Dominion

by Randy Alcorn

  “But Daddy, you just have to read to us about Aslan the Lion. You promised.”

  “But, honey, I told you, I’ll be gone tonight.”

  “Then read to us now, Daddy. Pretty please.”

  Clarence was about to tell Keisha begging wouldn’t do any good when Celeste stepped out in the hallway from the bedroom, clutching in both hands The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and pleading silently with her big brown Dani eyes.

  “Okay. I’ll read it to you now. But just one chapter. No more.”

  The girls shrieked and celebrated and headed toward the bedroom. “But we have to put on our jammies. I’ll get Jonah.” No sooner had she run out of the room than she screamed, “Jonah, Jonah! Daddy’s going to read the Narnia book right now. Put yo’ jammies on!”

  Jonah walked out of his room. “Now?”

  “Come as you are, Son,” Clarence said. “No jammies necessary.”

  They settled in around Keisha’s bed, with Keisha and Celeste propped up against pillows on top and Jonah sitting on the floor leaning back against the bedpost, not wanting to look quite as eager as the girls.

  “All right,” Clarence said, “you remember what happened last time we read?” Clarence couldn’t look at Celeste without thinking of when he’d read this book in Dani’s bedroom, six hours before the shooting.

  “Edmund was bad,” Celeste said.

  “He betrayed his brother and sisters,” Keisha added. “Peter and Lucy and Susan.”

  “And the White Witch says she has the right to kill him,” Jonah said.

  Clarence nodded, thankful that for once it was a white witch, not a black witch. He read a few paragraphs that culminated in the White Witch’s words to Aslan the Lion:

  “You at least know the magic which the Emperor put into Narnia at the very beginning. You know that every traitor belongs to me as my lawful prey and that for every treachery I have a right to a kill. You know that unless I have blood as the Law says, all Narnia will be overturned and perish in fire and water.”

  “It is very true,” said Aslan. “I do not deny it.”

  “Oh, Aslan!” whispered Susan in the Lion’s ear. “Can’t we— I mean, you won’t, will you? Can’t we do something about the Deep Magic? Isn’t there something you can work against it?”

  “Work against the Emperor’s magic?” said Aslan, turning to her with something like a frown on his face. And nobody ever made that suggestion to him again.

  “Then Edmund really has to die?” Jonah asked quietly.

  “We’ll see,” Clarence said. He’d never read the stories before and didn’t know what would happen next.

  He read on, as Aslan talked to the witch privately and no one knew exactly what was said. But Aslan came away and announced to the children, “I have settled the matter. She has renounced the claim on your brother’s blood.”

  All the children rejoiced and everyone was relieved, both in Narnia and in Keisha Abernathy’s bedroom.

  Clarence then read about how deeply troubled the Great Lion was, sad and lonely, and how the children could not understand why, since Edmund no longer had to die. Then at night they saw Aslan plodding away and they sneaked out and followed him to the Great Stone Table. There ogres and wraiths and hags and the witch herself lay in wait, torches in hand and gloating their evil threats. Aslan appeared and the crowd was at first terrified, but the Witch ordered them to bind him. He permitted them to do so, “though, had the Lion chosen, one of those paws could have been the death of them all.”

  The Witch ordered him to be shaved, and they cut off his beautiful mane. They mocked him, called him names, and muzzled him. Then as the Lion lay quietly on the stone table, the witch sharpened her knife.

  Keisha and Celeste looked horrified; Jonah looked perplexed. Clarence continued to read. As the White Witch lifted up the knife over Aslan she said to him:

  “And now, who has won? Fool, did you think that by all this you would save the human traitor? Now I will kill you instead of him as our pact was, and so the Deep Magic will be appeased. But when you are dead what will prevent me from killing him as well? And who will take him out of my hand then? Understand that you have given me Narnia forever, you have lost your own life, and you have not saved his. In that knowledge, despair and die.”

  With this she plunged the knife down into the Lion, killing him, to the roars and celebration of the spectators.

  Clarence stopped reading, the chapter over. The children sat stunned and teary eyed.

  “You mean Aslan dies?” Keisha said. “But I thought he couldn’t die! Isn’t he too powerful to die?”

  “I thought Edmund was going to die,” Celeste said.

  “I didn’t think anyone would die,” Jonah said quietly.

  “Keep reading, Daddy,” Keisha pleaded. “Something has to happen.”

  “No. I’ve read too long already. I have to get ready.”

  He shut the book, wishing he could tell them life was different. That no one had to die. But that would be a lie.

  She stared at the Cosmic Center, intoxicated by his character. This was her only king. This her only kingdom. The character of God defined the landscape of heaven. The Carpenter had prepared a place all right. What a place!

  Her family and old friends had greeted her. Finally she had a chance to ask her mother a question.

  “Did he give you a special name too, Mama?”

  “Yes. He gives one to all of his redeemed. Wherever you go you will be a testimony to one particular facet of his character, that reflected in your new name. Everyone who meets you will see something of Elyon they have never seen before.”

  Torel, the giant warrior who had carried her to this country, said, “It takes all the redeemed together to paint the picture of his character. Even then, the multitudes of his followers are insufficient. The caverns of the knowledge of God each lead to another and another and another. Should any explorer exhaust them on one world he can simply move to the next. There will always be more to learn, more to discover about him and his universe and his people. The learning will never cease, the reverence always deepen, the symphony of worship ever build, one crescendo upon another.”

  “But,” Dani said, “I thought we would know everything here.”

  “A common error of Adam’s race, one I can never comprehend,” Torel said, looking puzzled. “Only Elyon knows everything. Creatures can never know everything. They are limited. They are learners. We are learners. You have already learned much here, have you not?”

  “Yes,” Dani said. “For one thing, I’ve learned why America never felt like home to me. For a time I’d thought maybe Africa was my home, but somehow I knew that wasn’t right either. I always sensed I was on foreign ground. Whether it was in the city, the suburbs, the country, or on a tropical island, nothing there could be a permanent home. And given all the injustice and suffering, who would want it to be? I never fit in there, Torel. Sometimes I thought it was because of my skin color. Now I realize it was because of the God-shaped emptiness within me, the void that could only be filled by being in his presence. By being here.”

  Torel nodded, listening intently, as if he was not tutor but student.

  “While on earth I kept hearing heaven’s music,” Dani said, “but it was elusive, more like an echo. All that clatter, all those competing sounds, all the television programs and ringing phones and traffic and voices drowned out Elyon’s music. Sometimes I’d dance to the wrong beat, march to the wrong anthem. I was never made for that place. I was made for this one.”

  The wild rush of Joy, the rapture of discovery overwhelmed her as if she’d just gotten in on the greatest inside joke in the history of the universe. Now she saw and felt it with stunning clarity. Her unswerving patriotism had been reserved for another country. Every joy on earth, such as the joy of reunion, had been but an inkling, a whisper of greater Joy. Every place on earth had been at best a rented room, a place to spend the night on a long journey.

  She remembered the
rough sketches she used to make before starting to paint. “Mount Hood, Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, the Oregon Coast, all those places on earth were only rough sketches of this place. The best parts of the old world were sneak previews of this one. Like little foretastes, like licking the spoon from Mama’s beef stew an hour before supper.” She smiled at her mother and grabbed her hand.

  “I’m home,” she shouted, first hugging her mother, then grabbing the angel’s hands and dancing in a circle, turning around and around and around, taking pleasure in his unfamiliarity and awkwardness at the dance, while her mother clapped a beat. “Did you hear me, Torel? I’m really home!”

  Clarence looked up Barnes and Noble in the yellow pages and called. “How late are you open tonight? Ten o’clock? That’s great. I’m looking for some books on racial issues. You have a black literature section, don’t you?”

  “We have an African American section.”

  “Okay. Guess that’ll have to do.”

  It chafed him to be corrected by a white woman, as if he wasn’t entitled to say “black.” He knew the woman assumed he wasn’t black just because he pronounced his words clearly.

  Geneva stood in the bathroom, looking in the full-length mirror that hung from the back of the door. Her five-foot-three slender build fell nicely within the mirror’s borders.

  When Clarence got six feet from the bathroom door, he started saying, “I’m walking toward the bathroom. I’m getting closer. I’m still coming. Hand on the doorknob now. I’m going to open it slowly.”

  Suddenly Geneva let out a blood-curdling scream.

  “Clarence Abernathy! How many times do I have to tell you, don’t sneak up on me!”

  “I didn’t sneak up on you. I tried to tell you I was coming. But if I’d spoken any louder I would have startled you. There’s no winning, Geneva!” He laughed. Finally, she did too.

  Clarence stepped into the bathroom. When he entered rooms, he didn’t pass through doorways, he filled them. As tall men negotiate doorframes vertically, he negotiated them horizontally as well. He stood far back from the mirror, positioning himself three different places before he could see everything he needed to, and then never all at once.

  “How do you get all of yourself into this mirror at the same time?” he asked Geneva.

  “Just petite, I guess.” She finally had her breath back. “Of course, you help my image, you know.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Standin’ next to you, a rhinoceros would look petite.” She smiled. “Maybe that’s why I put up with you sneakin’ up on me like a prowler.”

  “I pity the prowler who has to hear you scream.”

  Clarence looked sharp in his dark blue dress slacks, maroon sweater, and blue tie, overdressed for a dinner at a casual restaurant. He never dressed garishly, never with too much color, making sure no one thought he was a black man trying to draw attention to himself. No shiny Florsheims like black hustlers wore, but not the penny loafers of the imitation white crowd either. Years ago he’d read Dress for Success, underlined it profusely, made some alterations for his blackness, and used it as a flight plan.

  “What would you do without me?” Geneva asked, as women do whose husbands don’t ask the question themselves.

  Clarence didn’t hear her. He was busy leaning toward the mirror with the tweezers, zeroing in on a stray nose hair. He pulled it hard. His eyes watered. He put away the tweezers in the drawer without looking down, closely studying the white fringes of his short sideburns.

  “You’re goin’ gray, old man,” Geneva teased.

  “Not sure I’m ready for all these white hairs.”

  “Well, it’s not the same as a melon goin’ bad, you know.”

  “Feels the same.”

  “Could be worse. Could be your skin turnin’ white on you!”

  They both laughed.

  “Baby,” she turned toward him and straightened his collar, “I declare you just get more handsome with the years.”

  She put her arms around his thick firm stomach, and he hugged her tight. She liked that. He enveloped her and it made her feel secure. She would have liked him to add how beautiful she still was too, but she’d take the hug.

  When Clarence left the room, Geneva resumed her look in the mirror. She rubbed skin softener onto her face. Her skin was “maple syrup,” her mom had always said in the many discussions of grades of skin color she’d heard growing up. She and Clarence were both “black” by popular description, but there was a stark difference between his deep brown and her sandy brown, a little lighter than Dani’s skin, but with less yellow.

  Geneva’s eyes were called brown, but had just a touch of what sometimes seemed blue and sometimes green, depending on what she wore.

  “Your eyes are most striking when you wear red,” her mama used to tell her.

  Geneva had always been intrigued by the hint of light colors in her eyes. It made her think of the European blood in her veins, presumably going back to slave masters and overseers who molested her great-great-grandmothers when they were slave girls. That’s where the lightness in her skin came from, she knew, because none of her ancestors had ever married a white, not in the last three generations anyway, and before that, interracial marriage was almost unheard of. The thought made her tremble, and she felt uncertain and powerless about the forces that had shaped even the genetic code that made her who she was.

  She continued to rub in the skin lotion, watching it disappear into the maple syrup brown. Her skin was soft, and she could have been mistaken for a college girl if not for the thin dark lines time had carved in her face.

  Suddenly the bathroom door flung open and she barely escaped getting hit.

  “What’s this, elephant stampede on the Serengeti? How many times I got to tell you not to charge in like that?”

  “Sorry, Mama,” Jonah said. “Frettin’ about your lines again?”

  “I’m not frettin’, boy. You want frettin’, I’ll give you frettin’. Now get yourself gone, you hear me? Just like your father, chargin’ in on a defenseless woman! I swear.”

  She swatted him on the rear, good naturedly. She saw his smile as he left.

  Clarence came back in, this time to get shoe polish. He looked at her gazing in the mirror. “You’re just maturing. I don’t want you to look like some high school cheerleader anyway”

  “Thanks a lot! You made my day.”

  He smiled at her vanity, then took another look in the mirror to satisfy his own. The doorbell rang.

  Jake, Janet, and Carly all stood at the front door. Geneva welcomed them in and everyone exchanged hugs.

  “How are you, Carly?” Geneva asked.

  “Oh, I don’t feel that great, to be honest. But I’ve been growing a lot in my faith. I guess that’s what matters most, huh?”

  Jake put his arm around her, drawing her near. Carly looks tired, Clarence thought. He knew her battle with HIV had moved into the early stages of AIDS, with some sort of cancer starting, her immune system unable to fight it. Something about how she looked reminded him of his cousin Mack, who’d died of AIDS a year ago. Carly was only nineteen, her son, Finney, a year and a half.

  Geneva helped Carly get Finney settled in Keisha’s old crib, set up in their bedroom. Carly’s life had changed dramatically in the last two years, outside much for the worse and inside much for the better. Through Jake and Janet, Clarence and Geneva had come to know and love her.

  “Olive Garden or Red Robin’s? I’m still going back and forth,” Geneva said.

  “Both sound good to me,” Janet said. “They’re just a stone’s throw apart, so we don’t have to decide till we get there.”

  In January Clarence and Geneva had gone with Jake and Janet to the Old Spaghetti Factory. They’d had such a great time, they’d gone out together at least once a month since, trying different places and establishing some favorite haunts. They rarely went to fancy restaurants, preferring to dine less expensively but more frequently.

&nb
sp; “Mind if we stop by Barnes and Noble’s just before dinner?” Clarence asked. “It’s right by the restaurants. The coffee’s on me.”

  Clarence drove to the bookstore and bought a round of mochas at Starbuck’s Coffee, attached to the store. All four loved to read and enjoyed hanging around bookstores together—especially a store that encouraged you to drink coffee, browse, and sit back on couches and comfy chairs.

  The girls hung out in fiction, domestics, and food while Clarence and Jake went to sports, military, and humor. While Jake was looking at Vietnam books, Clarence said, “Be back in a minute.”

  He headed around the corner toward the African American section. It was one of the largest and best he’d seen, with hundreds of titles. He looked at a few of the huge picture books, showing closeups ranging from Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B DuBois to Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe. He found himself touching the picture of Ashe in childlike admiration. His eye caught a book called The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why Are Middle-class Blacks Angry? He picked it up and started reading.

  Four pages later he felt someone close to him and whirled around.

  “Hey, Clabern. What’s wrong?” Jake saw the scowl on Clarence’s face.

  “Nothing’s wrong. I was comin’ back in a minute, just like I said.”

  “No problem. I finished up, so I was just wandering. What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing.” Clarence turned and shoved the book back on the shelf, his body shielding it from Jake’s eyes. “Just checking out some racial stuff so I can get ready to debate Harley over the holidays.”

  “I’d like to meet your brother. I keep envisioning a Black Muslim version of you.”

  “We’re nothing alike,” Clarence heard the edge in his own voice. If Geneva were there she’d say, “You’re a lot alike.” He cringed every time she said that.

  “Better find the girls and get to dinner.” Clarence walked away briskly. Jake wondered if he’d done something to offend him. He had no idea what.