The Book of Fred

by Abby Bardi

  “No'm. I think that's it.”

  “Oh, Mary Fred,” Alice said, looking like she was going to burst into tears. “I just feel so inadequate. I don't know what to do, or how to help you. I want to do a good job at this, but I don't think I know how. What was I thinking? I'm such a terrible mother anyway, and now—”

  I put my arm around her and patted her on the shoulder. “It's fine, ma'am. Alice. Really, I'm happy as can be.” We were standing near the express checkout line, since we had fewer than fifteen items, and on the shelf next to it were some long pink plastic tubes with little multicolored beads in them. I didn't know what they were, but I said, “Oh, Alice, can I have one of these?” I picked one up and showed it to her.

  “Of course you can, Mary Fred,” she said, wiping one eye and looking at me like I had just done something really nice for her instead of the other way around.

  I asked if we could get one for Heather too, and she said sure, so I grabbed another one. That meant we had sixteen items, but Alice took us through the express line anyway and the woman at the cash register never said a thing about it.

  Heather seemed to like the little beads—she ate them right up before dinner—and everyone liked the green beans with mushroom soup. It felt funny sitting around the dinner table and eating the same food I'd be eating at home, but without saying the Beautiful Prayer first, and without my real family. Uncle Roy made some comment about sitting there that mademe think that they didn't always eat together, or even at the table.

  Still, it was a nice dinner, and I think they liked it. They were all kind of smiley afterward, even Heather, who didn't smile much in general. I had folded up the paper napkins into little swans, and after dinner she wanted me to show her how to do it, so I did. Then Alice made her come help us in the kitchen, while Roy took out the garbage, because it was getting kind of smelly with the fish and all, and Heather showed me where all the dishes belonged and helped me wipe them. While we were working, she talked about her school. She said her French test last Friday hadn't been too bad, the only bad part was that she was concentrating so hard while she was taking it that her foot fell asleep, so when she stood up to go turn the test in, she fell over sideways and couldn't manage to stand upright, and everybody laughed at her. “It was so embarrassing,” she said.

  “But it wasn't your fault,” I said. “I mean, a person can't help if their foot goes to sleep.”

  “Mary Fred's right, Puffin,” Alice said. “It's not like you did it on purpose.”

  “I don't care, I just looked like the biggest dork in the world,” Heather said, rolling her eyes. “And stop calling me Puffin.”

  “How come everybody calls you Puffin?” I asked her.

  “They shouldn't,” she said, giving Alice a dark look. “They know not to call me Puffin. But they do it anyway.”

  “I don't know,” Alice said. “Roy, why do we call Puffin Puffin?”

  “It's because when she was born, she was all puffy,” Roy said, coming back through the kitchen with the garbage can and putting it down beside the sink. “Her face was all red and bloated, like a walrus's.”

  “That's not why,” Heather said, punching Roy on the arm,which kind of shocked me in spite of myself. “It's because when I was born, I looked like a bird. A puffin. That's what Dad always says.”

  “Does he?” Alice asked. She stopped wiping the dish she was holding and stood staring at Heather like this was some really interesting information. “Is that what he says?”

  “He says I had this cute little beak,” Heather went on, looking pleased with herself. “And I made these little tweeting noises, like a puffin.”

  “I don't think your father is up on his ornithology,” Roy said. “I don't think puffins tweet.”

  “They do tweet,” Heather said. “And they're really cute. That's what he says.”

  “You were a cute baby,” Alice said. “You had such tiny little hands.” She reached for one of Heather's big hands with her soapy, wet one, and Heather let her hold it for about a second, then snatched it away. Alice turned to me, as if to be fair, and said, “Do you have a nickname in your family, Mary Fred?”

  “Sometimes everyone calls me M.F.,” I said. “We have a lot of Fred names in my family so sometimes we use initials to keep from getting confused.”

  “M.F.?” Roy sort of smirked.

  “That's nice,” Alice said. “So other people in your family are named Fred too? Is that a family name?”

  “No, ma'am,” I said. I had explained this to many Lackers before in the past, but still, I always felt surprised when people asked me this. “It's our religion. People tend to be named after Fred.”

  “Oh, so your whole family is, um, named after Fred?”

  “Well, not Mama and Papa, but all my brothers and sisters.”

  “What are their names?” Alice asked.

  “Well, there are the little ones. Fredericka, we call herRickie, then Bobby Fred, then Billy Fred, but we call him Biffles, then Boo, who is really Susie Fred, then—” My voice got stuck when I came to Little Freddie, and I just stopped there.

  “Who's Fred?” Heather asked.

  “Fred is our founder,” I said, staring down at the floor while my eyes watered. “Fred was the man who founded us and found us and brought us into the light. That's how we say it, usually. He brought us into the light.”

  “How exactly did he do this?” Roy asked. I looked up at him and saw that he had a little smile on his face.

  “With his Prophecy. And his Holy Book.”

  “So your family met this Fred person and followed him to— where were you living?”

  “Virginia, at first. Then we moved up to Maryland. But we never met him.”

  “No?”

  “No, he lived a long time ago. He died in 1947.”

  “But his ideas lived on?”

  “That's right.” Although he sounded polite enough, I had a feeling Uncle Roy thought there was something funny about this, and since I didn't, I resolved to just clam up. This was how things went with Lackers, and while of course I wasn't angry, since as Papa always said, there was no point in being angry with Lackers, it was like being mad at the rain for ruining your picnic, still, I was getting this feeling in my stomach like someone had stuck a knife in it and was giving it a good twist. I decided to try not to talk about my family with anyone, especially not Roy, and it probably wasn't a very good idea to talk about the Book either, since I might as well have been speaking Chinese to them anyway.

  The next morning was Sunday, and when I got up, at first I thought I had better get ready for church, but then when Ithought more about it, I was absolutely positive that no one would be going to church. I went downstairs and sure enough, none of them were there—everyone was still asleep. I brought the Book down with me and just sat reading it for a while, though I kept daydreaming in the middle of the page, so then I felt bad, like my mind was going to start Lacking if I didn't watch out. What I kept imagining were my brothers and sisters in their church clothes, and Mama and Papa leading us down the path to the Chapel at the Compound, past the wild raspberry bushes and the honeysuckle that grew all over everything. I could see Fred and Little Freddie running after Boo, trying to tickle her, and how they'd pick her up and whirl her around, and how she would scream and laugh and yell at them to stop but they knew that what Boo really liked best was to be swung in the air. When I started to feel sad like this, I would pick up the Book and find some comfort in it, like I would read about the Sabbath and how we should keep it holy and not do any work, and rest like the Lord rested. I tried to have the feeling of Sunday all by myself, but things kept getting in the way of it—the sounds of cars outside, and the big TV that sat looking at me with its square blank face. I read the part in the Book about the Imminence, but it just didn't make me feel any more holy, since all I could think about was how I was sitting in some Lackers' living room, and it was Sunday, and no one was going to church, or anywhere else for that matter. After a wh
ile I just put the Book down and went into the kitchen and made myself some toast. I wondered where Mama and Papa were right now and whether they were getting enough to eat, and where the Littles were, and if they were living with Lackers too, and watching television, and forgetting the holy Word. I imagined Rickie and Boo wearing fancy dresses and saying a bunch of cuss words, and then I tried to stop myselffrom picturing that. I knew Rickie would never behave like that, though to be honest, I had some doubts about Boo. She was six and had a dramatic way with her, at least that's what Mama and Papa always said. I wondered what they were doing right now, and it seemed so strange to think they were all out there somewhere and I didn't even know where. Then I wondered why I was feeling so bad suddenly, like I had fallen down and bruised myself all over on the inside.

  I went back into the sitting room with my toast on a plate. Back home, we'd never be allowed to eat in the sitting room, but I had seen Heather break this rule several times yesterday so I figured it was okay. I stared at the blank TV while I ate, feeling bored and angry. Here it was, Sunday morning, and I was lounging in front of a TV in my gardening trousers instead of in the family pew at the Compound, and I hadn't heard a sermon in nearly three weeks, and if I wasn't careful I was going to start Lacking, I was going to let Evil into my heart, and before I knew it, I'd be wearing a golden gown and feathers like some hootchie-kootchie woman. That was what the Reverend Thigpen said sometimes. And meanwhile, I didn't have any idea where the Littles were, and I only hoped that wherever it was—I guessed they had all gone to different families—they weren't going to start Lacking, and they weren't lonely and afraid and crying for Mama and me.

  I picked up the remote from the sofa where Heather had thrown it and flicked on the TV. I flipped the channels around past a bunch of cartoon bears and some ugly puppets until I found a channel that had a church on it. For a moment I felt relieved, like I was going to be okay, because I could spend my Sundays at the TV church and not fall away from the News, but after I listened to the man for a few minutes, I shut the TV off again. He was talking about the same Words we talked about,but I could see that deep down, he was really a Lacker. He was talking about the God of Peace and Kindness, and it was the kind of thing that the Reverend Thigpen warned us was really just Evil talking in a pearly guise. That's what he said. “If Evil cast out Evil, then Evil is divided against itself,” the Book said. I felt divided against myself, like I wasn't sure anymore exactly what Evil was. I just hoped none of it had found its way into me and tried to make a home there like someone camping in a ditch.

  By the time everyone got up, it was nearly noon, and I was feeling even worse. I'd been sitting there for hours, I was bored, and I felt restless, like I was all shivery and twitchy inside and needed a good run, or maybe a horseback ride. Alice got up first and said good morning to me in her ghostly way, making a beeline for the coffeepot like she was dying of thirst. Then Heather came down and mumbled something, grabbing a bag of cookies and flinging herself down with them on the sofa. I could see crumbs spraying from her mouth in a fine mist. Finally, Roy got up, looking grim and grubby, without so much as a word to anyone. I just sat there, watching everyone waste a perfectly beautiful Sunday morning when they could have been out serving someone somehow.

  “Don't you get tired of just sitting?” I asked Heather.

  She looked at me like I had said something ridiculous. “I get tired if I don't sit,” she said. “So then I sit some more and I feel rested. That's how it works.”

  “But don't you feel like the whole world is just waiting for you to get up and do something? Like there's this really important thing out there that you could be doing, and you're just sitting here instead, and the important thing is going to pass right by you and you'll never even know what it was?”

  Heather seemed to think for a minute. Then she said, “No.”

  * * *

  I will say that Alice made us a nice lunch, with cream of tomato soup and some bread that she took out of the freezer and then put in the oven and it came out like fresh bread. She had put some onions and some wilted leaves from the fridge into the tomato soup so it tasted strange, but I kind of liked it that way. I didn't say much during lunch—I had a lumpy feeling in my throat, and it was too hard to get food past it and talk at the same time. When we had finished, Roy got up and went out without even clearing his plate, and Heather went back to the sofa, and Alice and me cleared up the table and did the dishes. Alice was talking to me about Heather's father and how he was going to take Heather to France for two weeks, and how she didn't really want Heather to go to France but she didn't see any way out of it. I said that from what I understood, all the people in France just drank wine all the time and got into mischief because of it, and that the women didn't wear underwear, and I could understand if she didn't want Heather in a place like that.

  “It's not that, really,” Alice said, staring at a stack of dishes like she'd forgotten what they were. “I just don't want her to be away for her birthday, and for such a long time. And I don't like the idea of her taking a plane. What if something happened—I just couldn't deal with it.”

  I thought of telling her that something was going to happen anyway, the Big Cat was coming, and coming soon, but that would just have made her feel worse, plus being a Lacker, there was nothing she could do about it anyway, so why tell her. So I said, “I'm sure everything will be fine. Those planes are really safe. They're big and powerful, so if they run into any trouble they can just fly away from it real fast. And when they land, they've got all kinds of emergency landing gear so if one set of gear doesn't work, the extra ones open right up, no problem.”

  “I'm sure you're right, Mary Fred. It's just that she's never been that far away from me. Usually he just takes her to Florida or the Caribbean. I don't like the idea of her being across a whole ocean, especially on her birthday.”

  “It's hard being separated from your people,” I said. “But sometimes you just have to make the best of it.”

  “Oh, Mary Fred,” she said. “I'm sorry. I hadn't thought.”

  “It's okay,” I said.

  “No, really, I'm sorry. It's so selfish of me to think of worrying about a little two-week vacation, when you're—really, I'm so—”

  “It's okay,” I said in a voice that sounded surprisingly hard to me. “I'm grown up enough to know that whatever the Will has set forth for me, well, that's the path I have to take, and sometimes it's a path I don't much like, sometimes it's a hard path, like when the One decides to just take both of my brothers, it's hard, Alice, but when you truly have faith, then you know, why, you just know that it's—”

  “It's so hard, I know,” Alice said, like I hadn't said anything about faith or the One at all. “I know.”

  “You couldn't possibly know,” I said, my voice a little rasp like Evil was starting to possess me and make itself heard. “You just couldn't possibly imagine.” Alice started toward me but I held up my hand, palm outward, to ward her off. “It's my own burden, ma'am, not yours. My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

  “It's not easy, Mary Fred,” Alice said, stopping about a foot from me and looking at me with sad eyes. “I understand that. I wish there was something I could do to help.”

  “There's nothing you can do,” I said, taking a step backward. “There's nothing any Lacker could possibly do. It's just the way things are.”

  “Let me know, Mary Fred, if there's anything—” Alice heldout her hands, palms outward, almost in a shrug, like she just had no idea what to say to me.

  “I apologize, ma'am,” I said. “I don't know what came over me. I just lost the discipline of my tongue for a minute there.” I said I was sorry, and Alice said it was okay, and we finished the dishes without mentioning anything else about it. The truth was, though, I didn't really feel sorry; I felt stiff and unkind inside, like someone had starched me.

  We were going to work in the garden in the afternoon, but right after lunch it started to rain. I wasn't even
surprised, since I felt all rainy myself, but it meant we were going to sit in the sitting room all afternoon while Heather changed the channels every couple of seconds. Roy had gone back upstairs. Alice sat at the dining room table with a pile of catalogues. I looked at them for a while with her—some had books in them and some had movies, and none of them had to do with anything that interested me. She said the fiscal year was ending at work and she needed to order a bunch of stuff for the library by June 30, otherwise the money would just go to waste. I could hear Papa saying in my mind that there was only One Book and One Word, and he didn't approve of movies at all anyway. The Reverend Thigpen said they were all just a bunch of undulating flesh. Every so often Heather would pass a movie on the TV, and she would leave it on for a few minutes and before I knew it, I was wondering what happened to the people on the speeding bus, or the people being chased by dinosaurs, but luckily she'd flip to a new channel before I got too interested, and sometimes she would say, “Boring,” like it was two words, Bo and Ring. I began to picture Bo and Ring as two clowns who danced around in the living room, trying to entertain Heather. It was not easy and I felt sorry for them.

  “Heather, do you want to come work in the garden withme?” I said after a while when I noticed that the rain had let up a little.

  “It's raining,” Heather said.

  “No, it's stopped. Look, the sun is coming out.”

  “But it's all wet out there.”

  “It's summer. It's a nice, warm wetness. The ground will smell nice.”

  “The ground will smell like cat poop,” Heather said. “Trust me.”

  “Heather, go on out with Mary Fred,” Alice called from the dining room. “It'll do you good.”

  “You're crazy if you think I'm going out there and getting soaked,” Heather said. Whenever she talked to her mother, she raised her voice to a little screech. “You're totally nuts.”

  I stood up and said, “Well, I'm going to go out and do some weeding.” As I walked past Alice, she looked up and said, “If you need to, Mary Fred, it's okay, but I don't want you to—”