The Dirty Parts of the Bible: A Novel (13 page)

“All right,” Uncle Will said, giving up. “I reckon he’ll be good for something.”

+ + +

Later, Millie brought a batch of steaming biscuits out onto the porch, along with butter and jam. Craw and I gobbled them up—they tasted just like Mama’s. At one point, Craw uncovered his hook and speared two biscuits at once. Millie jumped back at the sight.

When Millie left to get my room ready, Uncle Will dragged a thin, yellow-stained mattress out of the cellar and showed Craw to his shed. It was an unpainted clapboard structure with a sagging roof, not much bigger than an outhouse inside, and chock full of tools, machinery, and spare parts. Craw surveyed the premises. “It ain’t exactly a Frank Lloyd Wright, but it’ll do.”

Back in the farmhouse, before I fell asleep, I heard Millie chastising Uncle Will. “I told you to get rid of him,” she said. “And you give him a job?”

“But Millie—”

“He looks dangerous. For all we know, he could be a vicious criminal on the loose. Did you see that hook on his arm?”

“Aw, Millie—he’s nothing but a harmless old coot. I know the type. As soon as he finds out how tough the work is, he’ll be back on the road in no time. You can count on that.”

I hoped he wasn’t right. I didn’t want to lose Craw again.

A
FTER
a hearty breakfast of ham and eggs, Uncle Will fitted me with some old leather boots. “Never go outside without these on,” he said. “You’ve got to guard your ankles around here.”

“From what—cactus?”

He laughed. “I reckon you don’t have to worry much about rattlers in Michigan.”

A chill crawled up my spine.

“But keep clear of the cacti, too. A jumpin’ cactus can reach right out and bite you. And I don’t care if you are kin—I ain’t gonna be the one to pull the needles out of your ass.”

After lunch, we all packed into the truck for a tour of the farm. I was stuck in the middle, crunched between Uncle Will’s shoulders and Craw’s. The main crop used to be cotton, Wilburn explained, before the topsoil dried up and blew away. Henry Farms survived by diversifying. We drove past row after row of fruit- and nut-bearing trees—apple, pear, peach, plum, orange, grapefruit, walnut, pecan. Among apples alone, Wilburn pointed out McIntosh, Cortland, King David, Jonathan, Smokehouse, and a dozen other varieties. Picking apples—now that sounded like a breezy way to spend the next month while searching for Father’s money on the sly.

Uncle Will showed us the common garden, which was shared by him and Millie, Will Junior and his wife, and the hired hands. We went by the small houses Craw and I had seen last night—it turned out that Will Junior and the others lived in them. As we drove around, I kept an eye peeled for anything resembling an abandoned well. I thought about asking, but didn’t want to arouse suspicion.

When we came to an open field, Wilburn shut off the truck. “This,” he said, “is where you’ll be spending most of your time.”

What?
It was a bare plain, all dirt and grass with not a single tree in sight.

Wilburn turned to Craw. “You got any experience handling bulls?”

“Yes siree,” Craw said. “I’ve been dodging them all my life.”

I nudged Craw. “I think he means cows—not cops.”

“The orchard’s carried us through the depression,” Wilburn said, “but fruits and nuts are chump change compared to cattle. That’s where the real money is these days.” He kicked back against his truck and lit up a cigarette. “Right this morning, Will Junior’s checking out some bulls in Fort Worth. And I’ve got ten acres of pasture that needs to be fenced in before the first one arrives.”

Putting up a fence would be more work than picking apples, but it still sounded easy enough. Of course, I had no idea how large an acre was. “Do you want us to do it right now?”

Wilburn spit out a cloud of smoke and slapped my back. “Atta boy! With an attitude like that, you’ll go far. But truly, I’ll be happy if you finish by the first of July.”

+ + +

Craw kept quiet for most of the tour—which was unusual for him. But he made up for it the next day when we started to work on the fence.

As I unrolled a bale of barbed wire, trying not to slice my fingers, Craw sat beneath the shade of a pecan tree, chopping rough branches into smooth fence posts. He steadied the branches with his hook and swung a hatchet with his hand. “This isn’t exactly what I had in mind by
carpentry
.”

I rolled up my sleeves and took a few whacks at the earth with a post-hole digger. The metal blade bounced off the hard ground, sending up a little cloud of dust.

After a while, I became aware of a constant buzz in the air. “What’s that noise? Sounds like an electrical line.”

“Cicadas,” Craw said. “Also known as locusts. Or, as John the Baptist would say,
lunch
.”

I laughed, surprised that Craw knew his Bible characters so well.

We hacked and hammered all morning. By noon, Craw had carved five fence posts and I had stuck two of them in the ground. I rested on the end of my digger and squinted up at the black birds circling overhead.

“Buzzards,” Craw said.

After a few minutes, they swooped down to where I could see their gnarled, bald heads.

“They’re waiting for us to die, aren’t they? So they can pick our carcasses clean.”

Craw tossed another finished post on his pile. “You know, in all my years I’ve never encountered such pessimism in one so young.”

“I don’t trust birds,” I said. “Not after what happened to my father.”

“It’s more than that,” Craw said. “You don’t seem to trust anyone. Here you are, entering the prime of life—a world of possibilities before you—and you’re more cynical than Job.”

First John the Baptist, now Job. “You read the Bible?” I asked.

“Not much. More often, I’d say it reads me.”

“Take Job,” I said, hoisting my post-hole digger. “He was the most faithful man on earth, and look what happened to him—his kids died, his flocks died, and his body got covered with boils. All because of a bet between God and the devil.” I jammed my digger into the ground. “If I were around back then, I would have been one of the sons who got killed. And you blame me for being cynical?”

Craw chuckled. “No one ever said life was fair, did they?”

I threw down my post-hole digger and walked over to where he was sitting. I’d been waiting for an opportunity like this, to voice my doubts with someone who wouldn’t judge me. I stammered around for a while, then dumped the whole load—the confused creation accounts, Cain’s wife, the flaming sword, the angels raping women, the dinosaurs getting left off the Ark.

By the end, I was shouting like my father on a Sunday morning. “Foreskins—
foreskins!
Can you believe it? How can
anyone
believe this stuff?”

I closed my case and waited for Craw to agree that it was all a farce, but he only smiled and shook his head. “You’re going about it all wrong, my boy. You read Genesis like a textbook. It isn’t science or history—it’s a myth.”

“You mean it’s a lie,” I said.

“Not at all.”

“But a myth is a made-up story. A fairy tale. A
lie
.”

Craw laughed. “That’s the problem with you Baptists—

We both read the Bible day and night;

but you read black where I read white!

“Just because a story didn’t actually
happen
,” he continued, “you think it’s a lie. But myths and fairy tales aren’t lies—they’re deeper truths.”

“My father doesn’t believe in stories,” I said. “He says we should only believe in the facts. And to him, the Bible is a book of facts.

“Doesn’t believe in
stories
? The Bible isn’t a damn book of facts, it’s a collection of stories. And Jesus wasn’t a scientist or a mathematician—he was a storyteller.” Craw threw up his hands. “Why, all of life is a story!”

“But if it’s just a story,” I said, “if all that stuff in Genesis didn’t actually
happen
—how the hell can you say it’s
true
?”

“Oftentimes,” Craw said, “a truth is so big, so far beyond our understanding, that the only way we can grasp it is through a story. The creation of the whole universe is like that. How can our puny brains contain it?”

“So it’s a lie … but it’s a deeper truth. My brain can’t even contain what you’re saying.”

“Hell,” Craw said. “You don’t believe Genesis is true-to-life? Show me a man and a woman in love, and I’ll show you Adam and Eve. Give them a few weeks, and you’ll have a fall from grace. A few years after that, Cain and Abel will running around the house in diapers trying to kill each other. It’s the plain stuff of life.”

I began to see what he was getting at. But it still didn’t explain a lot of things, like Abraham and the Jews. “What about circumcision?” I asked. “Where’s the deeper truth in chopping the foreskin off your pecker?”

“It’s a rite of passage, my boy. A mark of belonging to the tribe.” Craw picked up his hatchet and eyed the blade.

“Put that down,” I said. “I’ve already been sliced.”

He tossed it between my feet, laughing as I jumped back. “I hate to tell you this,” he said, “but I doubt if it’s even possible for you white folks to understand the Jews.”

“Why not?”

“The Jews were tribal people. Nomads. Wanderers, fighting to keep their dignity. They were always being oppressed, exiled, sold into slavery. In America today, who does that remind you of?”

“Hoboes?”

“Not quite. I mean blacks. Negroes. Or—as your aunt would say—niggers.”

My cheeks flushed red.

“The way I see it,” Craw said, “white folks in this country have more in common with the Babylonians and Assyrians than the Jews.”

I walked back to my digger, trying to avoid the subject. A minute later, I muttered under my breath. “I just need some proof, that’s all.”

Craw wiped the sweat from his brow. “Son, right now I could use a little proof myself.
Hundred
proof.”

E
ACH
evening after work, I’d wash my hands and go inside for dinner while Craw waited on the back porch for Millie to bring him a plate of food. I felt awful about it—especially after what Craw said about his people and the Jews—but Craw seemed grateful just to have regular meals.

And what meals they were! Fried chicken, pot roast, smoked ham, butternut squash, mashed potatoes slathered in butter, apple dumplings, hickorynut cake, squash pie. As soon as I licked my plate clean, she’d pile on another helping. She fussed over me like I was her own son. “Eat another piece of that pie before you waste away to nothing. What do they feed you up North—snow?”

While Uncle Will was laid-back, Millie was serious. Millie—no one dared call her Mildred—used to play the pump organ at the movie theater in downtown Glen Rose. She’d seen every Chaplin and Keaton film, but her favorite was Rudolph Valentino. In fact, she walked with a slight crick in her neck from years of looking over her shoulder at the screen while she played.