Page 2 of Goodbye Paradise
Caleb sees the outside world, though. He’s the first born grandson of an elder, and therefore has a much better standing than I do. He has a valid birth certificate and — even better — a driver’s license. Once a week or so the elders send him out to the post office or to the feed store. Once they sent him to Wal-Mart, and he came back with lots of colorful stories of what he saw there. Bright television screens (we didn’t have any at Paradise, but we’d seen them when we were younger), crazy clothing, and all kinds of food in plastic packages.
There were no stories for me today, though. We couldn’t gossip on a bean harvest day, because there were too many others around to hear us. Though it was nice to be near Caleb. I could even hear the tune he kept humming under his breath.
Singing was not allowed. Caleb was very good at following the rules, but music was his downfall. Some of the compound trucks still had their radios. And since Caleb was handy with engines (and branding cattle, and the ancient tractor, and all the stuff I could never seem to manage) he was often asked to do mechanical maintenance. Even though it was risky, when he worked alone he would sometimes play the radio.
I couldn’t tell which tune he had stuck in his head today, because only little bits of it escaped. But even those breathy sounds made me want to lean in. I wished I could put a hand on his chest and feel the vibration when he hummed.
My head gave a brand new throb of pain, and I dropped some flaky pieces of chaff into the bucket, and had to fish them out.
* * *
The day endedbefore the never-ending bean field, which meant that we’d have to come back again tomorrow. Carrying my last ungainly bucket, I felt oddly exhausted. I stumbled, nearly spilling all those ill-gotten beans on the ground.
Ezra, the evilest of the bachelors, came running over — but not to help. Instead, he laughed in my face. “The little faggot can’t even carry the beans.”
Do not react, I cautioned myself.
Ezra used the wordfaggotwhenever he felt like it, and not always on me. But I knew what it meant, and when he said it I always felt transparent.
That’s when Caleb arrived at my side, setting down his own bucket without a word. He just loomed there, a quiet wall of support.
Ezra grinned in that mean way he had. “Why do you help the little faggot, anyway? People gonna talk.”
My blood was ice, then. Our whole lives, Caleb had been taking heat for helping me. To hear such ugliness come from Ezra’s mouth terrified me. Because if, even for a second, people believed the things that he had just implied about Caleb? I woulddieof unhappiness. My sin was my own, and I couldn’t stand to see that ugliness tainting my friend.
Luckily, Caleb had both parentage and competence on his side. He always shook off Ezra’s taunts. When he spoke, his tone was mild. “I help everyone, Ezra,” he said. “Even you. Christian charity? You ever heard of that? You been sleeping through Sunday mass?”
At that, Caleb picked upbothour buckets and carried them to the truck. He lifted them as if they weighed no more than two chickens.
* * *
Then it was dinner time, thank the Lord. My headache had spread down my neck and across my shoulders. For once in my stupid life, food did not even sound very appealing.
But I took my seat as usual at the end of a bench in our bunkhouse common room.
All the bachelors lived together. Usually around age sixteen, boys moved out of their family houses and into the bunkhouse. There were, at present, twenty-seven family houses on the compound, though the number went up by one or two houses each year. Each house held one man’s family, which meant they were crowded. Since each man had several wives, there were lots of children, too.
Teenage boys were very useful for farm work, of course. But the men did not like having their grown sons in the house. They took up too much space, for one. But also, it was not fit to have lusty young men share a roof with so many women. Since the girls in Paradise were married off at seventeen or eighteen, that meant that the youngest wives were often the same age as the bachelors.
Boys, on the other hand, could never marry as teenagers. The difficulty with polygamy was the imbalance. I had worked this out at a very young age, and naturally kept my conclusions to myself. But if a man deserves four or five wives, and women have boys fifty percent of the time, there are always far too many boys.
A boy in Paradise could expect to wait until he was in his twenties to marry. That gave the compound more than a decade of his farm labor while he tried desperately to prove himself worthy of his own wife and home.
Evil Ezra was twenty-four already, and probably the next in line to settle down. (I couldn’t wait to see him go, even though he wouldn’t go far.) In our bunkhouse there were twelve men over the age of twenty. Caleb turned twenty last month. I would turn twenty come springtime. There were a slew of teens, too.
Owing to the math, many of us would never get the chance to marry. But neither would we be welcome to stay on. Five years from now, quite a few of my bunkhouse roommates would be gone from Paradise. Some would run away, but many would be kicked out.
Nobody spoke of this practice, of course. There were many, many idiosyncrasies at Paradise that were not to be mentioned aloud, but the throwing away of half our young men was the ugliest one.
And here’s a sad thing—it often took Caleb and me a day or two tonoticethat someone had gone missing. We might hear a bachelor say at lunch, “where has Zachariah been today?”
And the question would be met with deep silence.
Then, a day or two later, a story would begin to circulate. Zachariah had been caught behind the tool shed with one of the daughters. Or, Zachariah had worshipped the devil. There was always a crime that was responsible for his downfall. And the crime did not need to sound original, or even plausible. Those who disappeared weren’t around to defend themselves. The ones who disappeared, however, were often the most dispensable among us. The weak and the slow. The ones whose labor would not be missed too badly.
The boys who disappeared looked a lot like me.
Caleb sat down on the bench beside me, folding his big hands in a typical gesture of patience. Whereas I was a pile of nerves, he was a calm giant. His body language was always serene. It was only when I looked into his eyes that I sometimes saw anxiety flickering there. That always gave me a start.
