“Yeah. I tried to read your
“You speak some of it?”
“I did take it in high school. Don’t remember anything but bits and snatches. But I recognized the Lord’s Prayer.”
“Read Revelations in the Bible again. Depressing.”
I put my back up against the wall, curled my arms around my knees. “Do you think that’s what’s happening? The Rapture?”
“If so, it would be a funny kind of Rapture, with all the holy folks kept on earth, don’t you think?”
“I suppose. But it still feels like the end.”
“Since neither one of us contemplates God having a perverse sense of humor like that, I’m gonna have to stick with ‘don’t know’ as an answer. At least until the Four Horsemen show up. Then I’ll revise my opinion.”
“Do you . . . do you believe in God?” I asked. Everyone I knew did, even Outsiders like Ginger, but I couldn’t tell if Alex did.
His eyes narrowed in thought. “I think I do, after a fashion. I’ve just never had any personal experiences with a god. God has never spoken to me like he apparently spoke to Joan of Arc. I’ve never seen an angel or gotten a warm, fuzzy feeling in a church.”
“God has never spoken to me, either.”
“No angels?”
“No.”
“How about the fuzzy feeling in church?”
“Sometimes, when we’re singing. It feels like there’s some kind of spirit there. It’s hard to explain. You can feel it moving through you, buzzing around you. It’s like . . . when the locusts come up in summer, and you can feel the vibration in the ground.”
He seemed to chew on that for a while, handed the jar back to me. “Most cultures do pick one or more deities, so the prevalence of the idea suggests that it could be real.”
“Hmm. It wouldn’t be easy to follow the edicts of more than one god. One is difficult enough.” I couldn’t believe I’d said that aloud, but here, in the small circle of light in the falling darkness, I felt like I could be honest.
Alex plucked a comic book from the stack. “Wonder Woman has a whole pantheon to please.”
“Well, not
“Ares was like that. He was the god of war. That was his shtick. But Athena and Aphrodite and Hera have her back.”
“It’s all fiction anyway.”
“Hera and Aphrodite were gods that people actually worshipped for centuries.”
“I could never imagine that.”
“Imagine having a pantheon of gods?”
“Well, that. That and being able to call upon a god and . . . and to have them help you.” My voice sounded very small.
“Yep. A lot of older Western religions tend to buy into the idea that God is the clock-maker. He sets the clock of the world in motion and then steps away from it. He created the world and let it run.”
I rested my chin on my hand, considering. “
“A lot of old pagan religions and some of what I call the shake-your-pocketbook forms of Protestantism believe that God can be appeased or bribed to grant favors. There’s a whole idea that God is really concerned with personal happiness and he’ll make you happy and shower you with riches if you tithe enough.”
“We don’t take up collections, except on rare occasions. Baptisms, yes. Money goes to buy church benches and things like that. When there’s a death or when someone’s house burns down, yes. The money then goes to the family or for building materials.”
“Yeah, but you Amish don’t have a physical church with big television screens and sound systems and a pastor who feels that God wants him to have a Mercedes. You guys don’t have to support all that.”
“Hmm. I can’t see how God would need money.” Nor could I imagine what place a television would have in a church.
“Yeah. That’s my issue with a lot of organized religions, anyway.”
I lifted a dubious eyebrow to him. “But Ginger says that many different religions were saved.”
He nodded. “Yeah. Sounds like it. But if the human race survives, I’d be tempted to see if there’s any statistical analysis done on whether megachurches were safe from vampires. To see if God really is indiscriminate.”
“Will you also include the pagan church in the strip mall?”
“Yep. I’d study that. See if yelling, ‘Hera, help me!’ actually worked against the vamps.” He put his wrists together as if flashing magic bracelets against an assailant.
I smiled. “It worked for Wonder Woman.”
“Yeah, well, Hera had a lot on her plate. I’m amazed that she had time to spend helping Diana out.”
“Well, being queen of Mount Olympus must have had a good deal of responsibility.”
“There’s that, sure. But I think she was busiest keeping an eye on Zeus.”
“Oh?” I’d never seen Zeus appear in the comic books.
Alex scraped the bottom of the empty applesauce jar to get the last of the cinnamon from the bottom. “Zeus was a ladies’ man, always chasing women and siring illegitimate children. He’d even go so far as to take the form of a swan or bull to seduce women.”
“Ew.”
“Yeah. That’s how he got Hera. He took the form of a wounded cuckoo, one of her favorite birds. She felt sorry for it, picked it up off the ground, and the next thing you know, Zeus is up her skirt and on her.”
I wrapped my arms tighter around my knees. “Lovely.”
Alex continued, “Zeus was never satisfied with having one woman. He was really the scariest serial rapist of the ancient world. He had dozens of children with other women: Hercules, Aphrodite, the three Fates, Apollo and his sister Artemis, Perseus, the three Graces, all nine Muses . . . he was a busy beaver.”
I shuddered. Though the Amish had many children and did not use birth control, we didn’t violate one another like that. It seemed the very definition of evil.
“Hera was understandably the jealous sort. She was the goddess of marriage and unable to keep her own marriage together. She heckled Hercules for years, starting with sending serpents to kill him in his crib. When Zeus loved Lamia, a queen of Libya, Hera murdered her children and turned her into a monster.”
I squirmed. I was a bit uncomfortable hearing this, these tales of other gods. But I convinced myself that they were simply fiction. Like Wonder Woman. None of the Greek gods were swooping in to save the earth from vampire attacks. But the thrill of hearing this bit of blasphemy quickened my blood.
“My favorite myth about her, though, was the story of Io. Io was a priestess of Hera who’d caught Zeus’s wandering eye. Io wanted nothing to do with him and rejected his advances. Zeus then sent the oracles to pester Io’s father, who eventually kicked her out of the house. Poor Io was walking through the fields alone when Zeus came upon her and tried to seduce her.
“Hera very nearly walked in on this. To avoid being caught, Zeus transformed Io into a very beautiful white cow.
“Hera, however, was familiar with Zeus’s shape-changing tricks and demanded that Io be given to her as a gift. Zeus was stuck between a rock and a hard place; he handed the cow over to Hera.
“Hera, determined to keep Zeus and his would-be mistress separated, gave the cow to a giant named Argus the All-Seeing. Io was chained to a sacred olive tree at one of Hera’s temples. Argus was a pretty good guard, since he had a hundred eyes and never closed all of them. He could sleep with a few of them open at any time.”
“What happened to Io? I mean . . . I imagine that Zeus moved on to the next conquest.” I rested my chin on my knee. No one had really told me stories since I was a child. I knew all the old biblical stories by heart. This was new. While reading was a common pastime among Plain folk, that interest rarely extended into fiction. The dogs
