On the day that my third brother died, I knew.
I knew what evil was and I knew whose heart harbored it. And evil must be obliterated.
Until that day, I didn’t even know where Lonnie had laid my other two brothers to rest. All I could do when they died was watch him drive away with them while I begged him to take me, too. But by the time Orly died, I was old enough to be stealthy. I was old enough to hide under the tarp that lay crumpled on the bed of Lonnie’s pickup truck.
It was late at night, so nobody saw him park near a concrete-lined drainage ditch at the river’s edge. Nobody but me saw him carry the blanket-wrapped body and a flashlight down into the ditch. Nobody saw me follow him down into the ditch, not even Lonnie.
Lonnie walked down that ditch into a round concrete pipe extending deep into the ground. It was huge to me, big enough so that even Lonnie could walk upright. I followed, hanging far back so that he couldn’t see me. There was no light to guide me but Lonnie’s flashlight, far ahead. In its way, the darkness was a blessing, because it hid me. Sliding my feet along the bottom of the big pipe, I made no sound, no splash that could reveal my presence.
Standing upright in the center with my arms outspread, I couldn’t even reach the pipe’s curved walls. If I leaned to the right, though, I could drag a hand as I walked. The faraway flashlight, the pipe beneath my feet, and the pipe against my hand gave me three points to keep myself oriented in space. The sound of my breath oriented me, too, reminding me that I was alive, even though my brother was not.
At intervals, my hand lost contact with the wall for a few terrifying steps. The first time it happened, I groped silently until I realized that these empty spaces were the mouths of smaller pipes entering the larger one that enclosed me. I shuffled on, aware that the side wall was getting slowly closer to me as the pipe narrowed and curved to the left.
Eventually, even the very texture of my surroundings changed and my hand began to drag across rough brick. My foot landed awkwardly on a brick’s edge, twisting my ankle. I almost went down in a splashing heap, but I was strong enough to hold myself upright and limp on. I was strong enough to do that, because I had to be. I had to know what he did with Orly. In my nightmares, I saw my brothers’ bodies dumped in trash cans or consumed in flames. I had to know.
I remembered what Lonnie said to my weeping mother as she begged him to let her bury their son, so she’d have a place to mourn him.
“Are you as stupid as you look, woman? Don’t you remember what happened at Waco and Ruby Ridge? The federal agents will come. We can’t be letting ‘em find graves and dead bodies. They’ll use ‘em to justify whatever awful thing they decide to do to us. I bet they’re watching us now, so we can’t be seen to be digging no graves. I’ll find a place for the boy, just like I did with the other two.”
As an adult with years of experience out in the world, I know now that this threadbare excuse for logic meant that Lonnie was either deceitful or stupid or delusional. If there were federal agents watching our pathetic little farm, then they would have noticed that three little boys had toddled around for a while and then disappeared. As a child, I was terrified of helicopters and people in uniforms, because Lonnie had convinced us all that such people would be firebombing us at any moment, but Lonnie had been the real bad guy.
All my life, Lonnie was the bad guy. Now that he’s gone, I’m going to have to figure out how to live without him. He has always been my yardstick for right and wrong. Next to Lonnie and the things he did, nothing seems wrong to me. Certainly murder didn’t, not when the victim was Lonnie. I feel not a shred of regret at what I did to him.
He is the reason I am still, after all these years, essentially alone. I have work colleagues and casual acquaintances, but friendship is hard when any conversation can go south in an instant. Even a casual reference to an insanely popular movie or pop song from my childhood years leaves me helpless. My go-to excuse for these memory gaps is “We didn’t have cable,” but what I really mean is “We didn’t have electricity, running water, flush toilets, or any conception of what the outside world was like.”
Well, that isn’t fully true. As the firstborn, I lived with Lonnie and my first mother for five years before he acquired a second wife and lost his mind, moving his growing family far from the malicious government and from everything else. I and both my mothers remembered civilization, but the other children didn’t have a clue. They only saw the outside world on Sundays from the crowded cab of Lonnie’s pickup while on our way to the weekly service he held at The Sanctuary.
He never even rolled down the windows to let us smell free air. The children born after Lonnie fled the government didn’t even have birth certificates. Only I do. Nobody outside the family ever knew my brothers and sisters were even born, so there were no repercussions for Lonnie when some of them died, not as long as nobody ever found the bodies. Hence this long slog down a dark pipe with a dead child in his arms, a slog that I was dead-sure he had taken twice before.
I dogged his steps the whole way and he never knew. When he stopped at last, he stopped so suddenly that I almost skidded into the flashlight’s dim sidespill. I might have been discovered then, but his attention was diverted by a door set into the wall of the brick-and-mortar pipe.
I knew that door. I’d seen it before, from the other side, while I sat in The Sanctuary. For as long as my first mother worked at the Gershwin Hotel, we had easy access to the room where Lonnie liked to take his family for Sunday worship, the one that he pretentiously called The Sanctuary.
After my mother lost that job, we lost The Sanctuary, or so we all thought. When I saw Lonnie leave the storm sewer and crawl through the little door, I realized that he’d known how to get back in there the whole time, but he’d never told us. I had studied the door’s battered contours every Sunday for years during the interminable church services that Lonnie had loved so much. They had given him a chance to expound on his heretical beliefs in front of an audience, and he had seized the chance with both hands.
Lonnie was always happiest when he had an audience. Never mind that the audience was small. Lonnie never stopped dreaming of an ever-growing congregation, but he’d never had one that didn’t consist entirely of his wives and children. Only Orly was born after we lost The Sanctuary. The rest of us, the survivors, we will carry that place inside us always.
Orly. The name breaks my heart, even after all these years. All their names break my heart.
Gabe had been such a good boy during services, so sweet and quiet. Then Zeb had come along, also sweet and quiet, and then Orly.
Only now, as an adult, do I realize that babies aren’t supposed to be sweet and quiet all the time. My brothers were sick. They needed the help of a doctor, but all they got was The Sanctuary, transformed by Lonnie into a crypt just for them.
Lonnie deserved the pain of losing his children, but Gabe, Zeb, and Orly didn’t deserve to die. It would have helped me to believe that sickly sons were God’s punishment for Lonnie, but I do not believe that God punishes children for their parents’ evil. What kind of sense does that make?
After I saw my father tuck my brother under his arm and crawl through the little door into the Sanctuary, I crept slowly backwards and out of his sight. Without even the light from Lonnie’s flashlight, I retraced my steps with only the feel of the pipe beneath my feet and against the fingers of one hand to guide me.
Because of the danger that he would soon turn around and walk back the way he came, I moved quickly until I was back in the bed of the pickup, hiding under the familiar tarp and waiting for Lonnie. Eventually, I heard him open the driver’s door and start the engine.
I knew then that Orly, Gabe, and Zeb were in their final resting place, and it was The Sanctuary. No other explanation made any sense.
Years passed before I grew old enough to drive to the river, make my way down the storm sewer, force open the balky latch, and lay eyes on my baby brothers again.
From that moment forward, my entire life has pointed toward this day, my first day without Lonnie in the world. I should be so glad, but my mind keeps straying to the everyday evil that occupies the front page of every newspaper I ever saw, and the second page, and every page after that.
I was taught from a very young age that the way to righteousness was to obliterate evil. But how could anyone obliterate anything with so many faces?