Rapture of Canaan (24 page)

They all watched me leaving, and Olin winked at me. “Be seeing you, Ninah,” he said.

 

 

 

I didn’t leave the front part of Nanna and Grandpa Herman’s
house again until it was nearly time for the baby to be born. I stayed in there and read the letters Pammy snuck me from Ajita Patel and then stuffed them into the inside of my pillow.

Me and Ajita wrote back and forth to one another, but we didn’t talk about school. We talked about ideas. She said she didn’t think it was right that I’d been shut up that way, but that her family might do the same thing if she was in my condition.

I told her that me and James didn’t mean to sin—if we
had
sinned—and she said she understood, that she thought sometimes she’d like to have a boyfriend, but that her family had to pick hers out for her, and that one day when she was older, they’d dress her up and take her to a photographer and make whole heaps of pictures to send out to boys she didn’t know, Indian boys who were almost finished with medical school. Then those boys would decide if they wanted her for a wife.

I told her that at Fire and Brimstone, it wasn’t much different. We might be allowed to pick out some partners to choose from, but if they didn’t have enough religious faith and weren’t interested in converting, then Grandpa Herman would chase them off with his shotgun and tell them not to come back.

I guess Pammy had told Ajita that I was making baby clothes because sometimes in her letters, she included pieces of lace. We didn’t have lace ourselves, so I treasured the delicate white ruffles. I stitched lace to the bottom of a little pair of trousers and decided that my girl baby could wear pants if she wanted to.

She wrote me again and asked if we married cousins out here, and I told her that we didn’t marry close cousins. Then she said that she couldn’t marry just any Indian boy, that she’d have to marry a Gujarati—because you’re supposed to stick to your own caste. She said Gujaratis were priestly, but that the only Indian boy she knew outside her own family was a Rajasthani, which she explained was sort of like royalty, and she wouldn’t mind marrying him, but her family would never allow it, and he wasn’t planning on going to medical school anyway. He wanted to be a chef.

That day she sent me some squares of Indian fabric, thin and patterned with tiny flowers. They had a funny smell, like the inside of a cardboard box that’d been full of medicine and one flower, maybe. I didn’t use the fabric for clothes because I wanted to keep sniffing it.

I’d sit in my bed for hours, a big white spread thrown over my lap, and I’d read her letters again and again, peeking out the window occasionally to see if the bus was coming, and hoping Pammy would bring me another one. I imagined Pammy bringing Ajita home with her for a visit one day, and though I knew it’d never happen, I thought that if she sat on the other side of that swinging door, I’d stick my hand underneath just enough to touch the fabric of her pants.

I was careful not to let the little loose edges of where she’d ripped the letter out of her notebook litter the bed or the floor. I picked them all up and stuffed them in the pillow too.

Ajita asked me if I’d be coming back to school whenever the baby was born, and I told her that I’d probably stay out until the next school year because Grandpa Herman had refused to allow the county to send their homebound instructor to Fire and Brimstone, and even though he was going to have to go to court over it soon, by the time they got it settled it’d be too late. I told her that I probably wouldn’t be in her grade anymore, but she said there were some eighth-and ninth-grade classes combined and maybe.

It was almost time for the baby when Pammy brought my last letter. I could feel a pressure I hadn’t felt before. Not a pressure really. It was like whenever I sat up, I felt like I had something between my legs. And when I walked around, my legs didn’t want to fit together right. So I was staying off my feet most all the time, and leaning back whenever I could.

In the last letter, Ajita asked me if I was going to take care of the baby myself or if Mamma would help me and if I thought I’d ever get married one day even though I’d already have a baby.

For that last week before he was born, I tried to figure how to answer Ajita. I knew what to tell her about marrying somebody besides James—I couldn’t because I was a widow, even if it wasn’t a legal kind of widowhood. But I just didn’t know about the rest. The more pregnant I got, the less anybody wanted to talk about what would happen to it. Even Nanna refused to talk about it, and I got an awful feeling that they might knock it in the head like too many girl puppies.

I didn’t know of anybody they’d killed before—at least not directly—but I knew that they believed more than anything else in punishing sin, and they thought my baby was sin personified.

The closer it came to time, the more scared I got.

I tried to get Grandpa Herman to give me some kind of indication. One night while we were praying, I asked him if my baby would be born a sinner.

“All babies are born sinners,” he claimed.

“But will my baby be more of a sinner than Clyde and Freda’s?”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” he said.

“Do you think you’ll be able to love my baby anyway?” I asked him.

“Ninah,” he said, “we need to be focusing on the word of God,” and then he started up again.

“But wait, Grandpa,” I stopped him. “Remember how when Mary had Baby Jesus, nobody believed he was really the child of God at first? Remember?”

He raised up his hand like he would strike me, but then he put it down. “I don’t ever want to hear you say something like that again. Do you understand me?” he yelled. “Your baby is
not
like Jesus. And I just pray to God that the rapture won’t come until you get yourself straight with your maker, because if it does, you’ll be left behind on this pitiful planet, left to have your limbs cut from your body by Satan’s own army, but you won’t die. I don’t know how we failed you, but you’ve got to get your vision directed back on that cross. Because those soldiers will cut off your fingers and toes, one by one, and toss them into a great vat of boiling grease, and you’ll hear them sizzle as they land there, but you won’t die. They’ll cut off your legs and your arms, and you won’t be able to move, but you
won’t die.
And the scorpions will stick their giant tails into your body, will rape you with their stingers, and you’ll wish you could die, but you won’t.

“But Ninah, my child, if you’ll just repent. If you’ll just admit that you sinned and that James sinned, and that the awful burden of that sinfulness caused him to leave this life, then you can go to Heaven with us all. It won’t be long, Ninah, before Christ returns for his bride. For the Bible says that he’ll come in the blinking of an eye, and if your heart’s not ready, they’ll be no hope for your soul, no salvation when the moon meets the sun.”

“No,” I said quietly.

“What?” he demanded, and I looked at him only long enough to see his bushy red eyebrows bump into one another. Then I looked back into my big, big lap.

“No, sir,” I said.

He left the room ranting about hardheaded women and the workings of the Devil.

Nobody came for a long time except Nanna, who still rubbed my sore muscles and felt my belly but didn’t smile.

“Tell me a story,” I’d beg her.

“I can’t, child.”

“Please?”

“No, Ninah. I don’t have no stories today.”

“You didn’t have any yesterday either,” I cried. “Or the day before. What’s wrong?”

“I have to leave you now,” she said.

And when Daddy came in, he wouldn’t look at me. He’d talk just like normal, about the weather and the new kind of chickens he’d heard about that grew feathers that fluffed out like rabbits. But he wouldn’t look at me.

“What’s gonna happen to me, Daddy?”

“Nothing, Baby.”

“I mean after it comes. Are they gonna throw me out of Fire and Brimstone? Because I don’t have any money.”

“Ain’t nobody gonna hurt you. You’re gonna move right back home with us,” he said to his trousers.

“What about the baby?”

“Honey, I can’t talk about it. I just don’t know.”

There was nobody for me to talk to but Jesus, and I got tired of talking to him all the time. So I talked to the baby.

“I won’t let them hurt you,” I said. “I’ll stay with you forever, and if you ever sin, you can just say you’re sorry and that will be enough. And you won’t have no nettles in your crib either because if anybody puts nettles in your little bed, I’ll brush them off. I’ll check your crib every day.”

I wondered if Daddy had made me a crib the way he’d made one for David and Laura. I thought maybe they’d give that crib to me, even though it was made short and I was taller than most. I didn’t figure it would matter much.

I prayed that I’d known enough of Jesus’ pain already to be able to handle giving birth.

 

 

 

N
anna looked at me strangely when I asked for some pieces
of barbed wire and told me that she wouldn’t bring it. I tried to convince her that I wanted to use it in a rug, but she called me a liar and said, “Why would anybody walk on a rug with barbed wire in it?”

She had a point.

But Grandpa Herman was delighted to bring me the wire.

“Now you make sure you don’t hurt yourself,” he said to me. “Cause you can do your penance when the baby’s delivered. You be careful where you put it.”

I knew he wouldn’t mind if I wrapped it around that baby though. All he wanted was to think that I was trying to get close to God again. He didn’t care if I got hurt.

But I really was making a rug. I knew nobody’d walk on it, but I wanted to make a rug for James.

I bent the barbed wire back and forth until it broke off into strips the right length. Then I cut the rope he’d tied around his waist and that tree to match. And then I took down my hair, combed it out, ran my fingers along the tops of my ears until they met at the back, and I lifted all that top hair up and got it out of the way.

I put a rubber band at the base of my neck to cord off what was left hanging, and then went to work cutting above the rubber band.

It took a long time because my hair was thick. It was more like sawing than cutting. By the time I’d cut just that bottom part off, I had more hair than most people have on their whole heads laying on the floor. Dark brown and more than two feet long. And when I took my other hair down, you couldn’t hardly tell the difference.

I worked all night on the rug. Tobacco twine and burlap, barbed wire and rope. I used my hair to weave in a big cross, right in the middle, and the barbed wire outlined it. I shredded up my fingers working on it, and the burlap had little blood stains smeared all over. I wove for most of the night, and I cried a little too. When it was nearly day, when the rooster had already crowed, I tied off the ends and lifted up my rug for James that nobody would ever walk on. I climbed aching into bed, threw the rug across my feet, and slept.

 

 

 

I
woke up late and cramping just a little, and I knew I had
to get out of the house. I didn’t ask anybody if I could leave. I just left. And nobody stopped me. Most of the men had taken jobs outside the community for those cold months, and Grandpa Herman had ridden off to town to take care of some business. But the women were around. Most of them were inside, but I walked right past Nanna, who didn’t say a thing. And Wanda was traipsing back from the henhouse when I passed her on the road. She looked at me funny, said “hey” and “how you feeling?” but nothing else.

I didn’t have a coat big enough to go around me, so I’d taken the blanket off the bed again, wrapped it around me like a shawl, and set off for the woods.

I walked out where the boys set their traps and even checked the traps for them, but they hadn’t caught any foxes that morning. I walked out to the creek, and even though I was heavy and aching, I crossed it and went to the tree stand where James killed his first deer.

I tried to climb up the steps, but I didn’t have the power. So I sat down at the base of the tree and remembered James. So gentle and confused, but so very, very dead.

I thought it might have been better if I’d drowned myself beside him, in that awful pond. Then we could have been like those people from great literature who took their lives for love.

But I just wasn’t that brave. I couldn’t think of anybody I loved enough to die for—except maybe the baby, and I wasn’t even sure about that.

I knew I had some time. Nanna had told me the pains would happen regularly when it was time for the baby, and I had some pains, but they weren’t the kind that took my breath or the kind you could count with a watch. Sometimes I closed my eyes and talked myself out of having to use the bathroom, but I figured I had a good while.

So I stayed there, in the woods, listening to the water in the distance dancing over roots and across little sticks and rocks. Listening to the leaves crunch beneath me as I tried to make myself comfortable. I did a little praying, but mostly for the baby—not for me. I prayed that nobody would trick it, or scare it with horrible stories about Revelations and plagues on the earth. I prayed that my baby wouldn’t ever have to get up in the night to check the faucet and make sure it still had water.

When it was time to go, I thought about staying. I thought I’d probably be better off alone, just squatting in some pine needles and having my child. And when it was out of me, I’d nurse it with my full breasts, and then I’d carry it over to the pond. We wouldn’t have to swim across. We’d just have to walk around it, through some tangles and vines, and then we’d be on somebody else’s property, maybe a nice Baptist family who wanted a young girl and her baby to bring up proper.