Children of Paradise: A Novel (3 page)

Adam simply stopped reacting and bent his head and kept his eyes glued to the floor, forgetting half a mango and part of a watermelon, loaves of bread with just one chunk missing, bags of flour, rice, and sugar ripped open and sampled, vegetables scattered about. The guards prodded him with their sticks, and he moved from the storeroom, as directed, toward his cage. They shouted at him to keep moving and move faster. They herded him into his cage and added a chain and padlock, and that was the last day he tasted freedom.

On occasion, he gets scratched by the preacher on his preferred spot between his shoulder blades, just as his mother had scratched him before his capture. Every time he thinks about her he stares at the jungle as if she might walk out into the clearing to end her long search for him.

The preacher scratches him with a hand that feels a bit like hers but through the bars of a cage, and Adam has to offer his back as a sign that he welcomes a scratch and therefore it is a safe undertaking. He held a child in his arms, and that earned him his second beating. The child’s mother screamed at him. He wishes he had his mother. She would scream at somebody to unlock her son’s cage, and she would scratch his back with more affection and accuracy than the preacher.

T
he unpainted wooden structures nearest the preacher’s house contain multiple families who are associated with the preacher in some personal capacity or have high standing in the commune. The doctor and nurses and the preacher’s personal assistants and top bodyguards all live with their families in shared houses set apart from the other commune members, whose children sleep together in dormitories. Other buildings serve as the laundry, carpentry, foundry, sawmill, schoolroom, and numerous dormitories, all joined by walkways. Close to dusk, with the low sun filtered by the forest, four guards march to Adam’s cage carrying long poles and a large piece of tarpaulin balanced between them. They spread the tarpaulin on the floor, thread the poles through two ends of the fabric, and hold up the sheet in front of Adam’s cage to block his view of the compound and main house and infirmary. Adam hears a lot of activity coming from behind the screen. He sees, around the sides of the tarpaulin, a number of people approach his cage from all parts of the commune. The activity behind the tarpaulin stops, and the four guards collapse it, pull out the two poles from the ends, and fold the sheet by having two guards walk with their ends to the other two guards. Adam recoils from the scene that greets him. He stops seeing the guards in front of his cage as they untie the ends of the tarpaulin until the sheet shrinks to the size of a suitcase. All four guards drag the folded tarpaulin to one side and come back to the front of the cage, waving again their sticks and rifles, and order the people assembled to take a few steps back. Few people need any further motivation. They comply quickly. They know it is never a good idea to stand too close to an armed guard. Still, the assembly swells, bringing the work of the commune to a standstill. Expressions of astonishment and loud gasps fly around the gathering as new arrivals catch sight of the scene in front of the cage.

An open coffin sits there on a plinth. Two armed guards stand at attention beside Trina’s lifeless body. A third person, a nurse, fans flies from the child’s face, powdered into a mask. Trina is adorned in an ornately laced full-length white cotton dress. Her mother pushes past the perimeter of guards in front of the cage and throws her body against the bars and bawls and implores Adam to take her life as he took her daughter’s. Some women in the crowd start crying, too. Ryan and Rose lean on each other in disbelief. Joyce cries and pounds her fists on Adam’s cage. She looks over at the community leader’s house and only incidentally at Adam, and she hardly glances at her decorated child in the oblong box. Adam retreats to the back of his cage, suspicious of her performance. He worries that his proximity to her might get him into some sort of trouble. Perhaps a third beating. A group of the preacher’s personal assistants and guards half-heartedly approaches Joyce, and she surrenders readily to their touch as they coax her away from the cage and the exhibit of her daughter.

Adam stares at Trina. He cannot be sure of his senses. She lies perfectly still. Her face is bone-white. Her lips have darkened with the lids of her eyes. Her hands clasped across her chest: white as well. And yet he expects her to leap onto her feet at any moment and resume her game of running from another child trying to catch her. Adam remembers how his mother grew just as still and how she failed to move no matter how much he implored her to attend to his cries. He thinks the girl might be in the same condition of helplessness. Could his grip have made her still the way his mother was long ago? He held her. Yes. She became still in his arms. Yes. Now she lies in a coffin in front of his cage. He turns away from the coffin and pictures a banana grove and a waterfall and his mother by his side. But his mind comes back to the child in the coffin. He sees himself in that box with his body reduced to the size of a child’s and his mother not there to scream for him. He sees his mother as that child. And he howls and rattles the bars of his cage.

Everyone in the commune wipes away tears of approval at their distant cousin’s display of remorse; sad as they are, they display gladness to see that Adam understands the meaning of his actions. The commune’s spiritual leader stares into the cage through the bars. Adam entertains an impulse to grab the man and keep hold of him just as he grabbed the child and earned a pile of treats. But he shakes the thought from his head and avoids the preacher’s dark, unblinking eyes. He knows this is the only man in the commune who does not fear him. He understands this lack of fear to mean that their fortunes are intertwined. If Adam knows one thing from his beating after he grabbed the girl, it is that his well-being depends on the preacher’s: As long as the preacher leads this community, Adam will prosper with him; just as only the preacher’s word can halt Adam’s beatings, only the preacher’s actions can alter Adam’s fate.

The preacher walks to the coffin and waves his arms over the face of the girl. Two more guards approach, taking turns pushing forward a woman in their custody. She stands beside the coffin, and the preacher announces to everyone that a good prefect, the very son of this woman standing before him, exposed her for expressing doubts about the tragedy that has befallen Trina and her mother, Joyce. He gestures to the prefect, who takes a step forward and bows his head, and the people applaud. The preacher turns to the woman and asks if, in her layperson’s opinion, she thinks the child is not really dead. He wants to know from her lips, because the report from her son, a trustworthy prefect, says that she thinks the child is pretending to be dead. The woman shakes her head. The preacher wants her to check for herself and tell the people gathered around them what she thinks she sees. The woman says she is not a doctor, and if the doctor pronounced the child dead, then it must be so, the child must be dead and gone, since the doctor is the expert. She apologizes for expressing any doubt and explains that her doubts were not said in disbelief but in a refusal to accept the loss of one so young.

The preacher invites various people in the crowd to come forward and see for themselves whether the child is pretending to be dead. He picks out individuals at random. Two guards are among the chosen. Each files forward and looks closely at Trina lying still as a log in her cot-sized coffin. Some start to cry, while others shake their heads in despair and make the sign of the cross, and one woman takes the preacher’s hand and kisses it. The woman who kisses the ring of the preacher lunges for the woman branded as a disbeliever, but the guards block her path and gently restrain her and steer her back into the crowd. The doubting woman cowers. Except for the two guards pulled from the crowd, who take up positions near the preacher, all the other witnesses are sent back to their places. They look at the woman as if she is the devil incarnate. The preacher raises his thick eyebrows and stares at the woman. His act of looking at her lasts no longer than a second. She falls to her knees and begs the preacher’s forgiveness. She tells the assembled crowd that the child is dead indeed. She says through her loud crying that it is a tragedy, but Trina is most definitely in the arms of the Almighty. The preacher nods in approval. He reminds her to keep her faith at the very moment when the devil of doubt and disbelief rears his ugly head. She says repeatedly:

—Thank you, Father. Thank you, Father.

The guards usher the woman back into the crowd. The people standing nearby edge away as if to avoid some form of contaminate. Her son, newly promoted from a prefect to a guard for demonstrating his loyalty to the preacher over loyalty to family, puts his arm around her. She stands there with her son’s arm around her but keeps her arms by her sides and cries. The commune leader returns his attention to Trina in the coffin. Again he waves his hand over her head.

—God’s child, listen. I speak to you as God’s messenger.

He looks at Adam and nods, and Adam returns the nod. For a third time the preacher waves his arms over Trina and places his palms on her face and issues his order to her at the top of his voice:

—Arise, my child. God, rise up this child, release the pangs of death, because it is not possible for one of your children to be held by it.

The crowd leans forward, eyes darting from the preacher to the coffin and back. Adam mimics the movement. Joyce stands at the front of the crowd and stares at her daughter lying in the coffin. Two women flank Joyce and keep their hands on her as if to check any sudden movement.

The preacher stretches his hand toward Trina and pushes with his spread fingers at her head, roughly, the way a hand might make contact with someone who has slept through an alarm and the calling of a name.

—Arise, my child!

Joyce tightens her lips and narrows her eyes. She takes care to lower her head and hide her disapproval of the way the commune leader is handling her daughter. Only the preacher looks away from the coffin. He searches the faces of the crowd for any trace of defiance, and finding his scrutiny met with cowed compliance, from averted eyes to heads lowered into shoulders, he returns his attention to the coffin fitted with Trina.

—Get up out of the coffin, child!

What happens next takes a couple of seconds to begin, seconds that appear to slow down and stall just long enough for the crowd to come to terms with the possibility of an impossible occurrence. Eyes search the sky just in case some external force might actually come into play. The people glance at one another and back to the coffin and preacher. Adam’s eyes chase the people’s stares from the heavens to one another and then the coffin. Joyce keeps her eyes on her daughter. The preacher repeats his action, pushing his fingers against Trina’s forehead as he speaks.

—Arise, my child, and take your rightful place among the living!

A gasp escapes the crowd as Trina jerks awake. She rises staggeringly to her feet. People faint. Small children scream and hide behind their parents. Ryan and Rose cling to each other. Rose buries her face in Ryan’s shirt. The prefect, who betrayed his mother for expressing doubts about Trina’s condition, falls to his knees, and his mother hesitates for just a moment before she drops to her knees beside him. Adam grabs the bars of his cage and thuds his head against them, eyes wide. His nostrils flare as he sniffs the space between Trina and him. The preacher offers an arm and Trina takes it, steadies herself, and steps out of the coffin as gingerly as one might step out of a bath. She curtsies and smiles to ecstatic applause. She leans against the coffin and shades her eyes, looking into the crowd for her mother. Joyce runs to her with open arms and scoops her off her feet and squeezes her nearly as hard as Adam. Mother and daughter sob. Ryan and Rose walk up to Trina and Joyce. Trina sees them and smiles. They stretch out their hands slowly and touch Trina lightly and quickly retract their arms. Joyce pulls them close to her and all four embrace. Rose feels Joyce’s arm around her shoulders and imagines it is her banished mother, not Trina’s, who hugs her. The people keep up their cheering and applause and bow their heads repeatedly in the direction of their leader. Some of the women fall to their knees and forcibly drag their children down with them. Others follow suit, their arms busy making the sign of the cross. Whispers of praise the Lord and Father begin and spread throughout the crowd, and a chant builds and rises to a crescendo of: Hallelujah. Praise Father. Bless Father. The preacher nods at them and looks proudly at Adam and bares his Tic-Tac teeth.

—You are all witnesses of how God works His miracles through me?

—Yes, Father.

—I am flesh and blood like you, but my faith in God is strong, and God feels it and works His miracles through me.

The crowd says over and over, Praise the Lord.

—Repeat after me, my children. We will die . . .

—We will die.

— . . . But we will rise again.

—But we will rise again.

—Repeat. We are destined to die . . .

—We are destined to die.

— . . . And surely we will rise again.

—And surely we will rise again.

—For the kingdom of heaven is ours. Repeat!

—For the kingdom of heaven is ours.

Spontaneous applause and more shouts of hallelujah ripple through the crowd. Several hundred adults hug one another, and the children take the cue and clasp hands and jump up and down. The preacher steps up to the bars of the cage. Adam suppresses an impulse to leap at the bars and grab his master, not to capture him but to feel if he is the same as the girl and the guards, the same soft flesh and pliable bones. Adam notices that the man’s left arm is behind his back. Adam focuses on that arm, interested in whatever surprise might be stored there. The preacher nods again, and Adam copies the nod and cracks his face with a smile. Next, the commune leader produces a banana and pushes his arm through the bars. Adam does not hesitate. He grabs the banana, taking care to touch part of the man’s hand. He finds that the hand is softer than he expects, almost as soft as the proffered fruit. Adam thinks, Father, just like everyone in the commune.