You Don't Know About Me (6 page)

I listened to a breath rattle through him.

“If and when you begin your hunt, here's my advice. Be like Huck Finn. Huck said, ‘I don't take no stock in dead people.' In other words, Billy, don't take no stock in invisible fathers. Only take stock in what fathers leave behind.”

He blinked in slow motion. His eyes were wet and shiny. “Before I fade to black—I have no right to say this, but I will because I never had the chance. I love you. Then, now, forevermore.”

He lifted his other arm from under the covers. There was a tube sticking out of it, snaking offscreen. His hand with the remote reached for a knob on the tube. I suddenly realized what he was about to do.

“Don't!” I heard my voice shout outside the headphones.

His quavering fingers turned the knob. He looked at me; his voice scratched in my ears. “I pray to all the gods, let his adventure begin with my end.” His finger moved onto the remote. The picture went black.

What I remember after that was like a foggy dream. The info man was at my side, acting like something was wrong. He pushed the box of tissues toward me. I knocked it out of his hand, or maybe he dropped it. I shouted that I wanted my DVD back. He must've given it to me. Running out of the library, I felt it burning in my hand.

As I ran I couldn't tell where my tears left off and my sweat began. All I felt was rage. I hated my father for dying, hated my mother for living, and hated God for letting me be born. How could they all be so cruel? How could my father rise from the river Mom drowned him in, wave a map in my face, and end his life a few minutes after his resurrection? Why didn't he try harder to find us? Why didn't he try harder to find me? Was I that worthless? The answers were now entombed in silence. My rage kept punching the tears
out of me: a total tear-ectomy. And there was no taking it out on “invisible fathers,” my earthly one or heavenly one. The only one I could rage against was Mom.

I burst into the house, grabbed the leather Bible from my room, and shoved it in her face. I shouted that the book was no sign from God. It was no miracle. I screamed it was from Richard Allbright and threw it on the floor.

She stood there, dead still. Dust swirled up from the floor, darting in the sunlight like angry gnats. She reached down. I beat her to it, snatching the book up. “It's mine! It's the only thing I'll ever have that he touched!” I wanted to keep yelling but a sob grabbed my throat.

“That's not true,” she said, moving toward me. “He touched me. You have me.”

I stepped back. “I don't want
you
!”

The words struck us both. They hit her harder than hearing his name. And they knocked out whatever tears I had left. I was done crying over a man who'd always been alive, hiding behind the mirror. A man who was now dead and gone before anyone gave me the chance to know him. To weep over him was as dumb as crying over a great-great-grandfather you'd never met. Whoever said “I don't take no stock in dead people” was right.

I asked her if it was true about them never marrying and her ditching him before I was born. When she asked me how I'd heard such things, I slammed her with the best scripture on lying she'd taught me.
“Liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone
.
”
There's nothing like a little Revelation to put the fear of damnation in Mom.

She sank into a chair and hid her face. I waited for her to spill.

Between sobs, she confessed how the devil had tricked her into falling in love with Richard Allbright. At first, everything had been good, with him coming to Christ and all, but then Satan attacked them with his carnal weapons and tempted them in the way of the flesh. They succumbed, and “plowed wickedness” is how she put it. After that, God punished them by making my father stray from his walk with Christ. She said he went back to his old ways of worshipping idols. When I asked her what that meant, she said he backslid to worshipping Mark Twain: instead of seeking God's approval he was seeking Twain's approval from the grave.

“But that was his job,” I said.

Her head jerked up; she wiped a hand across her cheek. “How do you know that?”

“Never mind how I know. You haven't finished.”

She went on. “It wasn't only a job for him; it was idolatry. He whored after graven images, from Twain's anti-Christian books to worthless souvenirs.”

She told me that after Richard refused to turn back to Christ, she prayed day and night. She asked God if she should marry a false believer, an idol worshipper, and the father of her child. God didn't answer. Then, a few months before I was born, she did a providence check. Her finger fell on the parable of the talents. The message from God was clear. Just as the nobleman gave each of his servants a coin to invest while he was away, God had given her a seed to grow and prosper. And because Richard was more like
the servant who took his coin and hid it in a napkin, and did nothing with it, the Lord was going to take my father's coin away from him and give it to her alone. The coin was me.

She gazed up at me, her eyes swimming with tears and the Spirit. “My child already had a father, the Heavenly Father.”

“I wanted a real father!” I yelled. “And all this time I had one! Who gave you the right to kill him when he wasn't dead?”

Her eyes went blank, cold. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Because I know when no father is better than a bad one.”

I was too locked on rage to imagine what she meant. She told me we needed to pray. Praying was the last thing I wanted to do, especially to a God who resurrected my father only to kill him. I finally threw it in her face. “He's dead!”

She fixed on me for a moment. The hum of the fridge sounded loud as a train. “How do you know that?”

I yanked the DVD from my pocket. “ 'Cause he let me watch!”

Something flashed in her eyes that shivered through me. I swear I saw relief. It made my insides boil. I had to get out of there before I did something I'd regret forever.

When I got to the door I was even dead to anger. I felt as cold and dead as Richard Allbright. I turned and raised his Bible. “You and God got it right.
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
I can,” I said, “I've seen it.”

*    *    *

I went to the only place I could think of. The high school.

I sat in the top row of bleachers and watched the football team practice. There were some other kids in the bleachers. None of them bothered me, even though I'm sure I looked Jesus-junkie weird sitting there with a big black Bible. They probably didn't mess with me because I must've looked like a mass murderer the moment before he yanks out a semiautomatic and opens fire.

After I got back to thinking halfway straight, I tried to figure out my next move. By the time the football team left the field and the sun dropped over downtown, I had a plan.

• I'd go to Bible camp so I didn't kill my mother.
  
• I'd try to solve the first riddle in my father's treasure hunt.
  
• After that, there was no plan.
  

At dinner we ate leftovers in silence. Mom had sunk into one of her depressions. Sometimes it took a couple days for her to pray her way out of it. Another not-so-bad thing about being homeschooled: go-to-school kids had snow days, sure, but I had end-of-the-world days.

I packed some clothes for camp. I got into bed and shoved the leather Bible, with the DVD back in it, under my pillow. It wasn't to soak up verses in my sleep or anything like that. I was worried Mom might steal it.

The amazing thing about the Bible is that it's no regular book; it's God's Word. So when you stick it under your pillow,
the Word is going to invade your brain whether you like it or not. The part that crept into mine was from Job, where Job plops down on a dung heap and wishes he hadn't been born. God hadn't exactly stripped me of everything and covered my body with boils, but I knew how Job felt. I wished I'd never been born.

To stop feeling sorry for myself I asked WWJD? What would Jesus do? A handful of answers wormed out of the Bible and into my mind. The juiciest one was when Jesus is setting the Pharisees straight.
If anyone comes to me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple
.

If Christ's gospel of love starts with hating your family and your life, then Jesus was truly my savior. I was ready to Son-up and walk in His Way.

Note to the Lord #2

T.L.
,

You made me a bastard. When I opened my Bible to find what You say about bastards, here's what I found.

• A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord
  (Deuteronomy 23:2).
  

Let me see if I got that. My children, my grandchildren, all the way to nine generations, won't be going to heaven. Right?

• But the Bible also says that children can't be punished for their parents' sins, and that only the wicked will suffer for the sins they
  alone
  commit (Ezekiel 18:20).
  

Now I'm confused. So I can't be punished for my parents' sins, but because my parents never got married, it still means that me, the
bastard,
plus my offspring for nine generations will be shut out of heaven. If
both
these things are true, then the only way all this can stack up and not topple over is in a riddle.

THE RIDDLE

• If a kid can't be punished for his parents' sins, then why is the kid whose parents birthed him a bastard punished by being shut out of heaven?
  

THE ANSWER (as far as I can figure
)

• My parents weren't the only ones who sinned. I did too. If human life, which is sinful, starts at the moment of conception, then so does sin. So sometime between the moment I was conceived and the moment I was born, I sinned in my mother's womb, and my punishment was being born a bastard.
  

Makes sense to me. Did I nail it?

There's just one thing I'm still wrestling with. What about the nine generations after me? I mean, You're saying that, for whatever reason, they're still going to be so sinful (in the womb or after) that they'll be denied entrance to heaven too? So if I'm going to be the father of nine generations of sinners all going to hell, shouldn't I do You and the world a mega-merciful favor and not have kids?

As You can see, my prayer rug's in a twist over this. I hope You can help me untangle it.

Looking forward to Your answers, thoughts, Word slams, lightning bolts, or whatever zigzag loving-kindness You can spare.

Your confused fan, then-now-forevermore,
Billy

I woke before dawn and checked under the pillow. The Bible was still there. Questions and worries zipped through my brain like bats. Morning takes forever when you've got brain bats.

After breakfast I tossed my backpack and suitcase in the back of the car. I vowed to be sullen and silent during the ride to the bus taking me to Bible camp. But, as Mom had proved with my father, the flesh is weak. One of my nagging questions jumped out. “If you weren't married, and he was such a sinner, why did you take his name?”

She sighed. She looked like she'd had a rough night too. “If I didn't take his name, no one, including you, would have believed I was a widow, now, would they?”

She had a point. “What's it say on my birth certificate?”

“Hayes.”

“So when I get my driver's license and have to show my birth certificate, I'll be Billy Hayes?”

“I don't know.” A muscle in her jaw bunched up and relaxed like a frog's throat.

We drove the rest of the way in silence. Obviously, a
name wasn't any more solid than taffy. It could be stretched into whatever lie you wanted it to be.

We stopped in a church parking lot near a big coach bus. When she hugged me goodbye it was weird; she felt like someone else. She
was
someone else. It was the first time I'd hugged Tilda
Hayes
.

I got on the bus and passed the little kids in the front. I recognized older kids from Feast of Faith. They were wearing a variety of stuff, from hippie tie-dye to black goth. I wondered how much Mom had looked into this Bible camp.

I found two empty seats, dropped my backpack by the window, and sat in the aisle seat. Then I saw a guy get on the bus; my stomach flopped. It was Ben. My gut coiled tighter as other guys came up behind him. Luckily, Case and the R-boys didn't show.

Ben said “Hey.” I said “Hey” back. He jammed his skateboard in the overhead, dropped his backpack on the floor, and plopped down in the seat across the aisle. I wasn't going to bring up the other day if he wasn't.