Chapter 10

The night before we get home, I tell my big brother everything I can remember about the Creedish church district. In the church district, we raised everything we ate. The wheat and eggs and the sheep and cattle. I remember we tended perfect orchards and caught sparkling rainbow trout in the river. We’re on the back porch of a Casa Castile going sixty miles an hour through the Nebraska night down Interstate 80. A Casa Castile has cut-glass sconces on every wall and gold-plated fixtures in the bathroom, but no power or water. Everything is beautiful but none of it works.

“No electricity and no running water,” Adam says. “It’s just like when we were kids.” We’re sitting on the back porch with our legs hanging over the edge and the pavement rushing under. The stinking diesel exhaust from the truck eddies around us. In the Creedish church district, I tell Adam, people lived simple, fulfilling lives. We were a steadfast and proud people. Our air and water were clean. Our days were useful. Our nights were absolute. That’s what I remember. That’s why I don’t want to go back. Nothing will be there except the Tender Branson Sensitive Materials Sanitary Landfill. How it will look, the stored-up years of pornography from all over the country sent here to rot, I don’t want to see firsthand. The agent showed me the receipts. Tons of smut, dump trucks and hoppers full, garbage trucks and boxcars full of smut, were arriving there every month, where bulldozers spread it three feet deep across all twenty thousand acres. I don’t want to see that. I don’t want Adam to see that, but Adam still has his gun, and I don’t have Fertility here to tell me if it’s loaded or not. Besides, I’m pretty used to getting told what to do. Where to go. How to act. My new job is to follow Adam. So we’re going back to the church district. In Grand Island, we’ll steal a car, Adam says. We’ll get to the valley just around sunrise, Adam predicts. It’s just a matter of hours. We’ll be getting home on a Sunday morning. Both of us looking out into the dark behind us and everything we’ve lost so far, Adam says, “What else do you remember?” Everything in the church district was always clean. The roads were always in good repair. The summers were long and mild with rain every ten days. I remember the winters were peaceful and serene. I remember sorting seed we picked from marigolds and sunflowers. I remember splitting wood. Adam asks, “Do you remember my wife?” Not really. “She wasn’t much to remember,” Adam says. The gun’s in his hands on his lap or I wouldn’t be sitting here. “She was a Biddy Gleason. We should’ve been very happy together.” Until someone called the government and started the investigation. “We should’ve bred a dozen children and made money hand over fist,” Adam said. Until the county sheriff was there asking about documentation for every child. “We should’ve gotten old on that farm with every year just like the year before it.” Until the FBI launched its investigation. “We should both have been church elders some day,” Adam says. Until the Deliverance. “Until the Deliverance.” I remember life was calm and peaceful in the district valley. The cows and chickens all running free. The laundry hanging outside to dry. The smell of hay in the barn. Apple pies cooling on every windowsill. I remember it was a perfect way of life. Adam looks at me and shakes his head. He says, “That’s how stupid you are.” How Adam looks in the dark is how I’d look if none of this chaos had ever happened to me. Adam is what Fertility would call a control group of me. If I’d never been baptized and sent into the outside world, if I’d never been famous and blown out of proportion, that would be me with Adam’s simple blue eyes and clean blond hair. My shoulders would be squared and regular-sized. My manicured hands with clear polish on the nails would be his strong hands. My chapped lips would be like his. My back would be straight. My heart would be his heart. Adam looks out into the dark and says, “I destroyed them.” The Creedish survivors. “No,” Adam says. “All of them. The entire district colony. I called the police. I left the valley one night and walked until I found a telephone.” There were birds in every Creedish tree, I remember. And we caught crawdads by tying a lump of bacon fat to a string and dropping it into the creek. When we pulled it out, the fat would be covered with crawdads. “I must have pressed zero on the telephone,” Adam says, “but I asked for the sheriff. I told someone who answered that only one out of every twenty Creedish children had a valid birth certificate. I told him the Creedish hid their children from the government.” The horses, I remember. We had teams of horses to plow with and pull buggies. And we called them by their color because it was a sin to give an animal a name. “I told them the Creedish abused their children and didn’t pay taxes on most of their income,” Adam says. “I told them the Creedish were lazy and shiftless. I told them, to Creedish parents, their children were their income. Their children were chattel.” The icicles hanging on houses, I remember. The pumpkins. The harvest bonfires. “I started the investigation,” Adam says. The singing in church, I remember. The quilting. The barn raisings. “I left the colony that night and never went back,” Adam says. Being cherished and cared for, I remember. “We never had any horses. The couple chickens and pigs we had were just for show,” Adam says. “You were always in school. You just remember what they taught you Creedish life was like a hundred years ago. Hell, a century ago everybody had horses.” Being happy and belonging, I remember. Adam says, “There were no black Creedish. The Creedish elders were a pack of racist, sexist white slavers.” I remember feeling safe. Adam says, “Everything you remember is wrong.” Being valued and loved, I remember. “You remember a lie,” Adam says. “You were bred and trained and sold.” And he wasn’t. No, Adam Branson was a firstborn son. Three minutes, that made all the difference. He would own everything. The barns and chickens and lambs. The peace and security. He would inherit the future, and I would be a labor missionary, mowing the lawn and mowing the lawn, work without end. The dark Nebraska night and the road slipping by fast and warm around us. With one good push, I say to myself, I could put Adam Branson out of my life for good. “There was hardly anything we ate that we didn’t buy from the outside world,” Adam says. “I inherited a farm for raising and selling my children.” Adam says, “We didn’t even recycle.” So that’s why he called the sheriff? “I don’t expect you to understand,” Adam says. “You’re still the eight-year-old sitting in school, sitting in church, believing everything you’re told. You remember pictures in books. They planned how you’d live your whole life. You’re still asleep.” And Adam Branson is awake? “I woke up the night I made that telephone call. That night I did something that couldn’t be undone,” Adam says. And now everybody’s dead. “Everybody except you and me.” And the only thing left for me to do is kill myself. “That’s just what you’ve been trained to do,” Adam says. “That would be the ultimate act of a slave.” So what’s left I can do to make my life any different? “The only way you’ll ever find your own identity is to do the one thing the Creedish elders trained you most not to do,” Adam says. “Commit the one biggest transgression. The ultimate sin. Turn your back on church doctrine,” Adam says. “Even the garden of Eden was just a big fancy cage,” Adam says. ‘You’ll be a slave the rest of your life unless you bite the apple.” I’ve eaten the entire apple. I’ve done everything. I’ve gone on television and denounced the church. I’ve blasphemed in front of millions of people. I’ve lied and shoplifted and killed, if you count Trevor Hollis. I’ve defiled my body with drugs. I’ve destroyed the Creedish church district valley. I’ve labored every Sunday for the past ten years. Adam says, “You’re still a virgin.” With one good jump, I tell myself, I could solve all my problems forever. “You know, the horizontal bop. Hide the salami. The hot thing. The big O. Getting lucky. Going all the way. Hitting a home run. Scoring big-time. Laying pipe. Plowing a field. Stuffing the muff. Doing the big dirty,” Adam says. “Quit trying to fix your life. Deal with your one big issue,” Adam says. “Little brother,” Adam says, “we need to get you laid.”