Ellen’s second funeral happened to be in the same year. She was going on six years old, but was definitely still five. This memorial was for Uncle Dink, whom she swore she could see breathing in the coffin when she walked by on tiptoe with her father.
Uncle Dink was Georgie’s youngest brother. I have no idea why I put him on this earth, but I had to take him out. He was a logger, a babysitter, and a pervert.
As a boy he’d been of a sensitive nature – but you know, it’s always the more sensitive ones who can turn really weird. You shouldn’t leave them alone too much. He was the last of five children and his mother had no time to supervise him. She thought his older siblings were watching him, but they were just grateful he wasn’t always begging to tag along on their outings.
Uncle Dink liked to experiment with strong emotions. His first pet, a cat, was the one he’d loved and tortured the most. Feelings of softness and compassion would well up in him and spill over a certain edge, like a waterfall. Then he was curious to see where they would go if he followed them down, down to the roaring explosion beneath. Uncle Dink was never sure which feeling he enjoyed best: when he neared the lip of the falls, or when he crashed at the bottom in a cloud of mist and noise. Anyhow, he became responsible for the misery and deaths of several small animals due to this tendency to test limits. He was a terrible little left-handed undercut from the devil himself.
By the way . . . when I speak of the devil, most of you would like to think I’m talking about some dude with a pitchfork on the opposite team from me. Humans love a personification of evil. They want the world’s badness clustered up into an arrow and pointing the blame at someone. Folks even thumb their noses at me and say, “Ha ha, Omnipotent Being, how’d the devil come at ya outta left field if you’re God, huh? Doesn’t God have everything planned out, doesn’t He know what’s on the horizon?” Well, let me reiterate – there is no opposite of me. I’m in everything; I am the field. The devil is nothing but human free will itself: the gift of choice, from me to you. Welcome to your own agency, folks.
I suppose it could be a whole lot easier. I could know everything, if I wanted. I could have a hand in it all and turn my back on nothing. But eventually I had to give something up to pure chance, and it wasn’t just the principle of natural selection. You don’t know what it’s like to exist in eternity – bo-o-o-o-o-ring! Of course, it’s fun to plan and control everything up to a point, but without unpredictability there is absolutely nothing to stay alive for. Anyone who has played the video game Desert Bus knows this. No challenge exists without chance.
In the beginning, it was enough of a test just to orchestrate everything – the changing of the seasons, the movement of the wind, volcanic eruptions, the menstrual cycles of female mammals. After I got all that under control, I started to experiment with my very favourite animal, the proto-human. It was amusing to make them poke sticks into holes in order to get termites, et cetera. I liked inventing all sorts of ways they could please and frustrate each other. I also learned a lot by contorting the bonobos into all sorts of pleasurable sexual positions.
I certainly don’t mean to bash the collective unconscious. Seriously, there is nothing more beautiful or awe-inspiring than when a flock of birds rises into the air simultaneously, flapping off into a wide quiet swath of sky, or swooping and swirling until it comes to rest as one body in the branches of one tree. Those sights – they happen every day, everywhere – they are the grand, simple, silent work of my hands. However, they all happen within me; I am their source, I’m at the heart of not only the movement, but even the collective inclination to move. I’m the sky and the air and the water, too. So, while it is glorious, it is like looking into a mirror for eternity – mere narcissism.
With the Neanderthals, I first developed the notion just to let them choose something, anything, outside of me. I gave Adam real consciousness; he was the first man to look around and say, “This is the world. This is myself in it. I can do things.”
I knew Adam’s loneliness would match my own; in everything he saw, he saw himself. He needed a partner, an other, something that was totally un-him. So I evolved Eve, to further my experiment in free will. I decided in giving them to each other, I would turn my back somewhat and let them have some privacy. I’d let them become creators.
People started to make all sorts of things that surprised me, real messes and awful children and exquisite songs and poems. I’ve had to clean up and rescue you people a lot, or watch you die in freakish and gut-twisting ways. You’ve made me feel so sad, which is likeable in its own way.
Occasionally, though, I am forced to intervene.
Uncle Dink often volunteered to babysit Marisol and Georgie’s children when they were little. Marisol gave him a crooked eye once or twice, but desperate for a break from her brood, she denied the inner voice hissing, Don’t trust that pervert! When she found blood in Ellen’s underwear, she brought her to the doctor, who said the signs were consistent with unmentionable things. Horrified, Marisol took this news, as women will do, to one of Georgie’s sisters. The sister-in-law related a recent conversation in which Uncle Dink admitted to being “curious” with little Ellen, who hadn’t yet started kindergarten. There was no more babysitting after that, except by soft-spoken female Mennonite teenagers.
As soon as I found the opportunity, I took a long bare log loaded atop a transport truck and swung it around and toppled it on Uncle Dink’s head. His neck snapped like the useless twig he was. His final breath was my sigh of relief.
Aside from chronic bladder infections, Ellen seemed unhurt by the abuse. Every day, the Jesus flame burned bright in her heart. She kept on looking around with callow eyes, singing, talking, growing, learning. She loved, above all things, to run around naked as a mole rat. And she loved to use her voice; the mother’s days were filled with the little girl’s chattery, endless observations.
“Mommy, what do you think the plants really want? I mean, do they want the sun, or do they want the rain, or the earth, or do they just want a bit of everything? If I was a plant, I’d want all that, but I would want some friends too.”
“Mommy, when Daddy gets angry he looks a bit like a camel. Are camels angry? I would be angry, if I had to walk around a desert all day. My feet would get hot. And I would be thirsty. Did you know camels keep water in their humps? Maybe Daddy’s hump is empty. Maybe Daddy’s really thirsty. Maybe he’s mad because he needs something.”
“Mommy, what do you dream about when you sleep? I bet you dream of being far, far away in a land where there is nothing to clean or cook. Is it snowy or sunny there? I bet Daddy doesn’t live there.”
“Mommy, I know Jesus wants to stay in my heart, but doesn’t he feel cooped up in there? Sometimes I’ve felt him bumping around.”
So, little Ellen was not visibly traumatized, and the curiosity had been of a fairly non-malicious sort. I hoped in my heart of hearts it wouldn’t affect her future.
But Uncle Dink’s actions made their indelible mark. There she was, opened up forever to the world. Ellen would never be a virgin. She would never recall what it is to be hallowed, unknown, unbroken.
People are impressionable by nature, so when I give you to the world, I mean for you to stay relatively shielded from unnatural forms of love. Folks have all sorts of different ideas as to what kind of love is unnatural, but I’m talking about mean, evil, perverted, twisted love – the kind that really fucks with people and ruins them inside. It’s the kind of damage that passes down through seventy generations.
I meant for Ellen to keep a deep, guarded secret within her that would enhance her knowing of what is sacred. Kind of like George Macdonald’s little Princess Irene, whose invisible thread guides her back to her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother upstairs. All Irene had to do was feel with her forefinger and there it would be, taut and silken. No matter what circuitous route it took, it always led her home.
Now, because of Uncle Dink, it was as if Ellen’s thread had been – well, not quite cut, but stretched to a thinness that would make it difficult for her to locate again. She would search and search; I trusted that much. And I hoped Jesus would lead her the way I could not – from the inside, deep in her incarnated self.
Anyway, on the surface Ellen still appeared fairly normal. The memory dwelt in her more as a subtle understanding that her mother was incapable of protecting her from harm, which is a terrible understanding for any little child to have.
As for poor Marisol, she knew deeply that she’d neglected her duties; her remorse was worse than whatever she felt about the worst of her own rages toward her whining rambunctious children. At least she could take responsibility for her own outbursts, but the damage of another could never be known or undone. It meant she had not been present; she had failed, permanently. This kind of feeling always hones down to a sore nub of resentment, and Marisol wasn’t one to take an inward breath and get past things. She held on and rubbed and rubbed, until she herself became the actual source of the pain.
Uncle Dink’s funeral took place at the Pentecostal church. Georgie loved the Pentecostals because of their shouting and moaning and speaking in foreign languages. The noise drowned out his niggling boredom and dread – the certain, silent knowledge that, no matter what prayers he said or what kind of drug he took, he would end up bored, sick, dead and in the ground. Against this background of his life’s malaise, Georgie raised his hands in hallelujah with the Pentecostals, waving and singing to evoke an emotional response in himself, while Marisol pleaded with him to attend the Mennonite church. It was a topic of contention, so they ended up dividing their Sundays evenly amongst the different services.
Personally, I do prefer the Mennonites because they imbue their worship with a flavour of humility and keep quiet about things they can’t understand. The Pentecostals are too busy listening to their own jibber-jabber to hear anything subtle I have to say to them, deep in their hearts. My absolute favourites, though, are the Quakers, who just sit in silence and be with me. It’s like we’re all back in heaven together.
But Uncle Dink’s funeral was a Pentecostal one. Everyone was crying, chanting in unison, and whispering “Praise Jesus, praise Jesus,” enough to drown out the fear of death that was threatening to choke everyone in the room. There were rosy flames flickering everywhere as Jesus did his magic. In the middle of the eulogy, Marisol whispered to Georgie, who knew only vague details of his brother’s shady hankerings: “Maybe it’s better this way. Poor Ellen . . . I wonder if anything happened to Bonnie?”
Georgie looked up like a tortured, blind bull and roared, “It’s not better at all! Nothing’s better, woman!” Nobody heard him; they were absorbed in their hallowed mental mazes of praises. Georgie had been in the throes of recollection, offering me visual sacrifices of him and Uncle Dink pillow-fighting, clandestinely smoking cigarettes, stealing food, building clap-trap forts in the backyard, sneaking around on their mother.
These innocent childhood memories somewhat softened my anger toward Uncle Dink, and made my murder of him take on the hue of a poignant necessity.