The Expeditions Read Online Free

the storm’s thrum waking the minister to a smoke-gray dawn shot with silver veins of lightning, but now the clouds were dissolved and sunlight spangled on the meetinghouse’s high windows. Such ridiculous, extravagant splendor, Reverend Stone thought. If the Lord ever displayed vanity it was during moments like this, these heart-lifting flights of beauty.
    Rain had seeped through the rotted shingle roof and lay pooled on the dining room floor. He stepped over the puddle and sat at the scrubbed pine table, and a moment later Corletta, the hired woman, emerged from the kitchen with a platter of fried ham and stewed green beans and milk biscuits. He thanked her and murmured a blessing over the meal, then reclined in his chair and gazed idly out the window. From the dining room he could see past the meetinghouse and chicken house and whitewashed privy, down the treeless hillside to the creek and Baptist church. New Hope, with its portico and brass weathercock and oak pews, its six-hundred-pipe Appleton organ shipped from Boston. The church was quiet now, but lately on warm afternoons its choir would practice with the front doors flung wide, the organ’s raspy bass rolling uphill to the minister lying sleepless on his bed. The melodies had at first pleased him but soon piqued his annoyance; they felt like a pious show of strength, a taunt. The Baptists were winning new followers in Newell every hour, plucking them like wildflowers from the thicket of unbelievers. Soon New Hope would be too small to seat its congregation.
    He ate a biscuit and scrap of ham but found he had no appetite. From the kitchen came a harsh scrape of iron against iron: Corletta preparing to black the cookstove. Often she sang while she worked, simple workaday or Bible-story chants, and the minister found himself awaiting her breezy voice. She was a virtuous woman but not religious. Once he had drawn out her beliefs and the result was a disappointing muddle of Scripture and superstition.
    The scraping stopped and Corletta appeared in the doorway. She frowned at the clotted grease on the minister’s plate. “Something wrong with your lunch, Reverend Stone?”
    He began to speak but was seized by a cough. He clapped a handkerchief to his mouth until the spell faded. “No, nothing. I’m weary from yesterday’s services—I am sure my appetite will return quick enough.”
    Her gaze lingered a moment, then fell with an expression of vague shame. She stepped back into the kitchen. Reverend Stone glanced at the handkerchief to find the gray linen flecked with crimson blood. The absurdity of his furtiveness struck him: concealing the blood from Corletta, when she was the woman who laundered his handkerchiefs. He was filled with sickly amusement. Then Corletta reappeared and took up his plate and fork. The minister smiled at her, then stared hard at her retreating form.
    Lately Reverend Stone had begun feeling a queer conviction that he could see the color of other people’s souls. That if he stared deeply enough, he could see a person’s soul hovering about them as a pale, colored nimbus. Two months ago, on the morning of his sixty-first birthday, he’d been delivering a chipped hewing axe to the smithy for grinding when he’d been overwhelmed by the notion that if he gazed at William Lawson he would see the man’s soul as a faintly hued mist. Lawson hunched over the anvil, truing a warped pry bar. The minister stared, transfixed. A dusty gray haze grew around Lawson’s shoulders, like ash consuming a burning page. Reverend Stone’s throat constricted. He lost his grip on the axe and it clattered to the floor. Without a word he rushed from the shop, hurried to the parsonage and lay motionless on the bed, his heart drumming as though he’d run a sprint.
    The color of souls. Purity, he suspected, was white as January snow; the violent and corrupt possessed scarlet or ocher colorations; sinners of the flesh fell among the infinite shades of gray. What