“Nothing,” she said. “It’s embarrassing. I have to start at the door of the church and make sure it’s the exact same number of steps every time, because that’s how I know God is still with me. If I ever counted one step too many, or too few…” She shuddered, perhaps at the thought, perhaps with embarrassment.
“My number of steps wouldn’t be the same,” Russ offered, although she hadn’t invited him to join her.
“That’s right, you’re tall. You’d have your own number—except you shouldn’t have a number. I shouldn’t have a number. I’m too superstitious already.”
“The Navajos have all sorts of superstitions. I’m not sure they’re wrong.”
“It’s an insult to God to think that counting steps has any bearing.”
“I don’t see the harm in it. The Bible is full of signs from God.”
She raised her dark eyes to him. “You’re a kind person.”
“Oh—thank you.”
“Maybe you can walk with me and distract me. I think, if I could walk even once without counting, I wouldn’t have to count anymore. Unless”—she laughed—“I get struck dead because I wasn’t counting.”
She was a mysterious combination of sharp and odd. The delicacy of her neck, visible above her velveteen collar, continued to fascinate him. In Lesser Hebron, and at Goshen, too, female napes had been concealed by plaits or tresses. As he walked her home, he learned that she’d grown up in San Francisco and had dreamed, foolishly, of being a Hollywood actress. She’d worked in Los Angeles as a typist and stenographer before moving to Flagstaff to live with her uncle. For a short while, she’d considered entering a convent, but now she was studying to be an elementary-school teacher. Being small, she said, she’d found that children trusted her, as if she were one of them. She said she hadn’t been raised Catholic—her father had been a nonobservant Jew, her mother a “Whiskeypalian.”
Each disclosure widened the vista of what Russ didn’t know about America. Although, by his calculation, she was only twenty-five, the place-names she dropped so casually, San Francisco, Los Angeles, were totemic of experiences more various than a woman from Lesser Hebron could expect in her entire life. As with Keith Durochie, he felt ignorant and inferior, and again the feeling was indistinguishable from attraction. It never crossed his mind that Marion might be attracted to him, too; that in her narrow Flagstaff ambit, with most of the country’s young men overseas, his apparition at Nativity had been as singular to her as hers was to him. Even if she hadn’t been significantly older, he had no concept of himself as an object of desire.
Her uncle’s house, on the outskirts of town, was low and ramshackle, its yard overrun with prickly pear. In the driveway stood a Ford truck blasted paintless by Arizona sand. Marion ran up to the front door and stamped on the mat there, spread her arms, and raised her face to the blue, blue sky. “Here I am,” she called to it. “Strike me dead.”
She looked at Russ and laughed. Trying to keep up, he managed a smile, but now she was frowning. Part of her oddness was how suddenly her expressions changed.
“I’m terrible,” she said. “This could turn out to be the moment when my fatal cancer started.”
“I don’t know that God minds a joke. Not if you sincerely love Him.”
Still serious, she came back down the walk. “Thank you for that. I do believe you’ve cured me. Would you like to stay for lunch?”
When he demurred—he was already derelict, owing to the length of Catholic mass, and he still had to retrieve the Willys—Marion insisted on walking back to the church with him. The taxation of being with her grew heavier as they retraced their steps. She admired his pacifism, admired his impatience at the camp, admired his compassion for the Navajos. Every time he glanced down, her brown eyes were glowing up at him. He’d never felt a gaze so unconditionally approving, and he lacked the experience to recognize the willingness it signaled. By the time they reached the truck, the stress of it had given him an actual headache. He offered to run her back to her uncle’s, but her face had clouded again.
“What you said earlier—that it doesn’t matter what we do as long as we love God. Do you really think that’s true?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “The Navajos don’t accept Christ, and I don’t know that they’re eternally damned. It doesn’t seem fair that they would be.”