Into Captivity They Will Go

by Milligan, Noah;

  An awkward silence followed. A horn blared in the distance. The water washed against the limestone below them, and then, without warning, Catherine took off running. Caleb was confused at first. What could she be doing? But this was soon replaced with terror. She was heading straight for the edge of the cliff. Deep inside him, he could feel the genesis of a cry, a plea for her to stop, but it somehow got buried before it could reach his lips, and soon she was midair, arms spread wide. It seemed like she hovered right at the apex of her jump, like gravity had ceased to function just as she’d leapt, but then she fell and disappeared behind the ledge. Caleb, Scoot, and Brandon raced over to the side and got there just before she hit the water, feet first.

  When she submerged, Caleb held his breath. He was sure she was dead. He counted to five, to ten, to fifteen, but then she broke the surface. She whipped back her hair and had the biggest grin on her face. Scoot and Brandon erupted into cheers, whooping and hollering and spurring her on, and Caleb couldn’t believe it. She could’ve died. Didn’t they realize that?

  “Come on!” she yelled from below.

  Scoot and Brandon didn’t hesitate. They stepped back, ran, and jumped at the same time, flanking Caleb as they did so, splashing next to their sister, and emerging to more laughter and cheers. That left Caleb standing atop the bluff alone, and all of a sudden, the cliff seemed to rise another hundred, two hundred, even three hundred feet into the air. Scoot, Catherine, and Brandon shrunk until they were just dots amid the dark, choppy waters, and they screamed up at him to jump, telling him he’d be fine, there was nothing to worry about, but fear clenched his chest. All his organs seemed to shut down, and the world turned dim, his footing unsure. He thought he might pass out.

  “You can do it!” they yelled. “Trust us!”

  Caleb took deep breaths until he regained control. The blood flow returned to his extremities. He found comfort in their encouragement. He found a semblance of strength and courage. Without thinking about it, he started to run. His arms pumped, knees high, straining for just a little more speed, and when he reached the ledge, he jumped as far as he could. Once in the air, he felt as high as the clouds, and for a second there, he thought he might float right through the atmosphere to heaven itself, angels reaching down and lifting him up into the air until all turned white and his fear and anxiety simmered away like steam, but then gravity took over and he began his descent. He wasn’t afraid like he’d thought he would be. Instead, he was euphoric. He’d never before felt so much joy. Adrenaline coursed through him until his skin vibrated and his teeth tingled, and when he hit the lake, it washed over him like baptismal waters.

  THE TRAILER PARK WAS FILLED with noise and life. Several dozen families lived on the property. They were younger mostly, men and women with calloused hands and grimy hair, two or three or even five children in tow, but they were happy, not haggard or worn, wracked with exhaustion and despair. The teenagers rode four-wheelers and hunted, coming back with dead-eyed bucks. Their parents hung the meat on clotheslines, salted it, and dried it to make jerky. When it was ready, they invited Caleb and his mother to try some, and it was absolutely delicious. It was salty and chewy, and it warmed his belly. Everyone was just so nice and welcoming and gracious, so much different than Bartlesville. They didn’t eye Caleb suspiciously or call him names. None of the children went to school. They tilled the fields, readying the soil to plant soybean and corn along the western side of the property as the weather warmed; they hauled trash and burned it down by the lake, and hacked down firewood with short axes. Everyone pitched in and shared the fruits of their labor. They shared their meals and their clothes and their bibles and their water, passing their belongings back and forth but never asking for anything in return. It was strange yet exhilarating, a community in and of itself, somehow connected but at the same time removed from the worries of the outside world.

  On Sunday mornings, Sam hosted the property’s church service. It was a lot different than First Baptist. Instead of a large building, service was held outside, the congregants sitting on aluminum folding chairs, their only shade from a tarp pulled taut over a PVC pipe structure. They didn’t wear trendy outfits, suits and ties and the latest dresses offered down at the JC Penney. Instead they wore plain cotton dresses and denim overalls, mud-covered work boots and off-brand sneakers. Their faces were creased and puckered and beaded in sweat. Caleb thought he would be uncomfortable around them, viewed as an outsider, but he wasn’t—once he got to know them, they turned out to be the friendliest people he’d ever met. They shook his hand and patted him on the back and fed him potato chips and Dr Pepper.

  All of them lived on the property or close to it. Ranchers, sharecroppers from nearby farms, janitors and plumbers, Walmart cashiers, and blackjack dealers from the casino. They lived paycheck to paycheck and had no use for a savings account. They wore what they could afford, old denim from Goodwill mostly, and they ate what they could buy off their SNAP benefits or grow or hunt. But unlike the church Caleb and his mother had attended in Bartlesville, there wasn’t judgment for this, the smug pride of those who were better off giving charity to the less fortunate. Instead, there was acceptance and warmth. Attendees always greeted each other with firm handshakes and genuine smiles, never once susceptible to the human follies of greed or avarice. Didn’t matter their name or position in life, they were welcome, loved even.

  There wasn’t an ordained minister wearing an ill-fitting suit, hair slicked back, bearing down upon them from an elevated pulpit. Instead, it was just Sam. He wore a pair of faded overalls, a simple white shirt underneath. On his head sat an old ball cap for the ’89ers, the former Triple-A baseball team in Oklahoma City. He took his time as he made his way up to the makeshift pulpit, which wasn’t much: a few wooden pallets stacked three high and a long particleboard floor. There wasn’t a microphone to amplify his voice, and when he stood atop the stage, Caleb had a hard time seeing him. Caleb and his mother sat near the back and off to the side, and large men obstructed their view.

  Sam cleared his throat and began the sermon. “Good morning,” he said. “I want to first thank everyone for coming out and spending some time with us. We realize you’re busy. You have jobs and responsibilities and bills, and I know how life can be eaten up a minute or two at a time until all you got left are just a few minutes to rest, recharge, and start the whole process over again. For you to show up and show thanks to God and to find communion with your neighbor—it’s a glorious thing. A glorious thing.”

  His voice was comforting. It was deep and smooth, the consonants and vowels draping over the audience in waves the way a concerned parent lulls their sick child to sleep.

  “I just want to ponder on that for a moment if we could, how busy life has become for all of us. We toil and we work. We work ten, twelve, fourteen-hour days. We have to answer to managers and supervisors and owners. We cater to angry customers and tolerate ungrateful vendors. We head to work, dreading it most days, slog through it, and then try to savor every moment out of it despite the nagging anxiety it brings, even when we’re not there. And for what? To provide what? Food for our family? To be able to feed them and clothe them and pay the banker his money? Sustenance, right? We strive to provide sustenance for our family. And that is a noble undertaking. It is. It’s the right thing to do.”

  As he spoke, Sam didn’t look at his audience. Instead, he looked everywhere else: the fields in the distance, the lake, the tent, and the table of orange juice and donuts. He stared at his feet and at his hands, at the cattle in the distance. He looked everywhere but at his congregation. Not once. Caleb found this bizarre but mesmerizing. It was like he could enrapture his audience without even trying, placing them under his spell with his voice alone.

  “But remember,” Sam continued, “sustenance isn’t just the material. It isn’t just the bread. It isn’t just the house. It isn’t just the new sneakers and video game. In your pursuit to provide these things, keep in mind a deeper kind of providing,
of support and acceptance and inclusion and love. We must create safe harbors of learning for our children. We must teach them to do right and help their neighbors and friends and strangers. We must place in them a sense of community, and every single waking day, we must strive to make our lives and the lives of those around us better. We must build homes and give to the needy. We must feed the hungry and warm the cold. We must write books and make art and help a neighbor in need. It should amaze us what we’re all capable of doing. We’re the makers of our own world. We are. It’s simply amazing. We’re all architects of our own reality. And when we cease to exist, that reality also ceases to exist.”

  The congregation nodded their heads and spouted impromptu amens. Grandmothers held their hands above their heads, and grandchildren snacked on cookies. Sam took a sip of water, used a handkerchief to wipe his lip dry.

  “We often speak of God’s grand design and plan for us, and he has one, that is irrefutable, but a part of that design is our ability to make our own fate. It’s a complicated matter, this conflict between free will and omniscient creator, and it often isn’t evident to us. We sometimes feel lost and isolated, and it’s difficult for us to imagine a benefactor looking out for our best interests both in this life and the next, and at other times we have a hard time seeing how we can affect our own lives for the better, bemoaning the fact nothing we do seems to go right. Still other times, we’re often confused about whether a turn of events, whether a promotion at work or the loss of a loved one, was the culmination of human choices or divine fate. To me, I would say they’re both. They are humanly constructs made possible by heavenly divination. We are the creators of our own world. And when we cease to exist, these worlds will cease to exist along with us. And, really, what it comes down to is that we have to make our own choices. We have to take responsibility for our actions. We have to do good and strive to be better. We have to find acceptance. We have to face the consequences of our choices, whether good or bad, whether grand or mundane, whether divine or evil, and if we do that, then God will take care of us. He will lay out a divine fate both in this world and in the next, but if we deflect blame, if we no longer try to do what is right, then God will lay out a different plan for us, a plan that will splinter our lives, splinter our families, and splinter the very world we make. We will have forced God’s hand. We will have forced God to create a hell on earth and a hell for us in the afterlife.”

  Sam stopped to grab a pitcher of water, pour a glass, and take the whole thing down in five or six gulps. He stared at the glass when he was done like he was surprised it had gone dry. He then placed the glass back at his feet and clasped his hands in front of him.

  “That’s why we’re here today,” he continued. “We’re here to challenge ourselves. God has a plan for us, but we must choose to follow that plan, to trust in the Lord, to love and to be kind and to help our neighbors. That is what life is about, taking care of people, friends, family, strangers, doesn’t matter. Each and every one of God’s children deserves our love and compassion and forgiveness. He demands it of us. And we will not let him down.”

  Sam raised his right hand above his head and began to utter a strange sound, his speech a smattering of unintelligible syllables rising and undulating in tone and intensity. It surprised Caleb at first. He’d never before heard such a thing, and he looked to his mother for guidance, but like him, she was enthralled. Sam’s words sparked with electricity. They spread like contagion. Soon, the rest of the congregation raised their hands, upturned their faces, eyes closed in rapture, and Caleb could feel this stirring inside of him. A building anxiety turned warm in his belly. He wanted to join in. He wanted to stand up and speak the language of God and share this experience with everyone else. It was a wonderful feeling, something he’d never experienced before. It was like he levitated. It was like he was an astral projection, witnessing all this from high above the tent. That was when he stood. He stood, and he began to speak. It was slow at first, and it felt strange on his tongue. The syllables he uttered were indecipherable, just a long stretch of vowels and consonants that didn’t form any discernible words, but they seemed to. Despite not being any language Caleb had ever heard in his life, they made sense. They communicated perfectly the message he wanted to convey, his love for God, his devotion, his indissoluble and unwavering faith that what he was doing was right and good and no language or words could ever even come close to that.

  Caleb moved out into the aisle, and the congregation spurred him on. They reached out and touched his arm and patted him on his back. He felt so many hands, dozens of hands. They were hands of brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers in Christ, and they grabbed ahold of him and lifted him into the air, and Caleb felt overcome. He burst from the inside out, filled with vibrating energy. His skin trembled, and he could smell the sweat and dirt and love emanating from everyone around him. It was transcendent. He no longer had control of his appendages, his legs and arms held firmly in place, his tongue moving across his gums and teeth, all of it controlled by some other being than him. It was God. It had to be. He was sure of it.

  CHAPTER 3

  ON MONDAYS EVELYN HAD THE DAY OFF, HER work week every Tuesday through Saturday, and they filled their time reading the Bible and talking about things to come, the opening of the Seven Seals and the final battle between good and evil. They sat at the dining-room table, which was just a fold-down table bolted to the wall and a couple of benches crammed in between the kitchen nook and the small living area, and Caleb’s mom was diagramming the signs she’d already deciphered, the things that had prompted them to move in the first place.

  “You see this here,” his mother said, pointing to a news article she’d clipped out of a USA Today, its text marked with circled words and scribbled notes in the margin. “This was the first sign I noticed.”

  It was a story about an earthquake in the middle of the Pacific, which had caused multiple tsunamis in eastern Asia. Approximately a hundred thousand had died, and another million were left displaced. Most had zero resources with which to rebuild, so they migrated to urban centers such as Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo. The pictures next to the story made Caleb’s stomach fold up like a fitted sheet. Cities ruined. Buildings demolished. Concrete crumbled and cars bent. People stood by with heads buried deep into their chests. They held onto one another loosely, arms draped over shoulders, fingers scraping another’s wrist. The pictures were black and white, but the streets were stained dark. Caleb hoped it was just water not yet dry after the tsunami had hit, but he feared it was blood.

  “They’re happening all over the world,” his mother said as she opened up a cigarette case, picked out a one hundred, and lit it with a flick of her wrist. She inhaled deeply and spit out a thick plume of smoke. “Look at this one here.”

  She showed him another story clipped out of a National Geographic magazine. On the front page was Mount Everest. Caleb had never seen anything so big in his life. It was like it scraped the bottom of heaven.

  “Avalanche hit a camp in the middle of the night. Killed about ninety people.”

  She picked out another story.

  “Hurricane hits Haiti. Thousands are dead.”

  Caleb read the first paragraph. Winds topped two hundred miles per hour, powerful enough to pick up an eighteen-wheeler and take out an entire resort. Floods six feet deep. Survivors starving and stuck on rooftops, unable to be helped.

  “You don’t think all these are coincidences, do you?” she asked.

  Caleb knew better. “No, ma’am.”

  “God’s angry,” she said. “Mankind has forsaken him, and he isn’t pleased.”

  “Like Sodom and Gomorrah?” he asked.

  She ashed her cigarette. Some of it landed in the ashtray, some on the table. She wiped it away with the side of her hand, the heel smudged black.

  “That’s right,” she said. “And you know what happened to them, correct?”

  “Fire and brimstone.”

  She nod
ded, took another drag. “The people out there,” she said, waving her hand above her head, “they’re living a life of sin. They steal. They covet. They murder, and they lie. Worst of all, they don’t repent.”

  “Like Dad and Jonah?” Caleb asked.

  “Exactly like Dad and Jonah.”

  “They still could, though, right? They could still ask God’s forgiveness.”

  “They could, but they’re running out of time. I fear the Third Seal has already been broken. These catastrophes, every time they occur, famine follows. Poverty. Destitution. Every single time. People lose their homes, their jobs, their very livelihoods, and who do you think benefits?”

  “The greedy.”

  “That’s right. The wealthy. The powerful. The follower of the white horse, the Antichrist. They’re the ones who profit. They hike up prices. They rebuild cities the poor can’t afford. They displace them, move them out, leave them with crumbs if anything.” She pointed out the window. “Look out there,” she said. “Look at those mansions. If something ever happened to us, do you think they’d be lining up to help us?”

  “No.”

  “No. And you know why?”

  “Because they’re slaves to the devil.”

  “That’s right. They’ll burn the world before helping their fellow man.”