The Center of Everything

  Pastor Dave ducks to take the accordion strap from around his neck, setting it down on the sheet-covered table. It rolls over to one side, and he has to move quickly to catch it and push it away from the edge of the table so it doesn’t fall. “Well, if you didn’t see the actual speech, I’m sure you saw clips of it on the news. That speech has a lot of people angry. But I, for one, am glad to see somebody putting the ‘God’ back in ‘God Bless America.’”

  Everyone claps this time. “Amen,” Eileen says. “Amen.”

  Pastor Dave holds up a finger, just one, like he is testing to see which way the wind is blowing, even though we’re inside. “But a lot of people don’t feel this way. A lot of people are a little angry right now, because President Reagan had the guts to go ahead and call the Evil Empire what it is.” He shakes his head, stroking his mustache with one hand. “People don’t like that word anymore, it seems. ‘Evil.’” He pretends to shiver when he says this word. “They think it’s a little…harsh, even for the Soviet Union.” He shrugs, sticking his thin bottom lip out, like there is a possibility this might be true. “They say just because the Soviets are officially godless, officially anti-Christian, doesn’t mean they’re necessarily bad.”

  He pauses, looking around the room. “Are they right? Or, as the president says, is this Cold War really a struggle between good and evil, clear as daylight?”

  We are all quiet for a moment, like when a teacher asks the class a question and nobody knows the answer.

  “He’s right!” the man sitting next to me says. “Reagan’s right.”

  I think of Russia, cold and gray, people wearing dark coats and hats and never smiling, standing in long lines. I understand that they want to kill all of us, or at least make us wear dark coats and hats and stand in lines too. Eileen says they don’t care about anyone, the Russians, even their own children. They don’t care if they get blown up or not, because they don’t believe in God. Still, it’s sad to think that if there’s a nuclear war they’ll all go to hell. I would like to go over there, and tell them the way things really are so they won’t want to bomb us and take over anymore.

  “Well,” Pastor Dave says, “I won’t get too into politics here, but I imagine most of you are with me when I say I know there’s a struggle between good and evil going on here in the world, and when one country tries to follow God, and the other one says there isn’t one, it’s not too hard to see which side is which, is it?”

  The man next to me claps again, says, “That’s right.”

  “Amen,” someone says. “Amen.” I like this, how people can just yell out when they agree with something. I wish we could do it at school. I want to try saying it now, but I have never done it before, and I worry that I will look stupid. None of the other kids are doing it. I’m not sure if you have to be an adult to yell out “Amen” or not.

  Pastor Dave says he agrees with Ronald Reagan. You can’t do business with godless people, because they lie and they cheat, just like godless people in our own country. He says right here in America we’ve got people giving out birth control to teenage girls and telling teenage boys it’s A-OK to be homosexual, it’s A-OK to ignore the Ten Commandments and act as if there are only four or five. When he says this last part, he pounds his fist on the table, trying to look mad now, even mean. But he can’t. Even with the mustache, he looks like John Boy Walton. His voice isn’t loud enough to be scary.

  “It’s not A-OK, is it?” he asks.

  “No sir!” a woman yells. “No!”

  The disco ball turns slowly, reflecting circles of sunlight around the room. Pastor Dave looks up at it, then out the window. “What are we going to do about America today? Read the paper, and you might be able to confuse this once great, God-fearing nation with Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  Eileen makes a clicking sound with her tongue and nods.

  “Well, let me tell you something. If you-all think fire and brimstone was bad, that’s nothing, nothing, compared to what’s coming, when God comes down from the Heavens to separate the faithful from the sinners once and for all.”

  “Hallelujah,” someone says. “Praise be.”

  Pastor Dave closes his eyes and raises his baby blue arms above his head. “But the righteous should have no fear,” he says, the words rolling out of his mouth. “For the Good Lord knows what names are written in the book of followers, and they shall be flown on the wings of angels into everlasting peace, while all the rest will be damned by his terrible swift sword to everlasting contempt.”

  When Pastor Dave gets to this last part, he clasps his hands together and swings his arms quickly, the way you would swing a bat, or maybe a swift sword as well. I try to think about what it would really look like, all those angels coming down, God swinging a sword from over his shoulder, cutting off the heads of all the homosexuals and Russians, Jesus standing behind him with his hands over his eyes. My name’s in the book! I would yell, and God, still cutting off other people’s heads, would smile and say, I know, Evelyn, I know.

  Pastor Dave has taken the microphone off the DJ stand and clipped it to the front of his baby blue jacket. He’s free to walk around now, and he does, slowly, circling the folding chairs. We can always hear his voice because of the microphone, but we have to keep turning around to see where he is. He says Lot’s wife had her chance to get away from Sodom, but she went and turned around even when she’d been told not to. All she had to do was to keep walking and not look back at her friends and neighbors as they were getting rained on by fire, but then she did, and so she got changed into a pillar of salt.

  I have never seen salt in pillar form, and am not sure what it would look like. I don’t know if she was still shaped like herself, or if she just turned into a big pile of salt that you would never know used to be a person. It’s scary to think something like that could happen to you, just for not listening to directions.

  He moves to the center of the rink, directly under the disco ball, shaking his head. “All this insanity that you see in the papers, the declining moral values of today—this is all part of the prophecy. If you watch the news, you can see it all unraveling before you. Deadly wars are brewing in Lebanon. The children of Israel are back in their homeland, and the stage is set for the final scene.” He looks out the window again, at the cars on the highway.

  “But Lot survived the fire and brimstone,” he says, quiet again, almost whispering. “And Noah survived the flood. And just by being in this room, just by staying true to the Scripture, we’ve built ourselves an ark, haven’t we? Haven’t we?”

  “We have, Pastor. We have.”

  “Yes. We have. So you have nothing to fear. Scripture tells us that when the storm comes, only the faithful will be ushered through the wind and rain to live in perfect salvation. Like Noah, we will be chosen not to suffer, because we, in our lives, have chosen to live rightly.”

  Noah and the ark is a difficult story to imagine, all that water coming out of nowhere, then disappearing just as fast. Last year the Kaw River flooded its banks, and when the water finally went down, the news showed dead cows lying in muddy pastures, their stomachs bloated, flies buzzing around their heads. The people who had to move the cows were wearing handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths, and even the reporter kept one held up to his face when he wasn’t talking.

  It must have smelled like that when Noah’s flood went down too, but worse, because there would have been not just cows, but people too. Lots of them. Even with the rainbow in the sky, when Noah first came out of the ark and looked around, things would have been pretty gross.

  “Everybody else drowned?” I ask Eileen. We are in the car, going home. At the end of the service Pastor Dave gave me a Bible, green with gold letters. I hold it carefully in my lap, feeling its weight.

  She nods. “Everybody who wasn’t on the ark. But they got to bring two of each kind of animal. That’s why we still have animals today.”

  We pass a field along the highway where horses are grazing, three brown h
orses and one gray. There is grass inside the fence, but all four of them lean their long necks over it to get at the tall grass on the other side.

  “Only two horses?”

  “Yes. A boy horse and a girl horse, sweetie.”

  “Two of each kind?”

  She runs her tongue along the bad side of her mouth. “There weren’t as many different kinds of horses back then, I think. Only when people started breeding them.”

  “And polar bears?”

  She nods again. “Mm-hmm.” I’m not sure if she is listening. She is thinking about the baby.

  “Did they bring ice and snow for them so they wouldn’t get too hot?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Two dogs?”

  “Yep.”

  “All the different kinds? Saint Bernards? Poodles?”

  “Yes.”

  “They were in cages?”

  She pauses, just for a moment. “Yes.”

  “Things like tarantulas? Mice? Rats?”

  “Yes, honey. Two of everything, except the fish. The flood didn’t bother them one bit.”

  “Grasshoppers?”

  “Yes.”

  I squint, looking out the window. “Wouldn’t the tarantulas need to eat the grasshoppers? What would the tigers eat?”

  She scratches her head. “They probably brought extra of stuff like that.”

  I picture Noah walking around with his staff and sandals, trying to organize the whole mess, giving orders, ducks quacking, kangaroos jumping around.

  “How did Noah know which tarantulas were boys and which were girls?”

  Eileen lights a cigarette and rolls down her window. “God knew, honey.”

  “And all the other animals died?”

  “Mm-hmm.” She looks in the rearview mirror. “He had to show he meant business, give the world a good cleaning.” She takes one hand off the steering wheel and makes tiny scrubbing motions.

  My mother took me to see Black Beauty last year, and I cried during the part where the old horse is whipped because it can’t pull fast enough anymore. But the true stories are always the worst, and this one about Noah is really terrible, all the horses in the world getting killed except just the lucky two. I picture thousands of them trying to swim, frantic and kicking, the water rising up over their ears. I imagine myself standing next to Noah before the rain came, me wearing my normal clothes, looking at a field of horses, all of them staring up at me with their lovely horse eyes—old horses with swaybacks, skinny colts, the rain already starting to fall. Two, Evelyn, Noah would say. You can pick only two. But how could anyone pick just two out of so many? No matter which two I chose, I would be killing all the others. There would be no way to choose the best two because all horses are good.

  You would just have to close your eyes and point.

  And finally, doors would have to be shut, sealed off, even when the other people came knocking and then pounding, dogs, even puppies, scratching on the wood. Let us in! Let us in! But you would have had to just close your ears to them and not open the door. Because if you did, the ark would sink under the weight of everyone in the world, and there would be no one left at all.

  Mrs. Rowley stands in her doorway, Jackie O in her arms. “How’s the baby?” she asks.

  “He’s getting better,” I say. I am walking to the bus stop, but I stop and look at her, surprised that she wants to know. “They might let him come home pretty soon. But he’s still pretty sick. And my mom too.”

  Mrs. Rowley nods quickly, as if she understands more than I have told her. She has gotten thinner since Mr. Rowley left, the sash of her robe wrapped twice around her waist. The last time I talked to Travis, he told me that his father had a new girlfriend in West Virginia, and this woman, seven years younger than Mrs. Rowley, was sometimes in the pictures he sent to them of Kevin.

  She catches my eye then, looks right at me. “That’s what she gets,” she says quickly.

  I start to walk again and then stop, look back. “What?”

  “That’s what she gets.” She tightens the sash of her robe and goes back inside.

  They let my mother come home first, bringing her out to Eileen’s car in a wheelchair. When she sees me, she leans forward and holds me against her chest until I am able to pull away. The nurses had to cut her hair short, so the curls look like mistakes now, coiling out from her head in all different directions, only brown now, no more red.

  “I missed you,” she says, taking my hand. “Oh honey, I missed you so much.”

  I smile weakly, say nothing. Adultery, I think. I looked “adultery” up in my dictionary, after coming home from church. The broken bed was a warning. Adulteress. Not just a horse.

  Samuel comes home a few days later. He is still so small, and now two scars, pink lines, crisscross his chest. But he is beautiful, even so, lovely to look at because of his eyes. They are like blue stained glass, the light shining from somewhere behind. Already he has eyelashes, so thick and dark that they catch ahold of one another when he blinks.

  My mother keeps him close to her at all times, carrying him around the house in the crook of her arm. She sleeps with him next to her on her mattress, a stack of blankets around him so he can’t roll. When I try to touch his face, she pulls him away from me, her hand over his eyes. “Wash your hands first,” she says. “You have to be careful, Evelyn. We’re lucky he’s still with us. Very lucky.”

  Just by looking at him, you can see he is still sick. His left arm doesn’t unbend at all, and most of the fingers of his right hand stay curled beneath the palm. Just the one pointer finger, instead of curling under with the others, stays straight.

  “He’s like E.T.,” I say, leaning forward to touch the tip of his finger.

  My mother frowns, pushes my hand away. “What a nice thing to say, Evelyn.”

  So I leave them alone. I stay back in my bedroom, doing my homework, reading my green-and-gold Bible. I read a page a night, starting in the beginning, with the seven days and Adam and Eve and the subtle serpent. That story is also difficult to imagine, a snake talking like that. Animals talk in cartoons all the time, and sometimes in movies, but not in real life. Except for parrots. I would have liked to have lived when animals talked.

  In all of the stories, God likes some people, and he stays on their side. He likes Abel, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, and Moses. He doesn’t really like the other people as much, right from the start. He doesn’t like Egyptians at all.

  Pastor Dave made it sound like when Noah and all of them came out of the ark and saw the rainbow they were all happy forever, but it wasn’t like that. Noah got drunk and fell asleep the way Mr. Rowley used to do, only Noah was naked. One of his sons, Ham, saw him, and instead of Noah getting in trouble for lying around drunk and naked, Canaan gets in trouble, even though he wasn’t in the story in the first place, and he has to have a special mark on him and be a servant for the rest of his life, just because he’s Ham’s son.

  Really, it’s not important if you do bad things or good things. Some people are just blessed, and some aren’t.

  I keep reading, every night, and now I have already finished Genesis and Exodus and Leviticus. I am already up to Numbers, the part where God helps Moses kill all the Midianites. The Midianites are not blessed, so they have to die, even all the boys, even all the women Midianites who have already known a man by lying with him. This, I think, is a nice way of saying women who have had sex. Adulteresses. Moses says they have to die, but the other women get to stay alive.

  My mother knocks quickly and opens the door before I tell her to come in, Samuel quiet in her arms. She is still wearing the nightgown with the ketchup stain, although now it has faded.

  “You’re supposed to knock and wait,” I tell her. “It’s my room, not yours.”

  She clicks her tongue, using her free hand to point at the Bible in my lap. “What’s this?” she asks. “When did this start?”

  I take a deep breath, getting ready. In me I have the strength of the Lord, and
I fear no evil. “Pastor Dave gave it to me.”

  “Pastor Dave.” She keeps standing there.

  “Pastor Dave at the church Eileen took me to while you were in the hospital.”

  She nods slowly. “The church Eileen took you to while I was in the hospital.” She waits, maybe counting to ten in her head. “What church would that be, Evelyn?”

  “The Church of the Second Ark.”

  “Ahhhh.” She bites her lip. “The Second Ark.”

  “Are you going to repeat everything I say?”

  She moves Samuel to her other arm. “Everything I say?”

  I don’t smile back. I’m sick of her and her jokes. She thinks she’s funny, but really, there’s nothing for her to laugh at. “Just because you don’t go to church doesn’t mean I can’t.”

  Samuel starts to whimper, his cry high-pitched and shrill. She shifts him again, blowing lightly on his face. “Well, who’s going to drive you there? Because I can tell you, Evelyn, I’ve got a new little baby here, who’s still very sick, and I’ve got other things to do with my time than take you to the Church of the Second Ark. Super sorry.”

  “I’ve got a ride,” I say. It’s true. Pastor Dave’s wife, Sharon, gave me a hug at the end of the service and told me they would be happy to give me a ride to church. More than happy. They are going to come early, so Sharon can French-braid my hair.

  “Were you going to tell me about this?”

  “I’m telling you now.”

  She leans against the door frame. “Let me get this straight. I go away for three weeks, almost die in the hospital, come back home, and you’ve turned into a carbon fucking copy of my mother.”

  Evil. She is evil. Don’t turn back. I sigh and look down at my Bible. “Please don’t use that kind of language in front of me.”

  She starts to laugh, her hand over her eyes, then backs away, shutting the door between us.

  She is giving Samuel a bottle in the front room the next morning at eight-fifteen. I wait in my room until the last possible moment, but I have to go past her to get my coat.