The Book of Fred

by Abby Bardi

  “A few. Like at breakfast. How there was sausage and stuff. And no fish.”

  “That was turkey sausage,” Mama said in kind of a weird voice. “The Book led us to the fish, but here in this fellowship, why, they eat the turkey.”

  “The turkey? How come?”

  “The turkey is a sacred bird,” Mama said, looking away. I couldn't believe she was letting me ask so many questions. “This place is a big turkey farm.”

  “Oh, those must have been the noises I heard.”

  “Noises?”

  “Last night, while I was trying to sleep. It must have been gobbling. I thought maybe it was ghosts or something.”

  “Now, Mary Fred,” Mama said, turning to me and absentmindedly smacking my hand, like she always had. We weren't supposed to believe in ghosts. “Anyhow,” she said, still holding on to my hand, “there are other differences.”

  “And the people here don't wear brown, do they?” I said, though Mama was still wearing brown, and so were some of the people we'd seen that I'd known from before. “They wear a lot of purple, don't they?”

  “Only certain ones,” Mama murmured. “But you're right about the brown.”

  “But we wear brown because of Fred Brown,” I said, starting to feel so confused that I forgot to trace an F and a B in theair. Mama didn't do it either. “How can people in our fellowship not wear brown?”

  “You see, Mary Fred,” Mama said, suddenly sounding a little-testy, like she was finally getting tired of my questions. “Here in this place, there are other prophets. Ours is not the only one. That's why the Reverend Thigpen is not our preacher. There is someone else now, and he's the one we follow. I need you to understand about that. Do you understand?”

  “Of course I do, Mama,” I said, but the fact was that I didn't, not at all.

  Mama seemed to relax a little. She smiled at me some, and touched my hair, catching a few strands that had fallen out of my ponytail and tucking them behind my ears. She stood up, so I stood up too, and we started walking. I didn't ask her where we were going. I didn't think I wanted to ask Mama any more questions—I would just see what happened, and try to travel hopefully in the One. I figured that whatever else happened here on earth, the One still had to be the same, at least I hoped so.

  We walked past the concrete building, along the dirt road and onto a path that led through some trees and up a hill. When we got to the top of it, we could see a white house, big as a mansion on TV, with six tall white pillars in front of it and a huge front door. I had never been in a house that size and I couldn't imagine who lived there, while everyone else was stuck in little cabins. I figured that if it was the big preacher, maybe he had a lot of relations.

  At the side of the front door was another man with a gun. I didn't like guns much—I had grown up with them, but ever since the one time I had shot a deer, they made me feel sick and frightened. Mama showed the man an ID card and explained who I was, and he let us in. Some more men with gunswere in the hallway as we entered, and yet another one stood at the foot of a long circular staircase. Mama and I went past him up the stairs and through some double doors into an enormous room with wood paneling on all the walls, and a bunch of mirrors, and dark purple curtains on all the windows. At the end of the room was a big purple chair, and a man was sitting in it like it was a throne. Mama took my hand and led me over to him.

  “This is my daughter, Mary Fred,” Mama said to him. She was smiling in this weird way I had never seen before, like we were on TV and she wasn't sure she was dressed right.

  I almost felt like I should curtsy, but I held out my hand in case he wanted to shake it. He stood up and I looked at him. He was a tall man with colorless hair that covered his head like fuzz. It was cut very short except for a long braid that hung over his left shoulder. He had round wire-rimmed glasses that made his eyes look big and blurry, and he was wearing a purple shirt with little red and gold stripes in it that made the fabric look like gift wrap, and blue jeans. He didn't have a scrap of brown on, and I wondered just what kind of preacher he could possibly be.

  “Mary Fred, this is Cyrus,” Mama said.

  Cyrus took my hand in his and held it for a moment, then put both arms around me and drew me close to him. As I was pressed against his chest, I could smell him, a combination of sweat and what must have been deodorant, even though no one I knew was supposed to wear chemical smells because they weren't natural. He held me tight, and I began to feel strange. I noticed that having his arms wrapped around me felt nice. It felt really nice. No man had ever held me close, unless you counted Papa, but Papa wouldn't have held me like that, not so tight and not in such a warm way, a way that made mefeel almost like I was burning. Things started to hurt inside me, not because he was squeezing too tight, although he was, but because they were shifting around somehow.

  Then, just as suddenly as this embrace had felt good, it began to feel suffocating, like my face was pressed so close against the shiny purple shirt and the hard chest inside it that I couldn't breathe, but then I realized that I couldn't breathe because of something else. All the hair on my arms and on the back of my neck began to stand up, like when you see a copperhead in the grass and you have to stay real still so it won't panic and strike you. I stopped breathing and just didn't move, as I waited for the whole thing to end.

  The man put his arms on my shoulders and held me away from him, looking me over. “Catherine,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “We're going to call you Catherine from now on.”

  “But my name—”

  “I sense that you're a Catherine.” He turned to Mama and said, “She's a beauty, Susan. Just like her mother.”

  Mama was no beauty, and she didn't look much like me, either, since I look just like Papa, and of course her name wasn't Susan, it was Ellen, but she got the weird face again and smiled at him shyly, like a girl.

  I thanked him and tried to step away, but he kept his hands on my shoulders. “We'll be seeing a lot of you up here, Catherine,” he said, smiling at me and rubbing my shoulder with his hand. “I understand you're still recovering from an injury.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All better now, though, I can see that.” He took his hand away from my shoulder and laid it across my abdomen, as if he knew right where it hurt and was going to fix it. His hand feltwarm, and once again I felt things moving around in me, things that made me feel uncomfortable.

  “It still hurts some,” I said.

  “Well, don't worry, Catherine, you've come to just the right place for healing.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, wanting him to take his hand away but at the same time, not wanting him to. Just as I felt I couldn't stand another second of it, he dropped both his hands and sat back down on his throne. We backed away from him, and Mama gave a little bow, so I did too. He said something weird then, something like “Bukulahara,” and Mama said it back to him, so I tried to do the same. Then we said a regular goodbye, and Mama led me away again. As we walked back down the hill through the trees, Mama said, “I think he liked you.” I couldn't tell if she was happy about that or not.

  We spent the whole day tidying up the cabin, sweeping it out and scrubbing everything, even the front stoop. We took breaks for lunch and dinner up at the cafeteria in the concrete building. Mama called it the Bunker. As we worked, we didn't talk much, but every so often I asked her a question, like how the Littles were. I could tell she didn't want to talk about them, but she said they were as well as could be expected, given that the Social Services had placed them with Lackers, even though our own people had been more than willing to take them. She said that we would get them back soon. I asked her how Papa was, but she didn't seem too eager to discuss him either. She said he had received a long sentence. I asked if we could go visit him and she said it wasn't allowed. I said I thought everyone was allowed to have visitors in jail, unless they were in solitary confinement (I knew this from TV, though I didn't tell her that), but she said Papa di
dn't want any visitors. I said, I thought you said it wasn't allowed, and shetold me not to get smart with her or she was going to use the discipline stick on me when I was well. So right then I got the idea that there was something funny about her and Papa, but I put it out of my mind.

  The next morning at 6A.M.,I started work in the cafeteria. Mama took me to meet a woman named Angela in the back office. When I first saw her, she was smoking a cigarette, and that really shocked me, since I thought only Lackers smoked. She stubbed it out when she saw us and handed me a plastic card with my name and a number typed on it. She had wrinkled gray hair that was trying to climb out of a little bun she had tied it in, and her cheeks were fat like a baby's. A purple scarf was tied around her neck in a big bow. “You'll be on the grill for a while,” she said. “Susan, will you take her and show her where to go?”

  Answering to the name “Susan” like it was her own, Mama led me down the hall to the kitchen and parked me in front of a big flat stove-like thing. “You'll be working with Jeff,” she said, pointing to a plump man in a white apron. “He'll tell you what to do. I'm over there prepping.” She gestured toward a long wooden counter on the other side of the room.

  Jeff, or whatever his name really was, seemed nice enough. He told me how to scrape the grill, and said that I didn't need to flip anything unless he was busy, that he would do all the cooking and I was there to act as his assistant. He said we needed to make sure that the grill was clean, that we had to put new grease on it, and that we had to be careful not to mix up the meat and the eggs too much because some people didn't like that. He told me that we always cooked turkey meat, not beef, and that it burned easily so I had to watch out for that. I told him I liked cooking and he said that this wasn't exactly cooking but that it was an important job, and I should be glad that everyone was trusting me to do it.

  After a while, another girl showed up. Jeff said her name was Sarah and that she was late. Sarah said she was sorry but that her alarm clock hadn't gone off. She looked like she was a few years older than me, maybe nineteen, and after a few days I found out that her alarm clock didn't work very well in general. Sarah was in charge of handing the food to Jeff for him to put on the grill, like they were in surgery and she was his nurse. By now it was nearly seven and people were already showing up on the line for breakfast, so we went into production. It was a mad rush, with Jeff flipping and Sarah handing and me scraping, but it went quickly and by the time breakfast was over, about ten or so, I felt kind of glad to have something that occupied my mind so totally, though my insides were hurting from standing for so long.

  “So you're one of the Fredians,” Sarah said when we were finished and were washing up in the women's bathroom. I could see her in the mirror. She had a round face with spotty red cheeks, and two of her side teeth were missing.

  “I guess so.”

  “Yeah, a bunch of your people showed up here a while back. I guess this place is a bit strange for you.”

  “I don't know. I mean, I haven't been here long enough to tell.”

  “Well, we do things different around here. I grew up in another church too and I can tell you right now, some things go on around here that will surprise you.”

  “Like what?”

  “You'll see.” Sarah dried her hands on her apron. The door opened and another woman came in and started washing her hands. “We can take an hour break now as long as we're back by eleven-fifteen to start lunch,” Sarah said, opening the door for me and walking with me out into the hall.

  I asked her what I should do for an hour and she said Ishould go home and take a nap, that was what she was going to do. We started walking and it turned out that her cabin was not too far past mine, so she walked me home. As we neared my cabin, she said, “Wait, are you that girl whose father is in jail?”

  “Maybe. I mean, there must be others.”

  “The one whose mother copped a plea and blamed everything on her husband?” Sarah's brown eyes bored into me hopefully, like she was just dying for details.

  “No, no, that's not us,” I said. I told her I'd see her later and I went into the cabin. I sat down in a hard chair in the front room and put my hands over my abdomen, which was hurting pretty bad now. I rocked back and forth for a little bit, though that didn't make it feel any better. It was like everything hurt from way deep inside. Mama came in just then and asked me how I had liked my first day of work and I said I had liked it just fine.

  For the next few days, Mama and I spent most of our time in the cafeteria, taking breaks between meals and then going back. We'd walk back and forth, not saying anything. There were still a lot of questions I wanted to ask her, but I didn't think it was a good idea. Often she seemed to be pondering something, maybe about Papa or the Littles, and when she got that sad, dreamy look on her face, I wanted to know what she was thinking about, but she never said anything that gave her thoughts away. Sometimes I felt surprised when I looked at her, because she looked so familiar to me, but she had started to have a face all her own, as if in the past she had been just my Mama but was now turning into a separate person. Her strangeness made me feel lost and nervous, like all the other new turns things were taking.

  I got so I knew every step of the path from our cabin to the Bunker. After that first day at work, I tried to avoid talking toSarah or anyone else, since if there was anything unpleasant to be said, I didn't want to hear it. Luckily, no one was very talkative. We all had our little jobs and we did them. There must have been seventy-five people in the kitchen, and it reminded me of how Fred and I used to watch ant colonies. We'd lie on the ground outside their hills and feed them crumbs of bread, and they would come out in lines and take the big heavy crumbs away like they knew exactly what to do, like they knew what do to every minute of their lives.

  On Sunday morning, I got up at the usual time and worked breakfast, but after that, it was time for church. Mama and I ran back home and put on our dresses. She was still wearing brown, and I felt relieved about that, since it was at least one thing that was the same as it had always been. Everything seemed so different that I had begun to feel jittery all the time, like the ground was going to disappear from beneath my feet as I walked.

  It was easy to figure out where the church was because everyone was heading there, streaming down the dirt roads like flocks of geese. Just beyond the Bunker was a big red brick building with a round stained glass window above the entrance, and as we neared the front door and the path narrowed, I felt bodies press against me on all sides. Being wedged between so many strangers reminded me of school, and how I used to think it was exciting to be around so many people and to wonder what the new day was going to bring. But having that feeling now just made me afraid, like a car might suddenly plow into me at any time. It didn't help that there were men standing on either side of the front door with great big machine guns in their hands.

  Mama led me to a pew as close to the pulpit as we could get. The place was packed. People were lined up on all sides of the room, and I was glad we had gotten to sit, since I was tiredout from being on my feet all week, and my innards still hurt some. We were probably ten or twelve pews back from the front row, which was empty, like the seats were being saved for someone. I wondered who, but then finally a dozen or so girls around my age or maybe a little older, all of them with big round stomachs sticking out in front of them, pushed their way to the front of the room and sat there.

  Then the choir at the side of the room began to sing. They had a little band accompanying them, with an electric guitar and some drums. I was expecting to hear one of the songs I knew, like “The Temple of the One,” but they were playing what sounded like the kind of music I used to hear at the bowling alley, and the choir sang something about seven angels with seven trumpets. When they sang the part about the trumpets, the guitarist took out a horn and started to blow. He didn't play very well, but it still sent shivers down my spine. As the trumpet sounded, Cyrus came out from behind a curtain on the side of the church, a
nd everyone started to shout things like “Praise the Lord” and “Amen.” I had never heard people shout in church before, though I had seen it on TV, and I started to feel strange, as strange as I had felt at the church Alice took me to.

  Cyrus walked to the front of the choir, in a long white robe with red and purple embroidery on the front. When he reached the pulpit, suddenly the band stopped and everyone hushed. He leaned into a microphone and said, “It's morning, my brethren.” It had gotten so quiet in the room that his voice was as startling as a gunshot.

  “It's morning,” everyone called back to him, like this was some kind of greeting.

  “My children,” he went on, his voice getting louder as he raised his arms in the air. “We have come to the end of time.The great controversy is about to end, and we will be anew in the world victorious. We have unlocked the secrets of Daniel, Isaiah, and Joe, and we are ready to begin the millennial order. Are you with me, hallelujah?” And everybody shouted some more.

  Cyrus started talking again, and some of the things he said sounded familiar to me. He talked for a while about the seven seals, and of course I knew all about them, though when I was little I had thought for a while that they were seals like the animal, which we had learned about from Mama. He talked about angels, hail, and locusts, things I had grown up hearing about, and I started to feel a little more at home. Then he said that no one had ever made it past the fifth seal, that even his great predecessors had not managed to crack the sixth one, but that we were on the verge of it. We knew when the earthquake would come—it would come on April 15, just as predicted through the ages. I listened to this feeling just a little bit sad about all the predictions I had heard in the past and how sure everyone had been about them. “The sun will be black as sackcloth, the full moon will be like blood, and the turkeys will cry out to the heavens,” Cyrus said, raising his arms again. I found myself hoping that for once someone would be right about something.