For Children's Day, the primary Sunday School classes put on a play about Exodus. The third graders had speaking parts—Moses, the Pharaoh, an assortment of Israelites and Egyptians. The minister stood in the darkened choir loft to speak the words of God each time Moses needed to hear them. The first and second graders were the plagues in order.

Under two red bedspreads, the second graders were a river turned to blood.  Masked and hopping, the five first graders were frogs before the second graders were lice and then flies. Finished jumping, the boy could hear the murmurs of the adults from the shadowed pews.

Part of a herd of cattle, he went on all fours and lowed like the teacher had taught them. The Pharaoh hardened his heart again while the five of them milled around in black and white outfits until they buckled and fell onto their sides because God had killed them.
   
The second graders wore white hoods circled by the red of boils. Everybody flung brown rice as hail before they all chattered like locusts. Finally, the boy put on a black sheet and waited for every light but the one at the base of the chancel to go out. He walked around slowly. The church seemed to spin as he and the other first-borns dropped and died, the rest of his classmates stepping back to leave them lying in the dark. When half the lights switched back on, the boy lay still while the Israelites walked between two pieces of plywood painted to look like waves.

That night his family talked about the plagues, what they would be if they were trying to get out of Pittsburgh.  "A flood, for sure," his father said.  "Heavy snow followed by rain and a sudden thaw."

"The Atom-bomb," his mother said, and his grandmother shook her head and made the tsk sound with her tongue she always used when she was displeased.

"The first-born would get polio," his aunt said. "They'd have to live in iron lungs." 

"Tsk," the boy's grandmother said. His aunt looked at him and said, "Not you, Bobby. You're not first-born if you're the only one."

His grandmother cleared her throat. "Smallpox," she said, and the boy smiled, rolling up his sleeve to show off the mark on his shoulder.

"I'm safe," he said. "All of us are safe." He'd seen the scars on his parents. His mother's mark was twice the size of his, as big as a quarter.

His grandmother began to lift the hem of her dress, and suddenly, on the outside of her thigh, a scar the size of a silver dollar appeared. It was milky and concave, not like anyone else's. "A plague on the fool who gave me this," she said as it shimmered. She pulled her dress back down.

That white circle seemed to shine through the cloth.

"Leukemia," he said, remembering his cousin Greg.

"The first-born," his aunt said.

"That's enough for one night," his grandmother said. "That's enough about the plagues." For then, it was. For six years until his mother brought home a dark diagnosis, a word no one had spoken that night, a plague nobody in the family had ever heard of.

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