The Names at Night

The Remnant

Chapter 41: The Names at Night

The church outside Abernathy had been a feed store before it had been a sanctuary and looked prepared to become either again if history asked hard enough.

Joel Harker met Nora and Maribel under the awning with a shotgun he was trying not to look nineteen with.

"I didn't shoot at the last one," he said before either of them asked. "My mother says that counts as maturity. I think it counts as confusion."

Nora swung down from the truck and studied him once.

"Did it speak to you?"

"No."

Joel looked toward the open doors of the church where families were bedding down between pew stacks and feed bins full of hymnals.

"It asked for the children polite."

That landed harder.

Mercy Depot Seven had copied their codes.

Whatever had come north after it had learned a softer theft.

Maribel climbed out on the other side with her satchel and the ledger roll Walter had sent north whether anyone needed more paper or not.

"Show me where."

Joel took them first to the Treviño porch.

The boards were old cotton-gray and the screen door leaned wrong on one hinge. A rosary had been wound twice around the porch post hard enough to leave its beads impressed in the wood. Teresa Treviño sat in a straight kitchen chair under the porch light with her hands in her lap and the stunned posture of somebody who had been sitting in the same grief for too many hours to call it posture anymore.

"This is Maribel," Joel said. "And Nora Hale. From Crossing House."

Teresa did not stand.

"Then maybe one of you will tell me why a woman in my dead sister's voice came to my window and asked for my daughter by the name we used only at the font."

Maribel felt Nora go still beside her.

"Your daughter?"

"Ana Lucia." Teresa swallowed. "Nobody calls her that except when they're angry or when they're blessing her. She's Luci to everyone with any sense at all."

Joel looked ashamed of breathing.

"The voice said her madrina had sent her. Said the roads were turning bad again and the covenant had opened a safer house north."

Teresa's hands tightened once in her lap.

"Luci left her blanket folded. She took her shoes. She did not scream. She thought somebody had come who knew us."

The porch light burned over all of them with the vulgar clarity of a bulb that had outlived better men.

Maribel knelt by the threshold and looked at the floorboards.

Small shoe scuffs.

One adult print in the dust beyond the step.

Wagon tracks faint in the roadside chalk.

No struggle.

That was the particular obscenity of it.

Nora crouched by the porch rail.

"How many others?"

Joel answered because Teresa had already spent the part of herself that handled counting.

"Three towns in five days. One boy out of Petersburg. Two sisters near Hale Center, though one came back by morning with a ribbon in her hair that didn't belong to anybody in the house. Everybody says the same part the same way." He looked at Maribel. "They asked for the water name."

The phrase made her skin go cold in a place older than weather.

There were archives in New Braunfels where baptisms had once been indexed with birth names, sponsor names, infirmities, flood years, food shortages, and whether the child had cried during the blessing. Meant as care. Stored as custody. She had spent months learning the difference between record and possession, and now the north roads were handing her the lesson back with smaller footprints.

"Who else knows Luci's baptism name?" Nora asked.

Teresa gave a crooked laugh that had no humor in it.

"The priest who drowned. Her godmother in Hereford. My mother, until winter took her memory in pieces. Me. Maybe God, if He was listening that day."

Joel lifted a finger.

"And the old parish book."

That did it.

Maribel stood.

"Where is it?"

The Abernathy parish book had survived the Rending in a metal file box under a baptismal basin that smelled faintly of rust and lilies gone old.

Somebody had been in it recently.

Not carefully.

The ribbon marker had been pulled free.

Pages toward the middle bore the crescent wear of hurried copying.

Nora turned one with the back of two fingers.

"You kept this here?"

Joel bristled automatically.

"It was a church."

"It is a church," Teresa said from the doorway, with the kind of force grief sometimes borrowed from old grammar.

Nora tipped her head in apology.

"Then somebody came into your church and stole its memory."

The sun went down under a sky wide enough to make anger feel temporary and duty feel endless.

They set the church for a watch.

No central room for the children.

That was the first thing Maribel said and the first thing half the adults wanted to argue about.

"I can keep them all in the fellowship hall," Joel offered. "Two doors. One window. Easier to guard."

"Easier to gather," Maribel replied.

Teresa looked up sharply.

"You think that's what they want?"

Maribel met her eyes.

"I think if I were building a theft out of tenderness, I would begin by teaching frightened people to sort children into convenient piles."

That ended the argument by making it uglier.

Children stayed where they were.

Adults rotated porches.

Nora walked the road edges with Joel and two local women who had the unteachable competence of people accustomed to making bad land tell the truth. Maribel sat with Teresa until the moon climbed high enough to silver the ditch line beyond the road and make every fence post look like someone thinking twice.

The voice came after midnight.

Not loud.

Loud would have been mercy.

It came soft from beyond the ditch, in the register of an aunt or schoolteacher or weary mother trying not to wake the house.

"Daniel James," it called. "Sweet boy. Your sponsor sent blankets. Come along."

The Corbin porch across the road went rigid.

A child stirred under the quilt.

Then a second line, still soft, patient enough to sound holy.

"Daniel James Corbin. We know where you were washed. We know whose hands held you."

The boy sat up like a pulled string.

Joel was already moving.

Nora hit the hand bell once hard enough to split the night.

Lantern hoods snapped open up and down the road. Adults came up out of chairs and blankets and shallow sleep with names already in their mouths. Daniel's father caught the child around the shoulders before his feet hit porch wood. Teresa was on her feet beside Maribel with a kitchen knife she had not announced to anyone because sorrow made people efficient.

Maribel stepped off the porch into the road.

"Who sent you?" she called into the dark.

The answer came almost kindly.

"The Shepherd Houses. We are receiving little ones until the roads stop lying."

Nora moved left through the ditch grass like she had been born suspicious of moonlight. Joel went right with the shotgun and more sense than bravery should reasonably have had. Something shifted near the fence line.

Then wheels.

Not fast.

Fast would have admitted guilt.

Measured wheels, as if whoever rode them still expected to be thanked.

Nora swore once and ran.

Maribel reached the ditch too late for more than a glimpse: a narrow wagon with its lamp hooded, one figure driving, another seated in back beside what looked like blankets or sacks or children if a person let fear do the sorting.

Joel fired over the wheel line.

Sparks off stone.

The wagon vanished north between the cotton rows.

What remained was a card pinned to the fence post by a butcher needle.

Maribel pulled it free and read by lantern light.

SHEPHERD HOUSE THREE

Children received by covenant name until roads settle.

Below that, in a smaller hand:

No child refused for lack of papers.

No child returned to confusion.

Teresa made a sound from the porch that might once have belonged to laughter and had since become something with sharper bones.

"Returned."

Nora came back out of the rows breathing hard and empty-handed.

"They knew our watch spacing."

Maribel turned the card over.

On the back, in pencil, was a verse line from an infant baptism liturgy almost nobody used anymore.

Known by water.

Kept in mercy.

She looked up toward the church where the old parish book sat under its basin like a heart somebody had learned to pick.

Then she looked north.

"No," she said quietly. "Not mercy."

The word that fit tasted older and meaner.

Belonging.

Counterfeit enough to pass in the dark.