A Children's Bible

by Lydia Millet

  “They don’t believe that’s all our food. They figure they’re going to starve the rest out of us. And eat the goat.”

  “We should have gotten the guns out before,” I said. “Then they wouldn’t have all of them.”

  I knew it was wrong before it was out of my mouth.

  “Eve. Please,” said Burl, even more wearily than usual. Disappointed in me, I could see. I didn’t like the feeling. “If we’d gotten the guns out, we’d be dead.”

  THEY HADN’T NOTICED the vegetables in the garden, so I got Jen and we dug together. We carried carrots and kale in our shirts, several loads, and hid the pile inside a rotting log.

  Then we saw Mattie being led out of the barn. He was still a hostage, I guess. Or a scapegoat. The two fat guards tied him to a tree, a delicate tree that grew beside the cottage. He gazed into the branches as they tightened the knots.

  The soldiers dragged Dilly’s body into the middle of the yard. They leaned over, their ass cracks fully exposed, and butchered it. A fat guard pulled out what looked like long gray sausages. Intestines, maybe.

  Jen threw up.

  “Ha ha ha ha,” said the red-haired kid.

  I wanted to stab him.

  IN THE DARK of the hayloft we lay in our row of sleeping bags whispering, some of us trying to plot a rebellion. But soon the whispers stopped. As long as the soldiers held their weapons, and their weapons were loaded, rebellion wasn’t getting much traction.

  I slipped out of my bag and climbed down the ladder. Couldn’t find my shoes, but I wasn’t planning to go far. So I went out the barn door barefoot and trekked over the grass to where Burl and the angels slept in their tents.

  I was just raising my hand to slap at his door flap when I heard him speaking, low.

  “They’re killing the rest of the goats tomorrow,” he said.

  “Then what?” asked someone. Luca, probably.

  “You,” said a voice behind me.

  Something metal poked into my back and I tried to turn, but it jabbed me.

  I knew who it was: the redhead.

  “Come on,” he urged. “I’ll shoot your foot.”

  Full retard, Juicy had said. I didn’t know about that, but I was afraid of him: he seemed like a guy who couldn’t predict his own actions.

  So I shuffled away from Burl’s tent, wondering if I should yell. The kid’s gun scraped against my backbone.

  “I seen you go out in the trees,” he said. “You’re hiding something.”

  “I go out there to pee, that’s all,” I said. I did pee in the forest, it was true. We all did. We had a rule: the cottage toilet was exclusively for number two.

  “You’re hiding food. You have a stash. And now you’re showing me.”

  “Now? In the dark? There’s nothing there,” I protested. I didn’t want him to find Jack.

  “Someone outside?” came Burl’s voice.

  “Don’t say anything,” said the redhead. “Go on. Move!”

  “Can I get my shoes?”

  “Move!”

  I picked my way across the field barefoot, the kid poking me with his gun constantly. My vision adjusted as the trees drew up in front of us, a black mass filling the sky.

  I didn’t know where to lead him. Jack and Shel were out there, and here I was in the dark with a trigger-happy moron who thought I could lead him to the end of the rainbow.

  Still, Mattie was worse off than I was by far. He wasn’t complaining.

  “There isn’t anything out here but trees and bushes,” I said as I stepped carefully. “There’s nothing to see.”

  He snapped a light on. A blazing white glare to either side of us, and then ahead of us when he took the gun out of my back. He passed me on the trail between tree trunks.

  “You run, I’m gonna shoot you,” he told me.

  “You mentioned that,” I said.

  I stepped on a sharp branch with a bare foot and gasped, and the kid spooked and whirled on me. I held up my arms, like that would help.

  “It hurt,” I said. My foot throbbed, and I limped.

  His light hypnotized me as we wound through the trees. I stared at the leaves and branches it lit up in front of us, trying to think of a strategy for avoiding the little boys. Where were we even going? But nothing came to me. My mind was blank. Maybe we’d walk forever. Maybe we’d walk sheer out of the woods again and into a nothingness beyond.

  Maybe I didn’t care anymore.

  There was a pattern to the sticks on the ground ahead of him, I noticed while he whistled some irritating tune. The pattern reminded me of pies we used to eat at Thanksgiving, each with a lattice of crust on top. What kind of pies had they been? Apple? Blueberry?

  I would love a pie right now, I thought.

  He stumbled and his light jerked. He was falling.

  Leaves and branches snapped and crackled, and I heard squeals. The white light angled up from below.

  He’d stepped through the mesh into a hole deeper than he was tall.

  From down in the hole, he screamed and shouted as I peered in.

  “My leg! I broke my leg! Help me!”

  But he still had his gun, so I left.

  IT WAS PROBABLY a trapping pit, Burl told me when I got back. The woods weren’t on the owner’s land. Some people hunted and trapped there.

  Any of us could have broken a leg, I wanted to whine. Or even a neck. But I was grateful for the pit. And then I went to sleep.

  We were groggy when the soldiers burst into the barn. It took me a minute to understand they were angry. We all sat up rubbing our eyes and blinking as they crashed the butts of their guns into posts and hanging light­bulbs.

  It was morning.

  “The goats! Where the fuck are the goats?” shouted one.

  The goats had made them­selves scarce, apparently.

  “Fucking OK,” said the governor. “You fucking kids. You’re gonna pay.”

  And they turned around and stamped out again. In confusion the rest of us followed, stuffing our feet into our shoes, climbing out of our stalls and down from the hayloft.

  Beneath the tree Mattie was standing again, his arms strung up in the branches. Some of the men were aiming their guns at him.

  “Why do you think they ran off?” shouted Burl. “Gunshots! That was you!”

  “Get over here,” said the fat guards, and poked at the angels with their rifles until all three of them were inside the circle of razor wire stretched around Mattie and his tree.

  Only Burl was left outside the circle—Burl and us.

  And the soldiers.

  “Go find the goats,” said the governor, in our direction. “For each five minutes we don’t see some goats, I’m going to go like this,” and he stuck what looked like a big, long red fork past the razor wire.

  It touched Darla’s side and she jumped, screaming.

  “Cattle prod,” muttered Terry.

  The governor poked again and again, till she fell on the ground and writhed and scratched herself on a razor blade. Blood dripped down her forehead.

  “Find ’em,” said the governor.

  “Head wounds just bleed a lot,” Burl told us. “She’ll be OK. Do what he says, I guess.”

  JACK AND SHEL had herded the goats through the shallowest part of the creek. Past the caved-in trapping pit, where the redhead was sleeping, cradling his shotgun. Through the trees, along a gravel road past a broken-down garage and the rusted teeth of a plow. Past a peeling billboard for satellite TV. Into a fenced pasture next to a neighbor’s house—one of the houses you could see from the silo.

  There were black-and-white cows standing around, and the goats browsed on some long grass at the far side.

  “If we bring them back they’re going to shoot them,” said Jack. “Like he shot Dilly. Like Dilly.”

  “But if we don’t, they’ll hurt the angels more,” said Rafe.

  “Or one of us,” I said.

  “It’s not fair. Why should they have to die?” asked Jack,
starting to cry.

  “Jack, look at me,” I said. “We have to take them back. It’s serious.”

  “It’s not their fault,” cried Jack. “We’re not supposed to sacrifice the animals. We’re supposed to save them. I’d rather sacrifice me.”

  “But the soldiers don’t want you,” I said. “They don’t eat little boys, you see.”

  “They don’t eat us,” mumbled Jack.

  Eventually the small boys headed toward the far side of the pasture. We waited by the farmhouse, whose front porch had some skate­boards on it and a jumble of scooters and muddy boots. I knocked on the door, but no one was home.

  Through the windows we could see the living room with daylight streaming in. It was full of toys, sitting in rows on the carpet like a kindergarten class. In front of them, in an armchair, sat a giant plush lion, the kind you win playing games at fairs. It had an open picture book on its lap.

  I expected the lion to turn the page.

  Then I heard a baa and saw the goats picking their way toward us, Jack and Shel trudging in front of them.

  We made our way back down the road.

  Jack and Shel sniffed miserably, petting the goats now and then on their backs and heads. The rest of us were distracted and anxious. I was thinking of the razor wire, and Mattie’s hand that had looked dark and shot through with black veins.

  But the goats’ death sentence hung over me too. I glanced sidelong at their faces as we led them into the trees again, their sleepy eyes with long white lashes. Their wet noses and blunt little horns, their gently sloping backs.

  When Jack rested his hand on their fur they seemed no different from our dogs, back at the great house.

  Contented. Wagging their stubby tails.

  SOLDIERS HAD BEEN sticking angels with the cattle prod and watching them thrash. Thrashing, their legs and arms got sliced up on the razors.

  But by the time we got back, leaving the goats in the field and Jack and Shel in the woods, they’d stopped. Sukey had come outside with the baby, said Burl. She’d stood there bouncing the infant and staring at the soldiers. Until finally they gave up. The baby was a buzzkill, I guess.

  Now two of them were peeing against the cottage wall while another one played a game on his phone. When they noticed the goats they checked that their guns were loaded and went off.

  The angels were crumpled on the ground inside the razor wire, arms and ankles bloody. Above them Mattie sagged against the thin trunk of the dogwood. His knees were bent, and he was hanging from his tied-up wrists. It looked like he was sleeping.

  We held the wire down so Low and Rafe could step over it. They lifted Luca first. His feet dragged across the ground as they carried him between them over the clumpy grass. In the barn we laid him on some hay bales and went back for John and Darla.

  I asked Burl if we could untie Mattie and take him too, but Burl shook his head.

  We shouldn’t go that far. Might tip the scales, he said.

  Behind us the governor stood up high in the hayloft door, lord of all he surveyed. He scoped around with one hand stuck in his button-down shirt, like a painting of Napoleon.

  DARLA HAD THE worst injuries. Patches of blood on her hippie tunic made its yellow sleeves red. In barely a whisper from his bank of bales, Luca said two of her cuts needed stitches: one was gaping open and still bleeding. Juicy offered to sew it up—he was getting into gore lately—but Burl said no thanks, he’d handle it.

  So Luca walked him through stitching Darla’s cuts, and we sat beside them. She was passed out at first, but then she woke up and moaned. Luca heaved himself over to us shakily and gave her a shot of painkiller from the medical kit, and Burl wiped a cotton ball with iodine around the biggest cut.

  She got giggly and started talking nonsense and slurring her words. “Razor blades,” she giggled. “Razor, eraser, razor eraser razor raze! Raisin!”

  But she let Burl stick the needle back in.

  It was while we were watching the needle poke in and out of the flaps of skin—Low fascinated, Jen throwing up in the corner—that we heard the shots.

  I stuck my fingers in my ears. I knew it looked childish, but I thought of the wagging tails and sleepy eyes and couldn’t help it.

  “Why are they shooting them all at once?” asked Juicy. “Won’t the meat go rotten if they don’t eat it right away?”

  “They have a big freezer,” said Burl. “A walk-in. Didn’t you hear? They’re living in a McDonald’s.”

  THE SOLDIERS BRAGGED about the stainless counter­tops and taps in the sinks that still ran water so hot it could scald you. The heavy bags of frozen French fries in the walk-in freezer. They’d cut up the carcasses there, in the comfort of their industrial kitchen.

  Carrying the goats by the legs, they swung them up into the beds of two pickups. Hooves and horns clanged on the metal.

  Jack was deep in the forest, his face turned away. Had to be, right? I asked Jen. He was not seeing this.

  Neither was Shel, she said. We looked hard at each other. Like if we looked hard enough, we could make it true.

  But the governor still wasn’t convinced we’d given up all the food. When the goat killers drove off he kept six men with him, including the two fat guards and the guy who carried a crossbow. And he left Mattie tied to the tree. He took his soldiers into the silo and ferried loads of supplies into their Jeeps.

  We hung out in the barn, the three bandaged angels lying down, the rest of us sitting on bales.

  “You’re not taking me seriously,” the governor said to Burl, standing at the door when the loading had tapered off. “You think I’m joking.”

  “I do not,” said Burl.

  “We know you’re not joking,” said Darla. She was still loopy from the painkiller Luca had given her. Lay on her back twirling her greasy dreads around a finger, arms wrapped in white bandages. She’d moved her jangly bracelets to her ankles. I knew them well by then: fish charms and peace signs, crescent moons and stars, spirals and yin-yang symbols. “But you’ve got a very black aura.”

  “Zip it, Darla,” said Rafe.

  “I’m gonna shoot that guy,” said the governor. “The teacher.”

  “He’s a biologist,” said Sukey.

  She was holding the baby laid across her lap in its blanket, where it looked like an oversized cocoon.

  “I don’t care if he’s Tarzan King of the Apes. If I don’t hear where the rest of your food is by sun­down, I’m gonna shoot him in the gut,” said the governor. “Slow and painful. Sunset. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “You have huge bags of frozen fries,” said Juicy. “Your guys said so.”

  “Plus we can’t give you what we don’t have,” said Burl.

  I thought they had balls, talking to him like that.

  “None of your fucking business what I have. Sunset,” said the governor.

  He kicked the leg of a donkey as he went out.

  It shied, then flicked its tail.

  Juice gathered some spit, but turned his face away from us to expel it. He’d gotten more mature.

  “One hundred percent douche,” he said.

  THE RAIN HAD let up after the soldiers arrived, but now it started to fall again. We went out to Mattie’s tree and stretched the fly of his tent above him, trying to keep him dry, but he was already soaked. Still he smiled faintly as Val and I propped a dry sleeping bag around his wet shoulders.

  “When they find that kid who fell into the pit, he’s going to tell on me,” I said to Burl, as we stepped back into the barn. “You think I’ll get punished?”

  He got out some fresh cotton batting and started peeling off the bandages around one of Darla’s arms. Rafe and Jen sat down near her head and put their hands on her shoulders to keep her from jerking.

  “I don’t think they care about that kid,” he said, as he pulled away some soaked cotton.

  “Kid’s a half-wit,” said Terry.

  “I think he just tagged along,” said Burl.

/>   “Oh oh oh oh,” said Darla.

  “The drug’s worn off,” said Rafe.

  “It hurts,” said Darla.

  Then Luca was standing up from his bales. He swayed.

  “I’ll do it,” he said, and took the cotton from Burl.

  Crickets began to chirp, from different parts of the barn at the same time.

  There shouldn’t have been crickets.

  “The phones,” said Juicy. “It’s phones.”

  And it was. Some of them still had a charge, and the ringers defaulted to crickets. They were all ringing at once.

  8

  MY PHONE WASN’T one of those phones, because I’d long since abandoned it in a kitchen drawer. So I wasn’t one of the ones who answered. I wasn’t one of the ones that brought them.

  I don’t say it to claim I’m innocent, I just say it because it’s true.

  There’s that common expression that goes: Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.

  But a knife is better than nothing.

  AT ONE HOUR till sunset we stood in the rain on the top of the silo, shivering and watching Mattie droop from his wrists when­ever he passed out. I could see him through the bare branches above his head: most of the leaves had been stripped off them.

  The soldiers liked to slash at the tree with their rifles, right above Mattie’s head.

  He would jerk awake when the weight on his wrists hurt too much, then drop as he passed out again. I kept thinking about how we would finally get him untied. How his arms would fall to his sides, the best relief there could be. Then we’d carry him off to safety. We’d wash him and take care of his hands and give him clean clothes to wear.

  We’d let him rest in a soft place.

  I glanced down at Burl, standing beneath me on the landing of the spiral stairs. I looked at his narrow shoulders and lined face. I thought how weary he looked.

  He’d let us in through the biometric door and we’d all climbed to the top. The governor and his soldiers didn’t try to stop us—they’d already taken all that the silo offered. We’d heard their laughing and music from the cottage as we dashed through the rain. The cottage windows were all lit up and cast a yellow light on Mattie’s tree.