Chapter One

Chester

People who live in houses never get it, but street people know: Fall begins on the fifteenth of August, at the exact moment when summer's at its peak. It happens like breath, the exhale being the seed of the inhale. There's the first yellow leaf. A tiredness comes over the green. The smell of snow rolls down from the mountain, and your bones remember the cold that's coming. It was that night, the night summer slipped into fall, that she became the Virgin. Before, she was just a girl who worked at Ronnie's Café on weekends, handing out free food after hours. There had never been anything about her to suggest divinity. No trace of roses lingered around her; there was no holy brightness. But all of that changed with the season.

That night, as always, I waited until dark to look for a place to sleep. There was a spot in the bushes by the river that I often used, and after I smoothed the dirt with my hand, I gingerly pulled my sleeping bag from its sack, trying to keep the goose down from leaking out of the many small rips in the fabric. I aligned the bag north to south because I can't sleep crosswise to the earth currents, and then I checked to make sure it wasn't visible from the road. You see, when the season changes, it brings the college boys back to town. They come, all suburbs and sex, looking to show their frat-boy friends how to kick bums trapped in sleeping bags. They never got me, though. I knew their ways from teaching them, long ago. And from being one of them before that.

I sat and ate my supper, a splendid ripe tomato pinched from a backyard garden. With the tip of my knife, I saluted my unknowing benefactors. They of the white picket fence and cozy kitchen. When the tomato was gone, I put away my knife, wiped the juice out of my beard, and turned up the collar on my coat. I didn't take off my boots. As much as I hated the dirt going into my bag, boots tend to disappear if they're not on you, and boots can make the difference between staying alive and not.

I had settled in, hoping for sleep, when there was a commotion above the water. I opened my eyes, and she was there. She was a vision, a visitation, a sighting, a hallucination. All words for the same thing: the moment that imprinted itself on all the remaining moments of my life.

She hovered over the creek, swirled in ambrosial light. The water coursed around her feet, but her dress stayed dry. She held the baby close. Her mouth moved, but I couldn't hear the words, so I made my way to the edge of the water. She was the girl from Ronnie's, only with eyes as deep as the universe and wrapped in a cloak of glory. The smell of roses, the velvety ache of them, lured me in. She smiled at me and said, "Yours will be a magnificent role in the coming of my son."

I'm no newcomer to strangeness. I've had it all my life. It's my curse and my blessing that I can smell things other people can't. I can pick up the rotten sweetness of infection from across the street. Anger coming off a person is an acrid, mustardy thing, not unlike the odor of ants, and lying has a cloying, soapy smell that makes my mouth pleat. In the past, when social workers and do-gooders discovered my gift, they sent me to shrinks who gave me the latest antipsychotic. I tried to take them, but the drugs always made me go dead inside. Each time I ended up deciding to carry on intact, smells and all, rather than live in that pharmaceutical twilight.

I had been smelling things forever, but I had never had a vision before. And this was the real deal, complete with singing angels and rapturous awe. I knew instantly who she was. I hadn't been to church since I was a little boy, but I knew. I recognized her by the roses and by the blue of her robe. And before I realized what was happening, she reached between my ribs and took my heart in her hand. It settled there like a tame rat, trembling at her touch.

I don't know how long she was with me, but when I came back to myself, I was waist deep in the water and she was gone. And I knew that this was what I was supposed to do: find her in the flesh and serve her.

Excerpted from The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn © Copyright 2012 by Janis Hallowell. Reprinted with permission by William Morrow. All rights reserved.