Bestial by Ray Garton Read Free Book Online Page A

whimpering, he barely heard it. He focused his attention on the talk station that was playing on the radio—KGO from San Francisco—but as usual, he was unable to tune Grandma out entirely. His window was down and the warm evening air hit his face as he chewed a stick of Juicy Fruit.
    “If only I could afford to go to the sanitarium,” Grandma said. “I’d feel so much better there. They’d treat me well, take care of me.”
    “It hasn’t been called the sanitarium for a long, long time, Grandma,” Bob said. “It’s the St. Helena Hospital.”
    “It’s still the sanitarium,” she said testily. “Sister White was treated there. She died there.”
    Bob expelled a burst of breath from his nose. “Guess they didn’t treat her too well, huh?”
    Grandma scowled at him. “She was eighty-seven . It was her time . That was a long life back then. People didn’t often live to be eighty-seven in 1915. But she was God’s chosen messenger. The Lesser Light. So she lived a long life because she lived for God. Led an unblemished life. Ate healthfully. Did God’s work.”
    Bob tried to narrow in on the talk show again. Grandma went on and on about Sister White as he drove. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t listening to her—she didn’t care. As she did so often and always had, she quoted Sister White’s writings, rambled on about the problems the Seventh-day Adventist prophetess had overcome—being hit in the head with a rock at age nine, comatose for two weeks, disfigured by the injury, and yet she’d gone on to write so many divinely-inspired books, to receive so many prophetic visions directly from God, and to lead the Remnant Church to his light. That was one of Grandma’s favorite stories about Sister White, the injury early in her life that the church claimed had twisted her features and plagued her health for all her years. Many people claimed that the injury had brought about in Sister White a condition called temporal lobe epilepsy, a symptom of which is often ecstatic religious “visions” and delusions of grandeur, but Adventists didn’t like that theory one little bit.
    Mom and Grandma had a few pictures of Sister White hanging on the walls of the house. The pictures had been there Bob’s whole life, a permanent part of his environment. He’d decided that getting hit in the head with that rock had not disfigured her at all—she’d simply been a very ugly woman, and probably had been an equally ugly little girl. Blaming it on the rock sounded better, of course. It was good marketing.
    As a boy, the grainy black-and-white pictures of Sister White had haunted his dreams—her stern, homely face glaring at him from the past, those fat lips pressed together hard in a straight line, sharp eyes accusing him, condemning him. The Lesser Light (as they called her), the co-founder of the Seventh-day Adventist church and prophetess of God, the final and infallible interpreter of scripture and arbiter of doctrine for the church, seemed to glare across the decades into Bob Berens’s eyes to let him know how wicked he was, how iniquitous and base... how doomed.
    Of course, she still haunted his dreams, even now at the age of thirty-eight. Sometimes she even haunted his waking thoughts. The stern face, condemning eyes, all those hundreds of thousands of words she’d written which seemed to exist only to tell him how sinful he’d been his entire life. Sometimes he imagined a great mountain of all her red hardcover books piled on top of him, crushing and smothering him.
    Grandma’s ramblings were not the result of senility—at eighty-eight, she was sharper than Bob’s mother, and probably healthier than he, although she enjoyed whining about her myriad ailments. When she was hit with one of her “spells”, she insisted he take her to the Emergency Room. Doctors familiar with her—and there were several in Big Rock, including those in the ER—always sighed when they saw Marion Berens coming. They knew