March, while he was at the library in Flagstaff, abusing his camp privileges, leafing through a book of photographs of Plains Indians, a young woman sat down across the table from him and opened a math textbook. She was wearing a plaid cowboy shirt and had her hair in a bandanna, but he still recognized her. In the library’s better light, she was easily the most handsome woman he’d seen since his eyes were opened by a Navajo dancer. Embarrassed to be looking at a picture book, as if he were illiterate, he stood up to fetch a different book.
“I know you,” she said. “I saw you at Nativity.”
He turned back. “Yes.”
“I only saw you twice. Why?”
“Do you mean why only twice, or why was I there at all?”
“Both.”
“I’m not Catholic. I was just—observing.”
“That explains it. Young Catholic gentlemen are few and far between. I notice you never came back.”
“I’m not Catholic.”
“So you just said. If you say it a third time, I’ll think you’re warding off some hex.”
Her sharpness surprised him, as did the directness with which she proceeded to question him. Having sensed a resemblance to his mother, he might have expected softness and modesty. While learning nothing more about her than her name, which was Marion, he told her where he came from, why he was in Flagstaff, and how the Navajos had led him to explore other faiths.
“So you just took a truck and disappeared for a month?”
“A month and a half. The camp director was very generous.”
“And you weren’t scared to go there by yourself?”
“I probably should have been more scared. Somehow it didn’t occur to me.”
“I would have been scared.”
“Well, you’re a woman.”
The noun was innocuous and everyday, but he blushed to have spoken it. He’d never engaged in conversation with a woman he consciously found attractive—wouldn’t have guessed how taxing it would be. That she seemed impressed with his story made it all the more taxing. He finally, awkwardly, said he ought to let her get on with her studying.
She regarded her textbook sadly. “The mind so drifts.”
“I know. I struggle with math myself.”
“It’s not a struggle, it’s just dry. I get hungry to be with God.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, as if God were a sandwich.
“I do, too,” Russ said. “That is—I know what you’re saying. I miss being with the Navajos. They get to be with God all day, every day.”
“You should come back to Nativity. You might find what you’re looking for. I didn’t even know I was looking till I went there.”
Another man might have been put off by her religiosity, but to Russ it was no more than a version of what he’d grown up with. Less placid, but familiar. It no longer disturbed him that a girl called his mother to mind. It had dawned on him that his mother wasn’t simply his mother, wasn’t merely a figure of sacred devotion. She was a flesh-and-blood woman who herself had once been young.
When he returned to the Catholic church, the next Sunday, Marion sat beside him and whispered brief explanations of the liturgy. He tried to connect to Christus, as the priest called him, but he was thwarted by the proximity of her little self. She wore a coat dyed bright green and collared with darker green velveteen. Some of her nails were chewed, the torn cuticles edged with dry blood. She knit her fingers together so tightly in prayer that her knuckles whitened, her breath faintly rasping from her open mouth. Because her passion was directed at the Almighty, Russ felt safe to be excited by it.
After the service, he offered her a lift in the Willys.
“Thanks,” she said, “but I have to walk.”
“I like walking, too. It’s my favorite thing.”
“I have to count the steps, though. I did it once, a couple of years ago, and now I can’t stop, because … Never mind.”
Two old, slow women had emerged from the church speaking Spanish. Cherry Avenue was so quiet that pigeons were camped out in the middle of it.
“What were you going to say?”