The Talisman

supposed to do the hatchet-job on? We’ve done a hundred and fifty already, we’re experts at smearing the righteous, don’t worry about us, just give us a few joints and a few cocktails and point us in the right direction.’

“But we fooled em, didn’t we, boys?”

Rumbling, almost vicious assent.

“They didn’t find no one chained to a beam in the barn, did they? Didn’t find no boys in strait-jackets, like they heard down in town from some of these hellbound School Board jackals, did they? Didn’t find no boys getting their fingernails pulled, or all their hair shaved off, or nothing like that! Most they could find was some boys who said they got spanked, and they DID get spanked, oh-yeah, they was spanked and I’d testify on that matter myself before the Throne of Almighty God, with a lie-detector strapped to each arm, because the book says if you SPARE that rod, you gonna SPOIL that child, and if you believe that, boys, you gimme hallelujah!”

“HALLELUJAH!”

“Even the Indiana Board of Education, much as they’d like to get rid of me and leave a clear field for the devil, even they had to admit that when it comes to spanking, God’s law and the State of Indiana’s law runs just about the same: that if you SPARE that rod, you gonna SPOIL that child!

“They found HAPPY boys! They found HEALTHY boys! They found boys who were willing to WALK the Lord and TALK the Lord, oh can you say hallelujah?”

They could.

“Can you say oh-yeah?”

They could do that, too.

Sunlight Gardener came back to the podium.

“The Lord protects those that love Him, and the Lord is not gonna see a bunch of dope-smoking, communist- loving radical humanists take away this resting place for tired, confused boys.

“There were a few boys who told tattletale lies to those so-called news-people,” Gardener said. “I heard the lies repeated on that TV news show, and although the boys slinging that mud were too cowardly to show their own faces on the screen, I knew—oh-yeah!—I knew those voices. When you’ve fed a boy, when you’ve held his head tenderly against your breast when he cries for his momma in the night, why, I guess then you know his voice.

“Those boys are gone now. God may forgive them—I hope He does, oh-yeah—but Sunlight Gardener is just a man.”

He hung his head to show what a shameful admission this was. But when he raised it again, his eyes were still hot, sparkling with fury.

“Sunlight Gardener cannot forgive them. So Sunlight Gardener set them out on the road again. They have been sent out into the Territories, but there they shall not be fed; there even the trees may eat them up, like beasts which walk in the night.”

Terrified silence in the room. Behind the glass panel, even Casey looked pallid and strange.

“The Book says that God sent Cain out to the East of Eden, into the land of Nod. Being cast out onto the road is like that, my boys. You have a safe haven here.”

He surveyed them.

“But if you weaken . . . if you lie . . . then woe unto you! Hell awaits the backslider just as it awaits the boy or man who dives into it on purpose.

“Remember, boys.

“Remember.

“Let us pray.”

23

Ferd Janklow

1

It took Jack less than a week to decide that a detour into the Territories was the only way they could possibly escape the Sunlight Home. He was willing to try that, but he found he would do almost anything, run any risk, if only he could avoid flipping from the Sunlight Home itself.

There was no concrete reason for this, only the voice of his undermind whispering that what was bad here would be worse over there. This was, perhaps, a bad place in all worlds . . . like a bad spot in an apple which goes all the way to the core. Anyway, the Sunlight Home was bad enough; he had no urge to see what its Territories counterpart looked like unless he had to.

But there might be a way.

Wolf and Jack and the other boys not lucky enough to be on the Outside Staff—and that was most of them— spent their days in what the long-timers called Far Field. It was about a mile and half down the road, at the edge of Gardener’s property, and there the boys spent their days picking rocks. There was no other field-work to be done at this time of year. The last of the crops had been harvested in mid-October, but as Sunlight Gardener had pointed out each morning in Chapel Devotions, rocks were always in season.

Sitting in the back of one of the Home’s two dilapidated farm-trucks each morning, Jack surveyed Far Field while Wolf sat beside him, head down, like a boy with a hangover. It had been a rainy fall in the midwest, and Far Field was a gluey, sticky, muddy mess. Day before yesterday one of the boys had cursed it under his breath and called it a “real bootsucker.”

Suppose we just take off? Jack thought for the fortieth time. Suppose I just yell “Go for it!” at Wolf and we start busting our buns? Where? North end, where those trees are, and the rock wall. That’s where his land ends.

There might be a fence.