“[An] exquisitely wrought memoir, Scheeres emerged with sensibilities intact and learned that love can flourish even in the harshest climates.” –People
“This is one of the best memoirs in years. I foisted it on friends and strangers alike, and everyone loved its marvelous story, writing, humor, truth.” –Anne Lamott
“[A] clear-eyed memoir…with judicious restraint. To spend your childhood in a doctrinaire environment, whether political or religious, is to become too familiar, too fast, with the worst of human frailities–hypocrisy, bigotry, moral cowardice.” –Vogue
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Jesus Land
By Julia Scheeres
Chapter 1
The Heartland
It’s just after three o’clock when we hit County Road 50. The temperature has swelled past ninety and the sun scorches our backs as we swerve our bikes around pools of bubbling tar.
A quarter of a mile downwind from Hanke’s Dairy, the stench of cow shit slams up our noses, and we rise in unison, stomping on the pedals and gasping toward the cornfield on the other side.
It’s been two weeks since we moved to the country, and this is our first foray into the wilderness beyond our backyard. Our destination is a cemetery we spotted during a drive last Sunday that Mother insisted on taking after church. While David and I sat in the back of the van glaring out opposite windows, she coasted down dirt lanes, chattering about edible corn fungus, pig manure fertilizer, and other gruesome factoids she’d gleaned from her recent subscription to Country Living magazine.
David nudged me when we drove by the graveyard. It was set back from the road a bit, filled with brambles and surrounded by one of those pointy black fences that circle haunted houses in children’s books, usually with a large KEEP OUT sign on the gate. This fence bore no such sign. We looked at the tombstones jutting sideways from the ground like crooked teeth, and knew we had to return.
We have a thing for bone yards, as we do for all things death-related. It’s part of our religion, the opt of countless sermons: Where will YOU spend ETERNITY? THE AFTERLIFE: Endless BLISS or Endless TORTURE? We are haunted by these questions. If we die tomorrow, will we join the choir of angels or slow roast in Hell? We’re not sure of the answer. So we are drawn to graveyards, where we can be close to the dead and ponder their fate as well as our own.
Once we pass Hanke’s Dairy, we sit back down onto our bike seats. Along the length of the cornfield, a series of plywood squares nailed to stakes bear a hand-scrawled message:
Sinners go to:
HELL
Rightchuss go to:
HEAVEN
The end is neer:
REPENT
This here is:
JESUS LAND
You see such signs posted throughout the countryside: farmers using the extra snippet of land between their property and the road to advertise Jesus Christ. Mother approves. She says the best thing you can do in life is die for Jesus Christ as a missionary martyr, but posting signs by the side of the road can’t hurt either.
“Anything to spread the Good News,” she says.
It was her idea to move to the country. She grew up in rural South Dakota and had been threatening to drag us back to the boonies for years. Dad finally caved in. His drive to Lafayette Surgical Clinic, where he’s a surgeon, is half an hour longer, but now he’s also gotten into the country act, donning his new overalls to drive his new tractor around our fifteen acres. Our three older siblings escaped this upheaval by leaving for college, so that leaves my parents, my two adopted black brothers, and me.
Jerome, our seventeen-year-old brother, hightailed it out of this 4-H fairground a few nights after we landed. He got into a fight with Dad, stole the keys to the Corolla, and drove off. Hasn’t been seen or heard from since, which is fine by me, since Jerome is nothing but trouble anyhow.
So basically it’s me and David, our ten-speeds, and the open road. And while the country graveyard is puny compared to the one by our old house–Grand View Cemetery, which we visited often in search of fresh graves–it still contains dead people, and that’s what interests us.
It takes five minutes to pedal past cornstalks, standing higher than a man’s head, to a cluster of double-wide trailers on the other side. They’re anchored in a half circle, with an assortment of plastic flamingos and gutted vehicles strewn on the bald clay before them. The irritating twang of country music leaks from the trailer nearest the road, and as we sail by, a heap of orange cats lounging in the engine compartment of a rusted station wagon scatters into the dry weeds.
I curse myself for wearing a dark-T-shirt in this booming heat. We haven’t seen another human since we walked outside and would have stayed indoors ourselves if boredom hadn’t driven us into the farmland.
“Watch for heatstroke,” Mother, a nurse, warned us before we left. “If you get cramps or diarrhea or start to hallucinate, walk your bikes.”
Sweat drips into my eyes, warping the landscape, and I lift my T-shirt to wipe my face, flashing my bra at the empty world. Ahead of me, David rides shirtless, his scrawny torso gleaming like melting chocolate. He’s draped his T-shirt over his head and tied it under his chin like a bonnet. Like a girl. As if he didn’t look dorky enough with those black athletic glasses belted to his head with that elastic band. If anyone from Harrison sees us, we’re doomed.
William Henry Harrison is our new school; Hick High, the townspeople call it. There will be 362 people in our class, compared to twelve at Lafayette Christian, our old school, and we don’t know a single one of them. These are farm kids who’ve known each other since they were knee-high to a rooster, kids who’ve probably never seen a real live black person before. Kids who worry us a lot.
***
My parents didn’t set out to adopt two black boys.
They wanted the white kid on my sister’s pediatric ward. Laura was born with spina bifida, and she spent much of her childhood in hospitals, being repaired and recuperating from repairs. During one month-long stay, she met an orphaned white boy, and they became fast friends. In the desperate manner of lonesome, suffering children, they clung to each other like family. My parents inquired after adopting him, only to learn he was taken.
But the adoption agency persisted. There were scads of other children who needed homes, they said: black children.
It was 1970, and America was scarred by racial violence. Civil rights leaders had been gunned down in the streets, and communities across the nation were smarting from race riots. My parents’ own state, Indiana, had once been a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan, and was still a haven for backwater bigots.
To reject a black baby would have been un-Christian, a sin. God was testing them. This was a chance to bear witness for Jesus Christ, to show the world that their God was not prejudiced and neither were they. Red and yellow, black and white, they’re all precious in His sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world. They would take a black baby home and call him son.
Such was the theory.
Years later, I learned that the first time my mother touched David, she feared “the black would rub off on her hands.”
Later still, I learned the miracle of my brother’s beginnings. That David was born to a thirteen-year-old girl, three months premature and weighing two pounds–less than a bottle of Jack Daniels. That machines and heat lamps kept him breathing during his first crucial months. That he was placed with a succession of foster families that gave him different names and collected their government checks and shut doors so they wouldn’t hear him cry. They weren’t paid to love the fragile baby with the liquid brown eyes, they were paid to keep him alive.
My parents would keep him alive and save his soul.
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A Thousand Lives Page 36