Grimfield, New Mexico

It was about 7:50pm when Shirley Milroy got home from her 12-hour shift at the Union County Hospital down in Clayton.  27 miles to and from work is actually a pretty short commute around these parts.  It's not the drive she minds; time behind the wheel gives Shirley a chance to prepare for her work as an emergency room nurse, and debrief.  Doing urgent medical care and triage at the only ER for many miles in all directions, she's seen some strange and disturbing things in her day.  No, the drive doesn't bother her.  What Shirley hates even more than Joe Biden is these damned 12-hour shifts.  Yes, it means she only has to work her nursing job three days a week.  And it means that she gets the other four days off--except she spends three of them cleaning toilets at the rest area off US-87.  But 7am to 7pm for three days straight?  It's enough to make you wanna find another way to live, another way to be.

It was June, still perfect daylight at 7:50pm.  "You've got to do what you've got to do," Shirley thinks to herself, pulling into her driveway.  "If you wanna to stay out here in a place like Grimfield, then you've got to do what you've got to do," including 12-hour shifts and long commutes.  All of Shirley's childhood friends moved away years ago--decades!  But Shirley never had the heart to leave, even though it means gazing daily at her friends' old houses standing vacant and falling into ruin.

"You've got to do it," Shirley repeats...for she's a gal of few words, but when she commits herself to crafting a sentence, she sees no sense in using it only once.  "You gotta do what it takes if you wanna stay in a place like Grimfield."  It was then she thought she smelled cigarette smoke coming from--where?--from the abandoned church across the street. 

Shirley's grandmother, rest her soul, had been a pillar of the old Grimfield Congregational Church.  Shirley herself had been baptized there and remembers attending occasionally on Christmas Eve.  The church was closed by the time she got married to her first husband, Gene.  They'd had to get married at the Methodist Church of Grimfield, which also withered up and died just months after the couple said "I do."  And there both churches have sat ever since--since about 1985 maybe?  The Congregational Church was now home to a monastic flock of mourning doves and rattlesnakes who, like the Prophetess Anna, never left the temple.  Tired as Shirley was, she smirked a little when she thought what old Reverend Stokes might have said if he knew someone was smoking inside his church.  

By June already the grass all around town is dry as tinder.  Lord knows any stray spark could set this whole village alight.  No one would miss most parts of it.  But Shirley had called her tidy little bungalow "home" ever since Grimfield's last mayor had moved away in the late 1990s, and Shirley claimed her house--the nicest dwelling left in town.  It was only then she finally moved out of the now-deserted house she grew up in, just two blocks away.  Cigarette smoke or no, she had to give Ed the Subway sandwich she'd picked up for him back in Clayton, then make him some coffee.  Dinners are rarely formal affairs at the Milroy house.  Ed's her second husband of just a few years.  He got his left arm taken off by a combine harvester some fifteen years ago, and now he sits home and collects disability checks all the while cursing and bemoaning those damn socialists in Washington.  If there's a soul in Union County who has less to say than Shirley, it's Ed.  Deaf as a yucca bush, too.

"You smell cigarettes?" she asks him.  Ed thinks for a moment, looks at his sandwich, which is getting soggy, a meatball sub with provolone and hot peppers, his usual Thursday evening fare.  He looks at his wife, squints, pretends to be concentrating on what she's saying when in fact he's only trying to remember the question.  "Cigarettes?" he finally manages to mutter before pausing.  "No."  And that's the extent of the dinner conversation in the Milroy home.

But there was indeed smoke over at the old Grimfield Congregational Church, and cigarette smoke it was.  As night drew on, Shirley glanced out the window of the vacant front bedroom just to see if there was anything going on over there.  The state police are a long way off.  She finds herself musing on the collection of hunting rifles Ed keeps in their bedroom.  At one point, staring out into the deep New Mexico darkness, she caught a tiny glimmer of dim light, as if someone had flicked a lighter.  But with her aging eyes she couldn't be sure.  It might have been a firefly.  It could have been an isolated flash of lightning; that kind of thing happens all the time on summer nights on the High Plains.

Friday morning just before dawn, Shirley is up early and looking again out the window of her front guest bedroom, staring at the derelict church across the street.  She calls it a "guest bedroom," though most women her age just name their empty bedrooms after the children who used to sleep in them.  Whenever Shirley's friend in Albuquerque invites her to visit she says, "You can have McKenzie's room tonight."  Of course, McKenzie moved to Santa Fe right out of high school to make turquoise jewelry for tourists.  She's never coming back, yet the room still bears her name.  Shirley never had kids, so vacant bedrooms are just guest rooms...even though she's never had many of those either.  There hasn't been an overnight visitor to sleep in the front bedroom since Ed's brother was too drunk to drive back to Raton on their wedding night.  There were no churches left in town by that time.  It was a backyard wedding officiated by a local cowhand who got ordained online.  Still, it was an occasion for drinking and thus for using the two extra bedrooms at Shirley's house--where Ed moved in on their wedding night and a number of unexpected houseguests made the windows rattle with their drunken snoring.

Shirley was sure she'd heard some kind of ruckus coming from the church this morning.  This time it sounded as if someone was over there...moving furniture, sliding things across the dirty floors, maybe even sweeping them with a broom.  If it weren't still dark outside, or if Ed were awake, she might work up her nerve and march across the street to see what was happening.  But despite its great beauty--or maybe precisely because of it--New Mexico is a place of vagabonds and drifters, some harmless, some unfriendly, and others downright menacing.  Shirley's no coward, but an encounter with a dangerous wanderer is the last thing she needs today.  She gets ready for work and tells herself she'll check in on the church this evening, before it gets dark.  

Friday night, not a sound issues from the old house of worship.  "Maybe it was just me," Shirley tells herself.  And because she'd crafted a sentence worth saying one time, she proceeded to tell it to herself a few more times.  "Maybe it was just me."  Why bother to investigate when the trouble has apparently passed?

Think of the things we tell ourselves in order to avoid facing the truth.  Shirley knows there's someone over there in the church, or at least that there had been someone over there, trespassing and probably up to no good.  She knows it, but she'd prefer to believe otherwise.  So she convinces herself that all is well, that she and Ed and a few elderly neighbors will have this little town to themselves forever, that nothing will ever change here, that Grimfield can just go on being the Grimfield she's always known--sans people.  You might expect the few remaining denizens of a near-ghost town to welcome a new resident, even a come-from-away who's taken rooms in the rundown church.  It might push the village's population into the double digits....

On Saturday, things were quiet again.  Shirley had to go work a few hours at the rest stop on the highway.  Ed was home alone all day, re-watching old episodes of "BJ and the Bear" on DVD.  If he heard or smelled anything coming from the derelict church, he didn't mention it when she got home.  "It's frozen pizza for dinner tonight," Shirley announces upon returning from her second job.  "Now I gotta run across the street and check on things."  Ed barely grunts his reply.  It never occurs to him to ask what Shirley might be checking on "across the street" when every building over there has sat empty for decades. 

The sun is blindingly bright, which emboldens her.  "Just gonna check on stuff across the street" she repeats to herself as she marches toward the ramshackle little church where she'd been baptized so long ago.  "Just gonna check on stuff."  Ducking inside the doorway and through the tiny narthex, Shirley is reminded again of Christmases long ago, when there'd be a dozen stationwagons and pickups parked along the snowy street, and the interior of the church would glow warmly with candlelight and carols.  Old Reverend Stokes would be dithering absently about shepherds and angels and stars, and everyone was always so happy.  Shirley hadn't been inside in a very long time.  The building had fallen into the hands of some rancher down in Clayton.  He used it as a personal storage shed until he died and most of his belongings slowly disappeared.  Last she knew, it was just an empty room with busted out windows and the ceilings collapsing here and there.  The remains of old theater seats sat strewn about, along with some rotting mattresses.  But things were different now.  It looked as if someone had cleaned the place up a little.  All the old debris was moved into the choir loft, an alcove along the side of the sanctuary.  The main part of the church was clear with the floors swept and the old theater seats all pushed into neat rows.  Someone had placed a kitchen table up on the dais.  What did old Stokes call that area?  The chancel!  Someone had put a table up there on the chancel as if there were going to be a communion service.  There was a rickety podium up there, too, with a tattered old King James Bible opened to Psalm 84.  These words were underlined in scratchy pencil: 

"My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord. Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself where she may lay her young, even at thine altars.  Blessed are they that dwell in thy house.  Selah" 

"Selah?" Shirley whispers, as a new mystery sends a spooky thrill down her spine.  Two mysteries!  "What's 'selah'?  And who's been sweepin' up in here?"  Troubled by what she'd found, she turns around and goes home to Ed.  But Shirley's not the kind to talk about the things that upset her.  To Shirley's way of thinking, you give things power by talking about them.  And she doesn't dare lend strength to some religious nutcase who's taken up residence in her church.  Talking about him will just make him real.  But...and this thought terrifies her.  But why would anyone straighten up over there unless he intended to...stick around?  And what's this stuff about 'dwelling in thy house'?  Whoever or whatever it was, Ed couldn't do anything about it.  Her first husband, Gene?  So energetic, so attentive, so handsome.  He'd have looked after things.  He'd know exactly what to do, how to protect her.  But Ed?  Just look at him, staring glassy-eyed at the same damn episode of "BJ and the Bear" that she saw him watching a few days ago...while the house fills with the bitter smell of a frozen pizza left in the oven too long.  She and Ed eat their scorched pizza in silence, and Shirley takes the mystery of the church to bed with her--as she has always done with all of life's mysteries.  Why did the Lord take Gene so young?  Why didn't the Lord give me children?  Why do all good things have to die--things like her town?  These are among the mysteries she's taken to her pillow.  And she meets them with the same reply.  "The night brings counsel," she tells herself.  It was an African proverb she'd read in a book when she was a child.  "The night brings counsel."  The repeated phrase comforts her, its sameness, its long tenure in her mind.  It was a bit of wisdom she'd trusted for many years.  It gently rocks her to a fitful sleep.  "One thing's for sure: The night brings counsel."  Even Ed's stertorous snoring lends the house a sense of safety and reassurance.  At least she's not completely alone...

Everything changes on Sunday morning when Shirley wakens with a start at about sunrise.  A long, tuneless moan seems to be rising like a tornado siren from inside the church.  She listens close as a chill sweeps over her whole body.  Is it...is it...singing?  Yes, it sounds just like singing--one of those old hymns she used to hear on Sunday mornings when she lingered in bed half-asleep.  This time, instead of a congregation singing, all in harmony, there's just a single voice, ghostly, thin, haunted.  It sounds shrill and ragged against the silence of the morning, and it sings, "Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms, leaning, leaning, I'm leaning on the everlasting arms."  Inside the darkened church, hidden away from the searing near-desert sun, a troubled wraith formerly known as The Snowbelt Parson had "found an house and a nest for himself" in Grimfield.