Chapter Text
Then the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil. And he still maintains his integrity, though you incited me against him to ruin him without any reason.” “Skin for skin!” Satan replied. “A man will give all he has for his own life. But now stretch out your hand and strike his flesh and bones, and he will surely curse you to your face.” The Lord said to Satan, “Very well, then, he is in your hands; but you must spare his life.” So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and afflicted Job with painful sores from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. Then Job took a piece of broken pottery and scraped himself with it as he sat among the ashes.
Dennis Whitaker believed in a world of quid pro quo.
That probably wasn't the correct term. Faith with works, maybe. Actions speaking louder than the faith. The first shall be the last. The ultimate belief that in order to receive, you had to give. If you gave good to God, you would receive good back. If you gave bad, you received his wrath.
He learned it first with his siblings. Let them play with his toys, they might let him play with theirs. Keep a secret about who actually broke the handle of the snack drawer, earn a handful of Goldfish in return.
When their farm dog, Betty, gave birth to a litter of puppies, he squished among his siblings around the small stall in the barn. The wood of the stall door dug into his ribs, and he could barely breathe from the suffocation and the excitement of new life in the family.
His elder brother, Simon, had nudged him slightly with his elbow. “See that small one on the left? The one with the gray spot on its leg?”
Dennis nodded.
“That’s the runt.” He snickered. “That’s you.”
The other Whitaker children laughed. Dennis didn’t know what runt meant, but he knew what entertained his brothers meant it was probably mean and meant to humiliate him.
The blood rushed to his cheeks, then to his brain, and suddenly he was dragging Simon away to start a tussle of arms and nails on the hay covered ground. He got one good scratch on Simon’s cheek before their father was pulling them apart, and he was being sent to bed early. A lecture on violence, on turning the other cheek, when he wasn’t sure how fair that was when he was the one being beaten first.
A week later, the small white pup with a gray spot on its leg died. The mother didn’t even flinch when Dennis had carried it out of the barn. His father made him bury the tiny body in one of the fields, over by the woods, all by himself. He cried so hard he threw up on the ground, leaving the tiny bundle of cloth in a not too deep hole, pressing a small yellow flower onto its body. His siblings ignored him for a few days, save Sarah, his only sister, who could only express her fondness away from their brothers.
Sarah was only a few years older than him, just barely two grades above him. She made him his favorite type of cake when it was her turn to bake for the family, a lemon cake with a sweet vanilla icing on top. She had passed him the first slice with a smile. Like she knew that she couldn’t make it better. She couldn’t stop the scoffs of their brothers or bring that small puppy back. But she could bake him something sweet, and hold his hand while the other puppies found new homes.
Only when he took on the gross chores, cleaning out the stables and feeding the chickens, did his brothers seem to accept his existence again.
Quid pro quo. Turn the other cheek. Give, and maybe you can receive.
Then he learned again at the pulpit. Repent, and be saved. Give up your Earthly materials and follow. Cast your eyes not on the things of the world. Have that mentality that God would bless you and watch miracles fall down like manna from heaven. The meek shall inherit the Earth.
He learned later, away at college, the definition of prosperity gospel, the wonderful idea that if you are devoted enough to God, He will reward you. If you want wealth, success, acceptance; it can all be found. It can all be granted to you. If you want to have a good life, you have to be good enough for God’s standards.
So he would read his Bible every morning, pray before eating, tithe his pitiful allowance as a child, tried to be slow to anger, quick to forgive. And he started every day the same.
The first thing Dennis would do in the morning was pray.
It’s an unfortunate habit. When he was younger, when he believed that science was witchcraft and the secular world full of demons, he would wake up in the middle of the night, heart racing from the sheer relief of still being alive. His forehead would be covered in a thin sheen of sweat, and he’d listen to the sound of his brothers breathing to make sure they were alive. On particularly bad nights, ones where he couldn’t stop thinking, he would crawl out from the bottom bunk, tip-toe to his parents room, and listen for their slumbering breath too. Just to make sure that God was still granting them the right to be alive, the gift of air in their lungs. And he always reasoned that even if the Rapture had happened in their sleep, at least they were a family, together, not alone, and he would go back under the hand-me-down quilt, the one his grandmother had sewn for his father, and drift back off.
Every time he opened his eyes in the morning, sometimes even before he realized he was awake, he was praying and thanking God for letting him live another day. Another day of being tormented by his siblings, being lectured by his father. Another Sunday sitting with an aching back against a wooden church pew, another afternoon of feeding the cattle, and another evening of his dad reading the Bible in the living room. He was grateful for it. It took him hours to fall asleep at night, in fear of being stolen away, called back to a home that wasn’t wooden floors and rolling skies on a front porch.
He didn’t want to die, he didn’t want to leave his family, and so he was grateful for the days that he was granted.
When he got sick, that was a different story.
He remembers the thirst. The shakes after a longer day on the farm, not being given a break because of the incoming storms or the lack of helping hands. Getting snappy when his head was pounding behind his eyes, and being forced to clean up the dinner table alone as punishment when all he wanted to do was sleep.
One time, after he’d been tagging a newborn calf with his eldest brother, Nathaniel, he had fallen to the ground, tongue numb, legs filled with static. He could barely hear Nathaniel yelling at him as the calf had squealed and sprinted back to its mother, dust kicking up behind it. He doesn’t remember how he got back up, how they recaptured the small brown animal, how he got home after Nathaniel had angrily left him alone in the field, taking the beaten up truck back to the house alone.
He remembers being in pain.
They didn’t believe him. Being the baby meant that he was the laziest. Didn’t pull his own weight around the house, the farm, the church. He could be the first one to wake up before school to check on the chickens, and the last to go to bed after helping with the harvested crops. Dennis was still the problem, the burden, the reason things went poorly and not right. Not good.
He would pray at night to be good. Not perfect, just good enough. To be helpful, not harmful. And when he didn’t pray hard enough, crops would fail, animals would disappear, and his family would suffer. It felt like anything he touched fell apart in his hands, his skin poisoned with a sin he afflicted upon anyone who came near him.
At his yearly check up, when he turned ten, the doctor had ordered the blood test. The needle hadn’t hurt anymore than the burrs he pulled off of his jeans after a long day in the fields. Hadn’t pulled out any more blood either.
It wasn’t one of those diseases he watched other families ignore with their children. The younger boys whose legs would twitch at Wednesday night youth group, or the teenaged girls who would sit silently to the side at potlucks, a blank look on their face. Or like one of Dennis’s playmates at school who always had a rash on his arm, splotchy and red and angry. Or the girlfriend of his brother Elijah, who would get really winded when they played outside at recess, and would need to sit down.
This one was deeper. Rooted in him. Something unshakeable, unchangeable. Wrapped around his bones, his muscles, down to his core. It stuck to him in a way that nothing else did, not even God. And suddenly, it didn’t matter that he was handing over his chump change into the wooden offering bowl. That he let his siblings use him as an emotional and physical punching bag without hitting back. That he would take verbal lashings from his father when no one else would, and help his mother with the chores around the house when everyone else was piled in the living room, watching some preacher screaming at a crowd full of people about the dangers of the secular world. There was no escaping the thing inside of him, the disease in his body. God decided that he wasn’t good enough for a healthy body. So he got a sick one.
He didn’t think it was fair that his sin emerged as an illness for his family. Insulin wasn’t cheap, and insurance for farmers was next to nonexistence. He heard the hushed conversations with his parents. The hospital hadn’t been cheap, and being alive wasn’t any better. Watched the way his father came home later and left earlier working an extra job with the vet in town to supplement a little cash.
He prayed harder. Worked more. He learned how to control his blood sugars, how to need less food, less insulin. He could see the relief in his mothers eyes when she pulled that tiny vial out and didn’t need to open a new box.
And instead of being thankful he was alive every morning, he prayed and asked God to heal him by nightfall. He didn’t understand it, how he could have done so much right, and still be stuck with this awful disease day and night, waiting for a cure the doctor had told his parents didn’t exist.
When that didn’t work, he started asking for death. He clearly wasn’t good enough to be a functioning member of God’s world, so maybe he could go somewhere else. Everything was harder. It was harder to do his chores, to play with friends, to exist. He had been taught that to be a Christian was to suffer, but he hadn’t expected it to be like this. To suffer every minute, every hour.
His parents were pious. His siblings were assholes, but they weren’t awful. So it had to be Dennis. There had to be something so evil, and twisted inside of him, some Adam and Eve level of sin that his entire family had to atone for.
Dennis was never that sure what that sin was until he walked into Youth Group one hot summer night when he was fifteen and laid eyes on the newest addition to Broken Bow.
Aaron was taller than him, but he never used it in a way that his brothers did. He never teased Dennis for his lanky build, all length and bones and no muscle. He had thick, coarse curls, and even deeper brown eyes. When he used those eyes to offer Dennis a glance, the boy could feel his entire body warming, a rush of something he couldn’t explain. He learned the name for it that same night. Lust. Something he needed to gauge his eyes out over, cutting off parts of him that he had always been told to stay away from anyway. He watched his brothers listen with a restless demeanor, eyes sliding across the room to look at a few of the blushing girls who couldn’t return the favor. He felt himself blush when he looked at Aaron as the youth pastor fussed at them about purity, staying clean, and how no one wanted damaged goods.
But Dennis already considered his body damaged. And he was so tired of not being good enough at home, or anywhere else. So when Aaron kissed him outside of the brick walls of the church that night, and he didn’t immediately keel over and evaporate, he knew that this was the reason he was sick without a cure. A physical manifestation of his sins. Of his wrongdoings.
And no prayer in the silent hours of the morning would heal him.
Aaron was only visiting for the summer. His parents had deemed him delinquent, and sent him to his uncle and aunt to fix it. Pray it out of him. But the same sin in Dennis was in Aaron, and for once, he didn’t feel so wrong. They made the most of it. Every hidden stroke of a thumb or pat on the back for a joke he stole from his brothers was filled with whispers of Do you even know? He watched his mom blush when his dad told her that she was still the prettiest thing he’d ever laid eyes on, and would turn the same shade of pink when Aaron whispered that he thought that color blue looked good on him.
His brothers were glad they weren’t saddled with watching him anymore. His parents were thrilled that he had made a friend. No one noticed when the two slipped away to hide in the fellowship hall, exchanging messy kisses and secrets about themselves. Whenever Dennis’s blood sugar dipped a bit too much, Aaron was the one who volunteered to go with him to the church kitchen to make sure he was okay. They would skip out on worship night under the guise of a high blood sugar, a needed shot of insulin, walking outside instead, and letting their knuckles brush against each other, ever wary of the watching eyes of the steeple.
When August rolled around and Aaron was about to be shipped back home, Dennis pleaded and won, (with promises of doing extra chores), an unsupervised sleepover at Aaron’s place. The night was full of sleepy kisses, slight pain, then something blissful, and Dennis told everyone he was limping because he took a tumble down the stairs.
He spent the next morning rubbing his skin raw with a rag, so hard he bruised himself. Angry red marks, blooming purple under the cold water. Blood slipping out, reminding him of his crimson stain. He had flashes of the white puppy, that white coat, that pureness of snow. He wanted to be clean again, pure again. He cried in the tub, trying to convince a God who didn’t fully love him back for forgiveness. He wasn’t even sure he knew what he was asking forgiveness for. His God, his family’s God, had given him a broken body, and a broken need. He was trying to be good, trying to stay away from the temptations of Satan, but if it was God that gave him legs to walk and eyes to see, why did forget those parts that made him a good, Christian man?
Aaron left him, but the sin never did. Other boys looked at him, and he looked away. Kept his head down, focusing on school and the farm. He took a girl to prom at his mother’s insistence, never touching her, and looking the other way when another boy stole her away for a dance.
He took the teasing, the odd looks, the whispers in the halls, and in the pews. He read the Bible searching for answers that God wouldn’t give him. His siblings left until he was the only one alone in their shared room, no breathing to listen for, but he still woke up gasping for air, thinking I’m still alive, I’m still alive, I’m still alive.
His brothers left and came back married. Sarah studied locally, staying at home with him and their parents. She wanted to teach, but her father only humored the classes to help her find a husband. With each passing niece and nephew brought into the world, Dennis waited to find one that came out like him. A diabetic, a loser, a sinner. And every time they came out normal, he could breathe a little easier.
His father is the one that found his acceptance letter.
“Came for you today,” he said, voice gruff, but Dennis could see the torn paper. His hands trembled as he opened the envelope, a congratulations greeting him with the explanation of things he would need to call and ask for help understanding. “Makes sense you’d be the preacher in our family.”
If Dennis hadn’t spent years searching for it, he’d have thought that was pride seeping into his father’s tone. But that was a sin the family had always kept an eye out for.
“Always were more bookish than the rest. Shame to lose your help around here, though.”
“I can stay,” Dennis had offered, the response a grip around his neck, tightening with every quiet second. “I can always just stay.”
“Nonsense. You’ll go, you’ll come back. Just like your brothers.” His father nodded at his wife who was smiling faintly from the kitchen. Sarah was leaning against the wall too, smiling in a way that was all support, all excitement. “And you’ll be home in the summer anyway.”
Dennis stared at the paper, the major listed out as Religious Studies. Vague, and unhelpful.
But maybe there was someone at the college who could fix him, fix whatever was wrong with him.
Then he could get that cure, and finally be free from the burden God had given him so early on.
It wasn’t guaranteed. It wasn’t even worth a shot.
But Dennis prayed, and packed his bags.