But none of their reactions mattered much. They were too hungry in the end to care how the food got to their mouths. And within a week, they would be clubbing, skinning, and cooking cute, furry creatures themselves with about as much emotion as it once took to make fajitas in their own kitchens.
***
God hadn’t created us to be a bunch of wimps. He knew we had to be tough to survive on the Old Earth. And though of late, for the most part, we had cushioned ourselves in the luxuries of the modern world, we were instinctively survivors, and left to our own resources, we had the capacity to tackle great hardship. Still, we had limitations. Only by faith and the grace of God could men endure such great suffering.
***
If the Book of Revelation was our Tribulation playbook, the Book of Job was our survival guide. Job was no allegorical figure but flesh and blood, his story real. Job was righteous in the eyes of the Lord, his faith unmatched among men. But even the most righteous men were imperfect in God’s eyes, and Job, because of his great faith, was made an example.
Satan had been causing havoc all over the Earth to those who had turned from God, and he was bragging that he could turn any man from God if given the chance. Well, God knew better, of course, but talk was cheap, so He allowed Satan to do his worst and picked the best man for the job (I know).
Job never knew what hit him. Satan had a local band of miscreants raid his estates, murder his servants, and destroy his livestock. Then he sent a great wind to collapse his house, killing his sons and daughters. While Job grieved, Satan struck again, afflicting him with painful boils from head to toe.
Job, having lost nearly everything, miserable and heartbroken, questioned God, but he never lost faith. Even though he didn’t understand it one bit, he continued to trust that God knew what he was doing. And for this, he was rewarded with many more children and twice the riches.
***
So why did Job have to suffer? Why did any of us? I already figured out there was more goodness than evil in suffering, that it made the faithful stronger. But why did one man suffer while others seem to cruise through life? I was curious and looked up the answer at the Hall of Knowledge.
***
There was some truth to the expression, “Only the good die young.” If you were already destined for heaven, God would more often than not leave you to fate, and Satan wouldn’t bother protecting you either because to him you were a lost cause. But if you were a sinner with a shot at redemption, God would offer you protection but also challenges, to give you time and opportunity to turn things around, while Satan might protect you and feed you goodies to keep your pit opportunities available. So, if you were a sinner and life was going along too smoothly, and it continued that way, it usually meant there was little hope, that you were set in your ways, and unredeemable. Therefore, why would God or Satan waste their time? God already knew your unfortunate destiny, and Satan already had you in his grip.
None of us is blameless. The righteous were made to suffer to bring them even closer to God, to make them more glorious in God’s eyes, to show other men the power of faith. The rebellious were made to suffer to put the fear of God in them, and hopefully, bring them back to the fold. But the unrighteous, the completely lost, the names unwritten in the Book of Life, their lives were left to chance and might also perish without suffering.
***
Yeah, there’s a big old Book of Life. Yes, it has all the names of the people going to heaven written in it. It’s sitting right there in the middle of the Hall of Knowledge. It’s behind some pretty thick glass. It must weigh 300 pounds. No, you can’t look inside it yet, not for a thousand years, not until the final judgment, not while there are people to be saved.
***
For some odd reason, skeptics and Bible scoffers would have a field day with this. They’d ask rhetorically, “How is it free will if the names are already in the book, our destiny predetermined?”
This thinking is really stupid, but I’ll explain it anyway in simple terms. There was once a very popular movie about a boy who gets into what is arguably the ugliest sports car ever built, except this one has been converted into a time machine, so who cares. The boy travels to the future where he finds a sports almanac, which is then stolen by his nemesis. The nemesis guy also steals the car, taking the almanac to the past to hand it to his younger self in order to make a fortune gambling because the book lists the final scores to all future sporting matches.
So the rhetorical questions I have that should explain things for the naysayers and God-haters are these: did the existence of the sports almanac stop any of the sporting matches from being played? Did its existence change the outcome of any of those matches?
And one more question: would the almanac have any meaning if the matches had never been played?
***
We weren’t the only ones in the throes of a Job experience. There were groups such as ours all across the planet, made up of the stubborn remnants of the material world—people with enough good in them to deserve yet another chance, but not enough good sense to have taken it earlier.
***
I did wonder about the possibility that we had been brought together for some purpose. I looked around at my new guests for similarities that might validate my speculations. I could not find any. But I was looking in the wrong place. I was trying to find the faults we shared that might have led us to our purgatory in the mountains, when I should have been looking for the good in us.
***
It doesn’t matter. I could know all the things I didn’t know about them already. I could read their biographies at the Hall of Knowledge. I could find out where they went to school and what grades they received. I could find out how their parents treated them. I could look up their places of employment and the people they dated. I could know their habits and their hobbies. I could know their good deeds, and I could know their sins. I could find out exactly why we were there together. None of it matters. It only matters that we were there together, went through it together, and I knew them as they were then.
***
I missed waking up to the voices of the sisters after they were gone, but I can’t say I wasn’t more than a little perturbed at the incessant chatting and gossiping from dawn to sleep. If at all possible, Ida was the more talkative, but they fed off each other, nonetheless, and Eva could certainly hold her own.
Both sisters looked after us, happily cooking, catering, even cleaning up our messes—Eva giving us a smirk and a sideways, scolding eye to say you should know better, but we love you anyway. I was closer to Ida in the beginning because she wasn’t as serious as Eva, and I could get away with teasing her. This made her laugh, and I liked that about her. Plus, she could be funny herself, with her thin yet accurate observations of others, so I hung around the cooking area quite often, listening to their nonsense and giving Ida a bad time.
***
Beyond the chatter, the mothering, and a few other sisterly quirks, I would find out that Eva wasn’t much like her sister after all. It happened late one morning while I sat cleaning fish by the river. Eva walked past me along the bank with a bundle of clothes for washing. Seeing her only from behind and mistaking her for Ida, I threw a handful of guts in her direction. She knew straight away it had been meant for Ida because we didn’t have that kind of relationship.
She stopped and gave me the stink eye. “I’m not Ida.”
Still, I laughed. “Sorry, Eva.”
The laughing annoyed her even more, and she stomped off down river.
I dropped the fish, catching up to her as she placed the bundle of laundry on a large rock at the edge of the water. “Hey, wait a minute,” I said, “I’m really sorry. You know I wouldn’t have thrown that at you.”
She looked at me without saying anything for some time. When she did speak, it was like she was someone else entirely. Gone was the gossipy lilt that accompanied her sister in their duet of blather. She spoke solemnly. “That’s just it. Why does
everyone like Ida so much and not me?”
***
This was exactly why God’s job was so tough on the Old Earth, I thought. No matter the circumstance, people would essentially remain the same. Billions had disappeared, nuclear bombs had demolished cities, Satan ruled the world while his Minions hunted us, the earth shook on a daily basis, and the coming judgments of the Tribulation were a certainty. Yet, bless her heart, here she was, concerning herself with social matters, as if we were on a high school campus or someplace and not hiding from the end of the world.
***
But I shouldn’t have excluded myself from those examining thoughts. I wished nothing more than to be the big man on campus, with Danny as my sweetheart. Besides, I was wrong about Eva. In fact, I would come to find she was quantum leaps ahead of me in substance and heart.
***
“It’s not like that, Eva. You’re just different. She’s bubbly, easier to joke with is all,” I said.
“I know I’m not funny like her. I try to be, but I’m just not.”
“I’m full of fish. Give me a second.” I washed my bloody, smelly hands in the river and sat her down next to me on the same rock where her laundry rested.
Before all the madness in the world, I would have kept it light. And though I would never completely escape my tendencies toward avoidance on the Old Earth, at least with some reflection, it was easier in those dark times to be direct. “Why do you do it?” I said.
“Do what?”
I paused but I said it. “Pretend to be like her.”
She bawled then. I mean she really bawled. Tears poured down her face until I was worried I might have to get her sister or Danny. “Eva…hey…it’s all right…really…I didn’t mean anything,” I said, placing a smelly hand on her shoulder without thinking. But she didn’t seem to care. She just kept crying away.
I started to get up. “I’ll get Ida,” I said.
But she pulled me back down. She seemed to calm down after that. Still, I braced myself for the usual angry reaction to my attempts at consoling women. It was not to be.
“You’re right. It’s not me. I’m not at all like her. I just don’t remember who I am anymore,” she said. “I wasn’t always like this. It was just easier.”
“Easier?” I said.
“I wanted to forget…and I went to live with my sister. She was so happy. She had so many friends. I wanted to fit in with them.”
“What did you want to forget?”
She wiped the last tears from her face. “I know we seem like we’ve been attached at the hip since birth, but we lived apart for most of our lives…in another state….”
“No…can’t be…I don’t believe it…in a whole other state. It must have been a border state, where you could still hold hands or something.”
She smiled and punched me in the arm. “You’re not funny.”
I grinned like a proud four-year-old. “Sorry. Continue.”
“I was saying…I had a family. We lived in a little town called Quartzsite. And yes, it was a border town, but not to Idaho where my sister lived,” she said, smiling and hitting me in the arm again.
I just smiled back.
“It’s in Arizona,” she continued, “It’s a hot, hot place. In the summer it’d be like 115 on a good day. My husband and me—Lee was his name—we lived there for eight years. Lee wasn’t a horrible man, but he drank an awful lot.”
“That’ll put a chink in things.”
“It did. Believe it or not, I was a Bible thumper. Not just the church-going kind—but a diehard, door to door, Bible pusher.”
“No kidding?” I said, and picturing her knocking on doors to preach made me laugh a little for some reason.
“Stop. We had three boys together….” she paused and the tears came again.
She had never mentioned them, and the way she stopped, I already knew something bad must have happened to them before the Rapture. I felt like an idiot for laughing before. I put a fishy arm around her. “I’m sorry, Eva.”
She leaned into me and pushed her words through the pain, “They were beautiful boys….I named them after the Gospels…Matthew, Mark, Luke…”
“Good names,” I said.
“They were all a year apart. I pushed them out…one, two, three….” Eva smiled then, but just briefly. “Five, six, and seven years old….Lee wasn’t a horrible man, but the drinking….He worked hard. He was a contractor…a good one….I don’t know what we were doing in that awful place…hell on Earth….”
Except for the light rush of the river, it was fairly quiet. I thought it odd because morning in the forest always brought with it the steady jingle of birds and other small wildlife. Perhaps it was later than I realized; perhaps they had stopped to listen to Eva’s sad tale.
She continued. “I prayed for the man every day. I begged him to change his ways, to quit drinking, to go to church with me. He went to prison for what he did; I would have left him regardless….Maybe I nagged him too much….Maybe I prayed too much….Maybe I thought I was better than everyone else.”
Eva stopped crying altogether. I thought she might have run out of tears. She had a blank look about her, staring at something or nothing in the distance.
“What happened to your boys?”
She closed her eyes and tilted her head up until she felt the heat of the sun on her face, filtered through one end of the forest. “The sun…I despise the sun…I would rather be in dark rooms, gaggling with other women about nothing. I could stay in the cave all day, cooking and cleaning…sleeping…hiding.”
“They’re okay now, Eva. You’ll be with them soon,” I said.
“I don’t know, George…I’m afraid…my faith….I can’t get it back.”
“It’s not gone….” I sure liked propping up everyone else’s faith, while mine danced precariously on a tightrope of apathy.
“That stupid man…that stupid, stupid man,” she said.
“Tell me, Eva….”
“He wasn’t supposed to go anywhere….It was his day off. I didn’t let him take the boys without me. He drank beer from the moment he got up. I shouldn’t have left them alone, but I was out…spreading the Word,” she added abruptly, with not a little sarcasm, and directed at herself. “But Lee took them anyway….All the sudden he had to fix the toilet….Been bugging him about it for months, but all the sudden it can’t wait. He said he thought he was gonna be just a minute—that’s why he didn’t bother even to roll down the window a crack, or bring them into the hardware store with him. He said it wasn’t even that hot.”
The tears came hard again. “I’m sorry, Eva.”
“Only five, six, and seven…five, six, and seven….” she repeated, the painful chant.
“All of them?”
She didn’t speak.
“Don’t think about it, Eva. God took the boys quicker than you think. He didn’t let them suffer.” This was before I knew it was true, how the angels or Jesus would jump in to suffer for the little ones, but I said it anyway.
“Are you sure?” It was the first time she sounded hopeful.
I heard chirping and other sounds besides the water start up, or maybe I’d only imagined the silence. “I’m sure, Eva. I’m sure.”
I held her awhile and stayed to help her with the washing. We talked about the future, about seeing our children again. I carried my fish; she carried her clothes, and we walked back together. Halfway to the camp, Eva stopped and gave me a wide smile.
It made me smile. “What?” I asked.
“You smell,” she said.
I laughed. “See, you are funny.”
16
Eva and I were close after that, but whatever amount of time I spent with her or her sister, or even Danny, for that matter, was nothing compared to the time I spent with the boys. I couldn’t do without women, and I certainly didn’t want to, but it had always been easier for me to be with men, especially if we were involved together in an ordeal or adventure of some sort.
<
br /> ***
I mentioned before that man was built for hardship and suffering, but men, as opposed to most women, actually needed it. It’s true. Why did Thoreau write, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation….”? Not simply because the daily tedium of the forced grind initiates such a state in men, but because they long for something bigger, something monumental, a great adventure, a tragedy even, but maybe most of all, and terrible as it might be, war.
***
Some liberal thinkers would whine about war even when the cause was just. And true, war was bloody, horrible, frightening, sad, heartbreaking, and more often than not, pointless. But these whiners were often the guys who refused to fight in the first place. The average man, the average soldier, would rather be nowhere else than fighting side by side with and for his brothers in arms, leaving the causes and the blood on the hands of the tyrants and politicians.
***
These same liberals would invariably blame God for war, which was odd, considering most of them didn’t believe in God. God never wanted war. He wasn’t up in heaven like some insane child, moving people around like toy soldiers on a giant, ersatz battlefield. So why did He create men whose nature was to embrace it? Why, to fight the devil, of course.
***
The Illuminati understood this, and that it would be problematic for the Antichrist’s push toward one-world government, and actually developed an insidious program to slowly feminize men and subsequent generations so they would be less likely to fight back. No kidding, I couldn’t make this stuff up.
Now Howard might have argued with me about this because he considered himself to be a man’s man. And I didn’t disagree. He could be as tough as any of us. But I wasn’t referring to gay men. Gay men fought bravely and died just the same as heterosexuals. And many relished the opportunity to fight as well. Besides, there were also plenty of women who wanted to fight, and throughout history had proved themselves on battlefields.
No, the Illuminati agenda on this one was much more realistic than trying to make men gay. Their goal was to take the warrior out of men. They implemented their agenda by getting psychologists and the like to promote the coddling of boys to sickening levels, urging mothers and fathers to pamper them on par with their female siblings, to stilt competitiveness, to offer constant and unwarranted praise, and to end even mild physical punishment.
What the Hand: A Novel About the End of the World and Beyond Page 17