Out of Darkness: Prologue–September 1936

But the work continues as armies of undertakers and volunteers tend bodies in makeshift morgues.

With no time for embalming, they brush the dead with formaldehyde from buckets.

There are so many funerals that the pews in churches have no time to cool. Voices grow thin and hoarse from singing. Throats tighten. Consolation falters.

All around the school grounds were the towers that his daddy called derricks.

She pressed her palms hard against the branch, felt all the little hurts of its years and felt how the bark had grown up tough and fierce over those hurts, and it did not remind her of her promise to Abuelito—to watch out for the twins, yes, but also to stick with school a little longer herself and so get the diploma that not one girl in their San Antonio barrio had, all of them falling away to work or to watch their sisters’ or brothers’ kids or to marriages and babies of their own.

She tapped a finger on each answer before setting their slates down on the desk.

It wouldn’t bore to death, either, like the dull primers they were used to at school.

He started with AARDVARK. The name meant “earth pig,” and the book said that a “sharp blow with a stout stick” was all it took to kill one, if that was what you wanted to do.

Wash stifled a chuckle and pressed his face back into character.

“Yes, ma’am,” Wash answered, all earnest now.

Henry had brought the twins to East Texas because his pastor told him to. Told him in words about lost sheep and duty. Told him with a hard stare from the pulpit.

The preacher yipped and jabbed at the sky with his fraying Bible.

Small dark hairs flecked the sink basin, and dust was gathering in the grout lines between the tiles.

She held Naomi’s letter in her hand. It trembled with her suppressed laughter. “I’m...hopping you are fine!” she said, exploding into giggles.

The preacher paced and shouted at the front of the tent, coming close to the revival crowd then veering back behind the plywood podium.

“We’re born drinkers and gamblers, profaners and idolaters, liars and thieves, all hateful in the sight of the Lord, every one of us, down to the smallest.”

“We’re born drinkers and gamblers, profaners and idolaters, liars and thieves, all hateful in the sight of the Lord, every one of us, down to the smallest.”

A throng of bodies carried him out of the tent and toward the river.

“Join your brother in the army of the Lord! Pray the redemption prayer and be freed from sin!”

The “Mexican wing” of Crockett High School, which was really five dank and crowded basement rooms that no white student ever entered.

They were the same ones, he was sure, but he couldn’t fathom what she’d be doing coming through the front door of a white grocery store.

“So there’s brown ones and black ones, that don’t matter. What matters is that they don’t sully up my store.”

The boy stepped closer, his eyes riveted on Wash’s pack and fishing rod.

She swept three dead flies from the sill into the basin. Their bodies stood out stark against the white enamel until she turned on the faucet and sent them spiraling down the drain.

“Y’all know how to clean fish?” Wash asked.
“Soap and water?” Beto ventured.

Knowing better came with being the son of the black school principal, who was also Egypt Town’s de facto mayor.

She was mostly generous with her gift. Like today, when he had wanted to keep the entry on the albatross, she had agreed to read it. All that it took for them to have it forever was for Cari to read it once.

Most of us couldn’t like the Mexican girl on account of Miranda not liking her, which made it downright dangerous, socially speaking. But Tommie Kinnebrew was near evangelical on the subject and spent half her talk trying to win us over.

Mary Ellis said that the Mexican girl went to Tommie’s church, which was why she was obliged to like her.

That afternoon on the way home from the store: light angling through the trees, cicadas clattering high in the branches, the twins racing and laughing with Wash, her not needing to say anything.

It was just a sloping building covered with corrugated tin panels hammered together.

His hat was askew, and he was still buckling his pants.

Naomi’s English was getting better, but she did not know what was meant by “abstinence,” “substitution,” “self-care,” or “prophylactics.”

In those days before the crash, Abuelito and Abuelita had had a nice house, but they still took their baths in a galvanized tin tub.

She backed out and went to her pallet in the corner of the living room.