Rachel’s birthday came in late August, but the Betty Crocker cake mix let us all down. Normal cake production proved out of the question.

To begin with, our stove is an iron contraption with a firebox so immense a person could climb right in if they felt like it. Mother yanked Ruth May out by the arm, pretty hard, when she found her in there; she dreaded that Mama Tataba in one of her energetic fits might stoke up the stove with the baby inside. It was a sensible concern. Ruth May is so intent on winning Hide and Seek, or any game for that matter, she would probably go ahead and burn up before she’d ever yell and give herself away.

Mother has figured out how to make bread “by hook or by crook,” she likes to say, but the stove doesn’t really have a proper oven. In fact, it looks less like a stove than a machine hammered together out of some other machine. Rachel says it was part of a locomotive train, but she is famous for making things up out of thin air and stating them in a high, knowing tone.

The stove wasn’t even the worst of our cake troubles. In the powerful humidity the powdered mix got transfigured like Lot’s poor wife who looked back at Gomorrah and got turned to a pillar of salt. On the morning of Rachel’s birthday I found Mother out in the kitchen house with her head in her hands, crying. She picked up the box and banged it hard against the iron stove, just once, to show me. It clanged like a hammer on a bell. Her way of telling a parable is different from my father’s.

“If I’d of had the foggiest idea,” she said very steadily, holding her pale, weeping eyes on me, “just the foggiest idea. We brought all the wrong things.”

The first time my father heard Methuselah say, “Damn,” his body moved strangely, as if he’d received the spirit or a twinge of bad heartburn. Mother excused herself and went in the house.

Rachel, Adah, and I were left on the porch, and he looked at each one of us in turn. We had known him to forbear with a silent grimace when Methuselah said, “Piss off,” but of course that was the

doing of Brother Fowles. The mote in his brother’s eye, not the sin of his own household. Methuselah had never said “Damn” before, so this was something new, spoken right out very chipper in a feminine tone of voice.

“Which one of you taught Methuselah to say that word?” he demanded.

I felt sick to my stomach. None of us spoke. For Adah that’s normal, of course, and for that very reason she often gets accused when none of us speaks up. And truthfully, if any of us was disposed to use curse words, it would be Adah, who could not care less about sin and salvation. That’s the main reason I got Mother to cut my hair in a pixie, while Adah kept hers long: so nobody would get our attitudes mixed up. I myself would not curse, in or out of Methuselah’s hearing or even in my dreams, because I crave heaven and to he my father’s favorite. And Rachel wouldn’t—she’ll let out a disgusted “Jeez” or “Gol!” when she can, but is mainly a perfect lady when anybody’s listening. And Ruth May is plain too little.

“I fail to understand,” said Father, who understands everything, “why you would have a poor dumb creature condemn us all to eternal suffering.”

I’ll tell you what, though, Methuselah is not dumb. He imitates not just words, but the voices of people that spoke them. From Methuselah we have learned the Irish-Yankee voice of Brother Fowles, whom we picture as looking like that Father Flanagan that runs the Boys Town. We could also recognize MamaTataba, and ourselves. Furthermore, Methuselah didn’t just imitate words, he knew them. It’s one thing simply to call out, “Sister, God is great! Shut the door!” when the spirit moves him, but he’ll also call out “banana” and “peanut” as plain as day, when he sees these things in our hands and wants his share. Oftentimes he studies us, copying our movements, and he seems to know which words will provoke us to laugh or talk back to him, or be shocked. We already understood what was now dawning on my father: Methuselah could betray our secrets.

I didn’t say so, of course. I haven’t contradicted my father on any subject, ever.

Rachel finally blurted out, “Father, we’re sorry.”

Adah and I pretended to be fascinated by our books.We brought our schoolbooks with us and study them whenever Mother threatens we’re going to fall behind and wear the dunce cap when we go home, which there’s no chance of really, except for Rachel, who is the one stubbornly mediocre mentality in our family. I think our mother is really just afraid we’re going to forget about normal things like George Washington crossing the Delaware and autumn leaves and a train speeding west toward St. Louis at sixty-five miles per hour.