"They spent the night in there?" asked Mick.
"Next morning she gave me the key and one bowl of oatmeal and two spoons. This time they were both back in the corner. They'd made themselves pillows and beds kind of, out of the rags in there, we kept the old rags in that closet. And my sister looked like she was afraid of getting hit, and it stunk real bad, because she'd done her poop in a shoebox, but what could she do, if Mom wouldn't let her out to use the toilet? I told Mom, and she just said, Empty it and put it back. I didn't want to, but you don't argue with Mom when she's like that."
"Gross," said Mick.
Scotty just stared. Mick knew it was because he messed his pants a couple of times lately, after the Christian Soldiers killed Mama and Daddy, and so talking about pooping in a shoebox kind of embarrassed him.
"I kept thinking, Mom's going to let them out pretty soon. I kept thinking that. But every morning I took them breakfast and emptied the shoebox and the mason jar we left in there for them to piss in. And every night I took them dinner on a plate. Sometimes I could hear them talking in there. Sometimes they played. That was all at first though. After a while it was always quiet, except when one of them was sick and coughed a lot. When the bulb burned out I told Mom but she just didn't say anything. I said, The bulb's out in the cedar closet, but she just looked at me like she'd never even heard of a cedar closet. I finally got my big brother to change the bulb while I watched the door so they couldn't get out. That first time—other times from then on he wouldn't do it, so I had to tie my little brother's hands and feet together so I could change the bulb. When I started first grade, I'd feed them and do the box in the morning before school, and take them dinner at night, just the same thing, day after day, week after week. Most of the time my brother and sister just sat there when I opened the door, not looking at me, just staring at each other or at nothing at all. But every now and then my brother would scream and run at me like he wanted to kill me, and I'd knock him down and slam the door and lock it. I was so mean to him and so angry and so scared that somebody would find out what I was doing to my own brother and sister, now I was keeping them locked in a closet. Nobody else in the family ever even saw them after my brother changed the light bulb that time. Mom didn't even make up the plates for them, I had to do it after everybody left the kitchen. When they grew out of their clothes, I tried to sneak some of the clothes I grew out of, but then Mom would say, What happened to those pants of yours, what happened to that blue shirt, and I'd say, They're in the cedar closet, and she'd look at me that way and say, Those are perfectly good clothes and if they don't fit you anymore we'll give them away to the poor. Can you believe that?"
"We used to give old clothes to Goodwill," said Scotty.
"They were naked in there, and their skin was white and they looked like ghosts, their eyes empty and never looking at me except when my brother screamed at me and ran at me, and every time I slammed the door and locked it, I wanted to kill them, I wanted to die, I hated it. I'd go to school and look around and I knew that I was the most evil person there, because I kept my little brother and sister naked locked up in a closet. Nobody even knew I had a little brother and sister. And I never told them. I never even walked up to a teacher and said, Miss Erbison, or Mrs. Ryan, or whoever, any of them, I could have said, I got me a little brother and sister at home that we've kept locked in the cedar closet since they was three and two years old. If I'd've done that, maybe my brother wouldn't have gone so crazy, maybe my sister wouldn't have forgotten how to walk, maybe they could've been saved in time, but I was so scared of what my mom would do, and I was too ashamed to tell anybody what a terrible person I was, they all thought I was an OK guy."
He stopped talking for a while.
"Didn't they ever get out?" asked Scotty.
"When I was in seventh grade. I did a report on Nazi Germany and the concentration camps. I read about the tortures they did. And I thought, That's me. I'm a Nazi. And I read about how all them Nazis, they all said, I was just following orders. Well that was me, just following orders. And then I read how after the war they put them on trial, all those Nazis, and they sentenced them to death for what they did, and then I knew I was right all along. I knew I deserved to die, and my mom and dad deserved to die, but my little brother and sister, they deserved to go free, they deserved to have a day of liberation. So one afternoon when my little brother got hate in his eyes and ran at me, I didn't knock him down. I stepped out of his way and let him run by me. He ran out of the closet and looked around, like he'd never seen the hall before, and I guess he never had, really, he never remembered it. And then he sat down on the top step and bumped his way down the stairs, like he always did when he was a little kid, and I realized that he'd forgotten how to go down stairs. And then all of a sudden I thought, he's going to go in the kitchen and Mom's going to see him and get mad. And I got scared, and I thought, I got to catch him and put him back, or Mom will kill me. So I started to chase down the stairs, but he didn't go into the kitchen, he ran right out the front door, stark naked, I never thought he'd do that, but what did he care about naked, he never wore clothes in seven years. He just ran down the street, screaming and screaming like a creature from space, and I ran after him. I would've called out to him, yelled for him to stop, but I couldn't."
"Why not?" asked Mick.
"I didn't remember his name." Brother Teague began to cry. "I couldn't even remember what his name was."
It was only then, with Brother Teague crying into his hands like a little baby, that Mick even noticed that Sister Monk and Brother Deaver had both come up sometime, they were both there listening, they probably heard the whole story. Sister Monk came over and knelt down by Brother Teague and gathered him into her arms and let him cry all over her dress. Brother Deaver bowed his head like he was praying, only silently. Scotty noticed that, too, and bowed his head, but then when nobody said a prayer he lifted his head and looked over to Mick.
Mick didn't know what to do, except that it was a terrible story, a terrible thing that happened to Brother Teague's crazy sister and brother. Mick never heard of anybody forgetting how to walk or climb down stairs, or forgetting his own brother's name. When he tried to imagine somebody locking Scotty into a closet and never letting him out, it made Mick so mad he wanted to kill them for doing that. But then he tried to imagine if it was his own mama who locked Scotty up, what then? What would he do then? His mama never would've done such a thing, but what if she did?
It was just too hard to figure out by himself. All he knew was that Brother Teague was crying like Mick never heard anybody cry before in his whole life. Finally he just had to reach over and take hold of Brother Teague's ankle, which was the only part of him that Mick could reach. Mick's hand was so small he couldn't even grab, it was like he was just pressing his hand against Brother Teague's leg.
"You shouldn't feel bad, Brother Teague," said Mick. "You're the one who let him out."
Brother Teague shook his head, still crying.
"I wish these kids hadn't heard that story," said Brother Deaver.
"Some things you can only tell to children," said Sister Monk. "It'll do them no harm."
Brother Teague pulled his face away from Sister Monk's dress. "I knew when you came. I was telling you. Isn't that how it's done in your testimonies?"
"That's right, Jamie," said Sister Monk. "That's how you do it."
"Now you see why I'll never be a worthy man, Mormon or not," said Brother Teague. "There's no place for me out west."
"It was your mama made you do it," said Mick.
"I was the one who pushed him back inside," said Brother Teague. His voice was awful. "I was the one who turned the key." Then he reached down inside his shirt and pulled up a key on a leather thong. A common ordinary door key. "This key," he said. "I had the key all along."
"But Brother Teague," said Mick, "you weren't eight years old yet when it all started. You weren't baptized yet. Don't you know Jesus doesn't blame children fo
r what they do before they're eight? I turn eight next week, and when I'm baptized I'll be like I was born all over again, pure and clean, isn't that right, Brother Deaver?"
Brother Deaver nodded. "Mm-hm," he said. He was crying now, too, though Mick couldn't figure why, seeing how it was Brother Deaver himself who interviewed him for baptism and taught him half this stuff right after testimony meeting today.
Scotty must have been getting bored now that the story was over. He got up and walked over to Brother Teague and poked him on the shoulder to get his attention. "Brother Teague," he said. "Brother Teague."
Brother Teague looked up just as Sister Monk said, "Leave him be, now, you hear?"
"What do you want, Scotty?" asked Brother Teague.
"Now that we're calling you Brother Teague, does that mean you're going west with us to Utah?"
Brother Teague didn't say anything. He just rubbed his eyes and then sat there with his face covered up. Sister Monk and Brother Deaver stayed with him, but Mick couldn't figure out what was going on anymore, and besides, he had to think about the story, and anyway he needed to take a leak and he couldn't do it in the woods unless he got a lot farther away from Sister Monk. So he took Scotty by the hand and led him off to a bunch of bushes higher up the hill.
The whole next week everybody ignored Mick and Scotty and the other kids. There was no school, just packing up and getting ready to go. On Saturday they went down to a deep slow place in the river and baptized Mick in his underwear, because he didn't have any white clothes except his shorts and t-shirt, and Brother Teague had to be baptized in his most faded boxers and a t-shirt he borrowed from Brother Cinn, because Brother Teague didn't have any white clothes at all. Brother Teague came out of the water shivering just as bad as Mick did.
"Water's cold, ain't it?" said Mick.
"Isn't it," said Sister Cinn.
"Damn cold," said Brother Teague.
Funny thing was, nobody so much as blinked that Brother Teague swore, right after his baptism, too. Mick couldn't say ain't, but Brother Teague could cuss. Which just goes to show you that kids just can't get away with anything, Mick figured.
"That's done it," said Brother Deaver. "You're one of us now."
"Guess so," said Brother Teague. He looked as goofy as a kindergartner, with his hair all wet and sticking out and that smile on his face.
"It's just a sneaky Mormon trick," said Brother Cinn. "Once you're baptized, we don't have to pay you for leading us anymore."
"I been paid," said Brother Teague.
Next morning they had a prayer meeting and headed off west toward Chattanooga. They only made it to somewhere between St. Louis and Kansas City that summer, what with getting arrested in Memphis and nearly lynched in Cape Girardeau. Winter was hard, so far north, but they made it, trading tales of how the Saints suffered through the deadly winter in Winter Quarters, Iowa, after getting driven out of Nauvoo. We're just following in their footsteps, living out their story.
The next summer, crossing the plains, all of Brother Teague's woodlore came to nothing. Trees got too sparse to hide in, so they had to learn to travel in the low places between the sweeping swells of the rolling prairie land. The mobbers of the plains didn't care much about highways either; they could come on you at any time. All the grown-ups learned how to shoot—it was worth wasting a few bullets now, said Brother Teague, to be sure they'd not be wasted if it came to a fight.
Never did see any mobbers. But there were signs of their passing. And one day they spotted a column of smoke a long ways off to the south, too thick and black to be a cookfire. "Somebody's getting burned out," said Brother Teague.
"Think we'd better hunker down and hide?" asked Brother Cinn.
"I think you best keep lookout while everybody waits here in this gully," said Brother Teague. "But I need to go see what's going on."
"Dangerous," said Sister Monk.
"No lie," said Brother Teague. "But we need to know which way the mobbers rode after they got done there."
"I'll go with you," said Brother Deaver. "There might be survivors. You might need help."
They came back in the evening. Brother Teague had a little boy perched on the horse behind him. "You can light up a cookfire," said Brother Teague. "They rode south."
Brother Deaver lifted the boy down off Brother Teague's horse. "Come on, son," he said. "You need to eat."
"What happened?" asked Sister Monk.
"No need talking about it now," said Brother Deaver. Plainly he meant no use talking about it in front of the boy.
At dinner Mick and Scotty sat on either side of the new boy. It was like he was a foreigner. He looked at the food like he'd never seen mush before. When they spoke to him he didn't even act like he heard them.
"You deaf?" asked Scotty. "Can't you hear me? You deaf?"
This time the boy shook his head just a little.
"He can hear!" shouted Scotty.
"Course he can hear," said Sister Monk, from off by the cookfire. "Don't go pestering him."
"Your folks get killed?" asked Mick.
The boy shrugged.
"Our folks did. Got shot down back in North Carolina couple years ago."
The boy shrugged again.
"What's your name?" asked Mick.
The boy went still, like a statue.
"You got a name, don't you?"
If he did, he never let on. After dinner Brother Teague gave the boy his own bedroll to sleep in. Boy didn't even say thanks. He was a strange one.
But strange or not, Brother Teague never let the new boy out of his sight the whole rest of the way. Always watching out for him, talking to him, pointing things out. Mick couldn't help but feel a stab of envy—Brother Teague was doing all the things he used to do with Mick, and here the new boy didn't even bother to answer. It was Scotty who cleared it up for Mick. "It's like Brother Teague got to talk to his little brother again," he said. It made sense to Mick, then, and so he didn't try to butt in, and it hardly bothered him at all to see the new boy perched on Brother Teague's horse with him all the time, or Brother Deaver's whenever Brother Teague was off scouting or doing something dangerous.
It wasn't two weeks later that outriders from Utah found them and led them the rest of the way home, with spare horses no less, so they could all ride. They made a wide circle around the ruins of Denver, but once they were up in the mountains it was Mormon country. "Didn't used to be," said Sister Monk. But it was Mormon country now, and the locals were glad enough about it, seeing how the Mormons brought law and order, and places without Mormons were dying or dead.
They ended up in a tent city called Zarahemla, which was going to be the new capital; Salt Lake City was mostly evacuated now, since the scientists said the Great Salt Lake was just getting started on flooding the valleys. Tina Monk took the children up to Temple Square for a picnic, so they'd get a look at what used to be the great Mormon city. "Now it's going to be the Mormon Sea," she told them. "But you remember what it was." There were sailboats on State Street, and the water was lapping at South Temple; Temple Square was still dry because of a levee of sandbags. People were crammed into Temple Square, looking at things, saying good-bye. The temple was a mountain of granite. It wasn't going anywhere, ever. But the basement levels were already flooded, and soon it would no longer be part of the life of the Church.
"Mankind was too wicked," Sister Monk told the children. "But maybe the Lord is just going to hide the temple from us for a while, until we're worthy to get it back."
The story of the Greensboro Massacre and their trek from North Carolina spread pretty quick. They met the new governor, Sam Monson, who just got elected under the new constitution of the State of Deseret. He was a young man, not all that much older than Brother Teague and a good sight younger than Brother Deaver. But he greeted them all with respect, promised jobs for the grown-ups, and kept his word.
What he couldn't do was keep them together. The orphan laws required kids with both parents dead and
no kin to be fostered with families that had both a mother and a father. There was an awful lot of orphans these days. Best they could do for Mick and Scotty was to foster them to the same home together.
Mick was sure that if Brother Teague had been a married man then, he would have adopted that new boy they found; as it was, it near broke Brother Teague's heart to turn him over to the authorities. But he couldn't argue. More than any of them, the new boy needed a family to take care of the boy day and night, something Brother Teague just couldn't do, especially since his new job was being an outrider, which meant finding folks heading toward Deseret and guiding them back safely. A good job for him, and he knew it, but it meant he was gone six weeks at a time.
It might have been they could've lost touch with each other; that's what happened with most companies. But being the sole company ever to come in from the Greensboro massacre, that gave them a story that bound them together. Tina Monk visited and wrote letters; Brother Deaver came every now and then and brought Mick and Scotty along with him when he was in town giving a faith-promoting talk in a nearby ward. The only one they lost track of was the new boy, him being with them only a couple of weeks, and never saying a word or even telling them his name. Mick felt bad about that sometimes, but it couldn't be helped. They'd helped him somewhat, as best they could, but he just wasn't one of them, just hadn't been through it all with them. There was no blame attached to losing touch with him. That's just the way of it—everybody doing his best, fitting in and helping others all he can.
Mick remembered that journey all the days of his life, as clear as if it happened yesterday, and whenever he saw Jamie Teague after that, like at Jamie's wedding with Marie Speaks, and once when they ran into each other at Conference, times like that they'd greet each other and laugh and tell folks that they were the very same age, they had the very same birthday. And it was true, too, because they were born again in ice cold water on that spring morning in the Appalachians.
Folk of the Fringe Page 8
