CHAPTER 10

MITCH’S GOING-AWAY STORY

Mitch

REALLY, I SHOULDN’T HAVE PUT UP SUCH A FIGHT. IT was nobody’s fault but my own that my leg got broken, snapped clean through. I was lucky for that. My calf could have been a bag of shards. If I had only listened to instructions when they found us in that tree house, nobody would have gotten hurt—it is neither the mandate nor intention to cause hurt. It never was. But I recognize that I was different back then, more focused on individual freedom than collective survival. I was a child.

I was blind. But now I see.

Things were rough, and I was convinced I was going to die. But I clung to the idea that you were out there, that you were going to make it. I felt like I’d done my job as a big brother, creating a distraction, letting you slip away into the godforsaken woods. Now I’m embarrassed that I left you out there to fend for yourself. Anything could have happened. How could I have told you to climb into the trees? To hide? You could have fallen. And what if they didn’t hear you fall and you were just out there, broken, at the base of a tree? Or what could have happened if you had managed to climb down? Over the years, I think I’ve imagined everything—you eaten by bears, taken by the insane who didn’t find help for their sickness, starving to death in the pines…I should have kept you with me. It would have been better to have you with me. Then we’d have been saved together. I was selfish.

The early schools were really nothing more than warehouses. There were fence cages full of metal bunks and no plumbing, and we were just kind of stored in there. It wasn’t all bad, though; there were regular meals, and the pastors involved gave us sermons and teachings every night before lights out so we had something to think about other than our pain, our loneliness. It’s weird to think that so many of us had been alone, and now there we were, hundreds of us all together, and yet still we felt lonely. That was before our hearts were relieved. Before we found grace. We were alone. Somehow, all together we were more alone than ever.

It was a few days before they really did anything about my leg, but what could they do? They had to wait for the doctors to show up. See, back then, the institutes didn’t have their own staff. People covered whole regions, so sometimes we’d go a week without a doctor or a dentist or a nutritionist. That was really the horror of it all—the waiting. If someone got sick or hurt in between visits, well, there was nothing that could be done. Sometimes releasing someone from their misery was the only kindness that could be afforded. But I was young and tough. In fact, it was how I dealt with and survived those first days that made them consider me for a higher calling in the first place. Though I was only a boy, a confused and lowly wretch, I was saved. Isn’t life wonderful sometimes?