James Smythe - The Testimony

When we got back to Colorado City everything was different. All the things that they had believed seemed to be gone, really. It was all Church of the One True God this, Church of the One True God that. Ervil Smith was dead, apparently; died in the plague, which didn’t surprise me, because he did not have a strong heart. There was a new leader, his son, named Joseph, like me, and that Joseph was the one responsible for pushing the group toward the newer church. We went to see him straight away, and he embraced me, welcomed us back. We worried you were dead, he said, and then he apologized for his father’s actions. We all watched you on television, he told me, and I asked how, because we didn’t have televisions there, and he said, I bought a computer, and you’re on this website, and he showed me YouTube. We can’t be stuck as we were, he said. No, we cannot, I said.

He explained that they adopted the new church because of The Broadcast , only he called it The Testimony . Used to be, with our religion, that your testimony was what you got when God spoke to you in some indirect or direct way, guiding your life toward Him, to let you know that you were on the right path. When we asked somebody to marry us they received their testimony, to let them know that they were right to marry; The Broadcast was, Joseph Smith said, a testimony for everybody. Apparently, he said – and he was proud of this – they’re taking the phrase across the whole church, across the entire thing. We won’t be credited or anything, but we’ll know, and isn’t that the important thing?

They hadn’t touched our house; I asked what happened to Eleanor, because I had decided that I only wanted my family to be myself, Jennifer and Joe. She’s gone, he said, she left, but we’re speaking about dissolving some of the marriages for everybody; we’re trying to make this right, he said, conform. (Truth be told, they had no legality to them anyhow, so dissolving most of them was just a case of saying that they never happened. I didn’t say that, of course; he reached that point eventually by himself.) I asked him if abandoning the old ways was the right thing to do; he said that it wasn’t abandoning. It’s adapting, he said. It’s very different. Besides, he said, everybody heard The Testimony , so they must have been doing something right. (He took me to one side as well, away from everybody else. We want to make it up to you, he said, so we’ve got some money that my father left. He was a rich man. I didn’t ask how much, but the cheque, when he dropped it off a few days later, made me near-hysterical with laughter.)

We took back the old house, and moved our stuff in from the RV. A few weeks later I drove out into Colorado state, to look for schools for Joe, to get him out from under our wing. Every day now I drive him in, and I’ve taken a job at a restaurant, as a short-order cook, working the grill, that sort of thing. And Jennifer is pregnant, now, with child number two, and we live together in the house on the compound, and we’re very happy.

Ally Weyland, lawyer, Edinburgh

We hadn’t been together a month when Joseph and Joe and Jennifer left, and then Katy said that she was going, and that just left Mark and myself. I tried to call my aunt a few times, to let her know I was okay, but she never answered. A few weeks after I started trying to call, the line went dead one day, and… God, that’s an awful term. That’s an awful way to think of it, I suppose.

So, I didn’t want to go home, anyway. Nobody there to go home to . Mark said, Well, why not stay here, with me? And it’s a fucking good job he did ask, because I was up the duff.

Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

When she told me I panicked, because I didn’t see it coming, because we’d barely been together for any time, and I didn’t know what it meant. I asked her to marry me. Did she tell you what she said?

Ally Weyland, lawyer, Edinburgh

I told him to fuck off, is what I said.

Mark Kirkman, unemployed, Boston

She said Yes about a month after that, when I fetched her something from the shop, I can’t remember what, but it was the middle of the night and I just did it, didn’t even question her. I got back, I gave her the food, whatever it was, and I was going back to sleep when she kicked me in the shin to wake me up. Alright, she said, I’ll marry you.

We’ve got a house in Atlanta, or just outside it, in a place called Peachtree City. Ally chose it, because of the name. I couldn’t believe it, but she’s quite the romantic. She always wanted one of those big places you saw in Gone With The Wind – she called them Plantation houses – and we found one, run down, ruined, pretty much. I sold my bike, used my savings, and we got the place, and I spend my days decorating, tearing down walls, working on the floors (to stop them caving in, replacing the rotten boards with fresh ones). Ally sits on the porch and drinks lemonade (that I’ve made) and tells me that I’m doing it all wrong. We’ve started a group, mostly through the internet, but we’ve met in person, like a small convention; none of us heard The Broadcast , and none of us got ill during those weeks afterwards. None of us know what it means, either, and I don’t think we want to. Either we don’t care, or we really, really do, but there are no answers, and there won’t be. It’s like God, Ally says: you didn’t know if He was there before, and so much was unanswered – life, the universe, everything – so why should it matter now? We lived through it, and that’s what counts. There are thirty-five of us, with a few more who have emailed, asking for details about who we are and what we do. What do we do? We just talk, I guess. Nothing more than that, because there’s nothing more we can do.

This morning I was in the yard, raking leaves, keeping it neat. Ally wouldn’t do anything around the place if she had the chance, so it all falls to me. She goes to work – she’s got a job at a law firm here – and I do the gardening, to get the place into shape before the baby comes. This morning I was raking, and then I heard it, static. It was faint and tinny, and distant, and I couldn’t tell where it was from. I thought… I heard it, and then it disappeared. I sat on the couch, put the TV on and went through every single channel, but nobody was talking about it. It can’t be just me, I said, so I switched the set off and called Ally, to ask her if she heard it – like, maybe we were catching up, finally? – and she had only just answered when I heard it again. I turned around and the TV set – one of those old ones, enormous and boxy, left here when we moved in – had switched itself on, but to no particular channel. There was that wash of white and grey and black fuzz, and the hiss that accompanied it, and then, all of a sudden it switched itself off again.

What’s wrong? Ally asked, and I said, I think we need a new television. I didn’t tell her why.

Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

Piers and I decided that we’d write our own set of rules for living here. We get up when we want to, and we don’t tell the other off for not moving if they want a few more hours’ sleep. We keep any pets or animals that we find wandering the hillside that might want a home. We help anybody we see that needs help. In the cities, the deaths that happened get brushed over, I think, treated as something that just occurred; I mean, they’re never forgotten, gosh no, but they happened, and they remember them, but life abides, as they say. It’s a phrase I’ve heard a lot since The Broadcast . Here, the plague decimated villages, families. We found a cow wandering the hillside a week after we moved in and now we have milk, after a lot of huffing and puffing and Piers getting himself covered in the stuff almost every morning. We need to find a bull now, and then we can hopefully get them to mate, and we’ll have even more milk. Don’t think I could eat them – we’re practically gone veggie since we started naming the damn animals, so we collect them as if they’re household pets. Makes sense; we’ve got the land for it (as soon as Piers finishes building his fence).