Rapture of Canaan (16 page)

Grandpa Herman didn’t decide what to do with Ben Harback
for forty days, which Grandpa said was a sign. When he came out of the mysterious cellar that I couldn’t even find on the property, he looked like a rib, having eaten nothing except rice for so many days, and the sunlight hurt his eyes so bad that he squinted almost all the time. I figured that by that time, Corinthian had forgotten him for sure, and it made me ill.

We were already gathering tobacco, walking row after row and popping off the four leaves on the bottom of every plant so that by the time we got back to that particular field, the higher leaves would have grown.

The day after Ben Harback reemerged, he was in the fields, but he was so weak that he fell behind, and Mustard had to help him keep up. James had moved on to bigger things than cropping tobacco by that time. He was driving the tractor, pulling the wooden drag where we tossed the leaves behind him.

“You okay, Ben?” I asked him that afternoon. Because he hadn’t been in the sun all summer, his skin was pale as a cotton boll and not as absorbant. He was already lobstering in that heat.

“I’ll be all right, I reckon,” he said.

“Cause you can sit on that drag if you ain’t feeling good. Me and Mustard will cover for you, and James won’t tell.”

“I’ll make do,” he insisted.

He’d been underground so long that his voice sounded funny, like he had water in his lungs, and when James stopped at the end of a row to wait for us to crop the last few leaves and then turn the tractor around to go back down the next, I stopped him.

“Ben’s sick,” I told him.

“Why do you say that?”

“Look at him. He’s about to fall down.”

“He’ll be okay,” James said, and drove on, riding high, like king of the field.

We took a break in the middle of the afternoon, and Ben climbed weakly onto the drag with the rest of us, and James drove us back to the barn where a bunch of women were putting the tobacco leaves onto the conveyor belt and Nanna was straightening them before they went through the stringer where they got stitched to the old wooden sticks.

During summer, we were allowed to drink Coca-Colas in bottles and eat Nekots out of their plastic wrappers on breaks. It was the only relief we got from the sun and the work.

We took twenty minutes to catch our breath. Even the men who were hanging the sticks in the barn got to come out and talk.

“You all right, Ben?” Nanna asked him.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said.

“We’re glad to have you back with us,” David added.

“Glad to be here,” Ben said. “It’s been lonely down under. I reckon I shouldn’t say that, since I had God to converse with, but I missed you people.”

“We missed you too,” Daddy said.

Before we left to go back to the fields where the strong people worked, where James drove a tractor and David did, where all the older children worked cropping tobacco and the younger ones followed them picking up dropped leaves, and the littlest ones not even old enough for school sat at the edges of rows and played with their toy tractors, I pulled Nanna aside and said, “Ben Harback’s gonna pass out.”

“You reckon?” Nanna asked.

“He’s pale and he can’t keep up and he needs to go to bed.”

“I told Herman not to put him in this field before he got a good meal,” she said, walking back.

Nanna motioned Ben to the side of the barn and was talking with him when Grandpa Herman drove up in his shiny pickup and Ben hurried back to rejoin the croppers.

We went back out in the sun, plucking off our leaves and laying them onto the drags in big armfuls. We hadn’t been working long before Ben threw up. I heard him gagging and didn’t want to look, but I didn’t want him to get in trouble by falling behind. So I kept crossing over to his row and Mustard helped too while Ben choked and wiped his face.

“I can do it,” Ben panted after a few minutes. “Y’all get back to your rows. I’ll get mine.”

“It’s okay,” Mustard tried. “Take it easy.”

“I can do it,” he bellowed. “Leave me alone.” He leaned over, cropped a handful of leaves, and tossed them on the drag next to the ones I’d just put there. A clump of vomit fell off his shirt and landed on the trailer.

I had to talk myself out of getting sick. I had to force myself not to think about it.

Me and Mustard let him keep going, and I prayed for my own weak stomach instead of for Ben.

We were halfway down the next set of rows when Mustard hollered out, “Hey, Ben’s fell down.”

James didn’t hear him and kept driving slowly along.

“Hey,” Mustard called again. “Ben’s down.”

I ran over to Ben, and some others rustled through tobacco stalks to where he’d collapsed. Somebody stopped James and he turned off the tractor.

“He ain’t hardly breathing,” Pammy declared.

“He’s breathing,” I said. “Don’t exaggerate.” But I was worried. His face was sunburned to the point that it looked like you could wipe his skin off with your fingers, but beneath that redness, it seemed like the blood had drained away. It was the scariest color I’d seen, doughy pink and almost runny.

“Let’s get him up there,” Barley said, and picked Ben up from under the arms. Mustard got his legs.

We all hopped onto the drag, trying to balance our weight in the middle so that it didn’t tip up or down, and Mustard sat up on the tractor’s tire shield to keep it from being so heavy.

I wiped at Ben’s face with a tobacco leaf. It was all I had.

James drove back to the barn going so fast that the nickels and dimes in the engine sounded like steady quarters. Dust clouded around us as we hit bumps in the road. Dust particles muddied in our sweat.

“Slap him, Ninah,” Pammy said. “Wake him up.”

So I did. I hit him on both sides of the face and then once really hard in the middle of the chest, all the time asking God to preserve him.

“Ben,” Pammy shouted. “Ben!” She yelled it in my ear, but I didn’t fuss.

When we got to the barn, Nanna ran over to us, and Grandpa Herman pulled the truck up, and Everett and Olin lifted the still-unconscious Ben into the back. Nanna leaped in, and then Grandpa drove away.

“Get back to work,” David said. “Everybody back in the fields.”

So we went.

 

 

 

J
ames asked me if I thought Ben would be okay, and I said I
hoped so. James asked me where he was staying, and I told him that I figured he was in Nanna’s spare bedroom. James asked me if I thought God was punishing Ben, and I told him that God didn’t need to because Grandpa Herman took care of that better than anybody else I knew.

“Sometimes when you say things like that, I wonder how God would even be willing to speak through you,” James smarted.

“Well, it’s the truth,” I said. “Leaving a man in a cellar for forty days. I don’t see how you could call it anything else but cruel.”

We were out behind the barn. James and Barley and Mustard were in charge of watching the fires that burned beneath the leaves, making sure they didn’t get too hot and ignite the curing tobacco during the night. Because James was still working, I got to go outside for prayer partners. Nobody was concerned about it. Barley and Mustard were there too. But they’d fallen asleep already, in the soft sand beneath the shed where the tobacco stringer was parked next to the barn door.

And we were on the far side of the barn, closest to the woods, stretched out on our backs and looking up at dark sky pocked with clouds. We couldn’t even see the moon.

“Do you ever worry that what we do sometimes during prayers could be considered ... fornicating?” James asked.

“No,” I lied. “What we’re doing is different. It’s just a part of a prayer. Besides, it isn’t
you
I’m doing it with. It’s Jesus. ”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think we should mention it to anybody though,” I added.

“No,” James agreed. “They wouldn’t understand. Sometimes I worry that we’re fornicating though.”

I felt an awful pinching in my stomach when he said that. I knew that if James really started believing he was sinning, he’d tell. I didn’t know what Grandpa’d do to us if he found out. I suspected it would be far worse than anything that had happened to Ben—since Ben came into the community late in life, but we’d grown up there.

“What Ben did is different,” James coaxed himself. “That’s nothing like what we do.”

“No.”

“I mean, if Ben had been following God’s instructions, he wouldn’t never have gotten caught—do you think?”

“No,” I said again.

“Me neither.”

I rolled over onto my side then, facing James, and I put my hand on his shirt and ran my fingers along the middle of his chest. He was skinny. We both were.

“But if you’re Jesus to me,” James figured, “then when I’m loving Jesus through you, that means I’m really loving a
man.
Do you reckon that makes me—you know—funny?”

“Jesus ain’t a man,” I giggled quietly. “He’s a spirit. He’s a God. That’s not anything
like
loving a man.”

“You’re right,” James said, rolling over to face me, and then I flattened back out on my back.

He ran his hands across my abdomen, across those bones that poked up at the place where my hips began.

“They feel like noses,” James whispered.

“If you’re really worried about it,” I said quietly, my voice getting lower and earthing, “then maybe we should ask Jesus for a sign.”

“What kind of sign?”

“I don’t know. We could pray about it and see what happens.”

So we prayed together, then quietly alone, and the whole time I was scurrying through my mind, trying to think of a way to make James certain that what we were doing wasn’t a sin.

Finally, I thought of something that might work.

“Lord,” I said aloud, “I think you’re trying to give me something for James. I’m not sure what it is yet, so please make it clear to me.”

“Thank you, Jesus, for speaking to Ninah,” James prayed.

“The ring?” I pretended to ask God. “You want me to put the ring on his finger?”

“What ring?” James muttered.

“Look,” I said to him with as much sincerity as I could muster. “Jesus gave me a ring for you, to put on your finger. He’s
marrying us,
James.”

I took his hand in mine, reached for his middle finger, and then slipped the invisible ring down over the knuckle.

“Can you feel it?” I asked him. “It’s gold with little diamonds all around.”

“I can feel it,” James laughed, and then he started crying. “Oh God, Ninah, can you believe it? Wait, I have to ask God if there’s something for you.”

While he prayed, I felt low and wicked, and I expected at any minute to hear a trumpet in the sky, God calling his children home to get them away from someone as evil as me. I felt lower than river sludge, but I wasn’t about to back down.

“Thank you, Christ,” James said. “Thank you for your sign.”

“What’d he say?” I asked.

“He gave me a ring for you too. Give me your hand.”

And he worked his fingers down mine, pausing for a second, then pushing until he fit it in place.

“It’s got rubies in it,” he said. “I saw it.”

“Really?” I asked him.

“Yes!” James laughed and cried and shook with relief. “I’m so
glad,
” he said. “You’re my wife. At least before God, you’re my wife. Oh, Ninah, I’m so glad you prayed for a sign.”

“I hope nobody can see the rings except us.”

“They
can’t,”
James followed. “He told me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. We’re the only ones who know they’re there.”

And then James was on top of me again, but it was different—because I knew it was James and not Jesus. I didn’t feel glowing and holy afterwards. I felt like I was made from mud.

 

 

 

I
didn’t know what to do. In my bed that night and for nights
afterwards, I stared up at the ceiling and prayed for a tornado to come down and suck me up and throw me in a river somewhere far away. I prayed for the ceiling to fall right in on me and flatten my face and scar me up so that nobody, not James, not Jesus, not anybody at all would ever want to touch me again.

I had bad dreams about being whipped in front of the altar. I had bad dreams that James was whipping me, then rolling me over and being Jesus for me, except he wasn’t Jesus. He was Satan. Either Satan or Grandpa Herman.

I woke up sweating, and kept climbing out of bed, creeping to the bathroom where I stood before the faucet. But I couldn’t even turn it on to make sure it ran water and not blood. Because all I deserved was blood.

But I didn’t see any blood. Not anywhere. Not in the faucet and not in the toilet after I peed. Not in my underpants. Not on my sheets. No blood at all.

I thought maybe the rapture had come already and we’d all missed it, the entire Fire and Brimstone community. I knew I had to be living in the years of plague and revelation. There was plenty of food, but I couldn’t eat. I’d seen no stinging beasts, but I jumped for fear of them at every corner.

I knew it was my fault. I’d taken something beautiful like our prayers and turned them into something horrible—just so I could keep feeling good. And I
didn’t
feel good. Not at all.

Nanna said, “Honey, what’s eating at you?”

And I wanted to say it was a little baby Jesus, eating me up from the inside, eating me like cake. But what I really said was “Nothing.”

“Something’s on your heart, ain’t it?” Nanna asked.

And I fell into her arms and cried like I’d been left behind. As she held me, I thought for sure that that’d be the last time I’d ever feel my Nanna, so soft in spite of her bones.

“Is it about James?”

“Yes,” I wailed. “He’s different now.”