The Power(101)

Roxy says, ‘I get it, right? If you killed him, he probably deserved killing. But you should go and look up what his wife’s doing now. She’s called Williams now. Remarried a Lyle Williams, in Jacksonville. She’s still there. You should go and look her up.’

Roxy stands up. ‘Don’t do this,’ she says. ‘Please don’t.’

Mother Eve says, ‘I’ll always love you.’

Roxy says, ‘Yeah. I know.’

Mother Eve says, ‘It’s the only way. If I don’t do it, they will.’

Roxy says, ‘If you really want the women to win, go and look up Lyle Williams in Jacksonville. And his wife.’





Allie lights a cigarette, in the quiet of a stone room in the convent overlooking the lake. She brings it to flame in the old way, with the spark from her fingertips. The paper crackles and blackens into glowing light. She breathes it in to the edges of her lungs; she is full of her old self. She has not smoked for years. Her head swims.

It’s not hard to find Mrs Montgomery-Taylor. One, two, three words typed into a search box and there she is. She runs a children’s home now, under the auspices and with the blessing of the New Church. She was an early member, there in Jacksonville. In a photograph on the website of their children’s home, her husband stands behind her. He looks a great deal like Mr Montgomery-Taylor. A shade taller, perhaps. A little bushier in the moustache, a little rounder in the cheek. Different colouring, a different mouth, but the same broad category of man: a weak man, the kind of man who, before any of this, would still have done what he was told. Or perhaps she’s remembering Mr Montgomery-Taylor. They look sufficiently similar that Allie finds she’s rubbing her jaw in the place where Mr Montgomery-Taylor hit her, as if the blow had landed only moments ago. Lyle Williams and his wife, Eve Williams. And together they care for children. It is Allie’s own church that has made this thing possible. Mrs Montgomery-Taylor did always know how to work a system to best advantage. The website for the children’s home she operates talks about the ‘loving discipline’ and ‘tender respect’ they teach.

She could have looked any time. She cannot think why she has not turned on this old light before.

The voice is saying things. It’s saying: Don’t do it. It’s saying: Turn away. It’s saying: Step away from the tree, Eve, with your hands up.

Allie doesn’t listen.

Allie picks up the handset of the telephone on the desk here in the convent room overlooking the lake. She dials the number. Far away, in a hallway with a side table topped by a crocheted runner, a telephone rings.

‘Hello?’ says Mrs Montgomery-Taylor.

‘Hello,’ says Allie.

‘Oh, Alison,’ says Mrs Montgomery-Taylor. ‘I hoped you’d call.’

Like the first drops of rain. Like the earth saying: I’m ready for it. Come and get me.

Allie says, ‘What have you done?’

Mrs Montgomery-Taylor says, ‘Just what the Spirit has commanded me to do.’

Because she knows what Allie means. Somewhere inside her heart, for all the twisting and turning, she does know. As she’s always known.

Allie can see in that moment that ‘everything will disappear’ is a fantasy, has always been a delightful dream. Not the past, not the lines of pain inscribed on the human body, not a thing will ever disappear. While Allie has been making her life, Mrs Montgomery-Taylor has also continued, growing monstrous as the clock turned.

Mrs Montgomery-Taylor keeps up a bright line of chatter. She’s so honoured to receive a telephone call from Mother Eve, although she always knew she would; she understood what was meant by the name Allie had taken on, that she was Allie’s real mother, her spiritual mother, and hadn’t Mother Eve always said that the mother is greater than the child? She understood what was meant by that, too, that the mother is the one who knows best. She is so happy, so delighted, that Allie understood that everything she and Clyde did they did for her own good. Allie feels sick.

‘You were just a young girl, so wild,’ says Mrs Montgomery-Taylor. ‘You drove us to distraction. I saw that a devil was in you.’

Allie remembers it now, as she has not brought it out into the light these many years. She pulls it from the back of her mind. She blows the dust from this heap of rags and bones. She stirs them with a fingertip. She arrived at the home of the Montgomery-Taylors, a jangled child, beady and birdlike and wild. Her eyes seeing everything, her hands in everything. It was Mrs Montgomery-Taylor who brought her, and Mrs Montgomery-Taylor who wanted her, and Mrs Montgomery-Taylor who spanked her when her hand was in the raisin jar. It was Mrs Montgomery-Taylor who grabbed her arm and threw her to her knees and commanded her to pray that the Lord would forgive her sin. Over and over, on her knees.

‘We had to drive that devil out of you, you see that now, don’t you?’ says Mrs Montgomery-Taylor, now Mrs Williams.

And Allie does see it. It is as clear to her now as if she were watching it through the glass panes of their own sitting room. Mrs Montgomery-Taylor tried to pray the devil out of her and then to beat the devil out of her, and then she had a new idea.

‘Everything we did,’ she says, ‘we did for love of you. You needed to be taught discipline.’

She remembers the nights Mrs Montgomery-Taylor would put the polka on the radio real loud. And then Mr Montgomery-Taylor would ascend the stairs to give her the teachings. She remembers, all at once and with great clarity, which order those steps occurred in. First the polka music. Then the ascent of the stairs.