Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

What a thing to see.

Pete had brought a cloth checkerboard, and Pearl allowed him to teach the boy to play, as it didn’t seem to represent anything except for war, and war was what Pearl was teaching Benjamin. Pearl was all right with war in the abstract. Chess, with its icons of castles and knights, was out. Checkers, okay. Pure.

Pete showed Benjamin the rules, how to avoid getting jumped. It was a wonder that the boy had never played it. But consider the child’s abbreviated understanding of the world, the fences round his experience. He’d heard that men had gone to the moon, but only in passing and said he did not believe it. He believed that demons coursed through the woods but were drawn to the cities, where they mostly performed their devilry among the coloreds and people who worked for the government and spoke foreign languages in their homes. He could count very high and spell a great many words, but he knew better all the apostles and the books of the Bible in order. He’d never stepped foot inside a public school classroom. Homeschooled, he never played with a child outside his immediate family or the families of various churches they’d gone to, and even then it seemed obvious that his shy and ponderous nature prevented him much interaction with anybody, young or old. Except for the time, the one time, he’d gone to the school in Tenmile.

The boy studied the board in the dirt by the fire.

“Hey, Ben. Can I ask you something?”

Benjamin nodded.

“Why’d you go into that school that day?”

The boy leaned over to examine his positions on the board.

“The lady on the playground said I had to.”

“But why were you on the playground?”

“I dunno.”

Benjamin jumped one of Pete’s pieces.

“You can keep going,” Pete said, showing where he could jump again.

“That’s all right. I don’t want to take all your pieces.”

“I think you have to, if you can.”

Pete moved the piece for him and set another red checker in the boy’s hand. Benjamin stacked them neatly with the others.

“Did you find your little girl?” he asked.

“Nope.”

“I’m sorry, Pete.”

“Thanks.”

They played a few minutes more, and Benjamin glanced in the direction of the creek where his father had gone.

“I ran away this one time,” Ben said.

Pete folded his arms and asked was that so.

IT WAS A SUMMER CAMP at Hayden Lake, Idaho. He didn’t want to go, but Mama and Papa made him and his brother and sisters too. The camp is all right. Games, and you can earn candy if you do your chores and all your Bible lessons. Songs around the campfire. Fishing the lake. Tubing the ice-cold creek.

One afternoon they are made to hike up to a clearing with only the pastor to hear some more about Chinese Communists. How they kill little girl babies and how the people are rounded up into camps, not like this camp not at all, but like—

The pastor is interrupted as men on horseback come from every direction firing guns in the air, throwing smoke bombs. Some of the older children laugh, stand up. The little girls are crying before the pastor is dragged away, hollering, kicking up dirt. Now all the girls scream and the littler boys too. At the edge of the clearing, just before the trees, the pastor gets loose. He’s at a dead sprint and one of the men pulls a pistol out from under his duster and everybody screams and he is shot and falls and now everybody is grabbing everybody else and bunching up like spooked sheep.

The men’s bandanas cover their yelling mouths. There’s smoke coming from somewhere, everywhere. The horses step in place at all of this carrying-on, the children dashing around, huddling, the young ones by now blubbering. Then a pickup and trailer come barreling through the meadow and more men get out and order the children to climb in back.

Ben’s big brother Jacob breaks for it. His sister Esther screams for him not to, but he’s running across the meadow. Two men on horseback go after him and sweep him up and for a moment he dangles in the air between the two horses his legs pumping, it looks almost like they’d tear him in two. Then he is thrown across a pommel and taken to the trailer. Ben’s big sister Esther is already lifting his little sisters Ruth and then Paula into the trailer. She reaches for Ben, says to come on. It’s just pretend , she says. The smoke has cleared and she points to where the pastor is pulling on a duster, covering his face with a bandana. It’s okay, she says.

But Ben drops and crawls under the trailer, his belly wet from the grass, and then to the hitch and no one has seen him and he keeps on crawling, under the truck and out from under the front of it. He’s almost to the forest by the time anyone spots him, but in no time, hoofs fall behind him, all around him. He feels a hand on his back, he’s lifted by his shirt. He throws up his arms and slips out and keeps running. He doesn’t know how he knows how to do this, he just does it. He scampers into the trees and into the brush cutting at him and the horses don’t or can’t follow, not directly. He’s hopping and tripping down a ravine and into some more brush. He drops flat onto the ground. Pine needles all in his chest and neck and chin. Panting on the ground, trying to be quiet. Dirt in his mouth. The fat of his palms bleed. The men are distant. Esther yells for him. Hoofs pound by a few yards away, go far, swing near again. He’s breathing heavy and trying not to breathe heavy. He stays put. Horses charge past. Men say Get him! and Gotta find that boy! and such things.

He tucks his knees under him and peeks through the brush. Now he knows it’s not real, but he’s afraid of getting into a different kind of trouble. He hears the truck leave the meadow. But the men on horses still search for him. They ride through the woods. They ride right by. They call to him. It’s okay, they tell him. It’s just a lesson. The other kids are okay. Nothing bad is gonna happen to him.

He doesn’t move. He can hear them talking about him. What a little bugger he is. He knows it’s safe, it’s okay to come out, but he don’t want to. Maybe it’s bad of him, but really it’s not bad because even when he wants to get up, he can’t.

He can’t make himself obey.

He realizes then what all his mama and papa have been talking about all these years. How they will be hunted down and killed and what that will be like, and it’s okay because what comes after is heaven and they’ll all be together it’s not for us to question only to obey. He is an obedient boy. Obedient to God. He knows what he’s supposed to do.

Now the men are on foot and Benjamin is standing there waiting for them. The man’s bandana is around his neck, and his chin and jaw are almost blue where he shaves them. The man has Ben’s shirt, and when Ben goes to him, he helps him on with it. They give him some water from a canteen, and the man lifts him onto the horse and climbs up into the saddle behind him. They ride slowly across the meadow, the man’s hand on his belly. He’s never been on a horse, and the animal swaying under him and the grasshoppers leaping away from the footfalls of the horse steady his heart. Everything runs from a horse.

Pete said that sounded like it was scary.

Pearl returned with a tarp, fishing line, and a needle. He sat within earshot and began to mend a hole in the canvas.

The boy was quiet, but maybe not because of his father. This was the longest he’d ever spoken to Pete and he seemed depleted. He told Pete it was his turn.

They jumped one another’s pieces until only a few kings remained on the board.

Benjamin sat cross-legged with his chin in his hands.

“Do you miss her?”

“Of course I do.”