After he was finished speaking, they each prayed, then sang a song unto the Lord. There was a pause, and then Vern cleared his throat before addressing the most important subject before them: the angel. As he had for the last several Sundays, he recounted the events of New Year’s Eve.
“There are no accidents,” he continued. “There is nothing that happens that God does not know about or plan. He knew we would shoot down His angel in our drunken revelry. He wanted us to do so. But now He is waiting for our response. Yet again, He has sacrificed one of His own for us, a blood sacrifice, and now it is up to us to do the same, to offer up to Him a blood sacrifice of our own.”
This was the moment he had been waiting for, and he opened the closet door behind him and pulled out the small cage that he used to house the jackrabbits he sometimes caught. In it was a baby he had taken from an Indian woman on Thursday. He placed the cage down on the carpet next to the coffeetable and stood there proudly as everyone looked at it.
He had seen the Indian woman standing next to one of the pumps at the gas station, holding her baby, obviously looking for a ride, and the idea came to him. He had no doubt that it was divinely inspired—there was no way he could have come up with such a plan on his own—and as smoothly as though he had rehearsed for days, he rolled down the window of his car and said easily, “Would you like a ride?”
She was suspicious for a moment, but she got in, and Vern drove at first in the direction she told him, until they were out of town, then he ignored her directions and took off down a dirt road that led into the desert toward the ruins of the old Peralta ranch. She was quiet, almost as though she knew what was coming, and she did not fight him as he stopped the car next to Wailing Woman Wash, got out, walked around to the passenger door, opened it and took the baby from her. He motioned for her to get out, and when she did, he placed the infant on her seat. She’d said nothing since getting into the car, and he knew that was the Lord’s doing, because he was weak and would probably not have been able to go through with it had she pleaded for mercy or begged him to stop.
Grabbing her arm, he pulled her to the side of the road and threw her into the wash. He wasn’t sure what he would have done at that point—stone her? strangle her?—but it didn’t matter because she hit her head on a large rock when she fell and was immediately still. Blood, an astonishing amount, flowed out from the side of her head onto the sand.
Instantly, as though it was part of a plan—and it was: God’s plan—a wild one-eyed dog came running out from between some brittlebush and began desperately chewing on the woman’s exposed ankle. Several crows flew down from the branches of a nearby palo verde, and from high in the sky two turkey buzzards dropped down and landed on her back. None of the animals paid any attention to the others, and all tore into her flesh, feasting. He had no doubt that in several hours there would be nothing left but bone.
As he turned away, back toward the car, a coyote crossed the road, heading toward the woman in the wash.
Vern had taken the baby home with him, told Rose of his plan, and put the infant in the cage, in the closet, feeding it only water. It had remained there until now, until needed. Opening the wire gate, Vern withdrew the baby and placed it atop the table, where it lay on its back, unmoving. Too weak to cry, the infant made low mewling noises.
Rose handed him a knife—her curved filleting knife from the kitchen—and he held it up. “Who would like to do the honors?”
He knew none of them would be brave enough to carry out the Lord’s will and was merely trying to shame them, to make them uncomfortably aware of their own cowardice, but to his surprise old Etta Rawls raised her hand. “I will,” she announced.
He was proud of her—as was the Lord—but he smiled, shaking his head. “I thank you, Etta, but on second thought, I believe it would be better if I did the deed myself.”
For a brief moment, looking down at the brown-skinned infant, Vern thought that maybe God would not consider this a real sacrifice because it was not someone who mattered. It was just some papoose he had stolen. For the sacrifice to count, it should be one of them, a white person, someone important. But then he remembered that he was doing this for the entire Magdalena community and not just for his congregation. This baby was a member of that community, so in the end it did count.
Besides, the angel they’d killed could not have been a very important one. If it had been, God would already have taken His wrath out on them. The fact that He was waiting, that He was offering them a chance of forgiveness and redemption, meant that this was the right thing to do.