The Savior of the Font

Chapter 2

 Faith leads me to a little house on the other end of the cornfield. The grass in the front yard is up to my waist. I guess mowing isn't really important anymore. It's a single-story structure with white, vinyl siding walls and green shutters on the windows. A set of gleaming, silver wind chimes hang from the awning over the front porch, looking bored with no wind today to make them sing. It's all very quaint, very quiet, and very not Faith Meade.

"This is where you live?" I ask.

Faith pushes the door open and a faint squeak echoed in the dark house. "It ain't much, but it's close to the farm so the walk's not so long."

"It ain't much?" I ask while walking through the door. "Since when do you have such a southern accent?"

She shakes her head. "When all you've got to talk to is Sam and Danny, you just kinda pick it up after a while." She moves into the living room. There's an ugly, pea-green couch against the wall with a loveseat on the opposite side of the room. A brown recliner that should have been thrown out years ago sits in the corner. The walls are covered with a beige wallpaper adorned with a pattern of little red dots that I can't tell are flowers until I get closer. Scattered about the walls is an array of hooks and nails. I guess Faith took down all the old owner's pictures and just stopped at that.

"You could have more to talk to then just them, you know," I remind her. "I still don't understand why you left, but you could still pick up a phone and talk to us." I pause as a thought crosses my mind. "You do have a phone, right?"

"Yes," she says. Was that a little laugh I heard? "I have a phone. I have power too, but it's all solar so use it sparingly. I have to make sure my batteries are full before dark or the fridge will shut off."

"Sounds like a hard way to live," I say.

Faith stops at the double glass doors leading to the back porch. The sunlight hits her face and her beauty takes my breath away. "It's... humbling. I'll give it that. Really lets you see what you take for granted."

I set my backpack on the carpet and move towards her. She's just staring out the window at the back yard. I can see more cornfields beyond the chain-link fence surrounding a little square of more unmowed grass. Her shoulder is leaned against the glass and she just looks lost. I want to ask her again why she left, but I've got to choose my words carefully. I don't need another episode like we had back on the farm.

"How did you find me?" she asks.

"Oh," I reply, startled out of my contemplation. "Well, it certainly wasn't easy. It took a couple of months to comfortably deduce you'd left the city, and these days no one lives out this far unless they work on a farm or in a plant."

"But why here? Why this farm?"

I laugh. "Well, I tried to think like you. If I were Faith Meade, where would I go if I didn't want anyone to find me? So I looked at a map of the farms still active around here and discovered there was one in Bethlehem, North Carolina, which I didn't know was a real place until then. Now, if I know my Antichrist, the last place she'd expect to be found is a town called Bethlehem."

She scoffs. "Well fuck," she responds. "Maybe I'm more predictable than I thought."

"Or I just know you that well."

"Why this farm then?" she continues. "It ain't the only one in town still running."

"The product trucked in from this one is always the smallest load," I answer. "I figured that meant it had to have the fewest people working on it. If you're trying to go where the people aren't, I guess you wouldn't half-ass it."