Free No Book but the World: A Novel by Leah Hager Cohen Page A

woken up that morning.
    Then we all filed into the back of the building, where there turned out to be a warm kitchen with applesauce bubbling on an industrial-sized stove and homemade bread and honey—and children! There had been other children there the whole time, off in some other room where they’d been given yarn and sticks for making God’s eyes, which they now displayed happily to their parents. Kitty and I exchanged a look of wordless indignation: apparently we’d missed out on the fun part of church. We bit into our bread and honey with sullen relief.
    That was not quite my only foray into formal religion. But for all intents and purposes, I grew up with neither a belief in nor even a rough impression of God. Except that no child grows up entirely godless, not unless deprived of the presence of those first, most tangible of gods: our parents. And they were real eminences, Neel and June. You might think parents who followed the creed of allowing their offspring total freedom in exercising their own judgments, their own curiosities and desires, would seem less god-like than other parents—those who more closely direct, intercede and proscribe. But which is more almighty—an ultimate controller, the author of every stroke and flourish, or a prime mover, one who sets life in motion and then bears witness as we exercise free will?
    I only know that to me they seemed the more powerful, the more all-knowing, for their remove, for the myriad ways they refrained from ordering or mediating or salving. Although in this they were not equals. Even at a young age, I was attuned to June’s ambivalence, the way her actions sometimes seemed to call Neel’s own into question.
    Once, at a birthday party for one of the Ganns, all the Batter Hollow kids were outside setting off Alka-Seltzer rockets: plastic film canisters in which water and bicarbonate of soda were mingled to combustive effect. It was an unseasonably cold spring day, the air packed with a raw, meaty dampness. Our hands and lips were purple by the time we finished passing around the hose, and as we began to insert the little antacid tablets (the older Gann kids referred to these, knowledgeably, as ammo), a sleety rain began to fall. Our fingers were so numb that the canisters were difficult to seal, but at last we got the rockets capped and lined up along the gravel crescent. Then one by one, with thrilling pops, they sprang into the air high above our heads, trailing white spume.
    My jaws ached from chattering and my hands were icy talons, but I remember the giddiness of our laughter as we emulated the whoops of the big kids; remember the sheer glee of being able to shoot things into the air and the pleasure of conspiracy, for we were doing this all on our own, no grown-ups. Our only supervisor was the eldest Gann, a bony-chested teen who’d recently started sporting a beret and a pretty decent Che Guevara mustache, and who exuded such a thrilling air of guerrilla competency that the string of successful explosions felt at once anarchic and ordained.
    Into this resplendently adult-free zone stepped June, intruding through the dripping grass in a pair of green rubber boots and a slicker, her arms laden with hats, gloves and scarves scooped from the old steamer trunk that had for decades functioned as the Batter Hollow School lost-and-found. On this cold, wet day, June wove nimbly among us and the detritus of our rockets, laughing a little at her own hennish impulses but earnest in her mission. To the older kids she simply handed protective gear, but with us younger ones she actually stretched the woolen caps over our heads and fitted the mittens onto our uplifted hands. No one protested. If none of us had thought of abandoning our rockets to go inside, we were no less grateful for the warmth she offered us now.
    Then across the meadow came Neel, the rain plastering his curls against his head so that he looked like an aged Kewpie. Arms pumping, he strode toward the