The Used World Page 5
She would say, Peter, there was a sinking-down comfort in my life, as if I knew I was trapped in the belly of a whale, and so I built my little fires and was content to ride the waves out. All my life I’d looked around at the hangar of ribs, the slick walls, and thought, This is the size of the world. But what if the Leviathan opened his mouth? What if the greatest darkest biggest beast in the deepest sea imaginable, my God, the land that was my God and the Mission and the fear that were the swallowing that had swallowed me; what if that very beast opened wide and there above the sky I had always thought was the sky, the hard black whale palate dotted with whale stars; what if that sky opened to the sky above the sea, and I could see the wild spread of it above me, the real stars for once, for the first time? What if I suddenly saw the teeth, the tongue, the cervical curve of the whale’s mouth? What then?
Well, she thought, taking a deep breath, I would run for it.
She gave him thirty seconds more, but she knew he wasn’t coming. Peter didn’t pull her from the sea. He wasn’t the shore, the sky, the stars. He was just standing there, agreeable at the time, and while she hadn’t even begun to grieve for him, hadn’t begun to reckon up what the cost would be to her in the end, she also knew women never really die from love. Hazel had told her so.
Rebekah put the car in gear, and headed home.
Claudia stopped at Parker’s Supermarket on her way out of town, joining half of Jonah in the joy of the looming crisis. She took what milk was left, the orphaned loaves of wheat bread. Not knowing whether the storm would even come, and if it did what she would need, made her forget what she’d come for. The store was vast, too bright, and both her knees and her will felt porous. Again and again and again, the car door, the parking lot, the groceries, the stares. In the produce section she stood a few moments unmoving, thinking how odd the fact of consciousness in beings who spent their lives like hamsters on a wheel.
She ended up buying more fruit than she could ever eat, and a few things she’d never purchased before in her life: buttermilk bath salts, smoked cheese, a bar of bittersweet chocolate. On a whim, she went back and bought two of everything, thinking she might leave a bag on her sister’s porch with no note, as if Millie had been the object of a visitation; Millie, who had no need of help from anyone, and didn’t care much for food. Everyone in the store gave Claudia at least a long look; and one elderly woman stopped in her tracks and pointed directly at Claudia’s chest, while saying to her stooped husband, “Look-a there!” Claudia walked on, never meeting an eye or giving an indication she’d heard their comments, as if she weren’t merely too tall, too broad, but deaf and blind as well. It wasn’t that she was resigned to her status, although that was part of it. And she hadn’t precisely taken inside herself the years of scorn, although for a while she had. Now she relied on something she’d heard Amos Townsend say in church a few months earlier.
He had welcomed them and they’d sung something, Claudia couldn’t remember the song, and then he read from Scripture and she didn’t remember what that was either—something from the book of Mark, she suspected—and then Amos began to talk about the character of Jesus. He’d quoted a Quaker theologian named D. Elton Trueblood: “Jesus Christ can be accepted; He can be rejected; He cannot reasonably be ignored.” Claudia wrote the words in the little notebook she had taken to bringing with her to church. She could see how Trueblood’s claim might be true intellectually, and yet ignoring Jesus was as easy as ignoring anyone else in the realm of the dead, as far as she was concerned. He could have easily said that the Civil War cannot reasonably be ignored, or the mechanics of evolution, or the missile silos in the American West. Of course they can’t, she had thought, and yet it’s in our nature to ignore everything except our survival, and indeed, our survival probably depended upon a narrowness of focus that began in the morning with the hunt and ended at night with shelter. She was thinking of this when Amos said that he’d thought about Jesus his whole life—he agreed with Trueblood—and as an adult his contemplation felt like a combination of what young girls feel for rock stars and what young boys feel for abusive fathers. Claudia had blinked, taken a breath. He imagined, Amos said, a girl lying on a sofa, studying pictures and biographies of the object of her affection, imagining she knew Him in a way no one else did, and also hoping to get closer, to establish greater intimacy and to get to the bottom, finally, of her passion. Or a boy, walking through the house after dinner and hearing his father come up the steps—the wariness, the quick prayer, Please don’t let him notice me. Jesus, Amos continued, had always struck him as a man filled with rage. Think of Jesus’ impatience with His mother, with the Apostles, His chilly distance from the people on whom He performed miracles, how He was so irritated with everyone who simply didn’t get it. Think of Him with the fig tree. What a world to be born into! How grotesque and cruel to be made manifest by the Divine just to suffer and be killed for a senseless metaphorical principle. Amos shook his head in disbelief, mentioned Abraham and Isaac, Kierkegaard, how the message sent was understood by the Son, but not by the messenger. He paraphrased a passage from a book about cosmic child abuse. Claudia was lost a moment, then Amos said he thought the great message of Jesus might be there, in His anger, in the abuse He had suffered not at the hands of the Romans, but at the hands of His Father, because that’s what we really share with Him. We are called upon to love a God who either didn’t see fit to protect us from disaster and death, or was helpless to prevent it. What sort of a God was that? And Jesus, in response, created for Himself a sort of daily compassion (not empathy, of which He seemed to have little, at least to Amos), but a cobbled-together will-to-patience that was born not of His divinity, but of His humility. Amos said he’d imagined Jesus so many times repeating under His breath, “Don’t smite them, don’t smite them, they’re really just a bunch of morons and are in enough trouble already,” repeating it as He healed the hemorrhaging woman, the blind man, the soldier, people He did not love but took mercy upon anyway. If Jesus hadn’t seen His lot as the same as humanity’s, He could not have been human. And if He hadn’t felt compassion for the people around Him, He could not have been Divine. “Or maybe I’m just mad at my Father,” Amos had said near the end of the sermon, with his rueful smile. He ended by saying it was possible to consider Jesus an entire lifetime and find nothing but projections of our own futility, our own fear of death; He was a wild, blank, imaginal screen on which we had cast our looming cultural shadow.
The Haddington Church of the Brethren was completely silent when Amos stopped speaking. Claudia didn’t dare look around, but she wondered what the other parishioners were thinking as they listened. At the time she didn’t even know what Brethren meant, except that she never thought about her clothes when she was there, and no one and nothing but Amos Townsend and this church really interested her.
After that Sunday, Claudia thought often of the phrase ‘He created for Himself a kind of daily compassion,’ and she tried to do the same, even though she lacked power, divinity, wisdom, grace. She walked through the grocery store, or stepped into a gas station, and when the toothless women in sweatshirts, their bodies and hair reeking of cigarette smoke and fast food, stared at her cruelly or even went so far as to make a comment, she no longer thought, They hate me. Now she tried to remind herself that if we don’t feel the weight of the human condition, we must not be fully human. She thought instead, They hate themselves. They hate being alive. They hate their Fathers.
As she walked to the car, the feeling in her chest was atmospheric, a pinching there not unlike excitement. The silence was so thick Claudia became aware of her own breathing, and of the sensation that she was actually in the sky. The sky was no longer above her, or the clouds at a safe distance. As she loaded her groceries the snow began to fall, heavy flakes at first, but by the time she started the car and turned on the lights, the wind had picked up and the six miles ahead of her seemed too long. She had the second bag of food, the things she’d thought she might leave for
Millie, but knew she’d never get to her sister’s house and back home before the storm struck. As she made her way through the north end of Jonah, she decided to leave them at Rebekah’s; the old house where Rebekah lived with her father was on the way.
The porch light burned at the Shooks’, but Rebekah’s car wasn’t there, and there was no sign of Vernon. Claudia trudged up the sidewalk, the heavy bag obscuring her vision. Rebekah’s neighborhood felt abandoned—there were no dogs barking, no movement. She left the bag in front of the wooden screen door, under the porch light, as she would have at Millie’s, with just these words written on the outside of the bag: For Rebekah, a cold night.
By the time Claudia reached Old 73, heading east toward home, hers was the only car on the road, or the only one she could see. There was a little visibility to the south, but almost none in the north; she could make out the houses, the convenience store, the used car lot to the right of the road, but nothing on the left. She knew her right turn was coming up, and began to look for the mailbox that signaled the V of the additional lane—just a little turn lane a quarter of a mile long. She was too familiar with the road, had driven it too many times, and tended to sail into the turn lane at top speed, then slow down quickly in order to make the turn. Indiana country roads have that effect on most people, Claudia thought; they breed a false security, because the world seems so flat and manageable, the sight line so clean. She didn’t see the mailbox and then she saw just the outline of it, and some part of her body led into the swerve to the right, but something else, a voice, cautioned her to flash her high beams into the lane, just in case. There in the lane was a man, dressed in a black coat and walking shoulder-hunched against the blowing snow. Claudia jerked the wheel of the old Cherokee too hard to the left; too late realized her error. The back fishtailed with a skating, liquid ease, and Claudia took her hands off the wheel. She spun in a full circle, then half of another, and when the tires found some purchase, she gently turned the wheel into the spin and felt the truck shudder in her hands.
She could no longer see anything. Her headlights were pointing west, she thought, but she couldn’t be sure. The walking man was gone, had vanished as if into smoke, or a high tide. She had to get off the highway—whoever she couldn’t see wouldn’t see her, so she drove a few feet, then recognized the iron gate of the old nursing home, empty for the past three years. Bear Creek, her road, was due south—so she turned and drove tentatively over what she hoped was the road. By now there was nothing, no shoulder, no fencerow, nothing to indicate if she was still on pavement or heading toward the culvert. Two miles yet from home, and she’d left earlier that day without either boots or gloves, another bit of typical Hoosier folly.
Sometimes the snow blew horizontally across her headlights, and sometimes it seemed to stop altogether. She’d gone nearly half a mile when she saw something off to her right, at the edge of the headlight beam. She angled the Cherokee toward the shape just slightly, just enough to cast light upon it, and got out of the truck. The wind and snow hit her face like an open hand, rocketing into her coat, and for a moment she thought of how silly this was, a woman like Claudia undone by a winter storm. She’d lived on this road her whole life; how could she possibly fail to get home? The wind sang in her ears, rising and falling, and a stand of trees outside her sight moaned along in time.
“Hello?” Her voice seemed to stop in her mouth. The wind had blown it back at her.
There, then: a set of eyes caught green in the halogen light. Claudia took a step backward, saw another set, a third, the vague impression of fur. Three dogs, she thought, long-muzzled, gray. She imagined more than she saw. Three dogs lying on the frozen ground, snow blown up against their sides, the brutal wind. Before she could decide what to do, all three animals rose and ran away from her, deep into the pounding whiteness, the black ground of the field on which they could run all night.
The snow was blinding by the time Rebekah drove home, leaning close to the steering wheel, as if that would help. When she finally reached her house, she parked the car in the general vicinity of other car-shaped, snow-covered mounds, hoping she wasn’t actually on the sidewalk, or in somebody’s yard. She’d left the porch light on by accident that morning, and now it was the only guide to her door—the too bright bulb her father insisted on and that she usually found distressing.
It was Friday, so Vernon would be at the Governance Council Meeting until it was over, snowstorm or not. Rebekah didn’t worry about him driving or becoming stranded; to do so would have been a betrayal of who he was to her, and who he believed himself to be. He had, Rebekah knew, thrived in storms far worse than this, once traveling seven miles on horseback in a blizzard because he’d intended to propose to her mother and would not wait.
Constance Ruth Harrison, called Ruthie, had been seventeen years old in 1958, had known nothing of the world when Vernon set his cap for her. They’d met when Vernon responded to a call from the pulpit to help get a neighbor’s crops in; Ruthie’s father, Elder Harrison, had fallen to pneumonia, and his family was in trouble. They weren’t Prophetic, the Harrisons, but belonged to a radical Holiness sect that had broken away from the larger body and set up worship in a barn on Elder Harrison’s land. At first they called themselves Children of the Blood of the Lamb, and then Children of the Blood, and finally, just The Blood. That was where the truth lay, they believed, in the old story. For some groups it was in Christ’s miracles, for some it was the Resurrection. (The Mission preached that demonic sects like the Catholics worshiped only Mary and a group of Mafia-connected cardinals in Italy who carried submachine guns under their red robes, and who communicated with the Underworld through a code involving sunglasses.) But the Harrisons and their little ragtag army, which had remained isolated as long as Elder Harrison lived, believed that the divine message of Jesus was in His Blood, the blood He shared with the Master Creator Father God, and the blood He spilled on the cross to redeem humanity. In them, the Blood rose up and spoke; it told them of the End Times, it said there would be a worldwide slaughter of the unconverted Jews. As the Children of the Blood married and mingled with the Prophetic Mission, and as the secular world slouched toward them, they realized there would need to be a worldwide slaughter of other groups as well. No hope of conversion would be offered to Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Muslims, Hindoos, the Godless Buddhists. A special trampling under the hooves of the Four Horsemen was reserved for Unitarians, and a spectacle of Holy Execution for the mortal enemies of The Blood, the Mormons. The old peace churches, the Quakers, Amish, Hutterites, Mennonites, and Brethren, would be mown down, but gently, like wheat, as the members of The Blood respected their work ethic. Jesus would smite the proclaimers of the Pentecost with a special vengeance, including the Nazarenes, the Assemblies of God, and the Church of God, because their worldliness was evidence of a silent affiliation with Satan. Any branch of the crooked tree that called itself Pentecostalism, then built its ministry around cavorting with prostitutes and self-glorification, had not merely gone astray. It had become a carrier of the Disease.
Until five years ago Rebekah had thought it all perfectly normal, what went on in that barn with her Granddad Elder, her child mother, the members of the fugitive group. It was Worship as they Worshiped. Of course there would be no Children of the Blood without blood, there would be no life, there would be no eternity. The barn was their Temple, and its altar was stained, as had been all the altars of the seven tribes of Israel. And her father riding his great horse Michael over miles of snow-blanketed fields to claim Ruthie as his own—that had sounded normal, too. Ruth had had no say in the matter, wouldn’t have dreamed of making any claim to her life or liberty. She’d told Rebekah at the end, lying in the hospital bed the Mission had rented and set up in her bedroom, that although she couldn’t say she’d loved Vernon at seventeen, there had been something in the cruel set of his jaw that had thrilled her and made her want to go away with him. So she’d been willing, in her way, then he took her and
married her, and it hadn’t been her family or her childhood she’d mourned, it had been her girlfriends in the church, whom Ruthie had taken for granted, considered permanent. They’d never been together as a group again, never walked across a field or gathered around a porch swing, never spent the night in the same bed or talked for hours about nothing, chattering like magpies, as the men used to say. All those girls were married off eventually, scattered to the winds, kept behind closed doors.
Rebekah hadn’t worn boots to work, and so was forced to make her way down the sidewalk in mincing steps, reaching out for trees. She imagined someone watched her do this. Hazel’s voice suddenly entered her head, saying, Oh look, a little redheaded stepchild has escaped from under the porch. Rebekah laughed aloud, lost her footing, righted herself. She could just see, in front of the screen door, a bag from Parker’s Supermarket. When she reached it, she looked inside before picking it up, but it was just what it appeared to be. Who would have done such a thing? Who would have thought of her, now that she’d lost her cousins and all her extended family, the church she’d grown up in, and the love of her father?