Read Online Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta - Free Book Online

wait three hours on the bus. Then off in Albany and wait for the next bus, which would probably stop in every empty town along the Mohawk River until it finally reached the stop in Fonda where Meadow would pick her up. All day was waiting.
    The ride westward on I-90 turned out to be interesting. The highway ran along the rail line and the river, and Carrie could see the Adirondacks to the north and the Catskills to the south. She listened to Maria Callas singing “Vissi d’arte” in 1958. Her eye camera ran along the river in the foreground but then looked up to quilted farmland in the near distance and beyond that the long view of the cloud-dotted Adirondack peaks. The movement was glorious. You could see for miles, and no camera or lens she had ever used was very good at capturing the simultaneous long and short view. Nothing like her eyes.
    She got off the bus in Fonda. Like most of the towns along the river, it looked quaint and pretty until you saw it up close. She took off her headphones and looked around. It wasn’t just the empty storefronts and the peeling paint. It was the plastic signage glaring from a service station, which also appeared to be the only viable business in town. After the bus pulled away, she could hear the music from the speakers at each corner of the convenience store behind the rows of pumps. The two people who got off the bus with her headed straightinside as if lured in by the sound of the Eagles singing “Hotel California.” Carrie followed them. What a strange overlaid place. Meadow had explained to her who lived here.
    â€œIroquois Nation people, fat white trash people, some leftover rural hippies, and sunburnt farmer people.”
    â€œFarmer people?” Carrie laughed into the phone. “You mean farmers?”
    â€œYes. Weird Germanic farmers. Palatinates, Moravians, some Amish. How and why did they get here?” Meadow said.
    â€œHow and why did you get there?” Carrie said. “I’m serious.”
    â€œThe place I found is amazing. Wait until you see the Volta Cinematograph!” She spread the syllables out so it sounded very European: vol-ta cin-e-ma-to-graph.
    â€œI can’t wait.”
    Volta Cinematograph was James Joyce’s failed cinema in Dublin. Meadow had a penchant for failures, a soft spot for them. And there were so many failures to chose from, weren’t there? The Mohawk Valley was a collection of failures, or at least of the conspicuous obsolete. All of upstate New York was filled with cities that came to be for a reason, and still had to be even though the reason had long moved on. Syracuse, Buffalo, Albany, Troy, all slowly shrinking. New York City on the other hand was a collection of wins: crack vials and rats aside, make no mistake, the city story was a long march of win. No wonder Meadow liked it up here.
    Meadow was late to pick her up, so Carrie wandered around the convenience store contemplating possible beverages. By the cash register was a rack with laminated prayer cards for Kateri Tekakwitha, the “Lily of the Mohawks.” Carrie bought one and read the back as she sipped her pale coffee. Kateri was a Mohawk girl who converted to Catholicism. Later as they drove out of Fonda, Meadow explainedthat not only was there a shrine to Kateri, but also a huge shrine to two martyred seventeenth-century Jesuit priests who became the first American saints. The priests’ shrine was on a hill on the south side of the Mohawk River, and Catholic pilgrims came from all over the world to visit it. But nothing beat the growing popularity of Kateri among supplicants. She was depicted as an Indian beauty, like Pocahontas in that kitschy Chapman painting, despite the fact that she was described as “disfigured by smallpox scars.” Kateri was recently beatified, which put her on the short list for canonization.
    â€œIs that really what they call it? A short list, like the Oscars?” Carrie said.