THE GUNTERS SAT AROUND THE dining table eating Hamburger Helper. Caleb’s father stuffed his face with bread, the corners of his mouth glistening with Blue Bonnet. The TV blared in the background. Jeopardy! was on, and Alex Trebek rapid-fired questions out to Mike Piazza, Donna D’Erico, and Johnny Gilbert, while Jonah blurted out wrong answers to all of them.
“William Faulkner set the name of this trilogy in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.”
“What is the chicken pox trilogy?”
Caleb’s mother was quiet, rubbing her temples with her fingertips, waiting nearly a full minute before spearing a single noodle with her fork. She didn’t quite chew the food, instead mashing it with her tongue against the roof of her mouth. She was suffering from one of her headaches. Caleb could tell by the way she tried to move as little as possible, as if just lifting her hand rippled pain throughout every cell in her body. Now a few weeks since Papa’s death, she’d been doing better the past couple of days. She still slept late, spent most of her time in front of the television watching the news, but she’d started to venture out of the house some, cook a meal or two a week, and started to read her bible more, which Caleb took to be a good thing. She still wasn’t the same as she’d been before, still depressed his father said, but she was trying. That much Caleb was thankful for.
Mom sipped her coffee, the steam fogging her glasses, and told a story about earlier in the day when she’d been shopping at Homeland. Caleb listened intently like he always did when his mother spoke.
“She was a young mother,” she said, her words even and slow, like she had to concentrate on each syllable she uttered lest one of them might break her. “Frizzy hair. Half-moon eyes. I know the look. She was exhausted, and her kid wouldn’t be quiet. He hollered. He sang. He pulled boxes and bags off the shelves, and she was too tired to argue with him. She just cleaned up behind him. Didn’t blame the woman. Felt sorry for her, in fact.”
“This fictional character in Herman Melville’s seminal work, Moby Dick, was obsessed with hunting and killing a sperm whale by the same name.”
“Who is Pee-wee Herman?”
Dad buttered another piece of bread and jammed half of it into his mouth.
“The place was crowded, and the other customers shot her dirty looks. They mumbled underneath their breath. Another mother started yelling at her. Right there in the store.”
“This American author went broke after hospitalizing his wife, Zelda, and famously asked his editor for a loan.”
“Who is the Cookie Monster?”
Dad gulped down a glass of milk.
“She tells this poor girl how much of a failure she is, how her kid’s a brat, how if she was the kid’s mom, she would’ve busted his ass right then and there, and how if the mother didn’t, she would have to.”
“This American League slugger was the only player to hit a home run in four consecutive World Series.”
“Who is—”
Dad muted the television. “Jonah,” he said. “Knock it off.”
“What?” Jonah feigned to be perplexed, a cheesy noodle stuck to his chin.
“The kid started crying. He screamed and balled up and reached for his mother, but they weren’t within arm’s reach, and so this woman grabs him and starts spanking the child.”
“You know what. It’s annoying,” Dad said.
“Just playing the game.” Jonah tined another noodle, but it slipped off his fork and landed on the carpet.
“So, what’d you do?” Caleb asked his mother.
“I did the Christianly thing. I took the kid from her. Gave the child back to his mother.” Caleb’s mom put her fork down, took off her glasses, and rubbed the bridge of her nose before continuing. “Then I paid for the young mother’s groceries.”
Dad put his fork down. “You did what?”
“I paid for the groceries. It was the least I could do.”
“Jesus Christ, Evelyn.”
“Don’t say that,” Caleb’s mother said. “Do not—”
“How much were they?”
“—take the Lord’s name in vain.”
“Answer the question, Evelyn.”
Caleb and Jonah stopped eating. A fight was coming. Caleb could feel it, the air gravid with static electricity.
“They weren’t much.” Mom returned to her plate, spearing a piece of venison and sticking it into her mouth.
“How much?”
“About a hundred.”
“A hundred dollars?”
The doorbell rang, and Caleb jumped, dropped his fork. It banged against the wooden table and fell to the floor. When he reached down to get it, he could see his father’s foot bouncing, like he was restraining himself from jumping up from his chair, doing something he might regret.
“Get the door, Jonah,” his father said.
“Why do I have to—”
“Get it!”
Jonah did as he was told. Caleb couldn’t see the door from where he was sitting, but he recognized the voice when Jonah opened the door. It was Minister Bly. At first, Caleb was confused. The minister had never made a house call before. He’d been a permanent fixture in Caleb’s life, and he often saw Minister Bly around town attending parades or volunteering at the food bank. Once, Caleb ran into the minister at the mall while he shopped for jeans, and Caleb remembered thinking it was odd. Here was Minister Bly, the shepherd of the community’s souls, doing something so ordinary, but having him in his house was even stranger. Minister Bly was a man of God. He shouldn’t have time for the trivial.
“Minister,” Mom said. “What a surprise. We just sat down for dinner. Are you hungry?”
“Please,” he said as he came into view. “I don’t want to be any trouble.”
Jonah followed behind the minister, making faces as he did so, pulling his cheeks out with his fingers, turning cross-eyed, and goose-stepping. Dad, Caleb could tell, wanted to say something, but he didn’t, not daring to call attention to his misbehaving son in front of the minister.
“It’s no trouble at all. Really. I’ll just make a small plate.”
“Please, no. I couldn’t.”
But Mom headed to the kitchen anyway, scooping up a healthy portion of Hamburger Helper and slopping it onto a plastic plate.
“Minister Bly,” Dad said. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
Caleb couldn’t help but notice his father didn’t stand for the minister when he’d entered the room.
“I’m afraid my visit isn’t a happy one,” the minister said.
“Oh?” Mom said as she placed the minister’s plate in front of him. “What would you like to drink?”
Minister Bly waved away Mom’s question with a flick of his wrist. “There have been a number of complaints.”
“Complaints?” Mom asked. “Is there any way we can help?”
“Well, yes,” the minister said. “We’ve had a number of calls from concerned parents. About your last Sunday-school class.”
“My Sunday-school class?”
“What’d you do, Evelyn?” Dad asked.
“You frightened a number of students, and, frankly, a number of their parents.”
“What’d you do, Evelyn?” Dad asked again.
“Apparently, the kids are convinced the end of the world is coming,” Minister Bly said.
“The children should be prepared,” Mom said with a shrug. “They should be aware of Revelation. They should know what will happen to them if they don’t repent.”
“They’re children, Evelyn.”
“Children burn in hell, too, Minister. You of all people should know this.”
Minister Bly folded his hands upon the table. They were soft hands, pale, unlike Caleb’s father’s. They weren’t marred by thick callouses. Dried blood didn’t coat the minister’s cuticles. Pale scars didn’t crisscross his knuckles. Caleb’s father had once told him not to trust a man who didn’t work with his hands, that a man who didn’t work for himself wouldn’t work for ot
hers, either. “Don’t count on ’em,” Caleb’s dad had said. “They’ll do nothing but disappoint you.”
“For a time, I think it would be best if you didn’t teach Sunday school. Let another parent take over for a few weeks. Let this whole thing blow over.”
“Seems like an overreaction. Don’t you think?”
Caleb’s father’s face turned the hue of ripe strawberries, a vein protruding from his forehead and pulsating up into his graying and receding hairline. Every day, his father looked older to Caleb, marching to the inevitability of old age, of decrepitude, of death.
“A few congregants have expressed they wouldn’t return if you kept your position. I have to think of what is best for the congregation. I’m sure you understand.”
“And you feel an unprepared congregation is for the best? You want your flock unrepentant upon the final judgment?”
“We don’t preach hellfire and brimstone at our church, Mrs. Gunter. Revelation is more of a …” He waved his hand in the air, as if conjuring the right words. “A metaphor.”
“A metaphor?”
“Yes, Mrs. Gunter. A metaphor.”
She picked up her cup of coffee as if to take a drink, stared at the now-cool black liquid, then put it down, thinking better of it. “Sure,” she said. “If you think that’s best.”
THE NEXT MORNING, MOM WOKE Caleb early. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and checked the alarm clock next to his bed. 4:18. Much too early for breakfast or to do his chores. He had to mow the lawn that day, take out the trash, and sort through the recycling, but that would be much later, when the sun rose and his father headed to work. The early hour worried Caleb. Had something happened? To Grandma? To his father? To Jonah? Was there a fire burning the other side of their home, devouring in flames their family pictures, their television, their books? Memories of the last time his mother had woken him up in the middle of the night flooded him. The hospital. The late-night infomercials. Papa with tubes in his nose, in his arms, his last few moments on the earth spent in an induced coma so he couldn’t feel the pain. But she didn’t seem worried. She shook him harder and leaned in close. Her breath reeked of cigarette smoke and coffee, and she told him to get up, to follow her, and to not make a noise.
The house was dark. Caleb’s father snored back in the master, his inhales troubled and difficult like he was gasping for breath after being submerged underwater. Sleep apnea, it was called. Caleb’s mother had told him about it, that sometimes late at night his father would stop breathing altogether, and she had to lean over and place her hand on his chest to make sure he started back up again. A few months back, his father had gotten a mask to help him sleep, but he stopped wearing it shortly after. He’d said it was uncomfortable, that he’d rather take his chances.
Jonah’s door was shut, the room quiet. He’d always been a deep sleeper, having on a couple of occasions dreamed straight through a late-night tornado. Caleb couldn’t understand sleeping so soundly. When Caleb had been younger, he’d suffered from night terrors, dreams of creatures crawling on him, strangling him, wrapping their tentacles tight around his chest and neck, and so his parents moved him into Jonah’s room thinking it would help. But it didn’t. When Caleb startled awake, frightened and panicked, he’d try to wake his older brother so that he could comfort Caleb, tell him everything would be okay, but Jonah would never wake. He’d just sleep, his breaths so light Caleb feared he might be dead.
His mother led Caleb to the dining room table and turned on the lamp in the corner. The light it emitted was orange and soft, casting shadows against the walls. On the table was an ashtray, a dozen or so cigarette butts smashed and smoldering at the bottom. She motioned for him to sit. Sleep still clouded his thoughts. He had been dreaming when she’d gotten him out of bed. It was one of those dreams where he was running from something. He couldn’t see it or hear it, but he knew it was something bad, something that wanted to hurt him, and it was getting closer. He was outside in the dream, someplace he didn’t recognize. The terrain jagged from bluffs and stone, his path blocked by tall, spindly trees so that no matter how hard he ran, the thing chasing him just kept getting closer, and closer, and closer, and it was when it was about to wrap its fingers around his neck that his mother woke him.
“Sorry for the early hour,” his mother said as she lit a cigarette, the cherry illuminating her face. “But it’s about time you heard this.” His mother picked a piece of stray tobacco from her tongue and flicked it to the carpet. “Things are not going to be easy for you and me. We’re going to face trials and tribulations, and I have to know you’re ready.”
Caleb felt himself drifting back to sleep, his mind listless, incapable of differentiating between dream and reality. Whatever it was that was chasing him lurked somewhere, hiding, waiting for him.
His mother took a drag from her cigarette and exhaled the smoke in a long, billowing plume. “Your grandfather wasn’t a normal man. I’m sure you were aware of this, even without me having to tell you. He was pious. Devout. A man of God. And that’s why he could do things. Things other people couldn’t do.”
Caleb didn’t know what it was chasing him, if it was beast or man. But he knew it was close, getting closer, the way he could sometimes feel a stranger staring at him from a distance, at the grocery store, or maybe at church, making his insides lose all sense of mass, turning liquid and then gaseous as if his body were a furnace. His Papa made him feel that way, too. Caleb could always feel him when he was near, and he was careful not to do anything to arouse Papa’s anger. Perhaps that’s what his mother meant. Papa had a way of always making his presence felt, agonizing Caleb with uneasiness until he couldn’t sit still. He’d once made Caleb cry by telling him stories of working the rigs in Midland, claiming they were haunted by the ghosts of oilmen.
“The man could perform miracles,” Caleb’s mother continued. “He was a saint. He spoke directly with God, and God listened. A lot of people say their prayers are answered, but they’re not. They ask for trivial, selfish things, for money, or for their favorite football team to win the Super Bowl, but God doesn’t trouble himself with such things. If their team wins or they get a raise, they might credit God, but it’s not. It’s coincidence, dumb happenstance, sheer luck. Your grandfather was different, though. He understood Revelation was coming. He could feel the Seven Seals were going to be opened, and the Four Horsemen would be unleashed upon the earth, and so he asked God for a miracle.”
“What did he ask for?” Caleb asked, his head still drowsy, fighting sleep.
“You.”
She told him the story, of her and his father trying to have another child, of the miscarriage, of the kidney disease.
“My body was failing me. Doctors said I couldn’t have any more children. I prayed and prayed and prayed, but still nothing.”
She told Caleb about going to Papa, the night at the barn, how he’d laid her down and spoken the language of the Lord and prayed over her to bear a son, and it was there, she said, that an angel spoke to her. She was shrouded all in white, and she glowed and vibrated like she was made from sound rather than matter. She told Caleb’s mother she’d be a vessel, and that Christ would be returning to the earth through her, and it was her son who would come for the righteous at the end of times to usher them into heaven.
“And the First Seal,” she said, “has been broken.”
“The white horse?” Caleb asked. “How do you know?”
“Minister Bly. You heard what he said. Calling the word of God a ‘metaphor.’ Your grandfather always said this would happen. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince people he didn’t exist. ‘Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie.’ It’s all right here in the Book.” She tapped h
er bible in front of her. “His word, son. His word.”
She took another drag from her cigarette, holding the smoke in her lungs. The smell stung Caleb’s nostrils and made his nose run. He kept sniffling so as not to drip snot down to his lip, but it didn’t do any good. He could feel the wet, but he didn’t dare get up to blow his nose or ask his mother to put her cigarette out. He just kept sniffling, and she kept talking, warning him about what was to come.
“Things are going to get tough,” his mother continued as she exhaled a thick cloud of smoke. “Real tough. You’re going to have to be ready. Can I count on you?”
“Yes.”
“When it’s time, will you be able to do what is asked of you?”
“Yes.”
“Will you be able to face the devil and strike him down?”
“Yes, Mom.”
She stood and stubbed her cigarette out.
“Good,” she said. “For all the souls in the world are counting on you.”
CHAPTER 4
CALEB AND HIS MOTHER BEGAN TO PREPARE. Spiritual inculcation, she called it. An education. An awakening of utmost vital importance for the entirety of the human race depended on them. Every day, they started before sunrise, before Jonah and Caleb’s father woke, and took to reading Revelation, for “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand.”
Their focus most mornings was the Second Horseman, the red horseman, brandishing a sword to wreak anarchy and war upon the earth. He would come, Caleb’s mother told him, soon. She wasn’t sure how, or when, or in what form. He might come as an invading people, the call for martial law, the bombing of a building, or he might be as innocuous as a local brawl down at the Wolftrap, a bar that Caleb’s father frequented. No matter how he came, though, they would have to be vigilant, unfearful, and brave. Neighbors would slaughter neighbors. They’d strike each other down with guns and with knives, even with their bare hands. It was not a time to be squeamish, she said, “for you will be faced with blood, and with gore, and with death.”
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