Rapture of Canaan (7 page)

“Can I go, Daddy?” I whispered in his ear. “I really want to, and Mamma said I could if you didn’t mind.”

“
I
don’t care,” he told me. “Don’t be gone long.”

So I hustled off with the boys before Pammy found out and wanted to come too.

“Girls can’t hunt,” John mocked.

“Well, you can’t hunt either,” I claimed. “Not with just a little BB gun.”

“I killed a bird with it,” he said. “Killed
two
birds. And I’m getting me a gun for my birthday. You wait and see.”

“Even when you get a gun, you won’t be able to shoot it,” Barley picked. “When you pull that trigger, it’ll kick back so hard your shoulder will be bruised for a week.”

“Well, your shoulder bruises too,” John whined.

We walked past the barn, and James stopped to stroke a mare’s long nose. We walked past the pigpen and past the chicken coop and all the way back to the place where the field ended and the woods began.

“Where’d we put that first trap?” Mustard asked. “Weren’t it right in there?” and pointed back down a path.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Barley agreed.

“Y’all go on in there and walk up the creek. I’ll take Ninah with me and we’ll check the traps from the other side and meet you in the middle,” James said. “I want to show her where I killed my deer.”

“Why do you want to show
her?”
John ridiculed.

“Because she ain’t seen it yet and you have,” James said.

“All right,” Mustard conceded, and the three younger boys disappeared behind branches and brush.

James led me in another direction. “It’s kind of growed up in here,” he said, holding back limbs so they wouldn’t slap me.

We walked for a long time, with him leading the way and me following, stepping over briars and over moss. As I crunched across lichen and then headed down near the creek through mud, I felt something churning in my chest like too much sorrow. I didn’t want to
follow
James to a place I hadn’t seen. I wanted to be the one showing him something. I didn’t want to be the girl.

We found a place to cross the creek where a tree grew in the middle and we could step onto a root and then over to the other side. James offered me his hand, but I didn’t take it.

“Not far now,” he said after a while, and I watched his flannel shirt stretched tight across his back. I watched his dark hair curling up around his collar. He’d need a hair-cut soon. I followed his dark pants into the woods, deeper and deeper.

“You tired?” he asked me, looking back.

“No,” I insisted.

“Well, why ain’t you talking to me?” he asked. “You mad?”

I shrugged.

“Why are you mad?”

He stopped, and I stopped too, not wanting to get one bit closer.

“Cause you killed a
doe,
” I said, “and she could have had ten baby boys for you to kill later, but now she can’t because she’s dead.”

“They told me to,” James argued. “They said, ‘Shoot anything that comes your way.’ It was the first one,” he explained. “That rule don’t apply to your first one.”

“Well, it
should,
I fussed. “You shouldn’t never kill a doe.”

I was holding onto a skinny tree, shaking it in my hand. When I looked up at James again, I was surprised to see him so silenced. He didn’t look like a big boy at all then. He looked little in his eyes.

“Want me to take you back?” he offered.

“No,” I said.

“You sure?”

“I want to see it,” I told him. “I want to see the place where you killed her.”

He took my hand and led me through the woods into a clearing. On the other side, there was a tree with a stand in it.

“You were up there?” I asked him.

“Yeah.”

So I walked over to the place where the little slats of board were nailed to the tree trunk and began climbing up.

When I was sitting on the narrow plank, with James right beside me, I said, “Show me where she was.”

He pointed to a cluster of bushes over to the right. “She was right there,” he said. “With her head down. And you see them branches over there, not in that first bush but the one behind it?”

I nodded.

“Well, I thought they were a rack,” he explained. “I thought she was a buck. Otherwise I wouldn’t have shot at her no matter what anybody said.”

“Oh,” I sighed, and looked into my lap, feeling like I might cry and hating myself for it. I told myself I should be relieved or even happy that James hadn’t meant to kill a doe. But I was crying anyway. I didn’t want James to see.

“Ninah?” he whispered. “Ninah?”

And when I looked at his face, all I saw were his lips, chapped and damp, his mouth open just a little and his chipped tooth right in front from the day we were playing in the pack house and he tripped on the stairs. I stared at his mouth until I had to close my eyes from the nearness of it, from the feeling of those chapped lips on the skin above my eyes.

I
was sitting in the porch swing beside Nanna, bundled up in
a blanket. Nanna didn’t have a blanket of her own, but the end of my blanket stretched across her legs, so she wasn’t too cold.

Pammy and Bethany sat outside with us for a while, watching the moon hover low in the clouds, the sky still streaked with hints of day. Bethany brushed out Pammy’s hair, then braided it back neatly in spite of Pammy’s protests. But then Pammy got whiny and wanted to go inside, so Bethany kissed Nanna goodnight, and they left.

“You need to get home and do your lessons,” Nanna said.

“Don’t have anything except a math quiz that I already studied for.”

“When did you study?” she asked me.

“On the bus.”

“That don’t count,” she said. “All that noise. You need to study it again.”

“I’ll go in a minute,” I promised.

Nanna rubbed at my sock, pressed her bony thumb into my arch and moved it around and around beneath the blanket.

“Tell me the story of when you met Grandpa Herman,” I begged her. What I really wanted to hear about was the first time they kissed, but I knew
that
story was off limits.

“Why do you want to hear that? I’ve told you a hundred times. Nobody else nags at me for stories.”

“I like your stories,” I said. “Tell me.”

Nanna patted my foot, put it down, and picked up the other one, pressing into my heel. “I was just about your size,” she began. “And stupider than a sunflower in the shade. And Herman came acourtin dressed in brand-new denim britches and a starched white shirt. Walked right up to Uncle Ernie’s door carrying a handful of ragged azalea flowers he’d cut off his mamma’s bush with his pocketknife.”

“Was he grinning at you and winking?”

I smiled at her and she smiled back and said, “You’ve done heard this story, and I ain’t telling it again tonight when you’ve got lessons to get. But don’t think I don’t know what’s in your head, girl. I can see it in your eyes.”

“Ma’am?” I asked her innocently.

“You’re James’ aunt, whether you like it or not. And he’s your nephew, whether you like it or not. I can see you two looking at each other. And you better be careful, is all I got to say, because you’re gonna get hurt if you ain’t careful.”

“I ain’t
really
his aunt,” I said.

“Not by blood, maybe. But by position. So you can forget that right now, do you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now get on home and study for that math test.”

“It’s just a quiz,” I reminded her.

“Study,” she repeated.

 

 

 

W
hen I got home, Everett and Wanda were sitting on the
couch, talking to Mamma and Daddy. I could tell that Wanda had been crying. Her eyes looked like pictures of boxers I’d seen, without the bruises. She and Everett were sitting close though, so I knew that the problem wasn’t between them.

Daddy motioned me to his lap, and I sat down there with him in his chair, my skinny legs almost as long as his. I sat in Daddy’s lap all the time—big as I was by then. But that day was the first time I paid attention to what his knees felt like against the backs of my thighs. I imagined what it would feel like to sit on James’ lap and then whispered a little prayer for forgiveness.

“Honey,” Daddy said to Wanda. “It’s just going to take some getting used to.”

“But I miss them so bad, though,” Wanda stammered. She was fatter than the rest of us, but then she’d only been living at Fire and Brimstone for a couple of months. “I just don’t understand why I can’t go see them.”

“Nobody’s saying you can’t see them,” Mamma interjected. “Go if you want to. But you know that the minute you step foot in their house, you’ll be breathing the air of their sinfulness.”

“I know,” she whimpered. “It’s not that I don’t like it here ... ,” and she buried her face in Everett’s shirt.

Everett looked at us while she cried. Everett had a lot of muscles, and the muscles in his face were begging.

“Wanda,” Mamma said, “you got to pull yourself together.”

She looked up with her face all red and ugly and said, “I miss their bad manners and their jokes. I miss their drinking and fighting. I even miss laying in the bed on Sunday mornings and listening to Daddy snoring down the hall. I know it’s a sin, to wish for those things. I know it is.”

“What you have to do,” Daddy told her, “is try to feel the way Jesus felt, dying on that cross for our sins. You have to think of your life as an example like Jesus’. Because one day your sinful people might look at you and see that they can step right off the broad road to destruction and onto the narrow path to righteousness, just like you’ve done.”

“I pray about it,” Wanda said.

“And we pray about it too,” Everett assured her. “We pray for your family every day, just like you do. And don’t that make us a stronger family here, joining our hearts in prayer?”

“Yeah.” She tried to smile.

Daddy scratched my back while they talked. I bit my bottom lip and shamefully pretended his fingers belonged to James.

Mamma got out of her chair and went over to the couch and sat down on the other side of Wanda. “I know I can’t be your mother, child,” she said. “You’ve done got a mother of your own, and maybe one day, through your example, she’ll see the state of her heart. But I want you to know that I’ll be everything for you that I can.”

And then Wanda leaned over and cried on Mamma for a while. Daddy winked at Everett to reassure him, and I saw that Daddy’s eyes had tears in them too.

“Where you been, Peanut?” Everett asked me, trying to keep his voice steady and change the subject at the same time.

“On the porch with Nanna,” I told him.

“Can you believe how this girl’s growing?” Daddy asked him. “Bet she’s shot up three inches this year.”

“She ’bout old enough to go out on dates,” Wanda sniffed, and Everett passed her his handkerchief.

“Not my baby,” Daddy said.

“I don’t
want
to go on a date,” I said.

“Not til she’s eighteen,” Mamma teased—because most everybody in our community was married by seventeen or eighteen. “And then she can only take a date to church.”

Later that night, before Wanda and Everett left, Mamma suggested that whenever Wanda got homesick, she should pinch herself with clothespins for distraction.

“Physical discomfort is one of the best ways to keep your mind on Heaven,” Daddy agreed.

That night I carried a handful of clothespins to bed with me, since my mind was on everything
but
Heaven. I clamped them to the skin on the inside of my arms and on my stomach. I saved two for my nipples, and those hurt almost too much to bear.

That night I prayed that God would guide me, would help me forget about James’ mouth and his hands that I couldn’t stop imagining. I prayed that God would cleanse me with a dose of Jesus’ pain and keep my body clean and sacred just for him.

And when I couldn’t keep my mind on Jesus, I told myself the story of Nanna and Grandpa to keep from remembering the way kisses felt.

L
eila watched him from the window of the bedroom she shared
with her cousin Imogene. Herman Langston, spiffed up and brave, walking towards the back door. Whenever she thought he might look her way, she’d duck back behind the yellow curtains. But he wasn’t looking. He didn’t even know which room was hers. He kicked at acorns as he made his way to the house.

“What’s he doing?” Imogene asked from the bed where she sat embroidering flowers on a tablecloth.

“Knocking. He’s knocking on the door.”

“Right now?”

“Yeah, he’s knocking right now.”

They sat quietly, straining their ears to hear what happened in the next room. Leila held her breath at the sound of her uncle Ernie’s heavy feet plodding across the floor and then the squeak of the door opening.

“They’re shaking hands,” Leila whispered. “How’s my hair look?”

“Fine,” Imogene told her. “Rub at your cheeks though. Rub them hard to get some color.”

“He’s got flowers.” Leila grinned.

“You’re so lucky,” Imogene whined.

They sat there and waited to hear Uncle Ernie’s voice call to Leila, but it never happened.

“Can you see anything?” Imogene asked.

“He’s still on the doorsteps, wait—he’s leaving.”

“What?”

“He’s leaving.” Leila stood at the window, staring out, not trying to hide, hoping he would see her.

“Lei-laaa,” Uncle Ernie called from the other room.

“Sir?” she yelled back from the window, and when she did, Herman turned that way, looked and smiled, held up his hands.

She grinned back at him and waved.

“Can you come in here for a minute? And you too, Imogene.”

“Be right there,” Leila called back, still facing Herman, who was walking on, turning back shyly to catch her eye from time to time.