Jesus Land

by Julia Scheeres

  During the church service, Dad joins us during the second hymn, sliding into the pew and sharing the Psalter Hymnal with Mother, but his pager bleats during the sermon—Unselfish Abundance—and he leaves as Mother sighs and shakes her head.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” Reverend Dykstra tells me as I file past him after the service. He squeezes my hand in his, and I want to pull my hand away, remembering his obscene gesture during Young Calvinists.

  “Where’s Jerome?” he asks.

  I glance after Mother, but she’s halfway across the foyer, wading toward the coat room with David. She’s got no time for greetings today; our relatives are due in from Chicago.

  “Home sick,” I lie. “Strep throat.”

  It’s the first thing that crosses my mind. How could I begin to tell him the truth? I look down at the tips of his black loafers, which poke out under his robe, hoping he doesn’t have a special preacher radar that detects lies.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he says, finally releasing my hand. “Tell Jerome I’ll be praying for him to get better.”

  We walk into the house welcomed by the thick brown smell of the twenty-five-pound Butterball mother stuck into the oven before church. She rushes to tie an apron over her Sunday dress and peer through the oven window.

  “We’re going to feed Lecka before company gets here,” I tell her, glancing at David. He nods.

  “Take her the milk rinsings, and come right back to help,” she says, pulling on oven mitts. She’s a nervous wreck today, as she always is when her housewifey duties are on display. As she pokes the turkey with a long-handled fork, I swish water through the cereal bowls stacked in the sink and pour the cloudy white liquid into a glass. Mother says milk rinsings give Lecka needed calcium.

  David holds the door open for me as we go outside into the blinding whiteness; the sun is a pinhole of light overhead, the sky blank of color. It’s begun to snow again, and great curtains of it blow over our bodies as we crunch over the frozen grass to Lecka’s doghouse. She strains joyfully at her chain, her shaggy winter coat snarled with knots and the hay that insulates her doghouse. We dodge her dirty paws as we look for her bowl.

  “It’s gone,” David says. “Weird.”

  I follow him into the pole barn, closing the door quickly behind me. The air in the lofty metal space reeks of fertilizer and grease, and the small windows punched in the walls cast a dreary light over the concrete floor; it takes my eyes a few seconds to adjust. I shiver; for some reason, it feels colder here than it does outdoors.

  We walk around the John Deere tractor and there’s Jerome in a dark corner, crouched in a nest he’s constructed from hay, and dirty rags and the blanket David gave him, still wearing his prison orange jacket and black face mask.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” he says, his breath rising in gray puffs to the high roof. “I’ve been smelling that bird all morning; must be close to done by now.”

  He folds the face mask up and his eyes are bloodshot and his nose runny with yellow snot. He smiles at me and I look away. There, at the edge of his nest, is Lecka’s bowl, the fake meat nuggets floating in red ice.

  “You eating dog food?” I ask him.

  “Nah, it ain’t thawed,” Jerome says. “But I was kinda getting hungry.”

  He blows his nose on an oil-streaked rag. My fingertips sting with the cold and I take a step backward, impatient to be gone.

  “We’ll bring you food right after we eat, Jerome, I promise,” David says.

  “Maybe I should just ring the doorbell and ask for table scraps, you know, in the spirit of Christian charity and all that,” Jerome says, flinging the rag on the floor.

  “Fat chance,” I say, stuffing my hands into my coat pockets.

  Jerome erupts in laughter, then starts coughing, snot rattling his lungs. He pounds his chest with his fist. Maybe he’s sick after all. Maybe he’ll die.

  David throws him a concerned look.

  “You need anything else?” he asks Jerome.

  Outside, the brass bell clangs. Mother, calling us in. I start walking to the door.

  “Wait!” David yells after me.

  He shakes himself out of his coat and hands it to Jerome, then looks at me. I reluctantly unbutton my brand new green felt jacket—bought with four months of babysitting money at Sears —and toss it to Jerome, who drapes it over his head and shoulders like a shawl. I wince; the tag said I have to wash it by hand.

  “Say hello to the relatives for me,” Jerome says. “Tell them to come visit when they get a chance.”

  His snickering dissolves into hacking as we walk out the door.

  There’s enough food crammed onto the long oval table to feed an African village. Mother dons a fresh white apron to present the once-a-year china bowls—filled with canned cranberries and candied yams with marshmallow, and giblet gravy—to the guests and lights the cornucopia-shaped candleholders, one engraved with “Enter His gates with Thanksgiving” and the other with “Go into His courts with praise.” Father appears at the last minute to carve the dead bird with his soft surgeon’s hands as Aunt Cathy and Uncle Jake ooh and ahh, and David and I scowl across the table at each other because it’s all so fucking Norman Rockwell.

  And in the photographs we’ll be the only ones not smiling for the camera and the guests because we are thinking about Jerome shivering in the pole barn about to eat dog food, and Mother will see these photographs and say that we are ungrateful. Not thanksgiving.

  There’s a recess before the pumpkin, apple, peach and banana cream pies; David’s recruited to clear the table, so it falls to me to feed Jerome. I do so reluctantly, taking my time as I wad turkey and yams in tinfoil. David nudges me to hurry.

  Mother sits with her sister on the sofa chatting about missionaries and the men sprawl in front of the television.

  “Put a hat on,” Mother calls from the sofa, when I tell her I’m going to make sure the dog has water. “You lose half your heat through your head, you know.”

  I rush to fetch a stocking cap from the mudroom closet before she notices I’m not wearing a coat.

  It’s stopped snowing, and powdery drifts ripple over the landscape like a frozen sea under the darkening sky.

  “Jerome, I got your food,” I say after I enter the hushed murkiness of the pole barn. I stand by the door, impatient for him to come get it so I can leave.

  “Jerome?”

  There’s no answer. What if he’s lying in wait for me? I lay the food on the floor and lift a pitchfork from the long line of tools hanging on the wall.

  “Jerome?”

  I walk around the John Deere holding the pitchfork in both hands, like a baseball bat. The nest looks empty, but I poke it with the tines to be sure. It is. I pick my coat off the ground and dust it off.

  He must have feared I’d rat him out. Or that Dad would walk in to show Uncle Jake his farm toys. As I take apart his nest, returning the hay and rags to their rightful locations, I find Lecka’s bowl upside down, icy chunks of dog food exploded over the concrete floor. Did he smash it in rage or hunger? Where did he go? They’re predicting an ice storm tonight.

  “The Cowboys are up by six!” Uncle Jake yells when I walk through the front door, wearing my coat and hiding David’s and the blanket under it. I glance at the TV; miniature men swarm over a green field. The women are now in the kitchen, conversing in low voices as the coffee machine gurgles.

  David’s downstairs in the rocking chair next to the woodstove. The faint ghost of his reflection haunts the window, and he stares at it as he rocks back and forth. He does this a lot lately, rocking and staring at himself.

  “Jerome’s gone,” I say, dumping his coat and the blanket in his lap.

  “I’m not surprised,” he says, laying his arm over them.

  “Where do you suppose he went?” I ask.

  He shrugs.

  “Somewhere better, I hope.”

  “Well, do you want to go look for him?” I ask, surprised at his nonchalance after a
ll his previous concern. “We could say we’re walking the dog.”

  “If he left, it’s because he doesn’t want to be found.”

  The basement door opens and the noise of football and polite adult laughter drifts down to us.

  “Time for dessert, kids,” Mother calls. “Your Aunt Cathy made a spectacular Dutch apple pie!”

  David gets up and walks to the boys’ bedroom.

  “Tell her I’ve got gastric distress,” he says, before closing himself away.

  It rained over the snow last night and then froze, creating a glass carpet in the field behind the house. We stumble over it, our feet punching holes into the snow, our ankles catching on the icy crust.

  A car backfires on the lane and I turn in panic to see Mrs. Schneider’s blue Mazda glide behind the cottonwoods. I don’t think she saw us. Scott marches ahead of me, kicking free thick slabs of ice and sending them spinning over the glazed field like giant hockey pucks. He’s trying to look cool with his bare hands stuffed in his letter jacket and his shoulders thrown back in a challenge to the bitter wind.

  When I told him my plan at lunch, he picked me up and spun me around the empty hallway, muttering “thank you, thank you, thank you” into my neck.

  I know that as a young Christian woman, my virginity is supposed to be my most prized possession, but Jerome stole it away from me a long time ago. Sometimes in my coma state, he does something that startles me to consciousness and an image—his hand groping my breast, his head descending my belly—burns itself into my mind before numbness again saves me. These images sicken me, and I want to replace them with others of my choosing. I can’t become pure again, but I can decide who takes things from me, and when.

  I pull my scarf over my face and trudge after Scott. Today’s a good day for sex; David is at Kenny’s and Mother’s working a double shift. We parked Scott’s Pinto behind an abandoned barn on 650, where it can’t be spotted by nosy neighbors such as Mrs. Schneider, who lives at the end of the lane and whose three-year-old son I frequently babysit.

  Lecka barks hopefully as we trample over the buried garden, but we don’t have time to mess around. David’s due back in an hour.

  At the back door, I press the new code into the alarm panel and unlock the door. Scott struts into the rec room, and I close the door and lock it again.

  The silent house presses down on us.

  “Well, here we are,” I say breezily, turning to Scott.

  We haven’t spoken since we ditched his car.

  He sits on the bench by the back door to pull off his shoes and doesn’t say anything, which surprises me since at school the teachers can’t get him to shut up and are constantly sending him to the Time Out room for disrupting class.

  “Would you like a snack?” I ask, wanting him to say something, anything. To act like he did before, like this was no big deal. “There’s punch and Snickerdoodles.”

  He shakes his head and looks at me warily.

  “You’re sure no one’s coming home?” he asks, unsnapping his letter jacket.

  “Not for an hour.”

  Scott says he’s already done this once before, last summer with a girl in Kentucky, a friend of a cousin or a cousin of a cousin, I don’t remember which.

  “We was fooling around and it just kinda happened,” was the way he put it.

  This does not make me jealous; I don’t love Scott. He tried to gang bang me, and he writes me poems and makes copies for other girls. He serves one purpose: He blots out Jerome.

  As he follows me up the narrow staircase, I feel his eyes roaming the back of my body and stiffen. Everything’s about to change. Everything.

  “Be back in a second,” I tell him at my bedroom door. He perches on the edge of my bed and bounces up and down a few times.

  In the bathroom, I reach into the towel cabinet for the Comfort I hid there this morning and empty it in my mouth, hoping it will dissolve the lump in my chest. Afterwards, I gargle and reapply my teal eyeliner and bubblegum lipgloss.

  Although the alcohol leaps to my head—all I had for lunch was half a Payday, knowing the booze would take hold quicker on an empty stomach—it doesn’t prepare me for the sight of Scott’s nakedness beneath my pink comforter. I stop short in the doorway.

  “Get yerself all purtied up for me?”

  He grins and put his hands behind his head, back to his cocky old self. He’s dumped my stuffed animals on the floor and stuck a tape into my cassette player; The Police’s “King of Pain” drifts across the room.

  “Can you change the song?” I ask.

  He reaches over to the night stand and fast-forwards to “Wrapped Around Your Finger.”

  “You coming to bed or what?” he asks.

  Through the window, the sun has burst through the clouds and the ice-dipped trees in the orchard glitter and sway in the wind. I walk to the venetian blinds and close them, then stand on the other side of the darkened room to strip to my bra and panties and rush to the bed before Scott has time to inventory my imperfections. He throws back the covers and I collide against his solid heat. I put my arm across his chest and press my face into his musk as Sting serenades us. If we could just do this, only this, I’d be happy.

  Scott puts his arms around me and unhooks my bra.

  “Roll over,” he says. “I want to see you.”

  He pulls my hands from his neck and I cover myself with the sheet as I turn. He flings it off.

  “But it’s cold!” I protest.

  He pulls off my underwear, then retrieves a silver square from the nightstand and kneels between my legs and rips it open. It contains a flesh-colored circle, which he rolls over his penis like pantyhose. So that’s a condom.

  “Ready?” he asks. I nod. He pushes my thighs apart with his knees and spits into his hand and wipes it between my legs before lowering himself onto me and prodding my inner thigh with his dick. I bite my bottom lip and look up into his eyes, but his face is turned to the alarm clock next to the bed.

  When I was in grade school, I used the Sears Roebuck catalogue to plan my future. I’d rest it on its spine on the dining room table, and let it fall open at random. In the men’s apparel section, I’d find the perfect husband. In the children’s department, the perfect baby. In housewares, the perfect plaid sofa, Corningware set, chandelier lights. The smiling underwear model on page 107 would present me with a diamond ring on page 236 and we’d have a big church wedding, me in my white dress (page 340) and he in his white teeth. After the wedding we’d retire to our canopy bed (page 560) and whatever happened there would be soft and gentle and beyond imagining. If there was a color to describe it, it’d be pinkish yellow.

  The only color I feel right now, as Scott pokes and prods at me, is gray. Cold, sterile, surgical, gray.

  “Stop fighting me,” he says as I scoot away from his fumbling. “You’ll only make it worse.”

  I look at the clock—we’ve only got forty minutes—and inhale deeply, letting my legs fall flat on the bed. I know from the groaning noises he makes that he’s inside me, and I try to feel something, to stay focused on the moment—this is Scott, my boyfriend—but it’s numb there. I wonder if I’ll ever be normal.

  The Police are singing “O my God” on the tape player and I’m thinking “O God, let me feel something,” and Scott’s eyes are closed as he moves inside me. The light slanting through the venetian blinds is muffled, as if a cloud had slid across the sun.

  It’s over quickly.

  “Did you like it?” Scott asks as he pulls off the condom. White liquid bulges at the tip of it. Sperm.

  “It was fine,” I say, wrapping the sheet around me.

  “Want to do it again?” he asks.

  I glance down at his penis, now deflated and pitiful, and he laughs.

  “I mean later tonight,” he says. “I’ll come to your window.”

  I’d told him how Jerome climbed the trellis Thanksgiving Eve.

  I shrug. I’ve sunk into my numbness as if it were a so
ft cocoon and don’t care one way or another. He can do what he wants.

  “What time do your parents go to bed?” he asks.

  “Ten-thirty. Sometimes eleven.”

  “Okay, see you around eleven-thirty.”

  He takes his Police tape from the cassette player and pulls his clothes on, then goes to the bathroom, and when he comes back he kisses me, gently this time, without groping.

  “You’re a bitchin’ girlfriend,” he whispers in my ear.

  I watch him from the window as he lurches over the glass field toward the gravel lane; as he cuts through the orchard, a flock of cardinals rises from the trees like droplets of blood.

  Maybe if we practice enough, I’ll learn to feel something.

  “Guess what I just did?”

  I’m in my parents’ study, swiveling in my father’s chair and twirling the phone cord with my hand. My fingernails are painted “Love’s Blush,” my face is zit-free, and Scott called me the moment he got home just to say “hey.” I’m floating.

  Across cornfields, Elaine squeals into the receiver.

  “No way!”

  “Way! He just left.”

  “And . . . did it hurt?”

  “Gosh dang it, Elaine,” I laugh. “Do you really think I’m going to tell you all the gory details? Jeez!”

  I had to share the news with someone, and Mary, my first choice, was not home. I’m glad Elaine is excited for me despite her dislike of Scott.

  There’s a rustling behind me; I turn and Mother’s in the doorway. I lower the phone and stare at her, stricken. How long has she been standing there? She taps her wristwatch and I look down at mine. It’s almost six, suppertime, and it’s my week to set the table.

  Elaine’s voice bubbles from the earpiece, indecipherable.

  “Um, I have to go.”

  “Your mom?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I hang up and spin around. She’s gone, the doorway a dark rectangle. I find her in the kitchen, her lips pinched into a small line, washing dirty tinfoil in the sink to reuse. I walk around her to the cupboard and open it, my heart pounding.