Love, Joy, Feminism
The Vision, pp. 36-65
This is going to go great. You all know that, right?
Okay, to recap, we’ve seen Hope (Debi’s stand-in) and Cheyenne (the stand-in for her daughter Shoshone) discuss end times, the potential death of nearly all men on earth in a plague, and a magical berry brew Hope has created that is a medical wonder and is now being mass-produced in China. There’s literally no reason to one-up this. This brew has already been called similar to the Tree of Life.
So why try to one-up this?
Hope tells Cheyenne that there are 22 gallons of berry brew in the cellar, and that the brew they’ve just made is their 23rd gallon. There is no reason for her to give Cheyenne these specific numbers, except that we all know that Derek is listening in and now has the info he wanted. After this Hope wants to tell Cheyenne something even more amazing so she turns up the fan, “just in case” someone is listening.
If she suspects someone might be listening enough to turn on a fan when they’re in an internal room inside their house, they really should have better security.
Hope gazed at a quart jar sitting toward the back of the cluttered countertop. She reached out, lightly touching the lid. “I need to tell you about this one. It’s different.”
“Different?” Cheyenne tensed.
Hope’s answer was so soft it was barely audible. “Very, very different.”
Cheyenne leaned forward and asked, “What are you saying, Mom?”
Hope continued speaking quietly. “Everything else—all of the research and work—could not equal this one small jar … everything.” Hope’s lips barely moved. “This is truly the fountain of life. This is the miracle brew.”
Why? Why are we doing this? Just, why?
(By the way, the footnotes at the bottom of these pages are littered with internet articles about various berries and herbs that contain healing properties.)
I mean, good gracious:
“I took some degenerated blood cells from a dead animal. The cells were already beginning to enlarge. When I applied this formula, the blood cells began to come back together, regenerate, and repair. They rapidly multiplied.” Hope hissed. “I mean rapidly.”
Okay. Cool. Cool cool cool.
Meanwhile, Derek, listening in with his listening device, overheard the bit about the 22 gallons of berry brew in the cellar:
Just what I needed to know. But that’s a lot of stuff. I’ll need help. Can’t get it all today as planned. Guess you ladies lucked out.
Cool cool cool.
By the way, Derek did hear Asher’s voice, when Asher yelled LOVE TO HAVE THAT WOMAN across the ridge, and it creeped him out. He’s still creeped out. And the dog, Wiggles, is not interested in being put off any longer (remember, Derek tried to pacify it with a donut, before choking on the donut himself).
We switch to Asher, who is up on the ridge, “searching for the source of the barking that had now finally stopped.” Um WHAT. Dogs often have distinctive barks, and Asher works at Malachi and Hope’s place—the The Last Publishers headquarters is right next to the Freeman home—so this is a dog he would know. But even short of that, if you were on a ridge and you heard a dog barking wouldn’t your first suspicion be that it’s the dog you know lives at the house in the valley below you?
As he put the binoculars back in their pouch, he muttered, “If I want to see the west slope, I gotta go to the side of the ridge where I was earlier this morning. What is it, God? I have walked all over these ridges. I don’t see anything. Am I just imagining something? Show me, Lord, what I need to do.”
This guy really is dumb as a box of rocks.
You feel worried but you don’t know why; the only people anywhere in the vicinity is the hot girl you want to date and her mother; you hear a dog barking like something is wrong, and you know there is a dog at your would-be girlfriend’s place. Do you: (a) go down to your fantasy girlfriend’s house to make sure everything is already; or, (b) climb to the other side of the ridge to see what you can see from there.
Asher goes with (b), and climbs to the other side of the ridge.
He reached the crest and stood in waist-high brush. He again retreated the binoculars from the pouch on his belt and scanned the side of the ridge he had just left. Nothing. Not a thing in sight. … He lowered his binoculars. At that moment a glint of sunlight reflected off something in the wooded area halfway down the slope, behind the old farmhouse.
“What?” Asher’s binoculars zoomed in on the spot. He was stunned. “Lord, what is that piece of lascivious trash doing?”
Before he could finish his tug ought, his eyes took in the unfolding horror. He stumbled forward shouting, “Nooooooo!”
Um. Guys. Derek kills the dog. Debi describes this killing in horrific detail. I’m not reprinting it here. It’s absolutely disgusting. Derek murders the dog in horrifying fashion, and Derek can (apparently) see the act from the ridge. As he heard the other shouted words, Derek hears Asher’s distant “Noooooo!”
This is a very dark book.
Meanwhile, Hope writes down the recipe for the extra secret miracle magic brew and has Cheyenne memorize it, and then puts the jotted-down recipe in her mouth and eats it. She tells Cheyenne that this recipe uses an herb that’s especially hard to get—the leaves of a small tree that’s very hard to grow. She says she doesn’t think this tree is actually the tree of life, but that it “smells right.”
She says she used the leaves of this small tree, rather than its fruit, because Revelation 22 says that “the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” This is how many evangelical Christians approach the Bible—like some sort of code book with weird secret messages to be found.
A friend who traveled to the “Far East” sent her the seeds, and she has some left, and 20 leaves from the one small shrub she managed to grow, and she shows Cheyenne where all of this is in a way that is so secretive that, when I read this the first time, I honestly thought Hope was about to die. That’s how stories like this work, right? Pass on the knowledge right before you’re mysteriously killed. But she isn’t.
Hope tells Cheyenne that God told her this recipe, which Cheyenne finds odd because her mother “had never had any use for hyper-spirituality.” This may seem odd, but it’s how Debi sees herself—she’s not like those other Christians, she’s a cool hippie Christian and not legalistic at all!
Cheyenne has a question:
“If you could get the tree to grow, would you make this elixir to sell?”
The girl was startled to hear her mother’s sharp guttural response. “Never … never. Not one drop, and you must never sell it. Never tell anyone, not a single person, how it was made. God took away the Tree of Life because men turned against him. That has not changed. It would be a great ill if what I have done changed that … no … no.”
Hope’s tone changed, sounding almost relieved. “My China brew is healing … a wonderful healing tonic. We say our Berry Herbal Brew will make you live forever but that is not literally true. A person taking it will still grow old and die. That is important.
My god, there’s just so much here. Is it the Tree of Life or not? She’s talking like this Super Secret Brew could make people live forever! Also, bear in mind that her regular brew can literally cure cancer. What does Debi think people die of, in old age? People usually die of something. If the regular berry brew cures basically everything, what exactly will people die of? And if the Super Secret Brew could make people live forever, how exactly is it different from the Tree of Life?
None of this makes any sense, especially when you remember that you don’t have to have a concoction that actually works to get rich off of selling herbal remedies. Debi could have written a story where Hope sells all sorts of formulas that may or may not work, a la Young Living or a million other similar companies, and that’s how they finance the printing of their graphic novel foreign language Bibles.
Anyway, the thing I want to emphasize here is that the Super Secret Brew really wasn’t necessary, from a story standpoint. The special magical berry brew that cures cancer was plenty enough.
Hope sends Cheyenne downstairs with the new gallon of berry brew and the quart of Super Secret Brew. Meanwhile, Asher is trying to get down into the valley as fast as he possibly can, having seen Derek brutally murder the family’s dog out back of their house. He runs into some good luck—two teenagers he’s mentoring, named Dusty and Ben, come along in their truck, and Asher jumps in and basically hijacks the thing, driving it at a ridiculous speed over bumpy, uneven ground.
I’m skipping the whole description of this, because it’s not terribly interesting. Dusty and Ben were on their way to the Freemans’ compound because Asher had told them he’d take them street preaching in Nashville or Knoxville, which they call Trashville and Poxville.
There are pages and pages of Asher basically trashing their truck. It’s bad.
Turning to view the damage out of the rear window, the boys didn’t see Asher turn the rocking truck left to mount the nigh ditch bank. He hit it fast enough to jump the truck over the small ditch and clamp into the slop on the other side. His unprepared passengers were thrown agains the door. Dusty banged his head on the roof of the cab when the truck stopped. Ben slammed his head against the glass of the passenger side window, pinching his ear painfully. When he regained his voice, Dusty shrilled, “Hey! You’re tearin’ up my truck!”
The calm, reserved teacher both boys knew had morphed into a wild man that shouted back dismissively, “I’ll buy you another one!” He shifted into second gear and gunned the truck up the steep ridge.
This is not great.
This really is all on Asher, too. The moment his sense of unease was joined by unexplained noises—if not before—he should have headed down the ridge to the farmhouse, instead of continuing to gallivant from ridge to ridge. The only people in the whole valley who could possibly be in danger were Hope and Cheyenne, and he knew exactly where they were. It’s his own fault he’s so far away now.
When they arrive up the ridge from the farmhouse—where Asher had seen Derek—Dusty is spitting blood. The amount of physical trauma these two teens just experienced is nuts. This really isn’t okay.
There, on the ground, is the dead body of Wiggles, the Freemans’ dog. Asher picks it up and puts it in the back of the truck. For a moment, he makes ready to go up the ridge after Derek in Dusty and Ben’s truck, but the boys stop him, explaining that this is their “onliest truck.” So Asher stops, defeated.
“Sorry, boys. I didn’t mean to scare you silly. I do hope neither of you wet your pants.”
Involuntarily both boys touched their pants to check. Each caught the other in the middle of checking and began to laugh. Dusty spoke. “Naw, it was fun. Sorta sudden and unexpected, but it was fun.”
The idea that dangerous things are fun has to be the most manliest masculinity thing there is. What Asher did was dangerous, and with the number of times the boys banged their heads into the dashboard oar the windows or the top of the cab, he could have seriously hurt one of them—and he did hurt them.
Asher explains what he saw, and Dusty and Ben immediately know who he’s describing: Derek, whose dad is the sheriff and whose grandfather is the judge. They tell Asher that Derek owns a “souped-up 450 dirt bike” that his grandfather confiscated from a pot dealer and gave to him, which explains the marks on the ground near where Asher found Wiggles. Dusty has more to say:
“Bunch of White Supremacists … the lot of ’em controlling this whole county.” Dusty’s voice was a mixture of bitterness and envy.
Asher’s brows raised. “White Supremacist? Man, that group went out with George Wallace.”
Dusty and Ben exchanged uneasy looks. Ben finally spoke up to straighten out his teacher’s error. “Maybe in Washington State, but in our county the White Supremacists, skinheads, KKK and all the other clans rule.”
The import, here, is that Derek got away on a dirt bike. But the White Supremacists thing will come up throughout Debi’s book. I get the feeling that this is something she is familiar with, something she’s seen, living in rural Tennessee as she has all her life. And here, she gets at least something right—she sees them as an evil, malevolent force. She has no sympathy for White Supremacists. But she misses something else, which is the white supremacy embedded in her view of Muslims.
Disliking White Supremacists does not mean one’s own views are free of white supremacy.
Back in the truck, the trio drive down the incline behind the Freeman’s house and park by Cheyenne’s pink panel truck.
“I don’t think I’ll tell the ladies about Derek and their dog just yet. I heard the girls at the Herbe Den talking the other day about all the news headlines. What with the Muslims blowing up that church in Chattanooga last week, killing all the kids, and the news this week of Yellowstone’s volcanic activity, they were saying that they couldn’t’ take much more bad news. I regret telling them about the Muslims in Washington State … about Dan. It was too much. So you two keep your traps shut about Derek and the dog until I decide what to do.”
Ben whistled lowly. “Cheyenne will not like being treated like a sissy. She fusses about bad things happening, but she likes to know what’s going on. I know you’ve been teaching us to treat ladies with respect and all, but southern girls are scrappers. Cheyenne’s one of the toughest. I don’t know about not telling them.”
I feel like you could write a dissertation about these two paragraphs. I really, just this sentence: “I know you’ve been teaching us to treat ladies with respect and all, but southern girls are scrappers.”
So, they go inside. Hope is there, but Cheyenne has just headed to the cellar with the two bottles of brew. Hope tells them to shut the screen door behind themselves, because she’s trying to keep Wiggles outside because Wiggles was being a “pest” and wouldn’t stop barking. To which mar reaction is: Really? Really? What’s the use of having a guard dog if you don’t pay attention when she won’t stop barking?!
Asher and the two boys’ faces immediately react to Hope’s comment, but they cover it quickly. This is all balderdash. I know they’ve said the Klan rules the town, but someone just killed the Freemans’ dog, and Asher knows who did it, and right now, he is hiding it from them. They brush away Hope’s concern about the fact that the boys are bruised and bloody, insisting that they just “hit some bumps” in the truck. Hope is skeptical, but they swear they’re being honest.
Asher tells Hope that he very badly needs to talk to “the Old Gent”—meaning Malachi—that afternoon. Asher is in a hurry to leave because, not seeing Cheyenne anywhere, he assumes she must be in the The Last Publishers office, and he wants to go over there and be all lovestruck in her presence. At least, I’m assuming that’s what he wants, because he already made abundantly clear that he’s not looking for her to tell her anything about Derek, or the dog.
What a catch this one is.
Hope says she’ll “tell Cheyenne she missed you when she comes up out of the cellar,” knowing full well that Asher’s trying to leave ether house so he can go look for Cheyenne. Asher sends the two boys outside to look for his hat—which is bullshit, of course—and engages in some serious excuse-making:
“Well, now I know where she is, I’ll just let her know we won’t be at tonight’s Bible study over at the Herb Den. I wouldn’t want her to miss us and wonder.”
Hope snorted good-maturely. “Yeah, save that claptrap for Cheyenne. I’m not fooled for one second. I call it predestined attraction. Hormones extraordinaire! I don’t know why neither one of you will just ‘fess up to nature’s call.” Asher was so flabbergasted by the old woman’s frankness that he could manage only a barked laugh.
The family’s dog is dead, murdered violently by a man who was squatting on their property up the ridge behind their house, and all Asher cares about is seeing his fantasy girlfriend? Really?!
Hope’s comments may seem very, very odd coming from someone as traditional and fundamentalist as Debi is. But you have to understand that there’s a subset of this group that pretends to be sex-positive by going way overboard at moments like these. Any hint of sex before marriage would be verboten, and marriage is, of course, the goal. But I have seen things, heard things, that an outsider might find very, very odd—and completely incongruous coming from people that still calls sex outside marriage promiscuity. Debi genuinely thinks she’s hip, and cool, and sex positive.
And that’s why Hope says things like this.
But Hope is no idiot. She stops Asher before he goes into the cellar and tells him to cut the shit. She says she knows full well something is wrong. Abashed, Asher tells her everything—about Derek and the knife and the dog—and finishes by saying that Wiggles’ body is in the back of Dusty’s truck.
“Derek? Hiding behind the house?” Hope slapped her hands together almost in glee. “So someone is spying. I figured as much.
This is such a weird book.
Hope tells Asher to bring Wiggles in, but does not seem particularly concerned. Asher brings her in and puts her on the steel work table. Then he goes down to see Cheyenne.
Good grief.
This section is filled with lines like:
A tingling wave ran through Cheyenne’s body at the feel of his fingers wrapped around her arm in support.
Cool. Cool cool cool.
Giggling, she tried not to appear flustered as she handed him the gallon jug she’d nearly spilled.
I mean. Sure.
The magical berry brew—the regular magical brew—is a secret not even Asher is in on. But he knows the rumors. “Is this the potion people say [Hope] uses to make your dadd a superman?” he asks Cheyenne. It’s interesting that this brew is both top secret and widely discussed.
Asher normally would have been impatient for her to answer, but he was momentarily mesmerized by her appearance. The high cheek bones, the exotic nose, the smooth olive skin, and her long lanky body folded up into a relaxed squat with her arms sticking straight out, elbows resting on her knees as she studied the jars, all spoke of Indian heritage.
Debi goes all in and straight-up uses the word “exotic.”
Also, this is some serious bullshit. Having Native American “heritage” results in having a particular sort of squat? It’s perhaps worth noting that no one seems particularly concerned about all of the Native American reservations that are going to be buried in ash once Yellowstone erupts, per this book. This is about making Cheyenne and her mother exotic and otherworldly, full stop.
It’s time to wrap this up, so I’m going to do some serious summarizing. Asher and Cheyenne stay in the clear, turning bottles of berry brew so they cure correctly and talking, for a good long time. Cheyenne tells Asher all about how her mom cured her dad, and then Rob Cohen. Asher objects, saying he thought Cohen died of cancer the year before.
Cheyenne nodded. “He did have cancer and was about dead. They even had his funeral planned, casket and everything. Creepy, huh? Mom put him on heavy doses of the brew, made him stop all sugar of any kind, forced him to eat raw vegetables and fresh fish. In less than a month he was in China making deals.
This is one of the issues I have with this book: we are never told how the Freemans know Roy Cohen, or how someone like Asher knows him from Adam. And why was he in China making deals? Was he a businessman with connections in China before he got cancer? We’re not told.
So then Cheyenne tells Asher about the China brew, and how they’re going to make tons of money off of it to finance the publishing of the graphic novel Bible. And remember, this whole time, Cheyenne has no idea her beloved dog is upstairs laid out on her mother’s work table, dead.
This withholding of information is weird.
Asher is not terribly impressed.
He looked over at her and forgot his resolve not to question the brew. The sound of skepticism was thick. “They plan on funding the entire publishing ministry with a brew?” Asher had a sinking feeling, thinking these people really are hillbillies.
They go back and forth, and Asher is thoroughly skeptical. He doesn’t think Rob’s recovery can necessarily be chalked up to the brew—sometimes these things just happen.
Cheyenne is defensive.
“Rob advised us to opt out of clinical trials. It would be impossible to keep everything under wraps if hundreds of people were involved and started reporting similar results as Dad and Rob. There would be no way we could keep it quiet. We would have to fend off thieves and the desperate before we could even get it to the market. Besides, some pharmaceutical company would end up pulling strings to get the FDA to halt our sales long enough for them to engineer and patent their own formula.”
Uh huh. Sure.
There’s a whole history here of why supplements don’t have to have FDA approval, etc., that this brings to mind, and it has a lot more to do with the fact that they don’t work than it does to do with being worried Big Pharma is going to steal it. Besides, the moment this stuff goes on the market, if it really works the way they claim, every other company will try to devise something similar.
There’s something that feels very contradictory in how very much they want to keep things quiet, given that their whole success depends on everyone buying their magic berry brew.
Debi has set Asher up here to be an author stand-in. Like us, he’s new to this. He gets to ask all the questions we have. The trouble is the way it’s resolved. It’s very Deus Ex Machina.
Cheyenne turns to go upstairs. Asher stops her, saying he needs to tell her something. He tells her Wiggles is dead, and that he’s very sorry. She asks him if he ran her over. He says no. But as they reach the top of the stairs, they see Hope sitting on the floor with Wiggles in her arms, gnawing on a bone.
Asher started at the dog. A drumming began to fill his head. The magnitude of what he was seeing overcame him.
Cheyenne stopped, momentarily confused by the news she had heard and the sight before her. She looked up at Asher to question him. Upon seeing his shocked face she quickly slid the squeaky chair behind his knees, pushing him to fall backwards into the seat. His head feel backwards as he stared into her face.
A look of pure mischievousness stared down at him. Cheyenne leaned down close, looked deeply into his eyes, and wrinkled up her nose while flashing him a big dimpled smile of satisfaction.
He stared back at her. Shakily he asked, “The brew?”
Cheyenne couldn’t repress a giggle. “Told you it works, city boy.”
This actually takes us back to where we started, because remember, this actually was not the berry brew Cheyenne has been telling him about. Hope used the Super Secret Brew to resurrect the dog. (I can’t believe I just typed that.) But what in the heck is the purpose of having two different formulas if they’re going to just elide them like this anyway? It makes no sense!
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