At the doorway, she stops. “Oh, Shelton! It’s beautiful. It’s so real!”
Together they each take one of Adam’s hands and walk him through the sweet scattered hay being munched by the remaining goats, a brittle-black nannie and her baby. The others have long been gone, some swapped for food to the Mexicans at the vegetable shed in Lake Park, a couple eaten by Kim and Shelton, when they were close to starving for meat.
“Baby Jesus,” says Kim, bending low over her childhood Cabbage Patch doll with brown string hair the shade of her own. “See Baby Jesus.”
“Desus,” Adam says and palms its peachy cloth face with a plump dimpled hand.
Baby Jesus is wrapped in a blue flannel blanket belonging to Kim’s first child Buck who vanished before Adam became her next first baby. She had laid the doll in an old wooden crate found in the shed. Mary and Joseph, kneeling to watch over the Christ-child, are straw-stuffed pillow cases with corded off heads, arms and legs to give them shape. They are draped in colorful striped rugs from Kim’s house, which she brought home the day she slipped away to get Buck’s clothes and shoes for Adam. She hadn’t even been sad. At last she knew where her baby and his daddy were.
Sometimes she thinks that she never loved Dan and Buck the way she loves Shelton and Adam. But she and Dan had been only physically joined, not spiritually like her and Shelton. They’ve never even had a formal ceremony; the Holy Spirit had knit them together and still does patching on a daily basis.
Adam refuses to go near Mary and Joseph and they do look scary, like ghosts or dough-people.
“Okay,” Shelton says. “Come here, buddy.” He sits cross-legged on the hay before the manger with Adam on his lap and Kim next to them, the morning sun flowing over them as Shelton tells the story of Christ’s first coming.
Before Shelton gets to the part about the shepherds seeing the star in the east and the angel appearing before them, Adam switches laps, staring up at the nail-heads of light like stars through the tin. Nuzzling a nipple from between the buttons of his mother’s old white shirt, he nurses till he falls asleep.
Shelton and Kim grow silent, listening to and watching the goats delicately munch hay while their son sleeps in Kim’s arms. His ringlets look like spun silk. Such a pretty child.
She whispers to Shelton, “I think he senses our fear of leaving this place. Maybe even our fear for him here.”
“Yeah,” Shelton whispers back. “Those screams this morning were a little bit too serious to suit me.”
According to the bible, Christians are supposed to expect persecution, like Christ, but Shelton and Kim hope to spare their son.
“Sis’ Shirley and her people have probably been quarreling about the Rapture in front of him.”
Fear is wearing down both of them.
“Is she going with us?”
“I think so.”
“Well, she’d better make up her mind; tomorrow morning we’ve got to go.” He stands up, brushing the hay from the seat of his worn jeans. “And no more grabbing and scaring Adam and running that mouth. I’ll have a talk with her.”
Chapter 16
But the next morning they don’t leave right away because John is coming to inspect the house and tow the truck, both bartered for supplies and gas for their trip east.
After breakfast, Kim sends Adam out in only a diaper to check on Baby Jesus and the goats. She doesn’t mention Mary and Joseph, because then he won’t go. Yes, he has been frightened by something or maybe it’s an accumulation of sensing Kim and Shelton’s fear and dread for so long. Night and day, their hands are on him; he even sleeps between them.
She peeps out the window over the kitchen sink, watching him climb up the fence and then drop to his bottom on the other side. It’s funny but it’s sad: he seldom cries when he’s hurt, only when he’s scared. He creeps up to the make-shift stable and stares into the dimness as he hangs to the door frame. Then he steps inside.
Out front, Dixie gives off a volley of barks when she hears John’s old white wrecker rumbling up the road. She has long given up on “Mama” coming home and understands that traffic along the road means trouble.
When common revelers, vandals and thieves come with their pistols and rifles, Shelton and Kim hide out in the woods behind the house with Adam and Dixie. The vandals and thieves do their damage and take what they want and then, most of the time, they are gone. The one thing of value really was the flat-screen TV but it was not a real loss to Kim and Shelton since they’ve had no electricity for a couple of years. The silent cell phones too have become a convenience of the past, like running water and the gas stove—they cook outside whatever they can scrap up to cook.
Slowly, they’d adjusted to washing clothes at the creek behind the house where their lives in microchip—sealed in an aluminum can to resist radar detection—had likely floated away to the sea by now. Kim thinks about the vanishing conveniences as something they would never have needed if they hadn’t known about them. She thinks about her first husband and son that way, too, and her parents and sister in Tennessee. If she’d never known them, she wouldn’t love and miss them.
Doing without is not really so new to her—though not on this level, even seeming so then. Five to ten years before her parents, and then she and Dan, struggled to hold on to vanishing money, stocks, and pension funds of every kind; loss of health insurance, along with everybody else not on the World Government’s get-it list.
Even those of late, who had received the “mark of the beast” on top of their right hands, and those before, like she and Shelton, with the loaded microchips, had to struggle to buy and sell and work.
Kim had graduated from University of Tennessee, in Chattanooga, with a Masters in Music and a minor in Childhood Education, but she’d had trouble landing a job, so had her classmates. Then when she finally found a job, it was over before her third paycheck. Her degrees, like Shelton’s, like their money and holdings, are paper, worthless, except for what they’ve managed to maintain in their brains—knowledge. Wisdom from experience and their bibles have become what are mainly of value, even from a practical point of view. They hardly think about their losses anymore. They think instead about their gains.
So, she can wash clothes by hand and hang them on a line in her back yard to dry, and she can love and enjoy only Shelton and Adam. Things change and they will change more.
Shelton is out front with John, hushing the dog.
Kim hears them talking and stomping across the front porch.
She goes into the hot, closed living room to greet John, who she’s never met before. To be on the safe side, Shelton has been going alone to John’s store for their needs. Knowing John is secretive about his shady business dealings, Shelton hadn’t been sure how he would take to Kim’s being in on his wheeling and dealing in undercover markets. Even when the other local stores are out of food and gas, John isn’t. But he won’t do business with just anybody, so they can’t take the risk. Shelton needs John and John needs Shelton, who he’s come to trust over the years.
John looks like a giant, to Kim, just as Shelton first described him to her: dark walled eyes and wet-black hair, white shirt and black pants that ride low under his broad belly.
Shelton, in cowboy boots and jeans, steps inside after John, closing the door in Dixie’s bothered face.
“No like dog,” John says, waving his hands. “Angels not come when dog in house.”
Apparently his English has improved.
“John,” Shelton says, “this is Kim, my wife.”
“She come back?”
“No. That was Elaine.”
“Kim new. Kim New.” He laughs and stares at her as if he’s just said something clever. Then his stare flashes to Shelton.
“Nice to meet you, John.” Kim sticks out her hand to shake but he only nods to her with his eyes rolled up under heavy lids.
Shelton speaks to Kim: “John’s come to check out the house and tow the truck.” He seems to be sayin
g this for John’s benefit rather than hers, to put him at ease about any suspicions she might have about him.
Shelton’s old pickup has been parked off the dirt road down a fire-break since the Monday after the Sunday of his and Kim’s melt-down and makeup.
Kim goes back into the kitchen to box up instant food from John’s store. No cooking, no mess, but sometimes she is starving for the real macaroni and cheese her mother used to make and freeze and serve anytime. She smiles at the coincidence as she places a box of instant macaroni in the cardboard box on the counter.
She’s never not-hungry, but she makes sure Adam is never hungry. This morning she had stale instant coffee with yellow canned milk; he had instant oatmeal, with mother’s milk.
She looks out the wide window over the sink and is satisfied seeing Adam petting the baby goat. Just don’t let the goat start shrieking, she thinks. Adam hates that shrill sound.
John steps amazingly light for such a large man, as if he’s afraid he’ll break the floor or tip over a lamp. Not that Kim and Shelton have lamps now; they’ve all been stolen or broken. But as with the TV and washer, they’re no loss without electricity.
“I’m going out to show John the stable,” Shelton says to Kim in the kitchen. “Do you mind bringing Dix in and putting her in the bedroom?”
“Angels no come with dog in house.”
Kim goes into the living room, opens the front door and Dixie trots inside, following Kim to the bedroom. “Stay, Dixie.”
She sits on the dusty floor and tilts her head, then starts whining as Kim closes the door.
From comparison studies on various religions, she recalls the Islamic belief that when you pray the angels won’t come if a dog has been in the room; and if a dog licks a Muslim he or she has to go out to the desert and bathe in sand.
She wonders if John might not want the house now with a dog having lived in it. Shelton believes that John attends Mosque mainly to draw customers to his store by appearing righteous. But if he doesn’t want the house now, will that mean they have to give back the stored gas and the spare tank full rigged beneath the Land Rover by Shelton and John? The spare tank will allow them to switch over without stopping when the main tank gets empty.
And what about the bartered, ratty, dirty-cleansed canned goods and crackers and bottled water? She recalls Shelton telling her about John pushing aside certain, suspicious cans while boxing up the supplies for them. He will sell them to somebody else, but not to his buddy Shelton.
Shelton says John has no fear of fire or extreme weather, such as the kind being experienced the world-over, only bad people and disease. Maybe that’s why he didn’t shake hands with her, Kim thinks. She shrugs her shoulders, something she seldom does anymore in place of speaking.
John believes that Abdul Selah will fix the weather soon and stop all the robbing and killing and maiming going on. Though lately, like everybody else, John is beginning to trust him less, to love him less.
Most people, especially former Americans and Europeans, fell out with Abdul Selah when he broke the peace treaty with Israel. Only a year after the European Union’s signed promise to protect Israel from its Arab neighbors, especially Iran, the promise had been revoked. Iran had amassed an army with Russia and tried to attack the Holy Land by sneaking into the mountains from the north where weather, panic and disease had stopped them.
So, why hadn’t Abdul Selah turned back the rain and wind, earthquakes and hail in the mountains? Shelton had asked John.
Kim had asked Shelton what the purpose of the attack on Israel had been. He said it was to take Israel’s land, to steal their money and holdings and to slaughter God’s chosen people.
But John, like other people with Arab connections, doesn’t share Shelton and Kim’s view of the Jewish nation of Israel being God’s chosen people as well as His literal land.
When John and Shelton walk up on the back porch, Kim steps out the battered screen door.
Adam is following with the Cabbage Patch Jesus dangling by one arm.
“He like the little Desus,” John says, walling his eyes and roaring a laugh.
“Had you ever seen the Christmas display before?” Kim asks.
Shelton surprises her by translating in mixed Arab-Indian and his own poor English, something he seldom does anymore since Kim convinced him that there’s nothing uppity about speaking properly. His sarcasm is completely gone and to Kim it seems that when he no longer needed the crutch of sarcasm, he no longer needed the red-neck tongue of his raising.
John is laughing, hugging the baby Jesus low to his belly as if to make Adam think he is going to crush or take the doll.
It is then that Kim notices the tiny blue print of a tattoo on his right hand, though she can’t make out what it says. Of course he would have what the bible calls the mark of the beast, in order to legally buy and sell, even dealing with the black-marketers on the side. He’d been one of those lined up around the courthouse square to receive the mark that Sunday afternoon, over three years ago, when Shelton and Kim had gone for a drive into Valdosta.
Adam is showing signs of primping up to cry.
“It’s okay, Adam,” Shelton says lows. “John wants to hold baby Jesus. He’s playing with you. He’ll give it back.”
John does, so quickly that Adam almost backs off the edge of the porch. John drops the doll and beats his chest with black-gray hair sprouting from the neck of his white shirt. “Mohammed! Mohammed! Way to Allah, Mohammed!”
Shelton picks up Adam’s Baby Jesus from the floor.
“I used to believe that too,” Kim says. “Along with every other religions’ notion about the way to God.” She is smiling but serious; these are facts. “I used to believe in the Buddha being...”
“Bah, Buddha!” John breaks in.
She doesn’t try to pick up that thread again. She will leave him her bible with the special section on comparisons of various religions, along with God’s living word and guides and her careful markings and annotations.
All publishing houses and book stores selling bibles or books by or about Christians had been closed since shortly after “so many people went missing,” to prevent further spread of religious superstitions—didn’t people the world over have enough to worry about with famine, disease, weather and war? You can still get bibles and such Online at banned books’ sites, but if you get caught you can go to prison. Church and Christian meetings have likewise been banned by Selah , who claims to be Jesus Christ, while beautifully blaspheming along with the world prophet, a student of Selah’s pastor before he sneaked into politics—the scriptural little horn that grows.
John makes Kim sad, recalling how she used to think of herself as too smart to accept the held beliefs of the Christian faith, more reasoning and intelligent. She had gone to church only because of Dan, to please him, though he knew about her “broader view” on religion. John’s Islamic beliefs, though voodoo-ish to her, are at least humble, not all about him.
Chapter 17
After John and Shelton leave to tow the truck to John’s store, Kim takes Adam and his Cabbage-Patch Jesus out to the Land Rover and starts to buckle him into Buck’s car seat. He begins to cry and stretch his body full length, struggling to get out.
“Okay,” she says, “but you’ll have to sit down like Mommy.”
He crawls up into the back seat for a few seconds, the doll in his lap, and then stands in the seat, swinging Baby Jesus by one arm.
Round two with the stubborn three-year-old.
Finally, she allows him to stand on the back floor behind her in the driver’s seat. It’s not that far to town, she reasons, and she’s coming right back. She is just going to her house in Valdosta to pick up some more of her things to take with them.
The sun overhead shines weakly through the dust and diffusing smoke of a distant fire. Oncoming automobiles have their headlights switched on, reminding Kim to switch hers on.
Almost to the city limits, she sees in the rea
rview a black police car tailgating her. “Uh oh, Adam. Now we’re in trouble.” She tries to make light of it but heat radiates from the insides of her fingers throughout her whole body.
He is standing on the hump in the middle of the floor, leaning between the two front seats and dandling the doll on her shoulder. He turns his blue-eyed gaze on her when she says that.
She wonders if it’s still a violation to let children ride without car seats. She thinks it’s possible that that law has been done away with since all children up to a certain age went missing; nobody knows what age or whether the children were lost in earthquakes, floods, and other weather catastrophes at the time. Then when she sees the blue light bar flickering end to end on the police car, she hopes the car seat violation is all she’ll be in trouble for. The star-scar on top of her right hand on the steering wheel looks suddenly huge, seems to span her entire hand. Add to that the fact that she is shaking so that she can hardly pull over to the side of the highway.
A sporty silver car in the southbound lane zips past and she hopes the officer—a large woman with cooped brown hair--will forget her and go after the speeding driver.
No. Her door opens and she steps out, black patent cap far above the car—that’s how tall she is—walking slowly with a sort of swagger toward the Land Rover.
“Adam, here.” Kim pitches the doll in the back seat. “Go sit with Baby Jesus.”
“Desus,” he says and dives for the doll, then takes his place on the hump again.
The doll is dancing down her right shoulder to her arm when Kim buzzes the window down, staring into the sharp plain face of the officer holding out a black RFID resembling a chrome miniature metal detector.
“Hand, please,” she says in a low crusty voice.
“Move the Baby Jesus, Adam.”
“Desus,” he says and pulls the doll back, and blessedly sits down in the seat with his plump legs sticking straight out from his khaki shorts.
“Hand, please.”
“I know I should have made him stay in his seat but...”
“I need to check your hand, ma’am.” The officer’s close-set dark eyes are fixed on Kim’s right hand on the steering wheel, on the knife-etched star.
“It got infected and I had to remove it.”