SO THERE I WAS in Wolverton, living with three Redeemers and eight beans, which I watered every day and tried to treat fairly, except for the prayers. I kept track of their progress on a graph. Ray was proud of my interest in botany. She hadn’t realized yet that the point of the experiment was to destroy her new life.
Life with Ray, Alda, and Geraldine was never much fun and sometimes it was just miserable. Part of the problem was that Alda and Geraldine, having been Redeemers a lot longer than Ray, had a lot more opinions about all the things I was always doing wrong. They didn’t like my immodest clothes, which sometimes displayed unmentionable body parts like knees. They didn’t like me arguing or asking questions because that was disrespectful. They were bothered that I still wouldn’t make the Affirmation in Mrs. Prescott’s Sunday school class because that showed that I was not in a state of grace. They wanted Ray to pull me out of the public school, which was a den of secular iniquity, humanism, and unsanctified peer pressure, and put me in the Redeemer school.
And they practically popped a gasket over the List. I wrote the List when I still believed in Andrew’s theory about snapping and deprogramming, when I thought that maybe if Ray just heard enough logical arguments she’d give up the Redeemers. The List was my list of everything I could think of about religion that was bad. This is it:
Octavia Boone’s List of Terrible Things Caused by Religion
The Spanish Inquisition
The Crusades
Centuries of European religious wars
Witch hunts
Suicide bombers
Anti-abortion violence
Denial of rights to women, gays, and lesbians
Blocking the progress of science, like arresting Galileo and preventing stem-cell research
Attempts to deny atheists citizenship
I stuck it on the refrigerator with the Cross of Faith magnets and left it for Ray, Alda, and Geraldine.
I figured that after that Alda and Geraldine would probably want to burn me at the stake, like Joan of Arc. I’d read her biography and part of her problem was immodest dress. She was caught wearing pants.
Instead they sent me to see Pastor Bruno.
Pastor Bruno had a wife named Barbara and six sons, though none of them was in Mrs. Prescott’s class because they were all under ten. Pastor Bruno referred to them as his little Warriors of God, of which at least the little warriors part was right on, since they were all hellions, especially Michael and Gabriel, who were seven and twins.
Pastor Bruno was round and bouncy and enthusiastic and tan, and always reminded me of a cheerleader crossed with a basketball. Ray said he had a contagious energy, but I thought he must have been pretty exhausting to live with, the way he was always popping up and down all the time.
“Well, Octavia,” he said. “I hear you’re having a crisis of faith. That’s what I’m here for, you know. To help people solve these problems. Would you like to talk about it?”
He was sitting behind his desk, which looked like the sort of desk Ray used to have in her law office, and I was across from him in a squishy leather chair.
“Not much,” I said.
I was pretty sure that what Pastor Bruno thought was a problem and what I thought was a problem were two different things. Also I didn’t think my problem was a crisis of faith. To have a crisis of faith, you have to have faith to begin with.
“It’s easy to lose the way, Octavia,” Pastor Bruno said. “You’re not alone in having doubts. I’ve had them. We’ve all had them. I’m sure Mrs. Prescott has told you the story of Doubting Thomas, the apostle who refused to believe that Christ had really risen until he saw the holes in his hands. And our Lord said that the blessed are those who have not seen but still believe.”
“I think Doubting Thomas was the only apostle with brains,” I said. “I think believing without seeing is stupid. Scientists don’t get to say, ‘Hey, trust me, stuff is made out of atoms.’ They have to have proof.”
“But that’s the nature of faith,” Pastor Bruno said. “You have to let yourself go, Octavia. You have to open your heart. You have to give yourself over to Jesus.”
So then I told him this story about Bertrand Russell. I’d heard it from Andrew, who, as I said, wanted to be a philosopher, and would like to be like Bertrand Russell. Though personally I don’t think Andrew has a hope since Bertrand Russell was brilliant in math, and math is far from Andrew’s best subject. It took him forever to learn his multiplication facts, and in geometry, he kept calling triangles little pointy things.
This is Andrew’s Bertrand Russell story:
Bertrand Russell was an atheist. At his ninetieth birthday party, a lady who was sitting next to him leaned over and said, “So what if you’re totally wrong? What if you die and you end up in heaven? What would you say to God?”
And Bertrand Russell said, “What I would say is ‘Well, sir, you gave us insufficient evidence.’”
I hoped maybe Pastor Bruno would tell me that I was a hopeless cause. But he didn’t. Instead he laughed so hard that I thought he would fall off his chair.
Then he said, “Octavia, I see you are going to be a challenge.”
It was not long after that that Pastor Bruno decided to build Salvation Mountain.
Salvation Mountain started out as Deer Hill. As long as anybody could remember it had been called that, because there were always a lot of deer on it. People around here are not very imaginative when it comes to place names. Right here in town we have Park Street, that runs past the park; Church Street, that runs past the Congregational church; Pond Road, that runs past the pond; and Maple Street, that has a lot of maple trees. The pond is called Brown Pond because during the part of the year that there’s no ice on it, the water is the color of strong tea. It always seemed to me that people should have been able to come up with something a little more creative. I said this to Mr. and Mrs. Peacock, and Mr. Peacock said then why didn’t I go to town meeting and put my two cents in, which in his opinion would be a real relief from having to listen to everybody fighting over Alden Baines, who keeps putting logs across the road in front of his house and calling them speed bumps.
Andrew’s idea was that Salvation Mountain should be named Grand Teton. The Tetons are a mountain range in Wyoming, which is what Andrew was writing a report about in school, having picked Wyoming as his assignment out of Ms. Hodge’s baseball cap. In French, Grand Teton means Big Tit. Andrew thought that was totally hilarious.
Deer Hill had been left to the Redeemers by a passed-on Redeemer named Maurice “Big Chip” Dupree. It had a bunch of dilapidated little cottages on it that Big Chip used to rent to deer hunters, and not much else except trees, weeds, and black flies. But Pastor Bruno had a vision. His vision was that all the cottages, where the deer hunters used to sit around with six-packs of beer, would be a Bible camp. There would be spiritual retreats for adults, uplifting activities for children, potluck suppers, and little benches set along a trail leading to the top of the hill, where people could sit and pray.
In my opinion, the O words for Pastor Bruno’s vision were Overly Optimistic.
But once the snow melted, which it did early that year just to be ornery, Pastor Bruno had every able-bodied Redeemer out on Salvation Mountain on Saturdays, hauling brush and building benches and painting cabins. Ray and Alda and Geraldine all went, though Alda wasn’t much help, due to shortness of breath and a low center of gravity that wasn’t suited to hills.
Since they all went, I had to go too, unless it was one of the Saturdays I was staying with Boone.