Salvation City - By Sigrid Nunez Page 0,34

and women pour out their hearts to twelve-year-old Michaela, asking for her advice about grown-up things—should they take this new job, should they have another baby—or for her blessing. The same kind of thing that had happened in the orphanage. Some of the other orphans were a little afraid of the rapture children because of this power they had with the adults. And Cole is a little afraid of Michaela. The way she always seems to be either laughing or crying. The way, in church, she is able to keep singing out strong even with tears streaming down her face. A girl with almost no meat on her bones and enormous hungry-looking eyes. There would not be enough hours in the day for her to fill all the requests she got from people to pray for them.

Cole is afraid of Starlyn, too. But that is love (and a secret).

Though there is no Bible story about them, Cole would like to do a comic book about rapture children.

“Did you used to be one?” Even before he asks PW this, Cole knows the answer is yes. But PW gives a loud whoop as if Cole had said something crazy.

“Me? Oh my, no, no, no. I was—my mama would tell you—I was more of a—of a reptile child.” And when Cole looks confused, PW stops laughing and says, “It don’t matter, Cole. It don’t matter what kind of child a person is. Like the song goes, Jesus loves all the little children.” And he opens the Bible to Mark 10:13, to show Cole where it is written.

“CHILDREN TELL TALE OF REAL-LIFE ‘LORD OF THE FLIES.’”

Pastor Wyatt had saved a copy of the article that had set him on the path leading to Cole. But long before that story appeared, he’d been preaching against the new orphanages.

“First we had all these horror stories about our inefficient and overburdened foster-care system resulting in all these abused and neglected kids. Then we had people saying why not bring back the old institutions? Why not dump all those kids in a group home and have the government be in charge? Can’t possibly be worse than what we got now. As if the solution to ‘the system’s broken’ was ‘break it some other how.’ But Jesus tells us straight out how he felt about children: the kingdom of God is theirs. And whoever seeks to live in the kingdom must love the children as he loved them. Meaning it is our inescapable duty to find Christian families for each and every child. And if that means moving children from parts of the country where good Christian families are hard to find to parts of the country where they are the majority, then I say that’s what we should do.”

Most people avoided calling them orphanages. They called them children’s homes instead. And in the beginning, most home children weren’t orphans at all but kids who’d been taken away from their parents. And although the homes might not have been the happiest places in the world for a young child to be, at least in the beginning they were safe and clean, the children got three meals a day and decent clothes, and, like other children, they were sent to school.

Before the pandemic the homes were kept as small as possible, and there were people who were angry about the expense, who complained about their tax dollars going to buy home children things they couldn’t afford to buy their own children—though, of course, this was worse than an exaggeration.

But most people would have been too ashamed to complain. These were just kids, after all, poor and unlucky but innocent of crime, and they touched the heart in a way that people rotting in nursing homes, or in prisons (as was the sad case with many home children’s parents), never could. In fact, in the beginning Americans everywhere opened their wallets. It didn’t take long for the new orphanages to become one of the nation’s top charities. Besides money, there were donations of everything from toys and computers to musical instruments and gym equipment. (One home in New Jersey found itself blessed with a stable of retired racehorses.) It was not unusual for a home to have more volunteers than were actually needed, and celebrities of all types could always be counted on to help raise funds or pay visits, especially at holiday time.

“An unlikely success story,” reported Time magazine. “What began as a bold and risky experiment soon turned into