Why that should be, she couldn’t have explained. Her mother’s name was Rachel Coraline Quicke. Alice hadn’t seen her in years; part of that was hurt, part of it disgust. She’d had no childhood at all. Her earliest memory was of Rachel in the mud of a Chicago street, screaming at the shutters of their landlord, flinging gobbets of muck because their tenement door was locked and she’d lost the key. There was such fury in her. Her hips were wide, her belly soft to the touch. She’d drink whole boots of lager at the Irish saloon off Declamey Street and stagger home cursing. She worked in a German bakery in the next ward, snorting like a horse in the early hours, shaping with clever fingers the little dough figures in the empty bakery, the night outside very black, the pretzels and pastries and jam-filled tarts warm and sweet-scented. It was the only time she seemed at peace. When she was very little Alice sometimes went with her, pretending to help stoke the stoves, wipe the flour from the tables, not minding the hour. Then when she was four, her father left. After that it was just the two of them. For a time she’d had a little Irish setter named Scratch but then one day he’d run off too, killed in a fight or kicked by a horse or maybe just he too decided he’d had enough and there were easier places to live.
Alice herself, in those early years, was already a gutter rat, haunting the tumbledown west side where they lived. She ran with a pack of older immigrant kids in the alleys, mostly Irish, all of them weaving between the wheels of the carriages and cabs, starting little fires in the produce market on Randolph Street, throwing rocks at freight yard windows and running from the watchmen. Her friends were seized, beaten; but she never was, being too quick even then. Chicago in that decade was a sprawl of mud and filth, of flooding and sewage. The river reeked in the summers, the streets thickened into a stew of muck in the spring and fall. Even the horses floundered in the deepest intersections. And everywhere were the railroads, the hotels, the supply stores, the vast yards of sheds and livestock pens and grain elevators, all lit up. It was a city of fire.
Alice was seven when her mother found God. What followed was a strange time of prayer and church gatherings and riverside picnics on Sundays in the summer. She had one dress, which her mother washed exhaustively. Her mother’s temper didn’t soften; but her faith, if that’s what it was, filled her with a renewed intensity, so that she’d lash her pink back before sleep each night with a birch branch, the red welts angry and oozing. She’d take to the street corners on a wooden crate in the afternoons, when she got off work, haranguing passersby to look to the state of their souls. And maybe it all poisoned her work, too, who could say. Because later that year she lost her job at the bakery, the only job Alice had ever known her to hold, the one steadiness in their lives, and after that everything changed.
At the Church of New Canaan there arrived a woman from the West, from a small religious community in the wheat fields of Illinois. Her name was Adra Norn. She was tall, with long hair the color of lead, and a face like sun-dried fruit, and huge rugged hands, masculine hands, hands that could rip a Bible in two. When she spoke, even the men listened. She said their God was an angry god, a vengeful god, and that his anger was directed at the men of the world. Her community was a place for women only, a refuge from the world’s corruptions. If Alice feared her mother, what she felt for Adra Norn was different, closer to awe. The woman would sweep past with the force of a hurricane, her gray skirts whirling, her huge raw hands scooping up whatever needed doing. Her speech sounded biblical and disturbing and her accent was but half-intelligible though her meaning was clear: God does not love you, God does not need you. Risk his displeasure and be harrowed.
“And yet for those touched by God,” she would also say, “anything is possible.”
Alice’s mother took to saying that too, under her breath, over and over, when she thought she was alone. Then one Sunday Alice saw her mother deep in conversation with Adra Norn; and soon the tall woman was descending upon their apartment in the evenings. Two months later, when Norn prepared to depart, Rachel too packed up their few belongings and set out with Alice for the holy community of Bent Knee Hollow.
That journey, her first, Alice would remember all her life to come: the crows rising as one out of the stubble fields, quick and crackling like thought, exactly like what she imagined thinking was like; the low red sun sinking over the tree line; the dusty roads, deserted, filling with an ancient light; and always the leafy green oaks and willows lining the cool rivers. Five days they rode, Adra Norn’s old Conestoga wagon creaking like a great landship over the rutted crossings, Rachel hunched next to Adra on the hard bench up front, lost in conversation. Alice was left to herself in the rear, sprawled among crates of seeds, grain, bolts of cloth, hatchets and spades and shovels and their like; and because it was summer she slept each night in the open, at the smoldering fire, Norn first blessing their food and their fate and the very fire itself before laying down her own steely head.