Routes

by John Okas

  Shibbola believed that it was easier to feed the savage than it was to fight him, and thus he instituted a mission, a place for natives to take shelter, get a Freeway lunch, an army surplus blanket, and hear the Word of God. There is some controversy among Shibbolites about whether a non-white person can be saved, but it is widely agreed that a lesson or two in the charitable and meek life of Emanual X, backed by a square serving of foods high in refined white beet sugar, could do a world of good to civilize the savage in the here and now.

  The young girl does not hear the Lord calling her. She knows her father on earth is the one doing all the talking. His love and proximity, the fact that he towers over everyone, are the only reason she listens. But listen she does and becomes a member of the mission. Two afternoons a week, after school, sweet Sarah helps in the handing out of candy to the needy.

  Still Jeremiah cannot get over the fear he has of the golden gate receding from his daughter. Again, he raises the number of missions that she needs to get to heaven. “Woman,” he says to his Emily, “have you heard the girl sing at Sabbath Services? No doubt she has a gift for music. Using the voice as an instrument for singing the praises of the Lord is putting it to its most proper use. What do you think God gave her the gift for, if not to praise Him for it?”

  Once again, approached by her mother to please her father, Sarah submits. She joins the choir. Two nights a week she goes to practice. And two weeks later, when Jeremiah finds his child right in that number, the hundred and four voices in the loft singing “Glory! Allelujah!” he is as proud as a fallen angel.

  Jared Hubbel, the old choirmaster, was a second string violinist, stand-in musician for the City of Brotherly Love Symphony Orchestra when he heard the Prophet’s call. Now whenever a chorister shows talent, as Sarah does with her good ear and soft clear voice, he sees nothing wrong with giving her private lessons using music from the secular sphere as exercise. He teaches her some operatic solos from Giacomo and Kreuszer and insists she gain a basic technique on the piano by working on playing Pynchon’s Etudes. Sarah finds nothing especially sinful about Giacomo, Pynchon, and Kreuszer, she takes little pleasure in it, but reasons it best not to tell her father about the unorthodox things the choirmaster is exposing her to, for she has read it written, “Whosoever giveth his soul to the music of this world his ears shall burn in the cacophony of the next.”

  However sweet and pure and lovely her appearance, as his daughter grows comelier by the month, the bookkeeper is reminded which sex the Book calls weaker, more likely to fall prey to the devouring taints of the flesh. As Jeremiah, by reason of his height, stands out among the men in the Temple, Sarah because of her lustrous beauty stands out among all the other girls in Zion like a nugget of gold in a bowl of plain grey oatmeal. Even the Elders cannot keep their eyes from her. It is written, “A beautiful daughter is the Lord’s curse.”

  Once again Jeremiah feels deflation and the Lord’s displeasure, and once again he goes to Emily. “You know that the stain on a girl’s soul is harder to get out than that on a boy’s? Why do you think God chose you, Woman, for labor, and curses you with the uncleanness of the moon? You have to work doubly hard to make yourself pleasant in his nose. Get on your knees and pray, and maybe you will see that the Lord has cut my daughter out to be more than just another faithful harmony voice in the Allelujah Chorus.”

  Emily instructs her daughter in the facts of life, that it takes more than soap and water to make a girl’s smell acceptable to the Lord. Again, under pressure, Sarah applies herself to standing out so the Lord will notice her for her special cleanness. The twelve-year-old finds it in her guts to try out for solo parts. After a year of work on her voice she stands before the tabernacle at the Sabbath Service and leads the choir in The Homecoming March of the Prophet. When she is finished there is hardly a dry eye in the Temple.

  After the service the members of the congregation congratulate Jeremiah and Emily. “Your daughter is such a lovely girl, a jewel, a real credit to your union.”

  The crown of pride, a fleeting halo, glows like laurel around the head of the Reverend, but Emily drops on the spot, and falls faint, down the temple steps. Two weeks later she is dead from a crab that has been chewing through her brain.

  Sarah inherits her mother’s work, and adds it to her already busy schedule of activity consecrated to the Lord. She is impeccable in her response to the obligation and glides between caring for her father, cooking and cleaning, and her obligations at the choir and at the mission. Jeremiah, no longer having his helpmeet Emily by his side, feels hollow and sinks into a deep melancholy, a feeling of the utter hopelessness of putting faith in the things of this world, mixed with a longing for comfort and company only the imperfection of the flesh can bring. Only when he beholds his lovely daughter serving him boiled beets and candied yams does he find relief from his despair and yearning. He sees no reason to bother pushing her to any further accomplishment, but says a prayer in his heart thanking the Lord he still has her, his obedient daughter, Sarah, the good girl, the choicest of the chosen, as flawless as a creature of this world could be, who speaks only when spoken to and ever shows a disposition that is as sweet as a sugar beet.

  So there she is, the Peach of Zion Beehive, the cream of the Shibbolite young womanhood, straight and narrow, sweet and soft, tall and well-made. Her fair hair hangs in a sleek wave to her shoulders. Her lips, a trifle thick, sit tight in a soft slightly superior smile, and give her face a certain gravity. Her eyes, long lashed and raven dark are lost in their own faraway secretive silence.

  You can’t judge sugar by looking at the beet, you can’t judge a book by looking at its cover. The girl is thorough in her motions toward salvation so that she can throw suspicions away from where her heart is really headed. Everything about Zion makes her wretched, the angelface has mischief on her mind. She longs for the primrose path, burns with an itch to wallow in a sewer of the sins of this world, the comforts and the pleasures, the excesses, of the flesh. She starts, in bed alone one night, by warming up the little knob of woman flesh the Prophet would put an end to. Time and again she has read in the Book of the Prophet that, even if no one else can see, the Lord knows whether you’re being naughty or nice. What then could be more damning than the fact that her excitement increases, her heart races, when as she frisks herself inside her homespun cotton drawers, and imagines the Lord, a hairy old man with a goaty smell, is peeking, and getting all worked up Himself.

  In the school of the Prophet stories of demonic possession are not considered incredible. The devil can snatch even the most righteous, unawares, by the tail. When Sarah slides down the slippery path to the primrose garden of her imagination, only the Lord knows for certain. She hides her sacrilegious side from her pious one. Her personality, built half on the need for approval and half on the shaky rocks of defiance, of leading the Lord astray and liking it, splits like a pea.

  Plain Brown Wrappers

  Jared Hubbel, the liberal choirmaster, comes up with a plan to blacken the ink on the Temple’s books. He wants to broadcast the sweet sound of the hive of the Prophet’s army, the Prophet’s message, the singing of the choir, the organ that plays at prayer time, and, last but by no means least, an appeal to the expanded congregation to contribute by mail to the March of Holy Soldiers. Jeremiah Blanche, the pious bookkeeper, has never heard a radio and, although he imagines it to be a device of the devil, he is so despondent that he is open for a distraction and agrees to at least sit still for a demonstration, and, should he approve, make a recommendation at the next Council of Elders that Hubbel’s plan be adopted.

  Sarah, curious about the big wood box, makes sure she is in the choir office when her stony-faced father comes for the audition. Hubbel turns the dial and searches through the static. When what finally comes forth is a ragtime tune with an evil rhythm called Red Hot Potato Blues the Reverend turns as white as if he had a vision of the abyss; he sees speakeasies, bathtub gin and immodest women. Horrified, angry and em
barrassed that the child was on hand to hear such things, he loudly declaims the radio as a tool of the devil. To mix the Prophet’s message on the air with that impious clamor could mean damnation for them all. “The saints do not march side by side with ragtime, Mister Hubbel,” he says. “When jazz lays the foundation the devil shakes the temple until it collapses from within.” He chokes on the word “jazz,” for, as he understands it, it started as a term dark people used for casual engagement in the sacred marital act.

  On the bookkeeper’s advice the Elders order the radio destroyed. But the choirmaster, a frugal sort, and sure they will eventually change their minds, locks it up in the utility closet behind the choir office and lets it sit there condemned to silence.

  Almost.

  Sarah’s heart went “pop” when she heard the popular tune of the day. She can’t get those hot potatoes out of her ears. The chorister has the keys to the office and the office has the keys to the closet. Friday nights at six everyone in Zion is free to make jokes about the pickled beets, honey mashed soybeans, corn flakes, and cauliflower in melted cheese sauce at a covered dish supper in the Prophet’s School auditorium. The coast is clear for her to go next door to the Temple and fool around with the big dials. She picks up a program that interests her on the short wave band, fading in and out, all the way from the City by the Bay. The Ragtime Hour features a whole sixty minutes of what’s new in music. With her pitch nearly as perfect as the arch of her eyebrows, her lips burst into whistle. She passes a sizzling hour blowing along with the wild raccoon rags and the muskrat rambles. When she rejoins the social, she is relieved to find that she was never missed.

  Although you would never know it to look at her, pretty Sarah hates having the text of the Prophet shoved down her throat. It disgusts her to swallow it and she can barely keep from gagging every time she has to sing Fight on Soldiers of the Lord and the wretched Homecoming March. Even though she appears as cool as the white marble of the tabernacle, as unflappable as the fine linen tabernacle curtain, singing as if the Lord were recording every note so He could keep it under critical consideration for eternity, in her heart she is doing those rags. Later, when she is alone in bed, she puts her hands in her cotton underpants, whistles the rags underneath her breath and feels the Lord come upon her and force his way into her tender bud. Oh la la, tempting her Heavenly Father to sin, she knows it’s bad, and that makes it all the better. She is back at six the following Friday for The Ragtime Hour, her ears hungry, her whistle wet.

  The program has a sponsor that appeals to her to send one dollar for a catalog-sampler of books and periodicals. The Freethinker Press advertises literature definitely not on the reading list of the Prophet, the kind they say comes in “plain brown wrappers.” Her father is generous, he gives her fifteen cents a week allowance, but she is not a good saver. In her bank there is only seventy five cents. The jazz makes her impatient, she can’t wait. The very last one to be suspected, she steals a quarter from the choir’s petty cash drawer.

  She makes it her job to pick up the mail at the post office.

  “The girl’s so good she does chores when she’s not even asked,” swears her Reverend father.

  In six weeks an unmarked package arrives addressed to her. She runs off with it to a deserted log cabin she knows about, just on the outskirts of town, in the foothills of the wild blue cliffs yonder. The catalog, designed to give a generous taste of the Freethinker Press’s merchandise, is worth every penny she stole for it. She leafs through prose articles and essays that reinforce her gut reaction toward liberalism, betwixt and between though it is. She learns that there is a whole world outside of Zion with minds who think that there is more to living the good life than wearing a white dress and white gloves and being dutifully on key in front of the tabernacle.

  She stops short when she comes upon the poetry of Clement Collier, hobo jazz bard, the modern Freeway poet who celebrates in free verse the wonders of love and rambling easy around the country, the world, and the universe. From a collection called Songs for a New Age she reads a poem called who am i? It begins,

  i roam from days long gone to ones yet to come,

  nobody special through all periods of history.

  i meet fools who comfort themselves

  thinking they are somebody,

  that someday they will be happy in heaven.

  there is no eternity except for now.

  and i am happy even in unhappiness,

  for in the end, i don’t see where earth is,

  if not already in heaven. who am i?

  Beyond Clement Collier’s riddle, in the back of the catalog, she finds samples from books of photographs of young women wearing only cosmetics and frilly underwear. The creamy Sarah lifts her plain style frontier skirts and admires her legs in a cracked mirror that the crudely furnished cabin has to offer. She practices the poses of the models in the catalog, spreads her legs as wide as she spreads her mind to the rhythm and hues of poetry and jazz. Perhaps she has inherited the sin of pride from her father for she swears she’s as well developed as any of the girls in the pictures.

  She hides the catalog under the floorboards of the little log cabin and so starts her library, her private reading room, her dream home away from the dreary home with the Prophet’s bookkeeper. Freedom of thought does not come cheaply. To stock the library, she steals and steals again, one five and five ones from an unwatched collection plate, before it was counted, and puts the bills in a candid letter to the editor of the Freethinker Press, Mister Morton Pastor.

  Dear Sir,

  I never thought I was a freethinker until I read your fine catalog. What I found most interesting was the poetry of Mister Collier. Please send me a copy of his “Songs for a New Age.” Also, if you have any books with men in similar poses as the ladies I would greatly appreciate as many of them as the enclosed ten dollars will allow. Thank you.

  yours truly,

  Sarah Ruth Blanche

  Zion, Beehive

  p.s. I hope there is no need to remind you of your promise of a plain brown wrapper.

  She continues to listen to The Ragtime Hour on the sly and covets the choirmaster’s radio. Knowing he is not supposed to have it in the first place, and thus will not report its theft, she would steal it were her little cabin set up with an electric line. Instead she takes some brooms and mops from the closet and whistles while she works cleaning up that abandoned shack, putting up curtains, recovering the little bed and chair that the place is furnished with, doing all she can to make it a decent place to loaf, read and wait for more books to arrive.

  When Hubbel notices things missing, he curses “pesty redskins,” but says nothing else about incidents. Of course he does not suspect his star chorister. No one, in fact, notices her absences, nor do they notice that her sweet pious grace is becoming subtly affected. It’s well known that she’s the busiest bee in Zion. And so when she starts coming late for choir practice, or to hand out the jelly beans at the mission, or as a volunteer to teach the young sabbath schoolers to read, it goes without saying that some other equally praiseworthy work must be demanding her attention. Further, her Reverend father, so deep down sad about the loss of his helpmeet, and so busy doing penance for his lack of trust in the Lord, punishing himself for his appetites, the comforts of this world that his dear Emily meant to him, and to which he became sinfully attached, stays sorrowfully unaware of whether it’s dinner time, his shirts have been laundered, or the house is clean. If he comes home from his office in the temple and Sarah is late he sits in his big chair in the cold empty house and prays for guidance and light. He would just as soon cry as eat.

  In the meanwhile Sarah is two miles out of town whistling the jazz she heard playing on the radio, and jerking her pelvis with reflex actions to it. When she gets tired of music, she practices her model poses, holding each one to give the Lord a good long look. She knows what that Ultimate Being has on His mind, and knowing the Lord’s mind shadows her smile further with the p
ride of one who believes herself God’s choicest person.

  Several months pass before the package arrives. In with the Collier poetry are two large books of art photographs, one called Beach Boys at Play and the other Oh, Boy! A Pictorial Essay of a Lord and his Squire at Bedtime. Sarah intuitively knows the books are intended for men. But half-liberated, she will take the primrose path where she finds it, inwardly anyway. Hot dog! She looks at the pictures and, hell-bent with the thrills of doing what she’s not supposed to be, tickles herself pink. Then she opens up the poetry, and celebrates in song the pleasures of the body and the lusts of the soul. It turns her on like the radio.

  At the same time the defiled temple puts on a show of increased purity, milder manners, tighter lips for the rest of the world. Her acts of innocence are ever in neat proportion to her feelings of guilt for running off with her lower nature. She takes advantage of every opportunity to do so and doesn’t hesitate to steal to support her habits, her secret voracities for jazz, art photographs, humanist poetry, and lately books of philosophical essays by Eisenburg Legenkopf on the topic of human freedom of choice and taking personal responsibility for the consequences of actions, and also some by a writer named Ursa Morrow, a woman who writes of women free from the oppression of men. She gets hints of why she aspires to free thinking: on the inside freedom is the thinking she lacks, the right of way to free speech being denied her under Shibbolism. She also learns a share of deciding between right and wrong in conduct and conscience by the use of general ethical principles. The Book of the Prophet says that crime does not pay. Honesty may be the best policy for the group, reasons the freethinker, but for me, an individual, it may be otherwise.

  Her father, seeing how thin she seems to be spread lately, wants to help her and reward her for how good she’s been. For her sixteenth birthday he buys her a buckboard and pony. Already the neighboring settlements are full of automobiles, but the Shibbolites, in imitation of their horse-drawn hacking Prophet, still cling to the old ways and believe taking life at too fast a pace can be hazardous to salvation. Hence, given the relatively slow speed of life around Zion, the buckboard will ease Sarah’s loaded schedule of getting in and out and around town, save her travelling time and give her more for reading, looking at picture books and practicing poses of her own.