Papa was quiet a moment, his eyes never leaving the man’s face, and then he nodded slightly in agreement. “Yes sir, sometimes we have to leave the beaten path if we want to survive. That’s just what my grandfather Jedidiah Miles understood when he built this compound.” I leaned back in my chair and tried to get comfortable because I had heard this story many times and knew what was coming next.
“Heavenly Shepherd started out as just one of a whole chain of dealerships owned by the Miles family—did you know that?” Zeke shook his head, but he needn’t have bothered. Papa’s storytelling did not require audience participation. I thought I saw Billie roll her eyes, and Jacob slid down a little in his chair. Rachel started to stand up and clear the table, but Papa gave her a look and she sat back down.
“My grandpa Jed was a godly man in a time of true evil. He stood fierce in his faith even as the wicked world tried to tear him down and paint him as the enemy of righteousness. They condemned him when he spoke God’s truth about the mixing of the races and the tolerance of heathen religions and Christ deniers. The world told him to accept all kinds of abominations, but he stuck fast to the word of God even when it meant defying man’s laws.” Papa’s eyes were shining, and his face was starting to turn red like it did every time he told this story. You could tell he wished he was preaching it in front of a church instead of just that supper table, but at least he had one new listener.
“Before the plague of barrenness became undeniable even to the faithless, Jed saw the signs and made his plan. He ordered in ten new trailers, ten! Then refused to sell a one of them, or any of the eight he already had either. He made sure they were all solar models, then converted all the bathrooms to these composting toilets we got. Not a one of the sinks ever ran a drop of water, but he had a deep well dug on the property while he could still pay for the men with them big machines to come and do it.”
This was before his family finally made good on their threats and cut him off. By then, he had made his changes to all the trailers and locked them into concrete block foundations besides, so they left him with what he had. I noticed that as I got older, Papa left out this part of the story. Or maybe it was as he got older and the idea of rebellious offspring became less appealing to him.
“While he still had money and credit, he laid in supplies. Bought every kind of book on survival and homesteading and edible plants and herbal medicine that he could find.” He pointed to the shelves that lined one side of the room, where those very books still sat, dog-eared and with covers half torn off. “What he knew would be hard to grow or find or make, he bought.” Papa waved his hand in the vague direction of our storage barn as he went on. “You seen that big metal barn back on the rear of my property? The whole thing is insulated and refrigerated, runs on solar. Using the sun to keep food cold, think on that! Jed got it rigged up, then loaded it with fifty-pound bags of flour, sugar, cornmeal, coffee, and oats piled near about to the roof, all in them big plastic tubs to keep the critters out. We got cases and cases of candles and matches, tools and guns and ammunition. He bought seed enough for fifty years of crops.” On a farm ten times the size of our little garden, I thought but didn’t say.
“He bought hand-cranked grinding machines for peanuts because he had a weakness for peanut butter.” Here Papa gave a fond little laugh, and for once I thought of him as a little boy with a grandpa who loved peanut butter. It was strange, and I couldn’t quite picture Papa as a little boy. “But he drew the line at storing more than a few cases of his favorite kind. He knew that the Lord requires sacrifices of those he chooses, and he did not want to appear unworthy.” Was it my imagination, or did he look pointedly at me then? I sat up a little straighter in my chair. “He built a henhouse and stocked it with laying hens and put a couple of roosters behind a fence so there could be generations, chickens in perpetuity! He even bought a few head of cattle and put them to pasture out back so there would be fresh milk, butter, and sometimes beef. I bet you never had beef before, have ya, boy?” Zeke looked like he might not like being called “boy,” but he wisely held his peace. He might not know what to make of me yet, but I saw he was getting the measure of Papa pretty quick.
“Ol’ Jed bought bolts and bolts of muslin and five working antique foot-pedal sewing machines, which my grandmother had to learn how to use. Women was spoiled back then, you know, used to the easy life.” He sneered at those lazy women and shook his head sorrowfully. Ruth nodded in agreement, but Rachel and Billie darted their eyes at each other and then away. Rachel smirked, but Billie looked mad. “He started his own church there in the dealership office and preached the hard truth of what was coming to the farm families that came around, until pretty soon there was eleven families besides his own living right here on this compound. They called him crazy, but ol’ Jed got the last laugh.” Did he? I wondered. They had cut themselves off from the world, I knew, but that didn’t keep the sickness from touching their daughters.
Zeke looked around the table. There are only a few other people on the compound now besides Papa Solomon and Ruth, who are my grandparents. My mother’s two sisters were still there: Rachel and Billie. They were not much older than her, but they had caught the invisible sickness that kept so many from being able to have babies, and Ruth said it had just dried them up and made them bitter and old before their time. There was Rachel’s husband, David, though they had lived in separate trailers for as long as I could remember, and David’s sister, Amber, who was strange and did not come out of her own little single-wide much. She told me that her and my mama were friends from the day David brought her to live with us, after their parents died. Their family owned one of those old farms about a day’s walk from us, and when they died, Amber was the last one left there. I don’t think the rest of my family was all that thrilled to have her, with her puffy yellow hair hanging loose just barely past her shoulders and her hand-me-down, store-bought clothes carried in two big sacks, but they were not going to leave her out there by herself to go crazy and waste away either. Plus, there was always the chance that she could bear a child by Jacob, just like Bilhah did for Rachel in the Bible (which is Billie’s real name too).
But one way or another, that never did work out. Jacob was the only boy and the oldest child. He always seemed nearly as old as Papa to me, although I guess he cannot be. I know he had a wife once, named May, but no one would ever talk about her, and if I asked, they all got real stiff and mad-seeming, so I learned not to ask pretty quick. I thought maybe she died and they were still sad about it. I doubt she would have left. She couldn’t have any babies, so there was no need for her to go off and hide like my mother had to after I came. There was nowhere to go and no one to go to, anyway, after all that had happened. No way to get there if there was. This was what I was taught from the time I could talk and understand words. I know different now, but I’m still not sure if it was all lies or if they believed it themselves and just didn’t know any better.
I guess Papa saw the question in Zeke’s face, because he went on before there was a need to ask it. “Out of those eleven families, only four had daughters who were blessed with children.” He shook his head sorrowfully. I definitely saw Billie roll her eyes then, but luckily Papa didn’t notice. “Of those four, three had only sons who lived past infancy. That shook the faith of the weak, and things got bad between Jed and some of the other men.” I didn’t know all the details, but I knew that one by one, then all in a flurry, the others went away. “Jed’s son Micah was a grown man by then, and he had married one of those precious daughters, so her family stayed. Her name was Leah, and she bore Micah two sons. You’re lookin’ at one of ’em.”