Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

He buys a Super 8 camera and they make little films. Goofy, typical stuff. People waving at the camera as they fix hot dogs. Kids flying off the rope swing into the shining river. Fireworks. Snow angels.

Twenty months later, two little ones, and she is a third time pregnant. They announce this at a barbecue of her extended family, hardy Irish farmers. Catholics. An uncle jokes, Christ, it’s a womb not a clown car. They have to use tweezers to remove the bits of his eyeglasses from his eyebrow. The way her cousins hold Jeremiah back, Veronica’s about sick with love for him. She doesn’t hate her uncle, but that Jeremiah would kill for her seems to please her in an unhealthy way.

The next time Jeremiah and Veronica visit they come with a film projector and boxes. Her whole extended family on folding chairs set up in the living room, smoking, drinking a little beer, thinking they are about to watch some home movies. Veronica sets out mixed nuts. Soap and sundries. American Way — Amway, for short. Jeremiah explains the versatility and breadth of the brand. He goes to her mother, sisters, and aunts, squirting dollops of milky lotion in their palms. The men notice his light feet, his mincing step. He is not yet at ease with himself as an orator. He explains how such a tiny amount of this here soap will clean a whole load in the Kenmore. Try the mixed nuts. Now lookit the business plan. When he glances at her, Veronica gestures for him to mop his brow with his handkerchief and then she nods — he’s doing just fine — to go on. He draws closed the jalousies and plays them the promotional film. A great opportunity to get in on the ground floor. A good start would be only a thousand dollars, maybe two.

My God , someone whispers loud enough for everyone to hear, they want us to sell this shit.

A winter later, they give silver coins for Christmas. Only precious metals ever keep their value, what with oil prices and the dollar, which buys less every year. The fiat dollar he calls it. The government’s taken all the silver out of new coins, don’t you know. Replaced it with the copper sandwich, don’t you know. There are pamphlets out in the car, just a second.

Then for a few-month spell, all this money stuff seems like a phase. He gets a job at the Cummins plant. A damn good wage. Just the phrase good wage passing his lips is astonishing. He drinks beer, smokes cigars, wears cologne. They buy a Z28 and a pair of motorcycles. She gets a big TV and Kenmore appliances. New cameras. Polaroids and long-lenses and tripods.

“The movies,” the sister said. “That’s what did it.”

Pete asked did what.

“She comes over crying her eyes out one day. The lab that develops all their film called. Said they didn’t want her husband’s money, that they are good Christians over there. Veronica knows immediately why. He’s been taking ‘private’ pictures of her. I tell her not to worry about it, but when she goes home, they have this big fight. A couple days she sleeps in her old room here at the house. Leaves the kids with him and everything.”

“And then…”

“He bought her a car.”

The old woman nodded and the sister went for another strawberry soda and poured them new pink portions. After the car, something else happened, she said. Pete asked what.

JEREMIAH COMES ACROSS A stack of Jack Chick comics and a copy of The Late Great Planet Earth in the break room at the plant. He has a feeling he should take them home, and home they go, where Veronica devours them in a day. He returns from the graveyard shift the next morning to a wife afire with the Spirit of the Lord. Everything is in place for the Tribulation, she says. So much has been predicted, so little has yet come to pass. She talks about the things that she will talk about constantly from now on. The Six-Day War and the consolidation of Jerusalem. How the oil crisis of 1973 was predicted by Zachariah. How Israel will become a burdensome stone. The Antichrist is probably alive right now. Right now, she says.

Half the time no one knows what the hell she’s talking about. Except Jeremiah. They come over and put on coffee. Want to talk to the whole family. He holds her a minute as it percolates. She fairly vibrates in his arms. It’s like with Amway, the Tupperware, only it’s the both of them going a mile a minute about the End Times and Revelations. Like they’re on uppers. At some point, Jeremiah’s outside with her father. The father, he’s never bought into a single line of this stuff. He tells Jeremiah flat out that this is bullshit. That there’s something wrong with the two of them. In the head. Jeremiah isn’t upset by this. He hears the old man out. Then he says, Either there is something wrong with her or there is something wrong with the world. I choose the world is wrong.

Everybody else in the family quickly has it up to their eyeballs, this holier than thou and the politics. The sister, she plays along, just to keep them close. She attends church with them from time to time. But they have trouble finding a congregation with any fire to it. They go to tiny, weird churches in Ogilville and Walesboro led by emaciated unkempt burnouts and longhairs. They attend services for alcoholics and the homeless in a repurposed movie theater in Edinburgh. Drunks throw up in the pews and ask parishioners for money directly. A certain disheveled preacher in downtown Indianapolis shows them his.22 pistol under his corduroy jacket and asks can’t they find a service for normal people, don’t they see his flock is demented. They spend a few Sundays at a house-basement ministry in Bedford. The naked bulb, electric keyboard, handwritten hymnals, and fresh supply of drunks largely mumbling to themselves on the metal folding chairs. Invalids and muttering halfwits pass the empty plate.

For a time they don’t even go to church, and take their cues from Hal Lindsey’s book, and from the Bible directly. They give up shellfish and Christmas.

Christmas! With all those children they have now.

Then they remove all the images from their house. The teddy bears and television go on the front lawn for the trash pickers. Her mother hears what she is doing and rushes down for the picture albums, and Sarah sends her back with them and the cameras, and too the nice china, the flatware with the images of the Clydesdales, and the paintings of covered bridges.

By now they’re hardly talking to anyone. They’ve started in with a new church, raving about Pastor Don, and you never see them.

And she’s not Veronica anymore.

“I can imagine,” Pete said.

“No, I mean she’s changed her name. She’s Sarah now.”

“Her middle name,” the mother said. “More biblical, she says.”

“Pastor Don?”

They didn’t know much about him. He led a small church outside of Martinsville. But they loved the congregation. They gave away dog-eared copies of books. The sister went to a shelf and pulled a few paperbacks down for Pete. Coin’s Financial School by William Harvey. America’s Road to Ruin by Chet Hart, The Startlingly True Visions of Isaiah by Jan Meyer. In the back you can see how to order still more.

VERONICA — SARAH — IS MAKING pen pals with like minds, every week an obscure new tome in the mail, some of them ditto-copied in aniline blue and lashed together with rubber bands, dog-eared and coffee stained.

Some of them have swastikas.

You talk to her now and half of what she says is out of the King James. She says she feels pristine, original. That is, the book and the reading of the book answer an unput-to question that has been rattling around inside her for years, a doubt and anxiety that she was too late for everything, that history was over, that the era of miracles was past, that the world was altogether discovered.