The Dirty Parts of the Bible -- a Novel by Sam Torode

Author:Sam Torode
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction & Literature
Publisher: Sam Torode Book Arts
Published: 2013-05-25T07:00:00+00:00

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Craw kept quiet for most of the tour—which was unusual for him. But he made up for it the next day when we started to work on the fence.

As I unrolled a bale of barbed wire, trying not to slice my fingers, Craw sat beneath the shade of a pecan tree, chopping rough branches into smooth fence posts. He steadied the branches with his hook and swung a hatchet with his hand. “This isn’t exactly what I had in mind by carpentry.”

I rolled up my sleeves and took a few whacks at the earth with a post-hole digger. The metal blade bounced off the hard ground, sending up a little cloud of dust.

After a while, I became aware of a constant buzz in the air. “What’s that noise? Sounds like an electrical line.”

“Cicadas,” Craw said. “Also known as locusts. Or, as John the Baptist would say, lunch.”

I laughed, surprised that Craw knew his Bible characters so well.

We hacked and hammered all morning. By noon, Craw had carved five fence posts and I had stuck two of them in the ground. I rested on the end of my digger and squinted up at the black birds circling overhead.

“Buzzards,” Craw said.

After a few minutes, they swooped down to where I could see their gnarled, bald heads.

“They’re waiting for us to die, aren’t they? So they can pick our carcasses clean.”

Craw tossed another finished post on his pile. “You know, in all my years I’ve never encountered such pessimism in one so young.”

“I don’t trust birds,” I said. “Not after what happened to my father.”

“It’s more than that,” Craw said. “You don’t seem to trust anyone. Here you are, entering the prime of life—a world of possibilities before you—and you’re more cynical than Job.”

First John the Baptist, now Job. “You read the Bible?” I asked.

“Not much. More often, I’d say it reads me.”

“Take Job,” I said, hoisting my post-hole digger. “He was the most faithful man on earth, and look what happened to him—his kids died, his flocks died, and his body got covered with boils. All because of a bet between God and the devil.” I jammed my digger into the ground. “If I were around back then, I would have been one of the sons who got killed. And you blame me for being cynical?”

Craw chuckled. “No one ever said life was fair, did they?”

I threw down my post-hole digger and walked over to where he was sitting. I’d been waiting for an opportunity like this, to voice my doubts with someone who wouldn’t judge me. I stammered around for a while, then dumped the whole load—the confused creation accounts, Cain’s wife, the flaming sword, the angels raping women, the dinosaurs getting left off the Ark.

By the end, I was shouting like my father on a Sunday morning. “Foreskins—foreskins! Can you believe it? How can anyone believe this stuff?”

I closed my case and waited for Craw to agree that it was all a farce, but he only smiled and shook his head.

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