Children of Exile (9 page)

“Didn't you ever go to church in . . . that place?” the mother asked. She meant Fredtown. I could tell. But she said “that place” like even those words hurt her mouth.

I looked at Bobo shoveling sugar-covered pancake pieces into his mouth. How much did he understand? How much of the tension in the mother's voice did he hear?

“We had religious studies in school,” I said, trying my best to keep my tone even and unconcerned. “We learned the best tenets of all religions:
Be kind. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Cultivate right thought and right speech. Forgive those who trespass against you.
”

“All religions,” the mother repeated. She sounded like she didn't believe me. “Didn't they tell you there are some false prophets who lead people into evil ways, not toward goodness and light? Or did they not even tell you about the evil ones?”

A noise came from behind the house—maybe a door slamming. Maybe it was the father leaving the privy.

The mother stood up, practically dumping Bobo from her lap. He landed on his feet and kept chewing.

“Hurry!” the mother said. “It's almost time to go.” She looked me up and down. “Don't the two of you have any other clothes than that? You're wrinkled.”

Did she think we'd carried everything we owned in
our knapsacks? Didn't she know about our luggage? Wasn't someone going to deliver it? Wasn't it a mother's job to keep track of her children's things?

“We have lots of other clothes,” I said. “When are our suitcases coming from the airport?”

The mother narrowed her eyes at me.

“You didn't tell me you had suitcases,” she said.

“I thought—”

The mother waved a dismissive hand, not waiting for me to straighten out my thoughts.

“You and your father can pick them up this afternoon,” she said. “If they haven't been stolen.”

Why did she sound like it would be my fault if someone stole our bags?

The back door of the house creaked open and then banged shut, making the walls shiver. The father stepped into the shadows just inside the door. It felt like he was watching us, even though he was only listening.

“You could come to church with us,” the mother told him, her voice breaking. “We could be a complete family, giving thanks together. Everyone would see—”

“Humph.” The father gave a grunt of disgust. It was a sour, bitter sound. “You know
I
can't see. You know I won't go there.”

I looked back and forth at the mother and the father. If
they'd been my Fred-parents, they would have exchanged a glance, then Bobo and I would have been sent out to play, and when we returned all the tension between them would have been talked out and gone.

But these were my real parents. One of them was blind, and the other didn't seem to have any expressions on her face besides glaring and sorrow and anger and fear.

The mother began making shooing motions with her hands.

“Take your turn in the privy,” she told me. “At least smooth down your hair. Then let's go. Hurry!”

Five minutes later—my hair semitamed, my dress no less wrinkled for my trying to straighten it out—the mother and Bobo and I stepped out the front door, leaving the father behind in his dark corner.

I wouldn't have said the mother was joyful walking to church, but there was a certain eagerness to her step that I hadn't seen before. Bobo skipped along beside her, bouncing up and down in a way that might have been because of all the sugar he'd had for breakfast, but might have happened anyway. Bobo was always a big skipper.

Doesn't he see how scary all the houses on our street are?
I wondered. I was paying more attention than I had the day before. I could see that our house—ramshackle as it was—was actually one of the nicer ones in the neighborhood.
The others were mostly boxes and boards propped together randomly, spackled with dried mud. They looked like they could be knocked down by no more than the breath of a child making a wish blowing on dandelion fluff.

“This way,” the mother said, tugging Bobo and me onto a dirt path winding through a field of weeds.

It wasn't long before we came to a large open building made of cinder blocks that stopped halfway up, with solid- looking posts leading the rest of the way to a shiny tin roof.

A crowd of some thirty-five or forty people had already gathered—maybe we were late. We took up a place at the back and sat down on the floor. I looked around at the other kids.

If Edwy's here,
I thought,
then . . .

Edwy wasn't there. But I did see Cana, the little girl he'd once had spy for him. A man who must have been her father had his arm around her shoulder, holding her close—maybe at least she had real parents who were nice. She shyly raised a hand and waved at me from across the room. I really wanted to see Aili, too, the girl the rude man had grabbed from me on the plane yesterday, but she was also missing. Most of the children around us were babies and toddlers.

Someone I couldn't see began blowing on a flute, and five adults stood up at the front and started singing about joy and rejoicing. Around us, people began to stand up and
dance in place, waving their hands in the air, throwing their heads back and singing along.

“Can I dance too?” Bobo asked, leaning toward me.

“Yes,” the mother said loudly, as if he'd been asking her, not me.

I nodded, because if Bobo was happy enough to dance, it would be wrong to hold him back. Both he and the mother stood up and joined hands and began swinging their arms and their hips back and forth in time to the music. But I sat still, because I wasn't happy. I didn't feel like dancing or singing about joy.

Finally the music ended and everyone sat down, even the singers. A man stepped up to a table in the front. Maybe it was an altar; it held nothing but a rough wooden cross.

So this is a Christian church,
I thought, as if I expected my religious studies Fred-teacher to be proud of me for knowing that.
Christian, not Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu or Jewish or Taoist . . .

The mother glanced over and must have seen me watching the man at the front.

“Pastor Dan is a missionary,” she whispered. “That's why he looks so different. But don't . . . don't hold it against him. He's been so helpful. . . .”

Looks so different?
I thought. The man had just bowed his head in a silent prayer—was that what the mother meant?
Another thought occurred to me, one that made me uncomfortable. Was she pointing out the fact that the man had paler skin than anybody I'd ever seen in person before? And that his eyes tilted in a way I'd seen only in pictures?

That was wrong to focus on, rude to talk about.

“What he looks like doesn't matter,” I whispered back to the mother, just like the Freds would have wanted me to.

Something eased in the mother's expression.

“I just started coming here a month ago,” she murmured. “So I'm still learning. But the things he says, the way he sees things . . .”

“Yes, the Freds always said it's the content of a person's character we should pay attention to, not how they look,” I said. “That's what the Freds taught.”

I thought she would be glad that I was agreeing with her, that the Freds agreed. But she flinched, and anger flashed across her face. Still, she didn't lash out, like she had before. She jerked her head forward and closed her eyes, as if she felt a sudden need to pray, too.

I didn't think I should try to say anything else to her, and it felt wrong even to notice all the ways this man looked different. So I thought about the word “missionary” instead. We'd talked about missionaries in religious studies class back in Fredtown: They were people who went to a foreign land to share their religion.

I remember Edwy asking all sorts of questions.

“Isn't that rude and disrespectful, to be a missionary?” he'd challenged the teacher. “Isn't that like saying to the people in the places they travel to, ‘The religion you believe in now is totally wrong and mine is right'? Why is that allowed, if people are supposed to have respect for everyone who's different from them?”

The Fred-teacher had surprised us both by saying, “I cannot comment on that. In a sense, I myself and all the other Freds are missionaries. . . .”

Then I started asking questions too, but the Fred-teacher said that was the end of school for the day.

When we went back the next day, we had a different teacher.

The missionary at the front of this church finished praying, put his hands up in the air, and called out, “Praise be to God!”

“Praise the Lord!” all the adults around me shouted back at him.

“Isn't this the most glorious day?” the pale man asked. “You have your children back! For twelve years you wept for your children, just as Rachel wept for her children in the Bible. But now you have your children back! They were returned to you! You stood up against evil, and now, by the grace of God, you have triumphed. Your patience and
persistence have been rewarded. The evildoers have been vanquished!”

His voice thundered in my ears, his words worming their way into my brain.

Stood up against evil . . . The evildoers have been vanquished. . . .

And then I understood: He was talking about the Freds. He was saying the Freds were evil.

I bolted upright; I was on my feet before I was conscious of deciding to stand.

“Stop it!” I screamed at the pale man. “Stop!”

Everybody stared
at me.

I'd wanted to say,
The Freds aren't evil! They're the kindest people ever. Take it back, what you just said!
I'd wanted to say,
Oh, right, while you're feeling so triumphant and gloating about your victory, did you ever think about what it feels like to be a kid ripped away from Fredtown? From our Fred-parents and everything we've ever known? Did you ever think how confused and scared we are? Did you ever think of just being kind and patient, and explaining everything? What if
you're
actually the ones doing evil? Did you ever think of that?

But everyone was staring at me.

It wasn't like how everyone watched me when I was the narrator in the school play back in Fredtown. Then, every single gaze was kind and encouraging; every face seemed to be saying,
Oh, you're doing so well! I'm so happy to see you succeed! I'm rooting for you!

The faces staring at me now in this cinder-block building
were all grim and disapproving. And I didn't have to guess at what the people around me were thinking, because I could hear them start to murmur:

“Who's
that
? Who does she think she is, interrupting like that?”

“Surely that's not one of the children, is it? She's so tall!”

“What if that's one of those Freds, who snuck back in, after all? She sounds like a Fred!”

I couldn't speak. I could barely breathe.

Bobo flung himself at my leg.

“This is my
sister
,” he cried, grabbing on tight. “She's Rosi! She's not a Fred!”

Bless brave little Bobo. He gave me the courage to take a deep breath, and that helped. Everyone was still glaring at me, though, except for the missionary at the front, who mostly looked puzzled and concerned. So did the little kids who were old enough to be paying attention. My eyes met Cana's, and she mouthed something at me. Was it
Be careful
? Was she smart enough to know to say that?

Behind me, a baby started to cry.

“I—,” I began. I choked on the word and had to try again. “I think you forgot how scared little kids can get, hearing about evil. And how much babies cry. If you want, I can take all the little kids out into the field to play until the service is over.”

This was a cover-up, a replacement for what I was too scared to say.

Bobo nodded vigorously, his head bouncing up and down against my leg.

“You can take
me
out into the field to play!” he said, his voice so merry it was like he didn't notice anyone glaring at us. “Especially if there's going to be a lot of sitting still and listening. I'm not very good at that.”

Any Fred would have laughed, and then gently told Bobo that the only way he was going to get good at sitting still and listening was by practicing sitting still and listening. But no one said anything in this cinder-block church.

The baby behind me cried louder. I glanced back, and the mother holding the baby didn't even seem to know she should bounce him up and down and murmur, “Shh, shh. You're okay.” The mother just sat there, watching her baby cry.

The pale man at the front tilted his head sideways, watching me.

“It's true we are out of practice dealing with children, and thinking about what children need,” he said. “Next week we'll have Sunday school classes and start taking turns with nursery care. But for this week, maybe it would be best if this girl—Rosi?—takes all the children out into the field to play until our service is over.”

I reached back for the crying baby. The mother didn't
seem to know what to do except hand him over. The baby's fat little hand grabbed one of my fingers, and I let him guide it into his mouth, between his gums.

“He's teething,” I said. “That's all.”

The baby gnawed on my finger, biting down so hard that it hurt. But at least he stopped crying.

The mother looked angry, not grateful.

“Come on, then,” I said to Bobo.

He and I went out into the open field, me carrying the baby, a trail of other little kids following us.

“Who wants to play Duck Duck Goose?” I asked.

“Me! Me! Me!” the children around me cried.