High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel

by Scott Cheshire

  Sunday at church, one week before, an announcement was made from the stage.

  Announcements were a big deal, and hardly ever good news, more like “So-and-So has been excommunicated and asked to leave the congregation,” or “So-and-So is dead,” or something foreboding and starting with “It has recently come to our attention…” But this was about the movie. One of the elder brothers said to the hundred or so of us there: “There has been talk of a television film, I believe we all know what I’m referring to. The Day After promises to be not only an important film, but a relevant one, especially to our work here. Preparing ourselves for God’s Holy War. And after much serious thought, we’ve decided to incorporate the film into our ministry. So we’ll be viewing the film as a congregation. Next Sunday. In lieu of a sermon. And we’ll talk afterward, as a congregation. Please feel free to invite your friends and neighbors. This will be a rare opportunity to make witness. And regarding the children, the film will be quite realistic from what I understand. And so children will not attend alone but with parents. Let us pray.…”

  Dad didn’t talk much on the way home.

  That next day, a Monday morning, the mailman brought a letter regarding the kids of New York City’s public schools, suggesting parents not let their kids see a certain upcoming television movie. That it would be age-inappropriate.

  That next Sunday, church was packed. Extended family members, curious neighbors dressed in weekend shorts, and borderline stragglers who hadn’t attended in years. Standing room only. I’d almost invited Bhanu, but, in the end, was so glad I didn’t.

  Four TVs had been brought in and set up for all of us to watch. We got there early, and sat up front by a TV as big as a sofa, encased in wood, with a turntable on top. A hefty thing, a real piece of furniture, it must’ve weighed a ton. I wondered how they ever got it in there.

  The lights went low.

  The microphones set up by the TV speakers crackled.

  There was chatter, and shuffling in the seats.

  I looked around and saw the faces of people I knew from the neighborhood, and the faces of strangers. Which was both exciting and upsetting. They had entered a place they didn’t belong. They were dressed wrong. Talking, mumbling, when they should have been quiet. I saw the black man from the convenience store around the corner from church. He didn’t seem to be with anyone standing in the back, by himself. He wore jeans, and a T-shirt, his usual white apron rolled up and tied around his waist. He wasn’t looking at the TV, though. He was looking at the people in the room, the brothers and sisters. His face looked thoughtful, and bewildered. I realized he wasn’t there for the service, as such, or for spiritual reasons of any kind. He was curious: What do they do in there? I watched him scan the room, until he looked at me. He gave me a neutral sort of acknowledgment, Yes, I have sold you Pop Rocks, given you change for Donkey Kong.

  I looked away from him and toward the TV, the opening credits and then …

  I’ve watched it at least one more time, some parts twice more, even read about it, and still I can’t remember the plot; what was the plot? I remember the attack. A five-minute collage of mass death in Technicolor, the apocalyptic footage, fiery rain, the buildings blown to quick rubble and ashy voids, the rolling thunderheads of nuclear fire wiping out forests, livestock, and people, entire cities laid waste—and so much of this footage was real! Actual stock film clips of war and early atomic testing. All of this coupled with—how can I say it?—a cartoonish X-ray obliteration of people. A mother and her baby turn to the sky and zizzzzzz—dark bones in a flash, and they’re gone … The infant’s tiny skull … A man runs from his car for his life and zizzzzzz—his skeleton shows in a bloodred splash on electric white, and he’s dust … A large group together and what are they doing? Walking? Standing? Sitting in church? zizzzzzz—X-ray fried, now invisible, and gone … I have to say, watching this again as a grown man froze my insides. It’s too artful. Armageddon respects no bones. Only dust, instant dust … But to a boy, the scary stock footage within that film looked like news. I half expected to find the world outside our church destroyed when the movie was over. This was the End, factory manufactured, and yet the imagery was the same. This was not a biblical vindication, or God’s fire raining down. This was man versus man. All the fault of bloodlust and earthly dispute. This strikes me as a great and disturbing irony.

  Lights up.

  There was some muttering. No applause.

  How did we feel? How many different kinds of response? Was I the only one so frightened by what I saw?

  An elder took the stage and calmly asked, “Any questions? Comments?” There were a few, but not many before the real event took place.

  My father stood up and started speaking.

  * * *

  Dad never spoke in church. He said it wasn’t his calling. So when this happened, Mom and I, we were dumbfounded. He stood, and stayed where he was, right beside his family, and said to the elder in a voice not quite loud enough: “I want to be a true believer, it’s all I’ve ever wanted out of life.” He turned and talked to the whole room now: “This means more like the Apostle Paul. More like our original first-century Christian brothers and sisters. Just a few decades from when our Savior walked this earth. Only miles from the places we read of. Galilee. Gethsemane.”

  I looked around and there were people nodding their heads, like usual, Yes, brother, say it.

  A microphone came passed down the aisle, its rubber cabling falling on our feet. I looked at the mic, and wondered how many eyes were on me. Will he stand, too? Will the boy speak? Or maybe they weren’t thinking of me at all. Dad looked at me. I couldn’t read his face. I gave him the microphone.

  “Thank you, son.” Loud now, he was filling the room.

  “Why such speculation?” he said. “Why doubt? We have living proof. Here. In the flesh, here, my son, who stood before you filled with God and gave a number. It’s not for us to know how it’ll look.” He spoke to the back of the room. I turned with him. Mom kept looking straight ahead. She squeezed my hand. “But our Savior comes at the New Millennium. And this”—he gestured to the TV—“this movie has no place in here. All lies…”

  “Brother Laudermilk,” said the elder from the stage.

  My father quieted him, his hands saying Now now now …

  “Look at my boy,” he said. “Josiah, stand up.”

  Mom squeezed my hand again. I didn’t move.

  “He’s in shock. You see? You doubt him? A child? You doubt the Lord’s Holy Spirit.”

  I still didn’t move.

  “And my wife. She wears a hat so you don’t have to see her shining head. For you! You think this is sickness? This is God’s work! All of it God’s work! All of them signs we are living in the End Days, and you won’t even see it. Look to the book of Matthew. In the Last Days. The Apostle Matthew says in the End Days one shall be taken, but the other left behind—”

  “Gill.” The elder was beside him now, his hand on my father’s shoulder.

  “You want to silence me? Make my wife an outcast? My son cast down like some false prophet for a TV show? In here? You bring this”—again the TV—“this Wild Beast. Mammon! Babylon the Great in here? Why not bring money changers? It’s blasphemy!”

  “Gill—” He tried taking the mic, but Dad wouldn’t let him.

  “Stop looking forward! It is here! In our presence! And we have to go back for it. Back! And return to original worship, to authentic faith. Have faith in the Word of God, in what God grants, a vision for his son, my son. A healing for my wife…” He fell back against the chair behind him. The brother sitting there caught him, held him up. “For my wife,” Dad said. He seemed dazed.

  I was heartbroken, for him. Confused.

  “Thank you, Brother Laudermilk.” The elder took the mic from Dad’s hand. “Okay. So obviously—”

  My father stood back up and shook his head, looked around the room. He wildly made for the stage, for the TV, and then he stopped himself
. He turned back, and took my hand. He took my mother’s hand and pushed his way along the aisle toward the exit. Some of the assistant servants followed, in case of a scene.

  We went home.

  That’s when as a family we stopped going to the Brothers in the Lord. Or any church, really. Unexpectedly, I found myself actually going to church more, a weird rebellion against him. I sat there alone like Issy used to. Dad’s display had sufficiently sullied what reputation I had, and whatever capacity I had for sermonizing or for visions had been supplanted by fears that I might have an unwelcome outburst onstage, like my father. I was now the son of the man who made a scene at church, and nothing more. That went on for about a month. And then it just stopped. Partly because I didn’t know why I was doing it, and I would sit there for the duration of the service, hardly listening at all, trying to understand why I was there, and partly because I realized that not a soul there cared to speak to me.

  I started telling Mom and Dad that I was going to church, but then I would go straight to Bhanu’s house and watch weekend morning TV. We held hands under throw pillows. Mom hardly paid attention, anyway. Seems like Mom slept for years, all the while getting better according to the doctors, but sleeping away her every last earthly hour. She just slept and slept and slept. I became hungry for even more freedom.

  Bhanu and I started cutting school together that fall. We hid deep in the woods of Forest Park, and watched truancy vans roam along the park roads. We kissed sometimes, and I wondered if God would one day open up the earth and drop me in for loving a pagan. While I knew Bhanu wasn’t a Christian, I didn’t really know what that meant. I didn’t want to think about it, what it meant for her, or me, us, or for my family, and so I decided it was easier to not think about it at all. We only talked about it once, and I asked if she thought it was weird. We were trying cigarettes for the first time, stretched out on the cement floor of the Forest Park band shell.

  We passed the cigarette back and forth like it was delicious, and she coughed. I didn’t. I had a talent for them, and I liked how the nicotine made everything slow down and go foggy. I rolled my head to one side, and blew smoke in her face. She laughed and slapped at my leg.

  I said, “Is it weird that we’re different?”

  She didn’t understand. “You mean how you’re so so so so white?”

  Now I laughed. I said, “I mean my family. You’re not Christian.”

  She looked at me like I was kidding. “You mean how you’re not Hindu?”

  I looked up at the sky, but there was no sky. Instead I saw the top-ridge lip of the clamshell and I thought of a giant clam. I said, “I guess so. Yeah.”

  She started to say, “I like you, Josie, even though you’re not a Hindu—” But she lost control of her voice in a sudden coughing attack made worse by the fact that she could hardly stop laughing. I thought of the giant clam, and imagined we were lying prone on its tongue.

  It was a long year, and much of what transpired at home with regard to Mom or Dad has fallen out of my head, forgotten. I spent that year with Bhanu, in and out of school, a place that no longer meant loneliness for me because I was with Bhanu, and her friends, who eventually accepted me, too. She was alive and love was all around me, and it felt like nothing else unfortunate could touch me.

  Later that year, there was a high school field trip to Niagara Falls. I didn’t tell my parents, and just went. Forged their signatures. It was the event of our year, and it would be all day long, with no real adult supervision, somewhere else entirely, outside of Richmond Hill, outside New York City. I bought a Ramones T-shirt from the Aqueduct Flea Market on Rockaway Boulevard even though I’d never heard one song. Bhanu mentioned them once and said they were cool and she was going to get their tapes. I never had the nerve to wear it. It looked too clean and too new. On the bus ride upstate I told her all about Issy. I told her how much I missed Issy, and was that weird? We were sharing a tall black vinyl seat and it felt like nobody could see us, we were all on our own. She said, “You’re weird, but that’s not.” I told her how I always wanted a brother, and she gave me a kiss on the cheek. What a shame kisses on the cheek never matter so much as you age.

  She said, “Now you got me.”

  I floated.

  We slept alongside each other there in the daylight, on warm black vinyl, until we got to Niagara.

  The bus parked. We stepped off and felt the mist in the air, heard the rush and gushing of the falls. We walked toward one of the railings, and the great void in the center of the falls. We wiped water from our faces and stood there, spray raining upward and needling our foreheads. We clasped our hands together, and we were silent. We looked at the white implosive hole.

  “It’s so big,” she said.

  I said, “You can’t even see where it ends.”

  “It’s so deep,” she said. “How deep do you think?”

  “No idea.”

  She asked me if I’d ever read a short story called “The Wish.” Bhanu loved to read. But I didn’t read much, then, so I lied and said I’d heard of it. She said it was about a small boy who played make-believe and actually fell into one of his make-believe holes.

  I thought twice before telling her a story this reminded me of. But then I told her about the biblical story of Korah, once a wise man of God, who bared his teeth, screaming for help, as the Good Lord punished him and turned the hard ground beneath him into a hole. A gaping and gorging mouth that swallowed him whole and all of his possessions, even his family. Bhanu asked me what he did to make God so angry. I said he rebelled against Moses (I asked, “Do you know who Moses is?” She said, “I’ve heard of him”), that Korah would not listen to God’s appointed men. That he claimed he could speak directly with God. I told her how it took up two pages in my children’s Bible storybook, accompanied by comic book–like illustrations, and that I’d seen it performed in full costume onstage at Bible conventions. At some point she’d stopped listening to me, and said, “That’s a horrible story.” She was letting her face get wet. Her mouth was open and the upward rain was on her tongue and teeth. I moved closer to her, my mouth closer to hers. The mere idea of a kiss! The possibility was so charged, I was surprised every time she let me.

  We stood there and watched the rushing falls, and I imagined the observation deck collapsing and sucking us under, and I was okay with that. This was the asshole of the world, and I looked away toward the river, the Niagara River; who ever mentions the poor river? It came roaring at us like water spilled from a bottomless bucket, incoming nonstop across a long and winding table. I promised myself I would never let anything bad happen to Bhanu as we were both entirely overtaken by the drama of it all, and cued up our Walkmans accordingly.

  The year I turned eighteen, Mom finally decided she was better. She sat up in bed one day, came marching down the stairs, and said she had to go for a special session at the hospital. Dad took her, and they came home with tremendous smiles on their faces; I don’t know whose was bigger.

  “Full remission,” Mom said.

  Dad took her face in his hands, and he kissed her. Never saw anything like that before. He kissed her so hard, she started pushing him off, and she was laughing, but he wouldn’t let her go, she was laughing so much. Then he stopped, and picked her way up in his arms, and she was up there almost to the ceiling, and laughing, while he played biting at her belly. This is my most favorite memory. Not just because of how lovely, but because it woke me up to their lives in such an unexpected way. Like a bucket of cold water over my head. I’d been living peripherally, in my own home, walking along the walls like a mouse, following the same daily paths in hopes of avoiding direct contact with the people who owned this home.

  But here they were, right in front of me. Mom was back, and fully charged, and she swore she would set this house aright because this was a churchgoing family. I have to say there was a welcome sense of security in having her back and taking the lead, and we returned to church as a family. Dad was reluctant to go
. He’d since taken to calling the Brothers in the Lord apostates. But he went anyway, for her. We all did, arrived just as service started, and left as it drew to a close. We spoke with no one. Mom also somehow managed to ignore the fact that I’d had a serious girlfriend for the last few years.

  I’d thought I’d done a good job of obscuring the presence of Bhanu, even though she lived around the corner, but it wasn’t like Mom was blind to it. She occasionally mentioned “the Indian girl around the block,” and when she was really bugged at me, “the brown girl.” When I think back on this behavior it seems so unlike her, uncharacteristic of her. She even claimed once that I chose Bhanu because she was Hindu. I remember being shaken by such a hateful accusation and not even bothering to respond. My parents began to unashamedly hanker aloud for the old neighborhood, because in the last few years Richmond Hill had become a haven for not just Bangladeshis, but Indians and Pakistanis, and there were rumors that the construction site around the corner was the future home of a Sikh temple. This was a new strain in my parents. I didn’t like their new behavior. It appeared to be connected to Mom’s remission: maybe she felt a debt to her Heavenly Savior and nothing less than the purest of worship would do. Mom and Dad were seeing eye to eye. They talked about the old days before the high trill of Hindi ragas, before the tap and pounding dance of tablas all of a sudden sang from car stereos all summer long. Before the teenage Hindi boys in shell-top Adidas made out with white girls on brick front porches. The corner store put up a sign in its window: “Fresh Goat Meat.” And this absolutely horrified my parents because, What, now everybody’s too good for hamburger? Dad turned hot dogs on our backyard grill, and the neighborhood barbecues smoked hot yellow curries.