The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  Proponents of Zen say that there are two ways of attaining self-knowledge. One is called jiriki, which translates “self power;” the other is tariki, which translates “Other Power.” The medieval Scholastics used the terms “will” and “grace” to describe the same two principles. And Irwin’s great strength, his great source of happiness, was his love of living by tariki alone. Not only did he “consider the lilies of the field,” he behaved like one. He loved nothing better than to take absolutely no thought for the morrow, then to sit back and grin when the Good Lord’s grace took care of him anyhow. His athletic life, his religious life, his love life were all an undifferentiated series of heart-over-head impulses, one blind leap of faith after another. Blind leaping was his joy, it was what he’d always lived for. And his shoulder injury had suddenly made his life a marathon of the head and the will.

  He didn’t complain. It must have been terribly hard for him, but he never griped at all. What he did do, though, was start warning us. Every time a family member asked how he was doing, he’d say “Great,” but then add that he didn’t know how much longer he could keep it up. Everett and I always greeted these doubts with a barrage of Vietnam horror stories—which Irwin always listened to with a wonderful non sequitur of a smile. But in time I realized what this smile meant: he didn’t care how long he kept it up. He had no fear of failure, or of the draft. He adored Other Power, and trusted it to care for him even if he did end up in ’Nam. He even gave Everett an apoplectic fit once by remarking that “a guy like me just might be needed over there”!

  Fortunately, as far as the draft was concerned, Irwin would have his church behind him. A number of Adventist boys—our old buddy Augie Mosk among them—had dropped or fallen out of college and gotten themselves inducted. And say what you will about the church of my childhood, it stood by its kids when the Armed Forces came for them. Every young man I knew who’d applied for Conscientious Objector status through the SDAs had received it. And though they ended up working minimum-wage “philanthropic” jobs for two years, minimum wage was more than the Army paid its ’Nam grunts. Augie spent two years fixing busted toys for Goodwill. Another guy we knew supervised an assembly line of retarded people who put cellophane wrappers on eight-track stereo tapes. And though they both complained of boredom, there was no boot-camp brainwashing, no shooting, no Napalm or Vietcong. So if worse came to worst, I figured there was still no way Irwin would end up in ’Nam.

  And worse did come to worst. Irwin managed to keep his dual career as a scholar/drudge going from ’67 clear through the end of ’69. But shortly after Christmas he sent a little postcard that said nothing but

  DEAR FAMILY: REMEMBER THIS WELL: HER NAME IS LINDA!

  And somehow we recognized at once the ominousness of this message. He added nothing, elucidated nothing, and refused to speak when Mama and I phoned and Bet and Everett wrote to ask if he was in love. But in January 1970, when his mysterious Linda apparently left town for a few weeks to try to chase down some long-lost relative or other, Irwin suffered a total tariki takeover …

  Without consulting anyone he dropped out of school and moved into the attic of a big shambles of a farmhouse outside Eugene—a place collectively run by a bunch of woolly-brained, Jesus-praising “Crippies” (Everett’s term for Christian hippies). They called their little spread the Ark, after Noah’s, though it was landlocked, which was lucky, since they never could get their roof or toilet to stop leaking. The name Ark didn’t seem to do their animals much good either: the milk cow died from eating nails left lying in the bottom of the cedar feed trough they’d built her; six of the nine goats were wiped out in a single day when they were fed yew-tree trimmings; the chicken coop was raided by weasels just as often as the weasels could manage to get hungry; and after the cats all died of distemper and leukemia the cat-chasing dog, Apostle, got bored and took to chasing cars, as if he couldn’t wait to be the next entry in the Ark’s animal graveyard, which was already as big as the vegetable garden, and as edible, too, since the surviving three goats had eaten all the vegetables.

  But Irwin, once tariki took him over, considered the Ark the next-best thing to heaven. And after spending his last tuition check on a little Sears stereo, a bluegrass and gospel record collection (Linda’s favorites), a diamond engagement ring and a bunch of roofing and plumbing materials, he set about burying animals, plugging leaks and living like a field lily as he awaited his Linda’s return—and his draft board’s decree.

  5. Mecca

  The love of those things that are outside Christianity keeps me outside the Church.

  —Simone Weil

  One Saturday morning in 1969, our twelve-year-old sister Winifred far surpassed any church going insurrections her notorious brothers had ever taken part in when she not only prayed audibly to Allah and lectured on the Prophet, but bowed to Mecca on the Sabbath School floor. Her teacher, Mrs. Babcock, responded by hospitalizing Freddy with cartilage damage to her right ear. The reason for the blow up was not entirely clear from Freddy’s hysterical report, but after Mama and Bet drove over to discuss the matter with the Babcocks it became far less clear. Mrs. Babcock and Freddy agreed that the latter had called the former a “hair shirt,” a “stupid fat whale” and a “porkbrained sow,” that she had done so because Mrs. Babcock had lifted her off the floor by her ear, and that Freddy’s purpose on the floor had been to pray in the traditional Islamic manner. But all this was the grand finale. What they couldn’t agree on was everything that led up to it.

  By her own report, Mrs. Babcock had been endeavoring to instruct her “Early Teens” on the “very real danger of cults and false religions.” But according to Winifred—who, thanks to her correspondence with Peter, probably knew more about Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam than the entire Northwest Adventist clergy, let alone their wives—the “old cow was spraying manure all over the room and calling it Christianity.” Freddy said (in words very different from these) that she was just sitting there as usual, trying to bear Mrs. Babcock’s fatuous espousals with Gandhian patience, that she held up all right when Mrs. B. lumped Krishna, Buddha, Brigham Young, Karl Marx and the Pope together under the heading “Antichrists,” and that she even managed to bite her tongue while the entire Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic worlds were scraped up in the same shovel as Satanists, Moonies, Darwinists, Homosexuals “and of course Catholics,” then tossed onto a dungheap labeled “Cults.” But when Mrs. Babcock tried to add spice to her lecture by adding that “certain ex-members of this very church have fallen under Satan’s power,” when she winced piously at a poster of a big brown-haired idiotically grinning Caucasian football-player-type guy who was supposed to be Jesus, then betrayed her own husband’s confidences by looking straight at Winifred and huffing, “Some members of this very class have fallen under the influence of certain lost souls who have given their lives over to false Christs and Satanic cults!,” Freddy’s radiator blew.

  For a while no one knew it had blown, because Mrs. Babcock had said, “Let us close our lesson with a few heartfelt moments of prayer.” But these heartfelt moments usually began with a brief silence, followed by an extemporaneous chat between Mrs. Babcock and the Lord during which the former did all the latter’s thinking and talking for Him. On this day, however, the silence was pierced by a high, quavering, angry voice, singing: Bism’Lahi’r-Rahmani’r-Rahim …

  With great reluctance, Mrs. Babcock later admitted to Mama, Bet and the Elder that the voice had been Freddy’s. The reason for her reluctance was that the instant she heard it she’d gestured for silence and said, “Children! The Holy Spirit! Our Winifred has returned to us, and she’s speaking in tongues!”

  At which point the singing stopped, and Freddy laughed and said, “I am not! I was singing, ‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.’”

  Too flustered to be angry, Mrs. Babcock said, “It sounded very … pretty.”

  “Thank you,” Freddy replied. “It’s Arabic. My brother Peter taught it to me. But M
uhammad sang it first, and he got it straight from God.” And before Mrs. B. could recover, Freddy turned to the other kids and continued: “Muhammad was the Christ of the Muslims. And he was wonderful! He liked to ride camels and eat dates off of palm trees, and to make jokes, even at church. And when he’d bow down to pray he had this little granddaughter he let ride on his back.”

  When some of the kids appeared to enjoy this information, Mrs. Babcock gathered enough of herself together to shout that there would be no more talk of “Antichrists” in her church. Both parties agreed that Freddy then shouted back, “Muhammad’s no Antichrist and this isn’t your church!” But there was vehement disagreement on whether she added: “you big shit!” When, at the discussion, Beatrice told the Babcocks that she and Freddy never used the word “shit” because it was one of the words their brothers beat to death, one of the words they disparagingly called “Camas Boy Talk,” Mrs. Babcock had snapped, “They’re both lying!” And, in that instant, Mama lost all sympathy for her and began to quietly defend her daughters, though she had to defy the Elder (and more or less accuse Mrs. B. of calling herself a big shit) to do it.

  The mechanism of Mama’s sudden loss of sympathy fascinates me. Had the Babcocks told her that all six of her kids were now irredeemable cult-worshippers who’d end up writhing eternally in hell, I know she wouldn’t have batted an eye. Yet to hear her daughters accused of a simple lie was intolerable. “Ungodliness” in one’s offspring is, after all, a lofty-sounding but essentially incomprehensible condition that leads one to reflect upon the terrible powers of Satan and the still greater powers of God. Whereas bald-faced lying is a tacky little crime that implies one has simply blown it as a parent.

  Be that as it may, the rest of the Sabbath School episode had been straightforward crime and punishment. Mrs. Babcock had yelled “Silence!” Freddy had replied, “Okay. Just tell me which way’s east. I wanna bow to Mecca.” And when Mrs. Babcock did not divulge the requested information, Freddy dropped to the floor and started to pray in a direction she later realized was southwest—which she felt might explain why Allah didn’t protect her when Mrs. Babcock pounced, grabbed her ear, and yanked her so violently to her feet that she required minor surgery at Vancouver General Hospital later that day.

  When Papa and I joined Mama and the twins at the hospital and Papa set eyes on the bandaged ear, he turned his scariest kind of quiet, then said, “Sweetheart. I’m sorry I didn’t speak up sooner, but listen. Unless you want to, you never have to go to that damned church, or any other, again.”

  Turning at once to Mama, whose face showed no surprise, Freddy said, “I love you, Mama. And I love God too. But I really don’t like your church much. I’m sorry, but that’s just how I feel.”

  I thought this an amazingly diplomatic speech under the circumstances. I think Mama did too. I think she might have taken it well, if she’d had a chance. (She had already called up, fought, and defeated the Elder on the subject of who was going to pay the hospital bill.) But before she could respond to Freddy’s statement, Papa snapped, “Don’t worry about your mother, honey. She makes her own choices. Those Babcock idiots are just plain vicious.”

  And just like that, Mama was on fire. “To save a family like this one,” she said, “you’d just about have to be.”

  Papa blew his stack. “Goddammit, Laura! Use the brain God gave you! When some old rhino roughs your daughter up, it doesn’t save anybody!”

  Mama said nothing more. She was afraid the noise would hurt Freddy’s ear. But our dinner, back home a few hours later, consisted of boiled eggplant, burnt turbot and a bowl of half-raw baked potatoes. And after saying his usual grace, Papa looked at it, took just one bite, then slid his plate away. Smiling at Mama, he calmly, almost genially said, “The hell with this food, Laura. The hell with this cook-for-revenge strategy. Vengeance is the Lord’s, not yours. I will not be punished for that Babcock woman’s tiny brain and bad temper. And neither will my children.”

  With that he stood, marched down the hall to their bedroom, and dumbfounded us all by raiding the little blue ceramic jewelry box where Mama kept her Sabbath tithes and offerings. “You’re all invited out for hamburgers,” he said when he returned.

  Freddy and I grinned, and stood up to leave. Mama and Bet frowned, and stayed put. “Papa,” Bet said. “That money is God’s. Not yours.”

  “Then God’s buying,” Papa said.

  Freddy and I laughed. Bet said, “It’s not funny.”

  “Bet honey,” Papa said. “This money is your mother’s till she puts it in the offering plate. And then it becomes Babcock’s, not God’s. If God needed money, He’d make his own. And if He wanted ours, He’d just take it.”

  Freddy and I were laughing again, but Bet ignored us. “I’ll always go to church with you, Mama,” she said. “And so will Irwin.”

  It was an odd moment, a moment that needed to be dealt with delicately. Bet meant only to show her love and loyalty, but we were breaking into factions again, we were forming armies against our will. And Papa, this time, just couldn’t seem to care. “I suppose this is some sort of crisis,” he sighed. “And I suppose we should talk about it for hours. But sometimes a guy just wants to go eat a goddamned hamburger. For me, this is one of those times.” And he started for the door.

  Freddy and I looked from Bet, to the dismal food she’d begun mouthing, to Mama, who sat crimson-faced, staring at nothing. Then we looked at each other. And both felt ashamed. But her ear still hurt, and I was hungry: we went with Papa.

  6. Everett’s Finger Does the Walking

  The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately, or in the long run.

  —Henry David Thoreau

  Telephones are, without question, useful devices. But they are also, it seems to me, the verbal equivalent of houses without toilets. Telephones allow minds to communicate with minds (or tongues with ears, at least) in clarity or turmoil, in semisomnolence or drunkenness, in lust, joy, hysteria, stupefaction or any other state that fails to render a human physically incapable of holding up a quarter-pound chunk of perforated plastic—which is most every state there is. That telephones can connect us in seconds to any creature on earth foolhardy enough to lift its own chunk of plastic is wonderful. But it’s also terrible, given what a lot of people think and feel about each other. That’s why, until they’re equipped with some sort of flush or filter or waste-disposal system for the billions of words that ought not to be spoken, I’ll not trust the things.

  In 1969—thanks to the old dial-a-prayer projects that resulted in the manifestations of G. Q. Durham and Doc Franken—Everett had an idolatrous faith in telephones. In 1969 he also still hated Elder Babcock as much as he hated anybody, but his antiwar struggles had dispersed his hate over such a wide area that the Elder seldom entered his mind anymore. When Freddy wrote and told Everett what Mrs. Babcock had done to her ear, though, the Babcocks reentered his mind in a hurry. In fact he walked straight to his phone in a rabid-dog stagger, dialed directory assistance, then the Babcocks’ number, heard the Elder lift his quarter-pound chunk of plastic, and just that fast was engaged in a malediction match with the only man I know of leather-lunged and tenacious enough to rage as long and loudly as Everett himself.

  What Everett later recalled was not so much the verbal blows struck as the odd rhythm of the striking. He’d expected the two of them to blaze away simultaneously, like riot cops and students at a militant demonstration, but instead their fury had fallen into a pattern: one of them would suck down a lungful of air, blaze away for as long as it lasted, then pause to catch his breath while the other poured out a lungful of abuse. It was almost mannerly, Everett said, “like an old Napoleonic duel.”

  But when he got around to telling me what they’d actually said, I saw nothing duel-like about it. It reminded me more of a fight I’d once seen between two hoods at my high school—two notorious street-fighting toughs who hated each other so
much, but were so equally matched, that in the end they hadn’t the wit or energy to avoid a single punch: they just stood there, propped up by sheer kinetic hatred, taking gentlemanly, almost golferlike swings from the heels as they smashed each other’s faces into featureless pulp. Babcock’s initial thesis had been that “Everett Chance” and “Satan’s Minion” were virtually synonymous terms. Everett had countered by shouting that Adventism was just a quirky little nineteenth-century cult started by a barnstorming peabrain and a puritanical plagiarist, and that it had survived into this century only because of the segregated school system and financial empire built by money-sucking leeches like Babcock himself. The Elder then averred that Everett was possessed and unnatural, that he had sex with himself constantly and probably with animals and his brothers as well, and that his pimples, manners, beliefs, depraved writings and speech all proved this. Everett told the Elder that he underestimated himself terribly, and that thanks to his last visit to our house we brothers had repented, baptized each other in the upstairs tub, and enjoyed several hours of Christian group sex afterward. Babcock cried out that on the day Everett and all his brothers tumbled down into the Lake of Unquenchable Fire, he would praise and thank his Just Lord and Savior and weep copious tears of joy. “Better an eternity in that lake than a night in bed with your sow of a wife,” quoth Everett. “How about your sisters, boy?” Babcock shot back. “Have you laid your lascivious hands on them yet?” And so on and so forth. Obviously, the AT&T conversation-flushing phone-toilet was what the situation required.

  Everett and I had a telephone falling-out of our own when he bragged to me about getting in the last word. He said he’d shouted at Babcock that the kind of preacher who threatens others with hell is no different than any moron leather-jacketed greaser who shoves his middle finger in people’s faces and tells them “Fuck you!”—and Babcock, instead of answering, had hung up on him.