Momma tells me the Women's Prayer Group at the Holy Ghost Church whispers among themselves that I've become peculiar. My name is mentioned in prayer requests on Wednesday nights as they tell how they last found me--doing better, coping, having a hard time that week, mending. They don't talk about the fate of my soul, not with Momma there, although I know most of them hear enough about me to doubt my salvation. I used to go to prayer meeting, too, so I know how it is. All those unspoken concerns can fill up that small windowless room near to the point of suffocating.

I find it's a heavy burden to be the subject of so many prayers.

Deacon Ferris has his suspicions about me. He says it's only logical that a widow in my precarious financial position would want to sell a few of those horses. He wonders why I haven't sold any yet.

Selling Pinto Bean would be a good start, he tells me. Is there some reason you don't want to sell him?

A reason? Not a good one, I think. Not one I'm even sure I understand.

Momma thinks I should take the money. It's a fair price, she tells me. You could sell a lot of those horses. You got a nice job at the bank. You don't need all that extra work. They were Walker's horses, after all, not yours.

She's right. The horses are a lot of work and I come home so tired anymore it's all I can do to take care of them and me both. But selling them would be taking the easy way out and I figure I owe it to Walker to keep trying. He didn't like easy. Said easy equaled fat and smug. Remembering how he was, I feel guilty about the persistent roll around my waist when I button my jeans. I'm getting plump all over like a quail in autumn. Plump enough for cleavage and though I imagine Walker would like that, I don't think he'd like the rest of my padding. Walker liked to see my ribs. He'd run his hard hands lightly up and down my rib cage and call me his human xylophone.

Even when we knew he was dying, he wouldn't let me talk easy about it. Passing, he'd say with a snort. You make it sound like I'm a kidney stone or a car in the fast lane. Tell me, Val, who am I going to pass?

Me, I told him and he grabbed me and hugged me so hard I thought maybe my bones would break. I wish now we hadn't argued about words. But Walker was all about words. I never knew anyone who read as much as he did.

It's been a whole year now and the house is still littered with Walker's books. I find them one at a time, under the dresser, in a jacket pocket, at the bottom of his toolbox, between hay bales in the barn. He left me in quite a mess. The books are the least of it. Not knowing what he wanted, I guess I can't sell the horses. Especially not his horse. Not P. Bean.

Deacon's been pretty one-track about buying P. Bean. It's an obsession that's almost scary, him all the time demanding a good reason why I won't sell. He's been that way ever since Walker died. Since right after the funeral dinner, when my house was elbow to elbow with friends and family and the crowd made it easy for him to snoop around. He was all over the place, carrying his paper plate mounded with ham, gelatin salads, scalloped potatoes and one of Brenda's fudge brownies plopped on top, pretending to be looking for a place to sit down. But even so, I saw him finagling for a spot where he could spy out Walker's bookcase. I knew I should have cleaned it out before the funeral. Except for the Bible I gave him when we were first married, Walker didn't have what you'd call good Christian books. It wasn't a good sign, Deacon shaking his head while reading the titles. I chose to ignore both the man and his disapproval. But Deacon is proving a hard man to ignore.

~

The Holy Ghost Church is never packed on Sunday mornings. Looking down from the choir where I sit on the soprano row next to Momma, I've never counted any more than sixty-seven in the pews. Not even at Christmas or Easter. This Sunday is no different. I count thirty-one before Pastor Piatt steps into the pulpit and blocks my view. He's a good man, I think, to devote his life to so few.

He visits me on Tuesdays on the weeks I don't show up for Sunday worship and gives me spiritual looks and kind words. My backsliding never seems to get him upset or impatient. He's a small man, shorter than me, with an unfocused smile and hands that quiver like oak leaves shaken by a winter wind. When he visits, he perches on the edge of Walker's old leather recliner within arm's reach of the plate of hot cinnamon rolls I set on the coffee table. I tell him he only comes because of my cooking. He laughs an old man's reedy chortle containing good wishes but no humor. After wiping his mouth with a paper napkin, he finally gets around to what brought him, saying we missed you in church. From his tone and his expression, I believe it. We kneel on the floor-it seems the knees of all his suits are shiny-and say a prayer that God will make things clear for me.

Sunday morning, out of respect, I try not to grimace when he announces his favorite verse as the topic for the day's sermon. Turn to Revelations, chapter 7, starting with verse 4, he says and begins to read, And I heard the number of them which were sealed: and there were sealed an hundred and forty and four thousand of all the tribes of the children of Israel.

I wish he'd picked another scripture. This one upsets Momma to distraction. The minute the scripture was announced, she started shifting around in her chair and tugging at her skirt. I know I'll spend the rest of the afternoon listening to her moan about how Father left her for another woman. About how she's sure Father isn't one of the chosen.

She'll tell me, he's like one of those seeds Jesus talked about that fell in shallow soil and spurted up for awhile until the heat killed it. It's up to you to keep me company in heaven. I don't want to go up there and be alone.

I have to agree. I don't want to be alone either.

~

Walker was always asking me why I wanted to go to heaven after looking at some of the 144,000 who were headed there. You can't stand most of them on earth, he says to me. What makes you think you'll be liking them any better in heaven?

I tell him, it's because Jesus will be there and we'll all be filled with love, and all the bad will be filtered out of us before we get there.

But I didn't convince him. I didn't convince Walker of a lot of things.

To tell the truth, my feelings were pretty ragged about that attitude of his once we knew he was dying. It felt like Walker didn't want to be with me forever.

If you really loved me, I'd tell him, you'd try to be one of the 144,000.

Nope, he tells me, that's pretty much already decided, don't you think? You and your momma'll be lucky if you get in on the tail end of the thing, figuring all the millions of people who've already lived and died.

All those millions don't matter, though, I say to him. If you believe, really believe, then you're one of the number and always have been. God figured it all out before he started the world. He knows how many people will be there.

Walker looks at me with brown eyes soft as chocolate creme and tells me, I can't believe it. I really wish I could. Don't you know there's nothing I want more than to be with you forever?

We were quiet then. I could see his side of it. Sort of. The trouble with Walker was he believed in a little bit of everything. He believed the Bible; it was just there were other things he believed, too. Things he said no one could know for sure. At least not in this lifetime. Preachers, rabbis, popes, and gurus, he says, they don't have a lock on the truth. They don't know it all. If they did then they'd all agree, wouldn't they? Maybe that's because God doesn't tell it all. Probably scare us all to death if He did.

~

Deacon Ferris always picks my line at the bank. Once a week on Thursdays, he brings in the receipts from his insurance agency and bargains to buy P. Bean away from me. It's troublesome. But his persistence isn't the only thing. His hands are soft as a woman's, with clean white fingernails longer than my own, and the gold ring on his pinkie sports a ruby big as a gooseberry.

Working at the bank, I know people by the hands they hold out to me. Businessmen with nails bitten to the quick, mothers with disinfectant-chapped skin, old ladies touting veins like road maps on the backs of their hands, want-to-be glamour girls with bright nail polish and hand cream slick palms, farmers with callused fingers. I admit I make judgments. It's hard not to. The farmer with the smooth hands has very little money in his checking account. The mother with perfect manicured nails has a child with dirty ears.

There are some hands I don't mind touching and some I do. If given a chance, I'll count the money onto the counter and push it toward the customer when I'm finished. Deacon always holds out his hand for his cash. Most days I don't mind, but today, just before his turn, I noticed him standing behind Linda Mitchell as he blew his nose into a dingy hankie. I couldn't stop watching until he inspected his deposit and stuffed the wrapped results into his back suit pocket. When he steps up to my window I scoot backwards a bit.

You look lovely as usual, he tells me.

This has been his opening line for the past few months. A softening line to get me to agree to sell P. Bean was what I'd always thought. I smile and thank him, forcing the corners of my mouth to relax so I don't look parsimonious, a look Momma says I get when Deacon is around. I guess that's because I'm a smidgen afraid of him. Working at the bank, I know more about him than I should. Like the life insurance money sitting in his account that he collected when his wife died. He only drew out a few thousand for her funeral. The coffin looked cheap and he didn't have a viewing. Probably too stingy to pay for a decent embalming. Everybody commented about it. He hasn't touched the rest of the money. Hasn't even tithed on it. I have to wonder what he's saving it for.

The whispers behind cupped hands are that he wore Martha out. That poor, exhausted Martha always smelled of marital relations. More like Deacon than herself. No surprise she died pregnant at the young age of forty-six. As if the seven children she bore Deacon weren't enough. Her face I remember clearly to this day, a constant despairing frown and her eyes stark, rimmed by dark circles.

Maybe I could come up with another hundred for that horse, Deacon tells me, responding to my smile with one of his own.

There's an impatient, foot-tapping line forming behind him--Red Conners, Mrs. Pflumm and Mindy Lee Reynolds. Mr. Steel, my manager, is giving me hurry up looks from his desk by the front window where he watches tellers and customers alike. I don't have time to argue.

I don't know, I tell him, counting money into his outstretched hand, knowing all the time I wasn't about to sell P. Bean, not to him or anybody else but still wondering how much higher he was willing to go. He's offering enough now that maybe I can get that leak in the barn roof fixed. If only it wasn't Walker's horse he wanted.

He grasps my hand across the counter while I'm considering. Pulls me toward him. Whispers close to my ear, Perhaps I could come out some night and we could discuss it.

His touch, which has nothing to do with the exchange of money, jolts like the first shaft of daylight that wakes me in the morning. I see Mr. Steel's eyebrows rocket to the middle of his forehead. I'm not naive. Deacon's been a widower for three years, me a widow for one. No doubt he's getting lonely. Maybe desperate. But his touch makes me shiver.

Sure, I tell Deacon, pulling my hand back with difficulty. Anything to get the line moving again.

~

My mind lingers more on death than life. Death and the pieces left behind. I don't think I realized how many things cluttered a life until Walker died. By things, I don't mean relationships or family or friends. I mean all the paraphernalia that accompanies living. Like the tassel from the mortarboard Walker wore at high school graduation. Pictures of people I don't know from before we met. Tools I don't know how to use. A shoebox with medals from Vietnam. A Zippo lighter that belonged to an Army buddy. Unfinished projects in the garage.

For a while it overwhelmed me so much I left our bedroom the way it was when he went. All his clothes hung from hangers in the closet, ghost clothes in tidy rows, ready to be worn. The novel on the nightstand he never finished reading. A pair of his dirty socks that missed the hamper on the bathroom floor. A movie set waiting for the actor to reappear.

It wasn't until Momma walked in one day without knocking that I realized what it must look like. She barged into the bedroom where I was changing clothes from work and tripped over Walker's boots in the middle of the floor. She stared at me hard. What are you thinking, Val? she asked. Picking up an overflowing ashtray from Walker's side of the dresser, she dumped it in the trash.

I watched the ashes catch the air and float hazily into the trash can. How to tell her what I was thinking? She'd lost a son-in-law, a chance for grandkids. I'd lost half my soul. She wouldn't understand I was thinking maybe if Walker didn't go to heaven like we were planning to do, then maybe he was still hanging around.

Walker told me maybe nobody's right or wrong. Maybe it's in the believing. Maybe if you believe and believe it so hard that it becomes a part of you, then whatever it is that you believe will turn real.

I guess he didn't say it exactly like that, but I know what he meant. Momma and me, we're going to heaven because that's what we believe, and our believing is going to make it real. When we die our spirit will go wherever we believe it will go. Spirits aren't bound by solid things anymore so thoughts can become reality. I know that's what Walker meant because he told me he needed to believe in something as much as he believed in the earth and the sky and me.

If I don't, he told me, my soul might get confused. I know I'm not going to heaven, but I'm afraid I'll end up in hell because those are the only two places I know about. You have to help me, Val. You have to help me find something I can believe.

We drove into Ft. Smith and bought a truckload of books. Practically cleaned out the spiritual life section in three, small secondhand bookstores. He never got to read them all. He went so quick. The doctor said it would happen that way.

I think Walker probably hated that his dying was so easy. No pain, no frantic rush to the emergency room, no final fight for life, no last words. It wasn't the exit he would have wanted. But then, I have no way of knowing that for sure, because the worst thing about a person dying is you can't talk to them anymore. I wonder if there's life after death, why can't the dead talk to the living? It's only the body that's missing. Their spirit, their thoughts continue. There ought to be a way to communicate. Is heaven or hell or wherever Walker went that far away?

~

It doesn't surprise me when I see Deacon's car dragging dust clouds up my long gravel driveway one fine summer evening. Can't say it thrills me either, not since that hand grabbing incident at the bank. To tell the truth, I don't believe he's really interested in me. Maybe it's the money that the horses and the ranch could bring. I know it's not a Christian thing to think. Still, when he steps out of the car, a shiver runs up my spine at the ostrich leather boots, stiff jeans and pearl snap shirt with creases still crisp from the store. The belly that overshadows a silver belt buckle. A smug man. A man who lives an easy life.

You look lovely as usual, Val, he tells me all the while brushing dust off his shirt.

I notice he's carrying a Bible in one hand and suddenly I'm uncertain whether he's come to woo me or reproach me. This is how it starts when they think about throwing you out of the church. Only one member sent at first to ask you to repent.

Since I've been going to the Holy Ghost Church we've had six preachers, but only one Deacon Ferris. If he denounces you from the pulpit, you're out. Out of church and out of heaven. Deep down inside I guess I'm very selfish. Very much afraid of hell fire, eternal agony, damnation. I can't say like Walker that if people like Deacon are going to heaven then I don't want to go there. I do want to go there.

But when Deacon holds the Bible out to me, I recognize it and relax. Red leather, pages edged with gold, a crease in the cover where it was folded in half to read easily, worn a little at the edges from the days when Walker was looking for the eye of the needle, the side door to heaven. Funny I hadn't even missed it.

Deacon tells me, I found this at my house. Can't imagine how it got there.

I take it from his outstretched hand, gently, as if it might disintegrate at my touch. Opening the front cover, I read the inscription: To Walker, From Val. It's precious to me, but to Walker it was nothing more than a how-to book. How to get into heaven. Something he ultimately discarded. Flipping through the pages I see passages have been highlighted with a yellow marker. Just like so many of Walker's books. I don't remember noticing this in his Bible before.

Thank you, I tell Deacon, but I can see he expects more. With regret I decide to oblige and ask him, Would you like to come into the house for a cup of coffee?

I tell him to make himself at home while I go to the kitchen for cups and coffee. I can hear him shuffling through things in the living room.

Walker certainly had eclectic tastes, he tells me when I return. I hope you weren't tainted by any of that blasphemy he was always spouting. It would be a shame if you were left out of the heavenly throng after being such a faithful Christian woman all these years. He takes a sip of coffee, looks straight at my cleavage and speaks to it, A very attractive one at that.

I wondered when the subject of Walker's beliefs would surface. The only surprise is he waited so long to bring it up.

I guess you think Walker went to hell, don't you? I ask him.

Don't you? he asks me back.

Do you think Martha went to heaven?

It's easy to see I've hit his weakness. His hands clutch his coffee mug as if it suddenly sprouted legs and would walk away. His eyes lower and I almost believe a sadness comes over his face, although it might have been a trick of light, a flicker of the setting sun.

Val, he tells me, we are in much the same situation. We were both married to unbelievers. I know you think Martha was a good disciple. I had hoped so too. But when she lay dying in the hospital, the minute I left the room, she called for a priest to give her last rites. She was Catholic, you know. Before we married.

I don't know what to say. I remember Martha's cheap coffin and think Deacon's love must not have extended beyond his own beliefs. A woman who had seven children for him, scorned for a brief moment of weakness. I cannot offer him the platitudes said to me so many times after Walker died. How could I? He didn't love her. Couldn't have loved her the way I loved Walker.

Our sudden silence becomes hollow. He drains his coffee cup and sets it on the table. His ruby ring winks at me. A sign to be careful. I offer to get him a refill. A chance to get away. But it doesn't work. I hear the thud of his boots on the linoleum floor echo behind me. I know by the prickle on my neck he's followed me, know it without turning around to face him.

He whispers in my ear, you are beautiful. His lips touch my earlobe and his fingers knead my shoulder. Through my thin dress I feel the heat from his hands, hot, feverish. Although I don't have much experience, I think I can tell the difference between the touch of lust and the caress of love.

As if he heard my thoughts he tells me, I fight lust in my heart for you every day. I think we should get married.

I shake my head "no" and set the coffee pot down on the counter.

Perhaps if you think about it awhile, he says.

I shake my head "no" again. I fear my voice. I fear Deacon. A sudden fear that has come from nowhere and everywhere. Perhaps carried by the breeze through the open kitchen window.

You have to marry me, he tells me. Every time I look at you I sin. I can't live like this.

I try to laugh. To make it into a joke. To let him know I don't believe he's serious. He couldn't be serious.

I don't have to do anything, I tell him. You can't force someone to marry you. I make a move to slip away. I'm too slow. His hands clamp onto my shoulders as I imagine an eagle captures its prey. Soft hands that are stronger than I imagined. Hands that, maybe, knew how to force a woman to his desires. I remember Martha, her smell, her eyes rimmed by dark circles.

If a man takes a woman and does the honorable thing by offering to marry her, then there is no sin, he tells me. He turns me around and says to my face, Read your Bible.

He isn't smiling. It isn't a joke. I stare into the calculating eyes of a man who has found his loopholes in the Bible. I wish I could remember the scripture he's talking about. No doubt Old Testament hell and damnation. No doubt if I refuse to marry him, he will be absolved for his offer and the sin will fall on me. It's then I realize what he's really saying as his face comes close enough to mine that I can smell peppermint and onions on his breath. It's then I realize what "take" means in the Old Testament.

I scream. It's answered only by the shrill whinny of a horse. I have no close neighbors.

~

Walker and I were sitting side by side on the piano bench at Momma's house when he told me, I'd like to marry you. His hands rested lightly on the piano keys, fingers long and slender-strong, the back of his hands covered with coarse, blond hairs.

I stared at the hole in the cuff of his navy blue sweater where his wrist bone poked through and asked him, Why? I remember he smelled like autumn, crushed oak leaves, cheap apple wine and of himself.

He smiled and asked me back, Why not?

I hated it when he answered me like that and so I sniped, Because, why not? which I thought was as much a non-answer as his own.

Because why not, why? was his answer. Even more nonsensical than my own words. I turned away and spoke over my shoulder, Ask me when you're sober.

He brushed a lock of hair behind my ear and began to play the piano. He said he played what he heard in his head. The notes on paper were like a foreign language. And then he told me, I don't remember asking you anything. I said I wanted to marry you. That is not a question.

I miss him. So much sometimes I want to double over and clutch my empty gut and cry until I'm all dried up. But I can't.

Maybe that's why they still pray for me in the Women's Prayer Group. Or why Pastor Piatt has given up visiting me on Tuesdays. Or why Momma can't convince me to step foot in the church, no matter her protests of being lonely in heaven.

I have to wonder how much the brain tumor affected Walker's thinking. How much it clouded his reasoning. I know the closer he drew to death the more he leaned toward the recycling of life in other bodies. Even Walker did not believe it was all over when we die.

Nothing ever really disappears, Val, he would tell me, like the water in a puddle, when it evaporates, it's not gone, it'll come back as rain. Nothing real ever disappears. It just turns into something else.

And so, every day now, I pull P. Bean's head down even with my own, and stare into those chocolate eyes. Looking for the sign. The for sure. The undeniable truth. But for that one day, I've seen nothing to feed my hope that Walker was right. That was the day Deacon raped me, after he zipped up his jeans and walked to the door, after he said he was offering to marry me to make it right, as soon as he stepped through the door, he stopped. P. Bean had broken out of the corral and had pawed the grass in the front yard to dust, his ears pinned flat against his head and his neck lathered as if he had run hard for miles. Deacon gasped it under his breath, Get back, you're dead.

He didn't think I heard, but I did. If need be, I'll use it against him.

Even though I no longer attend the Holy Ghost Church, Deacon has not tried to denounce me. That gives me some relief because I don't seem able to rid myself of thoughts of heaven and hell. As much as I want to believe what Walker believed, I can't.

What I do believe is that his spirit lingers. Waiting. Watching out for me. And so, every evening, I sit on the porch and listen through the darkness for the sound I've never heard, only felt. An unspoken warning carried by a breeze through an open kitchen window, an urgent command to a horse. Nothing more, really, than a whisper kissed on skin. Vibration without noise. Voice without words. Sometimes I think I can almost hear it. Sometimes I don't. But I listen all the same.

* * *

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