Chapter 34

The rumor was you had to squeeze a frog to death with your bare hand. You had to eat a live earthworm. To prove you could obey just as Abraham did when he tried to kill his son to make God happy, you had to cut off your little finger with an ax.

That was the rumor. After that, you had to cut off someone else’s little finger. You never saw anybody after they were baptized so you couldn’t tell if they still had a little finger. You couldn’t ask them if they had had to squeeze the frog. Right after you were baptized, you got on a truck and left the colony. You’d never see the colony again. The truck was headed out into the wicked outside world where they already had your first work assignment lined up for you. The big outside world with all its wonderful new sins, and the better you did on the tests, the better the job you’d get. You could figure out what some of the tests were going to be. The church elders told you right up front if you were too skinny or too fat for how tall you were. They set aside the whole year before your baptism for you to get yourself perfect. You were excused from work at home so you could go to special lessons all day. Bible lessons. Cleaning lessons. Etiquette, fabric care, and you know all the rest. If you were fat you ate to lose weight, and if you were too skinny you just ate. That whole year before baptism, every tree, every friend, everything you saw had the halo around it of your knowing you’d never see it again. By what you studied, you knew about most of the tests you’d get. Beyond that, the rumor was there was more we didn’t know would happen. We knew by rumor that you’d be bare naked for part of the baptism. One church elder would put his hand on you and tell you to cough. Another elder would slide a finger up your anus. Another church elder would follow along with you and write on a card how well you did. You didn’t know how you were supposed to study for a prostate exam. We all knew the baptisms took place in the meeting house basement. The daughters went to baptism in the spring with only the church women in attendance. Sons went in the fall with only the men there to tell you to get up on the scale naked and be weighed or ask you to recite a chapter and verse from the Bible. Job, Chapter Fourteen, Verse Five:"Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass.” And you had to recite it naked. Psalm 101, Psalms of David, Verse Two:"I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way ... I will walk within my house with a perfect heart.” You had to know how to make the best dust cloths (soak rags in diluted turpentine, then hang them to dry). You had to figure how deep to set a six-foot-tall gatepost so it could support a five-foot-wide gate. Another church elder would blindfold you and give you cloth samples to feel, and you had to say which was cotton or wool or a poly-cotton blend. You had to identify houseplants. Stains. Insects. Fix small appliances. Do elegant handwriting for invitations. We guessed about the tests from what we had to study in school. Other parts came from sons who weren’t too bright. Sometimes your father would tell you inside information so you might score a little higher and get a better job assignment instead of a lifetime of misery. Your friends would tell each other, and then everybody would know. Nobody wanted to embarrass their family. And nobody wanted a lifetime of removing asbestos. The church elders were going to stand you in one place and you’d have to read a chart at the far end of the meeting hall. The church elders would give you a needle and thread and time how long you took to sew on a missing button. We knew about what kind of jobs we were headed for in the wicked outside world from what the elders said to scare or inspire us. To make us work harder, they told us about wonderful jobs in gardens bigger than anything we could picture this side of Heaven. Some jobs were in palaces so enormous you’d forget you were indoors. These gardens were called amusement parks. The palaces, hotels. To make us study even harder, they told us about jobs where you’d spend years pumping cesspools, burning offal, spraying poisons. Removing asbestos. There were jobs so terrible, they told us we’d be glad to run up and meet death halfway. There were jobs so boring, you’d find ways to cripple yourself so you couldn’t work. So you memorized every minute of your last year in the church district colony. Ecclesiastes, Chapter Ten, Verse Eighteen:"By much slothfulness the building decayeth; and through idleness of the hands the house droppeth through."Lamentations, Chapter Five, Verse Five:"Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest.” To keep bacon from curling, chill it a few minutes in the freezer before frying. Rub the top of your meat loaf with an ice cube, and the loaf won’t crack while it bakes. To keep lace crisp, iron it between sheets of waxed paper. We were kept busy learning. We had a million facts to remember. We memorized half the Old Testament. We thought all this teaching was to make us smart. What it did was make us stupid. With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think. None of us ever considered what life would be like cleaning up after a stranger every day. Washing dishes all day. Feeding a stranger’s children. Mowing a lawn. All day. Painting houses. Year after year. Ironing bedsheets. Forever and ever. Work without end. We were all of us so excited about passing tests, we never looked beyond the night of the baptism. We were all so worried about our worst fears, squeezing frogs, eating worms, poisons, asbestos, we never considered how boring life would be even if we succeeded and got a good job. Washing dishes, forever. Polishing silver, forever. Mowing the lawn. Repeat. The night before the baptism, my brother Adam took me out on the back porch of our family’s house and gave me a haircut. Every other family in the church district colony with a seventeen-year-old son was giving him the exact same haircut. In the wicked outside world, they call this product standardization. My brother told me not to smile, but to stand straight up and down and answer any questions in a clear voice. In the outside world, they call this marketing. My mother was putting my clothes together in a bag for me to take with me. We were all of us pretending to sleep that night. In the wicked outside world, my brother told me, there were sins the church didn’t know enough to forbid. I couldn’t wait. The next night was our baptism, and we did everything we’d expected. Then nothing else. Just when you were ready to hack off your little finger and the finger of the son next to you, nothing happened. After you’d been poked and felt and weighed and questioned about the Bible and housework, then they told you to get dressed. You took your bag with your extra clothes inside, and you walked from the meeting house into a truck that was idling outside. The truck drove out into the wicked outside world, into the night, and nobody you knew would ever see you again. You never found out how high you scored. Even if you knew you’d done well, that good feeling didn’t last very long. There was already a work assignment waiting for you. God forbid you should ever get bored and want more. It was church doctrine that the rest of your life would be the same work. The same being alone. Nothing would change. Every day. This was success. Here was the prize. Mowing the lawn. And mowing the lawn. And mowing the lawn. Repeat. Joke.