Rapture of Canaan (4 page)

I stayed on the ground with Barley and Grandpa as each of the other children ran shrieking out the door and landed. Grandpa stood at the edge of the truck and helped everybody down, slapping the boys on their backs playfully and kissing the girls on their foreheads.

“Don’t you let me catch you doing that again,” he said. “The only reason you ain’t in trouble now is cause this is a holiday.” Then he grinned at us all real big.

 

 

 

B
ecause The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God’s Al
mighty Baptizing Wind wasn’t recognized as a denomination by a bigger group, there was always the problem of revivals. Revivals happened twice a year, and visiting preachers would come talk to us every night for a week and hopefully bring souls closer to Christ. Grandpa Herman would look into congregations from a hundred miles away, trying to find somebody whose beliefs resembled ours. Then he’d bring in a Baptist or Holiness preacher from a faraway church who was willing to go over his sermons with Grandpa before shouting them at us. But afterwards Grandpa’d call special church meetings for the entire next week to correct the flaws in the beliefs that the preacher had instilled. We spent more time in church than most people spent sleeping, but Daddy said there was no better place to be.

The best times were when Grandpa Herman would be away preaching revivals at other churches. When that happened, somebody had to go spend the night with Nanna so she wouldn’t be afraid, and I always volunteered. Secretly, I knew that Nanna wasn’t scared at all, but if she claimed to be, I got to move out for a whole week and sleep right in the bed beside Nanna on Grandpa Herman’s pillow that smelled like dentures.

We made big jokes about Grandpa Herman’s dentures because according to church beliefs, he shouldn’t have them. If the Lord willed that he’d lose his teeth, he should live without them. But Grandpa Herman had some and nobody knew but Nanna and me. Or if they knew, they never mentioned it.

At Nanna’s house, I only said my prayers when I felt like it. It wasn’t like Nanna didn’t want me to talk to Jesus, and I knew that she talked to him sometimes too. It was just that Nanna thought you should talk to Jesus when you felt like it—not because it was an obligation.

“Your old mamma’s crazy as a nut,” she’d say.

“Nanna,” I’d protest. “How can you say that? She’s your
girl.
”

“Nah,” Nanna’d argue. “She’s Herman’s girl. Spitting image of him. Except she ain’t got the good sense that he’s got. Herman’s a
smart
man. That’s how come he’s got all this land with people working it for him all in the name of religion. Your poor old mamma can’t think for herself.”

“Yes she can,” I disagreed. “She’s got just what she wants.”

“I reckon you’re right there,” Nanna’d say. Then she’d bring me hot chocolate, which I was never allowed to drink at home, and she’d sit it on an end table beneath a handkerchief with little embroidered flowers that she kept in a drawer except for nights when I slept over. She’d fix me a plate of the cookies that we’d baked together, and we’d dunk a cookie in our cups and see who could wait the longest to pull it out without breaking it off. But the truth was that it tasted better if you lost.

The bedroom walls were painted white, and I asked Nanna if she wouldn’t like some pictures to put up, but she said she liked to look at the shadow the tree outside made on the walls after she turned the lights out. In bed, I liked to snuggle up next to Nanna, who was skinny with so much extra skin that it dripped a little on the sheets beside her. And she’d let me touch the little blue place on her lip that she couldn’t remember getting—like a tiny bruise that never went away.

“Tell me the real story,” I’d beg her. “Tell me about the day that it happened.”

“Honey, that weren’t a happy day for me,” she’d explain. “Herman’s all but written it into the Bible and now I’ve got you nagging me for details ever chance you get. It don’t make me
feel good
to talk about it.”

I considered this for a while and decided I shouldn’t ask anymore. Then I felt guilty for bringing it up in the first place.

“I’m sorry, little Nanna,” I said, and rubbed her cheek. “I just know that Grandpa don’t tell it
right.
”

I heard her sigh, hard, and then she put her strong hand on my hair and stroked it away from my face.

“Nothing much happened on the day she killed him,” Nanna began. “I don’t even remember it, to tell you the truth. Don’t remember what I’d been doing or anything because it was just a regular day. I’d probably been to school and then come home and helped Mamma get supper ready while Pappa closed up the store. I reckon we ate together. I don’t know.

“By that time, though, Mamma’d started slipping off with the young man from the ironworks. His name was Weston Ward, and he was a nice-looking man. As a matter of fact, I used to stand outside the store with some of my girlfriends, and we’d talk about him and giggle and wonder what it would be like to be his wife. He had pretty arms, full arms with lots of hair on them like an ape.”

“Ugh,” I moaned.

“They were
pretty
arms. And Mamma thought so too, I guess, because while Pappa worked, she’d call him into the house to help her move a piece of furniture or get him to taste her soup. Sometimes he stayed in there for a while, and I believe that Pappa knew it but just didn’t know how to handle it.

“And Mamma started to take long walks in the graveyard. She’d come downstairs to the store and tell us she was going for a walk, and Pappa’d tell her to go ahead. A couple of times I followed her there, and saw her meeting Weston. And I know that’s a sin, Ninah. It’s a sin to love another man when you’re joined to one already. But I believe she loved him. And I believe that it must be a wonderful feeling to be loved so much by two men at the same time. I know that’s probably a sin for me to even think that way, but I imagine having two men willing to give you the moon would be a powerful temptation.”

“It’s not a sin for you to think that,” I assured her. “I think that’d be nice too.”

“But when a woman’s joined to a man, she has to stick with
that
man, through thick and thin, good and bad. And my mamma didn’t do that.

“On the day that Pappa died, all I know is that I was in the den, coloring a line of paper dolls I’d made myself. My pappa’d been giving me lessons for years, helping me make curls for girl dolls and showing me how to make their arms more narrow than their little hands. And I’d finally got the hang of it. So I was working in the den when I heard the gun go off.”

“What’d you do?” I asked her, moving closer so that my head was right between her breasts and my feet were touching hers too. Her bony feet were cold as February.

“I sat where I was and hollered out for Pappa, but he didn’t answer me. Then I listened for voices, but all I could hear was something moving around. So I hollered out for Mamma and she told me to stay where I was.

“So I colored and colored except I didn’t change crayons. I colored every doll just as red as you please. Faces and dresses and hands and all. And then somebody knocked at the door, and it was Weston Ward. He asked me if he could come in, and I told him that I thought maybe Mamma and Pappa were hurt, and I asked him if he’d go look.

“They stayed in the bedroom for a while longer, and when they came out, Mamma was bloody and crying and told me that Pappa had shot himself.”

“But he didn’t, did he?”

“No, darling, but that’s what Mamma told me. She told Weston he needed to go find the police for her, and while she led him to the door, I ran back into the room where Pappa was.”

“And he was dead,” I said.

“Yes.”

I could hear Nanna’s voice change, and I thought she might be crying, but when I reached for her face it was dry. She even let me touch the skin in the moat beneath her eye. I held my fingers there to make sure I hadn’t caused her tears.

“What’d it look like, Nanna,” I chanced.

“Child,” she said, reaching for my hand and pulling it down, “you don’t want to know.”

“Yes I do,” I promised. “Cause I don’t think you sinned at all,” and then I started crying.

“She’d shot him in the back. He’d fallen down face first. There wasn’t much to see because she’d put a blanket over him.”

“Did you touch him?”

“Oh yes,” she admitted.

“You pulled the sheet away?”

“Yes.”

“And what was it like?” I asked because I couldn’t stop.

“Like a fountain had sprung up out of his back,” she explained. “And then gone dry.”

“What’d you do?”

“Mamma pulled me away—or Weston pulled me away. I can’t remember. I think they sent somebody else for the police and it was Weston who pulled me away.

“Mamma tried to tell the police that he’d killed himself because his business was failing, but she wasn’t in her right mind by then. Anybody with any sense would know that a person can’t shoot themselves in the back. They left her alone that night and took Pappa away.”

“And you slept right in the bed with her?”

“Yes,” Nanna said. “She cried all night long. Wailed out, and I knew she was really in mourning. I didn’t understand all that was going on, but at the time, you see, I was too distraught to notice that he couldn’t have shot himself there. I don’t know if I would have figured it out if I’d been clearheaded.

“The next day, the police came to arrest her and took me to an orphans’ home. After that, I could only talk to her when a lawyer picked me up and carried me to the jail with him. The two of them made up this story and wrote it down for me to memorize—about how Pappa’d been beating me real bad and Mamma’d killed him because she thought he was going to kill
me.”

“And you said it to the judge?” I asked her.

“I reckon I did. I don’t hardly remember it. The judge didn’t believe it though, and Mamma went to prison, and I got sent down here to live with your great-uncle and his family.”

“What was it like in the orphans’ home?”

“I can’t remember, honey. And you’ve worn me out for the night. I don’t have no story left in me.”

“Okay, Nanna,” I told her.

I didn’t say my prayers that night, but before I fell asleep, I made sure Nanna knew that I didn’t think she committed a sin by lying to the judge. She didn’t have any choice.

“Sin or no sin,” Nanna said, “I’ve had nettles in my bed every night.”

“Really?” I asked her, and slid my hand underneath her back.

“Not those kinds of nettles, honey,” she replied.

 

 

 

T
hat was the beginning of my understanding of metaphors. I
thought about Nanna’s nettles a lot, wondering how it could be that she felt prickles and stings to her skin when nothing was in her bed at all. But after a time, I came to realize that the nettles were all around her, inside and out. I dreamed of Mamma cutting me down the back, filling me up with sandspurs, and sewing me back together. Nettles every night and even in the day, slightly stabbing with every movement, every turn.

Then I started thinking about Grandpa Herman and figured he was the biggest nettle of all. One great big irritation in the bed with Nanna. I remembered his whiskers, seventy years tough, and knew how badly he must make her itch, how she must just want to leap out of that bed and sleep somewhere else.

To The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God’s Almighty Baptizing Wind, metaphors were ways of saying the unpleasant. That’s how they taught us everything they didn’t want to say aloud.

In our after-supper classes, we’d recite, “He who carves a notch in another man’s tree shall pay a hundred dollars. Half to the man whose tree he marked and half to The Church of Fire and Brimstone.”

One night in the middle of this, my nephew Mustard, who was nine at the time and the youngest in our group, stopped Ben Harback, that night’s teacher, to ask, “A hundred dollars just for sticking your knife in a tree?”

“Mustard!” his sister Pammy scolded under her breath. Pammy was eleven, a year younger than me, and mostly invisible.

“It just don’t make sense,” Mustard said. “A hundred dollars! That’s a lot of money for one little notch in a tree.”

“But it is not a lot of money for thieving, now is it?” Ben Harback asked Mustard, then looked at us all.

“Maybe not for stealing a baby pig or something,” Mustard argued. “But for one little notch in a tree?”

I glimpsed at James, whose almond eyes were walnuts, and I couldn’t tell if he was about to laugh or about to yell, but he was about to do something. The Saturday night classes weren’t discussions. They were lectures and recitations. As far as I could remember, nobody’d ever asked a question before. We all knew Mustard was in terrible trouble and couldn’t imagine why he didn’t know. It would be more than nettles for disagreeing with the law book. Maybe even more than the strap. My ears felt hot. I put my hands onto the sides of the cold metal chair to cool them, wishing I could lay my ears there.

Ben Harback just stared at us all, his eyes cast down as if he was looking at a tobacco leaf covered with a breed of worm he’d never seen before.

I thought about Mustard, all alone, the only brave voice, the rest of us sitting like eggs, just waiting.

“It’s not about the notch or the tree,” I whispered.

“What did you say, Ninah Huff?” Ben asked sharply.

“It’s not about the notch or the tree either,” I said louder. “It’s about claiming something that doesn’t belong to you.” I couldn’t tell whether I was getting us into trouble or getting us out of it, but it was a huge chore, no matter what it was, and my voice shook. “It’s like if we told Grandpa Herman that we deserved to be paid for picking up leaves in the field when the field doesn’t really belong to us at all and he already takes care of our needs.”

“Yes,” Ben sighed. “Thank you, Ninah.”