News of the Spirit (30 page)

“It’s not far. It’s here.” Johnny opens a door, pulls a hanging light cord, and leads her inside the shed.

“Oh, Johnny.” This is all she can say. The slanted roof of the shed slopes up to a height well above Johnny’s head on the far wall, where plywood has been painted white and then entirely covered by tiny, tiny writing and drawings. Paula steps closer. She sees clocks, lots of clocks, but the numbers are all different from those on real clocks. Beautiful little birds fly through the sentences. Paula squints to read. One little sentence says,
The sons of the spirit wear rainbow armor
. Paula closes her eyes. “Well?” Johnny says at her elbow. “Whaddaya think?” Paula thinks he has stopped taking his medicine. She thinks it is happening again. “See, this is a new kind of book,” Johnny says. Paula opens her eyes and reads,
They ride the horses of dawn
. “I think it’s beautiful,” she says.

Then Lulu is at the door. “Honey, your boyfriend wants you in the worst possible way,” she says to Paula. “Far out, huh?” Lulu indicates the shed wall. Paula notices the blank space at the lower right. Johnny hasn’t finished it yet. He’s still working on it.

“Far out,” Paula repeats.

Paula and Johnny walk back through the weeds arm in arm. The party is breaking up. Corinne and Norell have already left—the big white car is gone. Bo stands silhouetted in the yellow light of the doorway, motionless as a tree. “Honey?” Lulu says, poking Pete. Dallas rides his
motorcycle off down the driveway in a red roar, going God knows where. Paula can still taste his kiss. Drew is already in the Volvo, she sees, and Muddy Waters is already in the back. In a few minutes Drew will drive her away from here, and in a few months they will get married, and sometime after that they will have a baby. Paula sees all this written out in tiny sentences on a big wall in her mind. A little wind comes up and the trees blow and the weeds swirl around her feet. It’s going to storm. It will be nice to ride home in the rain with Drew, Paula likes how the windshield wipers go in the rain, she’ll hold his hand all the way. Maybe she’ll fix him some scrambled eggs when they get home. Johnny hugs her. “Thanks for coming to my party,” he says. “I wanted you to come.” They are old, old souls, Roger and Darling. They know each other. “Listen,” Paula says sincerely, “it was a great party. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” Then the first big drops of rain hit her face, and she runs for the car just as the thunder cracks and lightning pierces the sky like an arrow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

L
EE
S
MITH
is the author of fifteen works of fiction, including
Oral History, Fair and Tender Ladies
, and her recent
Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger
. She has received many awards, including the North Carolina Award for Literature and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; her novel
The Last Girls
was a
New York Times
bestseller as well as winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in North Carolina.