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Show "Beautiful? In what way were they beautiful?" "I was in love." Everyone was interested. Julia, Tia, Molly. "i don't understand," said Philip. "With God," said Jonathan. Philip had to look away, had to disengage his eyes and mind from this man who clearly belonged somewhere else, in some other time and space; his eyes fell on Molly. What had happened between them? Where had things gone wrong? What was he forgetting? "And I'm still in love with God," said Jonathan, opening wide his arms as though to embrace the low-lying purple cloud. Molly's face was perfectly clear, held no answers at all. "I don't understand," Philip said without looking at the ex-monk, "surely you lost your faith when they kicked you out, I mean when they forced you to leave like that." "No, not at all," he said. "I wasn't betrayed by God. I was betrayed by the church, by men." The way he said men forced Philip to visualize cutthroats, smugglers, dark-skinned thieves. The trucks stopped and the Arabs scuttled out into the desert to gather dry bushes which they would pile higher than a man, nearly as high as the blankets which rose above the trucks, then splash with pink gasoline as the dogs, from a distance, watched. In half an hour they would have their bed of hot coals. Philip checked the chicken. It was doing fine. Jonathan was whispering to Molly as his eyes worked the sky. Julia was talking about the cemetery, saying that the grass there had done the best of |