Covenant

If there had been one specific moment that changed the course of his life, it might have made more sense. Instead, as with the hewing of the mountain from tens of thousands of tiny droplets, Rory had been cut into a shape at once beautiful and grotesque. It began, as these stories seldom do, with a scene from a book in a Native American longhouse. Or perhaps it began during one of his parents’ fights, the first time he heard the word fag. More likely, it began when a girl – well-meaning bipolar schizophrenic – sang a psalm in the woods with a boy – whose hidden rage was rooted deep – at a christian camp in the Catskills.

Time’s up! These are army showers – not much hot water! Out, out! The man, bellowing along the makeshift wooden row of shower stalls, could have been in the army. Rory watched as his shadow passed outside the gap below the door and over his own bare feet, drops of cold water earnestly clinging as he coaxed the thin towel to dry himself. The shadow paused with a guttural chortle Second warning, don’t make me come in! and then moved on. Slipping into a pair of neon green swimtrunks and flipflops squishy with soapy water, Rory unlatched the hook and eyelatch that loosely held the door shut. He brushed past camp counselor Tim, glancing up at the black man’s coarse hair and stern but smiling eyes. Get going then! Rory managed a meagre smile and made his way toward the group of tents clustered at the end of the field.

Every year, the family returned to that camp where their mother and father had met in the early eighties. Since then, spaceships and nuclear plants had exploded, a wall in Europe had fallen, computers connected the world, and sinful men in iniquitous cities were judged by a plague from God. Rory knew little of any of these happenings. Theirs was a community intentionally shielded from the world, called out to be separate. Little in the twentieth century, in the nineteenth or even the eighteenth, had done much to change this stance, and these devout hoped to continue the traditions their Scottish forebears began in the seventeenth century well beyond the twenty-first. Like the little city of tents perched at the edge of a green field just a few miles from Woodstock, they would band together for christ’s crown and covenant to resist the world’s temptations.

Rory unzipped the tent, the smell of warm nylon and flannel greeting him as he quietly took a tin bowl from beside his straightened pillow. His brother murmured in his sleep while his sister scrunched deeper into the womb of her sleeping bag. He would pick blueberries before they awoke. They could eat them together with the oatmeal cooked over the small camp stove before the day’s activities of bible lessons, skit-making, and paper-plate with pipe-cleaner crafts began. Yes, Rory thought, the berries will be good.

He liked to wake up early, before the noise of siblings and parents vanquished the sounds of birds and wind. Large trees surrounded their house at home, beside cornfields and cowpastures, and in the mornings the wind made its sounds and brought its smells – trembling of poplar leaves, rustling of corn husks, onomatopoeic chickadees, and a musky underlay of manure. He always slept with his window open – even in winter, if only slightly – and the sun woke him.

It was the early mornings he liked best. In the nights, when the children were thought to be asleep, his parents began their ritualistic arguments. What the fuck, David? Jean, stop swearing and just calm down. I will swear if I goddamn want to. You are always spending money on these fucking lowlifes that you find. Never on us, and with me so goddamn sick. Who is this new one – this Chucky? What kind of fucking name is that? If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were a fag – that’s right – a fag. Jean, would you knock it off? Knock it off, fucking knock it off? What you want me to leave so you can fuck your new fag boyfriend Chucky? Jean, I don’t know how to even respond when you are like this. You know what David? You make me sick, you make me fuckin’ – I don’t want him in the house, I bet he would like to get his hands on our boys – they’re all like that, those fags, perverts, touching little boys and giving them disease. I bet you’d like to see that! Jean, I am warning you . . . Yeah, you, you and your boyfriend Chucky would like to touch, I bet you would not even stop with the boys – if you do something to our little girl – Jean I said shut your –

The fights always ended the same way. A loud thud, Jean falling back cowering, spitting in rage. David turning away, angry and ashamed. Most nights he slept in his study, a room in the basement with one small window in a well full of moldy leaves. The shelves were lined with the Westminster Catechism, the complete works of John Knox, the collected sermons of . . . . biographies of Calvin. The tomes were leather with gilt writing, faded over years of handling, though not by him. They had belonged to Jean’s cousins, but they imbued a sense of history and honor in the dark basement room of a rural pastor. It was here he wrote his sermons, usually something about grace, about righteousness, an attempt perhaps to soften the rigidity of his congregation. Or to atone for his own anger, anger at the woman he had chosen as a wife, anger at the life he now lead but had never desired, anger at his drunken father for beating his own mother and thrusting them all into the arms of a church to which they never really felt they belonged.

North of the mountains of New York State, beyond the city, the Catskills, and the Adirondacks, he preached his sermons in a white clapboard church to about thirty adults and countless children. In the midst of hayfields, pickups, tractors and vans parked weekly on the muddy ground around the church. High-heeled women Sunday-dressed climbed down into the rutted earth and made their way slowly to the wooden doors. Their husbands gathered outside, remarking on milk and meal prices, as their children raced and scrambled around the white church. Inside, mothers suckled new babies in the nursery as the congregation assembled. David sat behind the pulpit, beneath a blue and gilt banner, the only adornment in the room. At eleven precisely, he welcomed with a prayer, and Jean rose to lead the singing, her shaky soprano and sure hand beating the rhythm of the psalm. No instruments, voices only singing words written by a shepherd boy thousands of years before.

Rory ate a handful of cheerios. Jean poured them from a ziploc bag to keep her children occupied. Still, at times during the long sermon one or another squawking child or squalling baby had to be taken out and spanked. An obedience silence was demanded, a stoicism not unlike the Scots who refused allegiance to the king and signed a covenant to God. They were the inheritance of the people of Israel. The Jews had killed Jesus. The Catholics given into sin. The rest of the churches worshipped the idols of emotion or ecumenicism. Only they, in the mud-rutted fields of a new continent, were the chosen people of their god.

Not all, though, could counted among the righteous. Ladies with faux-pearl earrings cast wary glances at each other. Who was truly chosen, a part of the elect? What sins in their congregation must be laid bare to reveal the righteous? Sideways looks landed often on Jean. She had a temper, they knew it. Poor David, being burdened with such a wife. Still, it was his cross to bear. But the children, they were to be pitied the most. What went on in the parsonage, they wondered. What did that woman do to them? They didn’t look properly bathed this week. Is Rory scratching his head? The woman in the pew behind them pulled her own son closer to her breast, fearing some infection.

Another week, another night, another argument, another thud. Wake up, Rory, fucking wake up. Jean hissed in the dark I have your sister, get your brother. We are leaving. She continued her hissing whisper, upper lip quivering, inner monologue surfacing. This is the last time. And if he thinks he can bring another slutty fag into my house he has got another thing coming . . .

Mother and children crept down the wooden staircase. Rory was terrified. His younger brother, unsure if this was adventure or nightmare, followed excitedly. The front door strained on its hinge, the rusted hydraulic shrieking into Jean’s mind as she slowly pushed it open. The sun had not entirely disappeared when they reached the cornfield. A dim light came from David’s basement window and Jean sighed relief. Now she ran ahead, clutching her daughter tightly. Rory and his brother struggled after her, feet sticking in the warm furrows of mud between the corn, grown higher than expected in mid July. The summer moon stood sentry in a dim blue sky, streaked red by the setting sun. A drooping leaf of a corn stalk brushed by his brown-eyed face, coarse edge grazing pink cheek.

Mommy, don’t go fast he whispered, as he grasped the arm of his blue-eyed brother whose tiny feet struggled in the mud. She continued ahead, resolute and unhearing. My shoe’s stucked, his little brother whined. Rory turned his eyes imploringly to the back of his mother’s skirt, then dropped to his knees beside his brother, a bare foot slipped from a loosely velcroed shoe, which sunk deeper into the mud. Forget the fuckin’ shoe his mother wheezed.

They ran deeper into the field. At the opposite edge was Alice’s farmhouse, where she lived with her brother. The farm had been inherited – neither had married, so they dutifully occupied the place of their parents, the farm, the house, and the third pew on the left side of the white clapboard church. Jean told stories about Alice that the children loved to hear. That she had been a spy during the war, that she had faked a marriage to a Japanese man to steal state secrets, that she still hid top secret files in the root cellar of her old farmhouse, that she may have been a double agent and is now in hiding. His brother believed every word – Rory knew not to trust everything his mother said.

A yellow fluorescence bathed the front porch of the grey shingled house. Rory loved this house. Like all houses he knew, spartan, but this one cleaner than most. No children. Alice kept an orange tree in the front parlour, which blossomed in the winter from which she harvested small, bitter oranges. Now, as every summer, it was relocated to the front porch so it might enjoy what sun there was. Whether or not the stories of Alice were true, the orange tree was exotic. It does not belong here Rory often thought. But somehow it still grows. He was in awe of it and when Alice would babysit, as she often did when Jean had an episode or went to the hospital, Rory would sit in front of it, allowing himself to softly finger the silky, creased leaves that lay open like a book.

Jean and her children spilled out of the cornfield and onto the drive. The motion triggered the cold, white light above the barn doors, and Alice emerged on the porch, wiping her hands on a gingham apron and peering apprehensively into the settling darkness.

Jean, what in heaven’s­­ – Alice, Alice listen, I have the children here, I’m leaving, I’m leaving him Alice. I can’t do it – listen to – hear him one more – he hit, hit me and god knows what – the children, what he may –

Jean, Jean listen, try and be calm and breathe. Why don’t you sit for a spell here on the porch, Don will be back from milking in the barn in a few moments and we can talk this all . . .

Fuck, Alice, fuck, I can’t be fuckin’ calm and he, he is –

Jean, for heaven’s sake, the childr –

I’m sorry, god will forgive me Alice, he will, I just, I just need you to let us stay here for the night until I can figure out what – he will find us, he will take us back – but we can hide here, you can say we weren’t here, I know, he will come and if he doesn’t find us –

I cannot lie, Jean, I think it best if –

No, goddamn it, no! She grabbed Rory by his wrist and dragged him onto the porch. We have to hide, now.

Pushing past Alice and grabbing the screen door, she pushed Rory into the kitchen. It smelled of fresh tomatoes, their stalks woody and their skin tight, warm bread baking in the oven, and the pine soap that Alice used to clean the hardwood floors. Rory thought the world could not be so bad filled with such smells.

His mother pushed aside the braided rug in the center of the kitchen floor. Beneath it was the door to the root cellar, a door as old as the wide maple floor boards, an iron ring inset to pull it up and open. It had always seemed to Rory like the portal to a great galley, beneath which sailors sat rowing in calm weather and clutching their swaying hammocks amidst storms. When Alice had opened it once he was disappointed to discover a small cellar, where drying herbs hung from the floorbeams above and Alice’s pickles, jams, and empty jars lined the walls above wooden bins for a winter’s provision of potatoes and beets.

Get down hissed Jean to the children. Rory climbed the short ladder to the earthen floor and waited for his brother to join him. Alice was aghast.

Is this really necessar –

Please, Alice, please! For the love of God! Jean said as she climbed down the ladder. Outside, the crunch of gravel sounded a vehicle coming up the driveway, a white caravan, the moon illuminating the plastic wood trimming the sides. Its lights bobbed and flashed as it drove quickly over the potholes in the drive toward Alice’s house, its headlights catching the crazed whites of Jean’s eyes as she pulled the door to the cellar shut.