The Miseducation of Cameron Post (35 page)

At first, the constant scheduling, the routine of the place, was the hardest thing for me. After years of running wild with Jamie, with whomever, being unable to lock my door, to take off on my bicycle, to put in a video and watch it three times in a row, felt like the worst kind of punishment: way worse than meeting once a week to talk with Reverend Rick.

If we weren’t in chapel, we were in the classrooms. There were two, and they each had a bunch of small tables and plastic chairs, a big whiteboard up front, the requisite ticking clock and pull-down maps, standard classroom fare; but when you looked out the windows, it was still all blue-purple mountain range and picture postcard, and the land and sky went on forever and ever, and every single time I looked out the windows too long, I felt like I was disappearing. And I looked out those windows for too long all the time.

Bethany Kimbles-Erickson didn’t teach so much as she corrected homework and occasionally might clarify something if one of us raised our hands while reading or working silently. The quiet in the classrooms was how I imagined a monastery. At times it was so thick and solid, I would scrape my chair back as hard as I could and go to sharpen my pencil, or to get a book I didn’t even need, just to break it. They ran things this way mostly because we weren’t all in the same grade and had come from different schools in different states, we had vastly different transcripts to consider, and it was next to impos-sible for someone to stand in front of the room and teach us ten different subjects at the same time. Our curriculum was mandated by the State of Montana and our sponsor school, Lifegate Christian, in Bozeman, where we would go in both November and May to take final exams. Study plans and learning goals were worked out one disciple at a time, and the whole thing was run as sort of an independent study in every subject. This was just fine with me. It meant a lot of “work at your own pace” time, which I liked, but some students definitely struggled, and Bethany would spend hours sitting next to those students, or crouched over them, or at a separate table where I guess she did her teaching one-on-one.

First thing every Monday she provided each of us with photocopied packets of homework and reading assignments tailored to the state requirements for students at our grade level. To complete this homework, we used textbooks from the Promise library, a series of four six-shelf bookcases that held a bunch of older-edition textbooks and a set of encyclopedias, some other reference books, a shelf of “classic literature,” and two or three shelves of books on Christianity, as well as current and back issues of
Christianity Today
and
Guideposts
. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting, but the textbooks themselves weren’t really any different from those I’d had at Custer. Actually, I’m pretty sure that the government/economics book was the exact same text used for that class at Custer. And although there were a couple of science books that specifically denied the fossil record as proof of the earth’s nonbiblically correlating age, and also predictably discounted evolution as hogwash, there was also a book of essays by scientists who were evangelical Christians, such as Robert Schneider, essays that actually made the case that one can believe in evolution without denying the theological notion that God created the world and all that is in it. Finding that book on the shelf surprised the hell out of me. It made me wonder who had made sure that it was there, who had advocated for its inclusion.

If we weren’t in the classrooms, we were on cooking, cleaning, or evangelical detail. The first two are obvious, and I got pretty good at casserole making for twenty plus. We did several versions with cans of soup and Tater Tots, onions, and hamburger, and also a few with cans of soup, rice, chicken, and peas. These mixtures came out of the oven bubbly and brown and so heavy that it took two of us in pot mitts to lift the jumbo-size baking dishes to the counter. We also did a lot of instant pudding for dessert, and that made me think about Grandma.

Evangelical detail is maybe less obvious. Two or three of us would be assigned to work in the main office copying and then addressing the Promise newsletter to donors, and also addressing donation request cards from these master lists of Christians from all over the country. Exodus International supplied us with those master lists, and also videos and worksheets and workbooks. They were the “largest information and referral ministry in the world addressing homosexual issues.” Occasionally, during evangelical detail, one or two of us even got to talk on the phone to major donors about the kinds of progress we were making, but for those first months I wasn’t asked to do that.

If we weren’t working a detail, we were in a workshop, a one-on-one, or a gender-appropriate activity. This meant lots of group sports for the guys, and fishing and hiking expeditions, or they’d take them to one of the neighboring ranches and let them help out for a few hours, really cowboy it up. For us girls it meant trips into Bozeman to various beauty parlors run by typically big-haired ladies sympathetic to our unique beauty needs, and also baking sessions and occasional visits from Mary Kay or Avon ladies. Once, a woman from the labor and delivery unit at Bozeman Deaconess Hospital did a presentation about pregnancy and infant care that featured dolls sort of similar to the Rescue Annie infant mannequins I had used in lifeguard training, and that made me think about Hazel. And Mona. And Scanlan. But not really all that much about the joys of motherhood, which seemed to be the point of the presentation.

If we weren’t in a one-on-one or work detail or doing a gender-appropriate activity, then there were of course study hours and journal/reflection hours and prayer/devotional hours, and every other Sunday we would load into one of the two Promise vans and head into Bozeman for worship services at the Assembly of God megachurch: Word of Life. We had our own pews and were semicelebrities among the congregants. On alternate Sundays, though, Reverend Rick just did the sermon in our own chapel, and some of the local ranchers and their families might join us. As much as I liked excursions away from the compound, I preferred the Sundays we stayed at Promise, the entire congregation mostly just us disciples. At Word of Life I felt like a big, shiny, obvious goldfish, a goldfish well known to have homosexual tendencies, so basically a big, gay goldfish in a tank with eighteen other such goldfish, wheeled in and parked in a pew for two hours, much to the delight of the crowd. At those services it seemed like everyone who looked at me, whether they smiled, or glanced away, or clasped my hand during the meet and greet, was thinking:
Is this the service that’s going to do it for her? Is she already becoming just that much less gay, and is this the service that will tip the scales to the side of the Lord? Might it happen before our very eyes
?

Despite all the routine, those of us who wanted to break the rules still managed to do so. We did have scheduled free-time hours on the weekends, and sometimes study hours could be manipulated, and depending on who you got stuck with for that week’s work detail, so could those hours.

Jane Fonda, Adam Red Eagle, and I were the potheads. Steve Cromps could be convinced; he just wasn’t a regular. Mark Turner, who happened to be Adam’s roommate, had recently caught Jane smoking up on the path to the lake, and though he’d not tattled, at least not yet (“because,” Jane said, “it just isn’t his way”), he certainly hadn’t accepted her offer to partake, either. Mark was the son of some big-deal preacher from Nebraska—a guy with two thousand–plus members in his congregation, and his billboards, complete with his picture, lined the interstate. I found out about all of this early, not because Mark bragged, or even spoke about it, really, but because he was basically an expert on the Bible, a child prodigy on the subject, and so he was often asked to recite passages during our Sunday services. What I’d noticed about him was his seriousness. But Jane thought there was more to him than that. He was, she said, “someone to be wary of.” I didn’t know quite what she meant by that, but this was typical of my understanding of Jane’s observations.

Adam and I helped her harvest the last of her marijuana plants in latish September. She had been complaining that the early frosts had already killed off a bunch of them and that she wouldn’t get what was left picked in time to save it. I offered to go with her and she gave me one of those unreadable looks of hers, but then she said, “Why not.”

When I met her outside the barn at the time she’d said to, carrying the beach towel she’d told me to bring, Adam was there with her, chewing on a tiny pink straw from the Capri Sun juice pack he’d purchased the last time we’d all gone to Walmart. Adam was almost always chewing on something, and so Lydia was almost always telling him to try harder to “curb his oral fixation.”

“He’s coming with us,” Jane said, Polaroiding Adam and me in that whip-fast way of hers.

“You might want to work on the part where you say
cheese
,” I said. Jane barely ever showed anyone her pictures, though she had to have hundreds and hundreds of them. She’d already taken dozens of just me, but I’d only seen maybe three of them.

“What would be the point if you were posed?” she asked, removing the Polaroid and putting it in the back pocket of her khaki pants before taking off toward the forest. Adam and I followed behind.

“Apparently you can’t interfere with art,” he said to me when we were a few yards down the trail. I didn’t know Adam well enough to tell how much of what he said was a joke, or if there was any joke to it at all.

“You think Jane’s an artist?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter what
I
think,” he said, sort of smiling at me around that straw. “Jane thinks she’s an artist.”

Jane stopped and turned around to face us. “Hey, wackadoos—I am an artist. And amazingly I can hear you from all the way up here, these six feet in front of you.”

“Artists are sensitive,” Adam said, doing the hushed voice of some nature-documentary host who’s spotted something wild. “They must be treated with care and sometimes caution.”

“Indeed,” I said, trying on the voice for myself. “Observe how the artist appears skittish and out of control when confronted by insensitive nonartists.”

“Those who lack talent are understandably frightened and jealous when in its presence,” Jane said, and then she took another picture of us: snap, flash, spit.

“The artist reacts with hostility,” Adam said, “using her advanced image-capturing device to stun and immortalize her victims.”

“My aesthetic approach requires spontaneity,” Jane said, pocketing that picture and resuming her march forward. “You two feel free to look up
aesthetic
when we get back to the lodge.”

“Does it have something to do with homosexual attraction?” I asked, not as loudly as Jane but loud enough. “Because it sure sounds like it does, and if that’s the case then no thank you, sinner. I know your tricks.”

“We’d better look up
spontaneity
while we’re at it,” Adam said, definitely smiling now.

“For sure,” I said. “And
approach
. And
requires
. It’s weird that we’ve been able to understand anything the artist has said to us, what with her massive vocabulary.”

“I haven’t, actually,” Adam said. “I’m not even sure where we’re going right now. She tried to explain it to me, but too many big words, you know? I just nodded my head in the places where it seemed like I should.”

Right then I decided that Adam was my favorite person at Promise.

Farmer Jane’s pot patch wasn’t far from one of the main hiking trails, the one to the lake, but Jane knew what she was doing, which plants to grow near, how to disguise her path. Even after following her out there and spending better than two hours tooling around among the smelly crop, I probably couldn’t have found it on my own without taking forever to do so. I guess that Jane knew this or she wouldn’t have brought us along.

The beach towels we each had draped over our shoulders served two purposes. The first was to make it appear, should we happen upon fellow disciples, that we were headed to one final, autumnal dip in the lake before the full brunt of fall and winter stopped our swimming. The second was for transport: to conceal the harvest. Jane also had a backpack with her for that purpose.

Lots of the leaves on the trees had already turned to shades of yellow, from canary to yield sign to lemon sherbet, and the fall sunlight was distilled through those leaves, the rays bouncing into the shadows around us in that chunk of forest. As we walked, Jane whistled songs I didn’t recognize. She was a good whistler and a fast walker, the squeak of her leg comforting, like the chug of a train or the whir of a fan, a piece of machinery doing its job. I liked following just behind her; she had such purpose to all of her moves.

Her patch was in a kind of clearing, at least enough of one for the plants to get their required daily amounts of sunlight. I don’t know what I had been expecting, but all these tallish, übergreen shrubs lined up in neat rows and bearing the actual, real-life leaves I’d seen immortalized on so many patches sewn to backpacks and black-light posters and CD cases were surprisingly impressive. And fragrant. Adam seemed impressed too, kind of smiling at the whole spread, the two of us shaking our heads at Jane’s industry.

“All this by yourself?” I asked.

“It’s best all by yourself,” Jane said. She moved in between the plants, carefully, delicately, trailing her fingers just against their leaves. Then she looked off into the thick cover of the woods, all purposefully, her head high, like a stage actress, and said, “‘And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.’”

“What is
The Grapes of Wrath
, Alex?” Adam said.

“No idea,” I said.

“We read it last year,” Adam said. “It’s good.”