Redemption
an excerpt

More like snippets, then excerpts:

Assenath had lived in the town for more than forty years, but the Village was still unfamiliar to her. She had been through it as a child, playing with friends, but the Village had no permanent shape. Many of the houses were on skids and moved around, according to marriage or death or general need. The roads were dirt and the paths were even less permanent, shifting with the makeup of the Village.

Tonight, though, her path was easy. It was a route she had followed a hundred times, usually in the darker night. But tonight, she sensed she was needed earlier. So, she took a direct route, never faltering, always like she belonged here, in this foreign region in her back yard.

All of Carriage was her backyard. At least, that’s how she thought of it. She knew each area better than the residents, and she knew the areas in ways they never would. Where others saw lawns and falling down fences and chipped, cracked driveways, she saw base metals, minerals and coal seams with water coursing beneath through a slim jet of a secret aquifer. Hers was an assayer’s view. Hers was her husbands view.

As a young girl, it had never occurred to her that she would come to see the world through the eyes and mind of a husband. Even now, it seemed like an abomination against herself, but it was true anyway. It had worsened, or improved, depending on how you saw things, after he had slipped into his semi-sleep. It’s like his failing body had finally freed his mind to wander through their house. At some point, it had infiltrated her own thoughts and begun to fill her head with information and data. Sure she was reading his books and records each night, looking for some clue about what he had hidden from her, but it wasn’t that. The emergence of his knowledge in her head was a more spiritual, more invasive process.

Now, walking through this Village again, retreating from Joe’s house toward her own silent, living tomb of a home, she saw the mineralized veins that ran beneath her feet. She could feel their glacially slow progress under the ground, compressing and folding into new veins and new strata, all in an effort to push up over ground, to taste air. Walking over this pulse of activity every day had started to make her feel like a traitor, like she was the only one that could hear the earth below and yet was ignoring it. Most days she used her husband’s old wheelchair as an accessory, to help explain away her own glacial pace. No one asked her anything, and she didn’t bother answering. Instead, she just listened to the activity below her feet, stared at her husband whenever she imagined she heard his gruff voice, and spent day after day in the assay office, leafing through old paper files in search of the secret she knew was hidden from her.

But after tonight, that might all get more complicated. The boy looked like a secret keeper, an ally in another situation. But it still had to be addressed. She still had to make sure that Joe’s secret was safe.

That’s the problem with secrets, she thought, they were either hiding or being hidden. They were never static. They never rested.

...

The ice gave way and he slipped into the water. The cold shocked him and doused the heat that clung to the surface of his skin. He started to struggle, but reminded himself not to. Instead he let the water fill his ears and his mouth and his eyes. He felt the fur collar on his coat grown heavy, as it drank in the moisture, and felt the tug of the slow current as his slipped further under the ice. Just as he slipped into black, he felt one last tug of pain. A grip on his hair.

And he thought to himself, “I never prayed.”

---------------

Later (or earlier, depending on editing...)

Riley pulled up in front of a clean, neat church. Much the same as the one Carriage, in fact, almost identical. Or it would have been, if the church in Carriage had been maintained. The Bastion church had a neat lawn with a smooth stone walkway leading up to the door from the road. Without going in, Jacob knew what it would like on the inside. There would be a small entry way with a discreet but clearly visible donation box to the right. In the church, the pews would line up perfectly, without any names carved into the backs. All of the pews would have hymnals tucked into the back pockets. The altar would be white and clean and perfect. There would be two tall coloured windows behind the altar and a large, but well proportioned cross directly behind where Jacob would stand. And off to the side, once again discreet but also clearly visible, would be some representation of the Virgin Mary. A Madonna statue or a picture. Whenever the parishioners would file up the aisles, they’d go straight to the altar and the priest, but they’d always find a reason to file out towards the Virgin and as they passed the image, brush it with real reverence. Their action would be quiet, almost secret. A hush of the fingers running over the image.

It was exactly what Jacob had imagined at the seminary. It’s what he imagined when he got his letter from the Vatican setting out his mission to Carriage. And it’s exactly what he had hoped for when he started his car and began the long drive North.

Right now, though, he missed Carriage.