Chapter 45

The night before I left home, my big brother told me everything he knew about the outside world.
In the outside world, he said, women had the power to change the color of their hair. And their eyes. And their lips.
We were on the back porch in just the light from the kitchen window. My brother, Adam, was cutting my hair the way he cut wheat, gathering handfuls of it and cutting it with a straight razor at about the halfway point. He’d pinch my chin between his thumb and forefinger and force me to look at him straight on, his brown eyes darting back and forth between each of my sideburns.

To get my sideburns even, he’d cut one, then the other, then the first, over and over until both sideburns were gone.
My seven little brothers were sitting along the edges of the porch, watching the darkness for all the evils Adam described.
In the outside world, he said, people kept birds inside their houses. He’d seen it.
Adam had been outside the church district colony just one time, when he and his wife had to register their marriage to make it legal with the government.
In the outside world, he said, people were visited in their houses by spirits they called television.
Spirits spoke to people through what they called the radio.
People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.
He went on cutting my hair, not for style as much as he was pruning it the way he’d prune a tree. Around us on the porch boards, the hair piled up, not so much cut as harvested.
In the church district colony, we hung bags of cut hair in the orchard to scare away deer. Adam told me the rule about not wasting anything is one of the blessings you give up when you leave the church colony. The hardest blessing you give up is silence.
In the outside world, he told me, there was no real silence. Not the fake silence you get when you plug your ears so you hear nothing but your heart, but real out-of-doors silence.
The week they were married, he and Biddy Gleason rode in a bus from the church district colony, escorted by a church elder. The whole trip, the bus was loud inside. The automobiles on the road with them were roaring. People in the outside world said something stupid with their every breath, and when they didn’t talk their radios filled the gap with the copied voices of people singing the same songs over and over.
Adam said the other blessing you have to give up in the outside world is darkness. You can close your eyes, and sit in a cupboard, but that’s not the same thing. The darkness at night in the church district colony is complete. The stars are thick above us in this kind of darkness. You can see how the moon is rough with mountain ranges and etched with rivers and smoothed with oceans.
On a night without the moon or stars you can’t see a thing, but you can imagine anything.
At least that’s how I remember.
My mother was inside the kitchen ironing and folding the clothes I’d be allowed to take with me. My father was I don’t know where. I’d never see either of them again.
It’s funny, but people always ask if she was crying. They ask if my father cried and threw his arms around me before I left. And people are always amazed when I say no. Nobody cried or hugged.
Nobody cried or hugged when we sold a pig either. Nobody cried and hugged before they killed a chicken or picked an apple.
Nobody lay awake at night wondering if the wheat they’d raised was truly happy and fulfilled being made into bread.
My brother was just cutting my hair. My mother was just done ironing and she’d sat down to sew. She was pregnant. I remember she was always pregnant, and my sisters were all around her with their skirts spread on the kitchen benches or on the floor, all of them sewing.
People always ask if I was scared or excited or what.
According to church doctrine only the firstborn son, Adam, would ever marry and grow old in the church district. When we turned seventeen the rest of us, me and my seven brothers and five sisters, would all go out for work. My father lives here because he was the firstborn son in his family. My mother lives here because the church elders chose her for my father.
People are always so disappointed if I tell them the truth, that none of us lived in oppressed turmoil. None of us resented the church. We just lived. None of us were tortured by feelings very much.
That was the complete depth of our faith. Call it shallow or deep. There was nothing that could scare us. That’s how people raised in the church district colony believed. Whatever happened in the world was a decree from God; a task to be completed. Any crying or joy just got in the way of your being useful. Any emotion was decadent. Anticipation or regret was a silly extra; a luxury.
That was the definition of our faith. Nothing was to be known. Anything was to be expected.
In the outside world, Adam said it was a bargain with the devil that powered automobiles and carried airplanes across the sky. Evil flowed through electric wires to make people lazy. People put their dishes back in the cupboard dirty, and the cupboard washed them. Water in pipes carried away their garbage and shit so that it was someone else’s problem. Adam pinched my chin with his thumb and forefinger and leaned down to look me straight in the face, and said how in the outside world, people looked in mirrors.
Right in front of him on the bus, he said, people had mirrors and everyone was busy seeing how they looked. It was shameful.
I remember that was the last haircut I got for a long long time, but I don’t really remember why. My head was a bristling field of straw with just the short hairs that were left.
In the outside world, Adam said, all the counting was done inside machines.
All the food was fed to people by waitresses.
The one time he left the colony, my brother and his wife and the church elder who escorted them stayed overnight in a hotel in downtown Robinsville, Nebraska. They didn’t any of them sleep. The next day the bus brought them home for the rest of their lives.
A hotel, he told me, was a big house where a lot of people lived and ate and slept, but no one knew each other. He said that described most families in the outside world.
Churches in the outside world, my brother told me, were just the local stores that sold people lies made up in the distant factories of giant religions.
He said a lot more I don’t remember.
That haircut was sixteen years ago.
My father had sired Adam and me and all fourteen of his children by the time he was the age I am now.
I was seventeen years old the night I left home.
The way my father looked the last time I saw him is the way I look now.
Looking at Adam was as good as looking in a mirror. He was my big brother by just three minutes and thirty seconds, but in the Creedish church district there was no such thing as twins.
That last night I ever saw Adam Branson, I remember thinking my big brother was a very kind and a very wise man.
That’s how stupid I was.