Page 43 of So Far Gone

“Mom and I made a promise to each other.”

“Leah. If you know something, you need to tell me.”

***

Asher was super glad to be back at Joanie and Brian’s house. The sun was going down, the pellet stove was warm, the lazy dog was nice, and Asher was happy to be on a stool at Joanie’s kitchen counter, about to get some dinner. Best of all, he was out of the Rampart, even though his dad had wanted Leah and him to stay there, and not with Grandpa Rhys. But Asher didn’t like being there without his dad. Everyone was so serious. Brother Dean and the AOL guys were kind of scary. And the Rampart School was even more boring than home school. He liked Miss Charlotte fine, but he hated rereading the same old Bible stories, which, in his opinion, weren’t even that good of stories! (The worst one was Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac! What was that even about? Like, God is a bully who does practical jokes?) Pastor Gallen said that Bible literacy was the cornerstone of any education, but Miss Charlotte taught even less science and math than their mother. What kind of education was that?

Joanie set sandwiches in front of the kids, and, as she poured them glasses of lemonade, Asher followed her eyes out the window, where Brian and Grandpa Rhys were on the porch, talking about something.

Asher turned a half sandwich over in his hand. “What did Brian’s people eat?”

“Oh, they ate like kings,” Joanie said. “The rivers were so full of fish then they didn’t even need bridges. You just walked across the salmon to get to the other side. Deer and elk would run up and demand to be cooked that very minute.”

Asher laughed. “Did they live in tepees?”

“Sometimes,” Joanie said. “But Brian is interior Salish. Do you know what that is?”

“No.”

“You should. We live in their country. Salish people lived from theRocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, from Oregon to Canada,” she said. “Nobody owned the land, they just followed fish and game and dug roots, and they got together for powwows, potlaches, stuff like that. Hundreds of tribes and bands. Sometimes they lived in tepees, but sometimes they lived in lodges, and some nights, when they were out on a hunt, or on war parties, they slept under the stars.”

“I’ve slept outside,” Asher said. “In a sleeping bag. I like to look at the stars. I know most of the constellations.”

“You know Sagittarius?” Joanie asked. She glanced out the window, to where Brian and Grandpa Rhys talking, pointing, gesturing with their hands. “That’s me. Loyal to a fault.”

Asher continued: “The funny thing about constellations is that when you’re little, you think the stars must be really close together, but did you know they’re millions and millions of light-years apart?”

“That so?” Joanie was still staring outside.

“Yes. Did you know a light-year is how far light can travel in a year? It’s very far. The light we see left those stars millions and millions of years ago. Those stars might not even be there now. They might have blown up back when there were dinosaurs!”

“Dinosaurs, huh?” Joanie said distractedly, still staring out the window.

“Our new church teaches that God hung the stars in the firmament, and that they move around the Earth, but Mom says it’s okay if I don’t believe everything the church teaches, because that’s just what peopleusedto thinkwhen they wrote the Bible, before there were telescopes and rockets and good scientists.”

“Uh-huh,” Joanie said.

“Asher,” Leah said. “That’s enough.”

Asher knew Leah didn’t like it when he questioned church teachings out loud. She didn’t believe everything the Blessed Fire taught, either, but she got mad when her brother talked like this. She liked to say what Pastor Gallen’s son, David Jr., had told her: your faith was personal, and God didnotneed you defending Him. David Jr. had toldher (and she told Asher) that his divinity professor said it was pointless to use science to argue against the Bible, because if scientific principles governed the universe, then they were, by nature, designed by God. In other words, if it was true, then God was its author, since God wastruth. And if He was all-powerful, why couldn’t He be the one who hung the stars millions of light-years apart? What would time matter to Him? And why couldn’t He be the one to light the spark to the Big Bang? What was thirteen billion years to the Creator of the universe?

Asher had to admit, these were hard points to argue.

Brian came inside then. He avoided eye contact as he marched to a back bedroom and emerged a moment later with a long brown leather bag strapped over his shoulder.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Joanie stepped between him and the door, hands on her hips. “Where are you going with that?”

“Joanie, don’t start with me—”

“Me start? You’re the one walking through the house with a rifle!”

“These people Rhys has got himself balled up with—”

“Rhys got balled up, not you!”

“I’m just going to follow him into town, so he can return the man’s truck and his cell phone. Then we’ll come right back here.”

“I don’t want you involved in this, Brian.”

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