World Made by Hand

Fifty-five

The original school building had been U-shaped, with a grassy courtyard inside the U that had never been actually used for much more than a place for a few redwood picnic tables under some scraggly trees, such was the thoughtlessness of the folks who commissioned these buildings. When we left the gymnasium, Brother Jobe took me back down the hall and through a new doorway that had been cut into a corridor that led into the courtyard. Unseen from the road these many weeks, the New Faith building crew had filled in the courtyard with another labyrinth of rooms, chambers, and corridors in wood construction. They’d used clerestory windows to get light inside, but these were as yet unglazed. It all had a raw finish, like a frontier outpost. The cell-like rooms within were unpainted, and there was no finished flooring besides the recycled planking. Each room contained a bed, so I figured that the whole thing was a kind of dormitory.

“Our women sleep here,” Brother Jobe said. I didn’t know whether he meant all the women, or just the unmarried ones, or what. I didn’t really want to know. Maybe, I thought, they had some kind of thing going on like the Shakers of the nineteenth century, with men and women assigned to separate quarters. As we penetrated the complex I became aware of an odd sweet-sickly smell. It increased when we reached a doorway near what I sensed to be about the center of the filled-in courtyard.

Brother Jobe rapped carefully on the door. One of the sisters answered. The two of them exchanged whispers. A gust of warm air washed over us. It carried that same sweet funky odor, but more intensely, as if someone had baked fresh corn bread in an unwashed sock. I followed Brother Jobe inside. The room was round, or rather seemed so, because carpets had been hung over the walls in a way that rounded out the corners, as though we were in a yurt. Up above there was a cupola, but they had hung drapes from the openings so the light entering was reduced, and it was actually very dim in the room, which needed ventilation badly. The floor was covered with layers of carpets. At the center of the room stood a large, heavy canopied bed with gauzy mosquito netting hung off it, and on it an extremely fat woman reclined in a posture of oriental luxury, propped up by many pillows. Curiously, her head seemed tiny in relation to the rest of her body. Perhaps it was because she was wearing a tight black headdress or turban. Her skin was extremely pale, almost pearllike. She wore a shiny yellow satin tunic embroidered with glittery things, rhinestones or sequins, I couldn’t tell. It seemed to barely contain her waxy flesh, in particular her heaving, lumpy bosom. Her arms extruded from their short sleeves like a couple of country hams. Everything below her hips was concealed in a sacklike robe of yellow satin. Altogether she gave the impression of something not exactly human. The odors in the room seemed to emanate from her.

She was methodically eating little cakes off a silver tray, one after another, with machinelike regularity. Five sisters sat in a semicircle on the far side of her bed, softly singing, or rather chanting, a harmonic Appalachian-style round that repeated over and over hypnotically, like a kind of meditative prayer. Something about a long time traveling. Another sister prepared a fresh tray of cakes from a rolling cart that seemed well provisioned with many types of food, like in the dim sum restaurants of yesteryear. Yet another sister sat in a chair at the near side of the bed, waving a woven reed fan at the figure reclining there.

“Morning, precious mother,” Brother Jobe called, rather musically, as one might address a longtime invalid on a routine visit. The figure ignored him, concentrating intensely on the food before her. The sister who let us in brought up a couple of chairs for us and set them beside the bed. Then she drew open one panel of the mosquito netting and tied it to the bedpost at the foot of the bed. “I brung a visitor, mother,” Brother Jobe said.

She finally broke her concentration on the food and lifted her head in our direction. She seemed to have trouble focusing her vision. Some kind of mucousy goop had collected around her heavily lidded eyes, and one eyeball kept wandering off to the side, on its own, as though the owner could not control it, or perhaps she was undergoing some kind of neurological spasm.

“What you got to say for yourself, Robert?” she said in a voice that was strikingly harsh and nasal, as though she were speaking through a long brass tube from the next room. I was so transfixed by a kind of reflex disgust that it was another moment before I realized that nobody had introduced me to her by name.

“I don’t know, ma’am,” I said.

“You be nice to BJ here when you put him in the hoosegow.”

“He won’t be there long,” I said, wondering how she knew about that too.

“That’s for damn sure,” she said, and gave out a harsh throaty laugh which seemed to pain her.

“You don’t know the Lord, do you, Robert?” she said.

“Maybe not in the way you mean.”

“But you walk with an upright spirit, don’t you?”

“I don’t know. I’m not the best judge. I get along okay.”

“For an Israelite. Oh my…”

She seemed to undergo a minor paroxysm. Her wandering eye rolled up under the lid, which quivered, and a bit of masticated cake leaked out of her mouth. The others did not react, or at least not with alarm.

“Is she all right?” I said.

Brother Jobe just nodded and patted my arm. Then she came out of it. One of the sisters wiped the food off her chin, while another replaced the now empty tray of cakes with a freshly refilled one.

“Pardon me,” she said, apparently coming back to herself. “I’m subject to fits. Did you know this old boy was a Jew, BJ?”

“He’s a member in good standing at the Congregational, far as I know, mother,” Brother Jobe said.

“Ain’t it so, Robert?” she said. “Born Ear-lick or something like that.”

“Ehrlich,” I said.

“That a fact?” Brother Jobe said.

“What of it?”

“You’re chosen,” the fat woman said.

“I never felt special,” I said.

“I’m anointing you, son, on behalf of you know who. Don’t be thick. Take the responsibility, or be goddamned.”

“May I ask what you’re choosing me for?”

“To be a father,” she said. “No, to be more than a father.”

“I’ve already been one.”

“Then you’ll know what to do.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will. In all your trials. Oh…”

The fat lady appeared to hyperventilate. Her left eye rolled up again, and she fell into another spasm, more profound this time, like an epileptic seizure. In the process, she knocked the little tray of sweets off the bed. Her body went rigid and tremored. She spit up more food. If it had been up to me, I would have rushed to make sure her airway was clear, or to put something in between her teeth to keep her from biting her tongue, but the others went about their business as if they’d seen it happen a thousand times, and perhaps they had. The sister with the fan just fanned. The singers kept chanting. The fit lasted less than a minute. Then the fat woman subsided in place and seemed to fall instantly into a deep fathomless slumber, her aspirations noisy and full.

“You sleep now, precious mother,” Brother Jobe said, while sort of lifting me by the elbow out of my seat, saying, “Let’s go, old son.

I couldn’t wait to get out of there. He took me back through the labyrinth of new construction to the lobby in the old part of the school. It was developing into yet another hot day, but nothing like the heat in that room. The sheer memory of that funky odor was still nauseating.

“How’d she know my name and all that,” I said.

“Ain’t it obvious?”

“Not to me.”

“Mary Beth ain’t like other people.”

“What’s her deal?”

“Look, old son. There’s real strangeness in this world of ours. Back in the machine times, there was so much noise front and back, so to speak, it kept us from knowing what lies behind the surface of things. Now it stands out more.”

“Am I ever going to understand what I just saw?”

“I don’t know as I understand it all myself. She has powers. It’s a dadblamed miracle. Probably a sort of curse too, for her.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know,” Brother Jobe said. “Ride with it. The truth will be revealed by and by. Like the old song goes: farther along, we’ll understand why.”

“Are you going to cooperate and come in with Loren and me this evening?”

“Sure I am. Didn’t I already say so? You just come by. I’ll be ready. Now about this Karp fella. He won’t let you search his premises for stolen goods. I ain’t even met the sumbitch, and I can tell you that. When you decide you want to bring him in, you come here and apply to Brother Joseph for assistance. You hear? He’ll know what to do.”

“We have to give Karp a chance to come in peacefully with us, first.”

“You ever study where God’s law diverges from man’s law?”

’Well, oddly enough, man’s law ain’t always grounded in human nature. Ain’t that a funny paradox?”

“I’m just trying to avoid a war.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you got too much Jesus in you.”