All the Names They Used for God Read online

  All the Names They Used for God is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Anjali Sachdeva

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  SPIEGEL & GRAU and Design is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The following stories have been previously published: “The World by Night” in The Iowa Review, “Glass-lung” in The Yale Review, “Robert Greenman and the Mermaid” in Alaska Quarterly Review, “Manus” in The Literary Review, and “Pleiades” in Gulf Coast.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Sachdeva, Anjali, author.

  Title: All the names they used for God : stories / Anjali Sachdeva.

  Description: New York : Spiegel & Grau, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017027249 | ISBN 9780399593000 (hardback) |

  ISBN 9780525508670 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author). |

  FICTION / Literary.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.A275 A6 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2017027249

  Ebook ISBN 9780525508670

  randomhousebooks.com

  spiegelandgrau.com

  Illustrations on this page, this page, and this page: © iStockphoto.com

  Book design by Dana Leigh Blanchette, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Rachel Ake

  Cover photograph: Shutterstock

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  The World by Night

  Glass-Lung

  Logging Lake

  Killer of Kings

  All the Names for God

  Robert Greenman and the Mermaid

  Anything You Might Want

  Manus

  Pleiades

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON,

  “NATURE”

  Sadie was sixteen when her parents died, and the gravedigger told her he would charge her less if she’d help him. Typhoid had killed so many people in town that he was tired of digging.

  “Can we do it at night?” she asked. Her skin could not weather the long hours in the sun, and in the glare of day she would be nearly blind.

  He agreed, and so there they were, twilight ’til dawn, shaving slivers of hard-packed earth from the walls of the graves. They had the coffins lowered by morning and the gravedigger looked at Sadie’s flushed face and said, “Go on and get inside now. I’ll finish this. I’ll do it proper. You can have your own service tonight.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of me?” she asked. She’d been wanting to ask all night. When she was tired or nervous her irises often jumped back and forth uncontrollably, as though she were being shaken, and she knew they were doing so now. It unsettled people, and more than one preacher had tried to cast spirits out of her, to no effect.

  The gravedigger looked at the earth for a long time, the pits with the bodies resting at the bottoms. “I saw another girl like you once, at a freak show in Abilene,” he said. “White skin and hair like yours, eyes like I never saw, almost violet. They called her the Devil’s Bride, but I think she would’ve liked to’ve been married to a good man, tending chickens and baking biscuits just like anyone else. Anyhow, you’re a fine digger.”

  * * *

  —

  Now Sadie is twenty and it is June and her husband Zachary has been gone for two months, moving southeast across the Ozarks and maybe farther, to look for work. She is not afraid of being alone. She was alone for two years before she met Zachary and she had thought she would spend the rest of her life that way. Just knowing he will come back sooner or later is enough.

  She sleeps in the sod house through the bright hours of the day when most women do their chores, saves her work for early morning and dusk. When the dark has settled she walks across the prairie, making her way by scent and feel. She finds some clumps of grass that smell like onion, others like sweet basil, others still covered in silvery down that tickles her fingertips.

  As the days pass, she saves up things to tell Zachary about when he comes home: A patch of sweet blackberries by the side of the pond where she draws the wash water. A hollow where a covey of grouse nest. Most important and mysterious of all, a hole in the ground with nothing but darkness inside, about the size of a barrel top. The grasses there move even when there is no breeze, and the hole breathes cool air. Once, she lowered a lantern into it at the end of her clothesline and saw a slope of jagged stone leading down. She stuck her head into the opening and breathed, and the air smelled just like the walls of her parents’ graves.

  * * *

  —

  When Sadie first met Zachary it was dusk and he was drunk. She was sweeping the front steps of the house she had lived in with her parents, and had a pot of elderberry jam boiling on the stove inside. A man stopped at the gate and said, “Appaloosa.” Sadie kept sweeping, but the word brought to mind the horses, stark white with a dappling of dark spots, that the Indians rode across the plains. “Appaloosa,” the man said again. “Appaloosa, I’m talking to you.” He sauntered up to her and took her face in his hand, fumes of whiskey and turpentine exuding from his clothes. He had straight black hair to his shoulders and fingers that were strong and calloused. Sadie stood very still as he rubbed her chin with his thumb, then showed her the dark purple smear of elderberry juice that stained it.

  “Not real spots at all,” he said. “You’re in disguise. You must be one of those Arab horses like the kings and queens ride, white from head to shoes.” He licked his thumb clean. Sadie didn’t say anything, just tightened her grip on the broom handle, but he dropped his hand and stepped back and bowed to her lightly. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, and just as quickly as he’d appeared, he was gone.

  She finished sweeping the steps and went inside. Looking in the glass, she could see that her whole pale face was spotted with the dark juice, her hands, too. She wiped herself clean with a damp cloth and went back to the canning, not thinking she’d ever see the man again. But he did come back the next day, and knocked on the door like any gentleman. The sound startled Sadie awake in her parents’ old feather bed, and she crept into the living room in her nightgown. Through the curtains she could just make out the shape of a man walking away down the front path. When she cracked the door open, there was a handful of dusty flowers on the stairs and a note. The grocer read it for her later: “My name is Zachary Pollard and I live at the boardinghouse by the bank and this is a gift for you.”

  He came every day after that, too, though once he learned better, he came in the evening, and they sat on the porch steps with a candle between them and talked. Her parents had been dead two years and he was the first person since their death to speak to her about anything more important than the weather or
the cost of flour. He was, he liked to say, mostly orphan himself. His mother was a Chinook Indian, but she had died when he was a boy and now he had nothing left of her but her songs and her language and a fine beaded bangle that he kept wrapped in a handkerchief at the bottom of his trunk. His father was a Scotch-Irish peddler whom he had not seen in a dozen years. None of this seemed to sadden him. Though he was only twenty, he had a hundred thrilling stories to tell, had traveled much of the country and met all manner of people. “But none like you, Appaloosa,” he would say. Sadie had often wished she looked like everyone else, but after she met Zachary she stopped wishing it. He drank her in with his eyes as though the very sight of her were delightful.

  She worried it would not last. During the months when she and Zachary were courting, she was convinced every day that he would change his mind and leave her. The day they were married she held his arm so tight she left crimps in the fabric of his shirt, and to put the ring on her finger he had to pry her loose.

  * * *

  —

  By the time the last hot days of summer come, she is restless. Even the weather seems impatient. Great masses of blue-black cloud gather above the prairie, and lightning cracks sideways at the horizon while the wind sets her hair whipping about her face. Times like these the world feels more alive than any other, like she is only a mosquito resting on the hide of some great beast.

  But when the storms end, the stillness is intolerable. She opens Zachary’s trunk and riffles the pages of his few small books between her fingers, wishing for the thousandth time that she could read them. She left school at eight when the schoolmistress complained that she was too much of a distraction to the other children, and that she still had not managed to learn her letters. When Sadie failed to learn them even from her mother, her parents took her to a doctor, who said her eyes were weak in a way he could not fix, that she was oversensitive to light, and farsighted; she would not learn to read and probably would not be much of a seamstress. He gave her a pair of dark glasses and sent her home. Standing on her front porch, Sadie hooked the glasses over her ears and looked at the people and horses moving through the artificial dusk the glass created. Brilliant bits of light still stabbed in from the sides of the lenses, and, though she could see better, people stared at her even more than they had before.

  She sets the books aside and carefully unpacks the rest of the trunk. Here is the shirt Zachary was married in, a spare horse blanket, a bundle of coins, a wrinkled handkerchief folded in neat quarters, and a long coil of rope. Sadie unwinds it and feels the whole length to satisfy herself that it is sound, and, finding it so, she coils it again. From beside the stove she takes the stout iron bar she uses to stir the fire. She slips a handful of matches into her dress pocket. With the iron bar in one hand and the lantern and rope in her other, she goes outside.

  She moves as quickly as she can to the cave entrance and ties one end of the rope to the iron bar, then hammers the bar into the earth with a stone until she believes it will hold her weight. After one last tug on the rope, she steps gingerly into the mouth of the cave and begins the steep descent.

  Once she has reached the floor, the opening to the cave blazes above her like a jagged red sun, but around her all is cool and dim. The lantern light does not go far in darkness this profound, but by moving around the perimeter of the space she soon gains its measure.

  At one end of the room she finds a tunnel, big enough to scuttle through at a crouch, and decides to see where it leads. As she goes farther, the passage angles steeply downward and grows narrower, until there is barely room for her to crawl and none to turn around. She has a sudden urge to stand up, though she knows she can’t. The stone floor cuts against her knees. She has no sense of how far she has come, and for all she knows the tunnel might end in a blank wall, and if it does, she will have to crawl the whole way backward, if she can even do such a thing. The panic makes her muscles twitch; she has to force herself to pause and breathe deeply to stay her own frantic motion. She imagines she is at home, in the little corner of the house where they store the potatoes, where the earthen walls squeeze close around her. At last she is calmer and moves forward again, and soon the tunnel widens out into another room. Sadie stands and stretches, claps her hands. To her right the sound echoes back, quick and sharp, but to the left it fades away into nothing. She sings out a line from her favorite hymn, “Glory, glory, praise His name,” and the stone walls sing back to her in a weird chorus. Laughing, she sings to the end of the song and holds her breath as the echoes fade. This is her reward for pushing herself forward when she might have turned back. She has never been anywhere so strange and apart from the world. It feels as though this place belongs to her alone, and before she has even begun the crawl back up through the tunnel, she knows she will return.

  * * *

  —

  All through autumn she visits the cave almost every day. Most times she goes only to the room at the bottom of the rope and lies in the cool darkness, breathing in the moist air. She daydreams, thinks sometimes of her parents, but most often tries to trace Zachary’s progress in her mind, imagine where he is and what he might be doing.

  The day before he left the two of them had gone for a ride in the early evening, the prairie still pale green and tender then, and if she tries she can sometimes summon the feel of his arm around her waist, his chest against her back as he let the horse wander through the tall grasses.

  “Will you be all right?” he’d said. “It’ll be a long while.”

  “I can wait.”

  “Go to the Burkes if you have any trouble.”

  “I won’t. She always looks at me like I’m a bug. I’d rather starve to death.”

  “Well, I’d rather you didn’t. I’m worried about leaving you alone.”

  “Don’t go, then. I’m the one with cause to worry, with you so far away.”

  He laughed, but it was a sad laugh. “I used to be a wild thing, you know, before I met you. I’ve drunk toasts in places that would make your stomach turn. I can take care of myself.”

  “I can take care of you, too,” she said.

  He sighed and kissed her neck, and turned the horse gently back to home.

  * * *

  —

  Some days she ventures through the tunnel, into the larger room, and beyond. She takes with her cloth scraps that she ties as markers so she will not lose her way, and the farther she explores, the more wonders she discovers. In some places streams of icy water cut through the caves, and after spending many long minutes staring into the current she notices the darting movement of small white fish and crayfish throwing back the light of her lantern. In other places she finds chimneys in the rock that seem to drop down forever, and empty riverbeds where the stone feels like melted glass. Pale crickets chirp from hidden niches. Every room holds some new wonder, and the joy of discovery stokes in her a boldness she has never felt in the world above. Her only regret is that Zachary is not with her. She knows he believes he has seen everything the world has to offer, but he has never seen anything like this.

  * * *

  —

  Then, too soon, the first snowfall comes. Sadie presses her nose against the tiny frosted window of the sod house and watches the flakes cover the bleached prairie. Within a day the snow reaches her knees, and soon after it is covered by a crust of ice. The glare of sunlight on the vast expanse of white is blinding at any hour of the day, and Sadie can’t find the entrance to the cave anymore now that the snow has erased all the features of the land. Bound indoors, she cleans, or cooks, or sings to herself. Despite what the doctor told her parents, she has learned to sew well enough, feeling the stitches and the way the fabric comes together with the tips of her fingers, so she busies herself patching the holes in her winter coat. Nights are so bitter she can’t bear to be outdoors very long, but when the sky is unclouded she wraps herself in her quilt and lies in
the snow looking at the riot of stars that fills every inch of the sky, so clear she feels she could prick her face against them if she stood up too quickly.

  Still, this is not enough to take up much time, and she begins to think she may go crazy in the little sod house. The winter before, Zachary read to her through the long hours, and sang while she played the guitar, and sometimes held on to her silently in their little bed, so quietly that she thought he was asleep until some slight movement made him hold her more tightly. Without him, the days are too long. She does not care to visit the Burkes, and the next homestead past them is ten miles distant. Soon she begins to sleep for long portions of the day, and the night, too.

  At last some travelers come by, a man and a woman and a baby. Sadie sees the shadow of their wagon move past the window, and goes quickly to the door to call to them. They come in stamping the snow from their feet and smiling, but a stricken look passes across their faces when they see her clearly in the firelight.

  “Would you like something to eat?” Sadie says quickly. There is little enough to spare if her stores are to last until spring, but she is desperate for their company. “Maybe it’s been a while since you’ve had a hot meal.”

  “We can’t stop long,” says the man.

  “Just a cup of tea and some bread, then?”

  The couple huddles together at the table as Sadie adds wood to the stove, sets the bread to warm, and boils water for the tea. There is one jar of blackberry preserves left and she puts that on the table as well. She slips her glasses on. They are more of a hindrance than a help inside the house, but she can hear the travelers’ fear in their voices, and knows the smoked glass will hide the way her eyes shake.