The Bible

The Bible is a recurring object of devotion, interpretation, and crisis in Thomas Birdsey’s story. He reads and memorizes it to preserve what he believes the Communists will try to suppress, turns its passages into proof of a divine mission against war, and invokes its language of bodily sacrifice before cutting off his right hand. The same text that offers Thomas order and purpose thus becomes entangled with his persecutory and messianic delusions, while his twin Dominick Birdsey witnesses both the force of his faith and the cost of living beside it.

A text carried into daily life

Thomas’s Bible is not confined to church or private prayer. During visits with Dominick Birdsey and Dessa at the Indian cemetery, he sits on the grass smoking cigarette after cigarette and reading it. By this period, he has already cast himself as God’s right-hand man and a target of the KGB. Scripture accompanies the predictions of doom he draws from newspapers, nightly news, and dreams; the reading is part of an everyday practice through which he tries to make threatening events intelligible.

In a recorded session with his doctor, Thomas says that he reads The Bible and is memorizing it. He explains that if the Communists take over, they will ban the holy text, and that memorization will preserve it should he become a hunted man. The effort is both devotional and defensive: he treats the words as something that can be carried within him when the imagined danger makes the physical book or public religious life seem vulnerable. His insistence that The Bible is the only book he reads sharpens the boundary he draws between sacred authority and other sources of knowledge.

Scripture as a prophetic map

Thomas reads current events through a scriptural framework. In conversation with his doctor, he recites the passage about Peter, the church, and the keys of Heaven, then identifies himself as a fisher of souls and keeper of the keys. Biblical language does not remain a source of general comfort; in his interpretation, it names his personal office and confirms that God has assigned him work.

The same pattern shapes his account of the impending war against Iraq. Thomas believes that President Bush may bring about the end of the world unless he intervenes, and links Saddam with Satan through a wordplay he regards as self-evident. He directs his doctor back to The Bible and its accounts of the Pharisees, moneylenders, and the serpent. His reading gathers political events and religious images into a single explanatory system, where signs in the news become evidence of a cosmic conflict and of his own responsibility to stop it.

That claimed mission also has an ethical and political dimension. Thomas says God does not want the country to go to war, but wants people to love one another and honor God rather than money. He invokes Wounded Knee and slavery as parts of the country’s history that expose its failures. As he sobs, he says that God wants him to lead the way, then contrasts that calling with his confinement under house arrest. The scene holds conviction and helplessness together: he imagines himself as an agent chosen to oppose violence, while experiencing institutional care as the force preventing him from acting.

The right hand and bodily sacrifice

The most destructive convergence of scripture and action occurs in the library on October 12, 1990. The account is related by Dominick Birdsey, who says his knowledge of what happened comes from Thomas’s telling and newspaper coverage published alongside reports about Operation Desert Shield. After Theresa Fenneck reprimands Thomas by a study carrel, he resumes silent prayer, repeatedly reciting Saint Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 5, verses 29 and 30. The passage about removing an offending eye and cutting off an offending hand gives his planned act a scriptural form.

Thomas takes a ceremonial Gurkha knife that his stepfather had brought home as a World War II souvenir. Until the previous afternoon, it had hung sheathed and forgotten on an upstairs bedroom wall in the brothers’ childhood home. With his left hand, Thomas carries out the steps he has rehearsed. The surgeon who later treats him is amazed that the severity of the pain did not stop him midway. Thomas cuts through the bone at his right wrist and amputates the hand cleanly. The Bible’s language is no longer only recited or interpreted: Thomas makes his body the site on which he believes its command must be enacted.

Faith, illness, and the burden of witnessing

The novel presents Thomas’s religious practice through more than the amputation. At Settle Psychiatric Hospital, he reads The Bible while Dominick Birdsey grows impatient with his brother’s prophecies and hurries back toward the institution, leaving his response to Thomas’s babbling unspoken. The text therefore belongs both to Thomas’s inner system of meaning and to Dominick’s account of the strain of being the twin who must keep returning, listening, and caring. The brothers do not experience the same scripture in the same way: for Thomas it supplies certainty and a role, while for Dominick its recurring presence is inseparable from obligation and exhaustion.

Thomas’s requests to read and memorize The Bible also coexist with elaborate fears of surveillance and persecution. The narrative does not reduce every religious belief to illness; instead, it shows how Thomas’s deteriorating grasp of events turns scriptural interpretation into a means of organizing threats and enlarging his sense of personal election. His antiwar concern, his references to injustice, and his bodily sacrifice remain connected, but they do not have equal consequences: the convictions that give his actions moral purpose also lead him to a devastating act of self-mutilation.

The Bible’s significance is thus carried by recurrence and contrast. It is a book read on the grass, memorized against an imagined ban, quoted to explain world events, and repeated in prayer beside the study carrel. Across those settings, sacred language moves from daily practice to political prophecy and then to bodily action. That progression makes the book a central measure of Thomas’s attempt to impose order on chaos—and of the gap between the meaning he finds in scripture and the suffering his interpretation produces.