Routes

by John Okas

  Jeremiah does not deny it. He turns his back on the mother and child. The name of Gloria Beatrice will not be going on the List of the Prophet, but on the blacklist. And the name of Sarah Ruth, unwed teenage mother, will be crossed off the Prophet’s Honor Roll and put there right underneath Gloria Beatrice’s, banished forever to living death in the Shibbolite community.

  On the Blacklist

  Gloria Beatrice is on the blacklist, her mother right under her. When you are on the blacklist it’s as if, from the point of view of God and his faithful, you never existed at all. You have no rights because you are not there. You can own no property, no one in Zion will give you the time of day. You are like a ghost, no place is set for you at table and no one will answer you if you ask them, “please pass the peas.”

  Ostracized Sarah is relieved by the totality of her father’s rejection. It will be a pleasure to leave it behind, whereas his partial acceptance, say, would cause doubts and hestitations about whether she is serious in her plan to strike out on her own.

  Saint to sinner, she stares bleakly out the window, west, at the darkening of the light, passing November, suffering the twin agony of being separated from her love and being cast among the living dead.

  Gloria Beatrice is more dead weight. Solidly built, heavier than she looks, dense, she is hardly a fussy baby, never a noisy one. She has no complaint that her teenage mother, unwed and emotionally overwrought, her mind given over elsewhere, is often neglectful, but sleeps as if there were no tomorrow. Often Sarah must wake her up to feed her. The little one sucks without opening her eyes, and falls back to sleep as soon as she is full, her lips sealed in a closure of soft composure. More than satisfied, the baby is self-absorbed, unusually so. She is a deep sleeper, goes to never never land when she sleeps, and when she wakes she doesn’t whimper or cry, but lies on her stomach, a thumb in her gums, waiting until her troubled mother, mooning over Corn Dog, comes back from the window to the present moment and remembers to change and feed her. Gloria is no trouble in and of herself yet is the cause of so much around her. She is not wanted in the house of her grandfather. He paces and notes her quietness. It gnaws on him. He takes it as a sign of the devil’s lazy blood mixed with the pure white strain. He feels her presence in his daughter’s bedroom and it makes his own blood boil. Sarah knows best: avoid her father, try not to circulate around the house, but weather out the winter as much as possible locked in her bedroom, come out only when absolutely necessary, ideally when the Reverend is not at home, because when he sees the honey-colored Glory Bee he sees black and then he sees red, and quakes with aftershocks to his pride: mental pictures, a review of his discovery of every manner of filth in his daughter’s hideaway. How good he thought his girl was, and all the while she was a collector of pornography! And those months when he thought she was going to choir practice, coming home late full of Emanual’s X rays, in fact she was joining in league with the devil, fornicating with a heathen savage. And the scandal! The news is all over the temple that Sarah, the model teenager, the daughter of the Prophet’s bookkeeper, has given birth to an off-white bitch bastard. Curses! Curses! Curses!

  One day, when Gloria is not yet a month old, Sarah, thinking her father gone for the day, comes out of her room with the baby and sets her down swaddled in the plenty of horn blanket in the big wing chair where the Reverend sits when he reads from his master copy edition of The Book of the Prophet. The Corn Dog weaving, the only thing Sarah saved from the fire, with its cone-shaped symbols, horns, serves as an outer sign of Gloria’s inner state of anonymous peace and plenty. Sarah goes to the kitchen to get some tea and eat some cheese and crackers, and to fix some watered-down goat’s milk and sugar for Gloria. The model does not like the way her own milk makes her breasts look. They are large and fresh enough without being engorged to the point of popping. And the dripping makes her feel messy; it reminds her of her Cornie and makes her miss him in the worst way. The easy way out is to close herself to the baby.

  In the meanwhile the Reverend, a block away, realizes he has forgotten his pen and pencil set. He returns home for it, re-enters the house by the parlor door. Look who’s sleeping in his chair! The little tan honey sucks her thumb in a peace that surpasses his understanding. And those pagan symbols! Those horns remind him of the ungodliness of his own flesh and blood. In the off-handed ways of righteousness he reasons: being on the blacklist crosses one off in the eyes of the Lord. Since there is no being there at all, if I toss The Book down on the chair no one will be hurt.

  “Lord,” he prays, “how can Thy Word crush who never existed in the first place?”

  The master copy of the Big Book weighs at least twice as much as the baby, and here it comes, down, end over end, on a course for tiny Gloria’s head. But the crushing blow does not fall on her. The Reverend swears that he sees the devil’s wind blow through the horns in the blanket and cast The Book aside. Or is it the current of air from the kitchen door as his daughter, hearing his voice in prayer, swings through it and runs for the baby? Whatever, at the last moment the tome swerves and misses the target. It wings the chair and lands on the floor, breaking its leather back under its own weight.

  Frightened Sarah gathers Gloria in her arms while her father examines the broken binding. He repents. He’s sorry about his softness on sin, he’s sorry that he missed burning the blasted blanket along with all the other abominations he found in his daughter’s hidden library. “Lord, this child is possessed by an evil spirit and I’m damned if this cursed rag doesn’t have something to do with it. Why do I continue to insult Thee by allowing this foul wrapper space under my roof? After all, I have seen it break wind on Thy Word. I refuse to let the devil have the last laugh.”

  The bookkeeper, a pressure cooker of pain, blows his lid again. He comes toward Sarah with a full head of steam. She runs toward the kitchen but she can’t escape the struggle with her father who angrily tries to strip away the last soft wooly vestige of Corn Dog. It’s either risk the baby or give up the blanket. She lets her only souvenir from her log cabin library days slip through her fingers. The Reverend takes the blanket outside, throws kerosene on it and lights it up.

  The attack leaves Gloria naked. But being deprived of her one worldly treasure doesn’t seem to bother her. To be sure the tug of war and the unwrapping ripples her sleep. She opens her eyes, chucks her tongue against the roof of her mouth three times, then closes in tightly to Sarah’s breast, sighs, puts her thumb back into her mouth, and sinks once more into serenity, unchanged, oblivious to the loss of outward signs.

  Her young mother however is enraged enough for two. “Father,” says the girl who once upon a time was a model of sanctity and filial piety in her speech, “I’d like to cut your balls off!” The words roll right off the tip of her tongue.

  Into the Closet

  Sarah wants to move without further delay. But how can she? Old man winter is on the outside blowing snow against the door. The cold weather keeps her trapped in the house with the monster man. She counts the days until spring.

  Now she is on twenty-four hour guard against her father. The crowbar she keeps on hand as a weapon gives her an idea of how to further protect Gloria from his wrath. The attic stairs cut her closet space in half, the underside of the staircase forms a right angle triangle of unusable space, accessible only from the inside of her closet. She crawls in, beneath her clothes, among her shoes, and finds the pine boards that wall off this dead zone. Pry, pry, pry and she lights a candle and pokes her nose into the dark. It is dusty, there are some old spider webs with the shells of crickets and flies in them. She wonders if this is going to extremes. The flicker of the flame reminds her of the fate that her collection of art books and poetry met at the hell-fire hands of the Reverend her father, then she thinks about the symbol blanket, now a charred smoky remnant on top of the ash pile in the backyard, and of the close call Gloria had when the book was thrown at her head. She must do more than keep her baby out of sight, she must do all she can
to keep her out of reach as well.

  So it’s into the closet for the little Queen Bee. Her mother spends a day on all fours in that cramped compartment, sweeping up and lining that void with every cushion, pad, pillow, and blanket she has. When she is finished the little cloister is as plush as a royal bower, or a triangular mausoleum. She slides the sleepy bundle in the wicker bassinet in feet forward toward the stair notched hypotenuse. “Baby, Mummy’s sorry to have to wall you up like this, but as long as we stay in this house we have to be sorry to be safe. But somewhere over this cold front, out in the Golden State, is someone who loves us.” As she sets the pine boards back in place she promises herself and Gloria Beatrice that at the first sign of spring they will leave together this hell she created by her innocence. She keeps the closet door locked, the key in her underpants, the crowbar always within easy reach, and when she takes the baby out of safe-keeping to feed her or change her, she reminds herself to stay alert, ready, if need be, to shuffle her back into the dead zone, tack back the boards, lock the closet door and defend it against the monster.

  It is an exhausting life for the mother, but Gloria adapts without a fuss. She is a natural for solitary confinement, a serene shut-in bug. In fact the deep pile of pillows in the back of the closet suit the Queen Bee’s nature. The big sleeper prefers the softness, the darkness, the quiet, to her mother’s hard frontier fundamentalist mattress.

  Is it the mix of material she has inherited from her father that gives her this air of calm and adaptability? At first, Sarah thinks it is.

  Ah, she thinks, with a father who’s singular in more ways than one surely my baby’s peacefulness is a sign of inner strength.

  Still, she can’t help but have some doubts that what she would like to see as inner repose and strength is in fact mental slowness. Baby Gloria never seems to care how long she spends in her wicker bassinet, walled up in the closet. She seems much too quiet. She grows in body but stays close to zero in mind. The Corn Dog Sarah remembers was a self-composed individual, not an aught. She begins to hope and sometimes even pray that Gloria’s pacific disposition is indeed a trait she has inherited from the buck. Handy under the circumstances as the baby’s withdrawal is, as the weeks of winter pass and Baby has yet to acknowledge anything surrounding her Sarah begins to consider it as more distressing than convenient. Baby Gloria does not ordinarily open her eyes, though when she does take the lids off those hazel browns, Sarah can see they are warm and clear; but when she waves her hand hello, Gloria just stares off into space, with a dumb expression on her lips, as if she were preoccupied by the sight of something in another dimension.

  As the first anniversary of the day she met Corn Dog approaches, three-month-old Gloria with her tranquility and her lack of demand begins to provoke some severe disquiet in Sarah. The mother’s mind magnifies the worry, the baby’s fretlessness causes her to fret: is my baby really the strong silent type like her father or is she a basket case? What if my baby is not normal after all, or if that book winged her in some way I didn’t notice?

  The cold months are long, what else is there to do but worry and cry about those evenings last February in the little log cabin library when she, in her best mail order underpants, sat by the fire, held the buck to her breasts and read and discussed the poetry of Clement Collier with him.

  I call myself “wife,” I call myself “lover,”

  whom I call “mother” is none other than me.

  The moon in the sky is a reflection of the life inside,

  the echo of angels on a deep blue sea.

  Corn Dog kissed her stomach and said, “I have questions about my origin, but I can see some things in the future clearly. When I look inside me, I see a daughter. When I look inside you, I see the same. I’m positive the baby will be a girl, but I can’t picture her no matter how hard I try. What’s in her cards from your side will be all Blanche, but what’s inside of me? I know nothing for certain about my father’s blood line, our daughter could be anyone. She could be red, she could be black, she could be white.”

  “Just as long as she’s normal.” said the expectant mother, typically anxious.

  “What’s normal?” Corn Dog wanted to know.

  In general, as in the Blanche house, things seem as if they’re coming apart. With the market crash, the whole Freeway is falling into a moneyless pit. Yet baby Gloria for all the turmoil sleeps through it all as soundly as the most privileged child on earth.

  The Beasts of Dejection Junction

  When April snows turn to slush Sarah starts looking around for a means of getting to the City by the Bay that does not call attention to herself. When her father discovers she is gone perhaps he will relent and wish that he had stood by her. Then it will be too late. Disappearance will be her revenge.

  Of course, never having been away from Zion, or on her own, a creature of comfort, sheltered, she shies in the face of the journey. Indeed she has so many doubts, she doubts her doubts. To carry on, she supposes herself doubtless.

  She finds an advertisement in the Zion Weekly Mail classified under “tourist opportunity,” an item about a service which still, now, in the spring of nineteen thirty, runs horse-drawn coaches through the towns of the high sierra, towns which broke out with the gold fever and have, in the decades since, fallen into oblivion, underpopulated by men whose fortunes did not pan out. The ad reads,

  Go west by stage, the vehicle of days gone by. The Purple Line takes you on a journey into the past and lets you see the country the way it used to be.

  Sarah thinks, this stage will suit my purposes perfectly. No one will ever find me on it.

  She has no misgivings at all about stealing her coach fare as well as some travelling expenses from her father. She sneaks something each day while he is trimming his beard. She books passage on the fourth of May, nineteen thirty, on the nine-thirty stage, under the name “Black.”

  “‘Black’ is our stage name, baby,” she says to Gloria. “Now and for always your name will be Black.” She tries a tickle. Her fingertips press into sound sleeper Gloria, but the solid little one hardly responds. She looks up at her mother serenely, with little sign of a healthy interest in social life. Six-months-old Gloria, the case in the basket, is a growing cause for her mother’s concern.

  All the possessions Sarah cared about, her lacy mail order lingerie, her volumes of poetry, her art books, the buck’s weaving, are lost to fire, the less of what she has left, the simple homespun clothing permitted a girl in the Shibbolite tradition, the better. When the day comes she is out of her father’s house before dawn in a dull grey cloth coat and matching sun bonnet carrying the light bag she packed for herself and her baby, fifteen pounds of dead weight in the wicker basket, bundled up in a plain brown wrapper.

  The stage depot is in a remote part of town. It takes Sarah twenty minutes to walk there. When she arrives at the station, she is surprised to find that they are the only two passengers, she and Gloria; the rest of what the stage carries is freight. On the roof, the boot and inside the coach itself there are boxes stencilled “men’s hand knit wool sweaters.” It does not bother her. She won’t have to explain herself to some nosy travelling companion. There is just enough room in the back of the coach between the boxes for her and the basket. She must inch one aside to squeeze in the carrying case now turned coach bed, and although she feels how heavy it is, she is too distraught to wonder how two cubic feet of wool could weigh so much. Sometimes Sarah feels like shaking Gloria to see if she might get a reaction, but she does not dare to. With all the bouncing around, oughtn’t the baby complain some?

  And then from Gloria, a good omen: for a moment she removes her thumb, softens her lucid stare and gives her mother a slight slip of the lip, a smile, or the shadow of it. It reminds Sarah of Corn Dog and gives her the boost she needs to be brave about going through with this journey. She longs for the safety of the Golden State, the intellectual climate she expects to find there, and yearns to see her love, the father of this chi
ld. “Someday,” she says to Gloria, “Mummy hopes we’ll get to laugh about this together.”

  And so they are on their way, westward ho, in an old bucket of bolts that bounces so much Sarah swears her kidneys will come loose. She holds on to Glory and her homely bonnet and bounces in her seat, bracing herself against the boxes of “sweaters.”

  A nineteen-year-old girl is so much more innocent than she thinks. This is the day of the passenger train and the automobile. People travel in airplanes. No one in her right mind would go by horse. The Purple Stage line is a front for a bootleg liquor operation. Most of what the coaches carry is illicit freight, spirits clearly and falsely marked as something else. The cartons that she and Gloria are crammed in with contain demon rum and whisky. In order to justify its existence to government agencies the line runs classified advertisements to the tourist trade in local papers billing itself as an inexpensive and charming way to travel, knowing in reality that practically nobody would want to see the west as wild as it used to be.

  In such turmoil about boarding the stage and leaving Zion, Sarah paid little attention to the driver. He is a hairy misformed man named Sam Hill. He decides instantly that a frightened looking young girl carrying an off-white baby is fair game for foul play. He would molest her himself except that as a drunken youth he sustained a grievous wound when a bullet he was firing in a barroom brawl backfired and took his manhood. He whips the horses in a way that upsets Sarah terribly, and she finds it loathsome that when he stops the stage every half hour to urinate, he does so in plain sight, merely turning his back to her.