Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

But now is the beginning of the End. Now is the At-Hand Completion. Now the evening news reveals the great engine of His devise. When the Israelis are murdered at the Munich games there is riveting horror to be sure; but you can feel another piece of The Plan slide into place too. Armageddon unfolding right there on the Wide World of Sports. What dazzling events gestate, what will come, befall, occur, what is yet is only just yet.

Selah.

Now.

They fall out with Pastor Don’s congregation. Their circle shrinks.

She’s been having these grave headaches that she says go off like bombs behind her eyes, and there are times she has to rush to the sink or the toilet to throw up they are so bad. Times she is in her terry cloth robe on the bathroom floor, palms up, weeping at the ceiling and the kids pee outside on the side of the house. Days at a stretch she hides in the murk of her bedroom, afghans nailed over the windows, talking in tongues and singing only to emerge pale and quaking on stilted legs, begging their father to take them all, all of the children, just away for a few hours , each discrete noise is like a gun going off, and her ears are ringing, Jeremiah, just take them somewhere, just for a little while please I got to get a little sleep if I can. If I can.

A summer day the sister drops in, finds Veronica on the kitchen floor, flushed and nearly gibbering. Her dress is sodden with sweat and urine. She’d been putting clothes on the line, so many clothes now with the five kids, another — Ethan — on the way, when a headache crept on, a dull and growing throe in the meat of her skull, and it pulsed behind her eyes. She fell in the hugeness of it. She concentrated on her breathing. She was terrified something was terrifically wrong. There was a blade of grass in her narrowed field of vision and on the blade was a droplet of dew. The sunlight shattering through the tiny bulb of water. Too much.

She clambered inside, pulled closed the curtains, and sat in the cool of the open refrigerator. The phone rang, and she ripped the cord out of the wall. All her senses were fire. The hot, the bright. This is crazy, I’m goin crazy. She tried to pass out. She prayed to pass out. She prayed to die. She prayed to take her children, her husband, make everything ash, just stop the pain.

I made a covenant with death , she says to her sister.

The sister asks what the hell she is talking about.

Veronica says, With hell I am at agreement.

She babbles about a vision, a vision that came in the cool wake of the fire she passed through, everything scorched away. The fire was a siren, His way of getting my attention . She saw mountains. She saw such privation. Hardship. It was the Tribulation.

Let them which be in Judea flee into the mountains , she says. We must go.

A month later, they are headed to Montana.

Pete took a sip from the syrupy soda out of politeness and then reached for one of the albums asking “May I?” and flipped to the pages he was looking for. Pictures of Veronica’s mother and father with the kids in the woods. Five kids, and the baby.

“Is this in Montana?”

The women nodded.

“The baby is little Ethan. Paula is five or six in this. Then there’s Benjamin, Ruth is the second-oldest girl. Then there’s Jacob — the oldest boy — and Esther, the oldest girl.” She gazed at them a moment and then looked up at Pete. “You haven’t seen any of them but Ben?”

“No, I’m afraid not. But Jeremiah says they’re up there.”

“You don’t believe him,” the woman said, staring into Pete.

“I just haven’t seen them is all.” He pointed at the picture. “When did they send this picture?”

“I took it.”

“Tell me about it.”

THEY VISIT WHEN the house is going up. Some friends they’d made are helping them out. Veronica’s father is helping.

When the kids get back from Bible Camp, they have a dinner at a big table in the meadow down from the house, the better that they might look at their work. Fried chicken and watermelon and cucumber and iceberg lettuce salad with cream dressing and onions. The boys have crew cuts. The girls all wear dresses — they aren’t allowed in pants. Veronica makes them bonnets. They look like homesteaders. Worse, they let the kids climb up on the new roof, those sheets of aluminum slick from a misty rain. Jeremiah only goes up there to get them down after she hectors him to do it, and when he comes back he says they ought to paint the roof because it can be seen from the air.

One evening, Jeremiah’s holding forth on the porch. Some of those tattooed friends and the kids and Veronica’s father. You could hear the whole conversation from inside. The usual stuff from Jeremiah. How it was the 1980s now and it was very, very late. How every man will soon have the Mark of the Beast. How that meant computers, how all the banks will be connected with computers, and did anyone doubt that at all. Credit cards. How the cards in their wallets were the Mark of the Beast.

Veronica’s father asks what the hell that means.

Jeremiah says all the numbers are derivative of 666.

Veronica’s father gets out his American Express and asks Jeremiah to show him, to use actual math.

Jeremiah begs off, says American money isn’t worth anything.

It’s the same old saw from back after the Amway days , the old man says. Just like when you and Veronica first got together.

It’s Sarah.

Her middle name is Sarah.

Veronica’s father is getting real hot by now. Then someone says something about Jewish bankers. Greedy fuckers. Holocaust was a fake.

Bullshit, I was in Dachau during the war , the old man says.

Thousands is all that were killed , Jeremiah says. It’s been blown all out of proportion.

Do you know that for a fact?

Hell yes, I know it’s a fact. Because it is a fact. It’s established by historians, John.

What historians?

“What historians” he says.

You mean the crackpots. Because credentialed historians—

“Credentialed”? Just who gives these credentials?

The universities.

Oh, riiiiight, the Ivory Tower. You gotta move out of power structures if you want—

Just give me a name. One name. A book by a real historian that says the Holocaust was a fake—

Guy by the name of Stussel has a fantastic book laying out the whole conspiracy. You have to do a little research, John. Just because they give you a shit sandwich to eat doesn’t mean you put it in your mouth.

Why you — I sat in frozen mud for six weeks getting shot at by murdering Krauts and you want to tell me I don’t know what I saw with my own damn eyes?! I was there—

Look, I’m no Nazi. But—

— and I know what I saw, and—

— you got to understand that if you make a country’s money worthless and let the banks control everything, some people are going to stand up to keep what’s theirs—

I had friends killed by those Nazi sons of bitches and I’ll be goddamned if you’ll shit on their memory! I ought to kick your ass! Get up! Get up right now!

Just then Veronica says to come inside.

The old man is quaking and nearly plum with rage.

Veronica calls him again.

He squeezes the bridge of his nose. He squeezes his legs and stands. Says the way Jeremiah is talking, somebody is gonna get hurt.

So be it , Jeremiah says.

You’re insane.

Some people won’t see the light until they feel the heat, John. It’s just the way it is.