by Brady Udall
Inexplicably, my eyes were spilling tears. The Elders lifted their hands off my head and I desperately ground a fistful of shirt into my face to wipe away the evidence. Before they rode away on their bikes, they each smiled and shook my hand.
In a daze, I headed out across the parade grounds toward the dormitory, feeling like the top of my head had been shot off. I started to climb the steps and it hit me right there, there was no doubt: Edgar had been touched by God.
EDGAR TAKES IT
FOR THE NEXT MONTH, the Elders came twice a week and taught me the gospel. They explained about heaven and hell and how to get to both places, they taught me how to pray. Instead of closing my eyes, folding my arms and praying out loud, like they showed me, I prayed with my typewriter.
My first prayer was something of an amateur effort:
God
Is my mother up there? Please tell her hello. I am sorry about everything I have done. I am getting better. Your friends the elders are trying to help me.
Thank you, Edgar
When I showed my prayer to the Elders they nodded and said it was pretty darn good, no doubt about it, I was really on my way. Together we read verses from the Book of Mormon and the Bible, talked about how Jesus died for our sins. Sometimes the Elders brought bottles of orange soda or root beer, sometimes a box of crackers, and we would sit at the table that said BITCH and discuss the matters of the Lord.
Just because God had touched me, just because He filled me for a moment with liquid light and had made the voices in my head and the ghosts go away, did not mean that I had to accept Him. Elder Spafford had explained this to me: I had free agency, the choice to take God into my heart or reject Him out of hand. It was my choice—a huge choice in a world that, for me, had no real choices at all.
The Elders taught me all they could and I tried my best to get it all sorted out. I learned that my mother and I could be reunited and live on together into eternity where nobody got old or sick or—Elder Spafford promised me—bored. I learned that Jesus, God’s only son, had suffered for every one of my sins, for all the guilt and sorrow they caused. This did not seem very fair to me, but I kept my mouth shut. I learned that cigarettes, beer and coffee were all no-nos, and that chastity, which I understood to mean keeping away from females entirely, was a must. And most importantly, I learned about this God who presided over this place called heaven where my mother was, who had a plan for me, who loved me without qualification, who watched over me. God, I learned, would never die, would never disappear without notice, would never beat anybody up, would never grow sick or old or tired of living. He might become angry or disappointed, yes, but He would never abandon you.
Okay, I would accept Him, I decided. I’d have to be an idiot not to.
So I typed Him a little prayer that said: God. This is Edgar. I will take it.
One morning, Elder Turley said they had done too much talking, they wanted to learn a little more about me. I told them all of the stories I had: my mother, the mailman, Grandma Paul, Dr. Pinkley pounding me back to life. I told them about St. Divine’s and my mother’s death, about Cecil saving me from Nelson and being sent away because of it.
Elder Spafford’s eyes seemed to go by shades brighter as he listened, and when I was finished he put his hands on my shoulders.
“Edgar, God has spared you for some larger purpose,” he said. “He has saved you from death to do a specific work, I am sure of it. I want you to pray and ask Him what it is. The spirit is telling me this. Can you feel it? God will let you know, all you have to do is ask.”
That night I crept down to the boiler room, sat down at my typewriter and prayed. I listened to Uncle Julius wheezing for a few minutes before I began to type. I got only halfway down the page before I had my answer, before the blank half of the paper told me all I needed to know.
“I have it,” I told them three days later when we sat down together in the thick light of a late spring morning. I ran my finger along a section of the table that said I hate Mrs. Fielding in shaky ballpoint lettering.
“Have what?” Elder Turley said.
“My purpose. What I’m supposed to do.”
“Okay, shoot,” Elder Turley said, yanking open a bag of pretzels from his backpack. “Lay it on us.”
“It’s the mailman,” I said.
“What mailman?” said Elder Spafford.
“The one who ran over my head. He thinks he killed me, but he didn’t. I’m going to find him and tell him I’m okay. That’s what I’m supposed to do.” I had been carrying around this answer with me for a long time—it just took God to confirm it.
The Elders looked at each other. “You’re saying,” Elder Spafford said, rubbing his hand over his head like he was trying to give it a quick polish, “that God spared you from being killed so that you could find the person who almost killed you and tell him you survived?”
I nodded—yes, that was it exactly. Elder Turley put his hand over his mouth, seemed to be trying to keep himself from grinning. I could tell they were both confused by this but it made perfect sense to me. My mother and father, Art and Grandma Paul and Cecil, they were all out of my control, they were all lost to me. But the mailman—I could do something for him. He was alive, I knew, suffering out there somewhere. I could relieve him of a burden he carried. I could do a little saving of my own.
That Sunday, the Elders took me to church with them, a small cinder-block building on the west edge of Whiteriver. I had expected the members to all be anglos, but the congregation was made up entirely of Indians except for a harried-looking white woman who sat in the front pew all by herself and cast uneasy glances at the dark-faced throng behind her. Most of the men wore ties and the women dresses and when they sang it echoed loud and beautiful in that small room.
Afterwards, we stood out in the raw heat and people came up to me, shook my hand and said welcome, we’re glad to have you, let us know if there’s something we can do. Some of them spoke to me in Apache, asked me if things up at Willie Sherman were as bad as they’d heard. I squinted and nodded and tried to forget that my hair was an unholy mess, that I was wearing my grease-stained jeans, a shirt that said Budweiser Brewing Company on the back, and tennis shoes so old they were held together with duct tape and hot glue. Everywhere I looked there were sons and daughters grab-assing on the dead lawn, fathers gathered around the open hood of somebody’s Chevy pickup, mothers trying to round everyone up to get home for dinner. I had never seen anything like it.
On the way home I told the Elders I wanted to be baptized. They had brought up the subject with me a few times before but I had held them off, not because I was unsure, but because I thought that if I got baptized they would stop coming to see me.
I sat on Elder Turley’s handlebars and told him when the road was bending right or left. “Help me!” he would yell. “Please help me, I can’t see, somebody’s head is right in my way!” Sometimes he veered off into the weeds, roaring that we were going down in flames, we were all going to die.
Normally, Elder Spafford would have given Elder Turley the evil eye, maybe said something about it being the Sabbath, but he pedaled alongside looking content.
“I know God is smiling right now,” Elder Spafford said over the clanking of the chains, the crunch of tires on the dirt road. “He’s happy with you. His angels are rejoicing.”
Up ahead, on the last rise before Willie Sherman when we got off the bikes to walk, I asked the Elders about the possibility of going to live somewhere with an anglo family, where every kid had his own bicycle and you got to eat ice cream for dinner, a place where everyone had a mother and a father, maybe some brothers and sisters, possibly a dog.
Elder Spafford stopped in the middle of the road and took on a serious face. “Somebody told you about the placement program? Well. Usually we don’t mention it until after baptism because we’ve had kids getting baptized just to get off the reservation. But, no, you’re a different case altogether. I’ll look into this. We need to
get you away from that school, someplace where evil isn’t staring you in the face everywhere you turn.”
Behind us, a car came barreling up the road, lifting up a thick bank of dust. We moved off to the side and the car slowed, then skidded to a stop just ahead of us. It was a rust-eaten Oldsmobile with whitewall tires and a ragtop that had been shredded into the kind of thick netting you might find covering an air raid shelter.
Barry Pinkley stepped out of the driver’s side, pushed his sunglasses down on his nose to have a look at us. He was wearing bell-bottom jeans and a yellow open-throated shirt with roses and tulips stitched around the collar. “Edgar?” he said. “Who are these people?”
Elder Turley let his bike drop and stepped in front of me. A woman, whose bleach-blond hair sparkled in the sun like cut crystal, appeared from the other side of the car, puffing delicately on a long cigarillo.
“How can we help you folks?” said Elder Spafford.
“Look,” Barry said. “I’m a doctor, okay? I take care of this boy, Edgar, so if you’d just be on your merry way we’re here to take him on a picnic.” The woman reached in the backseat and, like a lawyer in a courtroom showing off evidence, held up a basket with a loaf of bread and a bag of Cheetos sticking out of it.
“A doctor?” said Elder Turley, taking a step closer to Barry.
“I…I’m not practicing right now, but I’m Edgar’s guardian, technically speaking.” Barry’s ears were beginning to turn red. “This is ridiculous. Edgar, will you tell these jarheads who I am? Marlene and I came to take you on a picnic by the river. We’ve got Ding Dongs and Dr Pepper. I even bought a fishing pole.”
For a moment everyone looked at me. In the quiet heat of the day the Oldsmobile stuttered and ticked. I stood in Elder Turley’s shadow and kept my head down, watching a stinkbug that had climbed up onto my shoe and got itself stuck to a piece of duct tape.
Elder Spafford said, “Why don’t you just tell us your name, where you live, and we’ll check it out—”
Barry turned and got right in Elder Spafford’s face. “My name? You want my name? And who the fuck are you, you inbred piece of dirt? And what do you think you’re doing with this boy? Brainwashing him? Filling his head with holy-roller Jesus-on-the-cross bullshit? I saved this boy’s life!”
Barry took a step toward me, as if to take me by the arm, but Elder Turley was on him and had him backed up and pinned to the side of the car before I knew what had happened. Marlene shrieked and giggled like this was all a fun game.
“Get in the car,” Elder Turley grunted, his thick freckled forearm across Barry’s chest. “Drive on out of here.”
“You tell them, Edgar,” Barry spit, looking at me over Elder Turley’s shoulder. “Tell them who I am.”
In one motion Elder Turley pulled open the car door and stuffed Barry inside. He told Barry to leave now before he really got angry. “My God, look how big he is!” Marlene squealed as she slipped into the passenger side.
Barry gave the car some gas and the rear tires spun, sending up twin geysers of dust. The Oldsmobile swung around in a wide arc like a speedboat doubling back, and lurched to a stop next to us again.
Barry now held a silver snub-nosed pistol and was leaning over Marlene to point it at Elder Turley’s chest. A cloud of dust descended over us like a fine mist. Barry aimed the gun at Elder Spafford for a moment, then swung it back to Elder Turley.
Barry had taken his glasses off and his eyes looked like a pair of nails hammered into his face. He said, “If I ever see you two again I’ll send you straight to the worst hell you could ever believe in.”
LAST CONFESSION
BEFORE I COULD be baptized, first I had to confess. Confession is a vital part of repentance, the Elders told me, the only way to stand blameless before the Lord.
So one late May afternoon they brought another missionary along with them, a short, peanut-shaped guy who would hear all of my confessions and decide if I had enough of a broken spirit, if I was contrite and meek and repentant enough to make a personal, everlasting covenant with God Himself.
The day before, a man from the church who worked with the Indian Placement Program stopped by to talk to Uncle Julius, to have him sign some forms. He wore a shiny polyester blue suit and gave me a caramel to chew on while I answered his questions about my mother and father, where I had lived before Willie Sherman, why I thought it might be helpful to me to live with a Mormon family and go to school somewhere far away from here. When he headed out to his car I followed behind.
“Is there a family that will take me?” I asked him. “I don’t even care what kind of family it is. Maybe just a mother and a brother, something like that.”
“There just might be,” he said, winking at me. “You never can tell what the Lord has in mind.”
Now, here was this other missionary—Elder Doyle—asking me questions about Jesus and the prophets, wanting to know if my Elders had taught me everything I needed to know. For privacy we were down in the boiler room and Elder Doyle was perspiring so heavily drops of sweat were plopping off his nose onto his notepad like water out of a leaky faucet.
“Whew!” he said, grinning at me. He was squatting on Uncle Julius’ cot and I sat across from him on a plastic five-gallon bucket. “Kinda toasty in here. Holy cow!”
After coming to the conclusion that I was well enough versed in the gospel to make my own good decision, he explained that we were going to have to discuss whether or not I had any outstanding sins that needed to be taken care of before I could enter the cleansing waters of baptism.
“You mean all my sins?” I said.
He nodded. “At least the big ones.”
I fidgeted on my bucket for awhile, then let it fly:
I had lied too many times to count.
I had watched Mrs. Whipple doing the ficky-fick. Twice.
I had spied on Mrs. Whipple many times, hoping to see more ficky-fick.
I had hit Barry Pinkley with my typewriter.
I was responsible for Nelson and the others getting expelled, for Barry Pinkley getting fired, for the Whipples’ divorce, for Grandma Paul ending up in a crazy hospital, for Cecil being sent off to prison, for my mother drinking herself to death.
I had watched girls undressing through the bathroom window.
I had helped burn down the cavalry stables.
I had stolen urinal pucks, ballpoint pens, a crucifix, butterscotch candy, corn flakes, cans of gasoline, underwear, bottles of vanilla, rubber cement, shotgun shells, a Mr. Potato Head toy, bags of sugar and flour and yeast, syringes, comic books, a hacksaw, beer and whiskey, a deck of cards, money, a bag of contraband, typewriter ribbon, cigarettes, a clawhammer, nylon rope, a poster of a movie star in a bikini, cocoa powder, rubbing alcohol, firecrackers.
I had murdered Nelson Norman in my heart.
I had beat up Chester Holland and Walter Reed and punched Victor Ortiz when he wasn’t expecting it.
I had tried to commit suicide.
Throughout it all, Elder Doyle did not blink. When I was done, he held up his finger as if to say something, then changed his mind. He scratched his head and pretended to write something on his wet notepad. “Hmmm,” he said finally. “What about self-abuse?”
“I hit myself on the head with a brick,” I confessed.
Elder Doyle went upstairs to talk to the other missionaries. Once he was gone, I nearly slumped right off my bucket; it was as if all the buckles and clasps inside of me had been unlatched, leaving me loose and free and able to breathe. Elder Spafford had told me not to be afraid, that confession was a wonderful thing, God’s gift to me, and now I believed it.
After a few minutes the Elders called me upstairs. They were all beaming. I could be baptized next Saturday, they said, I had made it. Elder Turley picked me up and spun me around in the air until I was dizzy. I was twelve years old and I was going to become a member of God’s own church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I had accepted God and He had accepted me. I
had once been the miracle-boy and now I was going to be a saint.
BORN AGAIN
THE DAY OF my baptism clouds boiled up over the mountains, grumbling and stirring the air, their edges as brilliant as white marble against the blackening sky. I stood outside the church in a white polyester jumpsuit two or three sizes too big for me, trying with all my might not to grab my groin. Elder Spafford and Elder Turley were running around grabbing hymnbooks, shaking hands with the new arrivals, checking the galvanized tank out back that was filling up with water from a garden hose attached to a little sputtering well pump. Elder Spafford had told me they were trying to raise money to build a proper baptismal font inside the building, but for now we’d have to do it the old-fashioned way: in a cow tank.
I was glad when Elder Turley touched me on the shoulder and told me to follow him inside to the bathroom. He began to change from his regular missionary clothes into a white shirt, white pair of pants and white tie with a little golden tie clip. He even had a white belt. Tack on a couple of wings and you had yourself a burly, freckled angel.
“Are you excited?” he said. “Are you nervous?”
I worked at rolling up my pant legs, which kept falling down and were now covered with grass stains and dirt. “Little bit scared,” I said.
“Scared?” said Elder Turley, pulling at the knot in his tie. “There’s nothing to be scared about. Come on, now! This is your big day. Nothing to be worried about at all.”
He didn’t understand. I wasn’t scared about becoming a new person, about having my sins washed away forever—I was looking forward to that. It was the cow tank, and the water in it, that made me nervous. When the missionaries had explained baptism to me, I had this idea of somebody pouring water over my head from a bucket; when they said immersion I thought they simply meant getting completely wet. But the cow tank was as big as a swimming pool and the water was getting pretty deep—I had checked a few times. I knew there was no way that hose water in a cow tank could do the kind of things to me the river water had, but I still wasn’t comforted.
