The Devil's Alphabet

silk sleeveless blouse and a $300 Liberty Jacquard linen jacket she’d ordered special from Ann Taylor, and she’d be damned if she sweated moons into the pits of that beautiful suit.

The spaces between the trailers were littered with bicycles, toys faded by the sun, and plastic Little Tykes furniture. The muggy air was made hotter by the back-blast of rumbling air conditioners poking out of the trailer windows. Most of the adults seemed to be inside, but a pair of white-scarf girls sat in the shade of an awning, snapping beans. Their bellies under their light cotton dresses looked equally round, as if they were racing each other to the first contraction. Rhonda didn’t recognize them, so she nodded at them and they said hello.

When Rhonda was still a dozen yards from the nursery the building door opened and the reverend came out, wiping her hands on her skirt. She quickly hugged Rhonda. A stranger would be unable to see it, but Rhonda could tell the woman was flustered.

“Everything all right, Elsa?”

“As right as we can expect,” the reverend said. “Better than we hoped. Come on down to my place; I’ve got some sweet tea.” She led Rhonda past the nursery toward the outer circle of mobile homes, walking with that uneven gait of hers, as if she carried a stone in her shoe.

In the open space beyond the trailers was a makeshift playground wilting in the sun: a couple of knock-kneed swing sets, a trampoline listing on uneven legs, an aboveground pool sagging around the rim. It was too hot to touch metal, though; the dozen kids in the playground were all in the pool or running around the edge of it, through the water-slicked grass, naked as dolphins.

The gardens started out past the barn. The patches of tomatoes and corn and green beans were big enough to feed a few families but small enough to be tended by hand. A male beta wearing a baseball cap was bent over a row of beans, a blue plastic bucket over one arm. Tommy? Impossible to tell at this distance.

“I saw a bunch of your girls down at the Bugler’s today,” Rhonda said.

“Which ones?” the Reverend asked.

“Can you tell them apart?”

“Of course I can. What kind of question is that?”

“Well it would sure help the rest of us if you had them wear name tags or something. Maybe numbers on their backs-you could sell scorecards as a fundraiser.”

The reverend was standing on her front step, and she gave Rhonda a look as she opened the door. “Mayor, that’s the kind of redneck talk I expect out of your boys.”

Rhonda huffed up the stairs and followed her into the trailer. The air was chilly but stale; perspiration prickled the wispy hairs of her neck. The half-sized living room was as spare and tidy as a ship’s cabin: one couch, one chair, and between them a glass-topped coffee table like a display coffin. The only loose item in the room was a red leather family Bible set on a white doily at the center of the table.

“Girls?” the reverend called. To Rhonda she said, “Rest your feet a minute,” and then she left the room through a curtained doorway. “Girls, I need you to go play somewhere else for a while.”

Rhonda eyed the skinny legs of the chair and chose the couch.

Once Elsa had been married, to a man who had a good job at the Alcoa plant, and she’d lived in a handsome brick ranch up above the highway. When she first moved to the Co-op she jammed the contents of that house into the trailer, turning the living room into something between a furniture showroom and a self-storage unit. But then the babies started to arrive, crowding out her old life. Elsa gave away her extra sofa and armchairs to needier beta families, sold her cherry entertainment center and the upright piano at the flea market in Lambert. She put a Sheetrock wall down the middle of the room to make an extra bedroom.

A minute later two small bald-headed girls-the middle two of the reverend’s five daughters-ran past Rhonda and out the door. Elsa reappeared, dusting her hands. “You want that tea?” she asked, then disappeared in the other direction toward the kitchen.

Rhonda had never been invited past the living room. She’d bet good money the rest of the trailer looked like a hurricane hit it. Kids were kids, no matter what clade they came from. “Those girls downtown,” Rhonda called. “They were all wearing those white scarves. Two more pregnant girls I just passed were wearing them too. Seems like I’m seeing more and more of those.”

“The younger sisters like them.”

“Like them? It’s starting to look like a cult, Elsa. It started with that effigy of the doctor, and now all the girls want to be like them.” Three girls had burned an effigy of Dr. Fraelich and tossed it onto her lawn. The girls had been caught and punished, but they were still heroes to their sisters. “Next thing you know they’ll be dressed in robes, passing out tracts at the airport.”

Elsa came back carrying two tumblers full of iced tea. “A few of them got carried away. They’re not pagans, Rhonda. All my girls are good Christians.”

“Of course they are-they’re super Christians.” Rhonda drank from the glass with relish, and sat back. “Law, that’s good.” She sipped again and said, “Those teenagers, the ones that came through the Changes before puberty? I get the impression they think they’re a little more pure than everybody else-even the older sisters in their own clade.”

The reverend sat on the chair and sighed as if conceding the point. “They’re growing up in a different world than we did, Rhonda.”

“You don’t say.”

“The facts of life have changed. Those girls coming up now are sure they’re never going to be ‘defiled.’ They get to have their babies without going through any of that… business that other women have to go through.”

“They get to have their cake without having to eat it,” Rhonda said, and cackled.

The reverend allowed a wisp of a smile, and then her frown returned. “All they talk about is babies.” She pitched her voice to keep it within the thin walls of the trailer. “They don’t want to do anything but play with their dolls and talk about how wonderful it will be when they finally get their own children. And the only ones they admire more than themselves are the natural-borns.”

“I’ve noticed that, too,” Rhonda said.

“I’ve got NB girls having their periods at eight, nine years old. The oldest ones are nearly twelve. It won’t be long ’til I have babies raising babies, and the third generation will be upon us. And the white-scarf girls couldn’t be happier. You’d think angels were coming.”

“Hon, that’s a cult.”

“It’s not a cult, it’s just…” She shrugged.

“At the very least you’ve got another schism brewing.”

The reverend’s expression didn’t change, but she hadn’t missed that “another” slipped in like a knife. After the Changes, Harlan Martin had been determined to keep his church together, and he’d succeeded for a couple years. But he wasn’t about to alter his preaching to make it easier on all the people getting divorced, or moving in with people of the same clade. God doesn’t change, Harlan said, even if he changes us. Then Harlan tried to excommunicate two blank women who’d moved in together, and that was it-the fuse was lit. Rhonda admired Harlan for sticking to his scripture, but she’d already felt the political winds changing and knew he couldn’t win this fight. The blanks outnumbered the other clades in the church, and Elsa had led the charge to force him out. Her new church ordained her a week after Harlan cleaned out his office.

“They’re just children,” the reverend said. “They’re being rebellious.”

“Oh, listen to yourself. You already said they were growing up in a different world. You’re just an immigrant here, and you don’t understand the language. They think they’re the real thing. They probably don’t even think you’re a real beta.”

The reverend looked up, eyes slightly narrowed. In the limited vocabulary of beta expressions, that was outright anger.

So, Rhonda thought. The reverend had heard the girls talking about her.

“Listen to me, Elsa,” Rhonda said. “You’ve got to get hold of this before it spins out of control. Before they spin you out. You’re going to have to crack down on those teenagers. Make them throw out those scarves, for one.”

“I can’t just say, ‘No scarves.’ That would just make them more secretive, and I’d become the enemy.”

“You’re already the enemy,” Rhonda said. “You just have to make sure they know they need you.”

The reverend rubbed a finger over her smooth forehead. She went to the window and pushed aside the gauzy curtain. “Help me build the school, then.”