Lisbeth didn’t laugh back. “Wil, wait.” She took a breath, and I knew something big was coming; she inhaled, then spoke in a rush when she delivered bad or hard news. I pictured her holding on to her braid, squeezing it, as she did for reassurance. She didn’t even know that she did this. “We’re getting out,” she said. “The Church is going away and we’re going with them. I want you to come with us. My folks want you to. The Church said it was okay.”
“Getting out? Where are you going?”
“South. That’s all I know.”
The news, when I watched it at Lisbeth’s house—we didn’t have cable or internet on the farm—showed cars waiting to cross into Mexico. The line stretched for miles, longer and longer every cold day, the cars laden with suitcases, gas cans, children’s bikes. Whole lives strapped to the roofs. Most of the cars were turned away at the border. Where was Lisbeth going to go?
“What about your job?” I said.
She did laugh then, but it came out barking like a cough. “What job, now?”
What about me? I thought. Us? I said, “The entire church is moving together?”
“Yes. The Migration, that’s what they’re calling it.”
“Like birds.”
“Wil, you can’t tell anyone about this, okay? You can’t tell your mama or Lobo, when they call. The invitation is only for you. The Church talked about it, and that was the decision.” Silence from me, which Lisbeth felt uncomfortable with and tried to fill. “It’s just, we’re taking these vans, and there’s only so much room, so many seat belts. And there’s only so much food.”
“You’re taking food? What place are you going to that has no food?”
“The Church is prepared. We’ve been preparing for something for a long time. Not this specifically, but in case something should come, someday, we’ve been ready. My parents love you,” Lisbeth said. “I love you. Come with us. We can protect you.”
“Protect me from what? Do you know something? What’s causing this?”
Lisbeth paused. “God.”
2
The day she left, the vans filled the road, one after the other. It was like the news stories about the Mexican border, except these vans were identical white, their windows tinted. I knew Lisbeth rode in one of them. Even though I didn’t want to, even though I hated The Church for taking my closest friend from me, the only one who knew me, the one I loved, I stood out beside the road, in the wild field at the end of our driveway, beside the rural route, and waved at every single one.
Nobody had thought much about The Church until they had moved from the basement of the community center into the abandoned supermarket at the edge of town. Somehow they had enough money to buy the building and fix it up, and somehow they had enough people to fill it every Sunday and Wednesday.
In the holler, we tended to leave things alone as long as you weren’t hurting anybody—and even then, as Lobo liked to joke, there was a sliding scale. Was it your own kin you were hurting? Were they grown up? Had they brought it on themselves, bought the pills, boiled the poppies, kissed your wife or sister?
People were least likely to forgive hurting a dog, Lobo said. That was worse than hurting a woman. If you had land, had bought it or inherited it and held on to it, you could do what you wanted out there, beyond your driveway gate or locked doors. That was your right.
Nobody had thought much about The Church. Except their members kept writing letters to the editor of the newspaper, and they kept having candidates run for school board—and win. They became a part of the town, like a shadow quietly and swiftly spreading over us. Or a disease.
And now they were gone. All gone somewhere. All the white church vans.
The Migration.
I thought I would know which van she was in. I thought she would roll down the window, or I would see her moving behind the dark glass. She would give me a sign—and I would know her. But she didn’t. The last van passed me.
* * *
The leaves on the trees were supposed to redden and brown, to die and fall. But there were no leaves on the trees. We were supposed to start wearing sweaters as the cold nights stretched on. But we were already wearing sweaters. So we added layers, those of us who could afford more wool and fleece. The charity shop ran out of coats. The Church wasn’t there to launch a warm-clothing drive. School wasn’t open to feed children hot breakfast and lunch. It was harvest time, supposed to be. The moon looked silver and swollen, and the coyotes howled at night with a sharpness I knew was hunger.
Weed needs a warm, humid climate. Always before, that was what we had in southeastern Ohio; that was our gift. One of the only things that grew well in our old, abused soil, the earth mistreated by years of coal mining and fracking and mountaintop removal, was marijuana. That was what Lobo said.
But the outdoor harvest the year that Lobo and Mama decided to leave had been a bad one. A wet spring, if you could call it spring at all. Lobo and Mama had lost their plants that they grew in the wild: in neglected lots, in deep forest, in patches of unused land behind highways, in woody acres belonging to the state or accessible only by canoe.
Some of the plants that Lobo had hiked in on a pack and planted at twilight in the illegal ground had been swept away by rain. Other plants never took. The earth was too wet and chilled. Their roots rotted. Still other plants froze: their leaves folding, blackening, then falling off. Or they were eaten young by desperate animals or the always-desperate insects. Every time Lobo went out in a canoe to check on the wild plants, he returned with his head a little lower, his back more dejected, his jaw tight. I knew he would chew his food silently and angrily, lash out at Mama, kick something down the stairs. I didn’t go up to the farmhouse for dinner on those nights. I didn’t want to be the thing he kicked.
Outdoor crops were half our income. But after the first cold year, after the loss of everything wild, we didn’t even try to plant outside. All we had left was the grow room in the basement of the big house.
As a teenager, I had avoided going in there. It hurt my eyes. I felt it would stick on me, like the scent of weed, be obvious. I thought—like sex—once I had been down in the grow room, people would know. And they did know, but for other reasons: it was a small town. There were rumors that were true; people bought from Lobo and knew his girlfriend had a daughter. Our weed was good. People came across state lines to buy it. And they talked about it, about us.
Lisbeth and I became fast friends because I was an outcast and she was a Church weirdo. She had a list of forbidden things, and she obeyed it, at first. She would talk to me without asking, like other kids did, Do you have any on you? Is it true, what they say, that yours is as sweet as strawberry?
What I felt, going in the grow room, was trouble trouble trouble beaming at me from the walls. Bright lights were suspended from the ceiling. The light bounced off the walls, which were covered in silver insulation, nail-gunned into place, on every side of the room, even the ceiling, to keep in the heat and light. The fans ran daily, ventilating the space. The air was fecund, a lushness you could feel. Someone had to move the plants, heavy in their plastic pots of earth, every day, switching out the plants under the lamps, and the ones closest to the fans, rotating so that every leaf got the same amount of light and warmth, every plant had a chance.