The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [122]
Eliza tossed down her cigarette and crushed it beneath a heel in disgust “What, they think the boy did it?”
Malmey shifted and took another drag. “It was a mystery to everyone and they couldn’t prove anything anyway. The point is, no one wanted anything to do with the boy after that, until the BoLeves came along. They could’ve adopted any other child, but they were looking for a problem child they could rehabilitate and introduce to the Lord. You know how people in this church are. The spooky thing is, before they adopted him his personality changed. He went through all kinds of tests and by the time the BoLeves decided on taking him he was re-diagnosed as an average kid. His autism was choked out of him somehow. Everyone took it as a miracle and the BoLeves took it as a sign from God that their taking him was meant to be.”
“So how was he, I mean, at dinner the other night?”
“You know the swing set in my backyard? We went out to it and sat for a little while, he wanted to swing and I wanted to get away from the folks, and he bit me.”
“He bit you?”
“He bit me on the arm, left teeth marks. He told me he wanted to be a vampire and he grabbed my arm and bit me so hard it almost bled. Then he cursed and said, “The little black boy won’t let me be a vampire, I’m supposed to be something else,” then he paused and told me that raccoons rape cats when the cats venture into their territory. I didn’t eat much and went to bed before the BoLeves went home. This kid freaks me out. And this is his first day in Children’s Study and he’s in my class.”
“I hope it works out,” Eliza told her, deathly concerned. “What’s his name again?”
“His name’s Simon.”
***
The young boy went through the motions of bidding the mid-forties couple a prompt farewell as he retreated from the outside walkway and through the beige metal double doors of an entranceway leading into the ground floor of the Church of the Divine Jesus Christ. The couple then went their own way together, scanning the building down the walkway in thoughtful concern for their newly adopted son.
Brother and Sister BoLeve had faith in their Simon, a skeptical faith watered down by a methodical conviction that things would work out just fine. More importantly, they had faith in God, and as far as Simon went, any one person with faith as petty as a hole in one's pants pocket was capable of not only mending the threads but placing in that pocket a rare wallet carrying a gold card with enough credit to move mountains. The BoLeves believed in that, they believed in God, and they learned to believe in Simon.
The BoLeves were simple and responsible. They mortgaged a clean and proper home for themselves, virtually debt free, meditated on God’s Holy Word and otherwise exclusively on the publishings of the Church. Clinging steadfast to the Church’s ways, which demanded a strict separation from the ways of the wicked world, they did not watch television, did not celebrate holidays save birthdays, entertained themselves with board games and with music purchased only at the Church consisting of cassette tape recordings of hymns sung by the congregation itself at five dollars a pop.
If there was ever a couple to rear a child in a way right and just, it was a couple that served the Lord as devoutly as a Divine Jesus Christ couple, for sure. The BoLeves were a mixture of Polish and Irish, converted to the Church four years ago after their third miscarriage and after Brother BoLeve’s son from a previous marriage disowned his father to join the road crew for Alice Cooper.
But things were all right now and in retrospect, everything was meant to be.
The Church was how they handled things meant to be.
***
Simon handled things meant to be quite differently from the ways of his new parents, from those who claimed him before, from those even before them who gave him his first name after a nameless and homeless woman who claimed to be his mother expired in her sleep and rendered him at the mercy of State authorities.
He’d been through a tumultuous