But now his brow wrinkles into a stern frown.
“Boys,” he says, “it’s time for a serious talk.” His serious voice is a deep growl, three octaves below his peppy “praise the Lord” voice.
Mary and I are assumed in the word “boys” most of the time, unless it’s something fun. He’s always mixing up our names, calling me Mary and my sister Faithy, but he doesn’t like it if we correct him, so we’ve learned to just go along with it.
Elbows drop into place, and we sit on our stools, silent as the boiled oats.
“We’re hiding from bad people,” he begins. “They want to stop us from doing the Lord’s work. We can’t let them find us, so it’s very important that nobody, including your friends in the city, know where we are. It’s absolutely Selah.”
The silence makes my nose itch, but as I wiggle around to scratch it, my father rumbles, “Faithy?”
I freeze.
“Do you know what ‘Selah’ means?”
My gaze flicks to Hobo for salvation, but he’s staring in his bowl. My head gives a faint shake no. Is that the wrong answer?
“It means completely secret. Your lips are sealed. You cannot tell anyone where we live. Do you understand?”
Ah. I nod, solemn as a soldier. I want to ask, Who are these bad people? What will they do to us if they find us? But I keep my lips pressed together. I know what happens when Christians are captured. It usually involves torture, death, or lions in the Bible stories read to us before bed each night.
After my father’s speech is over, we say grace and eat in silence, glancing at each other over our oatmeal. With him at the table, we are afraid of talking noisily over each other as we usually do when we are just eating with Mommy Ruthie or Mommy Esther, or our caregivers. Where is Uncle Michael? I wonder. He usually watches us after breakfast.
It’s strange having just our personal family around the breakfast table. My siblings and I are normally taken care of by other Family members, like Uncle Michael, since our parents spend much of their days doing leadership work. My father and mother have the very important job of working on the Word of God by helping to edit and print the Mo Letters Grandpa sends to his disciples around the world. These paper booklets, formatted like a newsletter, arrive by mail every two weeks. They’re filled with Grandpa’s latest prophecies, testimonies, and dreams. Everything that Grandpa says is captured on tape by a person who follows him around with a recorder to transcribe his thoughts for the Mo Letters and other Family publications so not one gem that drops from his lips will fall to the ground.
I feel very close to Grandpa, even though I’ve never actually seen him. He’s been in hiding since before I was born, and all photos of him have been burned to protect his identity. The black-and-white pictures sprinkled through the Mo Letters are either cartoons or, if it’s a real photo, there is always a drawing of a lion head (he started referring to himself as Papa Lion after having a dream of being a powerful lion) or a white-bearded man who looks like Moses from The Ten Commandments movie pasted over where Grandpa’s real head should be.
After we stack our orange plastic camping bowls for washing, Mommy Esther holds up what looks like a large bamboo bowl with a pointed top. It’s a Chinese farmer’s hat. “Every time you leave the house, you need to wear one of these,” she says. “No white people have ever lived in this village. If anyone sees your blond hair, it will cause suspicion. We don’t want the bad people who are trying to persecute us to find us, so you must promise me you won’t leave the house without your hat.” Seven little heads bob up and down.
How will this help? I wonder. Surely, everyone will be able to spot we are not Chinese, hat or no.
My mother hands them out, and we put them on. I look at Caleb and giggle at the bulky, awkward shape on his head that almost covers his nose; he shoves me, and when my hat slides off, the wide brim bumps into Bones, who theatrically falls to the ground.
“Kids!” My father’s voice cracks like a whip, and we sit up straight as broomsticks. “This is very serious. The forces of Satan are out to harm the Family and Grandpa,” he barks out, followed by a punishing grip of the tendons in the back of Bones’s neck as he drags him to his feet.
I wince in sympathy. We’ve all been on the receiving end of that painful pinch.
“Why do we have to hide now?” Hobo bravely asks my father.
For years we’ve been Christian singing stars on local radio and TV in Hong Kong and Macau, despite being Grandpa’s grandchildren. We stare at my father in confusion.
My father’s voice dips to his deep growl. “We have been betrayed. By Lynne Watson.”
A gasp goes around the table.
Lynne Watson’s image pops into my mind. She is a British woman with wavy blondish hair who looks to be about my mom’s age; nothing about her stands out as evil. I’d seen her a few times, when my parents brought her by the apartment to study the Mo Letters.
My parents are always so happy when people want to learn about Jesus. It’s hard to imagine someone like Lynne Watson could betray us when all we are trying to do is help more people get closer to God.
“She was only pretending to be our friend to get close enough to confirm my identity,” Dad continues. “She’s written terrible things about us and published our real names in the newspaper.”
“Ho?” I whisper. Everyone calls my father Ho, short for Hosea, but also a common Chinese surname. Systemites call him Mr. Ho, and Family members call him Uncle Ho.
“No,” Mommy Ruthie explains. “Ho is fine. It’s his other name, his legal name, which we can never say.”
“What is it?” I ask. I had no idea he had another name.
“We don’t use our last name ever,” my father emphasizes, staring at the older boys, who had seen their last name on their passports, which are normally kept in his safe. “You don’t even tell other Family members. If someone lets it slip, enemies of God could find Grandpa.”
At all costs, Grandpa must be protected.
“I can’t believe she deceived us like that!” Mommy Esther’s pale blue eyes are blazing. She is normally meek and quiet, hanging in the background even when she is supporting us onstage with her guitar, but this morning she is fuming. “She lied about wanting to get to know Jesus and study His Word, just to get close to us and learn our secrets!”
The adults’ sense of betrayal and mistrust seeps into me.
“We thought she was a sheep,” Mommy Esther continues. “But she wasn’t even a goat! She was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a snake in the grass.”