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Joel believed in God.
In the World Before, he went to church on a Sunday or two, prayed at the table every Thanksgiving, and even baptized Sarah at the time she became interested in going to chapel with the other children in the Southern neighborhood who went to Catechesis.
He could consider himself God-fearing.
All Thanksgiving he had bread, a roof over his head, and the warmth of a daughter who fell on his shoulder napping as soon as she was fed up.
Life was good. Hard, but good, tender.
Then came the end of the world. Preachers sprang up everywhere claiming their authority under the wrath of God. Follow them, obey them, and God will spare you.
But God didn't spare Sarah. God spared no one from the hell that the earth has become.
It would be possible to say that Joel became even more credulous after the apocalypse.
Yes, there was a god
A vengeful and angry God.
There had to be a God to whom he could curse and wish he could obliterate personally every day.
There had to be a culprit. A sadistic God who reveled in all that pain.
He believed in it so much that when a freckled girl with a suture scar on her eyebrow showed up with her horrible puns and a bite that never quite turned her, no matter how many days passed, he could only conclude that twenty years of twilight of the world might have been exhausting even for a God of infinite time.
Ellie was a miracle.
A miracle capable of even redeeming the sordidness of a God who had condemned the world to hell.
So he dug himself into the nine circles of hell, and dug some more because there was a promise. Not the promise made to a dead woman, no more. It was the promise that was reflected in a girl's inflexibility to bend to any misfortune. The one and only thing he could not let that motherfucker world take away from a girl who had been deprived of everything else.
And so it was because Ellie was moving toward the sun on the horizon, no matter how dark the night she had just overcome. By reflex, he did the same.
It was like the stories he heard in the Sunday sermons. The one about a rich man who lost everything, but persevered in his faith and God decided to give him everything again.
Yes, it was a challenge from that same megalomaniacal God who once bet the mediocre life of a believer with the devil himself just to see if he would bend after all the trials. That cruel god whose ego needed to see if a righteous man would claim his faith even after losing everything.
As if to make sure of the clarity of the memo, God sent one of his heralds after leaving Jackson. A filthy prophet like so many others from the World Before who would touch a child and get away with it just by being protected by the cloak of faith.
The preacher, bringing hell itself with him, imprisoned the girl to a burning building, to which her darkest nightmares returned, without him being able to help.
At the time, Joel wondered why God would think he would exult him after all that.
Even at the time he was listening to the sermons in church, he wondered how God thought he could reward Job after imposing so much pain and despair by returning everything in double. Wealth, sheep, health, longevity. Just not children - God could not reward Job with double children, because he would see them in eternity, so the liturgy explained.
Still everything Job went through seemed little, unjustified. Cruel. Why should his children be the instruments of his punishment? Even though God gave Job ten children again, how did this do justice to the ten who had their lives interrupted by a bet? Were they not entitled to a life?
No answer would make that God pleasing in their eyes, but obviously he still had a point to make when they set out on their final probation.
He needed to say that he was the God of Abraham, the God who asked for a beloved child as a holocaust to verify his father's worthiness and selflessness.
Perhaps, if he went through that small ordeal of placing a beloved child on an altar and offering it in sacrifice before a promise of a new world, God would take pity on him, as he took pity on Abraham, sparing his son.
But he was not Abraham, able to give up the child for whom he had waited his whole life just because he trusted in God's word.
Nor was he Job, able to bow down once again to him, and be the intercessor of a sacrifice.
He was not interested in a new world where the body of a child would be just one more among many nameless ones. A world that would remain indifferent to her death, as it was indifferent to all the others, because children died all the time.
If God did not fear his fury, let him know his dread.
Let him be aware that from that day on he repudiated him.
That he was disowning the Paradise that depended on the blood of one more little girl.
God's wrath would surely reach him, and tinge the ground with blood. Cruel. Implacable.
But until that day came, he would devote his days to building, not a paradise, but a ranch of moon sheep.