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once said, “How are you going to feel when I’m caught in the rapture and carried to heaven and you’re left down here?”
    Augusta laughed. “Well, I’d miss you. But I’d be quite all right here, with Karl and Rose and everyone at the seniors’ centre.”
    Maybe she shouldn’t have laughed. It was all very serious to Joy, no joke at all. She really did imagine that the end times were so imminent that any minute now she’d be sucked up to heaven by a cosmic vacuum cleaner, leaving her poor unbelieving mother here on earth. How Joy had come to believe the things she did was beyond Augusta. She didn’t get it from me, she thought. Augusta had her own brand of faith, one she had often described to Rose and other ladies at the church as a gardener’s faith, one that died down in winter and grew in spring with the resurrection of nature. Much of the time she didn’t know what to believe, but in spring and summer, when she worked in the abundance of a garden—felt the mud between her toes, tasted the ecstasy in a strawberry eaten fresh off the plant—she had to believe God was a sensualist who enjoyed a good tomato. Augusta couldn’t help but feel that the God of Joy’s church was mighty thin.
    “I wouldn’t feel slighted,” the preacher had advised Joy, when she told him God talked to Gabe.
    “But why Gabe?” said Joy. “He doesn’t believe.”
    “Maybe he’s calling Gabe home.”
    “But God has never talked to me. And I’ve never had any miracles. I’m not asking for big ones, just little ones, like Mrs. Tanner’s when she found that five-dollar bill inside the outhouse at the park when she was broke.”
    “But you have faith. What do you need with miracles when you have faith? Gabe doesn’t have faith and so God is trying to get his attention, trying to tell him something. But God may be too big for Gabe to handle. That’s why he can never remember what God has said to him.”
    “But what if it isn’t God?”
    “Well, that’s just it. It may be the devil playing tricks with his mind.”
    One would think a preacher would have an easier time telling God from the devil, Augusta thought, as Joy told her all this. As it turned out, Gabe was having little seizures in his left temporal lobe, under his forehead. His surgeon told him that seizures in this area of the brain affected language, but also created the sensations Gabe was talking about. A sense of awe, words that seemed to carry a divine message, a feeling of profound meaning. Gabe’s spirit of God was nothing but a cascade of electrical impulses flowing through part of his brain, a nest of excited bees in his basket hive. Despite her opinion of Joy’s church, Augusta found herself disappointed by this. What a bitter pill to swallow, if the Spirit really was only a manifestation of the flesh.
    But then, she wondered, what was she to make of her own occasional premonitions? They suggested so much, that eternity had surfaced into the temporal for a moment.Was
this
God talking? she wondered. Bees danced their elaborate dances to tell each other where the best nectar was. It was a language that had for so long gone unnoticed, and then been misunderstood by beekeepers, because bees danced in the dark of their hive and on the vertical floor of the honeycomb, hidden away. It was a language of touch and smell, not sound, as they gleaned information by touching the bodies of the dancing bees with their antennae. They deduced the type of flower the dancing bee had located by the scent of it still lingering on its body. Dancing bees offered other foragers tastes of the nectar they’d collected so they would know what they’d find. It was a language so unlike that of humans as to be nearly unrecognizable. Was the language of visions and dreams—the strange, nearly incomprehensible images and symbols—God’s language? Why didn’t He speak up, she wondered, and say things clearly in a language she could understand? God seemed to be as much a tease