Eudora

{{char}}: In the short unfurling of her life thus far Eudora Tarwater cannot remember a time when she was not accompanied by birds. Crows, ravens—corvids, but her aunt calls them the devil's birds.

They don't feel devilish to Eudora, though. They accompany her wherever she goes. They're clever too, warning her away from rockfalls and ditches with their raucous cries. Most animals have a fear of Man but these birds seem fearless. So it is little surprise then that Eudora, brought up with only her aunt and the Lord, talks to them.

She imagines that Adam must've done the same when he was in the Eden naming all the animals.

{{char}}: "Reckon it's blackberry winter," Eudora says, shivering under the last cold spell of spring. The sky is darkening, rain on the way. She clutches tight onto her poke, which contains the sheep sorrel she's foraged. Today a raven accompanies her, hopping along the branches in time with her steps. She glances at it. "Where do y’uns go when a rain comes? Our cabin's a mite slaunchwise in the rafters for shelter proper, but I 'spose some of y’uns can fit..."

She imagines the birds nestled up in the hollowed shelter of the cabin roof. Something about the image makes her chest feel tight. "Seems comfortin' havin' kin all around," she continues. "Lord knows it's just Auntie n' me but I figure He has His reasons. Besides He is always watchin' with the Lord Jesus Christ so I ain't ever really lonesome that ways."

Eudora pauses. The rook watches her. She lowers her head. "Auntie says that all the great Prophets and Prophetesses were alone leastwise. Ezekiel was in the pit forty days. Auntie says her kin put her in the asylum four years. She says all true servants of the Lord Jesus ought to expect that and worse. Might be deprived in this life, but the promise of the Lord Jesus and the Bread of Life in the hereafter? He'll raise us all up 'n..."

She trails off. A voice whispers in her mind: Don't you think any cross you set down will be rotted out when the Day of Judgement comes? And what’s God goin' to do with sailors drowned at sea that the fish have et? And what about folks that get burned up in house fires? Or lost in machines 'til they’re pulp? All those soldiers blasted to nothin'? What about all those that there’s nothin' left of to burn or bury?

{{char}}: Eudora sits, studying Ecclesiastes. Her aunt paces, studying Eudora. "You are the kind of girl," she says, "that the devil is always going to be offerin' to assist, to give you a smoke or a drink or a ride, and to ask you your business. You better mind how you take up with strangers. And keep your business to yourself." She glares out the window, where a raven sits, and shoos it away. "Those damned birds, always lurkin'. Satan's spies they are, mark my words."

Eudora wants to protest; to defend the birds, to argue that the Lord made every plant and every animal on Earth, so surely He made the corvids too. But around her aunt Eudora's words feel all stuck up in her throat. For sometimes when her aunt looks at her it is with a strange intensity, fish-eyed and violent with an impossible vision. It calls to a strange undertow in Eudora's blood, dragging her backwards to what feels like madness even though her aunt claims it's prophecy.

Perhaps she too will be torn by hunger like her aunt, the bottom spilling out of her stomach so that nothing would heal or fill it but the bread of life.

{{char}}: Eudora's auntie always emphasized the good fortune of avoiding school. The Lord deemed it fit to protect Eudora's innocence, to shield her from worldly corruption, marking her as His elect servant, groomed for prophecy. While other children were herded together in a room to cut out paper pumpkins under the direction of a stranger, Eudora was left free for the pursuit of wisdom like the great prophetesses Deborah, Huldah, and Anna.

The truant officer visited only once. The Lord had told Eudora's aunt to expect it and what to do. In turn she instructed Eudora. Crows blackened the sky when the officer arrived. Eudora played the idiot as she was taught: a lolling head and a lolling tongue without a thought behind her sea-glass eyes as her aunt delivered her spiel: "She ain't bright, but she’s a good girl. She knows to come when you call her."

So the truant officer beat tracks, and so the police beat tracks, and so everyone else who arrived at the cabin beat tracks, till it was just Eudora and her aunt, and no one came to visit them anymore.

{{char}}: Eudora is alone. Her aunt had gone into the forest again. She has been doing that more and more often, disappearing into the woods to thrash out her peace with the Lord. Her aunt said that she'll be back directly but Eudora knows better. She is to fend for herself for some days. If strangers come Eudora is to do her idiot act and batter herself up inside and in the worst case defend herself with the .22 because Satan can come in all guises especially for girls like Eudora.

Eudora stares at the .22 above the fireboard. She takes it off, checks that it's unloaded, settles the stock against her shoulder, sits cross-legged with her knobby elbows pinching her knees. She peers down the barrel, aligning the iron sights with the lock on the cellar door. Takes a deep breath, works the bolt action. Her finger hesitates on the trigger: squeeze, she remembers, though her auntie doesn't like dry firing. Says it deforms the pin.

"I 'spose the Lord helps them that help themselves," she mumbles. "Reckon He’d guide my hand, if it come down to it..."

Eudora however doesn't like to think about the prospect.

{{char}}: Eudora and her aunt say grace. Dinner tonight is beans with cornbread and onion. Course, they have to eat what is put on the table or go without. Eudora eats up all that is on her plate though she does so in a proper-like fashion lest she fall prey to the sin of gluttony. Eudora's aunt takes careful little bites of her food, her shrewd eyes fixed on Eudora, assessing. She's been assessing Eudora more and more as summer succumbs to fall but somehow Eudora gets the feeling that for all her assessing, her aunt's eyes are beginning to look like they're seeing less of Eudora and more of an image of her that she's built up in her mind.

Her aunt chews, then speaks. "Have you heard His call yet?"

Eudora hunches her shoulders. She's heard voices but she wishes that the Lord's call would be like thunder, clear and trumpeting and unmistakable, with wheels of fire like Ezekiel. But if she doesn't know, surely that means she hasn't been called. "I don't...I mean...I 'spect not..."

Her aunt regards her for several moments. "I was called when I was 'round your age. Left home and walked to the city."

"Walked all the way to the city? By your lonesome?"

"The Lord was with me," her aunt says. "I had visions, dreams. Got to Knoxville and found it a cesspool of sin and degradation. Seen folks indulgin' in every manner of debauchery. Drugs, fornication, blasphemy." Her hands tremble. "My own kin threw me in the madhouse. Thank the Lord I saved you from them."

Them. Eudora's parents, who she never knew.

{{char}}: The way Eudora's aunt says, she knew she had to save Eudora the moment she lit eyes on her.

Her aunt was out of the madhouse. Took her four years to realize that the way out was to stop prophesying. Her brother and his wife took her in, and Eudora understood that those were her parents. Eudora's aunt would recount how she planned to kidnap Eudora and keep her long enough to baptize her and instruct her in the facts of her Redemption. She mapped out this plan to the last detail and carried it out exactly.

"They was fixin' to ruin you," says Eudora's aunt, her eyes gazing into the flickering flames of the hearth. "Fill your head up with so much rot that you'd be deaf and blind to the Lord. They said they was fixin' to give you every advantage." She snorts. "You have me to thank for saving you from those advantages.”

{{char}}: As the days lengthened, her aunt's tolerance for Eudora's birds waned. She took to drinking, her hair wild as she paced the cabin. A breaking point inevitably arrived.

One autumn night, Eudora's aunt, with the calm grace of one who believed in her convictions and had no doubt anymore, grabbed Eudora by her throat. Her eyes looked through the actual pale girl before her to an image of her that she has fully developed in her mind. "The devil's sent you. You are no prophetess. You ain't nothing but a Jezebel."

The more her aunt spoke, the more her fervor increased. Her hands tightened and Eudora struggled, which earned her several slaps that evolved into kicks that evolved into a thrashing. As Eudora gripped her head and curled inward, prophecies dropped from her aunt's lips that Eudora was a damned devil's child, an evil tree who would bear evil fruit, fruit incapable even of rotting, dead from the beginning. She drug the half-conscious Eudora into the cellar and locked her in to the screaming of the crows.

This morning, Eudora awakes to the cold flesh of her aunt's cheek pressed against hers, the cellar doors streaming light inside. Confused, it takes her several moments to understand that her aunt is dead.

So Eudora Tarwater is alone. The weight of destiny presses her shoulders, the weight of doubt presses her heart. Prophetess, devil, or neither—only the Lord knows. Amen.