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Lloyd took this comment as a reiteration of his point and continued. “Proximity may influence the luminosity. Cause unknown.”

“What about you—when you touch them?” asked a man with a mustache that curled in a way that reminded Lloyd of the “f” hole in a violin.

“There may be several other factors at work, which we do not comprehend as yet,” he answered.

“Fools, fools, fools we are!” an old dark woman gibbered.

“I would not say that,” Lloyd barked (somewhat surprised at himself). “The Headstones are not what you thought them to be. But while they may not be sacred in the way that you have believed, they are worthy of great interest and perhaps much more than that, if their secret were fully understood.”

Lloyd had intended his comments to be consoling, but, coming after all that had transpired, they were more than the Quists could bear. A woman in a sunflower calico dress and a knitted shawl thrust her googling baby into her husband’s arms and began unwinding her turban. Several others started to do the same.

“Ah,” McGitney lamented, remembering his moment of cowardice in the barn back in Illinois and his mad dash through the laundry line. He felt once again on the run, his vision clouded. Could he emerge to advantage once again?

“Dark night of the soul!” he mourned. “A messiah comes to us at last, who says he is not our messiah and yet calls the lightning down to aid our members. Then he tells us that our faith is based on false teachings—that our prophetic forebearers are in fact lunatics or lusus naturae suitable for naught but display alongside the sawdust and hogskin mermaid, and the two-headed calf at a village fair!”

There followed much grumbling and argument and more than a little weeping and wailing. Lloyd could find nothing to say that he had not already said and, in being there to witness the unraveling of the Quist theology, regretted the effect his knowledge had imposed, although he was canny enough to realize that without his performance with the Eye they might well have talked their way around his words. Truly, faith is a kind of blindness, he told himself. But, then again, so is being too sure of what you see. The first pale light of dawn began seeping into the storehouse. It was time for him to get back to his coffin, and for the Quists to mobilize.

“I must go,” he told them. “And so must you. Whether you take off your head wraps or not, you will not so easily lose your reputation.”

McGitney, who had been comforting one of his wives, turned to Lloyd.

“You are right again, young warrior. We must carry on and come to terms with this new revelation at a safe distance.”

“Why? What’s the point?” one of the young people hollered.

“I’m a-goin’ back to Indy-anna!” an old codger croaked.

“What say you, Brother McGitney? What in God’s name do we do now?”

“Who said he’s leader now?” A scraggly man choked and started snuffing the candles with a square-toed boot.

“Silence!” McGitney bellowed, recalling that moment of exhilarated surprise when the contents of the clothesline were removed from his head and he had found himself a hero. “Here is what I say. We must try to see the blessing in what has happened here. We are all still alive and unhurt, and if our pride and our faith have been challenged, perhaps in another way it has been renewed. If we are to put stock in what this boy has said—and it seems that we do—then we must remember that we have in our possession these things that have no less meaning than we supposed, just different. Perhaps we are more pioneers and pilgrims than we supposed. I say that we forge on as a family, as a clan and as a community, committed to freedom, industry, and the search for the significance of these tablets—an endeavor we can all participate in without the need for prophets or messiahs. It strikes me that I myself have never looked more closely at the symbols than tonight because I had some inkling, I believe, of what they represented. The Book of Buford was a kind of curtain, not an exegesis. I say that what we leave behind