Fourth of July Creek (35 page)

He buys a Super 8 camera and they make little films. Goofy, typical stuff. People waving at the camera as they fix hot dogs. Kids flying off the rope swing into the shining river. Fireworks. Snow angels.

The next time Jeremiah and Veronica visit they come with a film projector and boxes. Her whole extended family on folding chairs set up in the living room, smoking, drinking a little beer, thinking they are about to watch some home movies. Veronica sets out mixed nuts. Soap and sundries. American Way—Amway, for short. Jeremiah explains the versatility and breadth of the brand. He goes to her mother, sisters, and aunts, squirting dollops of milky lotion in their palms. The men notice his light feet, his mincing step. He is not yet at ease with himself as an orator. He explains how such a tiny amount of this here soap will clean a whole load in the Kenmore. Try the mixed nuts. Now lookit the business plan. When he glances at her, Veronica gestures for him to mop his brow with his handkerchief and then she nods—he’s doing just fine—to go on. He draws closed the jalousies and plays them the promotional film. A great opportunity to get in on the ground floor. A good start would be only a thousand dollars, maybe two.

My God
, someone whispers loud enough for everyone to hear,
they want us to sell this shit.

A winter later, they give silver coins for Christmas. Only precious metals ever keep their value, what with oil prices and the dollar, which buys less every year. The
fiat
dollar
he calls it. The government’s taken all the silver out of new coins, don’t you know. Replaced it with the copper sandwich, don’t you know. There are pamphlets out in the car, just a second.

Then for a few-month spell, all this money stuff seems like a phase. He gets a job at the Cummins plant. A damn good wage. Just the phrase
good
wage
passing his lips is astonishing. He drinks beer, smokes cigars, wears cologne. They buy a Z28 and a pair of motorcycles. She gets a big TV and Kenmore appliances. New cameras. Polaroids and long-lenses and tripods.

“The movies,” the sister said. “That’s what did it.”

Pete asked did what.

“She comes over crying her eyes out one day. The lab that develops all their film called. Said they didn’t want her husband’s money, that they are good Christians over there. Veronica knows immediately why. He’s been taking ‘private’ pictures of her. I tell her not to worry about it, but when she goes home, they have this big fight. A couple days she sleeps in her old room here at the house. Leaves the kids with him and everything.”

“And then . . .”

“He bought her a car.”

The old woman nodded and the sister went for another strawberry soda and poured them new pink portions. After the car, something else happened, she said. Pete asked what.

J
EREMIAH COMES ACROSS A
stack of Jack Chick comics and a copy of
The Late Great Planet Earth
in the break room at the plant. He has a feeling he should take them home, and home they go, where Veronica devours them in a day. He returns from the graveyard shift the next morning to a wife afire with the Spirit of the Lord. Everything is in place for the Tribulation, she says. So much has been predicted, so little has yet come to pass. She talks about the things that she will talk about constantly from now on. The Six-Day War and the consolidation of Jerusalem. How the oil crisis of 1973 was predicted by Zachariah. How Israel will become a burdensome stone. The Antichrist is probably alive right now. Right now, she says.

Half the time no one knows what the hell she’s talking about. Except Jeremiah. They come over and put on coffee. Want to talk to the whole family. He holds her a minute as it percolates. She fairly vibrates in his arms. It’s like with Amway, the Tupperware, only it’s the both of them going a mile a minute about the End Times and Revelations. Like they’re on uppers. At some point, Jeremiah’s outside with her father. The father, he’s never bought into a single line of this stuff. He tells Jeremiah flat out that this is bullshit. That there’s something wrong with the two of them. In the head. Jeremiah isn’t upset by this. He hears the old man out. Then he says,
Either there is something wrong with her or there is something wrong with the world. I choose the world is wrong.

Everybody else in the family quickly has it up to their eyeballs, this holier than thou and the politics. The sister, she plays along, just to keep them close. She attends church with them from time to time. But they have trouble finding a congregation with any fire to it. They go to tiny, weird churches in Ogilville and Walesboro led by emaciated unkempt burnouts and longhairs. They attend services for alcoholics and the homeless in a repurposed movie theater in Edinburgh. Drunks throw up in the pews and ask parishioners for money directly. A certain disheveled preacher in downtown Indianapolis shows them his .22 pistol under his corduroy jacket and asks can’t they find a service for normal people, don’t they see his flock is demented. They spend a few Sundays at a house-basement ministry in Bedford. The naked bulb, electric keyboard, handwritten hymnals, and fresh supply of drunks largely mumbling to themselves on the metal folding chairs. Invalids and muttering halfwits pass the empty plate.

For a time they don’t even go to church, and take their cues from Hal Lindsey’s book, and from the Bible directly. They give up shellfish and Christmas.

Christmas! With all those children they have now.

Then they remove all the images from their house. The teddy bears and television go on the front lawn for the trash pickers. Her mother hears what she is doing and rushes down for the picture albums, and Sarah sends her back with them and the cameras, and too the nice china, the flatware with the images of the Clydesdales, and the paintings of covered bridges.

By now they’re hardly talking to anyone. They’ve started in with a new church, raving about Pastor Don, and you never see them.

And she’s not Veronica anymore.

“I can imagine,” Pete said.

“No, I mean she’s changed her name. She’s Sarah now.”

“Her middle name,” the mother said. “More biblical, she says.”

“Pastor Don?”

They didn’t know much about him. He led a small church outside of Martinsville. But they loved the congregation. They gave away dog-eared copies of books. The sister went to a shelf and pulled a few paperbacks down for Pete.
Coin’s Financial School
by William Harvey.
America’s Road to Ruin
by Chet Hart,
The Startlingly True Visions of Isaiah
by Jan Meyer. In the back you can see how to order still more.

V
ERONICA
—S
ARAH—IS MAKING
pen pals with like minds, every week an obscure new tome in the mail, some of them ditto-copied in aniline blue and lashed together with rubber bands, dog-eared and coffee stained.

Some of them have swastikas.

You talk to her now and half of what she says is out of the King James. She says she feels pristine, original. That is, the book and the reading of the book answer an unput-to question that has been rattling around inside her for years, a doubt and anxiety that she was too late for everything, that history was over, that the era of miracles was past, that the world was altogether discovered.

But now is the beginning of the End. Now is the At-Hand Completion. Now the evening news reveals the great engine of His devise. When the Israelis are murdered at the Munich games there is riveting horror to be sure; but you can feel another piece of The Plan slide into place too. Armageddon unfolding right there on the
Wide World of Sports.
What dazzling events gestate, what will come, befall, occur, what is yet is only just yet.

Selah.

Now.

She’s been having these grave headaches that she says go off like bombs behind her eyes, and there are times she has to rush to the sink or the toilet to throw up they are so bad. Times she is in her terry cloth robe on the bathroom floor, palms up, weeping at the ceiling and the kids pee outside on the side of the house. Days at a stretch she hides in the murk of her bedroom, afghans nailed over the windows, talking in tongues and singing only to emerge pale and quaking on stilted legs, begging their father to
take them all, all of the children, just away for a few hours
, each discrete noise is like a gun going off, and her ears are ringing,
Jeremiah, just take them somewhere, just for a little while please I got to get a little sleep if I can. If I can.

A summer day the sister drops in, finds Veronica on the kitchen floor, flushed and nearly gibbering. Her dress is sodden with sweat and urine. She’d been putting clothes on the line, so many clothes now with the five kids, another—Ethan—on the way, when a headache crept on, a dull and growing throe in the meat of her skull, and it pulsed behind her eyes. She fell in the hugeness of it. She concentrated on her breathing. She was terrified something was terrifically wrong. There was a blade of grass in her narrowed field of vision and on the blade was a droplet of dew. The sunlight shattering through the tiny bulb of water. Too much.

She clambered inside, pulled closed the curtains, and sat in the cool of the open refrigerator. The phone rang, and she ripped the cord out of the wall. All her senses were fire. The hot, the bright.
This is crazy, I’m goin crazy.
She tried to pass out. She prayed to pass out. She prayed to die. She prayed to take her children, her husband, make everything ash, just stop the pain.

I made a covenant with death
, she says to her sister.

The sister asks what the hell she is talking about.

Veronica says,
With hell I am at agreement.

She babbles about a vision, a vision that came in the cool wake of the fire she passed through, everything scorched away.
The fire was a siren, His way of getting my attention
. She saw mountains. She saw such privation. Hardship. It was the Tribulation.

Let them which be in Judea flee into the mountains
, she says.
We must go.

A month later, they are headed to Montana.

Pete took a sip from the syrupy soda out of politeness and then reached for one of the albums asking “May I?” and flipped to the pages he was looking for. Pictures of Veronica’s mother and father with the kids in the woods. Five kids, and the baby.

“Is this in Montana?”

The women nodded.

“The baby is little Ethan. Paula is five or six in this. Then there’s Benjamin, Ruth is the second-oldest girl. Then there’s Jacob—the oldest boy—and Esther, the oldest girl.” She gazed at them a moment and then looked up at Pete. “You haven’t seen any of them but Ben?”

“No, I’m afraid not. But Jeremiah says they’re up there.”

“You don’t believe him,” the woman said, staring into Pete.

“I just haven’t seen them is all.” He pointed at the picture. “When did they send this picture?”

“I took it.”

“Tell me about it.”

T
HEY VISIT WHEN
the house is going up. Some friends they’d made are helping them out. Veronica’s father is helping.

When the kids get back from Bible Camp, they have a dinner at a big table in the meadow down from the house, the better that they might look at their work. Fried chicken and watermelon and cucumber and iceberg lettuce salad with cream dressing and onions. The boys have crew cuts. The girls all wear dresses—they aren’t allowed in pants. Veronica makes them bonnets. They look like homesteaders. Worse, they let the kids climb up on the new roof, those sheets of aluminum slick from a misty rain. Jeremiah only goes up there to get them down after she hectors him to do it, and when he comes back he says they ought to paint the roof because it can be seen from the air.

One evening, Jeremiah’s holding forth on the porch. Some of those tattooed friends and the kids and Veronica’s father. You could hear the whole conversation from inside. The usual stuff from Jeremiah. How it was the 1980s now and it was very, very late. How every man will soon have the Mark of the Beast. How that meant computers, how all the banks will be connected with computers, and did anyone doubt that at all. Credit cards. How the cards in their wallets were the Mark of the Beast.

Veronica’s father asks what the hell that means.

Jeremiah says all the numbers are derivative of 666.

Veronica’s father gets out his American Express and asks Jeremiah to show him, to use actual math.

Jeremiah begs off, says American money isn’t worth anything.

It’s the same old saw from back after the Amway days
, the old man says.
Just like when you and Veronica first got together.

It’s Sarah.

Her middle name is Sarah.

Veronica’s father is getting real hot by now. Then someone says something about Jewish bankers. Greedy fuckers. Holocaust was a fake.

Bullshit, I was in Dachau during the war
, the old man says.

Thousands is all that were killed
, Jeremiah says.
It’s been blown all out of proportion.

Do you know that for a fact?

Hell yes, I know it’s a fact. Because it is a fact. It’s established by historians, John.

What historians?

“What historians” he says.

You mean the crackpots. Because credentialed historians—

“Credentialed”? Just who gives these credentials?

The universities.

Oh, riiiiight, the Ivory Tower. You gotta move out of power structures if you want—

Just give me a name. One name. A book by a real historian that says the Holocaust was a fake—