“God wants to know how far you’ll go to undo the harm you’ve done.”
“But He wouldn’t really make me follow through with it,” Ian said.
“How else would He know, then?”
“Wait,” Ian said. “You’re saying God would want me to give up my education. Change all my parents’ plans for me and give up my education.”
“Yes, if that’s what’s required,” Reverend Emmett said.
“But that’s crazy! I’d have to be crazy!”
“ ‘Let us not love in word, neither in tongue,’ ” Reverend Emmett said, “ ‘but in deed and in truth.’ First John three, eighteen.”
“I can’t take on a bunch of kids! Who do you think I am? I’m nineteen years old!” Ian said. “What kind of a cockeyed religion is this?”
“It’s the religion of atonement and complete forgiveness,” Reverend Emmett said. “It’s the religion of the Second Chance.”
Then he set the hymnals on the counter and turned to offer Ian a beatific smile. Ian thought he had never seen anyone so absolutely at peace.
“I don’t understand,” his mother said.
“What’s to understand? It’s simple,” Ian told her. “What you mean is, you don’t approve.”
“Well, of course she doesn’t approve,” his father said. “Neither one of us approves. No one in his right mind would approve. Here you are, attending a perfectly decent college which you barely got into by the skin of your teeth, incidentally; you’ve had no complaints about the place that your mother or I are aware of; you’re due back this Sunday evening to begin your second semester and what do you up and tell us? You’re dropping out.”
“I’m taking a leave of absence,” Ian said.
They were sitting in the dining room late Friday night — much too late to have only then finished supper, but Daphne had developed an earache and what with one thing and another it had somehow got to be nine P.M. before they’d put the children in bed. Now Bee, having risen to clear the table, sank back into her chair. Doug shoved his plate away and leaned his elbows on the table. “Just tell me this,” he said to Ian. “How long do you expect this leave of absence to last?”
“Oh, maybe till Daphne’s in first grade. Or kindergarten, at least,” Ian said.
“Daphne? What’s Daphne got to do with it?”
“The reason I’m taking a leave is to help Mom raise the kids.”
“Me?” his mother cried. “I’m not raising those children! We’re looking for a guardian! First we’ll find Lucy’s people and then I know there’ll be someone, some young couple maybe who would just love to—”
“Mom,” Ian said. “You know the chances of that are getting slimmer all the time.”
“I know nothing of the sort! Or an aunt, maybe, or—”
Doug said, “Well, he’s got a point, Bee. You’ve been running yourself ragged with those kids.”
Contrarily, Ian felt a pinch of alarm. Would his father really let him go through with this?
His mother said, “And anyway, how about the draft? You’ll be drafted the minute you leave school.”
“If I am, I am,” Ian told her, “but I don’t think I will be. I think God will take care of that.”
“Who?”
“And I do plan to pay my own way,” he said. “I’ve already found a job.”
“Doing what?” his father asked. “Moving poor folks’ furniture?”
“Building furniture.”
They peered at him.
“I’ve made arrangements with this cabinetmaker,” Ian said. “I’ve seen him at work and I asked if I could be his apprentice.”
Student, was the way he’d finally put it. Having sought out the cabinetmaker in that apartment full of china crates and mothballs, he had plunged into the subject of apprenticeship only to be met with a baffled stare. The man had sat back on his heels and studied Ian’s lips. “Apprentice,” Ian had repeated, enunciating carefully. “Pupil.”
“People?” the man had asked. Two furrows stitched themselves across his leathery forehead.
“I already have some experience,” Ian said. “I used to help my father in the basement. I know I could build a kitchen cabinet.”
“I dislike kitchens,” the man said harshly.
For a moment, Ian thought he still hadn’t made himself clear. But the man went on: “They’re junk. See this hinge.” He pointed to it — an ornately curlicued piece of black metal, dimpled all over with artificial hammer marks. “My real work is furniture,” he said.
“Fine,” Ian told him. What did he care? Kitchen cabinets, furniture, it was all the same to him: inanimate objects. Something he could deal with that he couldn’t mess up. Or if he did mess up, it was possible to repair the damage.
“I have a workshop. I make things I like,” the man said. He spoke like anyone else except for a certain insistence of tone, a thickness in the consonants, as if he had a cold. “These kitchens, they’re just for the money.”
“That’s okay! That’s fine! And as for money,” Ian said, “you could pay me minimum wage. Or lower, to start with, because I’m just an apprentice. Student,” he added, for he saw now that it was the uncommon word “apprentice” that had given him trouble. “And any time you have to do a kitchen, you could send me instead.”
He knew he had a hope, then. He could tell by the wistful, visionary look that slowly dawned in the man’s gray eyes.
But were his parents impressed with Ian’s initiative? No. They just sat there blankly. “It’s not brute labor, after all,” he told them. “It’s a craft! It’s like an art.”
“Ian,” his father said, “if you’re busy learning this … art, how will you help with the kids?”
“I’ll work out a schedule with my boss,” Ian said. “Also there’s this church that’s going to pitch in.”
“This what?”
“Church.”
They tilted their heads.
“There’s this … it’s kind of hard to explain,” he said. “This church sort of place on York Road, see, that believes you have to really do something practical to atone for your, shall we call them, sins. And if you agree to that, they’ll pitch in. You can sign up on a bulletin board — the hours you need help, the hours you’ve got free to help others—”
“What in the name of God …?” Bee asked.
“Well, that’s just it,” Ian said. “I mean, I don’t want to sound corny or anything but it is in the name of God. ‘Let us not love in—’ what—‘in just words or in tongue, but in—’ ”
“Ian, have you fallen into the hands of some sect?” his father asked.
“No, I haven’t,” Ian said. “I have merely discovered a church that makes sense to me, the same as Dober Street Presbyterian makes sense to you and Mom.”
“Dober Street didn’t ask us to abandon our educations,” his mother told him. “Of course we have nothing against religion; we raised all of you children to be Christians. But our church never asked us to abandon our entire way of life.”
“Well, maybe it should have,” Ian said.
His parents looked at each other.
His mother said, “I don’t believe this. I do not believe it. No matter how long I’ve been a mother, it seems my children can still come up with something new and unexpected to do to me.”
“I’m not doing this to you! Why does everything have to relate to you all the time? It’s for me, can’t you get that into your head? It’s something I have to do for myself, to be forgiven.”
“Forgiven what, Ian?” his father asked.
Ian swallowed.
“You’re nineteen years old, son. You’re a fine, considerate, upstanding human being. What sin could you possibly be guilty of that would require you to uproot your whole existence?”