Children of Paradise: A Novel (18 page)

—You see that a blow from a child with a stick is nothing compared to the look on a child’s face, all of our faces, as we search for salvation from our Father in heaven, our Maker. That look is the rich man, ladies and gentlemen; that expression wants to enter the kingdom of heaven, but we may as well be a camel and try to stream through the eye of a needle. We must suffer the children because we are the children.

The preacher slumps into his chair and dries his eyes. His assistants surround him. The music teacher waves at the band, and they strike up a racy arrangement of the hymn “In the Sweet By-and-By.” Adults lead the old and the sickly out of the tent, followed by very young children and their parents and the older children up to the eldest. As they disperse, they clap and sing and sway. Children apologize to their parents, and many of the adults say it is the right thing to do and there is no need to be sorry, all the children need to do is listen to what adults tell them and conduct themselves like children of God. Remember what Father said about temptation being invisible and all around. Some of the adults laugh at having been hit with a stick wielded by a child. Others say it is a miracle that the preacher survived losing his father the way he did, and look how mysteriously God works. Trina walks beside Joyce.

—If you ever lift your hand to me again, it will be the last thing you do, child.

Trina freezes and darts an alarmed look at her mother, who, seeing the damaged reaction in her daughter, immediately switches from serious to happy and nudges and hugs Trina, who wants to know, as she returns her mother’s nudge:

—I did not hit you hard, right?

—Ooh, it still stings. I might need to visit the infirmary.

Joyce hugs Trina to make sure she knows it’s a joke. Trina gives her mother a playful elbow. They step in the dark and hold on to each other as they walk on the elevated log footpath. The logs rumble with all the marching feet. Trina’s mother holds up her bandaged hand and says they should count their blessings because the gorilla played no part in the evening.

—Imagine a lash from that beast!

Trina assents but does not confess that she prefers to face Adam any day rather than lift a stick and hit her mother. She imagines she feels Adam’s eyes on her, his gaze licking her back.

The preacher asks his assistants and guards: How was it?

The head teacher responds:

—Well, you had me worried for a while.

—Parents think it is their right to hit their children, but I’ve never seen a child exercise the right to hit a parent. That’s bold and original.

The reverend nods. He laughs aloud and runs his hand through his thick black hair.

—You have to surprise them, and keep surprising them, or else they lose interest in you and you lose them.

Everyone nods at his impermeable logic. He says he needs a drink, and as his assistant reaches for the ice water, he says:

—No, woman, I mean a real drink.

They head back to his house where a meal, and an array of real drinks in ample volume await him and his party. On the way, he stops at Adam’s cage.

—Come here, Adam, it’s me.

The gorilla scampers to the front of the cage and half turns away from the man, who pushes his hand through the bars and scratches Adam’s back. He fishes a stick of chewing gum out of his trouser pocket and hands it to Adam, who removes the paper with pursed lips before pulling the gum into his mouth and chewing gleefully. The reverend pats the gorilla on the head, says good night, and heads to his house. Inside, a record player perks up with Elvis followed by Little Richard, volume set low. And more than a dozen glasses with ice and half full of rum scatter from trays into the hands of the doctor, pharmacist, head nurse, chief accountant, chief electrician, project manager, head of security, head teacher, and various assistants and guards. All toast to the man’s health and the longevity of the community. They carve chunks from the roasted carcass of a lamb and open cans of Coke.

He asks the pharmacist about the quantities of cyanide in stock, and the pharmacist replies that there is enough for farm use. The preacher’s next question, how much is enough, leaves the pharmacist flummoxed, and instead of saying he does not have an accurate measurement for the poison but he can come back with an answer, he feels compelled to provide an answer that instant, and so he says off the top of his head that there is enough to kill about half of the community.

—Only half? Double our supplies.

—Yes, Reverend.

This remark causes the room to hush and pay attention but with each person assuming a demeanor of disinterest. The preacher wants to know, just out of curiosity, how lethal cyanide works: the dose, the taste, the speed. And here, the pharmacist, as the lone expert about the more lethal aspects of the periodic table, needs to speak as the sole protector of the commune responsible for ordering adequate supplies of medicines and industrial chemicals and not as the next candidate for most-favored-person status in the eyes of the community’s spiritual guide. But the pharmacist, also acting as the commune’s sole licensed jeweler, replies as the person who could prove most useful. And on the basis of the pharmacist’s advice, the preacher makes certain decisions about the chemical holdings in the commune based on the secret workings of his mind.

In a switch of topic and mood, the preacher takes a gulp from his glass, smacks his lips, grimaces, and utters, Praise the Lord, and slaps his chest as the rum shocks its way from his palate to his stomach, and asks no one in particular if this is not as good a place as any to be free from prying eyes and interfering hands.

—With our beliefs.

The preacher waves his glass as he speaks.

—No human and no government or state is qualified enough to dictate to us. No army on this earth is mightier than the heavenly gospel. Am I wrong?

—No, Father.

Murmurs of assent flick from mouth after mouth, full of meat and drink. The preacher belches and farts very loudly and calls his assistants’ names admonishingly.

—Nora, Dee, Pat!

The three giggle and cover their mouths and look their coyest.

—Oh, Father.

—Praise the Lord.

From outside the house, it is possible to hear faint traces of music and laughter. Figures move in front of the windows as if dancing and hanging on to each other for support. The rest of the compound wishes each other good night, and most of the generators switch off to save fuel and to increase the peace and tranquillity of the jungle setting, spoiled only by the loudspeakers that the preacher operates in the day at a whim and at night to broadcast his sermons. Night watchmen working in pairs take up positions around the perimeter of the compound armed with a flask of something hot, rifles, a radio, a flashlight, and proscribed playing cards. Some oil lamps flicker weakly, their flames like insects in the giant pitch black. Besides the preacher’s white-painted house, only the bakery and infirmary burn electricity. Inside the bakery, tables are taken over by bodies of dough, fists cuff the mixture and flip it over and break off pieces and roll them into loaves, and oil and flour pans for the oven, and feed the hungry flames of the giant oven with shovels of coal until the oven crackles and blazes with low gutturals. The guards glance at the man’s house with envy at their exclusion from the festivities.

—Blouse.

—Trousers.

—Skirt.

—Panties.

—Socks.

—Garters.

—Garters?

—You don’t want to know.

—I think I do.

The envy fades fast, eased by the knowledge that it will be their turn on another evening to join in the revelry, and someone else will be in their shoes on overnight guard duty.

Adam listens as he sticks to the back of his cage and waits for the guards to find comfortable positions of studied diligence and doze. The commune soon settles to sleep for the remainder of the night. Adam pokes his fingernails into the soil and digs, and the earth feels soft. He scoops handfuls of soil. He looks around, and the guards in the distance stop their chatter. Adam stands still and listens for any other sounds from the commune. Hearing none, he retreats to his bed area and pulls back the straw, leaves, branches, and tarpaulin to resume his widening of a large hole in the ground.

T
rina faces the wall on the bottom bunk of her bed and cannot stem the flow from her eyes. She thinks of Ryan. Her stomach hurts. She wishes she could spend the night with her mother. Trina thinks of Joyce going to sleep in the adult sleeping quarters, and she sees herself lying in a narrow bed with her mother, or not even on the same bed, perhaps on bedding on the floor. No words, just listening to her mother’s breathing and trying to match what she takes for an outward breath with her own exhalation. At some point she imagines she drifts off with her mother on a boat with the captain, who takes the three of them to a place where no one watches them and they can be together as mother and daughter from one end-of-the-day to the next.

—Trina.

She comes back to her name and reoccupies her place in the room and registers her stomachache. The breathing from the other children makes her think of the pipes of a church organ, but unlike an organ, each child operates independently from the others. She listens and hears her name again.

—Trina.

She recognizes Rose’s voice. Rose wants to know if Trina is still awake. Trina keeps very still and adds an audible pipe of her sleep to the organ of pipes. She wants Rose to do the same: not think about Ryan and grab what little time remains for sleep before the early-morning call on the community intercom. Trina tells herself that she is not the only one. She repeats the community mantra that all the children sleep away from parents and every adult is a parent to every child. And the preacher is Father to them all.

Child without parents. Parents with no memory and no mind left for a challenge. Parents up from a fog of sedation swear they have no son and the priest is the father of them all. No one speaks about Ryan in the company of his parents. They walk around dazed. Numb. Dumb. They pray that soon their work on this earth will be done.

Jungle for clothes on tree-stump legs, uprooted and gangly. Perambulation of vines and shrubbery. Child no more. Beast of sorts. Tongue forked for dicing air of smells, threats. Head full of matted weeds. Ryan shakes his head to scare off the devil of the dark, the devil of animal grunts and howls and roars, the devil of cold, the devil of thirst, the devil of an empty belly, the devil of trembling with every thought. He eats termites. Drinks from clear springs. Crouches and adds to the forest manure. Wipes himself with broad leaves. Runs on all fours to look worse than wild. Growls to deny sense sounds from his mouth. Jumps from a high rock into waterfall white roar and tumbles downstream with current. Climbs back to earth. Wanders far among trees without end. Green light. Blue cut above shine in forest floor pools. No words for this. Speech to shadow. Over. Shadow, come in. Over. Nothing but echoes.

In the commune’s infirmary, a nurse and two patients sit around the bed of the old makeup lady. They hold her hands and read from the Bible and fan her face. She breathes, irregular and very shallow. Once or twice she takes such a long time between breaths that those around her bed lean in close to see if she has left them, sneaked off under their noses or tiptoed off the world. But she draws heavily on the store of medicated oxygen in the room and puts them at ease. They whisper to each other about the evening’s sermon; they wonder what next? The patients talk about their aches and pains and the nurse about the work rotation ahead of her. It is at this moment of distraction, as they grow comfortable with the old woman’s brinkmanship, her way of reaching a precipice and balancing there, half on, half off, and in need of the merest flutter of breeze to tip her over the edge of the world, right then when all of their eyes avert from her face and they touch her hands absently because she recedes a little from the front of their minds, at that moment the old woman in the infirmary, a faint smile at the corners of her mouth and eyes, gasps her last and the man’s image fades in her head with the susurration of his name on her lips, Father.

Which will find Ryan first? Anaconda, panther, jaguar, wild boar? Or madness? The trees take him into their enclave. He is green from his days in their midst. Days he eats nothing but the bark of trees. Days a termite grows into a nutritious possibility. He chews leaves for brine, licks them for salt. Uses vine to hold up his pants and bind his feet. Vine for a lasso. Nights he sleeps a little and only lightly on a bed of leaves. Panther or jaguar on his trail. Some way off. They take the measure of him by the strength of his scent. He swings a stick to clear a path. He makes enough noise for three of his kind, his age. Panther or jaguar hesitate and circle Ryan as if he is not alone. Ryan smells good in the wild and a good deal worse than most: funk soil, vine sap, leaf smear bag of bones, veins cord his face, neck, and arms, tendons string the out-of-tune instrument of his body. Still the panther or jaguar persists in tracking him by keeping a respectful and safe distance from Ryan and his powerful scent.

Trina wakes with a stomachache and a sensation that she has wet her bed. She knows what happens to a child who wets the bed at the commune. She sits up and feels between her legs. Wet. But the mattress is dry. She decides she caught herself in midstream. She puzzles over how such a thing could happen to her. She drank hardly anything before going to sleep. In fact, the practice among the children is never to drink before bedtime to avoid the humiliation that follows wetting the bed. It is too dark to see her hands, but she thinks to smell her fingers to confirm that telltale smell of urine. She sniffs once and must sniff a second time to allow the word for the smell that she registers to take up residence in her skull. Not urine but something more alarming, more pungent and distinct for being rare. Not urine that maintains a dull presence in all the children’s dormitories scattered around the compound but something children know little about. She knows about urine. She knows how the children are made to drag a wet mattress into the sun and take the bedding to the laundry house and wash everything by hand and hang all the pieces on a line: the clothes the child slept in, the top and bottom sheet, and sometimes even a pillowcase if the accident is a big one. It takes over an hour for a prefect or adult to follow the child around and for everyone to know exactly what that child has done. The word for what Trina smells knocks on her skull to be admitted into the world, and she says it to herself, and again to confirm it, blood. She smells her own blood.