snow by making snow for my model world. There is a world in my room made of rubbish. I made snow for it and then it really did snow, do you remember?
After that I made it snow again and then I made it stop snowing. Then I brought back our neighbor’s cat and then I punished a boy at school. But now he is knocking at our house all the time and yesterday his dad threatened Father in the Co-op and called him a “scab.”
I chewed the end of the pencil.
The police are not helping. Nobody believes I have done any miracles. I should say also that I have heard God’s voice on numerous occasions.
“Cross that out,” said God.
“I don’t want to.”
“It’s dangerous,” said God.
“But I’ve only got one piece of paper.”
“Cross it out!”
I crossed the sentence out.
The thing is, now I don’t know whether to try and make more miracles or not. Having power is not as easy as it looks.
You said that all we needed to do was take the first step, but now I don’t know what to do next, and it doesn’t look like I can go back to where I began.
Then Father shouted: “Dinner!” and I folded the letter up and put it inside my journal, put them both under the floorboard, and went downstairs.
A BIT LATER we were pondering the Fall of Man, which happened six thousand years ago—two thousand years from us to Jesus, Father said, and four thousand years from Jesus to Adam—and I was pondering the reason I had to eat bitter greens again and not saying anything at all. My face must have though, because Father said: “There are thousands of African children who would be only too glad of that dinner.” I was about to say: “Then I wish we could send it to them,” when we heard the sound of smashing in the hall.
Father said: “Stay here,” and went out.
I didn’t hear anything for so long that in the end I got up and went into the hall. The first thing that hit me was a gust of wind and rain. The second thing was that Father was standing with his back to me, and at his feet there were pieces of stained glass, in the midst of the glass was a brick, and where the stained-glass picture had been in the front door, there was a large hole. Beyond the hole was the night.
Father cleared his throat. He said: “Go back into the kitchen please.”
I sat by the Rayburn and drew my knees up and put my chin on them. I said to God: “Please help Father.”
In the hall I heard Father say: “I’d like to report a smashed window…. Yes … my front door … About five minutes ago … No, not now.”
I peered into the Rayburn. The coals flickered and glimmered, but in the heart of them, where they were palest, they were perfectly still.
“I want someone here now,” Father was saying. “I’ve reported other incidents and nothing’s been done…. No, you listen. I’ve got a ten-year-old daughter—”
There were caverns in the fire. There were gullies and canyons and ravines. I imagined I was journeying to the center of the earth. Heat lapped at my cheeks. Heat sealed up my lips. I closed my eyes and heat bathed them.
Father went on talking. I went further into the fire. It was like being beautifully dead or asleep. My face began to sting, but I didn’t move away. This was how a star felt, I thought, and what were stars but furnaces eating themselves up, then falling inward, getting redder and redder and cooler and cooler until nothing was left but a heap of gray ash?
A click told me Father had put the phone down. I pulled my chair back. When he came into the kitchen, you wouldn’t have been able to tell from his voice that anything had happened. He said he was going to clean up this mess and then we would continue with our Bible reading.
He wouldn’t let me help. I watched from the kitchen doorway as he pushed the glass into a dustpan. I watched him wrap it so the garbagemen wouldn’t cut themselves. I watched him sweep the floor, then run his hand over it to see if there were any pieces he had missed. “Don’t walk around in socks for a few weeks,” he said.
“OK,” I said. And then I looked up and screamed.
A face was peering through the hole in the front door, a wobbling white face with red lips and black hair and a plastic rain cap. Father jumped too. He said: “Mrs. Pew!”
“Oh, John! I saw it all!” Mrs. Pew said. She appeared to be dissolving. Small black snakes were making their way down her forehead, and her head was wobbling fantastically. “Three boys on bikes!”
“I know,” said my Father. “I’ve spoken to the police. Everything’s taken care of.”
“One of them had a brick,” she said. “How terrible! Why would they do such a thing?”
Father said: “I don’t know, but don’t worry now. You go back inside. It’s too wet for you to be out here.”
“Will you and Judith be all right?” she said as he took her arm.
When Father came back, he went to the garage and came in with pieces of plywood. One by one he nailed them to the front door. I couldn’t bear to look, to see what he was doing to Mother’s door. But I heard the wood splinter and squeak and the rain whip and the wind batter. Then finally the hole was boarded up and the hall was quiet again.
A policeman arrived as Father was drying the floor. He stood in our hallway and wrote in a notepad. Father waited for him to finish, his eyes glittering like two lumps of coal beneath the light.
The policeman said: “And you didn’t see who did it?”
“No.”
“All you found was the brick?”
“Yes.”
“At approximately nineteen hundred hours?”
“Approximately.”
The walkie-talkie on the policeman’s shoulder burst into life and he said back to the crackling: “Yeah, all right, tell him to hang on…. No, just a domestic.”
Father waited. The crackling petered out. He said: “So what are you going to do to them?”
The policeman said: “Who, Mr. McPherson?”
“The thugs who did this.”
“You don’t know who did it,” said the policeman.
Father shut his eyes, then opened them. It seemed to me he was saying something without moving his lips. He said: “It’s the same boys I’ve been making complaints about for the past month.”
“But you didn’t see them.”
“On this occasion, no. I was in the kitchen with my daughter. We heard the crash, and when we got here they were gone.”
“There you go,” said the policeman. He put his notepad away.
“But our neighbor did see them.”
The policeman said: “Could she identify them?”
A vein pulsed in Father’s temple. “I don’t know; why don’t you ask her?”
The policeman said: “I’m trying to help you, Mr. McPherson. If I were you, I’d think about getting some cameras installed. A visual holds up well in court.”
“Cameras?” Father gave a strange laugh.
The policeman said: “There’s nothing we can do tonight. We’ll keep this on file with the other complaints
