Rapture of Canaan (2 page)

In my stories, the biggest bags were thick as skin. You couldn’t even punch through them with your fist.

Nanna heard the delicate bells of the cash register and then “thirty-five cents” in her pappa’s even voice as she made neat stacks beneath the counter.

“So how much?” her pappa asked again when the customer was gone.

“How about a line of paper dolls?” she’d bargain. She would have been good at that.

“Just for straightening out the bags?”

“Please?” she begged. Her pappa had shown her how to fold a grocery bag back and forth like an accordion in narrow, even strips, and then how to take scissors and cut out half a person so that when you opened it up, you found a whole line of children grasping hands. But little Nanna could never do it right. Her paper dolls had pointy heads or thick arms or feet like clubs.

“I reckon that’s a fair trade,” her pappa compromised. “But I won’t be able to get to it till later.”

“Thank you, thank you!” She danced around him. “I need some new dolls to color.”

Just then a man walked in. I imagined the man with rough whiskers and a scruffy black dog following behind—even though Nanna couldn’t remember all the details herself.

“Leila, go find your mamma and tell her to come here,” her pappa instructed.

“Where is she?”

“Upstairs, I reckon. Or out back. Now run.”

Nanna knew he didn’t like for her to be in the store when drunks came around. He probably didn’t need her mamma at all. He just wanted her out of the way. So she left, skipping out of the musky grocery and onto the street, waving to neighbors on their porches. Sometimes in my mind, I let Nanna stop to talk to a little boy on his tricycle, riding circles around the block. I gave him blond hair that jiggled as his wheels passed over the cobblestones.

Then Nanna would race into the house, up the stairs, pulling herself with the rail to improve her speed. She’d run through the airborne dust, spotlighted by the sun angling through the window, and wipe her face with the back of her hand to get the particles off, calling out for her mamma.

But there was never an answer.

Nanna’d look in every room, pausing only in her mamma’s bedroom, in front of the vanity where her cosmetics and brush were left out. I imagined her staring in the mirror, touching her own cheek, and wishing it flushed the way her mamma’s always looked. Then she’d throw down the brush she found in her hand and run out of that room too.

The next part of the story was always the same no matter how many times I told it.

Back down the steps and out the door, Nanna jiggled the handle of the gate. It was stubborn and wouldn’t catch. So she pulled herself up on the wooden fence and peeked over the side. Her mamma was there, sure enough, sitting on the ground against the side of the house, sipping Coke through a straw right out the bottle. Beside her, a man Nanna recognized—the young man from the ironworks who sometimes helped her pappa unload shipments. At first, she was confused. Then she noticed the man’s hand on the middle of her mamma’s back, right at the place where her skirt began, at the place where her body was so shy that it curved inward.

I imagined Nanna staring at that sight for quite a while.

But she didn’t call her mamma at all. She climbed down as quietly as she could and then ran, first towards the store to her pappa. But she couldn’t go there. She started to go back upstairs, but remembered how empty it was, without her mamma or pappa, with just the dust hanging in the air.

So she bolted down the street past boys playing ball, past an old woman pruning her bushes, past the rug-maker’s house and all the way into the cemetery where it was quiet and green and honeysuckled, where she could walk between graves and figure things out.

I knew how lonely Nanna must have been, but I thought maybe I’d like to live in a city someday—in spite of the drunks and noises. I figured if Nanna’d had a chance to stay there, nothing would have turned out the same. I wished we could have been little at the same time, best friends and next-door neighbors. I would have walked through the cemetery with her. I would have held her hand.

 

 

 

M
y grandpa Herman Langston was founder and preacher of
The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God’s Almighty Baptizing Wind. I think when he was trying to come up with a name for it, he just couldn’t make up his mind, so he put all his ideas together and acted like a prophet, and nobody said a thing. Grandpa Herman was a big man with red hair and huge freckles that hid in his wrinkles. He wore his blood pressure like the glaze on a loaf of bread, sitting shiny on the surface. According to Nanna, when he was a young man, he used his fists on anybody who crossed him, and as far as I can tell, after he got religion, he did the same thing. Sunday after Sunday, I watched him standing in the pulpit, banging those fists down hard on the podium, saying, “There shall be
weeping
and
wailing
and
gnashing
of teeth, where the worm dieth
not
and the
fire is not quenched.
”

All around the church, penitents would be wringing their hands and crying, hollering out “Amen.” My daddy, Liston Huff, would be on the shells of his knees, leaning his head against the pew and whispering loudly his private prayer to God and whoever else couldn’t help hearing. My mamma, Maree Huff, would be sitting or standing beside him, her scoured hands held high in the air, her face turned up to the paneled ceiling, tears falling so hard she’d have to sit her shoes in the sun for the whole afternoon just to dry them out.

Beside them would be my brothers David and Everett, and later their wives Laura and Wanda, perfectly mimicking my parents. David was known for holding his bible against his forehead, banging his skin into the cover until he worked himself into a holy trance.

And at the other end of the pew, my oldest sister, Bethany, who was married before I was even born, sat with her husband Olin and their children Pammy and Mustard and her husband’s oldest son James, who was just a year older than me.

But I sat with Nanna, in the pew behind them all. She’d give me a pencil and let me draw in her Sunday school quarterly once everybody’d got the spirit. I couldn’t draw in my own because if Mamma saw the marks, she’d spank me good. Nanna’d give me rolls of Smarties, the little candy pills that stacked up in their plastic wrapper, green then yellow then pink then white, and it’d take me two hymns and one altar call just to get the wrapper open without making any noise. I always wondered where she got the candy but feared she’d stop supplying it if I asked.

Every two or three Sundays, Grandpa’d step out from behind his podium, his bible in one hand held up in the sky, his other hand over his heart.

“Here he goes again,” Nanna’d whisper. “One of these days, he’s going to fall over and die right in the middle of that story.”

And I’d look up in time to hear him talk about liars and forgiveness.

“We’ve all sinned in the eyes of God. All of us,” he’d say. “My own wife Leila, who you all know, my own wife turned her back on God. Turned her sinful eyes away from God and lied. Lied. Lied to the courts of this land, lied to the very people who were trying to bring a murderous whore to justice. But more sinful than any of that, she
lied
to her Heavenly Father, to her King.”

“Yes, Lord,” the people would call.

“Just a child. Just a wee child but old enough to know the difference in right and wrong. She saw her own mother engaging in sins of the flesh and
did not tell
. She did not tell her father. She did not tell God. She allowed it to happen.”

“
Allowed
it to happen,” my mamma would yell out.

“And on the day that her own mother pulled out a rifle and shot her father through the back so she could live in sin with a boy young enough to be her son, what did Leila do? Did she call out to God?”

“No, Lord,” my brother Everett would answer.

“No. No, she did
not
call out to God,” Grandpa Herman would continue, the tears sliding down his rough cheeks.

I’d look over at Nanna, who’d roll her eyes at me and then sneak me a wink.

“She did not call out to God. She crawled right in the bed next to her murderous mother and slept there. And when her mother handed her a little speech to say to the judge, she studied it, memorized it, memorized that
lie
.”

“Help her, Jesus,” somebody cried, as if the things that had happened sixty years before were happening again.

“And she told that judge that her own pappa, the man who loved her more than any other earthly thing, had been beating her. She told that judge that her God-fearing pappa had pulled his belt from his pants and was striking her body when her mother pulled out that gun.” Grandpa Herman grew quiet and sad, and a hush fell over the congregation as well.

“And why’d she do it, people? Why’d she lie before the greatest judge of them all?”

“To protect her mamma,” Bethany hollered.

“To protect a
murderer,
” Grandpa Herman corrected. “To protect a
whore,
a wicked, evil woman.” Then he fell silent to give his words a chance to settle over the crowd.

“But God is good,” Grandpa continued. “God will forgive. He’ll baptize a sinner in his very blood and pull them out white as snow. We’ve got sinners among us, sinners who
need
God’s blessing, God’s forgiveness. Won’t you come? Won’t you pray to him now, say ‘God, I’ve been a liar, a murderer, a whore.’ Confess your sins to the one who will make you clean.”

Then he’d pause and add, “Sister Imogene, play us a hymn,” and Great-Aunt Imogene would hobble over to the piano that must have been older than she was.

Sunday after Sunday, we’d sing, we’d bow our heads, and I’d hold Nanna’s hand while around me people were praying aloud, their voices competing for God’s attention, growing louder and louder until I could talk to Nanna and nobody would know.

“Don’t go up there,” I’d beg her. “Stay here with me.”

“I’ve got to go in a minute,” she’d explain. “Lord knows, if I don’t get on my knees after this kind of sermon, I won’t never be welcome in my own house again.”

“What do you do up there?” I’d ask her.

“Just bow my head and thank the Lord for you, and then I sing a little song or something. Don’t matter what you do. Long as you go up there.”

“I don’t want you to leave me here,” I’d say.

“Well, come on up with me. God knows, the whole congregation will be up there anyway before Herman lets us out.”

So during the altar call, Nanna approached the altar, and whoops went up all over the church, and people cried, and I heard my own mamma hollering out
“Thank
you, Jesus.” I went up there with her, and I could hear Grandpa proclaiming, “Lord, we thank you for the youth of this church, for the children who understand sin, understand their own hearts, the children with so much love inside them that they can offer it back to their own elders, who are sinners. Lord, I thank you for my sweet Ninah.”

And I smiled to myself, thinking, “I ain’t his sweet
nothing,
” and then I nudged Nanna and kept saying my ABCs, imagining them first upper case, then lower, thinking that periodic trips to the altar made a good impression. My whole family would appreciate me more, at least for the rest of that week.

 

 

 

I
don’t think anybody knows exactly how Grandpa Herman
came up with his brand of Christianity. The church began years and years back, before my mamma was even born, when the church Nanna and Grandpa had been attending split into little pieces.

I used to imagine the building breaking apart, wondering how they decided who would get the back pews, who would get the front ones, who would get the altar. All I know is that Mossy Swamp Primitive Baptist Church broke into two other pieces so that when it was over, Mossy Swamp had a third of the congregation and two new churches developed: Mossy Swamp Pentecostal Holiness and The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God’s Almighty Baptizing Wind. Grandpa Herman built Fire and Brimstone himself, in one of his own tobacco fields near the house. At the time, the congregation of Fire and Brimstone was basically his family, his parents and brothers and sisters and cousins, and Nanna’s aunt and uncle, who she was sent to live with after her mamma went to prison, and all their children. But through the years, people joined up from marrying into the family and bringing their relatives, and by the time I was born, Fire and Brimstone already had eighty members. It was like having a big family reunion every Sunday, with Grandpa Herman leading it.

I guess you could say the church doctrine came from Grandpa Herman’s own sensibilities. He used the Bible, of course, but only the parts he liked. He had a habit of altering the verses just a little to make them match his own beliefs. He had a good dose of Baptist in him, so we sang soulful hymns and got saved on a regular basis and baptized in the pond at the far edge of the property. But the Pentecostal part of him wouldn’t allow us to watch TV or cut our hair, and he was always one to encourage speaking in tongues.

But there were other elements to Fire and Brimstone. I don’t know if Grandpa got a copy of the laws from some other religion or if he just made them up, but he’d walk around saying things like, “He who invades another man’s nets or fish traps or takes fish from another man’s fishing preserve shall pay fifty dollars as compensation. Half to the man from whom they were stolen and half to The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God’s Almighty Baptizing Wind. Amen.” On Fridays, Grandpa was a judge, and any disagreements in the community were brought before him, where he’d make his decision, lead the arguing parties in prayer, and then make sure they were hugging when they left the church.

And the children were required to go to night classes where we memorized Grandpa Herman’s laws. We’d sit in the tiny classroom with others about our same age, and a teacher would drill us again and again. “He who rapes a grapevine by taking more than his share of the fruit shall pay ten dollars in compensation, half to the man from whom the grapes were stolen and half to The Church of Fire and Brimstone.”