People were glad about that at first, since this had always been a real big problem as far as they were concerned. But then they added that up with the fact that ladies were also not having babies when they did mean to, and suddenly they had much bigger problems than all those accident babies put together. People panicked. Then came the parts that Ruth would not tell me much about, but I have heard bits and pieces when they thought I wasn’t listening or forgot I was around. I know that some that could still have babies were not godly women, and they didn’t waste any time turning a profit on what they could do. Other people who were lucky enough to have babies and little children had them stolen away, or one parent would sell them without the other one knowing. It was terrible times, when the right hand could not trust the left, and the whole world just started to fall apart. That’s when the government stepped in.
At first, they didn’t take the babies away. They opened Centers for the Preservation of the American Family in every state in the nation. Couples with children under twelve were invited to come and live there, where the kids would be safe and the husbands and wives could trust each other again (and make more babies), since it would not be possible to sell a child off on the sly the way they had been doing. Unmarried mothers and their kids could come too. I’m not sure when the invitation became a requirement, or how, but Ruth had told me many times that when people are scared, they will agree to almost anything. And they were scared. I guess no one really understood until it was too late that if there are no children to pass things on to, well, what is the point of anything? Their whole society was based on the idea that your parents sent you to school so you could grow up and get a good job making lots of money, then you could get married (or not!) and have kids and start the whole thing over again with them. Even the ones who didn’t want to have kids of their own knew that somebody’s kids would be around to keep everything going. I heard Papa preach on this many times. He said this was the folly of modern life and the reason the Lord brought about the downfall. He had to break the cycle.
Pretty soon, the children and babies living in the Centers got old enough to start trying to have babies of their own. And here is where I think things started to get sticky. I guess some of those boys and girls did like any young people would have done before in their towns or at school and found sweethearts in the C-PAF where they lived. But some didn’t. States would organize party weekends and things with the teenagers from three or four C-PAFs so those who were unattached could try to meet a partner. Sometimes this worked, but other times it didn’t. I used to ask Ruth why this should be so hard and didn’t they want to get married and have babies so they could carry out God and the government’s plan, but she would just look at me darkly and say I should never confuse God and the government. Also, she said that not all people want to do God’s will and follow the natural way, but when I pushed, she wouldn’t say any more on the subject.
But as it turned out, even those who wanted to follow the plan were mostly out of luck. That is where the sticky part comes in. Because once those girls got old enough to start trying and once it was shown that the trying wasn’t going to work for some of them any more than it had for all the women still living on the outside, those girls and their families had to go. They had been sheltered and given everything they could need or want in the C-PAF, and then all of a sudden, they were out in the real world, where things were considerably worse than they had been when they went in ten or fifteen years before. It also did not take too long for the government to figure out that all those boys were a whole lot of trouble and that it didn’t take that many to do what needed to be done, so they weeded out all but the cream of the crop. Only the smartest, healthiest boys were kept to father the last hope of the dying human race.
But it was maybe worst of all for the girls who could have babies, because by then, things were so desperate that the government said they could no longer leave the future of America to chance. Those babies were taken to be raised in nurseries so the mothers would be freed up to make more. At first, this wasn’t full-time, but pretty soon the “visits” were said to upset everyone too much, and the people in charge put a stop to them. This started happening in some other countries first, and back then there was TV and the internet so everybody knew what was happening everywhere every minute. Of course our government said this was just awful and not the American way, right up until they started doing it themselves. I had heard Papa preach on this too. The Evils of the Government is one of his favorite subjects. It runs in the family, since hatred of the government was what drove his grandpa to create the compound in the first place.
But for all that talk about the natural way and how people had defied it and how the government had twisted it for their own purpose, I still didn’t have a real clear understanding of what that meant. I knew the mechanics from that embarrassing talk I’d had with Ruth around the time of my first moon cycle, but that was just a small part of it all, wasn’t it? I thought the natural way meant courting and falling in love with the person God had chosen for you. But then if there were so few people left in the world, how could that happen? Was that why Ruth and Papa Solomon had brought that man into our home, even though it didn’t feel too natural to me at all? Weren’t they interfering the same way the government had done? I knew they probably didn’t think so, but that was how it felt to me. There has to be a better way, I thought. I just needed to find my mama so she could help me figure it out.
I wandered the streets of that empty town, trying to imagine the people who’d lived there and understand how it all went so wrong, until I was too spooked to stand it anymore. My shoulders were just about up around my ears, and then a loud crashing noise sent me running back toward the hi-way. It came from far away, at least a few streets over. Maybe that same sound in the woods would’ve just put me on alert for some kind of animal, but this was unfamiliar territory and I didn’t wait around to find out who or what could have made it. I’d been so sure the whole place was empty, but how did I know that? If my family could survive at Heavenly Shepherd all this time, maybe there were survivors here too. And they might not take too kindly to strangers. Besides, the sun was getting ready to set, and I didn’t want to be caught in that haunted place after dark. I scrambled back up the embankment and across the hi-way into the familiar shelter of the woods before I finally slowed down and caught my breath. I gave myself a few minutes to drink some water and get my bearings, then set off walking again.
I tripped over a tangle of ground vine just after dark and cut my legs up pretty good, but none of the cuts was deep and I made myself keep moving even though I felt like sitting down to pout about it. I’d wasted time in the town when I should’ve been moving forward, and I wanted to put as much distance between me and Heavenly Shepherd as I could before the next morning, when they would surely start looking, even though part of me still wanted to turn right around and go home. At times, I almost convinced myself that I should do it, turn around and beg Papa and Ruth for forgiveness, but then I thought about Zeke Johnson’s hands on me and kept going. Sometimes I sang songs and sometimes I talked to myself. I cried hot tears full of shame, then cold, angry tears full of resentment. I said a prayer for the lost men and women and children of that town, and I prayed that I would find something different at Lake Point. Let there be hope, please God, I prayed, and I didn’t just mean hope for me. It felt like I had been walking through the empty world for a hundred years, though it had only been a night and a day. I guess I didn’t know how much I needed to believe there were more people, good people, at Lake Point until I saw what it might be like if there weren’t.