The Expeditions Read Online Free Page B

Would you like to hear a piece?”
    Reverend Stone relaxed back into the chair. From beneath the ledger Edson drew a sheet of paper filled with loose, slanting script. He cleared his throat.
    “There is much argument of late on the complementing natures of geology and religion, especially with regard to mineral evidence of the great deluge. It is fully agreed that geology and religion shine with new and peculiar beauty in each other’s light, and cannot obscure or destroy one another. Yet doubt often lurks beneath the cloak of geology, and all the sciences. This doubt is cause for gravest concern.”
    “You need not be a scientist to feel doubt.”
    Edson glanced at Reverend Stone. The minister said, “Go on, go on.”
    “Geologists correctly claim that every happening follows certain chains of causes. Thus, some hold, the entire world’s workings might eventually be explained. But man is capable of observing only the lowest, and crudest, links in the chain, whereas God exerts his influence on a higher level, one entirely hidden from our observation. The peril for a geologist lay in believing he has discovered the meaning of an entire happening, when he has merely discovered the last, and simplest, cause in a grand chain.”
    “Interestingly phrased,” Reverend Stone said. In truth, he was struck by Edson’s eloquence. Perhaps he had underestimated the young man. That, or Edson had flourished without the minister’s notice, his light hidden beneath a bushel basket. I could disappear, Reverend Stone thought, and the congregation might continue under Edson. Might thrive.
    “There’s just a bit more.” Edson smiled nervously. “We know that the waterwheel is driven round by gravity—but what, then, is gravity? We know not. Men shall never divine the true nature of the world’s essential processes; and thus to claim that the Lord created the world, then allowed it to function freely and without command, is a form of infidelity, and one deserving great wariness.”
    “Again, interestingly phrased.” Reverend Stone rose to depart. “I am sure the congregation will find it enlightening, despite the fact that there is not a single scientific gentleman in Newell.”
    “You received a letter—or, one arrived for Mrs. Stone.” Edson gathered the desk’s papers into a sheaf. He riffled through the papers, then set them down and slowly opened and closed the desk drawers. He paused with his hands spread over the desk; then he said, “Aha. Yes.” Edson reached to the far corner of the desk and lifted his wide-brimmed hat to reveal a letter. “Here it is now.”
    Without looking at it, the minister slipped the letter into his trouser pocket. He nodded to Edson then descended the stairs and stepped from the meetinghouse into the warm yard.
    Grackles were huddled in the rhododendron bushes, and as the minister approached they ascended in a single black ribbon and wheeled toward the parsonage. The grackles’ shrill song and the creek’s distant mumble augured the coming of summer, and for this the minister said a silent prayer of thanksgiving. It had been a relentless winter that had turned people inward on themselves; bitterness had hung in the air like soot. The words of his sermons had echoed over rows of pallid faces then tumbled unheard to the stone floor. For the past several winters Reverend Stone had struggled toward spring like a swimmer toward a distant shore; this year, though, he feared that the change of season would not bring relief. He felt exhausted, his spirit as heavy as water. And then there was the blood in his throat, the taste of his body trying to unmake itself. The blood’s appearance some months ago had terrified Reverend Stone, but now its presence was numbingly familiar.
    He descended the hillside to the creek edge, momentarily nostalgic for his first days in Newell: he had been a young man of thirty-one, suffused with hope. His darkest sin was pitying the congregation members for their