Then they hang up. They never have to remind me to do anything. They just have to have the last word.
No sweat off my back.
The caseworker is fanning her fresh red nails back and forth in front of her mouth and blowing them dry. Between long exhales, she asks, 'Your family?'
She blows her nails.
She asks, 'Your own mother?'
She blows her nails.
'Do you remember your mother?'
She blows her nails.
'Do you think she felt anything?'
She blows her nails.
'I mean, when she killed herself?'
Matthew, Chapter Twenty-four, Verse Thirteen:
According to my daily planner, I should be cleaning the air conditioner filter. I should be dusting the green living room. There's the brass doorknobs to polish. There's all the old newspapers to recycle.
The hour is almost up, and what I never got to talk about was Fertility Hollis. How we met at the mausoleum. We walked around for an hour, and she told me about different twentieth-century art. movements and how they depicted Jesus crucified. In the oldest wing of the mausoleum, the wing called Contentment, Jesus is gaunt and romantic with a woman's huge wet eyes and long eyelashes. In the wing built in the 1930s, Jesus is a Social Realist with huge superhero muscles. In the forties, in the Serenity wing, Jesus becomes an abstract assembly of planes and cubes. The fifties Jesus is polished fruitwood, a Danish Modern skeleton. The sixties Jesus is pegged together out of driftwood.
There's no seventies wing, and in the eighties wing, there's no Jesus, just the same secular green polished marble and brass you'd find in a department store.
Fertility talked about art and we wandered through Contentment, Serenity, Peace, Joy, Salvation, Rapture, and Enchantment.
She told me her name was Fertility Hollis.
I told her to call me Tender Branson. That's as close as I have to a real name name.
Every week from now on, she's going to visit her brother's crypt. That's where she promised to be next Wednesday.
The caseworker asks, 'It's been ten years. Why don't you ever want to open up and share any feelings about your dead family?'
I'm sorry, I tell her, but I really need to get back to work. I tell her our hour is up.
Before it's too late, before we get too close to my plane crash, I need to explain about my name. Tender Branson. It's not really a name. It's more of a rank. It's the same as somebody in another culture naming a child Lieutenant Smith or Bishop Jones. Or Governor Brown. Or Doctor Moore. Sheriff Peterson.
The only names in Creedish culture were family names. The family name came from the husband. A family name was the way to claim property. The family name was a label.
My family name is Branson.
My rank is Tender Branson. It's the lowest rank.
The caseworker asked one time if the family name wasn't a kind of endorsement or a curse when sons and daughters were contracted for work in the outside world.
Since the suicides, people in the outside world have the same lurid picture of Creedish culture that my brother, Adam, had of them.
In the outside world, my brother told me, people were as reckless as animals and fornicated with strangers on the street.
These days, people in the outside world will ask me if certain family names brought higher prices. Did some family names bring lower labor contract prices?
These people usually go on to ask if some Creedish fathers would impregnate their daughters to increase cash flow. They'll ask if the Creedish children who weren't allowed to marry were castrated, meaning was I. They'll ask if Creedish sons masturbated or went with farm animals or sodomized each other, meaning do I.
Did I. Was I.
Strangers will ask me to my face if I'm a virgin.
I don't know. I forget. Or the entire issue is none of your business.
For the record, my brother Adam Branson was my older brother by three minutes and thirty seconds, but by Creedish standards it could've been years.
Since Creedish doctrine didn't recognize a second-place finisher.
In every family, the firstborn son was named Adam, and it was Adam Branson who would inherit our land in the church district colony.
All sons after Adam were named Tender. In the Branson family that makes me one of at least eight Tender Bransons my parents released to be labor missionaries.
All daughters, the first through the last, were named Biddy.
Tenders are workers who tend.
Biddies do your bidding.
It's a good guess that both words are slang, nicknames for longer traditional names, but I don't know what.
I know that if the church elders chose a Biddy Branson to marry the Adam of another family, her first name, really her rank, changed to Author.
When she married Adam Maxton, Biddy Branson would become Author Maxton.
The parents of that Adam Maxton were also called Adam and Author Maxton, until their just-married son and his wife had a child. After that, you addressed both members of the older couple as Elder Maxton.
Most couples, by the time her firstborn son had his first child, the female Elder Maxton would be dead from having child after child after child.
Almost all the church elders were men. A man could become a church elder by the time he was thirty-five if he was quick enough.
It wasn't complicated.
It was nothing compared to the outside world and its ranking system of parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, all of them with their own first names.
In Creedish culture, your name told everybody just where you belonged. Tender or Biddy. Adam or Author. Or Elder. Your name told you just how your life would go.
People ask if I'm ever mad that I lost the right to own property and raise a family just because my brother was three and a half minutes ahead of me. And I've learned to tell them yes. That's what people in the outside world want to hear. But it's not true. I've never been mad.
This would be the same as getting angry over the idea that if you had been born with longer fingers you might be a concert violinist.
It's the same as wishing that your parents had been taller, thinner, stronger, happy. There are details in the past you have no control over.
The truth is, Adam was born first. And maybe Adam envied me because I would get to go out and see the outside world. While I was packing to leave, Adam was getting married to a Biddy Gleason he'd hardly met.
It was the body of church elders who kept elaborate charts of who'd married which biddy from which family so that what people in the outside world call 'cousins' never married. Every generation as the Adams started turning seventeen, the church elders met to assign them wives as far from their family history as possible. Every generation, there was a season of marriages. There were almost forty families in the church district colony, and every generation almost every family would have at-home weddings and parties. For a tender or a biddy, a wedding season was something you'd watch only from around the edges.
If you were a biddy, it was something you might dream of happening to you.
If you were a tender, you didn't dream.
