Chapter Twenty-One

 

Trolleys

 

The teeth the Reverend Matthew Black used for morning services were his “perfect” set. They were the largest, whitest teeth in his possession. It had taken him a long, long time to learn to speak properly while wearing them. When he smiled with them, they seemed to occupy half his face, an effect he knew was disconcerting to newcomers. And that was fine. Disconcertion made for a good first impression in his line of work.

His shoes, shirt, and belt were black. His slacks were white. He wore no tie, but he did have the gold cross pins on his collar and shirt cuffs. It was his standard Sunday-morning ensemble. The nighttime punishments were more … casual.

He greased back his widow’s peak, checking for gray within the black. Unlike his much younger wife, his hair still held its original color. Every day he prayed for his hair, and the good Lord was still listening.

Ruth appeared at his bedroom door right on time. For the morning services, they did like to appear together, a single unified soul in two bodies, emblematic of love that was holy and true.

“Good morning, Ruth.” His teeth clicked. He’d spoken too soon. The denture paste was still hardening.

She noticed and answered, “You have two other new ones apart from Rebecca this morning. And one of them—this boy, Daniel—is exceptional too.”

Matthew clenched his teeth, waiting for the glue to take.

“We kept him secured until today, although Asher has been most attentive to his needs. He’s not even dehydrated.”

He nodded. Asher was a good boy. He did as he was told, always.

“The other girl, Caroline—well, she’s ordinary. Still, she’ll prove to be valuable to us in the end. Anyway, two out of three being exceptional … a real coup this week, if I do say so myself. How jealous the other camps must be.”

No one recruits like you, he answered with his eyes. But he was also thinking, Why must you speak to me when I cannot answer? You know I hate that.

He pointed to his mouth, and she dutifully fell silent. For a full minute, neither of them said anything.

When he finally felt like it was safe to try again, he ventured, “Jealousy is a synonym for envy. It is a sin.”

“One of the deadliest,” Ruth agreed, coming to him. She ran her hands over his shoulders, smoothing wrinkles. “I work very hard so that we won’t be tempted by it.” She kissed his lips. “And the best way to do that is to be better than everyone else.”

He returned the kiss, holding the back of her head. His teeth held firm. “I will have you tonight,” he said, affecting something between a growl and a purr. “After punishments and lights-out.”

It was best after punishments. With the punishments fresh in his mind, he could usually finish. One day, perhaps, if he remained steadfast, the Lord would open her womb and bless him with a child of his own.

She ran her fingers down his chest. “Do you love me?”

I try, he thought. I pray for love.

“You’re my wife,” he said. “Of course I do.”

 

****

 

“Wait,” Rebecca said. “It’s Faust. And … Vex.”

For Rebecca, they sounded like nicknames in some fifth grade nerd’s clubhouse. It was too soon, she knew, for them to feel natural, but she didn’t think she would ever think of Caroline as Wren or Daniel as Faust. Even though she had no idea what the blind boy’s name really was, she’d never really think of him as Vex either. And she hated that Mrs. Black had dubbed her Rags.

For a woman of God, that was a petty, dirty thing to call her.

Caroline’s gaze darted between her, then over to Daniel, then back past them both to the narthex. The line of kids passing under the shadow of the crucifix was still thick, but most were already inside. “Rebecca,” she said in a low voice. “We can’t be late.”

Rebecca was glad to hear Caroline still using her real name when she could. And Caroline was right. The clock tower on the quad said they had five minutes. Daniel was at least a hundred yards behind them, going pretty slow as he helped Vex along. He might get a pass, being a Good Samaritan like that, but she didn’t think she or Caroline would.

Daniel waved to her—not in greeting, though. He was waving her ahead.

Rebecca waved back. Save you two a seat, if we can. “Yeah,” she said to Caroline. “Let’s move it.”

 

****

 

That’s headquarters, Daniel thought, watching Rebecca and Caroline pass inside. Those two buildings right there.

The first of the two was the chapel everyone was headed toward, the massive crucifix on its roof casting an upside-down shadow over the horde of approaching teenagers. The second was a house, itself two floors high, with a sign out front that read “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” It had a wide glass window currently set to mirror-mode. Daniel would have bet anything, if he had anything, that it was where the Reverend lived.

“She’s famous, you know,” Vex said.

“Huh?”

“Maybe infamous is closer to the truth around here. But yeah. She’s a celebrity.”

“Who?”

“The girl you like. The one you want to sit with in church. Rags, from the cafeteria earlier.”

“You sure you’re blind? You haven’t bumped into any trees yet.”

Vex tapped the ground with his cane, his self-satisfaction evident even behind his sunglasses. Daniel hadn’t taken his arm once, but they were on a fairly straight walkway.

As they neared the chapel, the shadow of the crucifix enveloped them. Those few kids he could still see outside seemed to move on autopilot, including Vex.

Daniel took his arm at the steps. The clock tower began to toll. “Famous, you say?”

“Very.”

“And how would you know that?”

But they were passing through the doors, the last to arrive. The chapel foyer was packed as kids continued to work their way deeper in, toward services. The grownups were in here, serving as ushers. Armed ushers.

“Later,” Vex whispered. “Not now.”

The ushers separated them.

 

****

 

There would be no saving Daniel a seat, Rebecca realized. As soon as she and Caroline made it into the chapel, two ushers had instantly identified them as this week’s serfs and had taken them to their appointed place up front. There they sat upon a long, uncushioned oak wood pew, just the two of them. Here, unlike in the cafeteria, girls were seated on the right-hand side of the chapel, while boys were seated on the left. Once Daniel had been escorted to his assigned place, also up front but alone on the other side, the sensation of being on display mounted with each passing second.

The pews were arranged diagonally, forming a V-shaped alley that fanned out like arms stretching toward the altar and the pulpit. The stained glass windows were all reds and browns and golds, casting a burnished, dusky glow throughout the chapel. Within the glass, Rebecca saw familiar stories: the walls falling on the city of Jericho, David killing Goliath with a slingshot, the stoning of St. Stephen the martyr…

Jezebel cast from the rooftops, then devoured by dogs in the street…

John the Baptist’s severed head on a silver plate…

And throughout all, there was Jesus: the flogging, the crucifixion, the resurrected Son with holes in his hands, feet, and side…

The altar and the pulpit were white, but most everything else was an earthy wooden brown or bloody red. Even the carpeting was red.

Rebecca risked a look over her shoulder. In the pews just behind her sat the Threshers, all except for their devotional leaders, Magda and Asher. Beyond them, the rest of the campers were packed in tightly, the room hardly containing them, and yet it seemed to Rebecca that there was a strikingly equal number of boys and girls. The ushers found their places in the aisle seats of every pew.

They can’t all be counselors. Some of them are teachers—some are nurses, office workers.

But she could not find Barney or Wendy Scruggs anywhere.

All the way at the back sat the cafeteria workers and custodial staff. The garbage, Mrs. Harrell had called them. They were still wearing their work clothes. Maybe those were their only clothes.

Miss Paula wasn’t there.

Not yet. I’ll see her soon. I’ll find a way to thank her. Somehow.

Organ music came from everywhere and nowhere. Rebecca sat forward again. She knew this hymn. Even if she had not heard it just the other day projected through the ghost lips of electronic phantoms in the woods of New Sinai, it was part of her earliest choir memories. “Onward Christian Soldiers.” When Caroline and the rest of the congregation automatically stood and began singing, Rebecca made sure her voice could be heard.

Across from her, Daniel sat not singing, his face darkening.

She felt an acute twang of pity for him. Didn’t he know the words? Or was he trying to get in more trouble?

Rebecca wasn’t the only one who noticed. Behind him, Nero scooped a hymnal from the pew pocket, thumbed through it, and passed it ahead to Daniel with a brotherly wink, pointing to where they were in the song.

Daniel nodded with a small smile, wrinkled his brow, and actually joined in.

If she hadn’t been so busy singing herself, Rebecca would have sighed in relief.

 

****

 

Beyond the altar, beyond the pulpit, two doors on opposite sides of the back wall simultaneously opened, even as the hymn marched on to its third stanza.

I should be grateful, Daniel thought, singing along. He figured Nero could have just tallied him for not knowing the words if he’d wanted to. Instead, Nero had helped him out.

How unfair was it, though, to sit the new kids up in front, where there were no pews in front of them—and thus no pew pockets, and no hymnals, for them to access on their own? Somehow worse was the realization that Rebecca and Caroline didn’t even need the hymnal. Looking around, almost no one did, except for a few of the really young campers who’d picked up theirs after the second verse.

I’ll catch up. How hard can it be?

He forced himself to sing louder, even though he couldn’t carry a tune if it came equipped with a handle.

And I will hold on to myself, to who I really am, no matter what.

Asher and Magda emerged from the opening doors, pushing steel hand trolleys. The top platforms of the trolleys supported large, perforated brass serving trays of communion wine, three each, stacked one on top of the other. Each tray contained dozens of thumb-sized plastic cups. They were all brimming.

The middle platforms were brimming too. Each held a steel basin filled to overflowing. The sides were wet, dripping, and smeared with the same stuff that sloshed in the cups.

Sheep’s blood. Vex wasn’t kidding. Wine wouldn’t smear like that.

The bottom platforms carried simple bread pans. From this close Daniel could see the bread had been baked into small white wafers, all lined up in neat parallel rows like Ritz Crackers.

Daniel looked across the chapel. Caroline had a hand over her mouth. In this light it was impossible to see what was going on with her complexion, but if he had to guess, he would have bet that it was paling toward green. Rebecca’s expression, meanwhile, might have been cut from granite.

Asher and Magda joined the other Threshers in the second row of pews.

I do not want to be first for this. I really, really don’t.

The hymn ended. Just as Wendy and Barney Scruggs came through the back doors, the invisible organ kicked in with another one—and Daniel felt a moment of panic when it occurred to him that he had no idea what page in the hymnal he should be on now. But again Nero came to his assistance, leaning forward and pointing toward an electronic message board. Trying to keep up with the Angel Island rite of communion had zeroed his attention away from it, but it flashed with the necessary information: “Are You Washed in the Blood?” pp. 223-224.

As he found his place, campers behind him filed out in two slow-moving lines, boys on the left, girls on the right. To his relief the back rows emptied first—but not the ones with the cafeteria workers and custodians. It seemed that, though they would have to watch, they at least had the good fortune of not being made to participate.

Wendy and Barney set the blood basins and the bread on the altar, then assumed their gender-determined places to receive the supplicants, who sang “Washed in the Blood” as they approached.

Daniel focused on the hymnal. He needed to have these words memorized, or at least close to it, before it was his turn. He had no intention of bringing the hymnal up there with him.

 

****

 

Rebecca was grateful Philis had warned her and Caroline about this up front. She’d had time to mentally fortify herself, time to remember how she had wanted it to be blood when she had first received communion from her father two years ago. She kept picturing that reality TV show, repeated to herself over and over that people did this kind of thing on a dare or for a challenge all the time.

Next to her, she could see more than hear Caroline willfully regulating her own breathing. Rebecca wanted to talk to her, reassure her in the same way she was reassuring herself. Instead, she kept singing. Gently she elbowed Caroline in the hopes that she would get back to the hymn too.

From the back Ruth Black strode into the chapel. At the same time from the other side, Rebecca finally saw her husband more or less up close, as the Reverend Matthew Black came through the door on Daniel’s side. Husband and wife met at the middle, in front of the podium but behind the altar.

The final stanza of “Washed in the Blood” ended, and the singing stopped. The procession stopped too. The Reverend’s voice carried without amplification. “Blessings of the Lord,” he intoned.

His voice was rich, deep with serenity and command. But there was something … off about his face. It was difficult for Rebecca to pinpoint what it was, exactly—Mrs. Black was half in the way, from her angle—but it was something in the jawline. The mouth…

No. It was the teeth. They were too big, and they stretched his lips in an unnatural way.

“Blessings of the Lord,” the congregation repeated after him. Rebecca made sure her voice was heard among them. Thankfully so did Caroline. Rebecca could only hope, unable to see Daniel through the two lines of kids, that he was taking part as well.

“Let us pray.”

All heads bowed.

“We thank you, Lord God, for the body and blood of your Son. By eating His body, we become members of His body. Help us to be the agents of your providence in a blind, ignorant world. By drinking His blood, we have taken on His life, which was not ended by the cross, nor smothered in the tomb, but lasts for evermore. We thank you for this, the medicine of immortality, the antidote to death. All this we pray in the most holy name of Jesus Christ, because He is alive, and He reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit. You are one God, now and forever, Amen.”

“Amen,” the campers said, opening their eyes.

And then, unexpectedly, Mrs. Black spoke. “May the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ keep you unto eternal life.”

Rebecca’s mother never got to do that.

Meanwhile, the first of the campers was in position. Rebecca watched as a girl on her side of the chapel knelt in front of Wendy Scruggs to receive the sacrament, her head upturned. Mrs. Black spoke the words as she received first the body, then the blood, from Wendy.

“His body, given for you.”

With hands at her side, she took the wafer on her tongue and crunched it down.

“His blood, shed for you.”

She accepted the small plastic cup of sheep’s blood. And just as Philis had suggested, she pinched her nose before drinking it. But she drank it all in a single gulp.

“We do this in remembrance of our Lord and Savior,” Mrs. Black said.

Wendy took a wad of white gauze from the altar and dipped it into the blood basin. She then smeared it in the shape of the cross on the girl’s forehead. The girl accepted it without objection, even as the blood dripped from the tip of her nose. She made no move to wipe it off as she stood to return to her place near the back of the chapel.

And the line moved.

One by one for more than two hours, the lines crept forward, with Barney and Wendy serving while the Reverend and Mrs. Black performed the short incantation for each camper in turn. It could have been her imagination, but Rebecca could have sworn that, before they were even halfway done, the whole place reeked of blood. Had anyone ever gotten sick doing this? Surely someone must have at one time or another.

When the Threshers received communion, it was time for her and Caroline to join the line. And even though the sacrament had seemed to last ages, now it seemed to speed up far too quickly as she found herself watching Caroline kneel before Wendy and Mrs. Black with her head upturned and her eyes closed.

If anyone would get sick, it would be Caroline.

Have a little faith, she scolded herself. Are you her friend or not?

Caroline made it through. If her gait seemed a little wobbly as she departed back to her seat, Rebecca could hardly blame her. It took no small effort on her own part just to kneel in front of Wendy, who was quite young. Rebecca intuitively doubted she held any sort of legitimate rank in the church, New America Unity or otherwise.

But it could have been worse. Mrs. Black was at least standing off to the side, watching her like a half-starved cat might regard a plate of fresh tuna. Rebecca could have been made to kneel in front of her.

“His body, given for you.”

She kept her eyes open, receiving the body from Wendy’s reddened fingers, listening to Mrs. Black’s hateful voice and not reacting to it.

“His blood, shed for you. Even you.”

She pinched her nose, receiving the blood. But at Mrs. Black’s little spiritual ad lib, a small dribble escaped her lower lip. She wiped it away with the back of her hand.

“Oh no, you don’t,” Mrs. Black said. “You will do this right. Miss Scruggs—again.”

Across from her, she could now see Daniel finish his first sacrament. His mouth hung open. His teeth were pink as Barney painted a blood cross on his forehead under the Reverend’s watchful, smiling stare.

Rebecca forced down her second helping of sheep’s blood, this time without holding her nose, and saw the ritual to its finish.