Wonders of the Invisible World (38 page)

The discovery reinforced my vision, gave it purpose and intensity. “Yes,” I answered Sister Tiffany. “But it will be all right.”

She blinked at me. “You mean my skirt.”

“That, too.”

We had had children, years earlier. In those years, we scarcely noticed our dwindling numbers. God would replenish them, we thought, for we had made the transition across the millennium, and had once again found our place in the world without sacrificing our beliefs. Our families had tried to escape it in earlier years, as Mother Ann had wished. But there was no place left unchanged, at peace, in this busy, noisy century. No matter where we went the world followed, leaving its huge dinosaur footprints: a shopping mall where we had last worshiped, a hotel where we had planted crops, a small airport in what had once been our apple orchards. The world shaped its houses with our circular saw, harrowed and threshed its vast fields with other designs, hung its clothes, pared its apples, and shelled its peas with our ideas. It would not leave us alone, and we could not survive the century without it. So, desperate, we had prayed and danced and sung, until it was revealed to us that if we could no longer separate ourselves from the world, we should transform it and make it our own.

We began to patent all our inventions. We shared them, as we had always done, but no longer as freely. The money we earned with our discoveries and our designs, we used for the work that we had done since the beginning: sheltering and feeding the needy, the homeless. By the dawn of the millennium, we had 196 shelters all over the country, many of them run by those who had once been homeless. We could pay them well. Brother Brian had sold his unguent of beeswax and herbs to a pharmaceutical company; that had paid for all the land we now owned. Sister Jennifer’s designs for wood-handled flatware and carving knives had remodeled the first five battered old hotels we turned into shelters for the poor. Sister Tiffany’s hand-loomed weavings of carpets and quilts found their way into boutiques and major department stores. They bought our cars and trucks and kept them running. We built our own factory for packaging our seeds, and printed our own catalogues for seeds and furniture. Brother Michael, who loved animals, experimented with breeding, and produced a strain of sheep whose wool was multicolored and soft as silk. He told us what methods he used in breeding them, but I don’t think any of us quite understood that language. And I never thought of it again, until my vision.

We had everything we wanted and we were dying.

We had children, years earlier. Kyle and Carmela had come to us from the homeless shelter in the city near us. Megan had been left on our doorstep. Stephanie had run away from her parents, wearing nothing, in midwinter, but a thin dress and the burn marks on her arms. We took them in, fed them, taught them our ways. “Hands to work and hearts to God” as our precepts instructed us. “Excel in order, union and peace, and in good works. A place for everything and everything in its place.” So they learned to milk a cow, make a chair, mend a tool, to weave a hat to protect them in the garden, draw a perfect circle on the computer, print out a catalogue page, raise a chicken, roast it, and fire a platter to serve it on, then to wash the platter and put it in its place, all for the glory of God.

They were good, dutiful, gifted children. When they became adults, we gave them the choice to stay with us or leave. They all left. They chose the world that Mother Ann had sheltered us against, and they did not return. We ran our shelters, our factories, our stores, with those who were honest and gifted, but who did not believe. For a while, we scarcely noticed. Others would come, we thought. Our faith could never die with us. Instead came the evening, after the meal had been cooked and eaten, the table cleared, the prayers spoken, and the permitted number of us had sat down to talk about the day, brothers and sisters separated and facing one another in our solid, worn rockers, when I saw with the sudden clarity of revelation how old we had all gotten.

Brother Michael’s hair had turned completely white, the color, appropriately, of a fine sheepskin. Sister Tiffany’s bright cinnamon hair was shading into sage; her chipmunk’s face, with its big, inquisitive eyes, was lightly lined. Brother Bryan’s chestnut hair stubbornly refused to turn, though he had to reach back much farther to comb it now. Sister Jennifer, always thin and energetic, had grown pear-shaped in the past year; I could hear her wheeze as she climbed the stairs. Brother Greye, who had gone bald early, had grown a set of turkey-wattles under his chin. My own face, I noticed that morning, was beginning to resemble an apple that had sat too long in the bowl. Other members of the family, quietly busy in the house around us with late evening tasks, had also faded, the way dried flowers will grow pale, sitting for too many seasons in the light.

There was no one else. A couple of families, one in California, one in Nebraska, had survived gracefully and successfully for nearly two decades into the new millennium. We received notice from our lawyers three years ago that the last of them had died, and that the check from the sale of the property would be in the mail. Even then, we did not worry. God the Father and Mother Ann would see to our future.

It was revealed to me that night that I should worry. I brought up the subject at a tangent, as I squinted to thread my needle; I was cross-stitching a pattern for the seat of a chair. I wished aloud for younger eyes, quick, flexible fingers that never cramped.

“We had them once,” Sister Tiffany said calmly. Children, or vision, I wasn’t sure which, until she added, “Everything fades. Maybe you need glasses, Sister Ann. I think I finally do.”

“I think I need an apprentice,” I said. “Like Megan. Remember Megan?”

“How could we forget her?” Sister Jennifer asked. “Such a sense of design she had. I used to drive her to the malls so she could study fashions. She could take the oddest pieces of clothing—a lime green shirt, a skirt made out of glitter—add a bit here, take away something there, sew the two together, and sell it for ten times what she paid for it.”

“Such a sweet girl,” Sister Tiffany added. “But I don’t think she ever understood why we couldn’t let her wear what she made.”

Brother Bryan murmured assent, rocking gently. “That must be why she left.”

“And Kyle,” I persisted.

“And Kyle,” Brother Michael echoed. “He had such a God-given gift for computer art. But what he wanted to use it for—”

“Action comics,” Sister Jennifer said reminiscently.

Brother Greye scratched a tufted eyebrow with his thumb. “I never understood what they are, exactly. So much color, so much violence. Children sit and look at these?”

“It was most likely a passing fad,” Sister Jennifer guessed. “Though perhaps not for Kyle.”

Kyle still wrote to us, now and then, from southern California, where, it seemed, he kept getting paid for his strange art. I stirred, anxious in spite of the peace of the house. They were the last we had cared for, and they were no longer children.

“I think—” I began. But I did not know what to think, then, and Brother Greye was filled, suddenly, with the spirit.

He said sonorously, “Everything must be done to perfect this world on earth, with perfect love, and in preparation for the Day of Judgment, which will close the perfect circle of our days. Of course we could not have encouraged Kyle, even to keep him with us. He made his choice. ‘Do all your work,’ Mother Ann taught us, ‘as though you had a thousand years to live, and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.’ It is difficult for children to contemplate their death. They would rather read action comics.”

“But Carmela,” Sister Tiffany remembered, “was different. She was not brilliant, but she did the things she could with a simple perfection. I really thought she might have wanted to stay with us.”

Their voices were filled with the past, I thought; a comfortable past, not a threatening future. They added to one another’s memories of the children who had grown and gone; they found the flaws in faith that made them leave, but no terror in their absence. I said nothing more that night, but prayed and danced over my own fears, in our next evening service. Even dancing, I couldn’t transcend the world. It frightened me, how my heartbeat became tangled in the rhythms of Brother Greye’s heavy, clumsy tread; how I could not hear the familiar, bliss-filled conversations from the next world, only our thinning, wavering voices singing and chanting, like lonely children comforting themselves in the dark. Even that fear, I saw days later during our long Sunday service, was a gift. It led me to my vision.

I saw as I turned and turned in the light of Mother Ann’s love, how God Himself had become human. He had come among us not through any human intercourse, as we were of course forbidden; not even by any human touch. He had made an announcement, and it became the Word. He had cloned Himself, using a pure, perfect, human tool. We also were known for the purity and perfection of our handiwork, and for our love of the best tools. We led our lives by His teachings, and by the example of our Mother, who had lost four infants before she understood that she was to be a vessel of God, and not of the whims of her own body. The vessel is filled; it does not fill itself. Emptied, it remains in perfect stillness and submission, waiting to be used. It does not use itself. So it was revealed to me, we would find the perfect tools, the flawless vessels for God’s Word, and fill them.

I was moved to speak sometime later, after we had filled endless hot and steamy vessels full of the season’s pears, tomatoes, cucumbers, grapes, blueberries, cherries, and crabapples. In the fields, the cornstalks had been cut and mulched; the apples picked and stored; the potatoes and onions, squashes and peppers packed for market. We were all grateful, that evening, for our rockers. Outside, the cold rain tapped against the windows; a dark wind harvested the few leaves still clinging to the trees. How many more autumns would we all see, I wondered, before we wore our winter faces? Which of us would outlive the rest, to die among strangers in an unfamiliar place?

The distant sound of a jet coming in to land in the municipal airport inspired me; I found the place to begin. “Do you remember,” I asked the others, “when Orville and Wilbur Wright made their first flight—”

“No,” Brother Michael said with some amusement. “We have a few gray hairs, but we can’t be that old, Sister Ann.”

“We’re not that young, either,” I answered softly, and they were silent, wondering where I was taking them. “Anyway, do you remember the story of how our family in Ohio decided that since we had learned to master the automobile, we should buy an airplane? It was the newest and best tool, then. We have always loved the finest things.”

“So,” Sister Tiffany said, pulling thread; she was quilting a case for her new bifocals. “Where does all this take us, Sister Ann—the Wright brothers and airplanes and the best of things? Do you think we need a private plane?”

“No. I think we need children.”

They were silent again. We could hear Sister Lisa above our heads, at the linen closet where she was mending seams and patching holes in our winter quilts and sheets. Brother Patrick was in the kitchen, tottering dangerously on a stool, sharpening knives. People who live together for decades grow to know each other’s voices and expressions, their thoughts, whether they want to or not. My brothers and sisters knew mine; they heard what had never been there before. Nobody bothered with words like adoption, homeless, celibacy, faith. We had adopted the homeless; they did not stay. We were forbidden by our faith to touch one another unless it was absolutely necessary. We were forbidden even to pet a cat. We were the last of our faith; we would die without heirs. Sister Jennifer, her rocker twitching a quick, agitated little rhythm under her, said simply,

“How?”

I leaned back, rocking myself now, in a slower, even measure, like a pendulum. I looked at Brother Michael again. “From airplanes to sheep,” I murmured. He blinked. “You told us how, once. Tell us again. How you did it with sheep, so that the strain was always pure, unchanging.”

He drew breath. “Sister Ann. That may get us around the necessity for sex, but there is still the physical matter of birth.” He had been an Elder, briefly, before our dwindling number made such distinctions moot. But he still spoke like one, sometimes. “You are all young enough for that, but I don’t think you would be here, if you wanted to be pregnant. Even if it did not cut too close to the boundaries of our Mother’s tenets. If she could have conceived of the idea, two centuries ago, she would have considered it part of the evils of the world, for no other reason than that all the babies she gave birth to died.”

“But she didn’t conceive of the idea,” I answered calmly. “So it was never forbidden in our laws.”

Sister Tiffany had stopped sewing; her needle glinted between her fingers as she rocked. I knew her expressions, even beneath her new glasses: the bright, intense interest in her eyes. “Then you had better explain,” she breathed. “Sister Ann. How we are to give birth without sex.”

“God showed us,” I said. I rocked harder now, my whole body trying to dance without rising, my thoughts swooping through me like a flock of white doves turning and turning in the summer light. “He cloned Himself. We’ll find a virgin. The perfect, unfilled vessel. As He did. We’ll make children from ourselves, from our own cells. We all have something in our makeup that wants this life, this work. We will make children who will not leave us, because they will be born with all our faith. If we don’t do this, we will die, and there will be no one in the world to remember the name of Mother Ann.”