Out of Darkness Read Online Free Page A

of fruit cocktail and spooned it into three dishes. She divided the sweet syrup then used her fingernail to split the cherry into two bits for the twins to share. They began eating as soon as she set the bowls down in front of them, but Henry cocked an eyebrow. A moment later, he slid his bowl across the table to her. She thought about pushing it back, but instead she got up to do the dishes. She was only here to watch out for Cari and Beto; she wasn’t about to take anything from him if she could avoid it.
    She ran the water hot, filling the sink and leaning into the steam. The twins were slurping the last of the syrup from their bowls when Henry’s spoon began to clink against his dish.
    Â 
    HENRY Henry had brought the twins to East Texas because his pastor told him to. Told him in words about lost sheep and duty. Told him with a hard stare from the pulpit. Told him down by the river. Told him gentle and told him mean. Told him till his ear was full again with Jesus and promises and a calling, but still Henry held back. He tried to explain about the accidents, about his bad luck, but each time Pastor Tom cut him off, called it evil superstition.
    â€œJesus is calling on you to act,” he shouted to Henry over the drilling equipment one day after his shift ended. “Bring ’em home.” Tom steered him down one of the rutted work roads, his hand a sweating brick on Henry’s shoulder. He talked and preached till Henry wore down and said, “I’ll see about it.”
    Henry hadn’t really meant it, but when the words were out, feeling rose in his gut. He felt, briefly, like a boy straining over the handlebars of a borrowed bicycle, cresting a high rise, flinging himself into the downhill.
    The preacher yipped and jabbed at the sky with his fraying Bible. “You can triumph in Jesus’ name!”
    â€œIn his name!” Henry answered, hands trembling. A second swell of excitement grew in his belly. Sweat slid down from his armpits and back, soaking the waistband of his pants.
    â€œIt won’t be easy now,” the pastor said. His eyes shown bright in the twilight, full of the challenge he was calling Henry to, full of the promise that Henry would meet it.
    â€œNo, I reckon not,” Henry said. Already, though, he was picturing himself walking his bright, clean children up to Pastor Tom during an altar call, sunlight coming through the windows, the choir singing, the whole church looking on.
    After Pastor Tom prayed over him, Henry drove straight to the Humble Oil work yard and went to the boss’s trailer. “I need a place for my family,” he told Graham Salter, the man whose good luck Henry had followed through the oil fields since he was sixteen.
    Salter looked up at him with weepy gray eyes. He stubbed out his cigarette on a bit of scrap metal.
    â€œSince when have you got a goddamn family?” Salter said. Then he held out an application for the Humble Oil Company housing.
    â—Š ◊ ◊
    For the first time in years, Henry wrote letters to the kids’ grandparents in San Antonio. He described the church and the landscape. His work. He watched for bits of news that might sway Estella’s parents. He saw an article that talked about special classes in the new school that had just been built in New London with tax money from the oil companies. The kids got band instruments, sports uniforms, and new books. There was even a football stadium with electric lights. The reporter said that New London had built the most expensive rural school in the world. Henry clipped the article, folded it into thirds, and mailed it.
    Henry’s days were long with work and waiting and wondering if he had done enough. A house came open in the Humble camp, and he had two weeks to lease it or not. He wrote again and sent along a drawing that a little girl at church had made of her house in the Humble housing camp, which was the same as the one Henry could get,