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hour, the answer was the same. “Soon. Pretty soon.” When they saw Beaver Creek sliding through the muzzle of a state shaped like a gun, on through the acres of grass (cheaper than cheap after the tornadoes of 1949) that their pooled discharge pay had bought, it was pretty, soon and right on time.
    What they left behind was a town whose once proud streets were weed-choked, monitored now by eighteen stubborn people wondering how they could get to the post office where there might be a letter from long gone grandchildren. Where the Oven had been, small green snakes slept in the sun. Who could have imagined that twenty-five years later in a brand-new town a Convent would beat out the snakes, the Depression, the tax man and the railroad for sheer destructive power?
    Now one brother, a leader in everything, smashes the cellar door with the butt of his rifle. The other waits a few feet back with their nephew. All three descend the steps ready and excited to know. They are not disappointed. What they see is the devil’s bedroom, bathroom, and his nasty playpen.
             
    The nephew always knew that his mother had tried as hard as she could to hang on. She had managed to see him ride the winning horse, but beyond that she had no strength. Not even enough to get interested in the debates about what to call this place she had traveled to with her brothers and her little boy. For three years New Haven had been the name most agreed to, although a few were loud in suggesting other names—names that did not speak, they said, of failure new or repeated. Pacific veterans liked Guam, others Inchon. Those who fought in Europe kept coming up with names only the children enjoyed pronouncing. The women had no firm opinion until the nephew’s mother died. Her funeral—the town’s first—stopped the schedule of discussion and its necessity. They named the town after one of their own and the men did not gainsay them. All right. Well. Ruby. Young Ruby.
    It pleased his uncles who could then both mourn the sister and honor the friend and brother-in-law who didn’t make it back. But the nephew, winner of Ossie’s Purple Heart, heir to his father’s dog tags, witness to his mother’s name painted on signs and written on envelopes for the rest of his life, was displaced by these sad markings. The heart, the tags, the post office designation outsized him somehow. The women who had known and tended his mother spoiled Ruby’s boy. The men who enlisted with his father favored Ruby’s husband’s boy. The uncles took him for granted. When the decision was taken at the Oven, he was there. But two hours ago, when they’d swallowed the last piece of red meat, an uncle simply tapped him on the shoulder and said, “We got coffee in the truck. Go get your rifle.” Which he did, but he took the palm cross too.
    It was four in the morning when they left; going on five when they arrived because, not wanting engine hum or headlights to ruin their cover of darkness, they walked the final miles. They parked the trucks in a copse of shin oak, for light could signal uninterrupted for mile upon mile in this country. When casing heads for fifty miles were invisible, a lit birthday cake could be spotted as soon as the match was struck. Half a mile from their destination fog surrounded them to their hips. They reached the Convent just seconds before the sun did and had a moment to see and register for all time how the mansion floated, dark and malevolently disconnected from God’s earth.
    In the schoolroom, which used to be a dining room and now has no function except storage of desks pushed to the wall, the view is clear. The men of Ruby bunch at its windows. Finding nothing but confirming evidence elsewhere in the Convent, they gather here. The New Fathers of Ruby, Oklahoma. The chill they first encountered is gone; so is the mist. They are animated—warm with perspiration and the nocturnal odor of righteousness. The view is clear.
    Track.