Octavia Boone's Big Questions About Life, the Universe, and Everything

by Rebecca Rupp

  “It’s easy to lose the way, Octavia,” Pastor Bruno said. “You’re not alone in having doubts. I’ve had them. We’ve all had them. I’m sure Mrs. Prescott has told you the story of Doubting Thomas, the apostle who refused to believe that Christ had really risen until he saw the holes in his hands. And our Lord said that the blessed are those who have not seen but still believe.”

  “I think Doubting Thomas was the only apostle with brains,” I said. “I think believing without seeing is stupid. Scientists don’t get to say, ‘Hey, trust me, stuff is made out of atoms.’ They have to have proof.”

  “But that’s the nature of faith,” Pastor Bruno said. “You have to let yourself go, Octavia. You have to open your heart. You have to give yourself over to Jesus.”

  So then I told him this story about Bertrand Russell. I’d heard it from Andrew, who, as I said, wanted to be a philosopher, and would like to be like Bertrand Russell. Though personally I don’t think Andrew has a hope since Bertrand Russell was brilliant in math, and math is far from Andrew’s best subject. It took him forever to learn his multiplication facts, and in geometry, he kept calling triangles little pointy things.

  This is Andrew’s Bertrand Russell story:

  Bertrand Russell was an atheist. At his ninetieth birthday party, a lady who was sitting next to him leaned over and said, “So what if you’re totally wrong? What if you die and you end up in heaven? What would you say to God?”

  And Bertrand Russell said, “What I would say is ‘Well, sir, you gave us insufficient evidence.’”

  I hoped maybe Pastor Bruno would tell me that I was a hopeless cause. But he didn’t. Instead he laughed so hard that I thought he would fall off his chair.

  Then he said, “Octavia, I see you are going to be a challenge.”

  It was not long after that that Pastor Bruno decided to build Salvation Mountain.

  Salvation Mountain started out as Deer Hill. As long as anybody could remember it had been called that, because there were always a lot of deer on it. People around here are not very imaginative when it comes to place names. Right here in town we have Park Street, that runs past the park; Church Street, that runs past the Congregational church; Pond Road, that runs past the pond; and Maple Street, that has a lot of maple trees. The pond is called Brown Pond because during the part of the year that there’s no ice on it, the water is the color of strong tea. It always seemed to me that people should have been able to come up with something a little more creative. I said this to Mr. and Mrs. Peacock, and Mr. Peacock said then why didn’t I go to town meeting and put my two cents in, which in his opinion would be a real relief from having to listen to everybody fighting over Alden Baines, who keeps putting logs across the road in front of his house and calling them speed bumps.

  Andrew’s idea was that Salvation Mountain should be named Grand Teton. The Tetons are a mountain range in Wyoming, which is what Andrew was writing a report about in school, having picked Wyoming as his assignment out of Ms. Hodge’s baseball cap. In French, Grand Teton means Big Tit. Andrew thought that was totally hilarious.

  Deer Hill had been left to the Redeemers by a passed-on Redeemer named Maurice “Big Chip” Dupree. It had a bunch of dilapidated little cottages on it that Big Chip used to rent to deer hunters, and not much else except trees, weeds, and black flies. But Pastor Bruno had a vision. His vision was that all the cottages, where the deer hunters used to sit around with six-packs of beer, would be a Bible camp. There would be spiritual retreats for adults, uplifting activities for children, potluck suppers, and little benches set along a trail leading to the top of the hill, where people could sit and pray.

  In my opinion, the O words for Pastor Bruno’s vision were Overly Optimistic.

  But once the snow melted, which it did early that year just to be ornery, Pastor Bruno had every able-bodied Redeemer out on Salvation Mountain on Saturdays, hauling brush and building benches and painting cabins. Ray and Alda and Geraldine all went, though Alda wasn’t much help, due to shortness of breath and a low center of gravity that wasn’t suited to hills.

  Since they all went, I had to go too, unless it was one of the Saturdays I was staying with Boone.

  I DIDN’T LIKE living with the Redeemers, but at the time I didn’t much like staying with Boone either. Boone didn’t have a job exactly, but he was supporting himself by doing freelance financial work part-time. Also he was being frugal like Henry. He’d given up cable television and his subscription to American Artist, and he was heating with wood and eating a lot of rice.

  When I asked him about this, but only to be polite, not because I cared, he said, “‘A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone,’” which was a quote from guess who.

  Boone still spent most of the rest of his time painting his masterpiece, though now in the bedroom upstairs instead of his shed. His whole house smelled like oil paint and turpentine. He always came down and cooked special meals when I was there, so I suppose he was trying. But we didn’t talk much during them because Boone felt guilty and I felt mad.

  It was nice to be in Winton Falls, though, because I could visit Mr. and Mrs. Peacock and see Andrew outside of school and ride my bicycle, which I couldn’t do in Wolverton due to Ray’s house being in a center of urban development with a heavy traffic pattern. People couldn’t have pets there either, because of the cars, or if they did, they had to be indoors all the time or on leashes. Mrs. Peacock said that didn’t sound healthy, breathing all those hydrocarbon fumes, and Mr. Peacock said to forgive him for saying so, but both my parents were acting like tomfools.

  In May, on one of the Saturdays with Boone, we had our school science fair.

  The Winton Falls Elementary and Middle School K–8 science fair, as I said before, is a big deal. There are announcements in the newspapers and on WCOW radio, and on the day of the fair there’s a huge banner that says SCIENCE FAIR TODAY that hangs over the double glass doors at the school’s front entrance. The banner is purple and orange, which are our school colors. I thought it looked nice, but Boone said those colors could only have been chosen by a color-blind philistine.

  We spent most of Friday afternoon setting up, because the judges were arriving on Saturday morning at nine. There were three of them: Mr. Trahan, the geology teacher from the high school in Wolverton, who was freckled and bald and reminded me of a mushroom; Mr. Grumman, a retired engineer from IBM who had lots of fluffy white hair like Albert Einstein; and Dr. Cassidy, who looked a little bit like Hillary Clinton and was the president of a biotech company in Burlington.

  The first thing you saw when you walked into the cafeteria, where all our exhibits were, was Aaron Pennebaker’s radioactive spider, which was lime green and the size of a Frisbee. There was a big lime-green label pointing to the chelicerae, which are the parts spiders bite with, and Aaron’s poster had before and after pictures of Peter Parker, showing him first as a normal person and then, after being radioactively bitten, as Spider-Man.

  Aaron had also brought in his pet tarantula, Nicodemus, for purposes of comparison, but Nicodemus was so outraged by the science fair that he had crawled to the back of his cage and buried himself under his water dish.

  Next came Polly Pelletier’s “The Chemistry of the Permanent Wave” poster with all of our pictures looking like creatures from some hokey horror sci-fi show, like Psycho Killer Amazon Women from Mars. Our names weren’t on them, just numbers, but of course, this being a small town, everybody knew who we were. Also my hair was still curly, though it had calmed down by now and didn’t look quite so much like something you might use to scrub out a frying pan.

  Then came a blank space where Jean-Claude Chevalier’s poster of CSI corpses and blood splatters used to be, but that had been taken away because some of the teachers thought it was too gruesome for the little kids.

  Then came Andrew’s project, and I knew the minute I looked at it that it was going to be a disaster. The Wochaks, as I said, are prone to disaste
r, though usually this is not on purpose, but more like the time Andrew’s mother forgot the garage door was closed and so backed the car right through it, or when Andrew’s father cut down a rotten tree in the yard and it fell the wrong way and landed on the porch roof and smashed it flat.

  Andrew’s exhibit was called “The Anatomy of a Volcano: A Chemical Demonstration.” His poster had diagrams of the insides of volcanoes, done in different-colored felt-tipped pens, and lots of pictures of famous volcanoes, printed off the Internet. In front of the poster was a cone-shaped papier-mâché volcano model the size of an armchair, with a hole in the top. Andrew must have used at least a ton of papier-mâché. A sign on the side read VESUVIUS, and there were a bunch of helpless-looking paper houses labeled POMPEII.

  By the time I got there, all the judges were standing around it, along with the principal and Ms. Hodges and Andrew’s parents and the members of the School Board, and Andrew had begun his demonstration.

  “When I drop this mysterious substance into the mouth of my volcano, it will trigger a chemical reaction that imitates volcanic eruption,” Andrew said.

  I thought the word imitates was encouraging, because at least it showed that Andrew wasn’t using real lava.

  The mysterious substance was a lump of something about the size of a brick wrapped up in a paper towel.

  “Is everybody ready?” Andrew said, and he gave a worried grin like he does before a disaster, like the time he set the dining-room curtains on fire with his magnifying glass. I think somehow, subliminally, Andrew always knows.

  “Is everybody ready?” Andrew said again.

  Everybody said they were.

  Andrew waved the brick over his head.

  “One!” Andrew said. “Two! Three!”

  And he dropped the stuff into the top of the volcano.

  For a minute nothing happened.

  Then the volcano began to hiss and gurgle, like a pot coming to a boil. The three judges, who had had experience with science fairs before, hastily took several steps back, and so did Ms. Hodges and the principal and Andrew’s parents, who had all had experience with Andrew. But the School Board, which should have known better, didn’t move. So when the volcano erupted and belched out a huge fountain of red froth that drowned Pompeii and a lot of the table and the floor, it splashed all over Mr. Clover Harrison’s brand-new fawn-colored spring suit.

  That was pretty much the high point of the science fair.

  Andrew explained later that it was just baking soda, vinegar, and red ink, but his parents still had to buy Mr. Clover Harrison a new suit.

  Polly Pelletier won first prize in our division because the judges were impressed with her organization and understanding of disulfide bonds. Mr. Trahan, who, being a geology teacher, appreciates volcanoes, wanted to give Andrew an honorable mention for effort, ingenuity, and his description of pyroclastic flow, but Mr. Clover Harrison said absolutely not. Then he expelled Andrew from science fairs for the rest of his life, or at least until ninth grade, when he leaves this school district forever and goes to the high school in Wolverton.

  Andrew’s little sister Amanda won first prize in the grades 3–4 division for her vegetable solar system model, though luckily before two of Angelique Soulier’s hamsters escaped and took a couple of bites out of Jupiter and ate the Earth.

  Angelique’s mother, when she saw her daughter’s name on her poster as “Jennifer,” called on all the saints, appealed to Angelique’s father, and threatened to send Angelique to a French-speaking convent school in Montreal.

  And Andrew wasn’t the only one at the science fair who had a disaster.

  My beans, as it turned out, didn’t prove a thing.

  So here’s what happened with my beans.

  Of my four tallest beans, two of them had been prayed for and two of them hadn’t. Bean #8, the shortest bean, hadn’t been prayed for, but I was pretty sure that it was the shortest because it was on the far end of the windowsill where it didn’t get as much sun and sometimes I forgot to move it around.

  In other words, it didn’t look like my prayers had had any effect on the beans at all. But, as Dr. Cassidy pointed out, there was no way of telling if this was because prayers really didn’t work or because I’d been praying the wrong kind of prayer or because I just didn’t happen to be very good at praying.

  Of Andrew’s parents’ beans, the meditated-for beans, which you could tell because of the red feng shui ribbons around the pots, were all taller than the not-meditated-for beans. You would think that this was because Buddhism and feng shui were good for beans, but it turned out that Andrew’s father, as well as meditating for the beans, had fed them Miracle-Gro.

  Mrs. Peacock’s beans were all about the same size because she said that after the first couple of days, she felt sorry for the not-prayed-for beans and so she prayed for all of them. By then she only had seven beans, because Mr. Peacock had knocked one on the floor and smashed it while chasing a mouse with a broom.

  Dr. Cassidy said that even though my results were not conclusive, it’s always rewarding to see kids tackling big questions, and also she liked my graphs. I got an honorable mention.

  I couldn’t remember when I’d felt so miserable.

  I guess I hadn’t realized how much I’d been counting on those beans. I’d been so sure that I would be able to prove that prayer doesn’t work and that, therefore, there is no God. Then Ray would see the light, drop the Redeemers, and come home. But I hadn’t proven anything.

  Some questions are beyond the scope of science, Dr. Cassidy said.

  Then she asked me if I knew where the word prayer comes from, and when I said no, she said it was from the Old French word preiere, which means an entreaty of uncertain outcome. It’s from the same place that we get the word precarious, which means something iffy.

  In other words, you can pray until you’re blue in the face, but God doesn’t necessarily have to answer you.

  In other words, it was a stupid experiment and I’d been an idiot.

  After the science fair was over, I didn’t say good-bye to anybody or wait for Boone. I didn’t want to be around people. So I just left. I got my jacket and went out through the back door of the school, and across the empty playground, and then I walked. I walked for what felt like hours. I felt so awful that I didn’t care where I was going, but I was too miserable to stay still. I slouched along with my head down, putting one foot in front of the other, and I’m probably lucky I didn’t kill myself walking in front of a pickup truck or bumping into a tree.

  When I finally looked up, I was in front of our old house. I guess I was so used to going there that my feet just did the thinking for me. The house was sold now, but the new people hadn’t moved into it yet. The windows were blank and empty.

  I walked around to the backyard. The purple lilac bush that Boone and I had planted for Ray one Mother’s Day was in bloom beside the back porch, and that made me feel even worse. I thought that things shouldn’t be blooming like that, all lonely and by themselves, with nobody around to say how beautiful they looked and how good they smelled.

  “You look great,” I said to the lilac bush. “You smell wonderful.”

  I knew it was stupid talking to a bush, but I didn’t care.

  I walked across the grass to Boone’s shed. The door was unlocked, so I pulled it open and went in. Everything was gone: Boone’s easel and canvases and paint box and the jars he kept his palette knives and brushes in, and the corkboard where he used to pin up the pictures I’d done in school and postcards that friends sent him and photos of me and Ray. I sat down in a corner on the floor. The place still smelled a little bit like turpentine.

  Then I saw a scrap of paper sticking up between two of the floorboards and I got the edge of it between my fingers and wiggled at it until I managed to pull it out. It was a photo, all creased and bent, that must have fallen off the corkboard. It was of Ray and Boone and me on a picnic. Boone had a deviled egg in one hand, and his other arm was aroun
d me and Ray. Ray was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and she was squinting because the sun was in her eyes and she was laughing. We were all laughing.

  Suddenly I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  I hated having feelings. I wanted to be like Data in Star Trek, who was an android and never had any emotions at all.

  But it was too late.

  Right then I had so many feelings that it was as if they were all too big for my skin. It even hurt to breathe.

  I dropped the photo on the floor and I put my face down on my knees and I cried and cried and cried. I howled. I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore and could only make little wheezy sounds like a broken accordion. I cried until it seemed I’d cried a whole ocean of tears, like Alice did in Alice in Wonderland. If I’d suddenly been shrunk down small like Alice was, I probably would have drowned. Then I was worn out, so I curled up on the floor of Boone’s shed and put my head down on my arms and breathed in the dust-and-turpentine smell, which somehow felt comforting, and finally I fell asleep.

  I woke up when the shed door opened, and when I looked up, it was Boone.

  He walked over and sat down next to me, cross-legged on the floor. He took my purple-and-orange honorable mention ribbon out of his pocket.

  “You forgot this,” Boone said.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “Looking for you,” said Boone.

  “How did you know where I was?” I said.

  Boone said, “Lucky guess.”

  Then his eyes slid past me and he reached out and picked up the photo that I’d dropped on the floor when I started to cry. He looked at it for a long minute and then put it down again.

  “So tell me what’s going on with you,” Boone said.

  So I did. It just poured out of me, like Niagara Falls.

  “You abandoned me,” I said. “You and Ray. Both of you. You just went off to do your own things and you never cared about me. You never cared what I thought. I hate living in Wolverton. I hate being with Alda and Geraldine. I hate the Redeemers. I don’t want to go to the Redeemer school, where they teach how the Grand Canyon was made by Noah’s flood and how there were people around with the dinosaurs. I don’t want to think like that. I don’t believe that people go to hell if they dress up on Halloween and I don’t believe women are supposed to stay home and serve men. I don’t believe in being obedient all the time and never asking questions and I don’t think it’s a sin if men have a ponytail.”