Salvation City (11 page)

They do not start with Genesis. The first thing Cole learns is the Lord’s Prayer. Some of it sounds familiar to him, though he knows he has never learned it before, he has never learned any prayer before. PW shows him where in the Bible the Lord’s Prayer is from.

“You see, it didn’t make sense for people to go on praying in the same old ways as before. Because Jesus’ coming changed everything. What he was bringing to the world was something completely new, so there had to be a new way of praying, too. And Jesus told his disciples not to pray like hypocrites, making a big deal out of it, making sure everyone sees them doing it and using a lot of show-offy words. Pray like this, he said, and he taught them these very words you’re learning now, over two thousand years later. Short and simple, yet somehow encompassing all: thankfulness, forgiveness, a plea for help in avoiding sin, and praise of God.”

Cole learns the prayer easily, and then PW teaches him another prayer, or psalm, rather, from another part of the Bible. Again, Cole recognizes some of the words.
The valley of the shadow of death. Fear no evil.
He has come across those words many times before, in movies and comics and video games, but without ever knowing where they were from.

Cole is amazed that anyone could do what PW does: open that ginormous book to exactly whatever passage he is looking for. And he is amazed that anyone would spend hours every day studying something he already knows so well.

“Ah,” said PW. “Your mistake there is in thinking the Bible is just another—albeit ginormous—book. Even those of us who’ve read and reread every word, we don’t ever put the Bible away. Why? Because God inspired Scripture precisely so he and us could always be in communication with each other. The Bible may be ancient, but it ain’t ‘history.’ It’s today’s news, every day. And we call the story of Jesus the Gospel, or Evangel, because those words mean ‘good news.’”

They do not have set hours for their Bible study—they have to work around PW’s busy schedule—but often they sit down together for a half-hour or so after supper. Tracy never joins them, but she reads the Bible on her own every day, and every Wednesday night she meets with her women’s Bible group.

Cole also has a Bible study group, which is only for boys and girls his age and meets on Saturday mornings. There is Bible study for children of every age, even those who haven’t yet learned to read, and several different groups for adults. Besides one for only women, there is one for only men. There is one for couples and one for singles, and there are other groups, called workshops, for people in some particular kind of trouble, such as drinking too much or post-traumatic stress from the panflu. Most of the groups meet at the church, but some, like the women’s group, meet at different persons’ homes. Whenever it’s Tracy’s turn to host, she bakes a red velvet cake and, for the dieters, Weight Watchers’ brownies.

When Cole hears about a workshop to help married people stay together, he thinks about his parents. He wonders, if they hadn’t died . . .

But it is becoming harder and harder for Cole to remember his parents clearly. Partly because of his illness, which burned away or distorted so much of his memory. (He understands better now what his father meant when he explained what Alzheimer’s disease had done to Cole’s grandfather.) Partly because his life today is so different from his life before. He has a new home, he lives in a new town—still in southern Indiana but east of Little Leap. Called Salvation City, though not a city, not like Chicago, and not even as big as Little Leap.

And, for the first time, Cole has a church. The Church of Salvation City, which Cole figured was named after the town, but in fact it was the other way around. As the story goes, the church had been founded in 1995. It was for the millennium five years later that the residents voted to change the town’s name from whatever it was (Cole can never recall) to Salvation City, too. Not every Salvation Citian belongs to the church, though even some who do not might come hear Pastor Wyatt preach at one of the three worship services offered on Sunday. Some people go to the Baptist church in the next town, and some don’t go to any church at all. Cole has little to do with those who don’t go to church, but when he sees them, downtown, say, or at the mall, he can’t tell any difference about them. Many greet Pastor Wyatt as warmly as any member of his flock. There are times when PW will approach a person in public, whether it’s someone he knows or not, and say, “Are you ready?” or “Have you thought about the Ten Commandments today?” And if the answer is no and the person gives him a chance, he’ll explain what horrible danger the person is in and how they can be saved. There are some who’ve been approached by PW so often already that when they see him they try to avoid him. Mr. Hix, who owns the hardware store, always grins broadly at PW but stops him before he can even open his mouth: “Not today, brother, I got work to do.”

Most things Cole remembers about the near past seem to have happened much longer ago—years and years ago—and to have less and less to do with him as the days go by. He does not always feel that he belongs in Salvation City—at least, not the way he thinks everyone else belongs—but he has no desire to leave, either. And anyway, where would he go? Back to the orphanage?

But there are moments when he is struck by a sense of loss so keen, it’s like an ax splitting him down the middle. The agony of seeing his parents become more and more ghostly. He has dreamed of them, standing side by side and waving to him from across some kind of empty stadium. Their waves are strikingly different: his father’s arm almost straight, making slow, sweeping arcs, as if he were guiding a kite; his mother’s hand close to her body and moving rapidly back and forth, like someone trying to rub out a stain. Then, although it’s indoors, there is smoke, or fog. Closing in, making it harder and harder to see, denser and denser until it’s impossible to tell if his parents are still waving, or if they’re even still there. A dream turned throat-clogging nightmare.

“It might help,” the woman called Eden had told him, “if you talked to them. You know, imagine your mom or dad is right there with you and you’re having a chat. A good time to do this might be at night, right before you go to sleep.”

And that night he had tried, but it had felt too strange. He couldn’t pretend like that—it was not his way. And then he dreamed that he was indeed trying to talk with his father. But his father was speaking the language of the dead. He kept getting madder and madder at Cole for not understanding him. Finally, he punched Cole in the face. In real life his father had never hit him, but the dream punch came as no surprise. To Cole it seemed woeful but natural, even inevitable. Deserved. He’d half woken up, and when he drifted off again he dreamed that his parents had shrunk to the size of gerbils. He carried them around with him in a Tupperware bowl. He fed them jelly beans and nuts.

 

 

 

At first glance anybody—not just the kids in Bible group—would have found the group leader scary. One of his eyes is dead and lies buried under a patch of purple scar tissue. He has some fierce tattoos—snakeheads, skulls—and his head is shaved like a skinhead’s. A silver stud through his right earlobe reminds Cole of a bullet.

Everyone knows Mason Boyle’s story because he has told it during the part of Sunday worship when members of the congregation are invited to testify. They know about the fight in the bar where he lost his eye to “this other punk” wielding a broken bottle, and how that was even worse luck than it sounded. As a child Mason had been afflicted with lazy eye, and the vision in that eye had always been blurred and weak. The eye he lost in the fight was his other eye, the one with 20/20 vision.

“I was cast down so low, I hoped to die. I was so mad at the world, if I could’ve seen ’em I’d have punched out everyone who dared cross my path.”

But then Mason started noticing something.

“My left eye—my bad, lazy eye—seemed to be getting stronger.”

It took about a year, Mason’s hardworking eye making a little more progress each day, until it was as good as his dead eye used to be.

“And then, man, it just kept going! I mean, my left eye actually got
better
. Doctor said she never saw anything like it, but today this here eye is twenty-
ten
!”

Even if they’d already heard the story, people would roar when Mason got to this part. And they would hoot and stomp and clap as he told the rest so that he had to raise his voice louder and louder.

“It was like God had taken pity on me, and not just a little-bitty pity but enough to forgive the fact that I had only myself to blame. Because, don’t you know, I
picked
the fight in the bar that night. And I started thinking it was a miracle, and that within that miracle was a message for me. A message about blindness and healing. A message about laziness and strength. A message about work—about doing double duty and being rewarded with brand-new vision.

“And I knew that God was calling on me to put aside all my lazy, shameful, devil-delighting habits and to receive what he was holding out: a chance to accept his love and forgiveness and make myself worthy of the vision with which he’d blessed me. Mason the sinner had a new life, and Mason had a mission. Mason was blind no more. Now he must help the blind.”

Mason earns his worldly living fixing cars. But as part of his selfless service, he helps make Braille Bibles.

Cole likes Mason—all the kids do—and he feels foolish for ever having found him scary. But secretly he wishes he did not have to study Bible with him.

Whenever Pastor Wyatt talks about the Bible, whether he’s preaching a sermon or talking on
Heaven’s A-Poppin’!
or studying at home alone with Cole, he always makes it sound as if it had all just happened yesterday and he himself had been there. When he tells the story of Jesus, it’s as if he’d seen it all with his own eyes—the miracles, the Crucifixion—and Cole is captivated by his big voice and the way he moves his hands, floating them up and down like white birds.

“I’m too deaf to catch most of what he’s saying,” Cole has heard an old lady sitting behind him in church say. “But I feel blessed just watching him.”

“You want to teach folks, you got to hold their attention,” says PW. “Won’t do if they’re bored.”

But in Bible group Cole is often bored. In fact, Bible group reminds him a lot of school and of the kind of assignment he never liked.
(Imagine that you, like the narrator, are drafted into the army to fight a war that you think is wrong. What would
you
do?)
There is always a topic with a peppy title (“The Beatitudes vs. Bad Attitudes”), and though Mason picks the topic he has a rule about not doing much of the talking. He has another rule, about everyone having to write something about every topic.

“Okay, dudes, listen up. Say a Martian lands on Earth and this Martian comes up to you and he goes, ‘What’s this thing you Earthlings call Gospel?’ How would you define it for him? Say a secular kid tells you his mama told him Jesus’ story is nothing but a myth. How would you prove to this kid—without dissing his mama!—that she’s wrong? Cite verses but use your own words.”

But the worst assignments are the ones that are supposed to be fun.
Rewrite the Beatitudes as hip-hop verses
. The kind of thing that used to make Cole hate school.

But the other kids
do
have fun writing the hip-hop verses. And even when they might not like an assignment, they never get sullen or sarcastic or make a big show of how bored they are. And in this way Bible study is totally different from school. The other kids are happy to be there, and most of them throw themselves into the work. They want to please Mason, and they want to please God. Doesn’t Cole?

Mason sees all. Mason is not fooled. Mason teases Cole for not paying attention, for not really trying, and though he does it gently Cole is humiliated, he is ashamed, he knows it’s his same old problem. He has always been a bad student. Lazy, like Mason’s left eye. He will always be an underachiever. Everything has changed, but not this.

Mason sees all. “Never give up on yourself, little bruh. Moses was once a basket case.”

And in fact, it isn’t that Cole doesn’t want to learn. He loves the Bible stories. He thinks Daniel and Samson and David are superheroes. Every day he looks forward to the half-hour after supper that he spends with PW in the den. Cole has his own Bible, of course, but at these times they share an illustrated coffee-table-book-sized edition laid open on PW’s desk. They sit close together, and sometimes PW drapes his arm around Cole, and the weight and warmth of that thick arm on his narrow shoulders (like a friendly boa constrictor, Cole thinks) calm whatever jitters he might be having. When they are finished for the evening, PW kisses the side of Cole’s head. Once, he kept his lips pressed to Cole’s temple an extra beat and sniffed, saying, “You smell like a good boy to me,” and though Cole was embarrassed he was also pleased.

At first, when the inspiration comes to him, he puts off telling PW, afraid he might disapprove. But PW could not be more enthusiastic, and though Tracy’s response is not as important to him as PW’s, Cole is thrilled to hear her gush.

“Such a fine likeness of a lion! Nothing cowardly ’bout
him
, is there? And if that ain’t the darnedest scariest Goliath I’ve ever seen. Look, WyWy, he went and made Samson look like our Mason.”

Soon everyone in Salvation City knows about Cole’s gift, and besides his Bible-hero comics he is emboldened to try sketches—some cartoonish, some not—from life.

He is skillful beyond his years, and he knows it. The only good thing to come out of his days at Here Be Hope.

Two strokes of luck in that place where luck was essential to survive. First, he happened to be right there when a donation of art supplies arrived, and he’d managed to grab a supply of sketch pads and colored pens and pencils before they ran out (in that place where
everything
could be expected, almost instantly, to run out). Second, he had found a spot no one else seemed to know about (a cavity under some back stairs), where he could hide for hours without being disturbed.