The Used World by Haven Kimmel

Author:Haven Kimmel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2007-10-16T21:00:00+00:00

She woke and looked around. She was still in the car, which was bright and warm; no, the car wasn’t warm—she was under a heavy quilt, the one that hung over the quilt rack in #32. It was a Wedding Ring, red and white, Amish. Every stitch was perfect, and it was signed Frances Massey Odom, on the Occasion of her Marriage to Wilder Odom, June 15, 1914. Rebekah felt as she had as a child, when her mother gave her paregoric for toothaches or sore throats and tucked her into bed, and the sheets and blankets, even her skin felt like heavy soft fabric, like she was wrapped in hot, dark velvet.

There was no way up. She could open her eyes briefly, but they closed again. She drifted out onto the hot, sleek sea, floating. The girl cousins were gone and Rebekah was alone on the sidewalk in front of her house, in some long-ago autumn. In truth it was the season of the believers, and Rebekah still was one, so she could stand there, under the maple tree. There was a clan and she belonged in it, and when the fold was gathered she would go.

We believe that the ways of God are hidden, she was saying, that He hideth our souls in the cleft of the rock. We believe in deliverance and salvation, the Holy Spirit, Baptism, prophecy, the gifts and fruits of the slain. We believe in the Blood of the Lamb. She lost track of what they believed, but it began with God creating the earth in six days, and by that they meant six o’clock, seven o’clock, and so on. And God, Jehovah, Yahweh, God of Thunder and the Mountains, was the One True God Who presided directly and immediately over All. If the wind blew a leaf across the sidewalk, God had made the leaf and God had sent the wind, and the pattern by which the leaf moved was known, preordained by God. And they believed that God had left a wrench in the works that required a Son to be formed not out of clay and breath as Adam had been, but by the act of impregnating a virgin, a young girl, and sending her to marry a widower, and that baby was the Messiah. Far away in Bethlehem. What was prophesied in the Old Testament was made Flesh in the new, a perfect, unbroken line from Adam, Abraham, Moses, and David to Jesus the Nazarene. The Hebrews said that the Messiah would come, and He would be of a certain lineage, and all of that came true. And there were the Gospels, which were books but because they had been dictated by God were also living things and not objects like a clay pot or a sink but a living thing that was in fact more alive than the life of Rebekah herself. The Living Gospels told the story of Jesus but they also contained Jesus and when they were

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