“It doesn’t bother you, brainwashing these kids?” Kyle is murmuring to the pretty young wife. “I mean, they think there’s nothing outside this valley. They think the world ended and they’re all that’s left. They don’t want to hear different.”
“They’re children,” she says. “We know what’s best for children.”
“But you know this is all bullshit, right?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it fucking matters,” Kyle says, but he says it gently, with a finger tracing the curve of her cheek, like he’s telling her that she’s beautiful. “It’s all lies. And the old man —”
She stops his lips with her hand.
“Father knows best,” she says, and looks confused when he starts to laugh.
Maybe, Isaac thinks in the morning, it was a dream, the way his dreams of stabbing his sons, letting their blood run red over his hands, have always been dreams, the way his dreams of his mother and his father returning have always been dreams — the way he sometimes thinks the entire world before was a dream, video games and frozen yogurt machines and skateboards and homework all a collective fantasy that they’ve dreamed up together.
But if it is a dream, it’s one given to him for a reason.
Kyle wants to take a walk with him. But Isaac is an old man, tired and frail — he says. Come sit with me, he says, in the sleeping room of the old compound, where your grandfather and I once slept side by side.
The cots are still there, preserved for posterity, and Kyle perches on one while Isaac takes the other. Isaac remembers museums from before, trooping with his schoolmates through absurdly still rooms, adults frantically shushing them. He remembers a water fight in a bathroom with a cross-eyed boy; he remembers the glory of a dessert cart in the cafeteria, all you can eat; he doesn’t remember, has never been able to remember, what was encased behind all those panes of glass, and what was the point. He supposes that this museum will be its own kind of bible someday, telling its story after the storytellers are gone.
“I’m leaving,” Kyle says.
Isaac is too old to pretend at surprise. Does anyone ever do anything else?
He is an old man, but a cagey one, and he says to Kyle no, don’t.
“You’re my nephew,” Isaac says. “You have family here.”
Kyle shakes his head. “I don’t know what I was looking for, Isaac, but . . . this isn’t it.”
“What, then?”
“I miss him, I guess,” Kyle says. “My grandpa. Your dad. It’s funny, if you think about it. He raised us both. I guess I always thought of us as kind of like brothers, you and me. And maybe I thought — it’s stupid.”
“What?” Isaac prods, though he is hardly listening, his mind fixed on the word, brothers, the shape of things coming clear.
“You came first, you know? I’ve always been kind of jealous of that. You knew this whole different part of him. Maybe the real him? And he loved you first. Maybe he loved you best, even if he was a total shit to you, leaving you like that.”
“As he had to.”
“Uh huh. Yeah. The firstborn. That’s something. He was a good dad to my dad, I think, but I get the sense he never liked the guy very much. I guess I always wondered . . . I don’t fucking know what I wondered, okay? I thought you’d be more like him, or you’d be more like me, or we could be, like I said, brothers. Family’s more than blood, that’s what your dad always said. Maybe he was trying to tell me about ‘the Children,’ or whatever without actually telling me, I don’t know. Maybe he was trying to warn me not to come find you. I’m glad I did, though, Isaac. Maybe I needed to know you. Who knows, maybe your God brought me here, wanted you to know me, right?” He holds out his hand. “Brothers?”
All this time, Isaac has been trying to figure out what story he’s in, how events are meant to unfold. All this time, he’s had it wrong, distracted by the tangle of fathers and sons, nephews and wives.
Brothers.
Two brothers, one favored by his God, the other wandering in cold wilderness, envious and lost. One brother who was a shepherd of his flock and one who was rejected, and dreamed of usurping all his brother possessed: life and land and legacy. One who spoke the truth and one who used deception to gain the advantage, who said walk with me in the field and disguised love as its opposite. Both born to the father of all men, neither his brother’s keeper.
He feels foolish that he hasn’t seen it before now, and thanks God for this chance to put the ancient story right. This time, in this new world, the righteous brother is not so easily led to the slaughter. This time, the right brother will live.
Isaac’s bible, like its predecessors, is part history and part law. Such are the edicts of Isaac’s God:
Children shall ask questions, but only three at a time, and only these three shall be answered.
Man shall join with woman as determined by the will of the Father, and these pairings shall not be put asunder.
Honor thy Father.
Know thy edible mushrooms and berries, for they will sustain you in the wilderness.
Isaac’s God is a practical God.
Keep a store of six months’ worth of food, dried and canned and preserved from damp.
Keep herds separated, in case of plague.
Keep your weapon in working order and in reach.
Isaac’s house has many rooms, and in each room, Isaac has a gun. He keeps one in this compound, too, one the Children know nothing about, cached beneath his old cot, that sacred artifact none of the Children would dare touch.
He hears Kyle saying things like no and wait and what are you doing and again, more than once, no, but the voice is a stranger’s and the words easily swatted away.
Over them, he hears instead, finally, the word of the Lord.
He can sense the fog descending again, and recognizes it now as his reward for long service and one final, righteous act, and he raises the weapon and prepares for God to welcome him home.
Thomas and Joseph are the first to find the body. They’ve been keeping an eye on their father; they’ve been keeping an eye on the stranger; they know where and when to look.
They were hoping things would turn in this direction, though they were hoping the turn would be tidier.
“Now what?” Joseph asks Thomas. Joseph is older, but Thomas is smarter, and they’ve both come to terms with this.
“Now we deal with dear old Dad,” Thomas says. The old man has always liked him better, and they’ve come to terms with that, too. Once they did, it made everything easier. As long as they played the roles Isaac set for them, the old man believed he knew his sons.
The stranger who’s been fucking Thomas’s wife is gutshot and, from the look of things, took a good while to die. Thomas wishes that Isaac had shot him in the groin, and considers doing it now, for good measure.
Joseph, the firstborn, who actually loves his father, wishes the old man hadn’t pissed his pants. It’s an undignified way for him to go.
“Where am I?” the old man says, kneeling in the puddle of blood.
He got old fast, their father. Or maybe they were just so used to seeing him as he began, too young, that they didn’t notice the change until it was too late.
He got old fast, but not fast enough. Thomas feels like he’s been waiting for this moment forever.