Behind me, I heard the fellowship hall door slam, then Nanna asking Daddy what I’d done.
He led me up to the front, to the table in front of the altar where the communion bread and grape juice sat on days when we took Christ’s body.
“Bend over,” he said, “and lift your dress.”
I’d had the strap before, but not since I was little. I wondered if he made all the women lift their dresses. I tried to remember if any woman in the congregation had ever gotten the strap, but it seemed like they just fasted or slept on nettles.
When my dress was lifted and I was tensed up already, he said, “Slip down your underpants,” and I almost died, but I did it.
And then he whacked me again and again, swinging that belt so hard that I could hear it sneering at me as it sliced the air. I didn’t cry though. All that time, I hoped that there wasn’t something about the skin on your bottom that changed when you fornicated. Or some little smell. Some way for Grandpa to know.
But I didn’t consider anything I’d done to be fornicating. There was no way a big word like that could describe anything as nice as knowing Jesus all the way through.
When he was done, he pulled my underpants up and my dress back down in one swift movement, and then he pulled me to the floor and prayed with me, telling God how he was proud to have me in his family and congregation, and not to let me slip into sin anymore.
But I didn’t pray. I kept wondering how James could have done such a thing. I tried to figure out whether Jesus would have told if he’d been in James’ position. I decided that Jesus would never snitch.
On the way out of the church, Grandpa Herman said, “Sometimes I hate having to be the one to carry out these punishments.”
I walked back to my house seething. I wanted to smack James so hard he landed in the Lake of Fire. But only for a second.
I was late getting to prayer partners, and when I got there, James was waiting on the couch. But Mamma and Daddy were in there with him too, and they asked James to sit tight while they talked to me.
I went with them into their bedroom where Daddy said, “He didn’t hurt you, did he, Baby?”
And Mamma interrupted to say, “That isn’t what I’m concerned about, Liston.”
“I’m sorry,” I said to them both. “I sinned, and I’ve asked God to forgive me.”
And then Mamma hugged me close and I could smell her skin, faintly eucalyptus and warm. “I am so proud of you, Ninah,” she said. “For being such a strong girl and admitting to your mistakes. You won’t talk with that girl ever again, will you?”
“No, ma’am,” I said, but not loud enough to block out the sound of Mamma’s stomach growling.
“Then go on out to James,” she said, and slapped me on my backside, forgetting, I guess, that Grandpa had just hit me there, but Daddy remembered and gritted his teeth out loud.
“I’ve got to run get my bible. I left it in the bathroom. I’ll be right back,” she said to Daddy, and hurried off.
“He didn’t hurt you, did he?” Daddy whispered once she was gone.
“Not too bad,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” Daddy muttered. “Now get on out there with that boy.”
I made the walk down the hall take longer than it should have. With every step, I asked Jesus to help me not kill James.
When I got in the living room, he was sitting there, his head drooped down, his hands together between his open knees. He looked up when I approached.
“Thanks a lot,” I said sarcastically.
“Ninah,” he began.
“No, shut up. I’m not done talking to you,” I snapped, and then I had to pause to think of what I wanted to say. I was standing directly in front of him, hovering over him, and it felt good to have him sitting there so pathetic and so much lower.
“You know that I didn’t do anything at all on that bus,” I said. “I didn’t do nothing. And you know that I’m not like Corinthian, and that I don’t want to be. And you know why I sat back there. I mean, it wasn’t like I chose to sit with Corinthian Lovell, James, so why’d you get me in trouble?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and his voice broke, the way it did sometimes so that it sounded like he might yodel.
“I never told on you,” I said. “And you’re friends with Rajesh Patel.”
“We ain’t friends.”
“Well, I’m not friends with Corinthian either. But I still got the strap tonight just for talking to her.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Well, if you’re so sorry, why can’t you at least look at me?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said, peeking up for just a moment and then looking back down.
“I thought you loved me,” I said, and then I started to cry.
“Ninah,” he said. “Don’t.”
“Leave me alone,” I told him. “I thought you loved me.”
Justice comes to everyone, I guess. I don’t know how it can be that you can wish somebody evil and then feel so bad when it knocks them behind the knees and flattens them on the floor.
I’d been hoping and praying for James to get in trouble. I didn’t want it enough to cause it though. He could have danced naked on the school bus, and I wouldn’t have told. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t wishing.
I’d been saying prayers with James for a week, but we’d reverted back to the old way, where we didn’t talk and didn’t pray out loud and looked forward to the time when we could unclasp hands and go do our studying. I’d half forgiven him by then, but not completely, even though he’d said he was sorry every day and tried to kiss me once before I pushed him back.
Then the last day of school, after Ajita Patel had given me one of those foreign pencils and told me that she hoped we’d be assigned to the same classes next year, Pammy told me about James’ sin on the ride back to Fire and Brimstone.
She was sitting next to me, her books stacked neatly in her lap, and she whispered into my ear, “James has to sleep on nettles for a week.”
“Why?”
“He polluted his bed,” she said slowly, so quietly that it took a minute for me to process her words.
“What does that mean?” I asked her.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “He soiled it. And Mamma found out and told Daddy, and Daddy got real mad.”
All of a sudden, I figured it out. I remembered the film from school about the things that happen to girls’ bodies and the things that happen to boys’.
“Polluted it?” I asked again.
“I think he pooped,” Pammy said, and then covered her mouth to keep from laughing.
“But that’s an accident, right? He probably couldn’t help it.”
“It’s still a sin,” Pammy said. “And now he has to sleep on pine needles and cockleburrs and thorns.”
“Thorns?”
“Yeah, a whole bunch of them. Daddy went out in the woods and cut them down.”
“That’s awful,” I said.
And later that night when James and I met in the living room, I said, “I heard you have to sleep on thorns.”
“Yeah.”
“That hurts,” I uttered, but it sounded so stupid that I shut up.
“Are you still mad at me?”
“No. I guess not.”
“Good,” he said. “Do you want to go for a walk?”
“Will we get in trouble?”
“Everybody’s praying for the next hour. I reckon we can pray outside as good as we can pray inside.”
So we left. We went out to a tobacco field where the plants were just thigh high and walked in a few rows so that we wouldn’t be visible to anybody skipping prayers that night.
“I’m sorry you have to sleep on nettles,” I said, and I meant it.
“It’s like there’s all this stuff in me,” he said. “And it needs to come out. But every time it does, it’s a sin. I can’t figure it out.”
“That’d be hard,” I agreed.
“Girls don�
�t have it.”
“But if we’re created in God’s image, then it doesn’t make sense that it would be a sin.”
“It’s the curse of Eve,” he whispered.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s really a curse.”
“Yes it is,” he proclaimed. “You just don’t know.”
“Tell me,” I said, and he started to, but then he stopped.
“Ninah, we can’t. We have to pray.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “That’s fine with me.”
And so James asked again for Jesus to lead us and help us and to speak through us.
But every time he said that part about the speaking-through, it happened. Jesus just whirlwinded around inside me until he got so big that he started slipping out, and I think it happened the same way with James. Jesus just filled us up, so full we had to share it. It wasn’t fornication. Not there, with the tobacco leaves lisping in the warm wind, not with the moon overhead like a spotlight so that God could see from way up above.
Later, I told James that if it helped, he wouldn’t have to sleep on nettles ever again.
Later, I told James that it must be God’s will, because otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to sneak away and get back inside before prayer partners were over.
Later, I told James I loved him like the air, always moving, but constant as a hope.
He brushed off my back each time, and his hands felt like a remedy to all the badness I’d ever known.
Grandpa Herman didn’t decide what to do with Ben Harback for forty days, which Grandpa said was a sign. When he came out of the mysterious cellar that I couldn’t even find on the property, he looked like a rib, having eaten nothing except rice for so many days, and the sunlight hurt his eyes so bad that he squinted almost all the time. I figured that by that time, Corinthian had forgotten him for sure, and it made me ill.
We were already gathering tobacco, walking row after row and popping off the four leaves on the bottom of every plant so that by the time we got back to that particular field, the higher leaves would have grown.
The day after Ben Harback reemerged, he was in the fields, but he was so weak that he fell behind, and Mustard had to help him keep up. James had moved on to bigger things than cropping tobacco by that time. He was driving the tractor, pulling the wooden drag where we tossed the leaves behind him.
“You okay, Ben?” I asked him that afternoon. Because he hadn’t been in the sun all summer, his skin was pale as a cotton boll and not as absorbant. He was already lobstering in that heat.
“I’ll be all right, I reckon,” he said.
“Cause you can sit on that drag if you ain’t feeling good. Me and Mustard will cover for you, and James won’t tell.”
“I’ll make do,” he insisted.
He’d been underground so long that his voice sounded funny, like he had water in his lungs, and when James stopped at the end of a row to wait for us to crop the last few leaves and then turn the tractor around to go back down the next, I stopped him.
“Ben’s sick,” I told him.
“Why do you say that?”
“Look at him. He’s about to fall down.”
“He’ll be okay,” James said, and drove on, riding high, like king of the field.
We took a break in the middle of the afternoon, and Ben climbed weakly onto the drag with the rest of us, and James drove us back to the barn where a bunch of women were putting the tobacco leaves onto the conveyor belt and Nanna was straightening them before they went through the stringer where they got stitched to the old wooden sticks.
During summer, we were allowed to drink Coca-Colas in bottles and eat Nekots out of their plastic wrappers on breaks. It was the only relief we got from the sun and the work.
We took twenty minutes to catch our breath. Even the men who were hanging the sticks in the barn got to come out and talk.
“You all right, Ben?” Nanna asked him.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said.
“We’re glad to have you back with us,” David added.
“Glad to be here,” Ben said. “It’s been lonely down under. I reckon I shouldn’t say that, since I had God to converse with, but I missed you people.”
“We missed you too,” Daddy said.
Before we left to go back to the fields where the strong people worked, where James drove a tractor and David did, where all the older children worked cropping tobacco and the younger ones followed them picking up dropped leaves, and the littlest ones not even old enough for school sat at the edges of rows and played with their toy tractors, I pulled Nanna aside and said, “Ben Harback’s gonna pass out.”
“You reckon?” Nanna asked.
“He’s pale and he can’t keep up and he needs to go to bed.”
“I told Herman not to put him in this field before he got a good meal,” she said, walking back.
Nanna motioned Ben to the side of the barn and was talking with him when Grandpa Herman drove up in his shiny pickup and Ben hurried back to rejoin the croppers.
We went back out in the sun, plucking off our leaves and laying them onto the drags in big armfuls. We hadn’t been working long before Ben threw up. I heard him gagging and didn’t want to look, but I didn’t want him to get in trouble by falling behind. So I kept crossing over to his row and Mustard helped too while Ben choked and wiped his face.
“I can do it,” Ben panted after a few minutes. “Y’all get back to your rows. I’ll get mine.”
“It’s okay,” Mustard tried. “Take it easy.”
“I can do it,” he bellowed. “Leave me alone.” He leaned over, cropped a handful of leaves, and tossed them on the drag next to the ones I’d just put there. A clump of vomit fell off his shirt and landed on the trailer.
I had to talk myself out of getting sick. I had to force myself not to think about it.
Me and Mustard let him keep going, and I prayed for my own weak stomach instead of for Ben.
We were halfway down the next set of rows when Mustard hollered out, “Hey, Ben’s fell down.”
James didn’t hear him and kept driving slowly along.
“Hey,” Mustard called again. “Ben’s down.”
I ran over to Ben, and some others rustled through tobacco stalks to where he’d collapsed. Somebody stopped James and he turned off the tractor.
“He ain’t hardly breathing,” Pammy declared.
“He’s breathing,” I said. “Don’t exaggerate.” But I was worried. His face was sunburned to the point that it looked like you could wipe his skin off with your fingers, but beneath that redness, it seemed like the blood had drained away. It was the scariest color I’d seen, doughy pink and almost runny.
“Let’s get him up there,” Barley said, and picked Ben up from under the arms. Mustard got his legs.
We all hopped onto the drag, trying to balance our weight in the middle so that it didn’t tip up or down, and Mustard sat up on the tractor’s tire shield to keep it from being so heavy.
I wiped at Ben’s face with a tobacco leaf. It was all I had.
James drove back to the barn going so fast that the nickels and dimes in the engine sounded like steady quarters. Dust clouded around us as we hit bumps in the road. Dust particles muddied in our sweat.
“Slap him, Ninah,” Pammy said. “Wake him up.”
So I did. I hit him on both sides of the face and then once really hard in the middle of the chest, all the time asking God to preserve him.
“Ben,” Pammy shouted. “Ben!” She yelled it in my ear, but I didn’t fuss.
When we got to the barn, Nanna ran over to us, and Grandpa Herman pulled the truck up, and Everett and Olin lifted the still-unconscious Ben into the back. Nanna leaped in, and then Grandpa drove away.
“Get back to work,” David said. “Everybody back in the fields.”
So we went.
James asked me if I thought Ben would be okay, and I said I hoped so. James asked me where he was staying, and I told him that I figured he was i
n Nanna’s spare bedroom. James asked me if I thought God was punishing Ben, and I told him that God didn’t need to because Grandpa Herman took care of that better than anybody else I knew.
“Sometimes when you say things like that, I wonder how God would even be willing to speak through you,” James smarted.
“Well, it’s the truth,” I said. “Leaving a man in a cellar for forty days. I don’t see how you could call it anything else but cruel.”
We were out behind the barn. James and Barley and Mustard were in charge of watching the fires that burned beneath the leaves, making sure they didn’t get too hot and ignite the curing tobacco during the night. Because James was still working, I got to go outside for prayer partners. Nobody was concerned about it. Barley and Mustard were there too. But they’d fallen asleep already, in the soft sand beneath the shed where the tobacco stringer was parked next to the barn door.
And we were on the far side of the barn, closest to the woods, stretched out on our backs and looking up at dark sky pocked with clouds. We couldn’t even see the moon.
“Do you ever worry that what we do sometimes during prayers could be considered ... fornicating?” James asked.
“No,” I lied. “What we’re doing is different. It’s just a part of a prayer. Besides, it isn’t you I’m doing it with. It’s Jesus. ”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think we should mention it to anybody though,” I added.
“No,” James agreed. “They wouldn’t understand. Sometimes I worry that we’re fornicating though.”
I felt an awful pinching in my stomach when he said that. I knew that if James really started believing he was sinning, he’d tell. I didn’t know what Grandpa’d do to us if he found out. I suspected it would be far worse than anything that had happened to Ben—since Ben came into the community late in life, but we’d grown up there.
“What Ben did is different,” James coaxed himself. “That’s nothing like what we do.”
“No.”
“I mean, if Ben had been following God’s instructions, he wouldn’t never have gotten caught—do you think?”
“No,” I said again.
The Rapture of Canaan Page 12