The only question was whether or not the Lord would show mercy or require Abraham to burn her.
Chapter Sixteen:
“Are you ready to die?” the Disciple asked.
“I will die for the glory of God,” Christopher said. “If I have to.”
Christopher stood close enough that their noses were almost touching. They were almost the same height and once, in a BART station restroom in San Francisco, the Disciple had glanced in the mirror to see Christopher watching him and for a moment he’d seen himself reflected in the other man’s eyes. A prophet, a visionary. The man worshiped him, honored his every word and edict. If only they all felt this way, things would be different. He could stand on the wall overlooking the quad at the universities, proclaim the will of God, and they would listen.
“They mock us,” he said.
“Yes, Master.”
“They laugh, spit on us, throw beer in our faces, egg us from cars.”
“You warned us it would happen,” Christopher said. “And it came true. You speak for God.”
“In Seattle, the police arrested us for vagrancy, in Los Angeles, they dragged us in for questioning.” The whispering in his head grew louder. He closed his eyes, tried not to listen.
“They always persecute the righteous,” Christopher said. “But still His holy work continues. Nothing can stop it.”
“Well spoken, my servant. That is all.”
Christopher handed him the nettles cut from the far side of the dump, then picked his way through the piles of tires toward the trailer. The Disciple felt the sting on his hands, reveled in it. He would sit naked in the sanctifying room and rub nettles over his nude body until he had clarified his thoughts. They needed to be very clear today if he was to have the strength to accomplish the horrific tasks that lay before him. He couldn’t have the angels and demons whispering, arguing, fighting in his head.
The Disciple couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t hear the voices of the damned and the elect. And sometimes one of the demons would go a step farther and try to possess him entirely. He remembered once when he was a boy waking with his limbs paralyzed and a terrifying presence sitting on his chest. The voices were screaming, and only after he’d prayed silently for several minutes did the evil being leave him alone. He’d crept down the hall in the darkness to the bathroom, thinking that if he splashed water on his face he could shake the urge to hurl himself from the second floor window.
The hall in the children’s wing was maybe fifty feet long, with half a dozen bedroom doors on his left. Twenty children slept in these rooms, most of them set up like dorms, with three or four children per room. His older brothers Gideon and Taylor Junior shared the room next to his. He heard them arguing as he crept past.
“Do it, TJ. You know you want to.”
And Taylor Junior’s whining voice. “I don’t want to. Come on, please, just go back to bed.”
Caleb—that was his name in those days—stopped, amazed at the cowardly tone in TJ’s voice. Both boys were bullies, but Gideon was older and seemed content to torment TJ and two of his teenage half sisters, one older, one younger. Taylor Junior, on the other hand, directed his nastiness to anyone younger than him. He’d stick out his leg to trip a younger child walking by, or reach into the shower while you were in it to turn the water scalding hot. Caleb had even seen him loosen the nipple of a bottle so that it would dump milk over a baby’s face and clothes.
Caleb had fallen prey to a combination of pranks, random punches, sabotaged chores (Father never believed the explanations), and other nasty behavior that it hadn’t occurred to him that TJ might be equally oppressed by his own older brother.
One of the demons overheard his thoughts and whispered,
And you could do the same thing. You can’t get back at TJ, but Vera is helpless, and Phillip is a sissy.
Two of the angels immediately chimed in with a rebuttal.
But Caleb wasn’t paying attention to the arguing voices, not now. Gone, too, was the Satanic visitor who had sat on his chest and paralyzed his arms and legs just minutes earlier. He cracked the door and glanced in to look at his brothers.
Taylor Junior sat on the floor, naked. He was just hitting puberty and a few hairs sprouted around his groin. Gideon stood over him, fully clothed. In his hands, a pair of girl’s panties, pink, with frills. They looked like they’d fit a child no older than seven or eight, but where they’d come from, Caleb couldn’t guess. Nothing so worldly would be allowed in Blister Creek.
“Put them on.”
“Come on, Gideon. Please, just let me go to bed.”
Gideon shook his head. “Not until you put them on. Or do you want me to tell Father what I found? That you’re hiding girl panties to rub on yourself.”
“They’re not mine! You put them there!”
“Why would I do that?” Gideon asked in a faux injured tone. “I don’t want to tell Father that you’re a girly boy, that you want to stick your thing in boys’ bums, but I might not be able to help myself.”
“Liar!”
Gideon’s tone turned nasty. “You have five seconds. One…two…”
Taylor Junior snatched up the panties and struggled into them. When he had them up, they stuck to him, too tight, ridiculous looking. Watching from the doorway, Caleb fought down a giggle that was part nervousness, part delight to see TJ humiliated like this, when he was usually the one doing the humiliating. His brother’s back was turned, and Caleb couldn’t see the expression on TJ’s face, but he could imagine it.
“Just like a girl,” Gideon said. “I can’t wait until you start to grow titties.”
Caleb meant to slip away, but just then Gideon turned and fixed him with a half-smile, and a raised eyebrow. A look that said,
Do you like it? Do you want to wear panties, too?
He fled. In the bathroom, he locked the door and made faces in the mirror that alternated between the sneers the demons told him to make and the gentle, beatific expressions that reflected the sweet things whispered to him by the angels.
The next day he was walking by the shed nearest the greenhouses when he heard Taylor Junior inside, trying to start a weed whacker. TJ pulled the cord, the motor coughed and died, then he’d do it again. Caleb watched through the glass window, delighted to see his brother sweating and fighting with the tool. He pulled and pulled. At breakfast, Father had told TJ to hack down the weeds in the north irrigation ditch and Father wasn’t the type to accept weak excuses about faulty equipment.
TJ stopped and panted, then gave another pull. It sputtered, refused to start. “Damn it! Start, you son of a bitch.”
Father would stick hot pepper sauce on the tongue of anyone caught swearing, and some of the sister wives would split your lip with a backhand without a second thought. Few things brought on a quicker expression of righteous fury in the Kimball household than any curse stronger than a damn or a hell.
He should be punished.
It was a strong, clear voice. He didn’t know at first if it was an angel or an evil spirit, but the thought struck him as so right, so
righteous
, that he decided it must have been an angel.
“How?”
Use your gift of discernment.
There was a can of gas mixture for the weed eater outside, together with a damp spot on the brick threshold where TJ must have spilled some on the gravel while filling the tank. It was a chilly morning, and unlike Caleb, TJ wasn’t wearing a jacket, just a t-shirt, as he’d anticipated working in the sun as it rose. And so he’d apparently gone into the shed where it was warmer instead of staying outside to fight the weed whacker. Caleb unscrewed the lid off the gas can.
Inside, TJ started yanking at the cord again and shouting at the weed whacker when it refused to cooperate. He didn’t glance over his shoulder as Caleb hefted the can and sloshed some against the door. He spilled more on and around the wooden siding that surrounded it, then emptied the rest in a puddle on the brick outside. There was no lock on the door—little petty theft in Blister Creek—but the door did have a latch higher up where you could shut it so the wind wouldn’t drive it open or a small child wouldn’t come in and fool around with tools and garden machinery. He stood on his tiptoes and flipped the latch. It locked Taylor Junior inside. Caleb reached into his pocket, lit a match and dropped it into the pool of gasoline. Then ran.
He raced up the stairs to his room, then looked out his bedroom window. Flames already engulfed that side of the shed, consuming shingles that had been dried to husks by the desiccating winds that blew off the Ghost Cliffs. The shed door was still closed.
TJ is going to die.
He realized this with a mixture of horror and delight. The fire would consume him like it was consuming the building. He would scream as the flames roasted his skin until it was crackling and oozing fat like pork at a pig roast.
But to Caleb’s disappointment, Taylor Junior didn’t die in the fire. By the time someone from the house spotted the flames, it was too late to save the shed, but TJ had managed to kick out the window on the far side and climb to safety. But Caleb didn’t know that at first. He had watched as thick smoke curled into the sky, as a dozen women scrambled about with hoses and shovels and sent children running for the fields to find Father.
Caleb wasn’t sure, but he thought that both Father and Taylor Junior blamed Gideon for the fire. That was about the time that Gideon started falling out with Father. A few years later, when Gideon was home from college, someone caught him with some dirty magazines, drove him into St. George and dumped him in the parking lot of a 7-11.
Caleb’s turn to be driven from home and from the Church of the Anointing would come a few years later. The angels told him it was God’s will, that the Mormon fundamentalists practiced a corrupt form of Christianity, that they would show him the pure faith, and teach him how to announce the coming of the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord. And proclaim the fall of Wormwood from the sky.
“Master?” Christopher asked, shaking him from his thoughts.
“I have to go to Blister Creek,” the Disciple said. “To finish what I started.”
“What do you mean?”
“The cleansing. If it is to sweep over the Earth, it must come from where it started.”
After Gideon died, Taylor Junior disappeared, and Elder Kimball was sentenced to prison, Abraham Christianson had swept in to take over the Church of the Anointing, moved most of the Christianson family from Alberta to Blister Creek. The Disciple wasn’t so isolated that he didn’t know this already.
“I don’t understand,” Christopher said.
“You don’t have to understand. You’re staying here.”
“Master?”
“I’m taking the boy with me. Nobody else.”
“What? No, please. Diego can stay here, I’ll go. Kirk and Benita could do what needs to be done.”
The Disciple fixed Christopher with a hard look. “I need someone here I can trust. Someone who is not afraid to die. Benita is afraid. Kirk is afraid, so are the rest. You said you’d die for the glory of God. Do you mean it?”
Christopher looked down for a long moment, then raised his eyes to meet the Disciple’s. “I’ll do it. But what about Madeline and Eliza? They need to be sanctified.”
“I don’t have time, I have to leave for Blister Creek. But don’t worry, if we can’t manage, the fire will take care of everything.”
“But you said they’d be sanctified,” Christopher said. He licked his lips. “Maybe I could do it.”
He had a gleam in his eyes and the Disciple worried it would be a distraction, that if he said no, Christopher would do it anyway and the work here wouldn’t get done.
“Listen to me. First, prepare for the fall of Wormwood. Tomorrow night, when you’re done, you may sanctify them both.”
Chapter Seventeen:
“So the worm crawls home,” Father said.
Abraham Christianson possessed a withering sense of righteous anger and David felt the weight of it now, as Father clumped up the stairs to the porch that overlooked the ranch.
“You’ve sold your birthright for a mess of pottage. You let go of the iron rod and now you’re wandering in mists of darkness. You’re like the idle workers in the vineyard and now you want to be paid.”
“You’re mixing your parables,” David said.
But Father was just winding up. “I gave you a talent of silver and you buried it in the ground, just like a slothful servant. You’re the prodigal son, who collected his inheritance and wasted it on fine clothing, rich food, women, and wine. And now you’re stealing food from pigs.”
“Food from pigs? That’s not very nice. One of your wives made me breakfast this morning.”
Abraham narrowed his eyes. “Oh, is that supposed to be a joke? Do you think you’re funny? Would your loser friends think you’re clever?”
“I don’t know, would yours?”
David had dragged himself outside, where he settled into an Adirondack chair under the veranda with a pair of sunglasses, squinting at the sun. He could use a cup of coffee—to start; in truth he was craving harder chemicals—but the chance of finding coffee in Blister Creek was about the same as your chances of finding a good pulled pork sandwich in Mecca.
It couldn’t be later than eight, but when his father stomped onto the porch, he was already covered with dust, with sweat rings under his arms, and the hair peaking out from beneath his hat was damp with sweat. He’d peeled off his gloves and tossed them to his feet with disgust before jumping into the first of what would no doubt prove many tirades.
David leaned back, closed his eyes, and tried to concentrate on the morning sun that warmed his face, the sound of the single cricket still chirping from beneath the porch. Twenty minutes earlier, there had been several.
“So you’re going to take a nap? You’ve put in a long day, walking out to the porch and letting some hard-working woman cook you breakfast, and now you’re going to sleep it off. Is that it?”
“I can’t help it. Droning lectures always put me to sleep.”
“I don’t know why I listened to Jacob. I told him you were worthless, but he didn’t believe me. He seemed to think you could be redeemed. He seemed to think that all I’d have to do is tell you to come back and here you’d be, repentant, ready to change, to admit your mistakes and do what it takes to get back into the good graces of the Lord. Can you believe Jacob actually thought that?”