Ragnarök

One: The Caregiver

Sunday mornings are different. Mildred Moynihan is not woken by a broom handle jutting into her ribs, nor by the jangling shriek of an alarm clock. She is roused instead by a full brass band. Flugelhorns, trombones, euphoniums, tubas, all of it layered on a regimental spine of percussion. She pulls back the sheets, lying there in a sweaty pink nightshirt that reaches her knees. A whiff of barely burnt toast lures her into the kitchen. At the square table she finds a place set. Breakfast is an English muffin, halved, a fried egg nestled on one disc and strawberry jam spread on the other. Black tea instead of coffee. She has never liked the bitterness of coffee, never grown accustomed to its flavor despite enjoying the aroma when it brews. This much she knows about herself, though she is hard-pressed to determine where her food comes from, who might have put it there, and how come—when she shuffles back to her room, after dining in J.P. Sousa's bombastic accompaniment—her church clothes are already laid out neatly on the bed.

From the front yard of the Moynihan farmhouse one can see Holy Trinity's steeple dominating the Grillow Rock skyline, such as it is. Dropped haphazardly in an ocean of stubbled acreage, boasting a population that cranes its neck just above two-thousand, Grillow Rock is built flat and low, like a stunted orphan dumped on the side of the road. With the aid of her walker, it takes Mildred twenty minutes to walk the mile into town, to ascend the broad stone stairs of her church, the one where she underwent all three Sacraments of Initiation as a child.

Preceded only by the Post 83 American Legion (the original town hall), Holy Trinity is the second-oldest standing structure in town, built by Calvinist settlers in the 1830s. Following an infamous attack during the Dakota War of 1862, in which ninety percent of the town's Protestant majority was slaughtered wholesale—and the Reverend C.H. Spurgeon anecdotally scalped alive upon his own altar—the building was appropriated by Irish Catholics, remaining under their stewardship ever since.

Mildred enjoys this sense of intertwined lineage, this sense of belonging to the church, and vice versa. Father Timothy Rourke is also a native of the area. His father built with his bare hands the impressive stone wall encircling the Catholic cemetery. Rourke even married Mildred to her late husband back in '76, fresh out of seminary with an outsized Adam's apple and ears that stuck out too far. Now his presence is pleasantly domineering, thin and graceful and intractable all at once, like a Doric column.

Following the benediction, as everyone belts out the closing hymn, he will stride up the aisle in the wake of his incense bearer, pausing at the rear pew, where Mildred can always be found, to give her hand a fond squeeze. His kindly creased eyes meet hers, before moving on to the young man beside her. Just a child really, fifteen or sixteen, but it seems she has known him a very long time. It could be how the priest's eyes change, hardening to convey a look of omniscient reproach, but Mildred does not trust the young man, does not wholly approve of his proximity. She senses he is a source of hardship for her, a bringer of general misery.

The window of Joe Eggert's Citgo franchise is so crowded with beer and cigarette ads he can barely see through to the pumps. This is intentional on Eggert's part. He has grown tired of wearing sunglasses behind the register between the hours of nine and noon, when the sun slants in like a mandoline blade. Now he has arranged a shady little niche for himself, with enough of a gap left between the poster boards that he can watch cars pull in and out. He has his Clive Cussler paperback, his can of V8, and a cooler containing a chicken parm sandwich that never fully leaves his mind, even while bantering with customers or reading Cussler.

The bell chimes (an electronic chirp, not the old silver bell he misses) and in walks the Moynihan boy. Eggert can never recall his name, first or last, but since he has dwelt at the Moynihan farmhouse for the past four years that is how Eggert knows him. "A bit late, isn't it?" he ribs. "If you're gonna be late for school, you might as well skip altogether and help me out around here. My knees don't like me stocking them lower shelves."