Baptism in Blood Read online

  A few seconds later, looking down on Main Street, Naomi saw Beatrix come through the library’s front door and make her way to a big white van. The van had a gold cross painted on the side of it and the words JESUS CHRIST IS LORD painted in red. The side door slid open and hands reached out. Beatrix hoisted herself upward and disappeared into the dark.

  The cigarette in Naomi’s hand had burned down to the filter again. She had forgotten she was even holding it. She pitched the butt into the wastebasket and sat down. Her computer screen was blank. Thunder and lightning had fi­nally put her system down.

  Hello! Naomi thought. This is your class correspon­dent, Naomi Brent!

  She put her hand up to the gold chain she wore around her neck and fingered it. She had been given the chain, and the plain gold cross that hung on it, when she was twelve. She had worn it ever since without thinking about it. Half the time these days, she didn’t even realize it was there.

  Well, I realize it now, Naomi thought.

  She put her hands around to the back of her neck and undid the little spring clasp.

  Then she dumped the whole thing, chain and cross, into the wastepaper basket.

  7

  BOBBY MARSH WAS SUPPOSED to take the church van out to Dedham Corners, pick up old Mrs. Michaels and her husband, and drive on back to the church on the Hartford Road. This was the little green van, the wimpy one, not the big white one with JESUS IS LORD painted on the side of it. Bobby used to drive bigger trucks than that van could ever be, but he’d had a few accidents, and the Reverend Holborn didn’t like to trust him. Nobody trusted Bobby much anymore. He knew that. Less than five years ago; when he’d still been in high school, he’d been a real comer. He hadn’t been “college material,” as the guidance coun­selors liked to put it. He hadn’t been one of those guys who was being packaged like a gift sausage and sent away to Vanderbilt or Chapel Hill. Even so, he’d had a lot going for him. Bobby could remember, with perfect clarity, all those late fall afternoons of his senior year. The rich girls sitting in their open-topped cars in the parking lot of the Burger King out at Dedham Corners. The sharp knobs of the hooks on Jerri Lynn Carver’s bra as they wrestled in the back of Bobby’s father’s Ford pickup, parked in the trees out on Caravansary Lane. Bobby Marsh had been a good-looking boy at seventeen, good-looking enough so that even girls like Jerri Lynn Carver, who was going away to Sweet Briar after graduation, wanted to make out with him. In the years since all that had ended, Bobby had decided that there wasn’t much else those girls had wanted of him. He still saw them sometimes, on Main Street, when they were at home visiting their parents. They had big gold wedding rings on their fingers and the kinds of clothes you saw in magazines and they pretended that they didn’t really know him. That was why he had come to trust so much in the Lord. There didn’t seem to be anyone else he could trust in. Once his life had been all sex, sex, sex, and it had made him miserable. Now his life was all praise, praise, praise, and it made him—

  —angry.

  Dedham Corners was right ahead, a big splash of con­crete and asphalt and mock-brick facing. When Bobby Marsh was a small boy, Dedham Corners hadn’t been any­thing but a wide place in the road with a gas station. Now there were three gas stations, a Burger King and a McDon­ald’s, a 7-Eleven, a Kmart, and more. All the plate glass windows were boarded up, but all the lights were blazing. The sky was dark and the rain was coming down in slanting assaults, like electrons bombarding an atom in one of those educational in-school movies. Bobby couldn’t remember what had made him so angry. Maybe it was everything and nothing at all. All he knew was that ever since he had joined the Reverend Holborn’s church, ever since he had met Ginny and married her, something inside him had been bubbling up, getting ready to explode. It was crazy, really. He loved Ginny. He loved Tiffany. He loved the church, too, which had given him the only sane life he had ever known. Bobby Marsh knew that his growing up would have been much different—much better—if either of his parents had managed to get religion. Instead, his father got beer and his mother got laundry. His father worked until he was so drunk they had to fire him. His mother worked without ceasing, like a slave woman, carrying big plastic baskets full of dirty clothes up and down the side streets of Bellerton, driving out to Conover to buy her own clothes at the second-hand stores. They had a small place on a dirt road far out in the country, away from the sea. The roof leaked and the porch sagged and the yard was littered with pieces of dead machines. Jerri Lynn Carver’s family had a big Greek revival right in the middle of town. Suellen Cham­bers’s family had a split-level in a new subdivision right off the highway. It had all been rigged from the beginning, and Bobby Marsh knew it. He just didn’t know what to do about it.

  (Jesus is Lord, he thought now, half frantically, the words pumping through his brain like polished ball bear­ings, hitting each other and making his skull shake. Jesus is Lord. Jesus is Lord. Jesus is Lord. Take me now Jesus be­cause I’m falling right into the pit of sin.)

  Old Mrs. Michaels was standing under the roof over­hang near the side door to Burger King. Burger King was closed, but there wasn’t anywhere else on the strip for her to stand where she would be protected, even a little, from the rain. Bobby pulled into the parking lot and cut his en­gine. He could barely see through the windshield, the rain was that bad. Now that he was this close, though, he could see old Mr. Michaels, huddled behind his wife, blank-eyed and frightened. Mrs. Michaels was one of those big-stomached women who looked like they’d swallowed a basketball. She was wearing a bright orange sweat suit with the words CHRIST IS COMING BE PREPARED printed on the back of the sweatshirt. Mr. Michaels looked like he was wearing prison garb or pajamas. He was so thin, everything he put on his body sagged.

  Bobby opened the door of the van and slid out. His thick-soled shit-kicker boots landed in the middle of a pud­dle and spattered water everywhere. He had water in his face, too, where the rain was hitting it. He put his hand up to shield his eyes and ran over to where the old people were standing.

  “Praise the Lord,” Mrs. Michaels said, when Bobby reached her. “I thought you’d been drowned in this storm, I really did. I thought we were going to be stranded here forever.”

  Bobby looked back at the van. “Maybe I ought to go get the side door open. Then we can run him right in and he won’t have to stand around in the rain.”

  “It’s been the Devil’s own problem, keeping him out of the rain today,” Mrs. Michaels said. “Every time I take my eyes off him, he just wanders off. I’ve been driven to distraction.”

  “Mmm,” Bobby said.

  “I talked to the reverend about it,” Mrs. Michaels said, “but there wasn’t much he could tell me. Alzheimer’s disease, they call it nowadays. We just called it getting se­nile, in my time. That’s what it is. Just getting senile. He won’t ever get any better now.”

  Bobby looked dubiously at old Mr. Michaels. His eyes were vacant. His hands were limp. He was staring at a blown-up picture of a Double Whopper.

  “Maybe you could go to a healing,” Bobby said. “You know. Like they had down in Charlotte a couple of months ago. Maybe that would do him some good.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mrs. Michaels said. “I been to healings when I was younger. Those preachers never did seem to like people who were going senile. No percentage in it, I’d expect.”

  “Percentage?”

  “Well, you couldn’t make them better, no matter what, now could you?” Mrs. Michaels was matter-of-fact. “Better to get those other things, the cancers and the ul­cers. Nobody knows if they’re healed or not at the end of the night. Things work out better that way.”

  “But God can heal anything.” Bobby felt confused. “You just have to find somebody He’s given the gift of healing to. Then Christ will heal you and you’ll be whole.”

  “Will you?”

  The rain was getting worse by the second. Bobby felt himself getting worse, too, angrier and more agitated. He had always thought of Mrs. Michaels
as one of the most solid members of the church. Now it seemed she wasn’t any such thing. She didn’t believe in healing. She didn’t believe in miracles. She was standing here telling him there were some things God just couldn’t do. Or she seemed to be telling him that.

  Bobby looked her over one more time and decided he just didn’t like her. She was too bright and hard and cyni­cal. Her jaw was slack and there were lines on both sides of her face, slashed into the skin like wounds, set off by big blue tinkling earrings bought at the jewelry counter of a five-and-dime. Bobby didn’t like Mr. Michaels much, ei­ther, but that was just… reaction. It was hard to like somebody who drooled when you talked to him.

  “I’m going to make a run for the van,” Bobby said. “I’ll get the door open and be right back.”

  “That’s very good of you,” Mrs. Michaels said. “Mr. Michaels and I would be much obliged.”

  Bobby put his head down and ran across the parking lot. Lightning split the sky over his head, making him won­der whether he was grounded or not, whether he would get hurt if he was hit. He landed in puddle after puddle, send­ing waves of wet up the insides of his legs. When he got to the van, he suddenly couldn’t find his keys. He had searched all five of his pockets before he remembered that he had hooked them onto one of his belt loops.

  “Crap,” he said, out loud, into the wind. The wind was high and wild and strong. Nobody was going to hear him.

  Bobby got the van’s side door open and looked in. The interior was very clean. Reverend Holborn always kept the things that belonged to the church clean. Bobby took a thick cotton blanket off one of the seats and started back across the parking lot to Mr. and Mrs. Michaels.

  “Can the old man run?” he asked Mrs. Michaels. “It’s very wet out there.”

  “Maybe you could bring the van closer,” Mrs. Mi­chaels said. “Maybe that would work out better.”

  “If I bring it closer, we won’t be able to get him in,” Bobby pointed out. He kicked at the trapezoid concrete blocks that were lined up at the edge of the overhang. Lots of fast-food restaurants had them, but he had never under­stood why. Probably to keep people from doing just what Mrs. Michaels wanted him to do now.

  “We could make him run,” Mrs. Michaels said fi­nally. “Not very fast, but a little. He’s very weak.”

  “I don’t think I can carry him,” Bobby said. “He’s too tall for me.”

  “Of course you can’t carry him, dear. Let’s just run him out there, together. That ought to work as well as any­thing. And then once we’ve got him in the van, we can make him warm and cover him up.”

  Bobby thought of the cotton blanket. “Right,” he said. He grabbed one of Mr. Michaels’s arms and tried to guide the old man to the edge of the overhang. Mr. Mi­chaels seemed to be resisting.

  “He gets very stubborn these days,” Mrs. Michaels said. “He gets an idea into his head, and there isn’t a thing you can do with him.”

  Bobby held old Mr. Michaels’s arm even tighter. The door to the van was still open. Bobby was sure rain was pouring in there, getting the carpets soggy. Reverend Holborn always took such good care of all the things that be­longed to the church. Bobby could hear him already, chiding gently, criticizing gently, in that super-Christian tone of voice that always made Bobby’s head ache.

  “Come on,” Bobby said. “Let’s move him. On the count of three.”

  “Oh, dear,” Mrs. Michaels said.

  Bobby locked his grip in place, put his head down, and began to run forward. He felt as if he had to drag both of them along with him. Mrs. Michaels was holding back. The run across the parking lot seemed to last forever. His socks got soaked through. His baseball hat blew off in the wind. The rain plastered his hair to his skull and made him very cold.

  “Here we are,” he said when they drew up close to the van. Old Mrs. Michaels seemed to be panting. Bobby pushed Mr. Michaels through the van’s side door and let the old woman climb in after him. Old Mr. Michaels imme­diately sat down on the van floor and curled into a fetal position. Bobby slid the side door shut and ran around to climb into the front bucket seat.

  “We’ve got a problem,” Mrs. Michaels said as Bobby started the engine. “He’s gone into one of his frozen peri­ods. I can’t get him moved.”

  “That’s okay,” Bobby said.

  “But it isn’t okay,” Mrs. Michaels said. “There’s that law about the seat belts. He can’t be wearing a seat belt if he’s curled up like that on the floor.”

  “It’s all right, really. I don’t think some cop is going to stop us to find out if we’re wearing our seat belts in all this mess. The cops are going to have better things to do.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Michaels said. “If you say so. But I’d think this is when they would want to know if you were wearing your safety belts. In a mess like this.”

  Bobby began to ease the van out of the parking lot. He went very, very slowly, because it was raining so hard now that the windshield wipers were virtually useless. He had the heat turned way up, too, because it was suddenly very cold, as cold as he could ever remember it being in North Carolina. He thought it was a good thing he would have to stick to the access roads and stay off the interstate to get where he was going. He wouldn’t want to be in front of somebody who thought the best thing to do at a time like this was to hurry.

  “Well, now,” Mrs. Michaels said. “I almost forgot. Where’s that sweet little wife of yours this morning? Are we meeting her at the church?”

  “I don’t know,” Bobby said, suddenly uneasy. “I hope so.”

  “You mean you don’t know where she is at a time like this? What about the baby?”

  “The baby’s with Ginny,” Bobby said. “It’s not that. She went to work this morning. I don’t know if she got back down in time or if she got stuck up there.”

  “Up there?”

  Bobby felt himself blushing furiously. “At the camp. You know. She does typing for that Ms. Meyer up there—”

  “At the camp,” Mrs. Michaels echoed. “My, my. I wouldn’t like that, if it was somebody I loved. Aren’t you worried about her? Don’t you get anxious that they’ll do something to her? Or to the baby?”

  “She keeps her Bible with her. She puts on the honor of the Lord like an armor, like Reverend Holborn said.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. But those people.” Mrs. Michaels shook her head. Bobby saw it in the rearview mirror. “It’s just that you hear so many things. And you know what people like that are like. No discipline. No respect. Abso­lutely anything might happen.”

  “She just goes up there to type,” Bobby said firmly.

  “There was a case in Tennessee just a couple of months ago,” Mrs. Michaels continued. “It was a horrible thing. Worshipping the Devil. Having sexual intercourse with babies. Eating flesh and drinking blood. The world isn’t what it was when I was young.”

  “No,” Bobby said.

  “If I were you, I’d put my foot down just as soon as she came home. You know what young girls are like, espe­cially young wives. They want to help so much, they think they can do anything. They don’t believe they can ever get into trouble. If I were you, I’d tell her right out, you don’t really need the money she makes in that place. You can do without it as long as she stays at home.”

  “Yes,” Bobby said dully, and then thought: But we can’t do without it; we can’t afford to have Ginny stay home. How would we ever pay the rent?

  He had gotten to the junction of the Hartford Road. He pumped the brakes lightly—anything more definite and they would have spun right out and landed in a ditch—and eased the van into a left turn. There was no one around anywhere, no other traffic, no sign of life in any of the small brick ranch houses that lined both sides of this street. Bobby let himself pick up a little speed.

  The camp, the camp, the camp, he thought.

  And then it was crystal clear to him, really, what he had been so angry about before, what he had been trying not to remember. He never stopped worryi
ng about Ginny when she was up there. He never stopped wondering what happened to her, if any of them ever tried to touch her, if she ever thought about touching any of them. The horrible thing was that it excited him, all this thinking about women. It made him big and hard and dizzy all at once.

  The Devil is a good psychologist, the Reverend Holborn was always saying, and Bobby had to agree. The Devil was a hypnotist, that was it, and any minute now he was going to drag Bobby Marsh down into Hell with him. It was going to happen as sure as this storm was going to be over tomorrow—unless he did something about it.

  What Bobby Marsh hated most was feeling as if he were paralyzed. That was the way he felt when he thought about jobs or the way his money went out before it had come in. That was the way he felt when he recalled trying to learn things while he was still at school.

  There was no need for him to feel paralyzed here, though. There was no need for him to feel helpless about the camp. He was a soldier of Christ, and armed with his faith and the glory of the Lord, he could stop the Devil himself in his tracks.

  I’m going to do that, too, Bobby decided, as soon as this storm is over.

  I’m going to go right on up to that camp and have it out with that Meyer woman once and for all.

  I have been washed in the blood of the lamb, Bobby told himself.

  And suddenly realized he was grinning.

  8

  THE REVEREND HENRY HOLBORN couldn’t remember when he’d taken off his jacket and tie. It must have been hours ago, when they were first getting the kitchen in the basement ready to feed a couple of thousand people. He couldn’t remember what he’d done with his jacket and tie, either. They had to be floating around somewhere in the main room, where there were four thousand three hundred fifty seats. The seats radiated out in graduated arcs from the central core of the altar—except that to Henry Holborn, it wasn’t really an altar. It was a stage. Henry Holborn had been brought up Catholic. He didn’t believe in all that any­more—the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist; the Mass as the re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross—but it still seemed silly to him to call by the name “altar” what was really only a platform, with nothing much on it. The altars of his childhood had been elaborate affairs, made of marble, holding vessels of silver and gold. Maybe if the Catholic Church had stuck with that kind of thing, Henry Holborn would have stuck with the Catholic Church. Instead, the Catholic Church had gone all Protestant-y. The marble altars were exchanged for plain wooden tables. The Mass was rewritten until it sounded like a text­book for social workers. Nobody kneeled at the Commu­nion rail anymore, even if there was still a Communion rail to kneel at.