Mr. Splitfoot (2 page)

Nat’s T-shirt
DIESEL FUMES MAKE ME HORNY
defies the dress code. His pants are slung under his pelvis bones. A channel of dark hair points toward his fly because at seventeen—save in the eyes of the State—Nat and Ruth aren’t really children anymore.

She curls her spine over bent legs. She holds the folds of her belly. On all fours, Nat rests his head in her lap. “All we need is a room somewhere. We can fix it up.” He plays the part of the man.

“And a pair of jeans for me,” Ruth says, playing the part of the woman.

“We’ll see.” Being a man is scary.

“Children! Come unload the van,” the Mother calls from the bottom of the stairs. The Mother is a part-time parishioner, part-time wife, part-time drug addict. She’s most visible in the residue she leaves after preparing midnight snacks or sneaking a shower. Her infrequent appearances allow the children to believe there is something holy about her, though she looks like the singer in a hair metal cocaine band. Purple velvet pants, high black boots. She’s got a homemade permanent wave, and her face is soft, as if termites have had their way with the undercarriage.

“Supplies! Children!”

When the Mother’s around and right in the head, she cares for some of the home’s daily needs: shopping, cooking, math, science, the mission’s tax-free status, state inspections, and a Christmas light display so involved, planning begins in mid-August. She does not follow the Father’s partiality for olden times.

“Children! Supplies!” Or, for those who don’t cotton to an approaching Armageddon, groceries.

Nat and Ruth join the ranks outside. The Love of Christ! children are a rainbow of deformities.

• Roberta, eleven, and her weird tiny body. She has an old face on a kid’s body. She raises stray kittens in the barn, relying on coyotes to cull her pack.
  

• Tonya, sixteen, sold pencils and blowjobs when she lived in Worcester, Massachusetts, with her aunt. She compares the honeyed days of Worcester to “living on Capri,” the Tyrrhenian Sea island she once glimpsed as a photo in an Italian restaurant downtown on Ida Street.
  

• Colly, fifteen, brown as a mummy, is a boy who thinks he’s a girl.
  

• Vladimir, fifteen, the albino is Colly’s bunkmate. He once described to Ruth the pleasures of masturbating in a jar of mayonnaise. She’s not touched the condiment since.
  

• Shauna, twelve, and Lisa, thirteen, are actual sisters. Their mother, another addict, sold them to their uncle when they were nine and ten. He turned them out and made a pretty penny until Shauna was picked up by the cops. They speak in their own language, spare and coded.
  

• Raffaella, ten, has claw hands from arthritis.
  

• Sarge, sixteen. Her real name is Sarah. She was a gutter punk who arrived at Love of Christ! with dark insects skittering beneath the skin of her forearms. In the race to be the most messed up, competition is steep between Sarge and
  

• Tika, fifteen, a big girl who jig-tattooed the word “fuck” across her cheek and spelled it wrong, and
  

• Ceph, seventeen, whose body seems broad as Niagara and disturbs thinking in the same way. He resembles a scoop of lard. Ceph is angry enough to deform DNA.
  

• Then there’s Nat, seventeen.
  

• Then there’s Ruth, seventeen, and her wormy mess of a scar.
  

The Father requests damaged wards, parents who are dead, retarded, in jail, all of the above. The more desperate the case, the more money the State gives him. “Got any ugly ones?” The Father doesn’t want reunions or adoptions. He doesn’t even want scheduled visitations. He wants converts. He wants Jesus Warriors, foster kids for indoctrination, labor, and money to fund his mission.

Still it is not all bad at Love of Christ! The Father takes each child’s face in his hands and reminds him or her, “You are the light of the world. You are the light.” Most of these children have never heard that before.

Still, the adjustment’s not smooth. New arrivals carve filthy words into their dry skin, aching for their absent mothers.

“You know who my mom is?” Colly asks one night. Four boys, two bunk beds. “Barbra Streisand. ‘People,’” Colly sings. “‘People who need people.’”

Ceph doesn’t get the joke. Ceph doesn’t know how white Barbra is.

Vladimir on the bunk below calls Ceph a dumbass, so Ceph pins Vladimir to the bed, strikes a lighter, and sets his hair on fire. The room fills with a sticky stench, caramelized and runny. Colly throws a blanket over both boys. Vladimir with scorched hair says nothing. No one tells the Father because the Father fetishizes obedience, developing creative punishments when he should be sleeping. He withholds food until a child becomes docile. He locks children in the downstairs bathroom. He strikes the soles of their feet with a wooden dowel or sprays a child with a frigid garden hose, then screams at the child to cover his or her immodest, naked body. He issues shunnings, forbidding anyone in the house from speaking to a particularly willful child. The Father practices holding therapy, which sounds tender but entails sitting on a child, pinning the arms and legs to humble and break the will.

And
still
Love of Christ! is better than some of the other options the State has for hard cases. The Father says, “Come with me and you won’t have to go back to public school, where just now a gang of sixteen-year-old thugs with nunchucks are anxious to sprinkle your teeth across the linoleum of F Wing. I have clothing, beds, food, and clean lavatories. I have a purpose for you, labor and the Lord. I have farm animals.” Other foster kids bounce from home to home and school to school, but the Father never lets a child go. He deposits checks from the State and makes up a list of chores. “Stay,” he says, imagining he’s a savior performing rescues—and, in some rank way, he is.

The children make a human chain from van to kitchen, hefting bags of groceries into the house. It’s hard to be the light of the world.

The Mother calmly praises their work. “Such strength. Such cooperation.” She sings, “‘Ride on, ride on, in Majesty!’” clapping the rhythm. She sings, “‘Mama, Mama, I’m coming home,’” an insensitive choice from Ozzy Osbourne but one of her favorites. The children unpack supplies into the pantry, so happy to have food in the house again. Not many American children get to know how lucky they are on such a regular basis.

The Father supervises from the doorjamb, nodding, praising the Mother in turn. “The very spirit of love, sister.” They’ll be getting it on later.

Raffaella hefts a twenty-pound bag of rice. Her arthritis is not bad today. “The Father and I prayed hard last night. God took away the pain.” Sometimes God takes away the pain, sometimes God sticks it back in, twisting the knife tang.

The Mother points at the kitchen crucifix, an emaciated thing. “Magnificent.”

Ruth takes a long peek down her nose. “Yeah. Jesus is a hottie.” Ruth does love Jesus, same way she loves Lincoln, Robin Hood, Martin Luther King, and Nat. Handsome men who fight for justice.

After morning chores comes school. The Father walks with the children out to the barn, a pied piper fantasy of the little children coming unto the Lord—if the Lord looked like a pale electronics department clerk. The Father wears natural-fiber clothing that he scrubs and starches before re-ruffling in an approximation of ancient Jerusalem chic. Every morning the Father braids his long hair, smoothing the split ends with beeswax. He coats his skin with a homebrewed sunscreen. He takes a spoonful of ground flaxseed and a spoonful of turmeric powder in his nightly goat’s milk. He self-administers a coffee colonic on the fifteenth of each month. On the sixteenth, he reports any visions experienced during the purge. And every now and then, he loses control, drinking nothing but Canadian whiskey for three days. The visions he receives when drunk are a different sort of sight.

On a steely cherry tree, Ruth keeps a feeder she made from a pie tin. Birds hop in the grass below, eating rejected seeds. A couple of sparrows, a few starlings, but every now and again a goldfinch or cardinal in his brilliant red coat. Hello, Mom.

Sarge opens the barn door, a huge thing on wheels and runners. There’s no heat inside. A number of plain benches rule the wooden floor. The goats are penned in the northern corner. The rafters reach high as a cathedral. Cobwebs too dusty for spiders drape the gables. The loft is filled with onion racks, devices of torture, traces of hay, urine, and hide. “Cold in here.”

“And Christ suffered.” The Father smiles. They enter the sanctuary, where he thrills his small congregation with vitriolic sermons each Saturday, the real Sabbath, so says the Father, so says the mission. The Father nods at the cross. “Yes, indeed. The Lord is reigning from the tree.” Ruth hears, The Lord is raining, leaving her with a kindly, catholic idea of God. God is the tree. God is the light. God is the rain that falls on everyone, even girls with ugly scars.

If you ask the Father what denomination, his answer is, “I follow the Bible. Heard of it?” Father Arthur takes from the Baptists, the Episcopalians, and the Evangelists. Ruth trusts Nat’s assessment of their caretaker best: “Part hippie, part psychopath.”

Public schools, zoning boards, and outsiders terrify him. They hide the devil and a bottle of booze. Before he was the Father, he was a drunk in Buffalo on the jam band circuit. That’s where he met the Mother. They’d drink and drug until the Lord saw fit to save their souls again. The hill is steep, but the Lord is full of forgiveness.

The Father rests one butt cheek on a stool set beside the lectern, like a folksinger in a coffeehouse. “Now. Where were we? The Jews? Yes, the Jews.”

Ruth speaks out of turn. “Jews invented eyeglasses.”

The Father is astonished. “Children, do we speak without being called on?”

No one answers.

“We do not. And where in God’s glorious kingdom did you get that idea?”

She’s not sure. It was just there in her head. She’s never even met a Jew, but she wanted to give them something, a weapon, eyeglasses, before the Father tears them down. Ruth shrugs.

“Let me ask again, the Jews?”

A number of hands shoot into the air; the children are anxious to placate the Father, to keep him at simmer.

“Yes, Tonya.”

The girl contorts her face in thought. She stands, hands clasped in front of her womb, the way the Father told her ladies stand. “Umm.”

“Begin again. No hesitation.”

“Right.” Tonya steadies her eyes. “Jews murder their children through abortion and Christ rejection.”

“Good.”

Tonya blushes in the blessing of correctness.

“And let’s not forget—slayers of Christ. Now, the Catholics?” The Father scans for volunteers,
Price Is Right
style. “Colly?”

Colly stands, the only black kid at Love of Christ! The Father keeps Colly around to defend against charges of racism. Or to have a whipping post.

“Posture.”

Colly fluffs his sternum. “Mary was a sinner who masturbated in public.”

“Indeed. And what does God have in store for brothers and sisters who are selfish with their pleasures?”

“Fires of hell.” Like a platter of toothpicked cold cuts.

The Father steers the children from eternal death. “Undeniably. Watch for the cloven toe.” He eyes Colly. “I’ve told you of my profligate uncle and the night we dragged his drunken body from a charred mobile home up in Mooers?”

“Yes, sir. Last week. And the week before.”

“Flesh bubbled, burnt blacker than you even.” The Father looks up thoughtfully. “And oddly yellow in places where the pus fat had boiled to bursting. I can’t help but think of him when I see you, son.”

“Yes. You’ve told me, sir.”

“Burnt,” the Father repeats. “Slave to intoxicants.”

“So you’ve said.”

“Just checking. Because it’s important to Christ. He wants to forgive you. He wants to forgive all of us.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Father nods, smiles, moves on. “Good. So, Nat. Mormons.”

“Mormons are just like you and me.”

The other children hold their breath.

The Father sounds a dull buzz. “Just like us?” Slowly, chuckling. “We kidnap blond children and sodomize them while wearing magic underpants?” A number of the students snicker. The Father joins them in this laugh. Ruth looks to Nat. Ruth’s hair is brown. “I’ve always appreciated your vivid imagination, Nat, but this is our history, and history asks us for facts, not fiction. Take a seat, son.”

The Father mopes, staring at his shoes. “Ruth? How can I sleep at night when your soul will roast in perdition?” He’s overcome by his sorrow. “Tell me how you love Jesus. Tell me how you adore his flesh and spirit.” When the Father speaks of Jesus, it’s so intimate it embarrasses Ruth, like he’s talking about his penis or a case of hemorrhoids. Other days, better days, the Father mentions grace, mercy, and the majestic beauty of God’s promised kingdom. Once Ruth even heard him say, “Christians glory in the well-being of others.” But not today.

“I don’t know, Father Arthur. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Correct.” He blooms into a smile. “Tomorrow,” he announces, “Muslims!”

Ruth takes a seat, and the Father begins the day’s lesson on the chalkboard, geometric proofs detailing how the three branches of American government—executive, legislative, and judicial—are a false trinity. The lesson is long. The Father includes stops along the way at the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation (big smiles to Colly) and
Roe v. Wade.
The Father knows the story of history and manages to actually educate the children by teaching them to think and ask questions, to not accept the rubbish they hear, especially his rubbish.

Every day the lesson winds up at the Apocalypse. Total financial collapse, hurricane, earthquake, or nuclear war—it makes no difference to him. The Father used to prepare to survive the Apocalypse, spending the State’s money on rations and rifles. He taught the children skills to live through the devastation: farming, engineering, dowsing, husbandry, canning, intermediate nursing, and marksmanship to destroy the hungry hordes moving north from the city. Then one morning, coming off a binge, John 2:15 came to him. “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” At breakfast he told the children, “I don’t want us to survive.” He looked around the room. “What was I thinking, children? Trying to forestall the time when we will dwell with Heavenly Father in paradise? I must have been nuts.” Which, of course, he was.