Of course Agnes tells her the whole story of her namesake, Saint Agnes, a story she has told me over and over again since she got The Saints’ Way. I close my eyes and brace myself.
“Well, okay,” she starts softly, but as she gets into it, her voice picks up. “Saint Agnes was a very beautiful girl. And a nobleman from Rome wanted to marry her—they married really young back then—but she said no, because she wanted to be a nun and devote her life to God.”
“Like someone else we know,” I murmur.
“Honey.” Nana Pete glares at me. “Stop.”
“Okay, okay,” I answer. “Not another word.”
“Go ahead, Agnes,” Nana Pete says.
“So the man was really upset that Agnes wouldn’t marry him and to get back at her, he accused her publicly of being a Christian, which was against the law in those days. She was arrested and brought before a judge and the judge tried to get her to deny it. He even went easy on her because she was so young. But she wouldn’t budge. Then they threatened to torture her by peeling off her skin and burning her alive, but she still wouldn’t deny Christ. Finally she was ordered to be executed. When she was brought up to the block, the executioner got really nervous, because she was so young and beautiful. He even begged her to reconsider, but she wouldn’t.” Agnes sighs and leans back in the seat. “And so she died a martyr for Christ.”
“Good Lord!” Nana Pete says. “How terrifying! I wonder what that poor child was thinking as they led her up to the chopping block.”
I stare out the window. Fields of wheat rush by in a haze of gold. I’d give anything right now to be standing in the middle of one of them, flying a kite.
“She was smiling, because she was so overjoyed to be dying for Christ,” Agnes says.
I give Agnes as disgusted a look as I possibly can. “Agnes. Come on. The girl was twelve years old. She wasn’t smiling. She was probably peeing in her pants! She was about to get her head cut off!”
Agnes narrows her eyebrows at me. “Well, that’s what the book said, Honey. I didn’t make it up.”
“Whatever the case, there’s certainly no doubt Saint Agnes was incredibly brave,” Nana Pete says. “I don’t think I could be that brave if I was faced with execution.”
“No one could,” I retort. “And Saint Agnes probably wasn’t, either.”
“Don’t you dare defame Saint Agnes!” Agnes shouts. “I mean it, Honey!”
“Girls!” Nana Pete grabs her handkerchief and starts blotting. The two of us sit for a while, seething in silence. I’m so sick of Agnes’s holier-than-thou attitude about saints and martyrs that I could puke. I wish I could just rip that whole part of her out and toss it out the window. Instead, I watch the landscape pass by. There are no gold fields anymore; now everything is flat and green and still. I miss Winky.
“Here we are!” Lillian yells out suddenly in a singsong voice. She points to a green sign on the side of the highway. “Look—Savannah!” Twenty minutes later, she pulls into a wide gravel driveway. On the right is a weirdly angular yellow house edged with a white picket fence. She parks the car and looks over at Nana Pete. “Home sweet home.” She smiles. “We made it, Ma.”
The largest part of Lillian’s house looks like a big box with a slanted roof. There is a door and two windows on the right side and a closed-in deck that protrudes out from a second-floor window. Next to the big box is a slightly smaller attachment with a single rectangular window in the middle. A large tree with draping, heavy boughs hangs over the side of the house like a dark green umbrella.
“That is one weird-looking house,” I say, getting out of the car behind Lillian. She has her arm around Nana Pete and is helping her to the front door. Nana Pete is shuffling her feet and leaning her whole weight against Lillian.
“That’s because it used to be an old carriage house,” Lillian says over her shoulder. “Back in the day when people drove horse and buggy carriages, this is where they would store the carriages.”
“Are there any carriages in there now?”
Lillian laughs and shakes her head. “I barely have enough room inside that place for myself and Mr. Pibbs. No carriages.”
“You live with a man?” I ask.
“Nope. No guy. Come on in. You’ll see.”
Agnes, Benny, and I follow her through the front gate of the picket fence, stepping carefully along a set of cracked, flat stones that lead up to the front door. Big green bushes sit like boulders in front of the house. I pause, trailing my fingers over one of the strange fern-shaped spikes growing out of the top of the bush closest to the door. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Tiny buds cling to the tips of the spiky growth, hard and green on the outside with streaks of pink underneath.
“Those are my summer sweet,” Lillian says. She is fiddling with the lock, watching me out of the corner of her eye. “They need a few more weeks to bloom, but when they do, the whole front yard will smell like apple pie.”