"Don't jump," Fertility is saying.
She's saying, "I'll find you. I know where you're going."
For one instant, she almost makes it. Fertility almost reaches Adam's hand, but when he makes his grab to pull her inside, their hands miss.
Almost miss. Adam opens his hand, and inside is the tube of Chap Stick.
And Fertility has fallen back into the dark and the past behind us.
Fertility is gone. We must be going sixty miles an hour by now, and Adam turns and throws the tube at me so hard it ricochets off two walls. Adam snarls, "I hope you're happy now. I hope your lips recover."
The dining-room china cabinet comes open and dishes, salad plates, soup tureens, dinner plates, stemware, and cups bounce and roll out the front doors. All this smashes in the street. All this leaves a wide trail behind us sparkling in the moonlight.
Nobody is running behind us, and Adam wrestles a console color television with surround sound and near-digital picture quality toward the door. With a shout he shoves it off the front porch. Then he shoves a velvet love seat off the porch. Then the spinet piano. Everything explodes when it hits the road.
Then he looks at me.
Stupid, weak, desperate me, I'm groveling on the floor trying to find the Chap Stick.
His teeth bared, his hair hanging in his face, Adam says, "I should throw you out that door."
Then a sign goes by saying, Nebraska 98 miles.
And a smile, slow and creepy, cuts across Adam's face. He staggers to the open front doors, and with the night wind howling around him he shouts.
"Fertility Hollis!" he shouts.
"Thank you!" he shouts.
Into the darkness behind us, all the darkness and scraps and glass and wreckage behind us, Adam shouts, "I won't forget everything you told me must happen!"
The night before we get home, I tell my big brother everything I can remember about the Creedish church district.
In the church district, we raised everything we ate. The wheat and eggs and the sheep and cattle. I remember we tended perfect orchards and caught sparkling rainbow trout in the river.
We're on the back porch of a Casa Castile going sixty miles an hour through the Nebraska night down Interstate 80. A Casa Castile has cut-glass sconces on every wall and gold-plated fixtures in the bathroom, but no power or water. Everything is beautiful but none of it works.
"No electricity and no running water," Adam says. "It's just like when we were kids."
We're sitting on the back porch with our legs hanging over the edge and the pavement rushing under. The stinking diesel exhaust from the truck eddies around us.
In the Creedish church district, I tell Adam, people lived simple, fulfilling lives. We were a steadfast and proud people. Our air and water were clean. Our days were useful. Our nights were absolute. That's what I remember.
That's why I don't want to go back.
Nothing will be there except the Tender Branson Sensitive Materials Sanitary Landfill. How it will look, the stored-up years of pornography from all over the country sent here to rot, I don't want to see firsthand. The agent showed me the receipts. Tons of smut, dump trucks and hoppers full, garbage trucks and boxcars full of smut, were arriving there every month, where bulldozers spread it three feet deep across all twenty thousand acres.
I don't want to see that. I don't want Adam to see that, but Adam still has his gun, and I don't have Fertility here to tell me if it's loaded or not. Besides, I'm pretty used to getting told what to do. Where to go. How to act.
My new job is to follow Adam.
So we're going back to the church district. In Grand Island, we'll steal a car, Adam says. We'll get to the valley just around sunrise, Adam predicts. It's just a matter of hours. We'll be getting home on a Sunday morning.
Both of us looking out into the dark behind us and everything we've lost so far, Adam says, "What else do you remember?"
Everything in the church district was always clean. The roads were always in good repair. The summers were long and mild with rain every ten days. I remember the winters were peaceful and serene. I remember sorting seed we picked from marigolds and sunflowers. I remember splitting wood.
Adam asks, "Do you remember my wife?"
Not really.
"She wasn't much to remember," Adam says. The gun's in his hands on his lap or I wouldn't be sitting here. "She was a Biddy Gleason. We should've been very happy together."
Until someone called the government and started the investigation.
"We should've bred a dozen children and made money hand over fist," Adam said.
Until the county sheriff was there asking about documentation for every child.
"We should've gotten old on that farm with every year just like the year before it."
Until the FBI launched its investigation.
"We should both have been church elders some day," Adam says.
Until the Deliverance.
"Until the Deliverance."
I remember life was calm and peaceful in the district valley. The cows and chickens all running free. The laundry hanging outside to dry. The smell of hay in the barn. Apple pies cooling on every windowsill. I remember it was a perfect way of life.
Adam looks at me and shakes his head.
He says, "That's how stupid you are."
How Adam looks in the dark is how I'd look if none of this chaos had ever happened to me. Adam is what Fertility would call a control group of me. If I'd never been baptized and sent into the outside world, if I'd never been famous and blown out of proportion, that would be me with Adam's simple blue eyes and clean blond hair. My shoulders would be squared and regular-sized. My manicured hands with clear polish on the nails would be his strong hands. My chapped lips would be like his. My back would be straight. My heart would be his heart.
Adam looks out into the dark and says, "I destroyed them."
The Creedish survivors.
"No," Adam says. "All of them. The entire district colony. I called the police. I left the valley one night and walked until I found a telephone."
There were birds in every Creedish tree, I remember. And we caught crawdads by tying a lump of bacon fat to a string and dropping it into the creek. When we pulled it out, the fat would be covered with crawdads.
"I must have pressed zero on the telephone," Adam says, "but I asked for the sheriff. I told someone who answered that only one out of every twenty Creedish children had a valid birth certificate. I told him the Creedish hid their children from the government."
The horses, I remember. We had teams of horses to plow with and pull buggies. And we called them by their color because it was a sin to give an animal a name.
"I told them the Creedish abused their children and didn't pay taxes on most of their income," Adam says. "I told them the Creedish were lazy and shiftless. I told them, to Creedish parents, their children were their income. Their children were chattel."
The icicles hanging on houses, I remember. The pumpkins. The harvest bonfires.
"I started the investigation," Adam says.
The singing in church, I remember. The quilting. The barn raisings.
"I left the colony that night and never went back," Adam says.
Being cherished and cared for, I remember.
"We never had any horses. The couple chickens and pigs we had were just for show," Adam says. "You were always in school. You just remember what they taught you Creedish life was like a hundred years ago. Hell, a century ago everybody had horses."
Being happy and belonging, I remember.
Adam says, "There were no black Creedish. The Creedish elders were a pack of racist, sexist white slavers."