Parable of the Talents

It is to become new beings

And to consider new questions.

It is to leap into the heavens

Again and again.

It is to explore the vastness

Of heaven.

It is to explore the vastness

Of ourselves.

MY FIRST CLEAR MEMORY is of a doll. I was about three years old, maybe four. I don't know where the doll came from. I still don't know. I had never seen one before. I had never been told that they were sinful or forbidden or even that they ex­isted. I suspect now that this doll had been thrown over our fence and abandoned. I found it at the foot of the big pine tree that grew in our backyard.

The doll had been made in the image of an adolescent blond-haired blue-eyed girl. I remember that it was very straight and thin. It was dressed in a scrap of pink cloth. I remember feeling the knot in the back of it where three ends of the scrap were tied over one shoulder and around the waist. The knot was an oddly soft lump against the hard plastic of the doll's body, and as soon as my fingers found it, I began to pick at it Then I chewed on it Then I examined the coarse, yellow hair. It looked like hair, but when I touched it it didn't feel right And it both­ered me that the legs didn't move. They just stuck out stiff, the feet shaped in permanent tiptoes. I didn't know how to play with a doll, but I knew how to look at it feel it taste it, file it away in my memory as one of the new, strange things to come into my world.

Then Kayce was there, snatching the doll from me. When I reached for it, wanting it back, she slapped me. She had come up behind me, seen what was in my hands, and in her sudden rage, lost control. She was a stem disciplinarian, but she rarely hit me. To give her her due, this was the only time I remember her just lashing out at me that way in anger. Maybe that's why I remember it so well.

A man who grew up at the Pelican Bay Christian American Children's Home told me about a Matron who went into a similar rage and killed a child.

Her victim was a seven-year-old boy who had Tourette's syndrome. My informant said, 'We kids didn't know anything about Tburette's syndrome, but we knew this particular kid couldn't help yelling insults and making noises. He didn't mean it Some of us didn't like him. Some of us thought he was crazy. But we all knew he didn't mean the things he yelled out. We knew he couldn't help it. But Matron said he had a devil in him, and she was always screaming at him— every day.

'Then one day she hit him, knocked him into the edge of a kitchen cabinet. He hit the cabinet with his head, and he died.

'I don't believe Matron was sentenced and collared, but she was fired. I just hope that she couldn't find another pro­fessional job and had to indenture herself. One way or another, a person like her should wind up wearing a collar.'

There was a mindless rigidity about some Christian Amer­icans—about the ones who did the most harm. They were so certain that they were right that, like medieval inquisitors, they would kill you, even torture you to death, to save your soul. Kayce wasn't that bad, but she was more rigid and literal-minded than any human being with normal intelli­gence should have been, and I suffered for it.

Anyway, she snatched the doll from me and began slap­ping my face. All the while, she was shouting at me. I was so scared, and screaming so loud myself that I didn't know what she was saying. Looking back now, I know it must have been something to do with idolatry, heathenism, or graven im­ages. Christian America had created whole new categories of sin and expanded old ones. We were not permitted pictures of any kind. Movies and television were forbidden, but some­how Dreamasks were not—although only religious topics were permitted. Later, when I was in school, older kids would pass around secular masks that offered stories of adventure, war, and sex. I had my first pleasurable sexual experience, wearing a deliberately mislabeled Dreamask. The label said 'The Story of Moses.' In fact, it was the story of a girl who had wild sex with her pastor, the deacons, and anyone else she could seduce. I was eleven years old when I discovered that Mask. If Kayce had ever known what it was, she might have done more than just slap my face. I kept the dirty Mask well hidden.

But at three, I hadn't known enough to hide the doll. Only Kayce's reaction told me what a terrible thing it was. She made me watch while she dug a hole in our backyard, put the doll in, covered it with cooking oil and old papers, and burned it. This, she said, was what would happen to me if I went on defying God and working for Satan. I would go down to hell, and what she had done to the doll, the devil would do to me. I remember she made me look at the shapeless blackened plastic lump that the doll had become. She made me hold it, and I cried because it was still hot, and it burned my hand.

'If you think that hurts,' she said, 'you just wait until you get to hell.'