Сигрид Нуньес - Salvation City

Nothing is perfect. Not every children’s home everywhere ran smoothly all of the time. A scandal here, a scandal there—no one was saying it didn’t happen. But overall the new system was hailed as a great improvement over the old, offering a better deal for all America’s cast-off and mistreated children.

But who would ever envy these children? A lot of people, it seemed. At school, home children—especially boys—were among the most popular, the ones who set the style. Young people all over the world had taken razors, bleach, and lit cigarettes to their brand-new clothing to create the “diddy rags” American home kids were the first to wear, and when The New York Times Style Magazine did a spread, it used real home kids as models.

It was a bleak but inescapable fact that most home children remained at the bottom of their class, with a growing number expected to leave school without having learned to read or write. But everyone knew this was because there was no way you could be mad chill and a good student, too—and how many kids anywhere nowadays were convinced that reading and writing were the most important things in life?

Of all this Cole has memories, including one of his parents discussing, over bagels and chai, whether bringing back orphanages had been a good idea or a bad one. Cole’s father said it made sense that it would be easier to monitor children who were in public institutions rather than in private foster homes, and that the group homes were probably the least bad solution to a terrible social dilemma.

“Maybe. But I can’t imagine any sensitive kid surviving in a place like that,” said Cole’s mother. And she had glanced at Cole, sitting across the table.

Once, in downtown Chicago, Cole had seen a giant poster with a picture of the handsomest man in the world. It was a sight that had made his heart beat faster, and he had thought how, with a face like that—with such a strong mouth and jaw and such smooth bronze skin—and with such perfectly square shoulders filling out a uniform, you could be anything you wanted to be. Cole wanted to be a superhero. And later that day, he had told his mother what he had decided. He would join the Marines. They were sitting at the same table and in the same chairs, and it was the same look Cole saw on his mother’s face both times. As though a voice had shrieked from the sky, and only she heard.

AT FIRST, TRACY IS EXCITED about her new job. “But you’ve got to be patient with me. It’s a long time since I was in school myself, and I can’t say I was the sharpest knife in the drawer back then. Not that I’m saying I’m the sharpest knife in the drawer now. Oh, will you just listen to me! Anyhoo, I will pray for guidance.”

And she does pray, of course—just as Cole prays, every morning before they begin, thanking God for whatever portion of his truth will be revealed in that day’s lessons.

In what way Jesus answers Tracy’s prayers about homeschooling Cole cannot tell. But there is ample help from other sources. Most families in Salvation City are following the Christian homeschooling curriculum, and other parents are happy to give advice or to pass on whatever materials they might have used when their own kids were in Cole’s grade.

But the growing pile of books and study guides and worksheets and tests only makes poor Tracy’s head spin.

For moral support she turns to Adele, one of the women in her Bible group, a grandmother who once taught kindergarten and has homeschooled four children herself.

“I don’t know, Adele. They say it’s best to do a little bit of each subject every day, but if we’re supposed to do math and science and social studies and language arts—which at first I didn’t even know what it was—a little of each still adds up to a heck of a lot.”

The trick, says Adele, is to be creative. “That way Cole won’t get bored. Like, take medieval times. You don’t want to sit there teaching him a mess of dull facts that aren’t going to stick in his head anyway. But he likes to draw, right? So have him draw a medieval castle, you know, with the moat and turrets and all.”

“Oh, I think he’d like that.”

“And when you’re doing the Civil War you can have him watch an episode of the old Ken Burns documentary. Then, for a writing assignment, he can pretend he’s a soldier writing a letter home to his family.”

Tracy is most anxious about teaching her own worst subject in school: math. But Adele says just because a person is bad at math doesn’t mean he or she can’t teach it. “You can go on the Web and print out the worksheets for square roots, say, and you can print out a quiz with the answer key. I’m no math whiz myself, but how do you think I got my own kids all the way through calculus?”

“Calculus!” Tracy yelps, as if it were the name of a lion to which the Romans were about to throw her.

“Oh, come on, girl,” Adele says, laughing. “You know you’re never on your own in Salvation City. You need any help, all you got to do is ask. And remember, if the Lord wants you to be doing this—and you know that he does—then you know he’ll light up a way.”

And it’s true that, although Tracy is his main teacher, at least some days during the week Cole finds himself in a group class taught by one of the other grown-ups. For these classes the children usually meet at the church, where there might be a video or a talk on a special topic. One of the first topics is “Evolution or Not,” taught by a guest speaker from the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky. But by now Cole has studied Genesis with PW and he doesn’t learn much of anything new. Another time Adele shows them a video about preborns. There are photos showing babies who, though still seven months from coming into the world, have tiny eyes and noses and ears and mouths, and stubby little arms and legs, and hearts that beat strong. They look to Cole like cute little dolphins, and when he remembers how he and the other boys used to call some girls PBs he is ashamed. As he is ashamed when he remembers Ms. Mark and how much he used to hate and make fun of her. He wonders if she has passed.

And when, like every other boy or girl in the room, he is called on to answer the question “Would you yourself be willing and able to murder one of these innocent babies?”—like every other boy or girl in the room, Cole answers no.

But something funny has occurred to him. If Jesus was a baby, does that mean he was once a fetus, too?

Absolutely, says PW. Jesus was a fetus. “When God sacrificed his son he made him live through all the stages: conception, birth, childhood, manhood, death. Otherwise Christ couldn’t have been fully human and fully divine. And, of course, he was as much the Christ at the moment of conception as he was at the moment of birth. And it’s the same for every human being.”

Cole pictures the Bible that belonged to his parents, its place on a shelf with other big books: reference books. He remembers his father saying that a person couldn’t understand the history of art without some knowledge of the Bible. He remembers his parents and some of their friends playing charades one night after a dinner party, his father having to act out “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

He has no idea how much of the Bible either of his parents had read, but he knows that the things that are sacred in Salvation City were never important to them. What Jesus said on the cross, what happened to the preborn, these were not matters of concern to them.

His parents did not know the truth. They lacked the information. There was no one like Pastor Wyatt to explain the Good News to them. Cole does not understand why it had to be this way. Now that he knows the story of Jesus by heart, he loves Jesus, but he does not believe his parents were treated fairly. Whenever he thinks about it, it’s as if some spiny, muscular creature begins thrashing around inside him. He would like to talk about it, about why God would have wanted to save him but not his mother and father. He would ask PW, he would even ask Tracy, except it’s as if there was an agreement among them not to talk about his parents. Cole has the feeling that, if he himself didn’t bring them up now and then, his parents would never be mentioned again. Whenever he starts talking about his life before Salvation City, everybody acts as if the room had suddenly turned too hot or too cold. Now he is learning to be silent. But the spiny, muscular creature goes on thrashing inside him.