Robbie went upstairs to change into the blue-striped shirt Nanny had ironed. The sleeves were already too short, but she wouldn’t buy him another shirt until next year. Arnie would never pay him for his work on the farm; he and Myra thought the Fifth Commandment was the cornerstone of Christian faith. More than not committing adultery or murder, you must honor your father and grandmother.
Robbie studied his reflection in the bathroom mirror. If he rolled up his sleeves, the shirt wouldn’t make him look so much like a chimp, his too-long arms swinging at his sides.
He went to the landing and peered over the banister. Junior was sucking up to Pastor Nabo, calling him sir and laughing heartily at something the pastor had said. “Yes, sir, Pastor, I suck dick,” Robbie muttered. He pulled a grimy notepad from his back pocket and sat on the top step.
Love your neighbor
As you love yourself.
Jesus taught us this.
Jesus taught us this.
I love my neighbor.
Her hair is like bronze,
Soft bronze,
Living bronze,
It moves in the breeze,
Shines in the sun.
I love my neighbor.
Her breasts are like—
Like what? Like little ice-cream sundaes with cherries on top? He’d never seen any girl’s breasts, just snuck looks in a magazine when he was out on his own in a place where no one could possibly tell on him. Lara’s breasts weren’t like that, not those huge, gross mounds of flesh in the photographs. Hers were small and white. When she wore a tank top to school, he could see the soft shape through the fabric, so small his hand would completely cover them.
I love my neighbor, but she doesn’t know I exist, and if she does think about me she imagines I’m the same kind of jerk as my brother. He put the notepad back into his pocket and went downstairs before his grandmother sent Junior up to find him.
“Ah, Robbie,” Pastor Nabo said when he came into the front room. “I understand the mother has been your special charge.”
“Yes, sir,” Robbie said, pulling his mind away from Lara to Soapweed and her calf. “She’s a Guernsey-Jersey mix, and we bred her with a bull we’ve used before, a Jersey-Canadienne up in Wisconsin.”
“And this is the first time you’ve had a solid red calf?”
“Yes, sir,” Robbie said. “Sometimes they’ll be born all one color and the markings will come in later, though. And Serise, well, this calf, she’s only four weeks old, so it may be too early to tell if she’ll stay solid.”
“Yes, yes.” Pastor Nabo rubbed his hands together in the oily room. “I think we all understand it’s too early to be certain that the Lord is sending His messenger to us here in the valley of the humble Wakarusa and Kaw rivers, but we can pray, we can pray for spiritual guidance, for the strength to be worthy of His grace if He is showering it on us.”
“Roll down your shirtsleeves, Robbie,” Myra snapped, before bowing her head along with Arnie, Junior, and the pastor.
Pastor Nabo was only a minute or two into his exhortation when they heard the Jews’ van pull up in the yard. He gave a hurried amen, and rushed out with Arnie and Junior to greet them, Nanny stumping along in her black Hush Puppies.
Robbie hung back, unexpectedly nervous. When the party returned to the parlor, Robbie bit back an exclamation. The three men were nothing like Mr. Lewin, who taught chemistry at the high school, or Julie Sugarman’s dad, who owned one of the shoe stores on Massachusetts Street. They looked like a picture out of his history book, with their long, dusty coats, their beards, and the corkscrew curls that stuck raffishly out underneath their black hats. They were dressed identically, which made it hard to tell them apart. Two were heavy, with round cheeks puffing out from their graying beards. The third was short and slender, with a square jaw that made him look like Abraham Lincoln.
“So let’s go look at this miracle heifer,” the short man said. “You mustn’t get your hopes up, you know. If she’s only four weeks old, well, a lot can happen in the next thirty-five months.”
“We know that,” Pastor Nabo assured him. “And we aren’t calling her a miracle. But it did seem like, well, something special, that she just happened. I’ve read about these efforts to breed a perfect heifer, and I’ve always thought God would provide one when the time was right, that it was sinful, almost, to try to breed against His will, if you follow me.”
“Sinful?” the tallest of the trio said. “I wouldn’t say sinful. If we are to rebuild the Holy Temple, we have to prove we are willing to labor for it. The work is large and the day is short. We must do as much as we can.”
“Nonetheless, if we’re to believe the Seventy Weeks prophesied in the Book of Daniel, the end of days is near,” Pastor Nabo said, “and the Lord will show us by giving us a sign that He is ready for the final battle between Chri—between the forces of Light and the forces of Dark.”
The tallest man said something in a foreign language. Was it Hebrew? Robbie wondered. Was this how Jesus had talked, in that funny language they’d used in the movie about His Passion?
Arnie, with Junior and the pastor in tow, led the trio to the special enclosure they’d built for Soapweed’s calf. Robbie followed. When Myra tried to come along, too, the Jews said sternly that no women must come near the calf.
“Has she been handling the animal?” the short man asked.
“Nanny doesn’t have anything to do with the dairy farm,” Junior said. “But what difference does it make?”
“What difference, young man? Because a woman in the enclosure could pollute the heifer even before she’s reached maturity.” It was one of the two heavy men who spoke. “I hope we haven’t wasted our time in coming here.”
“No, no,” Arnie said. “No women have been near the calf. My mother is the only woman on the place, and she never works with the cows.”
The party moved on to the enclosure where Soapweed’s calf stood in lonely splendor. Arnie had set up an array of work lights so that the Jews could inspect the heifer. The three men stopped inside the enclosure; the tallest gasped in amazement. The calf was a dark orangey red, from the bridge of her nose to the end of her scrawny tail, a red heifer without discernible flaw.
The perfect heifer was bawling; she was hungry and lonely. Robbie wanted to put his arms around her and let her suck on his fingers, but now he felt nervous about what you could and couldn’t do around the calf.
The three men had brought rubber mats with them, which they knelt on to inspect the calf. They looked at her hooves, lifted her tail, studied her belly. They dipped rags in some kind of glycerin mix and scrubbed her sides to see if the Schapens had dyed her.
“Right now, she looks as though she has potential,” the short man finally said. “We’ll come back once a month to check on her. In the meantime, no women in the enclosure, no leaning on the animal or any other act that makes her work.”
“Leaning on her makes her work?” Robbie asked, wondering if he should confess that he sometimes hugged her—well, every day, really—because she was so lonely.
“She has to exert force to prop you up. That is work,” the short man said as if it were elementary physics and Robbie was too stupid to follow.
“Keep her clean, as you are doing. Make sure no sharp objects are in the compound—a cut on her flesh would be disastrous. And don’t let her become a spectacle for sightseers,” the tallest man added. “I know the temptation is great with an animal that potentially may be this special, but that is work for the animal, having to put up with the eyes of strangers. And a crowd is hard to control; someone might start touching her—a woman in her impure time might touch her.”
Her impure time—when she had her period—everyone knew that. Robbie was so tired of these men and the way they were bossing him and his dad and even Nanny around, he almost blurted it out. Arnie was beaming with pride, and nodding as solemnly as if God Himself were talking to him. Sorry, Jesus, Robbie whispered to himself, but you know
what I mean. It embarrassed him to see Arnie, the toughest man in the county, kowtow to these creepy-looking men in their round hats and long coats.
Arnie and Pastor Nabo walked with the Jews back to their van. They conferred again in their guttural, secret language, then told Arnie he needed to build the calf’s pen above a rock base, preferably obsidian, since that was the rock where the Holy Temple had been built. If she came in contact with the earth, she would be in contact with death. And Arnie nodded and agreed, although even Nanny muttered about the cost and where would they find obsidian around here?
The three men lived in Kansas City, with a group of Jews who all wanted to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Pastor Nabo had heard about them from another Salvation Bible Church, in Kansas City. Before they left, they assured Arnie they’d be back about the same time next month.
Pastor Nabo beamed and rubbed his hands. “I think we can tell the elders, Brother Schapen. Of course, it wouldn’t do for television cameras to show up. They’d startle our heifer, maybe make her injure herself. But it wouldn’t hurt for the church elders to know what may be in the wind.”
Arnie nodded slowly, thinking it over. “As long as they operate in complete secrecy.”
He turned to Robbie. “Well, well, who would have thought it’d be you who’d bring us fame and glory. Don’t you go calling that calf one of your flower names. She’s a holy animal; she’s destined for glory. If we keep her free of any impurities, they’ll use her in their Temple sacrifices and that will pave the way for Jesus to come again in glory.”
He stopped smiling and looked stern. “You boys have to promise me you are not going to talk about this outside the family. If people like Jim Grellier or his crackpot wife get hold of this information, no telling what they’ll do to try to make us look bad. You hear me?”
Both his sons mumbled “Yessir.” Junior added, “These Jews don’t even have a Temple, right? And they want her when she’s three? Don’t tell me they’re going to rebuild Solomon’s Temple with all his cedars of Lebanon and cubits of this and that by the time this calf is three!”
“No, no,” Pastor Nabo said. “But they have the instruments prepared for her ritual slaughter, and they only need her ashes—”
“Slaughter?” Robbie cried. “You mean they want to kill her?”
“Of course they want to kill her,” Arnie snapped. “Did you think they wanted to breed her so they could pour her milk over the doors of the Temple? Haven’t you read your Bible, Robert? Don’t you know the Jews were always commanded to make burnt offerings, which is why the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross means Christians don’t have to kill animals before they can worship God?”
“Yeah,” Junior added. “The Jews are going to end up in hell unless they take Jesus into their hearts. That’s why they wear those funny hats, to hide their horns—they’ve given themselves up to Satan. We’re just using them to pave the way for the Rapture.”
A confusing array of images swept through Robbie’s head—Soapweed’s calf laid on an altar and sacrificed, with the Jews and Arnie and Pastor Nabo dancing and bowing around her; himself taking the calf and hiding her, taking her to Lara Grellier: You have to help me hide her. They want to give her to the Jews to sacrifice. And Lara wouldn’t laugh or call him names. She’d understand how important this was and help hide the calf on the Grellier land.
Pastor Nabo drew him aside and spoke to him quietly. “You love Jesus and want Him to come again to save the world, don’t you, Robbie?”
“Yes, sir.” Robbie’s voice came out as a whisper.
“And you know it says in the Bible that Jesus cannot come again until the Temple is rebuilt in Jerusalem. And the Jews can’t rebuild the Temple until they have a perfect red heifer. As it tells us in the Book of Numbers, they require a perfect red heifer for the high priest to become pure enough to enter the Temple.”
“Yes. I know that, Pastor. I just thought, I sort of thought, my calf would be standing outside the walls. I didn’t know they would kill her.”
“They will do it very humanely, Robbie, and it will be for the glory of God. And you, the servant of this cow, the one who helped her through her delivery of this calf, you’ve been picked out by God for this very special deed. You will be known throughout the Christian world!” Pastor Nabo’s voice thickened with emotion. Robbie thought the pastor was imagining himself, Werner Nabo, at the center of Christian glory and praise.
Eleven
CAPPUCCINO AND ITS MAKER
IT WASN’T until a few days after Christmas that Jim finally found time to drop in on Gina Haring. An ice storm had broken the roof of one of the greenhouses where Susan planted seedlings for the X-Farm. Between fixing that and all the preparations for Christmas—Susan’s baking alone was a three-day enterprise, as she tried to re-create every dish the nineteenth-century Grelliers might have eaten—he didn’t have time to think about his neighbor’s problems.
Jim farmed a half section down by the Wakarusa; Blitz reported that the ice storm had also damaged his levee. When he finished repairing the greenhouse, Jim drove the two miles east, past Fremantles’, down to the Wakarusa. The road was nothing more than a pitted gravel track that Fremantles, Schapens, and Grelliers had used since landing in the valley. As Jim bumped from rut to rut, he cursed Arnie and Myra for their stinginess. When old Mrs. Fremantle was alive, the three families pitched in to lay down new gravel every spring: the county didn’t maintain private side roads like this. After her death, Arnie refused to help pay for upkeep. Since the Grellier farm was right on the north-south county road, this hurt Arnie more than it did Jim—except when he needed to go to the river.
On his way home, he pulled into the Fremantle yard. Contrary to the custom of the country, the kitchen door was locked. New York habits, or maybe fear after someone climbed a tree to peer into her bathroom. It wasn’t until the third time he pounded on the door and helloed loudly that Gina finally came and undid the lock.
She looked surprised to see him, but not stiff or unpleasant, as Lara had described her. When he explained that his wife and daughter had reported on her Peeping Tom, she asked him in for coffee.
“It’s my one domestic skill, making good coffee, so you have to let me show it off.”
She offered him espresso or cappuccino. Jim normally drank black coffee, but Lara had described the fancy cappuccino machine and he was curious to see what it was like. Lawrence had at least twenty cappuccino bars, but people who had to count their dimes stayed away from three-dollar coffee.
Gina twirled the knobs and the machine made noises like the Kansas City Chief roaring past the house. In a few minutes, she handed him a mug filled with foam that looked like whipped cream. The coffee tasted rich, almost sweet, under its cap of foam. He drank coffee all day out of habit, not for taste, and he said the first thing that popped into his mind, that he’d better not get used to cappuccino because he couldn’t afford such a rich drink.
“It’s all a matter of what’s important to you. I’d rather wear two sweaters and type with gloves on than pay the utility company to warm this big drafty house.” She wasn’t wearing gloves, but she did have on a big sweater, the kind that somehow made you aware of the body underneath it. When she crossed her legs in her skintight blue jeans, he had a disturbing thought of how soft her skin would feel.
He said quickly, to push the thought from his head, “We wear two sweaters and type with our gloves on and we still drink boiled coffee. But maybe you’re right. I have a thing for machinery, and I do spend money on good equipment. The big workhorses, the combines, the tractors, need to last thirty years, and they will, if you take good care of them. So I fill my shop with machines that let me repair my own equipment. But a lot of times, they’re things I could get by without. I just got a new jig borer. Used, I mean—it’s new for me.”
Jim plowed earnestly through the description of the machine, describing how Blitz—Blitz Fosse—who worked for him and was a wizard with machines, had retooled it. No m
an who cared that much about jig borers could possibly think about soft white thighs under skintight jeans, he seemed to be telling himself, especially not a man married to a woman as amazing as Susan.
“Good heavens,” Gina said, “I couldn’t possibly repair this machine here; I don’t even know how it works. I just like the taste of the coffee it makes for me. Would you like another?”
“No, no. I only came by to see if you were okay, to make sure you hadn’t had anyone else bothering you.”
“I haven’t seen anyone, if that’s what you mean, but I started locking all the doors,” Gina said. “I called Uncle John to tell him he needs better locks on the ground-floor windows. Right now, every time I hear a noise in the night I jump up and race around to look out the windows. I never realized how many boards went into a house or that each of them creaks separately sometime during the night! Autumn—do you know her? Autumn Minsky, from Between Two Worlds in Lawrence?—she won’t even stay here after dark now.”
He laughed with her, but uneasily, not wanting to imagine her and Autumn together in the night. “Can you describe the person you saw in the tree?”
“It was Autumn who actually saw him. She says he looked like everyone else out here, just another—” She bit off the words in consternation.
“Yokel?” Jim suggested. “Country bumpkin?”
She gave a wry grin. “Your daughter said it sounded like a youth who lives a couple of miles from here, who’s mentally handicapped.”
Jim said, “Lara is fourteen. A lot of times, she leaps before she looks. It could have been Eddie Burton, but there are a few other possibilities. Did you hear an engine—car, truck, motorcycle—after he ran off?”
“Why—oh, if he was on foot it narrows the range of suspects.” After narrowing her eyes in thought, Gina reluctantly shook her head. “I can’t remember, and if I push at it I’ll just be creating a memory.”
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