A Children's Bible

by Lydia Millet

  On the other hand, she was dead.

  Sukey hadn’t liked her mother either, as such, but this went way beyond.

  Others must have cleaned up afterward. All I saw was a red-soaked towel mounded in a bucket. Jen and I stayed with our little brothers, sitting and holding them. Juicy and Low came in once, looked, and left, slumping and kicking at straw as they went.

  Jack and I watched as the barn owl flew over us and perched on the open stall door above the mother’s body. It was covered in a white sheet from the cottage bed.

  The owl stayed. Keeping watch.

  For the first time since we’d come to the country I felt unsteady. I couldn’t tell if it was fear or confusion.

  “Evie,” said Jack. “Is she really dead?”

  “She is, Jack, I’m afraid,” I said. No way to sugarcoat it.

  “Why did she die, Evie?”

  “She lost a lot of blood, you see.”

  He started to cry, and I pulled him onto my lap and rocked back and forth. Half for him, half for me.

  I tried to calm myself by picturing everyday, organized systems: my room at home, chest of drawers, mirror, closet. The hangers in the closet, the sweaters folded in the drawers. I counted them and cataloged their different colors. I tried to remember how the periodic table went. They’d made us memorize it in chemistry, but that had been fall semester. Ages ago. 1 H: Hydrogen. 2 He: Helium. 3 Li: Lithium. 4 Be: Beryllium . . . then I drew a blank.

  So I ran through the list of irregular verbs and their conjugations that we’d had to memorize in French. I preferred French to chemistry.

  Être. Je suis. I am. Tu es. You are. Familiar form.

  SUKEY SAT BESIDE her dead mother all night holding the baby. When morning came the angels convinced her to bathe it, and they steered her out of the barn and into the cottage.

  I gave Jack and Shel a task to distract them: find the goats, make sure they were still around. We didn’t want to lose any, I said.

  Then I went to the mother’s car, parked at a hasty angle behind the ones we’d driven in, and popped the trunk. There was a bag of baby clothes, with a bottle and a packet of minuscule diapers. She’d had it all ready, I thought, and felt a wave fold over me.

  She’d wanted to care for her infant. And now she never would.

  Sukey dressed the baby in a cotton sleeper with feet attached.

  I tried to call her stepfather using the mother’s cell—Sukey nodded mechanically when I pointed to his name under Contacts—but there was no answer. Mailbox full.

  So we had two problems: how to feed the baby, and what to do with the mother’s body.

  One of the angels had a bag of powdered milk, but that would make the baby sick. Another angel—a biologist who’d been surveying birds along the trail and joined the others when the storm hit—warned against it.

  We didn’t have a mother, so we needed infant formula.

  Burl set off in a car to look for it. There was a gas station convenience store, he said, about five miles away. They might have some.

  David and Terry helped wrap the mother in a shroud made of sheets. The angels conferred in hushed tones in a corner of the barn, near an empty chicken coop.

  I snuck up and crouched behind a donkey to listen.

  “She’s just a kid,” I heard one whisper. “Trying to take care of a newborn, for Chrissake. We can’t put it on her.”

  “. . . a suggestion. And let her say yes.”

  “Or no.”

  “Burial here isn’t legal.”

  “That’s why I said fire.”

  “But burial can be undone. When things get back under control. Fire? Not so much.”

  “Maybe we wait?”

  “But that could be traumatic. You know. The decomp. Could be a lot of days before we go anywhere. Weeks, even.”

  “The father?”

  “Out of the picture. They can’t raise him.”

  “What if they need it for an autopsy?”

  “They’ve got bigger fish to fry. CNN said thousands.”

  Thousands of what?

  THEY SENT A delegation to Sukey. I followed. She was in the cottage bedroom sitting cross-legged on the bed, the baby in her arms.

  “In the Hindu tradition,” began the angel woman, who was white but had brown dreadlocks, “fire purifies and lets the soul escape the body. So they construct beautiful funeral pyres. They wrap the departed in white . . .”

  Sukey stared at her. And spoke. “She wasn’t a fucking Hindu.”

  “I didn’t mean—” started the angel.

  “But a pyre would be OK, I guess.”

  The rest of us had to collect firewood, since the pile beside the cottage wasn’t enough. It took us a while to find dry kindling. Rafe was in charge of building the pyre, and we did what he said.

  We were tired and sore by the time it was high enough. It was higher than our heads, on purpose. We didn’t want to have a close-up view.

  AS THE SUN went down the angels carried the long white bundle from the barn to the pyre on some planks and lifted it to the top. Their hands were shaky—I remember noticing that. I was afraid they’d drop it.

  While Rafe was lighting the kindling out came Sukey, still carrying the baby. Wouldn’t put her down. Her cheeks were streaked with the dirty tracks of tears, but she looked straight at the mother’s shroud and didn’t cry again.

  We had a couple of false starts: damp wood had gotten in. But in due time flames crept up. Rafe was anxious. He’d rigged a metal cage to organize the wood—the chicken coop stacked on top of a water trough—and he was worried about collapse. Every time a log or branch shifted I heard a sharp intake of breath.

  The angels were more or less hippies. Because of this, probably, they couldn’t help breaking into song. David had seen it coming, he said. Inevitable, agreed Terry.

  First was the woman, Darla. She sang all by herself in Latin. She told us she was “offering a tribute” she knew from her youth. She’d grown up Catholic, she said. But she had gotten spiritual since then.

  She had a high clear voice.

  “Ahhhhh-ve Mari-i-a,” she sang. “Grati-ia plena, Do-ominus tecum.”

  “The Lord is with thee,” translated Terry. “Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit—”

  Rafe dug an elbow into his ribs.

  When she finished singing, the others took it up. The next song was in English. It was a sixties song about seasons turning, laughing and weeping and peace, I swear it’s not too late. We wouldn’t have sung even if we’d known the song, which we didn’t. Except for Low.

  We listened. For a while it was embarrassing. But gradually it wasn’t.

  You could almost feel love for the mother, listening to the hippies sing. Or pity that passed for love.

  Or maybe was the same.

  THE ANGELS DIDN’T want Sukey to see bone fragments, so they collected the ashes in a paper bag. We dug a shallow grave in the far corner of the field and buried the bag there. Then we trooped back over the meadow and dispersed.

  Muscles aching from tiredness, I hauled myself up the ladder to put Jack to bed. Read him a book by flashlight. George and Martha Tons of Fun.

  He passed out right away. My boy was even more exhausted than I was.

  I sat beside his sleeping bag for a while listening to him breathe.

  THAT NIGHT I thought I’d never want to eat again, but the next morning I woke up hungry. David was hungry too, so he and I made our way to the kitchen early.

  Burl had gotten back with a box of infant formula and a package of diapers. He had a gash on his cheek, which Luca was dabbing with disinfectant. Darla stood at the counter and mixed formula with water.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Burl flinched as Luca poked with a cotton ball. “Lawless,” he said. “Lucky to get what I got.”

  “Lawless?” I asked.

  “I locked the front gate. You can still come in by foot, but not by car.”

  “We’re
closing in on the autumnal equinox,” said Darla. “Virgo and Leo are aligned. Did you all see the aurora?”

  We nodded.

  “Could be a major celestial event,” said Darla. “A message. Very meaningful.”

  “Charged particles,” said Burl. He sounded resigned. “Science. It’s not anomalous. The northern lights have been sighted before in these parts. Saw them myself. Four summers ago.”

  I went through the fridge and the cabinets, rifling. If we had to feed the angels, I estimated we had the makings for one, maybe two more regular meals.

  “Burl,” I said. “What about food?”

  “We’re OK there,” he said.

  “How do you figure? We have, like, three pounds of linguini.”

  “And stale assorted bagels,” said Darla.

  She pointed to the counter. Burl had brought those too.

  “I’ll show you later,” he said.

  Jen came out of the bedroom—she’d spent the night helping Sukey with the baby—and exclaimed in relief at the bottle of formula.

  “These diapers are too large,” said Darla, ripping open the bag. “They’re for eighteen-month-olds!”

  “Gimme a break,” said Burl. “They didn’t have the newborn size.”

  I unpacked bagels and cream cheese, then yelled from the front door. The rest of us thronged in.

  “Good to know they still have bagels in chaos,” said Rafe.

  “Goes to show. Jews are the chosen people,” said David.

  He stuffed an Everything in his mouth.

  I felt a twinge of envy. There was only one Everything.

  “Anti-Semite,” said Jen.

  “Well . . . I’m a Jew, though,” said David.

  “Self-hating,” said Jen.

  “I got them from a donut shop,” said Burl. “Door open. Windows smashed in.”

  I grabbed a couple of bagels and set out for the barn to find Jack. The little boys were sitting on a hay bale, writing in a notebook.

  Drawing near, I saw the open Bible—an illustration of loaves and fishes. The loaves looked a lot like baguettes, which I wondered if they’d eaten in ancient Judea.

  Also, the fish were smiling.

  “I brought you breakfast,” I said.

  “Thanks, Evie,” said Jack. Preoccupied.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Decoding,” he said.

  “You’re obsessed with that book,” I said. “Honestly. It worries me.”

  “Don’t worry, Evie,” he said, and signed something to Shel, who nodded. “Shel says don’t worry too.”

  “It’s tough times, isn’t it,” I said.

  I gave him a sideways hug before I went out again.

  IN THE COTTAGE kitchen Burl was being debriefed.

  “What you have out there,” he said, “is some folks pretty frightened. Some armed to the teeth. The road system’s useless. So as far as getting to your house in Westchester”—he looked at Juicy—“it’s no dice. Even if the roads were passable, we wouldn’t be able to fuel up. There was a run on gas. The pumps that aren’t dry are locked down by crazies. Saw a gas station with a yellow Jeep guarding the entrance. Guys holding rifles.”

  I gazed around. Dee looked frightened. Juice tore at a bagel with his teeth and stared at the floor, but his hands were unsteady. Rafe was attentive and thoughtful. Terry drummed his fingers on the table, anxious but not freaking out. Low’s face was settling into a determined expression, like maybe it was time to summon the vengeful spirit of the Khan.

  And Val—well, Val I could never read. She stood at Burl’s shoulder, patting the pockets of her cargo pants until she pulled out a pocketknife.

  Jen and Sukey were in the bedroom and hadn’t heard any of it.

  WHEN BURL LED us to the silo—Val and Rafe and me—we followed without speaking. In suspense.

  The silo door had some serious locks. A rubber flap with a high-tech keypad underneath. While Burl punched buttons and turned keys, I craned my neck and looked above. It wasn’t much from the outside—gray metal, with peeling white paint and patches of rust. Went up and up and up.

  Then he pushed open the door. Flicked on the lights.

  Stairs spiraled along the wall to the roof. There were shelves on the walls. And the place looked solid. Insulated, even. Leather armchairs and carpeting. Wires running up and down. A gun cabinet fronted in glass.

  Rafe whistled through his teeth.

  “We’re just here for the food,” said Burl.

  He directed us to carry dry goods from the shelves. We made two trips while he waited, carried eight boxes back to the cottage. The first thing to come out of my box was a ten-pound bag of rice. It looked like we’d be eating a lot of that. Plus beans, canned peaches, and peanut butter.

  “Go figure. You had a compound after all,” said Rafe, while we were unpacking.

  “Just a custodian,” said Burl. “I don’t have squat, personally.”

  I told Rafe I thought we should try calling 911 again for the parents, in case they couldn’t make a call.

  “Sure they can make a call. The house has a landline,” he said.

  “That’s cold,” I said.

  “May work. May not. Buried cables on the property,” said Burl. “But once they hit the road, they go up in the air. And a lot of those lines are down.”

  JEN’D GOTTEN RECEPTION in the hayloft before, so I sat up there on a bale and texted my parents: How are you? and How sick?

  Ready to dial 911 if needed.

  I got nothing.

  I gazed down as the biologist talked to Jack and Shel, gesturing. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, and I was looking at the tops of their heads, but after a while the boys walked to a cage and carried it out the double doors.

  Then another cage and a box, till all the animals were gone. Just the aquarium and the buckets remained.

  I climbed down the ladder and followed them. At the edge of the field, where a row of saplings separated the cottage garden from the pasture, the cages and boxes were lined up on the grass. The boys bent over each of them in turn.

  Rabbits hopped out and scampered off. Ditto a squirrel. An orange fox, its big triangle ears tinged narrowly in black, bolted and disappeared.

  The skunk box got carried farther out, and I waited nervously. But the boys trudged back across the field without incident, and the skunk’s puff of a tail waved lazily as it ambled into the brush.

  “How did you convince them?” I asked the biologist.

  He had smooth, olive skin. For an older guy, not totally disfigured.

  “I just showed them the animals were suffering.”

  We stood beside each other, me feeling awkward as the boys approached. I told him my name and he told me his. Mattie. It sounded like a girl’s name, I said.

  He said he got that a lot. He said it’d been his nickname when he was little, and he ended up keeping it.

  Jack’s face was serene when he came up to me.

  “Evie,” he said, solemn. “The storm passed. And there’s no plague here. So we had to set them free.”

  UP IN THE loft I sat at the edge of the hay door, dangling my legs off the side. The little boys made their way toward the stream that ran through the woods. Carrying fish containers.

  Ding, came a text alert.

  From my father.

  Dengue fever, the text said.

  I looked it up. A mosquito-borne tropical disease—

  I scrambled back down the ladder.

  Mattie was inspecting plants in the vegetable garden, turning over leaves and rubbing his thumb over their under­sides.

  “Come with me?” I said.

  We found Burl and Luca, Terry and Jen. A group of us settled around the white picnic table beside a birdbath.

  “It’s a tropical sickness,” I told them.

  “But we’re not in the tropics,” said Terry.

  “Sharp observation,” said Jen.

  “Diseases are migrating fast these days,” said Matti
e. “Look at the bats. White-nose syndrome. And Lyme.”

  “Maybe the diagnosis is incorrect,” said Luca.

  “But Terry’s mother’s a doctor,” I said.

  “She’s just a gynecologist,” said Jen.

  “Uh, yeah,” said Terry. “An MD. Not a cretin.”

  “The good news is, dengue fever’s not airborne,” said Luca. “And it’s a virus. So antibiotics aren’t called for.”

  “You need to find out how bad it is,” said Mattie. “Some of them may need transfusions.”

  “They’d be shit out of luck, then,” said Jen.

  “Not necessarily,” said Burl. “There’s decent medical equipment in the silo.”

  “I know how to transfuse,” said Luca.

  “I mean, do you have bags of blood in the silo too?” asked Terry, sarcastic.

  “No,” said Burl.

  “You’d supply the blood,” said Luca.

  “No!” said Terry. “No no no no no.”

  “It would depend which parents need it, of course. But probably some of you would match your parents’ types.”

  “We can’t even get there,” I said. “The bridge is out.”

  “We could walk the last mile,” said Burl. “We could take the van. But just one vehicle. And no more gas. It could be dangerous.”

  “We don’t even know if they need it,” protested Jen. “I mean. Is dengue fever serious?”

  I scrolled.

  “ ‘Most patients recover in two to seven days,’ ” I read.

  “See? No big deal,” said Terry. He sat back, satisfied.

  “ ‘However, some develop hemorrhagic fever, which can cause organ damage, bleeding under the skin, and death.’ ”

  “Huh,” said Terry.

  “Can you find out who’s sickest?” said Burl to me. “And how sick they are? If we go out there, it should only be to save lives.”

  “Everyone should text their parents,” said Mattie. “Cast a wide net. Ask those two questions. See what you get.”

  We went around the yard and into the barn, finding the others and telling them. I waved down Low and Juicy, riding their ATVs around in mindless circles. They drove across the field toward me at high speed. Their tires churned up dirt and rocks, and they stopped fast at the last second. Dickheads. Made me jump.