“The Bible is a good book, but it’s not the only book,” pressed Bob. “In fact, I personally feel that parts of the Bible are fiction.”
Stunned by this blasphemy, Jim held up his hands, surrendering, not wanting to pursue the line any further.
“No, wait,” said Bob. “I’m serious. I can name fifty stories right now from the Bible that some good novelist probably made up two or three thousand years ago.”
“Parts of the Bible are parables,” said Jim, giving in a fraction. “But they happened. At one time or another, they happened.”
“Exactly!” said Bob, feeling he had made the move to get his opponent in checkmate. “Fiction is much the same. It is a record, an interpretation of something that happened, or may have happened, at one time.”
But Jim found a move, at least one under his rules. “You’re wrong, Bob,” he said quietly. “The Bible is the Divine Word, the message from God, and therefore immune to challenge. I need no fictional lies in my life.” Case closed.
In the days that followed, Bob tried to steer the discussion topics away from religion, for such talk always tottered on the edge of exasperation if not anger.
One morning passed with pleasant talk of hobbies. Bob spoke of his great love of the outdoors; he told how he and Linda had bought hiking boots in Salzburg on their honeymoon and climbed the Alps, how they had spent two enhancing weeks on the hundred-mile Wonderland Trail around the slopes of Mount Rainier. Interrupting, Linda told of her fear of bears and of a book she had read in preparation for the hike. “It said to carry a bell and a whistle, and if one saw a bear, to ring the bell and blow the whistle.”
“So what happened?” asked Jim, impressed by her preparations.
“The third day out I saw a bear and I rang my bell and blew my whistle, and he loved it so much he came running right at me. I yelled to Bob and he came over with a branch and shooed him away.”
Bob began to laugh at the memory.
“My husband,” said Linda, feigning annoyance, “also fell down on the ground and laughed for approximately two hours. I should have rung the bell and blown the whistle to get rid of him.”
Shyly at first, but warming to his subject when he discovered that the others were genuinely interested, Jim talked at length of his beekeeping and tropical fish. When he was a child, Jim remembered, his parents had taken him out of school and traveled to Florida for a time, his education consisting of Adventist correspondence work. A neighbor boy kept bees, and Jim became fascinated by them. Later, as a man, he tended his own hives and became immune to bee stings.
“Really?” asked Linda. “Can that happen?”
“I guess so. I got bit enough, but they never bothered me. When I lived at Battleground, the fire department used to call me when somebody reported a swarm of bees in their yard.” What happens, Jim explained, is that when there are too many bees in a hive, the queen flies off to establish a new domain, and the workers follow obediently. It takes a while to find a new place to live, and the bees meantime swarm about and scare people. “I was always happy to get a call like that,” he said, “because it meant new hives for me. You wouldn’t believe the honey we got. I collected honey for everybody I knew. We even gave it away as Christmas presents.”
Rambling on and on, Jim considered bees well past the cut-off hour for discussion period. But Bob let him talk. The most important point was not the content of the hours—Bob knew all he wanted to know about bees within ten minutes—but that they remain filled with words. Something to listen to! As long as talk crowded the clock, then there was less chance of melancholy and depression settling over them.
The next day, Jim was almost eager to tell of his tropical fish. “Wilma and I used to tell people that our aquarium was our color TV,” he said, in a rare attempt at humor. So accomplished did they become in breeding and raising rare species that Wilma sold surplus fish to pet stores in Auburn.
Over the years, the Fishers had raised at least twenty thousand fish, and as Jim reminisced about them, Bob had the feeling that each and every one was going to be discussed. He closed his eyes and listened intermittently, happy that he had found a way to spur Jim into talk of something other than the Lord or their survival.
But Linda inadvertently resummoned Jehovah.
The fish were interesting, she said, but why was Jim opposed to having a television set? Did his religion forbid it? No, came the answer. Then, pressed Linda, were there not at least a few programs of quality—news specials, men walking on the moon, even religion discussions and sermons on Sunday morning?
“Sunday is not a holy day,” exclaimed Jim, a little shocked that she would think so. “The Sabbath is on Saturday. Read the Bible and learn that truth. Moreover, television is a thief—stealing time that could be used more fruitfully in service to the Lord.”
“After dinner,” said Jim, closing his eyes in the reverie of remembrance, “we enjoyed one another. We talked. Wilma sewed. I read the Bible out loud to the children. And we prayed together before going to sleep. Just as I pray here, every night, that God will watch over all of us during the darkness and wake us with His love each morning. If that is His will.”
Nodding, Linda fell silent. She had no more questions that morning. In Jim’s eyes, when he opened them, was the glow of contentment, and Linda felt envy. Besides, she told Bob later, the idea of families communicating without the hypnotism of a television set appealed to her. To each his own, said Bob.
It was growing slowly, but already Bob was troubled. On nights when none of them could sleep, or during the free hours, Linda began asking Jim questions about his religion. She wanted to know the history of the church, why such a severe moral code was imposed on its membership—what was wrong with a cup of tea?—and why the Adventists spoke of Catholics so harshly.
What if she falls in with him? wondered Bob. What if Jim convinces her that all of our problems are because I do not believe in his church anymore? He could challenge Linda on what she was being taught, but for the time being he would not. He would bide his time and eavesdrop on her religious curiosity and education.
On the first Saturday after Bob introduced his schedule of activities, Jim spent the morning free hour wrapped in his private worship service, “private” meaning that he kept it to himself. Previously it had been routine, and Bob and Linda had gone about their lives without attention to Jim’s devotionals. But on this day Linda paid abnormal heed to Jim’s silent prayer, his reading from The Great Controversy, the clenching of his hands and the raising of his head in summons to his God. At one point Bob even noticed her praying silently herself, in fellowship with Jim.
When it was time for the discussion hour, Bob almost hurriedly introduced Watergate as the subject. The hearings under the chairmanship of Senator Sam Ervin had been stirring the country on the day they left Tacoma, and now Bob wondered what had happened. Perhaps Nixon has resigned, he said. Perhaps we are lost on the ocean, and the country is collapsing. “Today’s topic is Watergate and its effect on our society,” he said. “What do you think we can learn from it?”
Linda shrugged. Not overly interested in politics, the scandals contained little fascination for her. But she was willing to throw a coal on the fire.
“I suspect all politicians, do it at one time or another,” she said. “They just happened to get caught.”
In part Bob agreed. Though he had opposed the Vietnam war, he considered himself a political moderate, certainly not a knee-jerk liberal who cried “fascist” at everything attempted by Richard Nixon. “I think,” said Bob, “that Nixon did not know about the cover-up. The executive branch of government has eight thousand people in it, and I can’t give Nixon the credit of knowing the machinations of the little men under him.” Bob paused, looking at his brother-in-law. “What do you think, Jim?”
The subject could have concerned the eros centers in Hamburg for all it interested Jim. He grimaced in response. “I have no thoughts at all about politicians,” he said. “They�
��re corrupt, they’re worldly, they don’t really matter to me. I’ve never even voted.”
“Never?” asked Linda, incredulous.
“I’m not represented by politicians,” he said. “I am represented by the Lord.”
“What does matter to you, Jim?” asked Linda. “I don’t mean this rudely, I really want to know.”
Accepting the question, Jim was quiet for a few minutes, putting his thoughts in the best possible order. He seemed grateful for the invitation to explain himself.
“My wife,” he began. “My children. My family. You. Bob. And, most of all, service to God. I’ve wanted to be a missionary since I was a little boy. I believe the only thing that matters is to live the kind of life that God will approve of, and I pray that Jesus will raise me into heaven when He comes again.”
“And what or when is that?” wondered Linda.
“The date is unknown,” said Jim. “But the end is near.”
“You’re not the kind of people who sit on a mountain-top and wait for the end of the world, are you?” said Linda.
Definitely not, said Jim. The Adventist church was formed by people who believed, through examination of biblical dates and prophecies, that Jesus was returning to earth in 1844. But when the Second Coming did not materialize then, further theological research by Adventist scholars determined that Jesus moved into a holy place in 1844, where he has since been studying the books of every soul who ever lived on earth. When that task is completed, Jim explained, then Christ will come again, opening the graves, raising the sanctified to heaven, leaving the others to hell. It is not so much fire and brimstone, this hell, but denial of paradise.
“Will only Adventists go to heaven?” asked Linda with unconcealed fascination. No, answered Jim. Others would gain admission to God’s kingdom. But Adventists, he made clear, held priority tickets.
Having listened quietly to Jim’s sermonizing, Bob prepared himself. He felt it was now necessary to interrupt. He would not tamper with Linda’s stirrings, whatever they were, for he considered man’s right to think and question and determine for himself to be the most sacred of abilities. But before he would witness his wife’s foxhole conversion, he wanted her to have another point of view.
“But don’t you think,” questioned Bob, “that a person can be a good Christian—can lead a moral life, can be saved—without belonging to formal church?”
“No!” said Jim firmly, but his negation dangled, his sentence was incomplete. More would surely come. The stirrings of new tension leapt up between the two men as they half-sat, half-lay on their rope beds, shoulders hunched and heads bent to avoid the ceiling above them. An awkward place for a face-off, an unreal setting for a duel of souls.
Crouching against the wall to watch the men and hear them out, Linda drew the sheet tighter to her nude body. Not until her legs and thighs healed from the sores could she bear to wear clothes again. She waited. Turning, Bob looked at his wife, seeing the dark shadows arcing like quarter moons beneath her eyes, eyes deeper set now in a face become gaunt. She weighed perhaps ninety pounds, twenty less than the day they set sail.
This is an impossible position, Bob thought. I must challenge Jim’s beliefs, I must expose them, yet I cannot destroy them because my wife wants to know them. Linda is concerned for her immortal soul, she is terrified of the unknown, she will accept any hand that is held out to her.
Even Jim’s.
(11)
With the sun at full strength, Bob could not trust his temper. It would be better to delay the confrontation. The grievances he held against Jim might enflame in the passion of a midday argument.
“This is getting a little heavy,” said Bob. “Let’s table the subject. Besides, we’ve run way over the discussion hour. Almost noon. Time for games.”
Jim fell back on his bed and stared at nothing above him. “You know I can’t play games on the Sabbath,” he said. “This is my holy day, no matter where I am.”
The memories raced again within Bob, for he had heard these words before. They had dominated his childhood. Saturdays were suspended in time, the tractors were stilled, the mules dozed unworked, the toys rested forlorn. “This is God’s day!” commanded his father, when Bob had begged for permission to play with the other children, those to whom Saturdays were crowded with discovery and adventure and laughter.
It had seemed then that his religion actually stole two days of his week, for on Sundays, when the Methodists and Baptists and Catholics marched to church in scrubbed pants and starched shirts, Bob was alone again. Sunday, according to his religion, was just another day, the first of the week, not the last.
In the silence of Jim’s refusal, Linda lay back on her bed. The quiet hung as oppressivly as the heat. When there was nothing to hear but the murmurs of the sea, the condition of loneliness could grow malignant. Bob could not risk breaking the daily routine and inviting despair only because it was Saturday. Hurriedly he thought of some way to fill the hour with an activity acceptable to Jim’s code.
He thought of one. “How about this instead?” said Bob, pseudo-enthusiastic. “You wouldn’t object to a game based on the Bible, would you, Jim?”
And what would that be?
“Well, one of us has to think up a Bible character or situation, and the others ask questions about it. Whoever guesses gets to think up the next one.”
“You guys would have the advantage over me in that,” said Linda.
Bob disagreed, trying to kindle interest in his new creation. Linda had gone to Sunday school probably as often as they had. She could remember as many characters and plots as they.
She brightened. “Okay,” she said. “I have one.”
“Is it Old Testament or New Testament?” asked Bob.
Linda pursed her lips. “Old.”
Jim, suddenly interested, raised on his elbows. “Before or after the flood?”
Now Linda made a frown. “Hmmmmm,” she said. “Neither.”
Jim laughed. “Is it Noah’s Ark?”
Linda shrugged. “I guess it was pretty obvious,” she said, brushing a hand against the wall of the Triton.
“You see,” said Bob. “It’s fun. But they should be a little harder. Jim?”
Jim shook his head. He was not yet committed to the game.
“Then I have one,” said Bob.
The interrogation began again. Questions from Linda and Jim narrowed the subject down to a woman in the Old Testament, but after half an hour, she remained un-guessed.
“Give up?” asked Bob. The others nodded. Jim a little annoyed, for he considered his Bible scholarship to be excellent.
“Mara,” said Bob.
“Never heard of her,” said Linda blankly.
Even Jim looked puzzled. Bob moved quickly to elaborate. His subject was originally named Naomi, until she lost her husband. Then she chose, as was custom, another name. “Naomi took a name that expressed her feelings. Mara means grief, or sorrow.”
The revelation fell heavily on the other players. Bob realized that grief and sorrow were not the best subjects to introduce. But, then, their plight inside the capsized boat was so almost Biblical that most any theme could be affixed to their desperate situation.
In a few moments, Linda put forth Adam and Eve, which the men quickly guessed, and she followed with the miracle of loaves and fishes, which restored the game to a lighter plane, particularly when Linda jested mischievously that perhaps Jim could pray over their sardines and make the cans multiply. Only Linda could get away with such flippancy.
The game stretched until the late afternoon when the sun relaxed and the chamber cooled. It worked, Bob’s invention, even though he guessed most of Jim’s characters, even though he stumped the others more than anyone. It became quickly apparent that Bob’s theology was stronger than Jim’s, even though he had renounced the church and no longer permitted its characters to shape his life.
“It’s almost dinnertime,” said Bob. “Let’s quit.” He wanted to prepare a
new milk shake for Linda and put new salve on her sores. In a few days, if the salve did not run out, they would be healed.
But Jim had one more situation. “Wait,” he said. “One more.”
“Is it Old Testament or New?” asked Linda, for she was now familiar with the narrowing process.
“Old,” said Jim.
“Before or after the flood?” asked Bob.
“After.”
“During the time of the kings of Israel?” said Bob.
“No.”
“Before Egyptian captivity?”
“Nope.”
“During the time of the Judges?”
Jim frowned. “Yes. But I warn you. It’s hard.”
“Is it Joshua?” asked Bob.
“Nope.”
Linda raised her hands in surrender.
“Did it involve a man of God?” asked Bob.
“Yes.”
“Were there other people involved?”
“Yes.”
Bob tried to put everything together, turning the pages of the Bible in his mind. He snapped his fingers in discovery.
“I know. Was it a prophet?”
Jim nodded.
“Elijah?”
“No.”
“Then it must be Elisha. I always get them mixed up.”
Jim nodded again. “But I want more than just Elisha.”
Linda backed away. “I can’t help you, honey,” she said. “The only thing I can think of are the walls of Jericho and that was Joshua.”
A smile came over Bob’s face. “Could it be when the bears came out of the woods?” He nudged Linda lightly, so sure was he that this was Jim’s subject. It would be a clever allusion to Linda’s anecdote about the bear and the bell and the whistle.
“Afraid not,” said Jim, folding his arms in no small pride across his chest.
Bob mused aloud. “I can’t think of a single other thing Elisha did. Tomorrow I could probably name twelve.”
“Give up?”
Bob nodded.
“Do you remember,” asked Jim, “when Elisha was building a boys’ school, and an ax head flew off and went into the water?”
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