A Children's Bible

by Lydia Millet

  Jack didn’t have an active interest in ceramics. He cracked open his Bible, trying to peek inside unnoticed.

  Her monologue trailed off.

  “Is that your favorite book, dear?” she asked him.

  “Fifth favorite. If you count series. I still like my old ones best. So it goes Frog and Toad, George and Martha, the Guinness Book and then Laugh-Out-Loud Jokes.”

  “What do you like about it?”

  “Mostly that it’s a mystery.”

  “The Bible is a mystery?”

  “We solved a lot of it,” said Jack. “The first clue was, God’s code for nature. And then we figured out that trinity thing. With God and Jesus.”

  “What did you figure out, honey?”

  Jack’s eyes flitted over from Shel’s signing hands.

  “So if God stands for nature, then Jesus stands for science. That’s why they call Jesus God’s son. It doesn’t mean actual son. God doesn’t have sperm.”

  “Goodness! You know the birds and bees!”

  “Darla. He’s not in kindergarten,” I said.

  “It just means science comes from nature. See?”

  He tipped his notebook so we could look.

  A window crashed. I couldn’t see which but heard glass break. Juicy ran by.

  “Oh man. I broke it!” he yelled from around the corner of the cottage. “The bathroom window!”

  “That looks very creative, sweetie,” said Darla to Jack.

  Juicy sauntered back and sat down heavily on the bench. Picking shards of glass out of the tennis ball.

  “And the proof is, there’s lots the same with Jesus and science,” said Jack. “Like, for science to save us we have to believe in it. And same with Jesus. If you believe in Jesus he can save you.”

  “That makes, like, zero sense, small dude,” said Juicy.

  “It does make sense,” Jack insisted.

  “Ow!” said Juicy.

  There was blood on his finger.

  “See this, Juice? Science comes from nature. It’s kind of a branch of it. Like Jesus is a branch of God. And if we believe science is true, then we can act. And we’ll be saved.”

  Juicy stuck his bleeding finger in his mouth. “Saved like, go to heaven? Holmes, that’s some Santa Claus shit.”

  “Your mouth is the least hygienic part of your body, Justin,” said Darla.

  She thought the name Juicy was undignified and called him by his given one, no matter how much he squirmed.

  “No. Like the earth. The climate. The animals,” said Jack. “Heaven’s part of the code. It just means, a good place for us all to live.”

  “This stings a lot,” said Juice.

  “Why don’t I get the peroxide,” said Darla, and rose.

  “Look,” said Jack to Juicy, earnest. He turned a page in his notebook. “These are the miracles of Jesus, right? But they’re all what science does too! Almost all. See? Proof.”

  Shel signed.

  “Not a math proof, he says,” said Jack. “It’s not a math book. Just concepts.”

  “Hovercraft?” asked Juicy, peering.

  “Shel really likes hovercrafts,” said Jack. “They’re an example, see? Of how science makes it so we can walk on water. Get it?”

  Jack watched Shel sign and interpreted fast. I admired his fluency.

  “Other examples are, science can freeze water. And when it’s ice we can walk on it. Like Jesus did.”

  Darla came back carrying a box of Band-Aids.

  “Also science can build bridges, and they go over water. There’s like, a lot of things.”

  “That book was written like two thousand years ago,” said Juicy. “Science wasn’t even invented then.”

  “You’re very ignorant,” said Shel. Out loud.

  “Sheldon!” said Darla, after a moment. Face wreathed in smiles. “You can talk!”

  I’d never heard him speak before either. I’d known he could—Jack and Jen had both told me. But he spoke only on special occasions.

  Juicy’s ignorance qualified, I guess.

  “Sure he can,” said Jack, shrugging.

  “What a wonderful self-expression, honey,” said Darla to Shel. “Humanities is over, boys.”

  THE STORMS BEGAN again. Up and down the coast they came rolling in.

  The barn was built on higher ground than the great house, and the trees were mostly set apart, across the field. Too far from our buildings to crash through the barn or cottage roof. By the time they made it inland, the storms were tamer.

  Still, it rained constantly. We played games on makeshift boards we drew with chalk on the barn’s cement floor, but when we argued about rules the games broke down. Energy dissipated.

  Jen kept Terry on a short leash, sometimes ignoring him, then making out with him when she had nothing better to do. I didn’t make out with Low. No matter how many times he tried to brush up against me accidentally, I couldn’t muster an interest. It was less the tie-dyed shirts and sandals themselves (plus old banana) than the way he didn’t notice how we looked at them.

  A lack of self-awareness, that was Low’s problem.

  We sat around and listened to the angels tell stories. Mistakes they’d made, their lives’ worst situations. And strangest. The time on a fishing ship in Alaska when Luca’s job was to cut the heads off flatfish the size of sofas. The time he saw an eyeball dangling out of a woman’s eye socket after an accident and had to tape a paper cup over it. The time on a raft in Norway when he watched the blue ice of towering glaciers fall into the warming sea, and a man sat at a piano on an ice floe.

  The glacier fell like water, he said, and the man played a funeral song.

  At one of his jobs, Mattie’d got half a finger in the mail from a man who went to jail. Another time he walked barefoot on the sands of a Brazilian island at night and stepped onto the broken neck of a beer bottle. It went all the way through the top of his foot.

  “See? Entry and exit wounds,” he said, and pulled off a sandal to show us the scars.

  We liked the angels. They hadn’t brought us into the world—they hadn’t brought anyone into it—and in that fact we felt a bond. In that fact we were equals.

  I GOT INTO the habit of walking around the farm by myself when the rain was light. I’d find a quiet place and just stand there, listening to the patter of drops on the leaves and ground. I closed my eyes to see what else I could hear.

  I practiced forgetting what was beyond me and noticing only where I was. I practiced being wet and cold and hungry and not minding.

  Sometimes I took Jack with me, along with a field guide from the closet that we consulted through plastic. We learned the names of the trees and bushes and looked up their histories. We learned which had grown here in the time of the Indians and which had been brought from far away. Maples from Norway, mulberries from Asia, Siberian elm.

  A tree from China called the empress.

  EVENTUALLY WE GAVE up our custom of keeping watch. Socked in the way we were, enclosed by low clouds, we had no visibility from the silo.

  Also we feared lightning. So we stopped going up.

  It was the rain that kept us off the watchtower, so it was the rain that brought the men with guns.

  WE WERE SITTING around the table in the cottage kitchen when a man we’d never seen before walked right in.

  He slid a gun from his coat. We got up quickly.

  He smelled bad, not like sweat but something else—gas, maybe. (Motor oil and raw meat, Rafe said later.) He had gray hair in a crew cut and a bushy beard, like all men suddenly. He was wearing filthy jeans and a camo vest over a bright T-shirt, the orange of pylons. There was an edge of energy to him like a sick buzz.

  He showed the gun to us, matter-of-fact. It looked heavy. He said, “How’d you end up sitting around here, kids? All fat and happy?”

  We stared at him. We weren’t fat.

  And we didn’t feel too happy, either.

  He said, “What’s your secret?”

 
He didn’t say it nicely.

  Gesturing with his gun, he made us file out the door. Then he talked on a walkie-talkie and marched Luca down to open the locked gate.

  We could see trucks and Jeeps waiting.

  I ran to the barn to find the little boys. “Jack,” I whispered. “There are guys with guns here. You and Shel need to grab some camping gear and run. Into the woods. Stay hidden till I come looking for you.”

  “I don’t want to leave you, Evie,” said Jack.

  “I need you to, you see? I mean it. Go! Go! Go now!”

  Once they were gone, dropping down from the hay door in the back, I went outside again. The motorcade was coming through the gate. More men sat in the backs of the trucks. They looked like soldiers, minus the neatness and uniforms.

  “Redneck soldiers,” said Rafe.

  Some were standing on the running boards of a Jeep, outside the doors, holding onto a rack on the top. Their guns were chunky and long. The men parked the cars messily, and one truck ran over the fence around the vegetable garden. Ripped the wire out of the ground and rolled right over our best tomato plants.

  When I saw that, my face felt hot.

  Luca said we could offer them sandwiches, but then they should go. There was a baby here, he said. An infant. And youth. “Recovering from trauma.”

  A soldier punched him hard in the shoulder, while the others got busy rummaging.

  We stood outside the cottage and waited. One of them was around our age, a redhead with prominent acne. He guarded the door with his gun while cabinet doors slammed and pots crashed and banged.

  The men came out stuffing food in their mouths, and when I peeked around into the empty kitchen I saw the contents of drawers and cabinets spilled all over the floor. The aftermath of a burglary.

  IT WASN’T LONG before they found the silo. They rounded us up and herded us into the barn, and there the leader gave a short speech.

  “You’re gonna let us in,” he said.

  What was locked up had value, and what had value was food. Therefore. For every five minutes that we didn’t let them in, a penalty would happen.

  We looked around at each other, knowing Burl was the key. I couldn’t see him.

  “You,” said the leader to Mattie, who had a protective arm around Sukey. The baby was making squawks, and Sukey was bouncing her to keep her from wailing full-out.

  “Yes?” said Mattie.

  “Move. Over there. Put your hand on the bench.”

  It was the tool bench, along the wall Mattie used for his projections. The barn door was open, and I saw one long, single-strand cobweb float off the side of the bench in the light from outside, snagged on a splinter.

  I remember that cobweb.

  So Mattie stood beside the bench. Rested his hand on it. One of the soldiers took a rope and tied the hand to the vise on the bench’s end. The leader held a power tool, yellow and black. I stared at it.

  “Staple gun,” whispered Rafe.

  The leader turned and switched it on. It made a grating noise, and I saw Mattie flinch.

  “In five minutes I put a staple through that hand,” said the leader.

  Angels were looking at each other, faces strained. Where was Burl? Not there. I glanced around. I didn’t want to rat him out, and I sure didn’t want the soldiers to take our food.

  But then there was the staple gun.

  “The lock is biometric,” said someone.

  Darla. I wasn’t surprised she was the first to cave.

  “Say what?”

  “You need a fingerprint to open it.”

  “Whose?” said the leader.

  “He’s not in here,” said Luca.

  “That’s too bad,” said the leader, and before I knew it he turned and Mattie cried out. Blood ran down his hand from a staple right through the center of his palm.

  He stopped yelling and looked like he was trying not to cry, his lips tight. He pushed air out of his mouth in quick huffs and said, “OK. OK. OK.”

  “I’ll go find him,” said Luca.

  “I’ll help,” I said, because I had to get out of there.

  Outside the barn it was way easier to breathe.

  We ran instead of walked, calling for Burl as we went. When we found him, behind the cottage messing with the generator and listening to music on some borrowed earbuds, he was clueless.

  We told him the deal and went back into the barn.

  Mattie called, “Burl! Don’t let them take the food!”

  The leader punched another staple into his hand.

  THEY HUSTLED BURL out the barn door and left Mattie stapled, guarded by the redheaded kid. At the back of the crowd Rafe grabbed my sleeve, a finger to his lips. We hovered there till the men were all outside.

  The kid wore his red hair straggly at the back, a mullet. He had a classic chipped tooth, right up front. His tan work boots hung off his ankles unlaced, tongues lapping out and laces dragging, and his white tank top was finger-smeared black across the stomach.

  He chose that moment to break his long gun open. Sat down on a hay bale with it braced on his skinny knee, shoving in a shell.

  “Grab it,” whispered Jen, and elbowed Rafe. “He can’t shoot while he’s loading!”

  “But what if he closes it in time?” asked Rafe.

  “Now! Now!” said Jen, and we both elbowed him.

  Awkwardly he walked up to the kid and grabbed the open gun. They wrestled for a minute—Mattie was watching from the tool bench, blood pooling around his tied-down hand—until Rafe kneed the kid in the balls. He grunted and dropped the weapon.

  A shell rolled on the floor.

  “Here!” said Jen, and jumped on the gun before the kid could straighten up.

  “Hide it,” Rafe told her. “Just hide it somewhere.”

  I went to Mattie, peered at the staples. They were sunk in deep. I could barely see them, just puffy skin and blood.

  “We’re going to need Luca,” he said. His forehead was sweating, and it was hard for him to talk. “Will you get Luca? Maybe he can take them out.”

  Sounds of crashing glass in the distance, muffled. We ran out to see. There was a crowd at the base of the silo, and from the back I couldn’t see much. Then soldiers streamed out, cheering and shaking the guns they held.

  “Lookit this! H&K MP5!”

  “I got a Ruger!”

  “I got a vintage six-shooter!”

  “Vintage is crap.”

  The leader came out after them with Burl walking behind him, his hands attached to each other at the wrists. The plastic ties I’d seen police use on TV shows.

  “Come on,” said Burl. “Cut off the flex cuffs. What am I going to do? I’m a little outgunned here, don’t you think?”

  “You want me to believe you got nothing but peanut butter and peaches left? You think I’m buying that?”

  “And all that rice!” said Burl. “We’ll miss the bags of rice. Leave us just one, will you? One bag.”

  The angels were clustered around. Jen tugged on Luca’s sleeve, asking him to help Mattie, and the soldiers sat on the hoods of trucks and on the ground loading up their new guns, breaking open boxes of bullets they’d stolen.

  “One bag!” chanted Darla. “One bag! One bag!”

  Her numerous bracelets jangled as she clapped. It irritated me.

  “Shh,” David urged her.

  “What’s that?” said the leader suddenly. He pointed.

  We followed his gaze. On the edge of the meadow near the woods, three of the goats could be seen.

  “Sheep tastes bad,” said a man with a crossbow.

  “Lamb’s tasty,” said the leader.

  “That’s not lamb. That there’s a full-grown sheep.”

  “They’re goats, in fact,” said Terry.

  “Goat really tastes like shit,” said the leader.

  “Solid protein, though,” said the crossbow.

  There was a shot. I almost screamed. A goat buckled and fell. The other two took off
.

  I turned around and around, my breath stopped, till I pegged where the shot had come from: the redhead, shooting from the door in the hayloft. He had a small gun this time. He raised his arms in the air and yelled. Whoo-hoo.

  Jack was out there. Jack was behind the goats.

  “Jack could be hit!” I hissed, low, to Burl. “Jack’s over there!”

  “Stop him from shooting,” said Burl to the leader. “Come on, man.”

  The kid raised his handgun again. My body got tense. I looked back at the fallen goat, a white lump on the ground, and saw what I feared most.

  Jack ran out from under the trees and dropped to his knees beside the goat.

  “Oh no oh no oh no,” I think I said. I looked back and forth frantically between him and the gun kid, who wasn’t noticing. Just celebrating his shot. Waving his weapon in the air, dancing around in the hayloft door.

  “Is he . . . ?” said David.

  “Seems like a full retard,” nodded Juicy.

  Luckily the leader—the other men called him governor—had walked off toward his muddy truck, and as the kid raised his gun again he passed him, yelling something. The kid looked bummed out, but relaxed his arm.

  I took off across the field to Jack.

  He was on his knees crying over the goat, who was breathing weakly and bleeding from a hole in her rib cage.

  “Dilly, Dilly,” sobbed Jack. The goats had tags on their collars with names on them. “She’s the only LaMancha goat here. She’s so sweet. She’s the sweetest goat ever.”

  I wanted to stay with him, but I knew I couldn’t.

  So when the goat stopped breathing I led him back into the woods, where Shel was hunkered down behind a clump of thick undergrowth.

  I never raised my voice to Jack, but that time I came close.

  MATTIE HAD BEEN freed when I made it back to the barn. Pale, he lay on his back across some bales while Luca wrapped gauze around his hand.

  “Nice place you got,” said the governor to Burl, and then his men took over the cottage.

  He posted guards at the kitchen door, the two fattest soldiers. They wore plaid shirts and carried rifles over their shoulders on slings.

  “Why aren’t they leaving?” I asked Burl.