Rapture of Canaan (21 page)

“Hey,” I said, not remembering at first what they were there for.

But then Grandpa Herman yelled, “Silence,” and I jumped—because I hadn’t known he was in the room.

The bells kept ringing as I stood up and then followed them out, still wearing my nightgown with James’ shirt over it, not even putting on my shoes. Outside, everybody was waiting.

We formed a ridiculous parade, walking down the dirt road, that sand so cold on my feet. Mamma and Bethany kept ringing the bells, walking beside me. Grandpa Herman led the way. And behind us, everybody except Olin shuffled along.

It was like walking through a dream.

I wasn’t sure if Daddy was there, and I didn’t think I was supposed to look behind me, but I did it anyway and saw him with Everett and David. Pammy tried hard to catch my eye, but I wouldn’t look at her and only saw her tiny wave after it was too late to wave back.

Grandpa Herman didn’t slow down even when we came to the woods. But the straw and sticks and briars hurt my feet. Because I couldn’t keep up, he had to shorten his strides.

It wasn’t raining just then, but it looked like it might at any minute. I couldn’t tell if the dreary sky came from the weather or the earliness. I kept looking at the clouds, waiting for God to rapture me, thinking that maybe I’d had it wrong all along. Maybe I’d be the only one called home when the angel sounded his trumpet. Maybe they’d be left to perish, and I’d live it up in Heaven with Jesus and James and my baby.

In case I was right, I prayed quietly that God would take Daddy too. And Pammy and Mustard and Nanna.

And maybe Mamma and Wanda and the rest of them, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted them all up there with me. That’d make Heaven a lot like Fire and Brimstone, and that just didn’t seem all that heavenly.

We walked for a long, long time, right along the creek until it widened out at the far end of the property into the pond where James had died. And I knew then that I was being punished for more than blasphemy, but I couldn’t let myself think about James. Not just then.

I thought instead about alligators. I knew there were alligators because I’d seen them once before, when we were baptizing Wanda. I decided maybe Grandpa Herman was planning on killing me by dunking me in the water right where the mother alligator had her babies. Because unlike my own mamma, I was almost sure that a mother alligator would raise holy hell when somebody messed with her young.

The bells got louder and louder in my head even though it felt like everybody was far away from me, like they couldn’t touch me if they wanted to.

I told myself it’d be like a baptism.

Mercifully, we didn’t go to the part of the pond where James had tied his rope and walked out. That would have been too much for Mustard and Pammy and Bethany. We filed along the opposite bank, around dying cattails and withering huckleberry bushes. There was a big upright tree on that side of the pond with limbs thick as washtubs, and somebody had built a stand into it. I’d never noticed the stand before and tried to figure if it was put there for men to sit in while hunting for deer or if it’d been used before for dunkings. The thick plank stretched between two giant limbs that leaned way out over the water.

I’d never seen a dunking in my lifetime. I wasn’t even sure what a dunking was.

As I was climbing up the tree’s makeshift ladder, with David in front of me and Everett following behind, I tried to recall if I’d seen Nanna in the procession. I couldn’t remember seeing her.

I scraped my knees against the bark, reaching high for each wooden slat and pulling myself up, wondering if Everett was looking up my nightgown, if he could help it.

When I got to the top, I followed David out on a limb. I had to straddle it and scoot myself along, and the bark rubbed hard at the inside of my thighs, rubbed the skin off of me, it seemed.

I was glad to have James’ shirt. The day was chilly and damp and so strange. I pretended that the shirt was James, wrapped around me all the way, and I pretended that I wasn’t alone—even though I knew better.

When I had crawled onto the flimsy board, way up above the water, I looked down at the people behind me, their faces so unfamiliar it was like they were somebody else’s family. They were all watching Grandpa Herman tying a tiny wire cage onto the heavy rope that Everett held from the top of the tree-ladder. And even though I knew it wasn’t the rope once tied to James, I couldn’t help thinking of it, the way it smelled wet—like an old rug left out in rain.

I could feel the board sag beneath me, not like it was going to give, but like it was thinking about it. I thought maybe I should jump before they had a chance to do whatever they had planned. I wondered if I’d hit bottom if I jumped, if I’d break my bones and be in too many pieces to swim away.

Too bad it wasn’t the river. If they’d taken me to the river, I could have swam underwater until I was far from them. But in a pond, there was nowhere to go.

Everett made his way along the limb, to the place where the plank bridged branches. David sat on the branch to my right, and Everett sat on the branch to my left, and I sat in the middle, my long, long legs dangling, and I stared down, stared out at the broken tree and imagined its underwater arms waiting for something to grab. I stared far beyond the pond, where the land belonged to someone else.

Everett slid the cage down the plank to me. Fortunately the plank was sort of wide.

“Toss that rope to David,” he said.

So I passed the rope along.

David tied his end of the worn-out rope to his limb. Everett tied his end of the rope to his limb, and then they dropped the cage into the water to make certain that the rope was long enough.

I reminded myself that the James-rope was still coiled up on the floor of my bedroom closet, where I’d hidden it months earlier.

When the cage hit the water, it didn’t sink right away. It went down slowly as water passed up through all the holes. It was made of the same wire we used to fence in the chicken coop, heavy wire with square holes almost as big as slices of bread. Then they grabbed the ropes and pulled the cage back up, all the way up to me, where it dripped on my nightgown and chilled my arms.

“Pull it up on the plank,” David instructed. “Now balance it, that’s good. And open that little flap right there.” He pointed. “And crawl in.”

“Be careful,” Everett said. “Don’t fall.”

I shook like that spider suspended over the pits of Hell by a thread, the one Grandpa Herman referred to in his sermons ever so often.

“You gotta turn around,” Everett told me. “You gotta back in so you can close the door.”

It’s a miracle I didn’t fall off—not that it would have mattered. They’d have made me swim out and climb up to the plank again. But I didn’t fall. I trembled as the plank beneath me swayed, but I turned around up there, on my hands and knees, and I backed into the cage so small that I had to squench up like a rock. It was hard for me to find a place for my arm once I’d fastened the hook.

“Ready, boys?” Grandpa Herman called.

“Yeah,” one of them yelled, but I was so turned around that I wasn’t sure if it was David or Everett.

And maybe it was the fear, because I had plenty of that, or maybe it was the feeling of being captured in the air, because capturing usually happens on the ground when at least you’ve got the earth to support you, but for whatever reason, everything around me got loud. They were praying down there, voices that didn’t sound like voices at all. It sounded like clapping and whistles and moans. And I couldn’t tell what was happening because all I could see was the wire and the plank, my face pressed next to that damp wood.

Then Grandpa Herman gave a sermon that I didn’t hear like words. I heard it like rain and things blowing in wind, and then I realized that it was raining and the wind was real.

And then I was dropping hard, and I kept my eyes open so I could see the water coming for me, getting closer and closer until it was nothing but a shining, and I fell faster than the cage so that my skin pressed against it, and there was a cold wire barrier like a cross cutting between my nose and my mouth, and I felt like each of my breasts had slipped through a different hole.

When I hit, the water stunned me, not from the temperature but from the hardness of it. I felt like I’d hit a table or a floor, not water, and I didn’t even realize I was sinking or that my mouth was full until my ears bubbled.

Before I knew I was under, I could feel myself pulled up, a foot at a time. My backside was in air before my face was.

The praying continued as they raised me, bit by bit, and the water that had been on me dripped off—first like juice, then like seeds.

I wondered if I was as heavy as I felt. I looked out at the fallen tree across the pond and remembered that people weigh more when they’re wet. I wondered if David and Everett’s arms would give out.

But then I heard, “Let her go,” and I fell again.

I tried to cover my face with my hands that time, but I couldn’t make them let go of the cage, holding onto it like it was all they knew to grip.

Then underwater, I promised my lungs that I’d take in more air the next time. I let out a little air each time I felt them lifting me, but I couldn’t tell how long it would be before I’d find air again. I couldn’t tell how deep I was, and I didn’t want to open my eyes.

When I was out of the water that time, I managed to tilt my head so that I could look at the congregation, and though I was too far away to see expressions, I could tell that the man who was walking away was Daddy.

I didn’t care. It was Nanna I wanted to see, and she was there.

The third time before they dropped me, I sucked in so much air that it hurt, but I let it all out without meaning to when I spanked through the surface.

I mouthed “hebamashundi, hebamashundi,” feeling the murkiness saturate my tongue, and that time when they pulled me out I was coughing.

I wondered if they’d stop if I repented. I wondered if I cried out or prayed aloud or begged, if that would be enough.

But I didn’t.

Up in the air, the cage rocked and swung. I wondered if they’d stop if I vomited.

Then in the water again, in the dirty water, I decided to breathe. Breathe like James, burst my lungs, and be done with the whole damned thing. I’d breathe he-ba-ma-shun-di, one syllable at a time, and by the time I was through I’d be in Heaven. And I almost did it, too, except I opened my eyes, for one last peek at the things we see alive, and I saw the bottom.

It was brown and soft, and there were pieces of sticks and logs, and there were moving shadows in the distance, maybe of fish, though my splashing kept them from swimming nearby. I wondered if James had opened his eyes.

There were things growing, even in autumn, even underwater, and as I got farther and farther away from them, as David and Everett heaved me up, it seemed like they were a miniature world, underwater, operating by different rules, knowing different things to be true, and thriving all the same.

I decided I couldn’t die. Not when I had a baby living in me, depending on me, a baby who could change things. I knew there was something inside me that could imagine a different world and make it so.

Back in the air, suspended like a promise, I listened to them praying, hollering out, and I heard Grandpa Herman yell, “Pull her up another five feet before you drop her again. She ain’t getting much impact.”

But then Nanna said, “She’s had enough.”

The praying stopped. Everything stopped except the rain and the wind and my strong, strong heart.

“I said pull her up another five feet,” Grandpa hollered.

“And
I
said that’s
enough,
” Nanna spoke.

I dallied over that pond for what seemed like a long time, crouched above the water, closer to Heaven than Grandpa, with all my doubts draining out. And if the rapture had happened right then, if I’d heard the trumpets, I knew that I’d have been the first one to get to Jesus because David and Everett would be slowed down by the trees, but I’d lift right off, and plus, I wasn’t as heavy as either of them, though I carried two souls.

 

 

 

But I wasn’t so brave in my dreams. They kept making me cry. First I dreamed I had barbed wire in my chest, coiled around my ribs, and for some reason, my heart was growing bigger and bigger, and my heart couldn’t see the barbs waiting there to pierce it. I tried to find someone to unravel the wire and take it out, but everybody I told kept saying, “It’s there to keep your heart from swelling up so much. Your heart will see it in time and shrink back down.”

Then I dreamed I was dead, but walking around. I kept begging James to bury me, but he’d say, “You ain’t dead. Look, you’re walking around.” But my skin was already falling off, every step was a mile, and nobody would bury me.

Then I dreamed I had the baby, and it was crying and I couldn’t make it stop. I tried to feed it, but it wouldn’t eat. I shoveled spoonful after spoonful of food into its mouth, but it kept spitting all over the church, covering the pews and the altar and the pulpit with strained vegetables. Finally, I started laughing. There was baby food everywhere, and then the baby started laughing too, hard and like an old, old man, coughing in his laughing, and he said, “It’s a joke on you. I’m ninety years old, and I’m not your baby.”

Then I dreamed I walked to my bedroom door, opened it, and found Mamma and Daddy in my bed, being carnal. There were candles all over the room, and I could see that there were peppers in the bed with them, all around them, hot peppers, red and green and all over the mattress. But they didn’t know that there was another bed up above them, at a forty-five-degree angle from the headboard, and it was about to drop down.

“Daddy,” I called.