Jesus Land

by Julia Scheeres

  “I never want to hear that language from you again,” she says in a tight voice.

  I stop stacking plates and look at her.

  “What language?”

  “You know very well what I’m talking about.”

  “Actually . . . I don’t.”

  “Gosh! Darn! Jeez!”

  “What’s wrong with those words?”

  “You know exactly what they mean: God! Damn! Jesus!”

  I stare at her mouth as profanity explodes from it, then swallow hard, as if I were the one caught using it and not her.

  “But I use those words so I don’t have to use the other ones,” I say.

  “Don’t be flippant with me, missy,” she says. “You’re not too old to get your mouth washed out with soap.”

  How dare she threaten me? I storm into the dining room with the plates, muttering I hate you, I hate you, I hate you as I set down each plate on the plastic tablecloth.

  “What did you say?”

  I whip around to face her. She stands a few feet from me, her fists on her narrow hips, her blue eyes boring into mine. Despite her aggressive posture, she looks frail. The pouch of her abdomen bulges under her gray polyester slacks. Hard to believe I occupied that space once, that we were that close. She has never told me she loves me, or drawn me to her in an embrace. Never touched me with tenderness whatsoever. When I was a little, the closest she got was spitting in a tissue on the way to church and scrubbing my face with it, and I craved that attention.

  Once in sixth grade, after spending a weekend at the Kuipers’ house with my friend Sandra, I asked her why she couldn’t be more like Mrs. Kuipers, who read us bedtime stories and took us to see a matinee and made us popcorn balls.

  “What, Mommy too hard on you?” she asked in a whiny voice. I was horrified at her mockery and slammed myself in my room to write “I hate you” on every page of my diary, which I knew she read.

  When did she start to despise me, and when did I learn to despise her back?

  I should tell her what I feel for her, those three words, and pour salt on the infection of our relationship. Get it out in the open, clean and honest.

  “I said . . .,” I start to say, but stop and shake my head. What if she says the same words back to me? What then? How could we live in the same house anymore? And I have nowhere to go.

  “I didn’t say anything,” I say, setting a glaring white plate in front of David’s chair.

  The garage door creaks open, announcing Dad’s arrival, and we quickly revert back to mother and daughter roles, she pulling a casserole from the oven, me setting utensils alongside the plates. This is what Father will see when he walks through the door.

  At supper, we are four strangers, eating. We have nothing to say to each other.

  The wind howls over the sharp corners of our house on the prairie and Rejoice Radio plays Christmas carols on the intercom.

  “Your mother and I have something to tell you kids about Jerome,” Dad says halfway through this silent meal of macaroni with cheese and hot dogs.

  David and I look across the table at each other and then at him.

  “Jerome’s in juvenile hall. Apparently he got into a fight with another boy and put him in the hospital with a concussion. A judge will decide what to do with him.”

  So that’s where Jerome is. “Juvi.” Jail for kids. Kids who are hardcore screwups, beyond hope, total losers. Figures.

  “Can I go visit him?” David asks, putting down his milk glass.

  “Of course not,” Mother says.

  “Why not?” David asks.

  “Well, for one thing, you have school,” she responds.

  “And what else?” David asks.

  At this, Father jumps in, irritated at David’s insistence.

  “If your mother says no, it means ‘no,’” he says loudly. “End of discussion, got it?”

  Dad’s got his fork in his hand, and David sees it and shrinks away from him. In eighth grade, Dad got angry at him during supper and pronged him in the head. He cried from the pain, but they wouldn’t let him leave the table.

  As soon as the “Amen” is pronounced, David mutely clears the table and slams himself into the basement. He doesn’t even open up to me when I walk downstairs with two bowls of mint chocolate chip ice cream, his favorite flavor.

  “I’m not hungry,” he says through the door.

  “Gastric distress?” I ask.

  He doesn’t respond.

  “Okay, I’m going to leave it right here,” I say, setting one of the bowls outside his door. I shut myself in my room to eat the other.

  We were fascinated with the world outside our stern household and became chronic wanderers, given to poking around dank church basements, the secret back hallways of truck stops, the Lysol-scented wards of our father’s hospital.

  There were other places besides home, and we wanted to explore them all.

  One summer morning when we were five, we struck out on our own. David pulled me down the sidewalk in our red Radio Flyer wagon, which I’d stocked with cookies, a blanket, and my pet tick, Blinky, which I’d housed in an empty salt shaker.

  We’d decided to join the outside world, the bright sun and sweet grass and playful dogs that beckoned behind fences. Outside was better than home.

  But our adventure was cut short before we reached the end of the block, when a neighbor woman phoned our house.

  “Your daughter’s running off with the maid’s son,” she told Mother.

  CHAPTER 7

  SHARP OBJECTS

  We’re shoveling the driveway, scarves wound around our faces, heads and jackets soaked from the pelting sleet. It’s Saturday morning, the sky is ash gray, and Christmas is two weeks away.

  David jabs his shovel under the heavy snow, grating cement as he shoves it off the driveway. His glasses are fogged so I can’t see his eyes, but I know he’s still pissy at me.

  On Tuesday, I was standing with Elaine at the snack bar when she remarked on the outfit she’d seen David wearing that day, a bright purple sweatshirt and green jeans.

  “Good thing his sense of fashion doesn’t run in the family,” she sniffed, “because I wouldn’t be able to associate with you.”

  “Good thing he’s not my real brother,” I’d shot back, “because he’d embarrass the hell out of me.”

  There was a commotion behind us, and I turned to see David racing away with Kenny trailing after him, the dictionary I’d lent him crashed to the floor.

  I tried to apologize as he set the supper table that evening— “you know I was just kidding”—but he banged down the plates on the table, refusing to talk to me, and hasn’t spoken a word to me since. Even yesterday, when we missed the bus and had to hike a mile and a half to Harrison as the below zero wind sliced our faces, he refused to open his mouth.

  He’s been acting strange lately, and my stupid comment didn’t help matters. It’s like something’s been knocked out of him. Every evening he camps out in the downstairs rocker, swaying and staring at his reflection in the window.

  Last weekend I tried to force him out of the chair, and the effort backfired on me. I went into the basement Saturday night with the Monopoly board and set it up on the carpet at his feet, spending ten minutes organizing the money and separating the Chance and Community Chest cards.

  He refused to play. I grabbed his arms and tried to pry him out of the rocker and this devolved into a fierce battle of wills that ended with him kicking me in the stomach, knocking the wind from me. I fell onto the Monopoly board—sending money and cards flying—and lay there doubled over, gasping for air.

  “I told you I didn’t want to play,” David said before locking himself in his room.

  Although we’d had many brutal kick fights in grade school, his action on Saturday was unjustified and I was still angry at him when I made my comment to Elaine. But I know all too well that my comment hurt him more than his kick hurt me.

  Mother’s frustrated with him, too.
Half the time he won’t respond when she calls him on the intercom, and then she makes me go find him. She seems to think I have a sixth sense for locating my brother, as if some invisible leash tied us together. “Where’s David?” she’ll say. “Go find him.” It’s been this way since we were little.

  The other day, I had to interrupt a manicure to find him. He was locked in his room.

  “David, open up,” I yelled, kicking the door with my shoe so I wouldn’t ruin my nails.

  “Hold on,” he called.

  When he opened the door, he had blue eyes.

  “What do you think?” he asked, smiling for the first time in weeks.

  His eyes were blue. Cataract, sickly, unseeing blue. He looked like a freak.

  “They’re contacts,” he said, before I could gather words to respond. “I saved up my allowance.

  First he cuts a part in his hair, then he gets blue eyes.

  “When are you gonna stop trying to be white?” I asked.

  His smile fell, and he stood there blinking his blue eyes for a moment before closing the door in my face. When he sat down at the supper table, his eyes were back to normal, but he didn’t lift them from his dinner plate.

  After the last patch of the driveway is cleared, we walk around the house to the basement door, stomping the snow from our boots before entering. The woodstove is burning, and Mother’s set a pan of apple cider and cinnamon sticks on top of it; the aroma hits us as we walk through the door.

  “Mmm, smells good,” I say, looking at David hopefully. “You thirsty?”

  He ignores me, sitting on the bench to peel off his snow pants.

  “How long you planning to stay mad at me?” I ask him. “Forever?”

  He doesn’t say anything, but shrugs, which is something at least. A possible softening. As I’m arranging my wet socks and gloves on the rack next to the woodstove, Mother thumps downstairs.

  “Don’t hang those so close to the stove, you’ll scorch them,” she says.

  I move the rack to the other side of the woodpile, and she starts to walk away, then stops.

  “The judge sent Jerome to Cary Home for Boys, downtown,” she says. “They’re not going to charge him with assault because he’s a minor, but they should have.”

  “Is he coming home for Christmas?” David asks, and I feel a twinge of jealousy at this concern for Jerome.

  “Of course not,” Mother says. “He’s a juvenile delinquent!”

  “He’s not a juvenile delinquent, he’s my brother!” David screams, jumping up. He whips his snow pants across the room and they flap against the ping-pong table like a giant tattered bird. His action startles both of us and we stare speechless as he stalks to his room and kicks the door shut.

  “David, get out here and clean up your mess, right now!” Mother yells.

  I hold my hands to the woodstove, thawing my blue fingertips. The cider is boiling in the pan, ready to drink.

  Mother edges closer to David’s door, hands on her hips, looking tired and old in her flesh-colored sweater.

  “I’m warning you,” she says.

  The door stays shut.

  “Just wait until your father gets home!”

  I wince as she thunders back up the steps, slamming the basement door behind her, then walk over to pick up David’s snow gear and put it away.

  When his screams rise from the basement a few hours later, I wrap my head in my pillow and scream along with him. After twenty minutes tick by on my alarm clock, I unwrap my head and sit up. Pat Boone is crooning “O Little Town of Bethlehem” on the great room stereo.

  I tiptoe to the mouth of the hallway. The ceiling-high Christmas tree flashes rainbow beads of lights on the walls and windows. David and I decorated it last weekend to the usual soundtrack of A Christmas Sing with Bing, but this year, it was just another Saturday chore. We used to sing along to the album as we decorated the tree, giddy with the idea of Christmas, with the idea that the presents our parents gave us would prove that they loved us.

  Beyond the flashing tree, Mother and Dad sit on the sofa, reading the newspaper. I creep to the basement door in sock feet, the tree between us, and open it, lifting the doorknob to ease the stress on the hinges.

  The lights are off downstairs, but the boys’ door is open. I walk in and find David lying faceup on his bed, shaking. It’s too dark to see his face.

  “David?” I whisper.

  He doesn’t respond, so I turn on the lamp next to his bed and crouch beside him. Tears are drying on his cheeks, and his eyes are vacant as he stares at the ceiling.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, although it’s obvious that he’s not. “Do you want some water or something?”

  He begins to murmur.

  “So sick of it, sick of all of it.”

  My heart contracts. He’s giving up, and we’re almost there.

  “Don’t do this now,” I say. “A year and a half and we’re eighteen. Remember Florida!”

  He laughs bitterly—we haven’t mentioned Florida in months, not since we started living our separate lives—and starts to sit up before gasping and putting a hand on his left arm. I notice, for the first time, the weird bend in the middle of his forearm.

  “What’s happened?” I ask him.

  He turns his head to look at the carpet next to where I’m crouched and I follow his eyes. A 2x4 lays on the floor, one of the pieces from the pile beside the woodstove.

  “Dad hit you with that?”

  He nods.

  “I think it’s broken,” he says.

  My throat constricts and it’s hard to breathe. What kind of father would do this to his own son? Unless it’s true what Jerome said. That Dad doesn’t consider the boys his sons.

  “I’m so sick of it . . .” David murmurs again, and then he starts to cry in silence, tears dripping down his cheeks.

  “Shh . . . I’ll take care of you,” I say, fighting tears myself.

  I pull the bedspread off Jerome’s bed and cover him, then go upstairs.

  They’re sipping coffee; Pat Boone’s now singing “God Rest You Merry Gentlemen.”

  I walk over to them.

  “I think something’s wrong with David,” I say, giving them each a knifing look. “I think somebody busted his arm.”

  I glare directly into Father’s eyes after I say this, defying him to say something, then stride to my room and lock the door. Half an hour later, the garage door creaks open and I look out my window to see the Porsche disappear down the lane.

  Jerome was the last person to break David’s bones, in 1980. Jerome was being his typical bullying self, chucking pieces of asphalt at David in front of our old house as David sat on the curb with his legs stretched out in front of him, bouncing a basketball between them. I sat in the yard behind him, playing with my hamsters.

  After a while, David got tired of dodging the rocks and lobbed a piece back at Jerome, hitting him in the head. Jerome yelped in pain, then ran over to him and jack-hammered his size-14 feet onto David’s leg. I heard it snap from where I was sitting.

  “That’ll teach you to respect your elders,” Jerome said as David screamed and twisted in the street.

  The official story after church the next morning is that he fell off the bus and broke his arm. That’s what David tells people when they crowd around him in the foyer. Mrs. De Jong clucks her tongue and asks me if I saw it happen. I look at David and he looks at the ground.

  “No, I got off before he did,” I say, my cheeks burning with the lie.

  “I bet you heard him, though,” Rick Hoolsema laughs. “I bet he yelled real good.”

  David manages a weak smile, and my eyes sting as I watch him.

  Dad must have arranged to have David “taken care of” by one of his partners at the clinic or reset David’s arm himself, so there was no need to fill out a police report on suspicious injuries.

  “You kids are blessed with medical parents, they take good care of you,” says Mr. Needam, an elder.

 
At this, I turn to David.

  “Time to go,” I say. “We’re late.”

  David follows me mutely, his noninjured arm flung out for balance as he walks down the icy steps in front of church.

  “Do you want to hold on to me?” I ask him.

  He shakes his head no.

  “I’m quitting the swim team,” I tell Mother on Monday afternoon.

  She’s sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, signing a large stack of Christmas cards. “Jesus is the Reason for the Season!” is printed in shiny green letters on the front of each card, and Luke 2:11 is printed inside: “For unto us a child is born, for unto us, a son is given.”

  “I thought you liked swimming,” she says in an absent voice, signing “In HIS name, Dr. and Mrs. Jacob Scheeres” inside the card.

  “I do, but I’m having problems with some classes and I can’t do everything,” I say, walking past her. I fill a mug with morning coffee, yawning loudly, and stick it in the microwave.

  She looks over at me.

  “Maybe you have that chronic fatigue syndrome,” she says. “I’m calling Dr. Walters.”

  I shrug. The microwave dings and I stir milk into the stale coffee, clouding it gray, and yawn again.

  She’s threatened to drag me to the doctor for weeks because I’m always yawning and taking naps, but she never makes an appointment.

  “That’s high school for you,” I say as I turn to go back to my room. “Exhausting.”

  What I don’t tell her is that I already quit the team last week—I skipped so many practices that Coach Shultz was about to kick me off anyway, so I decided to beat him to the punch.

  What I don’t tell her is that I’m flunking half my classes.

  What I don’t tell her is that these things are happening because I’m up all night having sex while she and Dad sleep two doors down the hallway.

  I wait for Scott each night dressed in a summer teddy, perfumed and painted and shivering under the blankets because Mother lowers the thermostat to 55 at night.

  He walks forty minutes from his house to mine, down County Road 650 through unplowed snow. As I wait for him, I imagine myself his prize, one he must battle cold, dark, and distance to claim.