Sign Here(76)
By the time he climbed the hill and saw the crowd, Elsie was barely breathing. The blows to her stomach were nothing compared to the blows to her face, as if the premarital pregnancy—since it didn’t spring from the Holy Father—wasn’t as insulting to God as her face, which invited such a possibility. Lying in the dirt, she looked like a peach neglected on the tree, the kind that gets so swollen with ripeness, it is bruised by a strong breeze. The kind that bursts open and rots into the ground before anyone ever knows it’s ready to be eaten.
Once the General had made it back to the armory, shouldered a rifle, and run back up the hill, shoving his way through the raging crowd, he found Elsie still on the ground, the Holy Father holding to her cheek the thick metal cross he wore around his neck. It took the General a second to distinguish the red of the metal from the red of her blood, but once recognized, they seemed such obviously different colors. The first was a lit-from-within red, molten red, the kind of screaming red that can come only from deep, intimate contact with fire. The Holy Father pressed the neon cross to her cheek until the smell of burning flesh hit the crowd, even as Elsie had stopped moving entirely. The General had seen the Holy Father brand people before—or, rather, he had seen the aftermath. He preached that the scars were necessary for God to know whom to save once the Almighty War had been won: the scars were needed to prove who had known to forgo the water and had infiltrated Hell with honest hearts, as opposed to the usual sinful, thirsty masses. But never before had the General smelled it. The gummy char, mingled with the smell of hay and the faint wind-whipped whiff of Elsie’s white-blond hair, made the General sick with rage. He clocked the Holy Father with the butt of his rifle, picked up the fifteen-year-old mother of his child in one arm, hoisted her over his shoulder, and walked out, knowing that when the gate slammed shut behind them, it was to stay that way, permanently.
He didn’t know if Elsie would make it through the night, let alone the next three months of her pregnancy, or the unforeseeable future of their lives. But somehow, as they camped in the desert and stole provisions from gas stations that spotted the sparse and sun-blinded land, her face healed, save the branding scar, and that second heartbeat inside her beat on. At night, as they dined on beef jerky and pop, the General would press his ear against her belly and listen, tuning out the put-put-put of the cactus pygmy owls and ceaseless squeak-squeak-squeak of killdeers, trying to find that distinctly human thump, thump, thump. It wasn’t until his daughter (although he had no way of knowing she was a daughter at the time) kicked him in the face that he knew their baby had survived.
He wasn’t prepared for how relieved he would feel. It wasn’t until then, his cheek burning with the tiny pressure of her foot, his heart soaring out of his throat and into the New Mexican desert, that he knew he wanted this child, and not only because, beyond that purple ribbon, she was the only thing in the world that was really his.
He just simply wanted her.
Elsie lasted until the girl turned three.
They had been surviving on the road, the General taking seasonal farming jobs and Elsie tending to the child. All in all, it wasn’t as bad a life as he had lived before, and he even managed to believe what they shared could be considered happiness. It was certainly happy enough for him. But one day he came back to their motel room to find the child alone, the TV on, and a note tucked into the Bible.
Elsie was going home.
He knew that they wouldn’t let her back into the Farm. He knew that, on some level, she must’ve known it too. Maybe she was ready to go fight in the Almighty War. She already wore the brand. Or maybe she preferred nothing to being with him. With them.
In that moment, he did what he always did when he felt the edge of panic, that loose-rock decline into the unknown. He went for the cashbox, the key where he always kept it around his neck. He was eager to hold the ribbon, to pull its tattered length through his fingers. But then his daughter reached up her hands for him, even though he had never been the one to hold her, and he stopped. She had his eyes, and as he lifted her up and into him, the key pressed into his chest and he realized that he was the father now. He could create purpose out of nothing; he could give them both—and anyone else who wanted it—something for which to live, or otherwise die.
At that point, the General hadn’t entirely stopped believing in the Almighty War, but he wasn’t the same fervent boy he had been when he first arrived at the Farm either. Now it seemed to him to be more of a convenient tale, like a fable or national anthem: something that served a worthy purpose, even as a lie. It was a whip without the bite, death-march shackles without any chains. It was the excuse people needed to give up their freedom, to submit. Which, in turn, meant they could get what they truly always wanted: to be cared for. To be a part of something. To be loved. For if he had learned anything in his short life, it was this: when expertly combined, the threat of that which is outside and the promise of being on the inside yielded a special kind of complacency in the weak, which provided a special kind of symbiotic power for those doing the talking. And thanks to the fathers in his life, he knew exactly how to direct that balance of power to his own most profitable benefit.
Of course, he resented Elsie for leaving him alone with this breathing black hole of need, whose arms reached for him the minute he entered the otherwise empty room, even when he had never before held her. But she had his eyes, and as he lifted her up and into him, the motel key that hung from his neck pressing into his chest, he thought he could be his own Holy Father, and hers too. He could create purpose out of nothing. Starting with that purple ribbon, he had been doing it his whole life.