We call her the wild girl because she is naked and unafraid when she first appears in the Meiers’ cornfield near the collapsing barn. Mr. Meier brings her a can of tuna and sets it down in the field along with his eldest daughter’s old dress and a saucepan of water. Mr. Meier remembers the winter he found a dead fox under the graveyard road’s slope, two fox cubs curled up under her. He took half a can of wet dog food and the same pewter saucepan to the Calvary crosses every other day. He kept his vigil over the foxes until spring but never saw them again. Mr. Meier is a faithful man.
Like the foxes, the girl hides herself. She takes the food but not the dress. The dress is a formality she does not understand. When Mr. Meier takes it back into the house it is damp and sweet-smelling but his daughter refuses to wear it. Sometimes Mr. Meier can catch the wild girl’s silhouette if he stops halfway to the house and turns back. She is slender, her hair like a blond flame. The wild girl continues to take the food, the water. One day she stops.
So everybody is surprised when she walks into town a month later. She is swaying on her feet and clutching a horse blanket. She is waltzing into town like a drunk homecoming queen after a night of too much and her hair is shorter, chopped ragged. It does not take long for Mr. Edzel Winters to claim her as his long-lost daughter. Look at the scar on her arm, he says. Nina had a scar just like it from when she caught her arm in the baler. He points to what looks like a deep rope burn on her forearm. It’s plain as daybreak, he says. Mr. Winters reminds us that his wife and daughter disappeared on the same day in June, ten years ago. The two of them had hiked up into the Big Meadow to fetch the horse and neither came back. Nina would have been six then, and stubborn enough to follow her mother. Nobody looked until dark, assuming they had stopped to pick sour early apples. The Jollytown Volunteer Fire Department arranged to have bloodhounds trucked down from Pittsburgh, but the search ended after a few weeks.
The wild girl lives with Mr. Winters and his six sons. The brothers coddle her and dress her. Some say they see the family resemblance, especially in the childish chin and the sharp, thin nose. Some say there is no family resemblance. Even the skeptical Mr. Meier says nothing because the glow of mystery is too warm to sidle away from.
It is devilment to cut her hair. Mr. Winters’s sons trick her with candy but the first snip of scissors against her neck makes her bolt. They dress her in their mother’s pink silk nightgown but she screams when they put shoes on her feet. The social workers descend with tote bags and paperwork. Reporters follow the social workers. Some of them pay to sleep in extra beds, but most take rooms at the motel off the highway in Waynesburg, half an hour away. The Colonial Inn is the closest bar, ten miles south on Rural Route 18, and as such becomes a de facto press club.
Mr. Edzel Winters agrees to a blood test but later changes his mind. He receives the reporters always with dignity, offers them coffee and pie. The wild girl knows only three words: mother, father, bellyache. She can use a spoon without instruction. She responds to games but treats her family with indifference. So say the newspapers that run developments on her story every day. She seems content enough but her brothers keep watch. She seems willing to disappear.
Of course there are theories. A newspaper man from Pittsburgh has examined the marks on her ankles and wrists, concluding that she must have been confined at some point. Her hair, cut short around her face when she walked into town, must have been cut by someone, he says. The police bring dogs and trackers but no trace shows.
Mr. Winters is a recognized evangelical. He is the first one to remind you, casually, that your presence was dearly missed at the most recent tent revival, that without your cabbage noodles the potluck could not be counted a success. Mr. Winters loves his new daughter like he loves tent revivals: in public. Some see him buying dresses for her at the department store an hour away. Everybody begins to wonder when the wild girl will show up at a revival, when he will use her keening and moaning to dial up his direct line to God.
With such rich material people can’t help themselves from telling stories. Francine Wyman says she saw the wild girl walk into the post office to play with the pens chained to the counter, later to mash her face into a wrapped loaf of Wonder Bread at the store. Some people say Mr. Winters shouldn’t let her roam around like that. Evelyn Rospun says the wild girl approached her in the Rospuns’ hayfield carrying a purple corn snake in both hands, holding it out as if to bestow a gift. But Evelyn has a history of hysteria and it is difficult to take her seriously.
Mr. Meier’s daughters refuse to walk to the spring up the hollow, even in daylight, unless they carry corn knives. At night they put the dog in the root cellar for safety. Myra, the eldest, claims to see a white-suited man with a slingshot and musket running along the deer paths on the hill behind the house. He wants her back, Myra explains to her mother. He wants her back and if he can’t find her he’ll take me instead.
Before her sisters were born, Myra’s parents told her she had a twin who lived in the attic. When she sassed back or pouted, they claimed she could easily end up there, too. Mr. Meier regretted the joke when he found Myra on a stepladder with a box of crackers and a jar of peanut butter, looking for her imaginary twin. Now he regrets bringing her dress to the wild girl because Myra won’t touch it. It hangs in the middle of her closet, a foot of space on either side.
Mr. Meier is not given to worrying superstition, but he has noticed dark, leaping things at the edges of his vision. Lately he has found snuffed fires on his walks to mend fences or sluice the spillway at the pond. A hammer has gone missing from the work shed. Whenever he finds a wrinkle like that, he smoothes it. He doesn’t want his girls to go spooky.
The social workers drive into the hills and washed-out towns to ask questions. They check their registers of previous abuse and family trouble for the wild girl’s source. What they find only makes more work. So much family trouble has gone unregistered. In Deep Valley, they find a mother dosing her children continuously with bourbon to make them sleep. Naked, they sprawl on a mattress like mice. None of them know the word birthday.
By the high point of summer one story takes root. It is Mr. Meier, the faithful man, who first tells his neighbors that he has heard the wild girl sing. Mr. Meier has a calm way of doing things, a kind of natural reticence about wild stories. But he walks into town one day to get some bread and a can of chaw, and he has a healthy audience of midday loafers at Sissy Pecjak’s gas station. Mr. Meier tells the boys around the sandwich counter that he hasn’t gotten any good sleep lately because of the singing.
The singing? They look him over for exhaustion.
Mr. Meier says he hears things at dusk coming from his property line, about a quarter mile away from the house. It sounds like somebody singing the national anthem.
Almost nobody believes this at first. The boys go out in their pickup trucks at night to the Meier property line. They are fragrant with cheap beer and hay musk. Some of them are so ready to hear singing that they hear it before it begins. But they get their shock when the wild girl actually starts singing. This time it isn’t the anthem, but “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
She must be close by to the place where they pull their trucks into the field to sit on hoods and tailgates. From there you can see the Winters house, yellow and crooked on the ridge like a rotten tooth. When the wind catches it the song rushes down to them from somewhere. Though they are natural wisecrackers, they shut their mouths. Every night, it is always one patriotic song, over and over, for sometimes as long as an hour. They lose sleep dreaming of her. Accidents chase their waking hours.
Peachee Mitchum gets the worst of it when, fraught with exhaustion, he missteps in the hayloft and falls to the barn floor. His arm is broken and his ribs bruised. It is the kind of bone break that will trouble him for the rest of his life, according to the doctor. He can’t work for a month. He listens to the radio deep in a fat, listless annoyance. Sometimes, from within himself, he hears the bones click in disagreement.
The rest of the boys go on in his absence, listening to her sing every night. Their livid girlfriends try all kinds of bribes. Some claim they will start putting out. Some beg to ride along; others try to sneak up on their own. But it is understood, somehow, that it would be wrong to let them listen. The boys chase their girlfriends away with threats. One pulls a rifle, unloaded, just for show, to demonstrate his seriousness.
Peachee goes back the first night he is well enough to join them again. And for the first time, he finds the pure reverence on their faces repulsive. In his absence, the rest of the boys had started jacking off whenever she sang. They find their own quiet places in the dark, spread out in Mr. Meier’s field, to moan or clutch their breath. Peachee sits up on the hood of his truck and tries to look away from their shows of ecstasy. It is hard to focus on the singing like this, without their collected attention to magnify it. He finds his floodlight in the cab, the one he uses to spot deer in the fall.
With the light in his hands, Peachee aims for the source of the singing. When he feels he has a bead on it, he flips the switch. The beam hits high on the hill behind the Winters house and catches the wild girl in its circle. She scrabbles up the hill and he chases her with the light but loses her in a stand of trees.
The rest of the boys push him to the ground. One holds the floodlight on him while the others take turns roughing him up. They stomp on his cast until it cracks. They return the next night already knowing the singing is over, but it is important to verify. They can sit still only five minutes before their hearts feel raw and they leave.
By the end of summer, when ironweed starts flushing through the fields, Mr. Winters leaves a stack of revival brochures at the counter of Sissy Pecjak’s gas station. This time he springs for full color with his newly adopted daughter as the centerfold. Come Hear the Angel Girl of Western Pennsylvania Translate the Gospel Back into Tongues, it reads.
A lot more people show for this revival than the last one. It is difficult to compare, but the atmosphere has a ring of carnival in it. The women wear brighter dresses. The men wear their good boots. The Volunteer Fire Department will hold a chicken fry after the proceedings. The wild girl sits up front near the stage and Mr. Winters fans her with a program.
Mr. Meier stands near the back. His Quaker distrust of spectacle will not let him enter for fear of the urges to sweat and dance. Peachee Mitchum stands even further off, enough distance to become a spectator rather than a participant. Myra waits with binoculars in her father’s truck. She is keen for a look at the white-suited man, and truly expects him to show up.
Mr. Edzel Winters begins at noon prompt. The faces before him shine with sweat. Do you know your father God, he begins, do you know Him by His face? Do you know Him by His voice, do you know Him by His hand? Nobody listens. The story about Peachee has spread as wide as a net, and everybody who was not interested in the wild girl’s singing is a damn sight more attentive now. Mr. Winters testifies that the great hand of God brought back his lost daughter. Proof, proof, proof, he shouts.
Come home, come home, come home, ye weary. The choir invites sinners to get saved. Mrs. Martha Bedillion walks to the stage to have hands laid upon her. She does this at every revival, even though she has not built up enough sin in the interim to warrant it. When she faints, a girl with a basket of scarves leaps up to cover Mrs. Bedillion’s legs. Nobody else is weary enough to come on home.
Any good revivalist possesses an ear for the pall of silence. Silence means that belief is not running high enough in the crowd. Believers mutter to themselves and respond in kind to testimony—Mr. Winters is certain he can hear their blood heat up. With so many staunch minds to convert, he decides to turn up the dazzle full-blaze immediately and reaches for the wild girl’s hand.
Signaled, the wild girl hikes herself onto the stage. Someone has tried to teach her a pretty smile but it comes out wrong. It’s more wolf leer than feminine wile, although it looks right on her face. She balls up the front of her yellow gingham dress with her fists. It is a feverish silence, at the edges of which Mr. Winters is smiling and nodding his head. Go on honey, he says.
She starts with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” All of the boys who had listened in the dark that summer cannot stop from shivering a little. It is stunning, to hear her this close by, and to watch the breath she takes heap in and out of her chest. Some of the old boys who ribbed Mr. Meier at the sandwich counter blush impressively. Everybody seems to remember an incident they had defeated with shame. The girls in the choir look on, desperately jealous of that voice.
Because he senses the rising reverence in the tent, Mr. Winters reaches for the spotlights. Nobody had told him about the wild girl’s fanatic audience over the summer or what ended her nightly performances. He hits the switch, snaring her in a golden circle. Her face crowds in on itself. We see it for only a moment because she bolts. It takes all six of her brothers to catch her. They smooth her hair and coo to her but she scratches one’s face hard enough to draw a little blood. When he slaps her stiff on the jaw, she hardly reacts at all.
The show must go on. Mr. Winters believes in this principle. When he tries to cue the choir girls they look blankly back. Only true believers remain. Mr. Winters considers the revival a failure, but he shouldn’t. Everybody, even the ones who leave or refuse to enter the tent in the first place, leave believing indelibly in some thorny, private vision.
School starts and part of the dream is over. The social workers make recommendations regarding the wild girl’s education and return to normal life. After the revival, it is unlikely she will ever fully rejoin society, but almost everybody imagines her in the hallways at school carrying a satchel and binder. She would answer all of Mr. Tanner’s questions about the New Deal by saying either mother, father, or bellyache. She would join choir. A few VFW boosters suggest she sing the national anthem at the first football game. Peachee Mitchum imagines her as a homecoming queen. Of course it’s impossible.
The wild girl attempts escape more often after the revival. She is not allowed to wander without at least two of her brothers present, always. Calvin, the strongest, still recovers from a concussion she gave him when he tried to stop her once at the door. She will only sing if she thinks she is alone.
Peachee Mitchum ends up married to Myra Meier. In spite of her father’s intentions, she has gone spooky herself. Nobody could convince her that the white-suited man with the slingshot and musket was not real, and she only disdained them for trying. Peachee built her a house deep in Mr. Meier’s back forty and then built her a road. In the mornings she takes her coffee outside and walks the perimeter, pretending to pull weeds or look for snail shells. Sometimes Peachee worries when contracting jobs require him to stay in Wheeling for a few weeks, not out of fear that someone will take her, but because he can imagine her taking off. He suggests moving to a city but she likes her job. Myra is a social worker, driving into the hills to check on the family trouble.
She visits the wild girl often. They sit at Mr. Winters’s Formica kitchen table eating apples. One of the brothers sits, always, on the other side of the door. They can talk as long as they only use words from the national anthem or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which the wild girl learned eventually to say. Even so, she has to sing them a little. Myra tried to teach her other words, then other songs, but found that some, like “America the Beautiful,” frightened her just to hear them. Still, jokes are possible: Whose broad stripes and bright stars? Mine eyes.