by Sigrid Nunez
They do not have set hours for their Bible study—they have to work around PW’s busy schedule—but often they sit down together for a half-hour or so after supper. Tracy never joins them, but she reads the Bible on her own every day, and every Wednesday night she meets with her women’s Bible group.
Cole also has a Bible study group, which is only for boys and girls his age and meets on Saturday mornings. There is Bible study for children of every age, even those who haven’t yet learned to read, and several different groups for adults. Besides one for only women, there is one for only men. There is one for couples and one for singles, and there are other groups, called workshops, for people in some particular kind of trouble, such as drinking too much or post-traumatic stress from the panflu. Most of the groups meet at the church, but some, like the women’s group, meet at different persons’ homes. Whenever it’s Tracy’s turn to host, she bakes a red velvet cake and, for the dieters, Weight Watchers’ brownies.
When Cole hears about a workshop to help married people stay together, he thinks about his parents. He wonders, if they hadn’t died . . .
But it is becoming harder and harder for Cole to remember his parents clearly. Partly because of his illness, which burned away or distorted so much of his memory. (He understands better now what his father meant when he explained what Alzheimer’s disease had done to Cole’s grandfather.) Partly because his life today is so different from his life before. He has a new home, he lives in a new town—still in southern Indiana but east of Little Leap. Called Salvation City, though not a city, not like Chicago, and not even as big as Little Leap.
And, for the first time, Cole has a church. The Church of Salvation City, which Cole figured was named after the town, but in fact it was the other way around. As the story goes, the church had been founded in 1995. It was for the millennium five years later that the residents voted to change the town’s name from whatever it was (Cole can never recall) to Salvation City, too. Not every Salvation Citian belongs to the church, though even some who do not might come hear Pastor Wyatt preach at one of the three worship services offered on Sunday. Some people go to the Baptist church in the next town, and some don’t go to any church at all. Cole has little to do with those who don’t go to church, but when he sees them, downtown, say, or at the mall, he can’t tell any difference about them. Many greet Pastor Wyatt as warmly as any member of his flock. There are times when PW will approach a person in public, whether it’s someone he knows or not, and say, “Are you ready?” or “Have you thought about the Ten Commandments today?” And if the answer is no and the person gives him a chance, he’ll explain what horrible danger the person is in and how they can be saved. There are some who’ve been approached by PW so often already that when they see him they try to avoid him. Mr. Hix, who owns the hardware store, always grins broadly at PW but stops him before he can even open his mouth: “Not today, brother, I got work to do.”
Most things Cole remembers about the near past seem to have happened much longer ago—years and years ago—and to have less and less to do with him as the days go by. He does not always feel that he belongs in Salvation City—at least, not the way he thinks everyone else belongs—but he has no desire to leave, either. And anyway, where would he go? Back to the orphanage?
But there are moments when he is struck by a sense of loss so keen, it’s like an ax splitting him down the middle. The agony of seeing his parents become more and more ghostly. He has dreamed of them, standing side by side and waving to him from across some kind of empty stadium. Their waves are strikingly different: his father’s arm almost straight, making slow, sweeping arcs, as if he were guiding a kite; his mother’s hand close to her body and moving rapidly back and forth, like someone trying to rub out a stain. Then, although it’s indoors, there is smoke, or fog. Closing in, making it harder and harder to see, denser and denser until it’s impossible to tell if his parents are still waving, or if they’re even still there. A dream turned throat-clogging nightmare.
“It might help,” the woman called Eden had told him, “if you talked to them. You know, imagine your mom or dad is right there with you and you’re having a chat. A good time to do this might be at night, right before you go to sleep.”
And that night he had tried, but it had felt too strange. He couldn’t pretend like that—it was not his way. And then he dreamed that he was indeed trying to talk with his father. But his father was speaking the language of the dead. He kept getting madder and madder at Cole for not understanding him. Finally, he punched Cole in the face. In real life his father had never hit him, but the dream punch came as no surprise. To Cole it seemed woeful but natural, even inevitable. Deserved. He’d half woken up, and when he drifted off again he dreamed that his parents had shrunk to the size of gerbils. He carried them around with him in a Tupperware bowl. He fed them jelly beans and nuts.
At first glance anybody—not just the kids in Bible group—would have found the group leader scary. One of his eyes is dead and lies buried under a patch of purple scar tissue. He has some fierce tattoos—snakeheads, skulls—and his head is shaved like a skinhead’s. A silver stud through his right earlobe reminds Cole of a bullet.
Everyone knows Mason Boyle’s story because he has told it during the part of Sunday worship when members of the congregation are invited to testify. They know about the fight in the bar where he lost his eye to “this other punk” wielding a broken bottle, and how that was even worse luck than it sounded. As a child Mason had been afflicted with lazy eye, and the vision in that eye had always been blurred and weak. The eye he lost in the fight was his other eye, the one with 20/20 vision.
“I was cast down so low, I hoped to die. I was so mad at the world, if I could’ve seen ’em I’d have punched out everyone who dared cross my path.”
But then Mason started noticing something.
“My left eye—my bad, lazy eye—seemed to be getting stronger.”
It took about a year, Mason’s hardworking eye making a little more progress each day, until it was as good as his dead eye used to be.
“And then, man, it just kept going! I mean, my left eye actually got better. Doctor said she never saw anything like it, but today this here eye is twenty-ten!”
Even if they’d already heard the story, people would roar when Mason got to this part. And they would hoot and stomp and clap as he told the rest so that he had to raise his voice louder and louder.
“It was like God had taken pity on me, and not just a little-bitty pity but enough to forgive the fact that I had only myself to blame. Because, don’t you know, I picked the fight in the bar that night. And I started thinking it was a miracle, and that within that miracle was a message for me. A message about blindness and healing. A message about laziness and strength. A message about work—about doing double duty and being rewarded with brand-new vision.
“And I knew that God was calling on me to put aside all my lazy, shameful, devil-delighting habits and to receive what he was holding out: a chance to accept his love and forgiveness and make myself worthy of the vision with which he’d blessed me. Mason the sinner had a new life, and Mason had a mission. Mason was blind no more. Now he must help the blind.”
Mason earns his worldly living fixing cars. But as part of his selfless service, he helps make Braille Bibles.
Cole likes Mason—all the kids do—and he feels foolish for ever having found him scary. But secretly he wishes he did not have to study Bible with him.
Whenever Pastor Wyatt talks about the Bible, whether he’s preaching a sermon or talking on Heaven’s A-Poppin’! or studying at home alone with Cole, he always makes it sound as if it had all just happened yesterday and he himself had been there. When he tells the story of Jesus, it’s as if he’d seen it all with his own eyes—the miracles, the Crucifixion—and Cole is captivated by his big voice and the way he moves his hands, floating them up and down like white birds.
“I’m too deaf to catch most of what he’s saying,” Cole has
heard an old lady sitting behind him in church say. “But I feel blessed just watching him.”
“You want to teach folks, you got to hold their attention,” says PW. “Won’t do if they’re bored.”
But in Bible group Cole is often bored. In fact, Bible group reminds him a lot of school and of the kind of assignment he never liked. (Imagine that you, like the narrator, are drafted into the army to fight a war that you think is wrong. What would you do?) There is always a topic with a peppy title (“The Beatitudes vs. Bad Attitudes”), and though Mason picks the topic he has a rule about not doing much of the talking. He has another rule, about everyone having to write something about every topic.
“Okay, dudes, listen up. Say a Martian lands on Earth and this Martian comes up to you and he goes, ‘What’s this thing you Earthlings call Gospel?’ How would you define it for him? Say a secular kid tells you his mama told him Jesus’ story is nothing but a myth. How would you prove to this kid—without dissing his mama!—that she’s wrong? Cite verses but use your own words.”
But the worst assignments are the ones that are supposed to be fun. Rewrite the Beatitudes as hip-hop verses. The kind of thing that used to make Cole hate school.
But the other kids do have fun writing the hip-hop verses. And even when they might not like an assignment, they never get sullen or sarcastic or make a big show of how bored they are. And in this way Bible study is totally different from school. The other kids are happy to be there, and most of them throw themselves into the work. They want to please Mason, and they want to please God. Doesn’t Cole?
Mason sees all. Mason is not fooled. Mason teases Cole for not paying attention, for not really trying, and though he does it gently Cole is humiliated, he is ashamed, he knows it’s his same old problem. He has always been a bad student. Lazy, like Mason’s left eye. He will always be an underachiever. Everything has changed, but not this.
Mason sees all. “Never give up on yourself, little bruh. Moses was once a basket case.”
And in fact, it isn’t that Cole doesn’t want to learn. He loves the Bible stories. He thinks Daniel and Samson and David are superheroes. Every day he looks forward to the half-hour after supper that he spends with PW in the den. Cole has his own Bible, of course, but at these times they share an illustrated coffee-table-book-sized edition laid open on PW’s desk. They sit close together, and sometimes PW drapes his arm around Cole, and the weight and warmth of that thick arm on his narrow shoulders (like a friendly boa constrictor, Cole thinks) calm whatever jitters he might be having. When they are finished for the evening, PW kisses the side of Cole’s head. Once, he kept his lips pressed to Cole’s temple an extra beat and sniffed, saying, “You smell like a good boy to me,” and though Cole was embarrassed he was also pleased.
At first, when the inspiration comes to him, he puts off telling PW, afraid he might disapprove. But PW could not be more enthusiastic, and though Tracy’s response is not as important to him as PW’s, Cole is thrilled to hear her gush.
“Such a fine likeness of a lion! Nothing cowardly ’bout him, is there? And if that ain’t the darnedest scariest Goliath I’ve ever seen. Look, WyWy, he went and made Samson look like our Mason.”
Soon everyone in Salvation City knows about Cole’s gift, and besides his Bible-hero comics he is emboldened to try sketches—some cartoonish, some not—from life.
He is skillful beyond his years, and he knows it. The only good thing to come out of his days at Here Be Hope.
Two strokes of luck in that place where luck was essential to survive. First, he happened to be right there when a donation of art supplies arrived, and he’d managed to grab a supply of sketch pads and colored pens and pencils before they ran out (in that place where everything could be expected, almost instantly, to run out). Second, he had found a spot no one else seemed to know about (a cavity under some back stairs), where he could hide for hours without being disturbed.
In that hiding place he drew and drew. He hadn’t drawn anything in a while—not since the awful business with Mr. Gert. Now, in a flash, he finished a whole book about gladiators and was working on another one about mutant girl samurai. Works he was extremely proud of. Lost!
Sadly, those drawings had not made it to Salvation City. But Cole had let himself cry over this only once. For a while he consoled himself with the fantasy that they would be found by someone who would immediately recognize Cole’s talent. Then, no stone would be left unturned until the artist had been tracked down. And when they saw how young he was, he imagined people would shake their heads in disbelief. Probably this would all happen soon. Any day now, Cole Abrams Vining, boy wonder, would be discovered. From this, everything a boy could wish for would follow. But success would not spoil him. In fact, riches and fame would only increase his natural-born goodness. He would never forget the little people. And despite his own terrible childhood, how unfair life had been to him and all the suffering he’d had to endure, he would always be loving and generous, noble and kind.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN ORPHAN, says Pastor Wyatt. Everyone has a father in God. But Cole knows it’s because he’s an orphan that everyone is so nice to him. His whole life, people have never been so nice to him as they are in Salvation City. There are other children here who’ve lost parents. There is a girl named Michaela, who, like Cole, lost both. But unlike Cole, Michaela has family who survived the flu: a sister and a brother. Michaela’s case is unique, though, because she never knew her birth parents. A janitor found her in a high school gym locker when she was just a day old. So in a way Michaela has been orphaned twice.
Cole has heard it said that Michaela might be a rapture child. He has heard Tracy say it to PW. “Sometimes I think I can see her aura.”
The first time Cole ever heard of rapture children was at the orphanage, where there were three: a boy and two girls. Rapture children had been around before, but since the pandemic there were lots more of them. Rapture children were children who’d been sent by God to be lights in the coming dark. They would be among the first of the living to be caught up to Jesus’ side (right after the holy dead). God had endowed them with special spiritual powers so they could lead others in the countdown to the final battle. Though PW says there is nothing in the Bible to justify this, Tracy is among those who believe it.
Tracy has a niece named Starlyn who is a rapture child.
The rapture children at Here Be Hope got so much attention, naturally everyone wanted to be one. Some kids declared themselves raptures and would do almost anything—including lie through their teeth—to prove it. But only grown-ups could say who was or was not a rapture child.
Cole has heard about rapture children performing heroic deeds and even miracles—the boy at the orphanage was said to have run into a burning house to rescue a baby when he was hardly more than a baby himself—but Cole has never seen anything like that. The older of the two girls said that every night when she knelt to pray, Jesus came and stroked her hair. But Cole has learned that seeing Jesus, or at least conversing with him, is not such a rare event.
Some rapture children are unusually gifted. Michaela plays music without having been taught and sings like an angel (there are those who insist rapture children are angels). But though everyone says Cole is gifted, too, no one has ever said he might be a rapture child.
One thing all the rapture children Cole has met have in common is that they are good-looking. Almost every one of them is blond. (Michaela’s hair is so pale it’s more white than yellow; from the back you might even mistake her for an old woman.)
The biggest difference Cole can tell between rapture children and other children is that raptures have a way of making adults happy without even trying. He has seen Starlyn walk into a room and people light up as they do when dessert is set in front of them. He has heard grown men and women pour out their hearts to twelve-year-old Michaela, asking for her advice about grown-up things—should they take this new job, should they have another baby—or for her blessing. The
same kind of thing that had happened in the orphanage. Some of the other orphans were a little afraid of the rapture children because of this power they had with the adults. And Cole is a little afraid of Michaela. The way she always seems to be either laughing or crying. The way, in church, she is able to keep singing out strong even with tears streaming down her face. A girl with almost no meat on her bones and enormous hungry-looking eyes. There would not be enough hours in the day for her to fill all the requests she got from people to pray for them.
Cole is afraid of Starlyn, too. But that is love (and a secret).
Though there is no Bible story about them, Cole would like to do a comic book about rapture children.
“Did you used to be one?” Even before he asks PW this, Cole knows the answer is yes. But PW gives a loud whoop as if Cole had said something crazy.
“Me? Oh my, no, no, no. I was—my mama would tell you—I was more of a—of a reptile child.” And when Cole looks confused, PW stops laughing and says, “It don’t matter, Cole. It don’t matter what kind of child a person is. Like the song goes, Jesus loves all the little children.” And he opens the Bible to Mark 10:13, to show Cole where it is written.
“CHILDREN TELL TALE OF REAL-LIFE ‘LORD OF THE FLIES.’”
Pastor Wyatt had saved a copy of the article that had set him on the path leading to Cole. But long before that story appeared, he’d been preaching against the new orphanages.
“First we had all these horror stories about our inefficient and overburdened foster-care system resulting in all these abused and neglected kids. Then we had people saying why not bring back the old institutions? Why not dump all those kids in a group home and have the government be in charge? Can’t possibly be worse than what we got now. As if the solution to ‘the system’s broken’ was ‘break it some other how.’ But Jesus tells us straight out how he felt about children: the kingdom of God is theirs. And whoever seeks to live in the kingdom must love the children as he loved them. Meaning it is our inescapable duty to find Christian families for each and every child. And if that means moving children from parts of the country where good Christian families are hard to find to parts of the country where they are the majority, then I say that’s what we should do.”