Jesus Land

by Julia Scheeres

  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.

  CHAPTER 2

  FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS

  David’s in okra and I’m in snow peas. We kneel in parallel rows killing Japanese beetles as the sun bores down on us. We each have different methods of doing this. David plucks the beetles off the leaves with gloved fingers, squeezes them until they pop, then tosses them over his shoulder. I find this repulsive. The ground behind him is littered with their mangled metallic green and copper bodies. My method is to bat them off the plants with a trowel, then press them into the dirt with the blade, where I won’t see their insides squirt out. Sometimes I whack off leaves or vegetables in the process, but at least I don’t see the beetles die. Secretly, I think they’re beautiful.

  I pause to swipe my dripping forehead with the back of my arm and look up at the house. A grackle squawks overhead and lands on the clothesline, its purple-black body gleaming in the sun like spilled motor oil. At the end of the driveway, our mutt Lecka lies panting in the shade of her doghouse. Her name means “sweet” in Dutch. Our family tree reaches back to Holland on both parents’ sides, and we attend a Dutch Calvinist church in town where people slap bumper stickers on their cars that proclaim “If you’re not Dutch, you’re not much.” Until this year, we attended a Dutch Calvinist school as well, where all the kids were blond and lanky like me—all the kids except Jerome and David, of course.

  Through the dark glass of the upstairs window, I can just make out Mother sitting in the recliner, feet up, a glass in one hand, a Russian-language book in the other. The ceiling fan spins lazily above her. She’s learning Russian because the Communists are persecuting Christians, and there’s a great need for people to smuggle Bibles behind the Iron Curtain to these clandestine congregations. She wants to be prepared should the Lord call her on that mission.

  “What if the Commies catch you?” I recently asked her, although I already knew her answer: The best thing you can do in life is die for Jesus Christ.

  But I’m not too scared of her being martyred. According to the page marked in her textbook, Take Off in Russian, she’s still learning to ask directions to the toilet and say “I prefer cream in my coffee.” She’s got a long way to go before she can pass herself off as a babushka.

  The telephone jingles as I start down a row of cauliflower, and I look up to see Mother rise to answer it, disappearing into the shadows where light from the great room windows doesn’t reach.

  Our new house is what they call “ranch style.” There are three bedrooms upstairs—the master suite, my room, a guest room—and one in the basement for the boys. They share it, just like they did in the basement of our old house.

  The entire house, bathrooms included, is wired with an intercom system, and every morning at eight Mother blares Rejoice Radio over the speakers to wake us up. It took a while to get used to this. At first I would jackknife awake, panicked that I’d fallen asleep in church. Now when the organ music starts, I thrust my pillow over my head and try to refill my ears with the sweet syrup of sleep until Mother comes pounding on the door.

  “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop!” she’ll call through the wood. It’s her favorite saying, along with “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” and “Honor thy father and thy mother.”

  The intercom has another important function: spying. Control panels in the kitchen and master bedroom have a black switch that can be flipped to “listen” or “talk.” You can tell when Mother’s eavesdropping because the speakers crackle, but we can’t turn the volume down or off because we get in trouble if we don’t hear her call us.

  When David and I need to speak privately, we go outside. We spend most of our time there anyway. Mother’s got romantic notions about toiling the land—or mostly, about her children toiling the land. And with fifteen acres, there’s always something that needs toiling with.

  The garden gets the thrust of our attentions. We try to get at it early, before the vegetation perspires in the heat, sending up a dizzying haze that can sting your eyes. We work on our hands and knees, ripping out crabgrass and pennyworts, killing Japanese beetles and cabbage loopers, aerating and fertilizing, all the while swatting at the horse flies and sweat bees that buzz around us.

  Although we complain about our chores, there is a satisfaction to poking an itty-bitty tomato seed into the dirt and watching it resurrect and snake into a six-foot vine. David and I take a certain pride in our work, marveling at the two-foot zucchinis and the baskets of ruby red strawberries our hands help produce. Our garden is so bountiful that Mother fills grocery sacks with the surplus to bring to the soup kitchen downtown.

  “I bet there’s no Japanese beetles in Florida!” David says, pitching a crushed bug over his shoulder; it lands in the pink and orange zinnias bordering the garden.

  “Nope, only geckos.” I pinch off a snow pea and bite through the shell into the sweet green balls inside. “And jellyfish.”

  Florida! That’s where David and I are moving when we turn eighteen. Things are different in Florida. Until three years ago, our family drove there every August to a timeshare condo on Sanibel Island. David and I would spend the week running around barefoot and unsupervised. There was a group of secular kids at the complex who hung out with us despite our skin color. Florida’s the place where I first got drunk, first made out with a boy, first got my heart ripped to shreds.

  Did it all on our last trip with Alex Garcia, a seventeen-year-old local who lounged around the complex pool in tight white bathing trunks. We flirted all week, and the night before we left, he convinced me to meet him on the beach at midnight. I wore my clothes to bed—carefully pulling the sheet around my neck so my older sister Laura wouldn’t notice—and watched the alarm clock for two hours, my heart racing. When I slipped out to our designated meeting place, Alex held beer cans to my thirteen-year-old face until I passed out. When I came to, he was lying on top of me, his tongue rammed down my throat. I pushed him off and ran away.

  “ You’re so immature!” he yelled after me.

  The next morning I woke with bruises circling my mouth, but despite this, I loved Alex. He was beautiful with his caramel skin and those white trunks. But as we were driving out of the complex to return home, I saw him by the pool, frenching a twenty-two-year-old who’d just arrived that morning. I cried all the way back to Indiana.

  “Too bad Jerome screwed everything up for us,” David says, rocking back on his haunches and scowling at me over the broccoli. His glasses are powdered with dust.

  “Yeah, we’d be there right now if it weren’t for him,” I say, popping another snow pea into my mouth. I wonder who Alex is kissing this summer.

  “I can’t believe Jerome was so dumb,” David says. “I mean, our parents aren’t completely dense.”

  I nod and wave away a sweat bee that’s trying to land on my face. Our parents put an end to Florida when Jerome showed up one evening reeking of beer, too drunk to remember to gargle and spray himself with Glade. David doesn’t know what I did with Alex. No one does; it’s my secret, one that both shames and thrills me.

  A bead of sweat runs down the back of my neck and I glance at my watch. It’s two o’clock, just about peak heat time, and we still have to do the squash, the beans, the carrots. An hour ago, the back door thermometer was already pushing ninety-three degrees, and that was under the eaves. The sky is covered with a low cloud quilt, the sun reduced to a white pinhole. It’s the usual, year-round Indiana sky, always a
pearly glare. Sometimes the heat and humidity are so intense that the quarter-mile walk down the lane to check the mailbox seems like an epic journey through hot Jell-O.

  “I need a drink,” I say, lurching up on legs bloodless and wobbly from being bent. I look at the upstairs window; the recliner’s still empty. She must be in the study, corresponding with her missionaries, scribbling churchy news onto onion paper in her loopy cursive. I peeked at some of her letters last week when she went into town for groceries; they were tucked into unsealed envelopes destined to countries around the world.

  We took a collection to renovate the narthex. Lord willing, we’ll have enough for new carpeting and new paint as well. The Grounds Committee hasn’t decided whether the best paint color would be pale blue or eggshell. . . . The Ladies Aide Society is holding a potluck next week before Vespers to welcome new church members. We will open our arms to receive them even as Jesus opens his arms to the sinners and the fallen. . . . Please join us in prayer for President Reagan as he leads the country toward The Light. We are blessed to have a Christian leader in the White House, and must support his efforts to reinstate school prayer and overturn abortion “rights.”. . . In HIS name, Mrs. Jacob W. Scheeres.

  “Hey, space cadet!”

  David rubs a glove over his gleaming forehead, leaving a chalky smear.

  “What?”

  “I said, what are you going to be in Florida?”

  “I dunno,” I shrug, reaching over to the next row to pull a slender carrot from the dirt and toss it into my basket. It’s best to harvest vegetables while they’re young and sweet, Mother says. “Maybe I’ll make jewelry from shells and sell it on the beach. You?”

  “Haven’t figured it out, yet. But it’d be way cool to work on one of those deep-sea fishing boats—I could put a pole in myself, and we’d eat fresh fish every night—grouper, snapper, maybe even shark!”

  I scowl at him.

  “You’d reek of fish guts. I’d have to hose you down with Lysol every night when you got home.”

  As he contemplates this thought, frowning, I walk to the pipe jutting from the ground in the middle of the garden and twist open the faucet. After a couple of burps, the water flows into the attached green hose. I grip the end in my fist, letting the water gurgle over my hand like a fountain, and hold it up to my mouth. It’s well water, warm and weedy-tasting. It thuds into the dust at my bare feet, splattering my legs with muddy droplets.

  “Want some?” I hold out my arm to David.

  He stands and trudges over. When his face is a few inches from my hand, I slip my thumb over the hose tip and the water jets upward, bouncing off his nose and glasses. It’s an old trick.

  “Hey!!”

  He reels away and I drop the hose and hurdle rows of vegetables. Before I reach the garden’s edge, water pounds my back. I swerve to dodge the spray while David charges after me. He runs the length of the rubber hose and snaps backward like a yoyo, falling onto the potatoes, hose still in hand. Water rains down on him, sparkling like shredded sunlight, and I flop belly-down in warm grass, laughing.

  Our play is interrupted by a sharp rapping of knuckles on glass, and we look up at the house. A faint figure stands behind the upstairs window, hands on hips. Mother.

  After the bone yard incident, David and I stay close to home; we’re not in a hurry to cross paths with the farmers again. We don’t discuss it, we just don’t turn right on County Road 50. We stay out of the deep country.

  Jerome returned the Corolla one night while everyone was asleep—probably fearing our parents would report it stolen and sic the cops on him—and then took off again. Mother says we can’t use the car for “frivolous driving,” though, which, in her mind, is all the driving we want to do.

  So we’ve spent most of these last few weeks before school playing H-O-R-S-E and P-I-G on the small basketball court next to the pole barn; hiking through the nearby woods and cornfields with Lecka, hoping to stir up pheasants or deer or box turtles; taking turns dangling a bamboo rod rigged with bologna over a fishing hole at the back of our property; playing foosball and ping-pong in the basement. Anything to relieve the boredom and unease that constantly gnaw at us.

  But all we catch is junk fish in the fishing hole, slimy carp that are too small to eat. David yanks the hook from their bloody mouths to toss them back into the water as I scream at him not to hurt them. The only thing we’ve kicked up during our hikes was a dead raccoon. And it’s way too hot for sports.

  Sometimes we lie on lawn chairs in the backyard in the late afternoon and watch thunderheads churn toward us. We’ll see a breeze riffle the Browns’ cornfield across the lane and lift our faces expectantly to the cool, metal-smelling air and we’ll know we’re in for a good squall. We’ll stay reclined in our chairs as the dark clouds seethe and flicker with lightning, until the cold hard raindrops pelt us, competing to see who can withstand the storm the longest before sprinting under the eaves.

  But those are the exciting afternoons. Most times, it’s a devil wind riffling the Browns’ cornfield, and it blasts over us like a hair dryer, pelting us with the smell of dirt and onion grass and manure, and offering no refreshment at all. But we stubbornly remain in our lawn chairs as the overcast sky fades into deeper shades of gray and Mother finally rings the supper bell, because there’s nothing better to do.

  As we watch the sky, we talk about things that would make country living easier. For David, that would be a BMX bike. He says he could build a ramp behind the garden and do all these tricks where you flip upside down and land perfectly centered on the fat rubber tires. Says he’s seen it done in magazines. Me, I’d get a horse. A golden palomino that I’d ride bareback through the fields, all the way back to town.

  Sometimes we discuss Harrison.

  “Do you think all the kids will be like those farm boys?” David will ask, his eyebrows creasing with worry.

  “Nah, they can’t all be that ignorant,” I’ll respond. “Some of them have got to be normal.”

  Usually he lets it go at that, sitting back in his lawn chair with a sigh, but sometimes he persists.

  “But what if they are all like that?” David asks one afternoon as we watch the darkening sky. “Ronnie Wiersma told me they hate black people at Harrison and call them names, you know, like the ‘N’ word.”

  Ronnie is a know-it-all at our church, Lafayette Christian Reformed. He went to Lafayette Christian School too, same as all the church kids do, and graduated two grades ahead of us.

  “What does Ronnie know? He’s at West Side.”

  “His older brother went to Harrison.”

  “Yeah, but that was a long time ago, like three years.”

  The subject of Harrison always puts me in a foul mood. School starts in a week, and we still don’t have any friends, or any answers to our question. What will it be like? I try to reassure David that everything will be okay.

  “Those farmers were just being stupid that day,” I tell him. “We caught them off-guard is all. Now that they know who we are, they won’t bother us.”

  All I can do is hope this is true. We often hear them in the distance as we garden: the whine of their dirt bikes banging over homemade tracks, the blare of their car radios as they tear between cornfields, the explosions of their guns as they shoot cans or grackles or squirrels, silencing the world for a long moment afterward.

  Jerome, David, and I walk into Harrison on the first day of school sporting matching Afros that envelop our heads like giant black cotton balls. As we stride down the entrance corridor bobbing and grinning like J.J. on Good Times, our classmates recoil in horror.

  No.

  This will not happen.

  This is a nightmare.

  I will myself awake and stare at the wind-up alarm clock on the bedside stand. It’s almost six. I stare at it until the black minute hand jerks over the red alarm hand and the clock rattles to life, jittering over the wood surface. I wait until the nightmare dissipates completely, then I slap it qui
et.

  It’s the Tuesday before classes start and swim team tryouts are in thirty minutes; the coach wants to make sure people can handle the early-morning workouts once school starts. I figure it might be a good way to meet potential friends.

  I hear Mother rumbling around in the kitchen, opening and closing drawers and cupboards, but by the time I walk into the great room, pulling my hair into a tight pony tail, she’s gone. I stand at the kitchen counter, gulping down coffee and generic granola doused with powdered milk. The sky is pink outside the great room windows, the orchard and garden wrapped in pink mist.

  It’s a mile and a half to Harrison, a right on County Road 650 and a left on County Road 50. I had Mother measure it with the van’s odometer last Sunday after church.

  After brushing my teeth, I wheel my ten-speed from the garage onto the gravel driveway. Lecka hears me and crawls from her doghouse, yawning and batting her tail in furious circles. She strains against her collar, whining, and I walk my bike over to her.

  “Wish me luck, girl,” I say, tugging on her ears.

  As I turn to mount my bike, the venetian blinds in the master bedroom window clap shut. Mother?

  I shrug and mount the bike, standing on the pedals to force the Schwinn’s tires over the slippery gravel lane until I reach County Road 650. As I cruise by the Browns’ white clapboard house, a dog barks in the dark interior. Opposite the Browns’, a red barn slowly collapses into overgrown weeds. Next to it, a pair of meadowlarks trill in a sugar maple. Then there’s an alfalfa field, bright with yellow blossoms. I inhale the sweet air and am seized by a sudden joy at the beauty around me. It’s still early, and life hasn’t acquired its sharp edges.

  The road dips over a small creek before passing a double-wide trailer mounted on railroad ties. Pink gingham curtains hang daintily in the windows, and the muted voice of a news announcer floats through the ripped screen door along with the smell of percolating coffee.

  At the intersection of County Road 650 and County Road 50 is a small brick building where farmers met in the days before telephones to discuss business. I turn left onto the ragged asphalt ribbon of County Road 50, which bisects cornfields and dairies until it reaches town, ten miles away. As I pedal up a small rise, the concrete expanse of William Henry Harrison High School swoops into view, sprouting mushroom-like between fields.