by Brian Meehl
I was looking for an earthly sign of who had sent it when I noticed a ribbon bookmarker. I opened the Bible to the marked page. It was the book of Joel. There was a verse highlighted in yellow.
Mom sucked in a gasp. “Two, twenty-eight,” she whispered. “Praise Jesus.”
I got a weird feeling. It was like someone knew about her finger-pointing providence checks and had done one for me.
“Go ahead.” She nodded at the yellowed verse. “Read it.”
“… and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.”
“It’s more than a sign, it’s a prophecy!” she exclaimed. She was so exalted I thought she was going to bust out in tongues. She went on about how the passage was an Old Testament prediction about the coming of Christ. But now, God had dropped a Bible in my lap marked with that verse, and that confirmed what she’d said the night before about her purpose: to raise me up as a child of promise and a man of the Book.
Until I figured out who had sent the Bible I didn’t want to rain on her exaltation parade. She was so juiced she began to overheat. She fanned her face with a hand, then went inside to fetch two glasses of ice water.
I stared at the “miracle.” I lifted it by the spine and flapped it. Nothing fell out. Except a feeling. Not a gut feeling, a finger feeling. The back cover was stiff, like something was inside the leather. I spread the back cover open. Near the binding, the leather was slit. Something was tucked inside.
I dug my fingers in and pulled the thing out. I stared at a silver disc in a paper sleeve. A DVD. I turned it over. Staring up at me, in the same shaky handwriting as on the brown wrapper, was:
To CWA,
For your eyes only.
From your father,
RA
My heart stopped; my breath stopped; the world stopped.
The clink of ice came from inside the house.
I jammed the DVD back inside the cover a second before Mom opened the screen door.
9
Resurrection
Mom handed me a glass of cold water. I bit my lip to stop myself from asking if my father could still be alive. If I did, she might make a connection to the fifty-dollar Bible.
I listened to her go on about how God had spoken, and how things were going to be so different in Independence that we might never move again. I thought I was going to explode from not being able to jump up, go find a DVD player, and see what was on the disc making my head spin with questions. Was it a fake? Some kind of joke? Was it him? If it was, what did he really look like?
After what felt like hours, Mom calmed down enough for me to say I wanted to go to the library to check out some books for camp. I went inside, grabbed my sneaks, slipped the DVD from its hiding place, and shoved it in my cargo-shorts pocket. As soon as I got out of sight, I started running. I didn’t stop till I reached the library I’d spotted earlier.
The man at the information desk told me I had to do two things before I could use a computer: get a library card and stop sweating. I spent another five minutes of torture filling out a form.
I got my card and convinced the info man I was done sweating. He took me to a computer. He handed me a box of tissues and told me to clean the headphones when I was done. I threw on the headphones and tried to feed the DVD into the slot. My hand shook so much it took several tries before the slot grabbed the disc and gorped it.
The screen started all black, then words came up: FOR CHARLES WILLIAM ALLBRIGHT. A picture blipped up. An old man stared out at me. He was in a bed, propped up on pillows. One hand, wrapped in tape, dropped to his lap. At first the hand looked bandaged, but it was a remote control taped to his palm. There was no guessing his age because he looked so sick. His gray skin hung on his head like a wrinkled sock. His longish white hair fanned back against a pillow. This can’t be my father, I thought, it’s Methuselah. I’d seen my dad countless times in the mirror, but the mirror door had swung open and a ghost was staring out at me. I wanted to shut that door, pretend it was a dream. I couldn’t. The ghost had me hypnotized.
He blinked, real slow. His dark blue eyes disappeared, then reappeared. His mouth cracked open. “Hello, Billy. I know I’m not much to look at.” His voice was stronger than he looked. And it sounded like his tongue was shoveling sand along with his words. He sucked in a raspy breath. “Nevertheless, to quote Darth Vader, ‘I am your father.’ ”
The last word shot a bolt of pain through my chest, like there was an invisible arrow sticking in my heart that he’d reached out and batted. Part of me wanted him to bat it again. He was my father, back from the dead!
His wrinkled face bunched into a smile or a grimace, I couldn’t tell which. “I suppose it’s rude and presumptuous quoting Darth Vader when your mother has probably shielded you from the corruption of popular culture. But that’s me, rude and presumptuous Richard Allbright.” The more he spoke, the more the life in his eyes spread into his face.
“Maybe you’re wondering how I ascertained that you’re called Billy, and that you’ve been raised as a God-fearing, Bible-thumping, Christo-terrorist. Well, I’ve been keeping my eye on you and Tilda for some time.”
His head slowly turned. His hand, the one with the remote, lifted and reached offscreen. I stared at his profile. Under the wrinkled curtain of skin, his nose was just like mine: a big beak. My stomach ballooned like I’d whoop-de-dooed over a hill. Before I could find the next piece of him that was me, he pulled something across the screen.
It took me a second to recognize what it was: a white board with a map of America’s middle. Pushpins poked from the map in all the places me and Mom had lived. Colored string zigzagged between the pins. It was the zigzag path of my life with Mom. “I’ve kept track of you by Googling Tilda’s name,” he said. He sounded so close in my headphones. “I’ve read the entertaining accounts of your exploits in police blotters and local newspapers.”
He pulled the board away and stared at me again. “Your mother’s Christian zeal is why I’ve come to you tucked inside the Good Book. The Bible is my Trojan horse.”
He swallowed as slow as he blinked. “But why, you may be wondering, has your ancient, deadbeat father suddenly materialized? First the bad news. By the time you see this I will have unmaterialized. I will be dead.”
“No!” For a second I couldn’t understand why he didn’t hear me.
He kept going. “I may sound like I’ve got some time, but I assure you my hour upon the stage is up. If it wasn’t, I’d—” His hand waved the thought away. “Enough of that. To the news that isn’t bad. I’ll let you decide how good it is. It comes in two parts. The unvarnished truth about the past. And a possible truth about your future.”
He took another raspy breath. “I don’t know what Tilda has told you about your birth. Here’s what I know. We met on a Mississippi riverboat. She was there to get gamblers to bet on Christ. I was there taking part in a conference on Mark Twain and giving a talk on one of his books. That’s who I was, and still am: an expert on Twain, and a professional collector and trader of all things Twain. I’ve sold everything from first editions of his books to a strand of his hair I found in his dictionary. I call myself a Twainiac.”
I was in a trance, hanging on his every word.
“Your mother, the beautiful Tilda Hayes, wandered into my talk. We spoke afterward and fell in love. I don’t know why a Twainiac and a Bible-thumper fell for each other, but we did. Maybe it was Twain playing a joke on me from the grave, or God playing a joke on both of us. In any case, our undying love lived long enough for me to come to Jesus and for you to be conceived in a reckless moment of passion. Then the trouble began. As you grew inside Tilda, the life-in-Christ growing in me miscarried. The unbeliever I’d been before meeting your mother was born again. I kept offering to marry her, but she refused to wed a man who hopscotched from sin to salvation and back to sin again. For her, there was only one explanation for her dire circumstance. I had been sent
by Satan to tempt her and she had failed God. When she was four months pregnant she disappeared without a trace. The only thing she took was my name.”
The throbbing pain in my chest was back again, worse. Now he was grabbing the arrow and twisting it. He was calling me a bastard. I wanted to rip the pain from my chest and plunge it into him. But I couldn’t even talk back to him.
He sucked in another breath. “For years I didn’t know what had happened to Tilda, or to my child. After I found you on the Internet, I wrote letters to you. I suspect she intercepted them, because I’ve never heard back. Perhaps she has intercepted this. I even showed up at some of the places you lived, hoping to see you. But you had always moved on by the time I got there.”
I wondered if he was telling the truth. I wondered how hard he’d really looked for me. The answer I got was a twisted smile. He went on. “I don’t have the strength to dwell on past failures. I want to talk about your future. I have something for you. Your inheritance. Like me, it doesn’t look like much. It’s only a book.” His white eyebrows lifted. “I call it the ‘bad book.’ Of all the things I’ve held in my hands that Mark Twain once held in his, the bad book is the most valuable of all.”
I had no clue what he was talking about, but as he spoke his craggy face filled with life. His gray skin shaded pink. His cheeks seemed less sunken. He began to look like the Reverend Richard Allbright I’d always seen in the mirror.
He pushed his head off the pillow. A strand of white hair slipped to his shoulder. “The world has never seen the brilliant story Twain feverishly scribbled in the bad book. It’s the sequel to his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. For scholars, the story is priceless. For collectors, it’s worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. For me, it’s the only thing I’ll ever give to my son”—his eyes shut, he leaned back into the pillow—“Charles William Allbright.”
I didn’t care about some book. I didn’t care about the money. I only heard the echo of his words—“my son.” I wanted to hate him for never finding me, for never being my father. I couldn’t. How could I hate a man who’d pushed open the mirror, like a lid on a coffin, and uttered my name? He was my Rip van Winkle sleeping all this time. He was my father.
His eyes opened again. “Here’s the problem. I can’t send you the bad book. If your mother saw it, she’d say it was written by the devil and destroy it. If I could, I’d bring it to you myself. I can’t. You have to fetch it, by yourself. And because I fear Tilda might be watching this, finding the book won’t be easy. It will be a treasure hunt.” He swallowed and went on. “Your first clue is a riddle. Here it is: Where do you find the book of Genesis and human conception?”
I listened to a breath rattle through him.
“If and when you begin your hunt, here’s my advice. Be like Huck Finn. Huck said, ‘I don’t take no stock in dead people.’ In other words, Billy, don’t take no stock in invisible fathers. Only take stock in what fathers leave behind.”
He blinked in slow motion. His eyes were wet and shiny. “Before I fade to black—I have no right to say this, but I will because I never had the chance. I love you. Then, now, forevermore.”
He lifted his other arm from under the covers. There was a tube sticking out of it, snaking offscreen. His hand with the remote reached for a knob on the tube. I suddenly realized what he was about to do.
“Don’t!” I heard my voice shout outside the headphones.
His quavering fingers turned the knob. He looked at me; his voice scratched in my ears. “I pray to all the gods, let his adventure begin with my end.” His finger moved onto the remote. The picture went black.
What I remember after that was like a foggy dream. The info man was at my side, acting like something was wrong. He pushed the box of tissues toward me. I knocked it out of his hand, or maybe he dropped it. I shouted that I wanted my DVD back. He must’ve given it to me. Running out of the library, I felt it burning in my hand.
10
Wicked Hearts
As I ran I couldn’t tell where my tears left off and my sweat began. All I felt was rage. I hated my father for dying, hated my mother for living, and hated God for letting me be born. How could they all be so cruel? How could my father rise from the river Mom drowned him in, wave a map in my face, and end his life a few minutes after his resurrection? Why didn’t he try harder to find us? Why didn’t he try harder to find me? Was I that worthless? The answers were now entombed in silence. My rage kept punching the tears out of me: a total tear-ectomy. And there was no taking it out on “invisible fathers,” my earthly one or heavenly one. The only one I could rage against was Mom.
I burst into the house, grabbed the leather Bible from my room, and shoved it in her face. I shouted that the book was no sign from God. It was no miracle. I screamed it was from Richard Allbright and threw it on the floor.
She stood there, dead still. Dust swirled up from the floor, darting in the sunlight like angry gnats. She reached down. I beat her to it, snatching the book up. “It’s mine! It’s the only thing I’ll ever have that he touched!” I wanted to keep yelling but a sob grabbed my throat.
“That’s not true,” she said, moving toward me. “He touched me. You have me.”
I stepped back. “I don’t want you!”
The words struck us both. They hit her harder than hearing his name. And they knocked out whatever tears I had left. I was done crying over a man who’d always been alive, hiding behind the mirror. A man who was now dead and gone before anyone gave me the chance to know him. To weep over him was as dumb as crying over a great-great-grandfather you’d never met. Whoever said “I don’t take no stock in dead people” was right.
I asked her if it was true about them never marrying and her ditching him before I was born. When she asked me how I’d heard such things, I slammed her with the best scripture on lying she’d taught me. “Liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone.” There’s nothing like a little Revelation to put the fear of damnation in Mom.
She sank into a chair and hid her face. I waited for her to spill.
Between sobs, she confessed how the devil had tricked her into falling in love with Richard Allbright. At first, everything had been good, with him coming to Christ and all, but then Satan attacked them with his carnal weapons and tempted them in the way of the flesh. They succumbed, and “plowed wickedness” is how she put it. After that, God punished them by making my father stray from his walk with Christ. She said he went back to his old ways of worshipping idols. When I asked her what that meant, she said he backslid to worshipping Mark Twain: instead of seeking God’s approval he was seeking Twain’s approval from the grave.
“But that was his job,” I said.
Her head jerked up; she wiped a hand across her cheek. “How do you know that?”
“Never mind how I know. You haven’t finished.”
She went on. “It wasn’t only a job for him; it was idolatry. He whored after graven images, from Twain’s anti-Christian books to worthless souvenirs.”
She told me that after Richard refused to turn back to Christ, she prayed day and night. She asked God if she should marry a false believer, an idol worshipper, and the father of her child. God didn’t answer. Then, a few months before I was born, she did a providence check. Her finger fell on the parable of the talents. The message from God was clear. Just as the nobleman gave each of his servants a coin to invest while he was away, God had given her a seed to grow and prosper. And because Richard was more like the servant who took his coin and hid it in a napkin, and did nothing with it, the Lord was going to take my father’s coin away from him and give it to her alone. The coin was me.
She gazed up at me, her eyes swimming with tears and the Spirit. “My child already had a father, the Heavenly Father.”
“I wanted a real father!” I yelled. “And all this time I had one! Who gave you the right to kill him when he wasn’t dead?”
Her eyes went blank, cold. Her voice drop
ped to a whisper. “Because I know when no father is better than a bad one.”
I was too locked on rage to imagine what she meant. She told me we needed to pray. Praying was the last thing I wanted to do, especially to a God who resurrected my father only to kill him. I finally threw it in her face. “He’s dead!”
She fixed on me for a moment. The hum of the fridge sounded loud as a train. “How do you know that?”
I yanked the DVD from my pocket. “ ’Cause he let me watch!”
Something flashed in her eyes that shivered through me. I swear I saw relief. It made my insides boil. I had to get out of there before I did something I’d regret forever.
When I got to the door I was even dead to anger. I felt as cold and dead as Richard Allbright. I turned and raised his Bible. “You and God got it right. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I can,” I said, “I’ve seen it.”
* * *
I went to the only place I could think of. The high school.
I sat in the top row of bleachers and watched the football team practice. There were some other kids in the bleachers. None of them bothered me, even though I’m sure I looked Jesus-junkie weird sitting there with a big black Bible. They probably didn’t mess with me because I must’ve looked like a mass murderer the moment before he yanks out a semiautomatic and opens fire.
After I got back to thinking halfway straight, I tried to figure out my next move. By the time the football team left the field and the sun dropped over downtown, I had a plan.
I’d go to Bible camp so I didn’t kill my mother.
I’d try to solve the first riddle in my father’s treasure hunt.
After that, there was no plan.
At dinner we ate leftovers in silence. Mom had sunk into one of her depressions. Sometimes it took a couple days for her to pray her way out of it. Another not-so-bad thing about being homeschooled: go-to-school kids had snow days, sure, but I had end-of-the-world days.