Sometimes he’d send me with a wad of money back to the house to report the sale of the day to Juliabelle and Aunt Scripty. Once, when I had seventy-five dollars in my little hand and a guarantee from Nigel that he’d take us all to McDonald’s for supper, I ran through the woods and onto the porch and peered through the open window, where I could see Aunt Scripty propped up on her bed, staring ahead at the muted fuzzy television screen while Juliabelle stood over her, her hands cupped around Aunt Scripty’s head, speaking loudly the same mysterious tongue she was speaking over me today.
I can remember Aunt Scripty’s nostrils flaring as she breathed in and out, in and out, as if she were trying to suck up the incantation itself.
As if she would starve without it.
Now, I wasn’t about to interrupt to tell them about the sale of the day. Instead, I sat down on the bed Juliabelle had made for us on the screened porch and intently listened to the sounds and syllables blending together like a power-wielding poem, like the coke and the iron ore that are heated together and poured out into a fiery lava before being molded into sheets of steel.
They didn’t have telephone lines out there, so when someone wanted an update on Aunt Scripty, Juliabelle would stand on the edge of the bluff and call the news, and the neighbors would pass it on down the river, calling to one another as the wind carried their voices along.
That afternoon it was Aunt Scripty herself moving out to the water’s edge, her hands around her mouth to say, “I’m betta now.” Then she clapped her hands in a strange rhythm as she stomped to her garden.
As Dizzy and I followed her, she sang, “The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!’ And let him who hears say, ‘Come!’”
Then she let us yank the largest honeydew off the vine, which she cut into sweet cubes for our evening dessert.
It was Aunt Scripty who tucked us into a king-sized bed on the screened porch that night, and we drifted off to the sounds of the crickets and bullfrogs while she and Juliabelle smoked their evening pipes at the foot of our bed and Nigel weaved another fruit basket to replace the one he’d sold that day to a couple from Pennsylvania.
Today, when Juliabelle stopped talking in the strange language, I opened my eyes and reached out to the carton beside her.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Tonic,” she said. “From the well, remember?”
Yeah, there was more than just that time my throat had swelled from a bad oyster and she made the trip to Huger Creek to get me some. And now I remembered that she had bathed Lou with the water when she contracted such a bad case of chicken pox that it lined every crack and crevice of her skin. And once when Daddy was suffering from an awful case of insomnia, she had taken Dizzy and me with her into the Francis Marion Forest and had us hold a bowl while she pumped out the drink that would help him rest.
“Can this help a hurting heart?” I asked as I fingered the carton lid.
“Might be,” she said, and she rubbed my back gently.
“Okay, I’ll drink some,” I said, sitting up again. “And one day I’ll get the strength to tell you.”
“Every time I think on you,” she said, reminding me of her prayer promise of last summer, knocking her shoulder against mine.
“Thank you,” I said, embracing her again. I rested in her arms for whole minutes, smelling her powder-sweet perspiration and staring down at the fresh dirt from the forest that lined the edges of her sandals.
11
End of Summer
The next day I drank a cup of Juliabelle’s water with my breakfast, and an hour later I found myself in the Harvest Time pastor’s office (which in its previous life had been a bathroom for the barbecue restaurant that the building once functioned as). The Pelzers had laid down some pieces of scrap carpet and hung a few cheesy sunset and rainbow posters on the tile walls, but there was still a floor drain in one corner of the office and a random sink beside Dale’s desk.
“C’mon in, girls,” Darla said to Shannon and me as she popped her bright blue chewing gum and patted the place beside her on the secondhand couch while Dale pushed his swivel chair from around his desk to face us.
“Hi there, Adelaide.” Dale extended his hand, and when he smiled, I could see that he needed braces something awful.
He popped a mint-flavored toothpick into his mouth and began to gnaw on it, and I could just hear Mae Mae whispering, “What terrible manners!” (I mean, these folk could give the Bizway diamonds a run for their money in the etiquette department.)
After a lengthy prayer in which Darla supported Dale’s words with several moans of agreement, Dale straightened out his blue jeans and leaned in toward us, saying, “Now, Shannon tells me you’re a thinker, and that’s a God-given blessing. You ask me your questions, and Darla and I’ll try to answer them the best we can. We’re not the sharpest tacks, but we believe we have the answer to life’s most important question. What’s been revealed to us is the truth of the Almighty, and it’s good news indeed, Miss Adelaide! As Christ Himself said in Matthew 11:25 and 26, ‘O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, thank you for hiding the truth from those who think themselves so wise and clever, and for revealing it to the childlike.’”
Darla offered a four-syllable “Amen” and began to roll her cheap beaded bracelets back and forth across her wrist as I found the right place in my journal.
What am I doing here? The sharp thought suddenly nipped at my mind as I looked down at my questions. Do I belong next to a lady who wears sparkly eye shadow at ten in the morning and a man who chews on mint toothpicks while he prays? Shouldn’t I have gone to St. Anne’s to ask these questions first before heading to this barbecue bathroom office?
Though it took me a little by surprise, something in me was utterly repelled by Dale and Darla’s evangelistic eagerness, and I had half a mind to just stand up and walk out. I didn’t think I could contain my disdain for whatever their message was and whatever they expected me to do about it.
This newfound contempt was a surprise. It was so real and forceful that I could hardly speak. I suddenly recalled this same kind of repulsion when I was ten and attending my last year at St. Anne’s vacation Bible school. How, when the music director asked us to sing a corny song about the steps of salvation and Jesus’s making a home in our hearts, I muttered, “I won’t do it,” then stole away to the bathroom, where I waited for the bell to ring.
I can say I’m sick, I thought as we all waited for me to read from my journal. I can tell Dale and Darla that I have just come down with a terrible virus and run out of the room and pretend to be nauseous.
Mustering up the strength to sell this lie, I gave a side glance to the dear friend of my childhood, the girl who had practically carried me through this painful summer with her steady love and support, and I realized I didn’t want to offend or hurt her. And what about Darla? The woman who had courageously spilled out her scandalous personal history a few weeks ago to me and a hundred other searching souls? The glow in her eyes burned even now.
Fighting off my rebellion, I rattled off my questions to Dale, who nodded as though they were thoughtful, but typical.
“Let me start with a visual analogy,” Dale said as he pulled over an easel with a small chalkboard attached to it. “All my answers to your questions are going to build on this, so I might as well go ahead and lay this down as our foundation.”
“Okay,” I said, and I was breathing a little easier even now. I liked the classroom approach and was entirely comfortable approaching this as a brain exercise.
Dale took out a broken piece of chalk and drew a horizontal line across the middle of the cracked board. Under the left side of the line he wrote “man,” and under the right side of the line he wrote “God.”
“In the beginning God and man were together.”
“Genesis,” Shannon said in an effort to anchor me.
“Oh, like the Garden of Eden,” I remarked.
“Yep,” Darla added as her jaw worked her gum over.
“The Fall,” Shannon said, and I conjured up an image that had accompanied a John Milton poem in my freshman literature class.
“I get this,” I said. “What happened when Adam and Eve gave in to temptation. I mean, they got thrown out, right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Dale said. “They and all of their descendants.” Then he took his nubby chalk stick and pointed to himself, then Darla, then Shannon, then me.
Sin? I was mulling the archaic word over in my mind. I could already think of a few folks who surely did not have sin in them: (1) Mother Teresa; (2) Gandhi.
Now I was ready to stir the pot.
“Hear me out, now,” Dale said, raising his chalky fingertips. He clapped his hands together once, and the white dust lifted for a moment like a cloud of smoke before him.
“But God had a plan to bring you and me back to Him.” He drew a picture of a cross that filled in the schism so that one side could now get to the other.
“You mean Jesus?” I said.
“Jesus and what He did on the cross.”
“He died,” I said plainly, still not making the connection. Jesus-died-on-the-cross. These words were like wallpaper or a kind of white noise that had always been present in my small-town childhood. I had heard bits and pieces of the story over and over on the radio, in the pharmacy, in the strip mall, and at the gas stations, but it had never held any personal connection to me before. The words were part of the Williamstown culture, just another piece of the backwoods South, like tobacco or pork rinds, and I had always considered them as much superstition as anything else. In my mind, Jesus-died-on-the-cross was simply a notion that dim-witted folks relied on to get them through their hard and simple lives.
“Do you know what happened when Christ died?” Dale asked.
“I’m not sure I do,” I said sheepishly. I was embarrassed that I had never followed this story all the way to its conclusion. Had I been asleep my whole life?
“Well, God Almighty’s holy Son was sacrificed. He bore all of our sins—the ones from the beginning and the ones in the here and now and the ones to come—so that we could come back to God if we believe in what was accomplished on that cross.”
I thought for a moment. Then I took out my pencil and re-created the illustration in my journal. I had to admit, it was a beautiful story, if not compelling. But still, I kept my spoon in hand. Where was the catch?
Life was painful, I’d concluded after my freshman year at NBU. Life smacked you in the face and left you sitting on the side of a cemetery hill with shame and a potential disease invading your body and destroying the future you had worked so hard to protect. I feared that even with a seemingly pure and simple situation like this salvation one, there was a catch.
“Jesus paid the penalty, took the shackles off our feet, and allowed us to enter back into fellowship with our Maker,” Shannon added. Her voice cracked on the word Maker, and I could tell she was nervous. For years she’d been wanting to put a check by my name and write “saved” beside it.
“And not just that, darlin’,” Darla said as her bracelets clamored together with her excited arm motions. “In this act of mercy, Christ conquered death. He rose again on the third day, and we will rise, too, if we believe.”
Rise again? Hold on! I was just here to ask a few questions. I needed help coping with the here and now, not the afterlife.
“All who believe will have eternal life,” Dale added, and the light in his eyes was bursting into a flame. It wasn’t a Carrie horror-movie kind of fire, but rather a white light, like an electrical current, and I examined it with a kind of curiosity as it shot across his pupils.
He really believes this stuff.
“And in this next life,” Dale continued, “God will be with His people. ‘He will remove all of their sorrows, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. For the old world and its evils are gone forever.’”
“That’s from Revelation 21:4,” Shannon whispered to me, and I wrote it down as if it would be a question on a test, but in truth, I was confused. What would some of that electrical light cost me?
Let’s slow down, I thought. Maybe I want to keep my speedometer at zero after all.
“Back to the separation part,” I said in an effort to take this thing by the horns and stand nose to nose with it. “Do you mean to tell me that Mother Teresa is separated from God or that Hitler could have been forgiven if he had believed this in the last moments of his life?”
“Yes’m,” Dale said. “The Good Book says that no one is good—not even one. ‘For all have sinned; all fall short of God’s glorious standard.’”
“Romans chapter 3,” Shannon whispered again.
What an encyclopedia of Scripture quotes she was! Weird. I turned to look at her as though she had two heads, and she grinned back at me.
Dale pressed on with an article that he removed from his secondhand file cabinet. “Mother Teresa says there are five words that explain the reason she picks those little orphans up out of the gutter in Calcutta: ‘He Did This for Me.’”
“Really?” I said, raising my eyebrows as Dale handed me the article, where I read the very words he had highlighted.
This is going to shatter the whole protagonist/antagonist literature prototype, I thought. I mean, if we’re all bad guys after all . . .
“And what about Hitler?” I said. “Do you mean to tell me that he was redeemable?”
“No question Hitler was evil,” Dale said. “Somewhere along the way he turned away from God and became a mighty instrument of the enemy, but to say that he couldn’t be saved would be to take away the value of the Cross, and I’m not gonna do that. So yes, Hitler was redeemable, but only the Lord knows if he chose that at the end.”
Darla then added, “We are made right in God’s sight when we trust in the shed blood of Christ to take away our sins.”
As Shannon cleared her throat to cite the Scripture, I whispered back a little too loudly, “Take it easy, Miss Bible Beater,” and we all broke out into laughter, relishing this moment of comic relief.
“It’s so simple,” I said.
Then Dale pulled out a book titled Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis and handed it to me. “The Lord’s given you a brain, and He wants you to use it, so try this on for size, and meet with me again when you come home during your next college break.” He threw his frayed toothpick into the trash and added, “This’ll be one for you to sink your teeth into. I never have gotten through it.”
C. S. Lewis. I had loved the Chronicles of Narnia as a girl and had passed them down to Lou last year and even read them with her from time to time. Then I remembered peering into that Bible study at NBU where they were reading a book by Lewis—The Great Divorce, I remembered.
“Let me leave you with this thought,” Dale said. He put his Bible down and rubbed his knees as he searched for the right words. “It’s good to think this through, but it’s also good to move ahead and commit when you sense it is right. You never know what tomorrow holds.”
Scare tactic, I thought, the repulsion making its way back into my throat. If this is an altar call, I’m not budging. (I was beginning to feel bipolar.) Clearing my throat, I looked away from Dale and became suddenly conscious of the ticking of a bright yellow “Smile, God loves you!” clock behind his head. I imagined it was a bomb that would detonate any second.
“Let me put it another way,” Dale said. “What could be bigger than eternal life, Adelaide? If you want to plan for your future, think about more than just the next seventy years. There was this bright fellow by the name of Pascal who came to the faith by seeing it in term
s of a wager.”
Pascal’s wager. It sounded vaguely familiar, like a reference in a poem, but I couldn’t recall.
“Anyhow, what Pascal said was, ‘If God doesn’t exist, it doesn’t matter how you wager, ’cause there’s nothing to win after death and nothing to lose neither. But if God does exist, your only chance of winning an eternal life is to believe, and your only chance of losing it is to refuse to believe.’”
Then Dale pulled out another yellowed file that quoted Pascal. He scratched the back of his neck and read, “‘I should be much more afraid of being mistaken and then find out that Christianity is true than of being mistaken in believing it to be true.’”
That’s a thought, Mr. Toothpick, I thought. But then there’s that whole “surrender your life” thing that Shannon brought up before and Darla mentioned in her testimony. My life belongs to me, and I’m not going to hand it over.
Dale pointed the file at me and said, “I mean, if I’m wrong in believing, what did it hurt, but if I choose not to believe and I am wrong, what did I lose?”
“Everything,” I murmured. Still, I wasn’t going to budge. I looked into his fiery eyes head-on to let him know.
“But this is not wrong,” Dale concluded as he stared back at me. “It’s the truth, and we get confirmation of that every day of our lives.”
I practically felt a breeze from Darla’s and Shannon’s strong head-nodding beside me.
If God had been courting me all of my life, then the splendor part was all about Him. My search had been for Him all along. Though I considered that this could actually be true, I wasn’t ready to accept it.
I thanked Dale and Darla for their time and didn’t say much to Shannon on the ride home. But late that night, I wrote the first poem I’d written since April.
Adelaide Piper Page 17