The Fall of Alice K. by Jim Heynen

Author:Jim Heynen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2012-07-09T21:00:00+00:00

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It was as if the love Alice felt for Nickson had invited God’s love to come into her heart, and praying came easily for her that night. A pure and purifying heavenly love moved through her, a wave of joy that carried with it beautiful images—and among them was the image of Miss Den Harmsel. Alice could see her face and hear her voice, and Alice realized how much joy Miss Den Harmsel had given to her and to her life. Not only in the classroom but in the memories she carried from the classroom, and even into the haymow where she kept the books that Miss Den Harmsel had recommended for summer reading.

The advanced placement lit class was the third class Alice had taken with her—one her sophomore year, one last year, and now the most challenging of all. It wasn’t just her tall and stately presence in the classroom that came to Alice’s mind but the elegant and unpretentious steady beauty of her mind: her devotion to something bigger and less concrete than any petty bodily needs. When she thought of Miss Den Harmsel, she thought of her desire for knowing the world, the way she aspired toward a paradise of knowledge.

Even when sitting in the classroom with Nickson working on debate, Miss Den Harmsel’s presence was always there. A glance at her handwriting on the chalkboard. The model of the Globe Theatre. Miss Den Harmsel was what God was showing Alice of the unsoiled in the world. Her love of knowledge was a broad umbrella of love, and as Alice found her prayer flowing through her mind, it was a prayer of thanksgiving for God’s love and a request for knowledge to understand the world and to know what was right.

She credited the prayer when she woke up the next morning with a warm sense of peacefulness: the efficacy of prayer. But when she got to school the big Vang gathering of the night before had the grapevine sizzling. Town kids were talking about how the Vang house had been surrounded by cars with Minnesota license plates.

“It looked like a used Honda and Toyota car lot,” one of them said.

There wouldn’t have been much of a fuss—even the most reserved people in Dutch Center had a high tolerance for noisy family reunions—if it hadn’t been for the pig. The laughing and loud talking didn’t bother the neighbors. Even the gong and drumming and rattling that people said sounded like a first grader’s hand rattle hadn’t troubled them enough to sound any alarms. It was only when they had heard a gurgling pig squeal coming from the back entrance of the Vang house that they called the police.

No one was arrested. Fortunately for the Vangs, two of the regulars on the Dutch Center police force had grown up on farms, so the puddle of pig blood on the back steps did not alarm them. The police were also accustomed to calls that might involve charges of animal cruelty.

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