There had been, he said, a change of plan. It would be better, he’d decided, if he led the Kitsillie contingent and let Rick stay in Rough Rock, where there was dormitory housing. After a moment of stunned silence, the bus erupted with cries of protest from Laura Dobrinsky and her friends, but it was too late. The driver had already closed the door. His father took the aisle seat by Clem and clapped him on the knee. “This is great,” he said. “You and I get to spend a whole week together. It’s better, don’t you think?”
Clem said nothing. From farther back in the bus came urgent, angry female whispering. His father had trapped him in the window seat and he thought he might die if he didn’t get away. The shame of being the son of this man was new to him and searingly painful. It wasn’t that he cared how he personally looked to the cool kids. It was how weak his father had made himself look to them, by abusing his petty authority to commandeer their bus. And now his father was using him, being all fatherly, so as to pretend that he’d done nothing wrong.
The pretending continued on the mesa. The old man seemed willfully blind to how much the Kitsillie group resented him for taking Ambrose’s place. He didn’t seem to realize that he was nearly fifty, twice as old as Ambrose, not interchangeable. Yes, he was stronger and more skilled than Ambrose, and, yes, he was full of energy—returning to the mesa, reconnecting with the Navajos, walking the land he loved, always fired him up. But every morning, when he organized the work crews, no one volunteered to be in his. When he went ahead and selected a crew, and busied himself with tools and supplies for the day, a funny thing happened: every girl in his crew who was friends with Laura Dobrinsky traded places with someone from a different crew. He had to have noticed this, and yet he never said a word about it. Maybe he was too cowardly to make an issue of it. Or maybe he didn’t care what the girls thought of him. Maybe all he’d wanted was to prevent them from spending the week with their beloved Ambrose.
Clem was a crew leader himself, the only non-adult to whom his father gave responsibility. A year earlier, this expression of trust would have thrilled him, but now he was merely grateful that he never had to be in his father’s crew. During the day, hard physical labor dulled his fear of returning to the schoolhouse where the group was camping out, but the shame was always waiting there at dinnertime. He felt obliged, by his principles, to eat with his father, who was otherwise shunned, and to submit to his fraudulently hearty talk about the trench he was digging for a septic line. Seeing his peers all laughing and eating together, Clem felt uniquely cursed and isolated. He wished he were the son of someone—anyone—else.
It was a fellowship tradition to gather as a group around a single candle after dinner and share thoughts and feelings about the day. Every night at Kitsillie, there was a wall of stony silence from the cool girls. Late in the week, his father went so far as to ask the prettiest of them, Sally Perkins, if she had anything to tell the group. Sally just stared at the candle and shook her head. Her refusal to speak was so pointed, the tension around the candle so high, that it ought to have triggered a full-on confrontation, but Tanner Evans knew exactly when to strike a chord on his twelve-string and lead the group in song.
If Clem’s father was relieved to avoid a confrontation, he shouldn’t have been. The explosion that followed ten days later, at the first Sunday meeting after the Arizona trip, was more violent for having been suppressed. The evening was unusually hot for April, the fellowship meeting room as airless and rafter-smelling as an attic. Everyone was in a hurry to get downstairs for activities, and most of the room quieted when Clem’s father stepped forward to deliver his opening prayer. He glanced at Sally Perkins and her friends, who were continuing to talk, and raised his voice. “Heavenly Father,” he said.
“This room could sure use an air conditioner,” Sally remarked, loudly, to Laura Dobrinsky.
“Sally,” Rick Ambrose growled from a corner of the room.
“What.”
“Be quiet.”
After a pause, Clem’s father tried again. “Heavenly Father—”
“No!” Sally said. “I’m sorry, but no. I’m sick of his stupid prayers.” She jumped to her feet and looked around the room. “Is anyone else here as sick of them as I am? He already ruined my spring trip. I’m literally going to throw up if he keeps doing this.”
The contempt in her voice was shocking. Whatever might be happening in the country at large, however angrily authority was being questioned, nobody could speak like this at church.