"Yes, the young man had unwittingly contracted the deadly virus. It had infiltrated his heart, weakening the structure of his conscience, liquefying his judgment." Reverend Thomas seemed positively overjoyed. "After a while, there just didn't seem much difference between right and wrong."
So how could the kid have ended up as anything but one of the Manson killers?
I had sunk back in my chair as far as Carolee by now, and Starr's perfume and the hissing words of the Reverend were making me sick to my stomach.
Luckily, in prison, the young man had a revelation. He realized he was a part of a raging epidemic of the sin virus, and through another inmate discovered the Lord and the life-giving serum of His Blood. Now he was preaching to the other inmates and doing good works among the hopeless. Although he was twenty-five years into a life sentence, his life was not a waste. He had a reason for being, to help others, and bring the Good News to people who had never looked an inch beyond their own momentary desires. He was redeemed, a new man, reborn in the Lord.
It wasn't hard for me to imagine the Manson kid in prison, his hardness, his warped thinking, a killer. Then something had happened. A light had come on, which let him see the awful reality of his crime. I imagined his agony, when he saw what a monster he had become and knew that he had ruined his life for nothing. He could have killed himself, how very close he must have come. But then came the ray of hope, that there might be another way to live, some meaning after all. And he prayed, and the spirit came into his heart.
And now, instead of living out his years as a walking corpse in San Quentin, hating and more hate, he had become someone with a purpose, someone with the light within him. I understood that. I believed it.
"There is an answer to this deadly epidemic laying waste our vital substance," Reverend Thomas was saying, lifting his arms, like an embrace. "A powerful vaccine for the devastating infection within the human heart. But we have to recognize the danger we are in. We have to accept the grave diagnosis, that by acting upon our own desires instead of following God's plan, we have become infected by this terrible plague. We have to receive the knowledge of our responsibility to the heavenly power, and our own vulnerability."
Suddenly, a scene that I had kept at bay all these months came flooding in. The day I'd phoned Barry to warn him, and then hung up. I could feel the weight of the receiver as I put it on the cradle. My responsibility. My infection.
"We need Christ's antibodies, to overcome this contagion within our souls. And those who choose to serve themselves instead of the Heavenly Father will experience the deadly consequences."
It wasn't surreal anymore. What Reverend Thomas was saying was true. I had contracted the virus. I had been infected all the while. There was blood on my hands. I thought of my beautiful mother, sitting in her tiny cell, her life at full stop. She was just Jike the Manson kid. She didn't believe in anything but herself, no higher law, no morality. She thought she could justify anything, even murder, just because it was what she wanted. She didn't even use the excuse of who was she hurting. She had no conscience. I will not serve. That's what Stephen Dedalus said in Portrait of the Artist, but it meant Satan. That's what the Fall was. Satan would not serve.
An old lady stepped forward from the choir and began to sing, "The blood that Jesus shed for me, way back at Calvary ..." and she could really sing. And I was crying, my tears coming down. We were dying inside, my mother and I. If only we had God, Jesus, something larger than ourselves to believe in, we could be healed. We could still have a new life.
IN JULY, I was baptized into the Truth Assembly of Christ. It didn't even matter that it was Reverend Thomas, how fake he was, how he looked down Starr's dress, the way his eyes fondled her when she walked up the stairs in front of him. I closed my eyes as he laid me back in the square pool behind the Assembly building, my nose filling with chlorine. I wanted the spirit to enter me, to wash me clean. I wanted to follow God's plan for me. I knew where following my own would get me.
Afterward, we went out to Church's Fried Chicken to celebrate. Nobody had ever given me a party before. Starr gave me a white leatherette Bible with passages highlighted in red. From Carolee and the boys I got a box of stationery with a dove in the corner, trailing a banner in its beak that said, "Praise the Lord," but I knew Starr must have picked it out. Uncle Ray gave me a tiny gold cross on a chain. Even though he thought I was nuts to be baptized.
"You can't really believe in this crap," he whispered in my ear as he helped me put the necklace on.
I held up my hair so he could fasten it. "I've got to believe in something," I said, low.
His hand rested on my neck, warm, heavy. His good plain face, sad hazel eyes. And I realized he wanted to kiss me. I felt it inside me. And when he saw that I felt it, he reddened and looked away.
Dear Astrid,
ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?? You may not 1) be baptized, 2) call yourself a Christian., and 3) write to me on that ridiculous stationery. You will not sign your letters "born again in Christ"! God is dead, haven't you heard, he died a hundred years ago, gave out from sheer lack of interest, decided to play golf instead. I raised you to have some self-respect, and now you 're telling me you've given it all away to a 3-D postcard Jesus? I would laugh if it weren't so desperately sad.
Don't you dare ask me to accept Jesus as my savior, wash my soul in the Blood of the Lamb. Don't even think of trying to redeem me. I regret NOTHING. No woman with any self-respect would have done less.
The question of good and the nature of evil will always be one of philosophy's most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself. I'm not quarreling with your choice of issues, only with your intellectually diminished approach. If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one's own universe, to live on one's own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth clichés lent us from the so-called Fathers. To dare to see is to steal fire from the Gods. This is mankind's destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race. Three cheers for Eve.
Mother.
I prayed for her redemption. She took a life because someone humiliated her, hurt her image of herself as the Valkyrie, the stainless warrior. Exposed her weakness, which was only love. So she avenged herself. So easy to justify, I wrote to her. It's because you felt like a victim you did it. If you were really strong, you could have tolerated the humiliation. Only Jesus can make us strong enough to fight the temptations of sin.
She wrote back, a quotation from Milton, Satan's part in Paradise Lost:
What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield.
UNCLE RAY was teaching me to play chess from a book, Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. He had taught himself in Vietnam. "I had a lot of time to kill there," he said, running his fingers over the peaked hat of the white pawn. He'd carved the set there, Vietnamese kings and Buddhas for bishops, horses with sculpted cheeks and combed manes. I couldn't imagine the months it must have taken him, patiently carving with a Swiss Army knife while all the bombs blasted around him.
I liked the order of chess, the coolness of reason, the joy of its patient steps. We played most nights when Starr was at AA or CA meetings or at Bible study, while the boys watched TV. Uncle Ray kept a little pipe of dope next to him on the arm of the chair to smoke while he waited for me to make my move.
That night the boys were watching a nature show. The littlest one, Owen, sucked his thumb, holding his stuffed giraffe, while Peter twined a bit of his hair around his finger, over and over again. Davey narrated the show for them, pointing to the screen.
"That's Smokey, he's the alpha male." The light from the screen reflected in his glasses.
Uncle Ray waited for my move, looking at me in a way that made my heart open like a moonflower — his eyes on my face, my throat, my hair over my shoulders, changing color in the TV lights. On TV I saw the white of snow, the wolves hunting in pairs, their strange yellow eyes. I felt like an undeveloped photograph that he was printing, my image rising to the surface under
his gaze.
"Oh, don't," Owen said, clutching his giraffe with the broken neck as the wolves leapt on their deer, pulling it down by the throat.
"It's the law of nature," Davey said.
"There, look at that." Ray pointed with the black bishop he was moving. "It's like, if God saved that deer, he'd starve the wolf. Why would he favor one person over another?" He had never quite resigned himself to my becoming a Christian. "The good don't get any better a break than anybody else. You could be a fucking saint, and still, you got the plague or stepped on a Bouncing Betty."
"At least you have something larger to fall back on," I said, touching the cross around my neck, zipping it back and forth along the chain. "You have a compass and a map." "And if there's no God?" "You act as if there is, and it's the same thing." He sucked at his pipe, filling the room with its skunky smell, while I examined the board. "What does your mother have to say about that?" he asked.
"She says, 'Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.'" "My kind of woman."
I didn't say that she called him Uncle Ernie. Through the screen door, the summer crickets sang. I flicked my hair behind my shoulders, moved my bishop to queen's knight 3, threatening his knight. I sensed how he looked at my bare arm, the shoulder, my lips. To know I was beautiful in his eyes made me beautiful. I had never been beautiful before. I didn't think it went against Christ. Everybody needed to feel love.
We heard the crunch of Starr's Torino turning into the yard, car tires in the gravel, earlier than she normally came home. I was disappointed. Ray paid attention to me when she was gone, but when she came home I went back to being just one of the kids. What was she doing home so early anyway? She usually stayed out until eleven, drinking coffee with the addicts, or discussing Matthew 20 verse 13 with the old ladies at the church.
"Shit." Uncle Ray quickly pocketed his stash and small pipe just as the screen door swung open and the bug zapper zapped a big one at the same time.
Starr stopped for a second at the door, seeing us, and the boys sitting on the couch, mesmerized by the TV. Then it was like she was confused to find herself home so soon. She dropped her keys and picked them up. Uncle Ray watched her, her breasts practically coming out of the scooped neck of her dress.
Then her smile came on, and she kicked off her shoes and sat on the arm of his chair, kissed him. I could see her sticking her tongue in his ear.
"Was it canceled?" he asked.
It was my move, but he wasn't paying attention.
She draped herself over his shoulder, her breast squashed into his neck. "Sometimes I just get so tired of hearing them complain. Taking everybody else's darn inventory." She picked up my remaining white knight. "I love this," she said. "Why don't you ever teach me, Ray baby?"
"I did once," he said in a murmuring, tender voice, turning his head and kissing her breast, right in front of me. "Don't you remember? You got so mad you turned the board over." He plucked the knight from her hand and put it back down on the board. King 5.
"That was in my drinking days," she said.
'"Can white mate in one move?'" he repeated out of the Bobby Fischer book.
"One move?" she said, tickling his nose with a strand of her hair. "That doesn't sound too exciting."
White knight to king's bishop 6. I rode the delicately carved knight into place. "Mate."
But they were kissing and then she told the boys to go to bed when they were done and led Uncle Ray back to her bedroom.