Baptism for the Dead Read online

  Baptism for the Dead

  Libbie Hawker

  Running Rabbit Press

  For you, Bluebird .

  Contents

  Initiatory

  Creation

  Garden of Eden

  The Lone and Dreary World

  The Nail in the Sure Place

  Veil

  More Books by This Author

  Acknowledgments

  References

  About the Author

  Copyright Information

  Initiatory

  1.

  The roads in Rexburg are too wide. Four lanes through the heart of town, rows of pale-barked trees in precise square holes that break the sidewalks at regular intervals. The sidewalks are level and straight, empty but hopeful, running neat in front of the shops that sit like abandoned cardboard boxes, dull-colored with faded signs. This Space for Lease in white shoe paint flaking off a window. A kid has scratched his initials into the opaque streaked L. These small acts of self-proclamation pass here for petty crime.

  Now and then a car passes, a big one, a minivan or something more masculine but with plenty of seating for the kids, probably belonging to a chiropractor or a professor, too bright against the speechless dun of old brick facades and cinder-block walls. The few cars on the road move like prairie schooners, bold against the vastness of all that open space. Big houses in pale hues cling to the sides of every road and hold hands, red rover, red rover, and out beyond it’s isolation, picked last for the team.

  But the roads are the thing. Wide like flood rivers in a badland, scouring, dominating, so great that when you stand on the dry sidewalk and watch the streets you can feel the burden of the dreams that built them. If you look hard enough, if the sun slants at the right angle in the afternoons when the clouds gather out west, you will see apparitions. They are the specters of the dreams that built Rexburg: ghost cars sweeping by, silent, with fender fins and wood paneling, wheels a slow-motion blur. Cars full of perfect children, moms who forgot to take their aprons off, dads with big line-art smiles and tidy fedoras, all of them transparent and color-reversed, photo negatives. You see all this, if the light hits just right, through a dissolving, particulate haze: the plans of the pioneers who plowed these roads into the ground, a dream collapsing into a final burst of scent and sound, a golden flare of light, scattering just before the dreamer wakes.

  The Thirty-Three runs through town like a line sketched on a yellow canvas, glancing and fast. The highway draws out to Sugar City, out to the mysterious hot places where streams sink into the golden sighing earth and reappear where you do not expect them, out to Sugar City and on and on toward a dense purple stillness on the horizon, far away from this place.

  **

  The setting is the first thing. If you don’t understand where you won’t understand at all. Let me draw this out in a grid: a topographic map of Madison County. Rexburg, Idaho. Population 18,647. College campus on the hill. Golden brick hospital with state-of-the-art maternity center. Business establishments in order of economic importance: retail, health, real estate, agriculture. Ethnicity: white. Religion: Latter-Day Saint. Sex: male. Five-point-five children per household. White picket fence, dog in yard, pot roast with carrots and potatoes on Sundays. Approved housing for young ladies just off West Fourth Street. Virtually no crime or Democrats. It’s the Best Place in America to Raise a Family. Nobody knows who first declared this, but everybody in town believes it with a wide-eyed, breathless sensation of good fortune, the kind that settles like a royal mantle over winners of lotteries, raffles, cake walks.

  I grew up here, went to college here, was married and sealed to my husband here in the new temple on the hill. Sealed together for time and eternity.

  At night the temple lights up like a pillar of fire.

  2.

  There are always eyes watching, day or night. This is what the eyes saw in 1999, the summer I turned fourteen.

  **

  They call themselves the Latter-Day Saints, and they mean it, that bit about the latter days. On the surface it’s all board games and Kool-Aid, but look in the pantry of the most Norman-Rockwellian of homes and you will find stores of potable water wax-sealed in jugs, bags of popcorn seed and cans of beans, five-gallon buckets of honey with opaque crumbling crusts of crystallized sugars and drowned ants. Years’ worth of goods laid away as surety against the impending Second Coming of Christ, guaranteed to happen any day now, any moment, in fact.

  Not a soul in Rexburg draws breath but doesn’t believe that these are the Last Days, and in 1999, when the Great Odometer of Planet Earth was about to roll over to a lot of fresh and terrifying zeros, every citizen was more certain than ever that the End Times were at hand. Rexburg, of course, being thoroughly righteous through and through, would be spared – exalted, even, once God was done scouring the planet with His cleansing fire. Everyone was watchful for signs, and everything was a sign of the End: politics, routine earthquakes, lunar eclipses. I remember one dinner with extended family where my grandfather casually remarked that the President was on his way to a summit meeting somewhere far away, and one of my aunts clutched her napkin against her blouse and said fearfully, with her End Times face studied and pale and meek, “Summit meeting? That sounds scary.” Scary meant one thing: the terrible blare of the angel’s horn. The ground heaving in fear. Christ with his tongue like a sword, his eyes like fire.

  Incidentally, years later I learned that the new millennium didn’t technically start until January 1, 2001, and I felt vaguely cheated, like the whole gut-clenching year of ‘99 had been a cosmic prank. But at the time, everyone was sure the coming New Year was our big moment. Nobody could wait. Housewives chomped at their bits. Boys thrilled to the prospect of missions spent spreading the word of God in apocalyptic wastelands, where forlorn survivors of the Lord’s wrath would be only too glad to be baptized. They’d need no convincing at all. It would be like Disneyland, with considerably more pestilence. Everyone in Rexburg eyed their pantry stores with jocularity. Oh, you baked beans and soggy canned asparagus. We’ll soon be opening you while we watch the fireworks!

  **

  Everyone in Rexburg believed but two. I was one. The other was Adam. He was fourteen, just like me. It was the summer before ninth grade and very windy, and we were in love.

  We met on the last day of school. The bell had just rung, and I was pedaling hard for home down a long quiet street where shade from old dry-barked trees alternated with pools of sunlight on the parched sidewalk. I didn’t slow as I came to the corner; I didn’t look, either. The front wheels of our bikes smashed together; we both flew to the pavement. Stunned and stinging, I picked myself up carefully, brushed grit from my tender scraped palms. Adam said “Sh–it,” drawing out the sibilant with a wild acceleration, the sharp end of the word bursting from his mouth in a shower of sparkling spit.

  No one in town swore. I adored him immediately.

  Neither of us was much hurt. He was completely unapologetic about his language, either unaware of uncaring that he had used such a terrible word. I was glad. Everything would have been ruined if he had repented.

  Let me describe him for you if I can. The memories of my childhood are mostly dark and rusted, and even Adam slips away from me now and then, if I’m not careful. But the way he looked is important to the story.

  He was only a little taller than me, and just as thin. His hair was dark rich brown like damp earth and very straight, and I noticed right away that it was longer than other boys’ hair. That’s not to say it was actually long, of course. Male Mormons are well-groomed. (A sign at the college’s dance hall: Thank you for observing the grooming and hygiene standards.) He wore things Mormon boys never wear: a tired old black t-s
hirt, faded denim shorts with rat-cuffed hems, a plaid shirt unbuttoned. This last was lying on the sidewalk. He picked it up, shook it out, and tied it around his waist while I righted my bike. He wore glasses with crackled blue-black rims. The lenses were thick and magnified his eyes, so that they stood out with a compelling intensity, each individual dark lash larger and thicker than it should have been. The irises were a darker blue than was usual, and the whites of his eyes were not white, but diffuse pink, redder around the edges, as if he had recently woken from a bad sleep. The intense color of his eyes and their prominence behind his glasses made him seem all eyes, so that everything in my field of vision, everything within range of all my stirred senses, was cokebottle lens and the downward mope of Adam’s gaze.

  His family attended a different church ward from mine, and so he was a virtual stranger to me, although we went to the same school. When he said, “I skipped school today. Let’s go up onto the Bench,” my heart burst and reformed itself in one quick beat. I liked the sound our bicycle wheels made, rolling together. I liked the look of our two pairs of shoes stepping in unison over the cracks in the sidewalk.

  The Bench is the hill, a long, high promontory that slouches above the town, wandering up from the south. It slopes easily into the white and buff homes at the northeast edge of Rexburg, its gentle grade holding the temple and college up like pennants in the sun. It is a place for dry farming, home to the most famous of Idaho’s famous potatoes. When the spring rains come the Bench flashes briefly into glorious, lime-green life, then settles back to its dry-smelling, dun-smelling slumber in mid-May, until the autumn snows set in.

  Aside from the potato farmers, you will find no one on the top of the Bench but the wealthiest families, and at the start of the summer when Adam and I were fourteen the ranks of wealthy families were growing. Construction sites pocked the spaces between clean lawns with their crab apple trees in glossy foliage. Valley-view lots were subdivided and allowed to tangle with weeds, dreaming of the backhoes that would soon dig the foundations that would hold the future rumpus rooms of return missionaries, who would come back to town to marry the girls who had waited for them. Business as usual, generation after generation.

  Adam and I climbed steadily up the Bench, pushing our bikes. When the road leveled out at the long plane of acreage that would one day house the new temple, we got back on our bikes and coasted slowly, gear chains ratcheting, skinned knuckles grasping handlebars, wobbling. Startled grasshoppers clicked and glided along the road’s shoulder. We rode all the way out to the blue and white water tower that reminded us in bent block script, REXBURG, an admonition, holy scripture engraved on plates.

  In the grass behind the reservoir’s cool cement wall, under the dark shadow of that same water tower, Adam and I sat on the ground, ate granola bars and half a cheese sandwich from his backpack, and nervously I held his warm hand. I rested my head on his shoulder. We talked of incidental things: town gossip, music, the end of the world. I sighed over and over because I felt good – better and more alive than I had ever felt before. And as the sun dipped and darkened and the shadow of the tower passed off our faces to stretch out across the potato fields into forever, I lifted his glasses off his face, looked into his sleepy dark blue eyes with all the fragile sincerity of a teen-age girl, and I kissed him.

  Do not do anything to arouse those powerful emotions that must be expressed only in marriage. Do not participate in passionate kissing, lie atop another person, or touch the private, sacred parts of another person’s body. Do not allow anyone to do these things to you.

  Do not arouse those feelings in your own body.

  Oh, Adam, your hand was so kind and eager, and your tongue in my mouth....

  The prophet Alma taught that sexual sins are more serious than any other sins except murder or denying the Holy Ghost.

  Why?

  I loved you, Adam, and God made you. Or so I thought on that day, under the shade and spell of the water tower. I believed then that He made us both, as He made the grasshoppers and the Bench, as He made the colors of spring that grade into summer dull, that stifle under the thick snows of winter, temple-white.

  3.

  Did I feel guilt? Oh, yes.

  When I was alone I would frantically pray, beg God to forgive me, cry great hot rivers of tears until the salt burned my cheeks. I swore never to do it again. I abased myself in my room with the door shut, face-down and trembling on my bubblegum-pink rug, but soon enough the tickling of the rug’s fibers would begin to feel like Adam’s fingers on my skin, and my shaking would turn to shudders, and a dark thick cloud of desire would eclipse my guilt entirely. The still, small, nagging voice in my head shut off like a light switch. Despair vanished, replaced by a bright pain of anticipation as I planned our next tryst. Sometimes I forced myself to recall the words I had learned in Sunday school, a half-hearted attempt to chastise myself into chastity: Let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly; then shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God; and the doctrine of the priesthood shall distil upon thy soul as the dews from heaven. But that was no good at all. The dews from heaven made me think of wetness and the taste of salt, and the whole attempt at goodness would fall apart, and I’d get on my eager trembling bicycle and ride past Adam’s house just to see if he was home.

  Dating before the age of sixteen was unthinkable in Rexburg – unthinkable in any Mormon community anywhere. Yet there we were, fourteen and depraved and absolutely in love. If Adam and I had been better children we would have heeded our lessons and removed ourselves from temptation. But there was the same slow current in both of us, the same slit eye. We were both inclined to question, both inclined to doubt.

  After a few weeks of guilty prayer I no longer felt the need to beg God’s mercy. My body had won this battle, and gladly I allowed it its victory. By July I saw the curved shadow of a monumental question mark fall across my town. By August I knew that the only truth in the world was Adam, and the feel of the hot summer against my back, and the whisper of insects in the long grass mingling with the whisper of our shared breath.

  We didn’t always do those things, of course. We had a proper courtship. We would buy Slush Puppies and sit on the hot curb outside the Circle K, discussing world events with an ill-informed fervor. With deprecating grunts and eye-rolls we would deny the accusations of our friends that we were “boyfriend-girlfriend.” And best of all, most romantic of all, were our walks. As we wandered construction lots and potato fields that smelled of ladybugs and crushed leaves we would talk about anything – about all things – but mostly about religion.

  It started innocently enough. One of us asked a question that skirted dangerously close to doubt, just for the thrill of it, just to see what the other said, a game of spiritual chicken. Who would be the first to admit the unspeakable?

  “Do you think Joseph Smith was really a prophet?” I would ask, and Adam would reply, turning over rocks with the toe of his shoe, not making eye contact, “Yeah. Well, I mean, he could have been, right? It’s possible.” “But you don’t think he really was.” “I’m not sure. Do you?”

  Or Adam would ask me whether I believed blessings were really from God, or were the men who gave them just saying what they hoped was true and right?

  Was free will a plausible gift from an omniscient God?

  Would the world really end in January?

  Was it really so bad for us to do what we did together?

  Finally I asked him the only question that mattered, the one we had both been hinting at for weeks but didn’t dare touch.

  “Do you believe in God at all?”

  Adam looked out across the valley to where mountains folded into mountains into distant haze, where the river cut like a glyph into the ancient earth. He never did answer that question. But by then, I knew him well enough that he didn’t need to.

  4.

  The day after I asked him whether he believed, Adam took me out to the acreage behind the water tower. We pushed out
beyond a well-spaced line of poplars into a field gone to weed. It was green and lush, an ankle-high jungle of curling hot leaves and drying seed heads, alfalfa and tiny wild peas and stray viney potatoes.

  At the edge of the field the land dropped away some ten or twelve feet, a sharp bank of exposed ocher-colored hard-packed earth spilling over with some scrubby plant heavy with tiny purple flowers. Below the bank lay a dusty pad of cracked cement, its edges and center eroding, yielding up handfuls of round loose stones from its crumbling matrix. It may have been the rotting foundation of a root cellar or a storage shed. Adam had found somewhere a box of old dishes, china and crystal, chipped, none of them matching. He had placed the box here already, right on the edge of the embankment. It waited for us in the sun. A spider had crawled inside. It scurried out of the way when Adam reached in, removed a teacup, and lobbed it into the air. The teacup hung a moment, suspended, glinting in the sun, rotating serenely at the apex of its arc. It threw a spark back into my eye from its gold rim. Then with a rush gravity caught it, and the cup hit the cement pad with a bright cardiac crash, a sound more exhilarating than a teacup had any right to make.

  My heart pounded as loud as train wheels. There was a farm building close by, houses across the road, out of sight but not far off. Somebody would hear us. We would be in trouble.

  I picked up a plate and hurled it into the sky. It caught on the breeze, banking like a crop duster. When it smashed against the cement I laughed.

  He grabbed another cup with a very sad dinged rim and a broken handle. It was painted with a country-cute motif of hearts and flowers in subdued pinks and dusty blues, but the paint had rubbed away in places.