Mission to America Read Free Page B

named it?”
    â€œHmm . . . I'll think.”
    â€œNot that they let us name things. Or ever will.”
    â€œDon't talk that way, Mason. It's a downhill road.”
    â€œDon't be so somber. Let's hear your name.”
    â€œâ€˜The Clench.'”
    Exactly sixty minutes after sundown, Sarah had me lie on my back with my arms beside my trunk and my legs about a foot apart so that she could kneel between my ankles. She was as thin from the front as from the side, an index finger of a woman. She spread her hands and gripped my goose-bumped shins and seemed to be steadying her mind for something that she'd mastered while alone but found more daunting now that I was here. I asked her if she'd intended to leave my socks on.
    â€œIt's brisk tonight. I thought you'd want warm toes.”
    â€œIt looks wrong,” I said.
    â€œNo one's looking at you.”
    â€œYou are.”
    â€œBut you don't know at what. It's not your socks, young man.”
    Surprising. Enlightening. Her quip meant that she did know the difference, but it meant more than that. It meant she didn't care to hide her knowledge and even that she enjoyed it. And felt entitled to.
    Like the five or six other young women at that year's ceremony, Sarah had made a small campsite along a stream at the edge of a cut alfalfa field. She'd pitched a loose tent of gray mosquito netting supported at its corners by sharpened willow sticks and spread out a freshly laundered flannel sleeping bag made fragrant with drops of purifying sage oil. On the ground, beside a kerosene lantern, her purse lay open, filled with her supplies: a tube of skin cream, a folded yellow hand towel, and a pocket edition of Mother Lucy's
Discourses
bound in white elk skin, stitched with yellow thread, and marked with a lavender ribbon near the end. I'd never managed to read that far myself, but Sarah was a student of theology, about to complete her fourth year at Coleman College, the Church academy for women. There was no such institution for men. Men in Bluff trained for jobs, for concrete tasks, but women cultivated a higher view that showed them what all our sweat and toil would come to. They spoke of this vista in parables, symbolically, and my hunch was that they withheld important elements out of fear of lowering men's morale.
    â€œYour body needs to form a line,” said Sarah. “North-south, to take advantage of magnetism.” She grasped my heels and tugged my legs out straight, gently shaking them to relax my hips, and then, beginning with the little ones and working methodically inward, she cracked my toes. Afterward, I couldn't feel them. The lantern light through my closed eyelids was mottled pink, its patterns shifting with my heartbeat, and I could smell concentration on Sarah's breath—a burned odor, not unpleasant, like peanuts roasting—as she positioned herself athwart my pelvis.
    â€œAll the way flat. No tension. Dead,” she said.
    I'd assumed we'd pray first. Maybe later. She gave me all of her weight. She gave it smoothly. I drew a deep breath, then felt Sarah blow it out. That people could breathe for each other was strange new knowledge and I felt suddenly enlarged by it, like the moment I'd learned to stay upright on a bicycle. A needle of hay stubble pierced the sleeping bag and I arched my back to avoid it but couldn't go high enough without disturbing a balance that had developed. I let the stalk scratch me, its sharp dry tip, and then let it cut me when she drove me flat again. I must have made a sound then—Sarah stopped.
    â€œAre you close?” she said. “How close are you?”
    My father had said it would jolt me, but not wholly. First would come a sense that a jolt was likely.
    â€œI'm pretty sure we're safe,” I said.
    She touched me near where we were connected, in a spot where I'd never been touched as an adult and hadn't wished to be. Now I wished to be. This new wish would endure until I died, I