Children of Paradise: A Novel (23 page)

—What’s that about?

—Nothing, Mum.

Trina’s mother kisses her good night at the door of the children’s dormitory and leaves with the other adults for the women and men’s accommodations. The moment Trina closes the door behind her, Rose and the others crowd around to hear about the party. She gives them the treats, and as they nibble, she answers as many questions as she can about the decor and the food and drink and the topics of conversation. She says the preacher got called away to the infirmary by the doctor, and knowing that the preacher was not at the house with Trina stops many of the questions that have to do with what it is like to be with him in his private space, since all they ever see of him is in public. Trina cannot tell them about her preparations for the sermon. The preacher made it clear to her, along with the head teacher and assistants, that all of her time in his house getting ready for the sermon had to be “our secret,” as he, and they, put it.

—Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.

This creates an awkward silence in the dormitory. Rose asks about her new dress. Trina says it was the last item made by Miss Taylor before she took ill and died. It is a dress for a grandchild the old woman dreamed about, one of her dream children, since she had none. The children ask Trina if she feels different with the Holy Spirit in her body. Is it a voice she hears that issues her instructions, or a force she feels that guides her, or is she in a trance, taken over and unaware of anything, the time she approached the gorilla, the other time she dared to answer back to the preacher in a way no other child has ever done, tonight as she addressed the congregation. Trina says she is tired and will talk to them about it another day, since she is not going anywhere and neither are they.

She climbs under her bedding, retrieves her pajamas from under her pillow, and changes out of her dress with a series of orchestrated maneuvers in the dark.

At the infirmary, the doctor and the preacher remain behind a curtain beside a couple of nurses with wet faces. The nurses disconnect tubes from the arm of a patient and cover her face by pulling the bedsheet. The doctor pulls back the sheet and reveals a young woman with eyes open just a tad and mouth slightly agape. He says the mother could not be saved, that she died during the service, not half an hour after the baby was cut from her. She was too weak for the sedation and operation. He tried everything to save her, but she hemorrhaged badly; only a total blood transfusion could have saved her. The infirmary does not stock that amount of blood. The doctor weeps. The preacher says it is a tragedy, but he needs the doctor to focus, now more than ever. He asks about the baby. The baby seems to be doing fine under the circumstances.

—Who else knows about this?

The doctor answers that only those present at the bedside know. The preacher says they should keep it that way, and he summons his assistants and two bodyguards. Everyone groups around the bed and listens as the preacher issues instructions. They stare at the young mother, who seems more asleep than dead. He covers her face and makes each person repeat specific parts of his plan. He says his instructions must be followed to the letter. He asks them all to bow their heads. He whispers a last prayer over the body of the dead mother of the miracle child:

—Absolve, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the soul of Thy servant from every bond of sin, that being raised in the glory of the resurrection, she may be refreshed among the Saints and Elect. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Everyone murmurs and makes the sign of the cross. They tiptoe away from the covered dead.

The young guard in his complete body cast and the other patients feign sleep. They keep very still and listen hard. They hear whispers and receive confirmation of their suspicion as a gurney is wheeled out in darkness and the bed stripped. They cry without making a sound by turning to a wall or burying faces in pillows. The nurses tiptoe and work through the night. Outside the infirmary, the bodyguards transfer the dead woman from the gurney and into a wheelbarrow. They aim torches into the night and, with shovels and rifles, head toward a clearing at the far end of the compound, cleared long ago during the commune’s construction for the commune’s inevitable dead, the first of whom happened to be the makeup lady and seamstress, Miss Taylor, who still lies in the coffin under the tent. The first dead but not the first buried: That honor goes to this mother. She is wrapped in the hospital sheet that lay over her at the time of her death. The guards drop her into the hole they’ve already dug and shovel dirt over her, not too much dirt, just enough to cover her so that if people were to look into the hole, they would see a shallow grave waiting for a coffin.

T
he young guard cocooned in his body cast enjoys hearing the nurse read aloud from the Bible his favorite passages about martial matters. She reads, and he daydreams not just about opposing armies but about the two of them, as generals facing each other. Before he became a prefect, he performed dull chores and daydreamed to pass the time. As a prefect, he watched over swaths of children working in a daze and guessed they daydreamed their way through those chores, while he dreamed where he stood. He became a guard and the dreams stayed with him. And here he lies, still relying on dreaming to make it through these long stretches of time. In this daydream he tumbles with the nurse, a synchronized pair, naked in moonlight. He stops abruptly in his fantasy with an erection pointed upward and stuck painfully under his body cast. He cannot move, and the predicament hurts and jolts him from his fantasy. He calls to the nurse for help, and she stops reading and takes a look at his troubles and calls another nurse, who takes a peek and calls a third.

—Vascular constriction is required, won’t you say, Nurse.

—Yes, we could use a needle to extract some blood, perhaps.

—Too risky. How about a direct lowering of the temperature around the site?

The nurses introduce crushed ice to the young man’s crotch and suggest he visualize his time in the cage with the gorilla to alter his circulation. He complains about the burn and they ask if he prefers them to draw some blood with a needle or cut off the offending object. That last suggestion works best as a visual aid. The nurse who reads to him uses her tongs to pull the willful object from under the cast and relieve the guard. The nurses leave him alone with the ice pack. He closes his eyes and soon his pain and embarrassment ease somewhat. Despite all his broken bones at least one thing on him is still working, and not an unimportant thing. He smiles. He is grateful to be alive.

He looks over at the young mother’s bed that attracted so much attention during the night. He recognizes the nurse who has been reading to him. She lies propped up on the mattress, not wearing her usual nurse’s uniform but dressed in the raiment of a patient, with a bassinet next to her. She folds her arms and looks around to see if anyone dares say anything. The young man says he read somewhere that a baby likes to listen to its mother’s voice. He suggests that she read the Bible to the baby. He says if she feels up to it, maybe she could walk over to his bed and wheel the baby along with her and read to him and at the same time read to her child. The new mother likes this idea very much. She says movement is good for her after her operation and indicates her bandaged stomach. She moves in slow motion as she wheels the crib to the bedside of the young man. He asks if she knows her Corinthians and does she mind starting there. She says she knows her Corinthians back to front and is happy to oblige him.

The guards walk the coffin of the makeup lady to the hole prepared for her. Dressed in black, they march in step and pass people out early on chores to milk cows, feed and clean the massive pigsty, and cook breakfast for the multitudes. All pause and cross themselves as the funeral cortege passes. The guards lower the coffin sealed with the makeup lady’s remains and her Bible and favorite makeup compact. The coffin sits lopsided in the depths. The men pick up shovels resting in a wheelbarrow beside the hole and shovel dirt onto the coffin until the hole fills to the brim and then pat the humped rectangle with the backs of their shovels.

The community carpenter hammers a wooden cross into the soft red earth at one end of the rectangle. The cross, made by him, bears the old lady’s name and age. He wanted her year and place of birth and her favorite couple of lines from Scripture. But Nora, Dee, and Pat take turns reminding the carpenter of some crucial community tenets about the treatment of the dead.

—The past life of everyone at the commune is irrelevant, and all you need to know is her age.

—Everyone alive remains a child in the eyes of the Lord, and all their earthly lives will be over in the blink of an eye, and the only life that matters is everlasting life in the kingdom of heaven.

—Forget the convention of adoration of the dead with quotations and elaborate graves.

—That practice derives from a belief that this life, lived on a short fuse on this earth, is the only one worth living and therefore the only one in need of glorification.

—And that is devilishly wrong.

—And devilish.

The preacher keeps all legal documents belonging to the community, from birth certificates to passports, in a safe place close to him. Those paper markers from their former existences—full of sin and meaninglessness—do not apply to their new condition of rebirth as children of God, children of the Most High, in line for direct entry into the kingdom of heaven, children of paradise in waiting. And when they are delivered unto Him (not if, for this is the only certainty in a life of chance and accident, thanks to their trust of the preacher to steer them along the lane of righteousness), when they arrive, Miss Taylor will be there to greet them.

The preacher tells his followers that they are blessed like no other community on earth. He promises them that only the old die here and the young are happy and they live to a ripe old age. He says everything the people do is in preparation for their entry into the kingdom of heaven. Their physical and temporal lives on earth amount to a series of devout acts to prepare them for this stop of the physical clock and beginning of a spiritual eternity. The death of the young woman in childbirth upsets his philosophy and breaks his promise to his followers. He cannot inform them about it and her relatives overseas least of all. She joined his church and cut her ties with the world of disconsolate sinners. Her pregnancy was out of wedlock, by a man who had regular contact with the commune in his capacity as a delivery person but who abandoned her because she refused to leave the church and go with him. The life left behind is a blessing for everyone. The old woman dies, the baby is born. That is the equation. And if it means the death of the mother spoils the binary symmetry of one departure matched by one arrival, then the despoliation will be restricted and confined to a few minds. He will keep it from the heads of the community at large and maintain the purity of the equation. One death balanced by one birth.

He needs to get to his strong room, an underground cavern located beneath a back room in his house. Bodyguards move the eight chairs and long dining table and roll back the russet Persian carpet in the center of the room. They feed the end of a bayonet into a crease in the floorboards, a line that is difficult to discern as anything more than the join between two pieces of wood, and they lift a trapdoor. While one of them stands guard at the door into the room, the man and Nora, Dee, and Pat walk down the steep stairs with a rail to keep them from tumbling forward into a door. At that door, the man operates a combination safe and turns a handle and opens the door into a vault. He flicks a switch and the brightness blinds him. The shine in the room is almost audible. Bars of gold are stacked four feet high and ten feet along one side of the strong room. The preacher pulls his handkerchief from his back pocket and flicks it at the wall of gold to clear away imaginary dust. He blows a kiss at the burnished wall. He opens a metal trunk emblazoned with the large letters M–Z, and with the help of Dee, he locates the passport and birth certificate of Norma Riley. Dee shows him the passport photo and the birth certificate, and he nods. She closes the trunk. Pat and Nora heave one gold bar at a time up the steep steps and load ten into two attaché cases, five in each case. They mark a leather-bound ledger with the number ten and a minus sign and the year, 1978. The two of them sign and the preacher countersigns. The three assistants leave the room, and the preacher closes the vault behind him and climbs the steps, and the guards come back into the room and lower the trapdoor and spread the Persian carpet over it and replace the eight chairs and long table on the peacock-embroidered carpet.

The preacher grabs a pair of scissors and heads to the kitchen. He lights the stove and slams a frying pan on the fire and sprays the pan with a layer of lighter fuel. He cuts the passport into strips over the frying pan and tears the birth certificate into pieces and drops the bits into the oiled pan with the shredded passport. He grips the pan by the handle, jiggles and tilts it toward the flames, and the contents whoosh into a bonfire and he watches it burn to ashes. He kills the stove with a flick of the knob and waves the smoke toward the kitchen window. His assistants comb through the register of commune membership and the infirmary records and brush Wite-Out over Norma Riley’s name and blow on it, just as they would on a fingernail if they brushed polish over it. They credit the baby to a young nurse, and for the father, they write unknown. They get the doctor to sign the necessary documents detailing the birth of a boy and the death of the old lady and address the large envelope to the country’s registry of births and deaths. And they add the envelope to a pile of letters for the postman to collect when he arrives with his delivery for the community.

The captain sends messages to Joyce, but they appear to fall on deaf ears, since he hears nothing in return. He keeps writing and he waits for a reply but none comes from her. All he wants is a chance to clear the air with her. He cannot quite understand or accept that the commune can get in the way of what is just beginning between them. What is beginning between them? He wonders why an involuntary smile plays with the corners of his mouth when he thinks about her and how every thought of his duty as captain includes some reference to her for no reason, from her hair brushing his face to her rosewater smell, and something that bears no relation to her nevertheless brings her along with it so that she is there in his mind and she comes to him unbidden in kaleidoscopic ways and this continuous presence of her puts a spring in his steps and even the river takes on a sheen because of her image glistening in it and he wants nothing more than for her to be with him in person and for this feeling to be with him always.