“What about the rest?” says Phoebe.
My father hoists the bag over one shoulder, which lifts the robe and exposes a constellation of small brown scabs on his ankle. “I divested myself of anything that wouldn’t fit into a single bag,” he says. “And anyway, I’ve been wearing this robe for two weeks now.”
“I see,” says Phoebe, and I know she’s thinking of the trip organizer’s list of suggestions we followed to the letter. The loose linen clothes that were supposed to withstand the heat of the Holy Land. The search in Lexington for the appropriate walking shoes, for the hat that would protect his face and neck from the Middle Eastern sun. The list had been specific. And expensive. And Phoebe said she felt humiliated to go around raising support for the trip from hardworking people while we ourselves were forgoing work in order to live on faith alone. Which my father said was her pride talking.
“I have shed many things,” he says now, as if he’s thinking of the list, too. “But I didn’t come home empty-handed.” He winks at me and pats part of the duffle that looks flat, like maybe it contains a shoebox.
Outside, the clouds have turned deep gray and it has begun to rain. Phoebe and I trot across the road to the parking garage, then wait for my father, who takes his time, palms and face lifted gratefully to the rain until he is soaked through. Phoebe watches him and says nothing, which makes me nervous. The rain steams up from the road, a metallic smell I usually love, but now it’s just turning into a heavy, wet dread in my lungs.
“I haven’t seen rain in a month,” my father says when he reaches us. “You forget how nice it can be.”
Phoebe slides a foot out of her satin pump and regards her toe, which has turned blue from the wet dye. She slides her foot back in without comment. She points her chin. She offers my father the keys to the Pinto, but he shakes his head and opens the passenger door, flipping up the seat for me to climb in back, which I do, holding my dress against my legs. Outside the parking garage the rain comes down steadily. Our windshield wipers keep time with the dull throbbing in what I can’t stop thinking of, now, as my womanhood. Phoebe heaves the Pinto through its gears, and we grimly, silently make our way over the back road home.
Daze is chatting with Mayor James on the front porch when we pull up. At five feet nine she stands taller than the mayor, and straight as a pole, too, until her shoulders narrow and curve in on themselves like the tip of a canoe. She squints through the rain in the direction of the passenger window. When we get out, she smiles hard at my father and runs two manicured hands over her silver hair, which is pulled straight back from her forehead with a clip. Since she turned sixty-five a few years ago and splurged on permanent lip liner and eyeliner, she has been pulling all of her hair back from her face to tighten everything up.
“Well,” Daze says to Mayor James. “I guess you can tell where he’s been for the last month.” She gives a single clap of what might be delight. A woman’s real emotions, she likes to say, should hold some mystery.
“Surely,” says Mayor James. He shakes my father’s hand, looking him up and down with the deep, friendly brown eyes that make him a good mayor. “You keep me guessing, David. Can’t wait to hear all about it.”
“Can’t wait to tell it, Mayor,” says my father, “and a few other things too.”
“No doubt,” says Mayor James. He sticks his hand out from under the porch roof to check the rain, which is letting up. “And now I’m going to get after the weeding while the ground’s still wet.” And we all watch from the porch as the man hightails it back to his own yard, leaving family to deal with their own.
I’ve been trying to remember everything I know about the Apostle Paul. He never married, which might be what my father means when he says that Phoebe is going to have to adjust her expectations. Though the Apostle Paul did say it is better to wed than to burn, which means burn in hell for lustful activity outside of marriage. He didn’t have children, either, that I know of, so I may have to adjust my expectations, too. I don’t know what happens to Daze. The Apostle Paul had to have had a mother. But my father just does the same thing to Daze that he did with Phoebe. He doesn’t call her “Mother” or “DeeDee,” his pet name for her. He just pats at her thin upper arms and delivers the smile.
Over his shoulder, Daze makes big eyes at me; I make them back at her and shrug. Then she arches an eyebrow high into the middle of her forehead, which she knows I like, to let me know she’s not worried.
In the kitchen, Phoebe takes two casserole pans from the freezer and peels back their tinfoil. I’m expecting her to launch into her encouraging speech, the one she makes whenever our lives change direction according to the Lord’s will, but she just hands me the bowl of sourdough and says, “Biscuits, please.” Then she switches on the oven and adds, “Feed the dough after.”
“I know,” I say.
“Flour and a little sugar water.”
“I know.”
When we’re alone, Phoebe wants to talk to me like I’m an adult, but the second that Daze is in the room, Phoebe snaps back into treating me like a child, just to let Daze knows who’s in charge. Daze would take over everyone’s life, Phoebe says, if you let her. Which doesn’t sound all that bad to me.
I spoon out eight biscuits onto the cookie sheet. The cramps come regularly now, like a slow, airless breathing deep inside me. As one fades I find myself waiting for the next, and when it comes, it’s comforting, in a way. There you are.
Daze lowers herself into a seat at the table. She makes a teepee of her long forearms and props her chin on top. “Can I help?”
“No, thank you,” says Phoebe.
“Got those biscuits okay, sugar?” Daze says to me, and I tell her yes. “I always say your sourdough’s on the strong side, Phoebe, but then the biscuits turn out fine. I wonder what Mary James did that was different.”
It’s a sore spot that Phoebe didn’t take her sourdough starter from Daze. Instead she took it from Mayor James’s wife, Mary, who got her own starter twenty years back when she cleaned out a dead woman’s refrigerator. There’s no telling where the dead woman got hers, because sourdough can last for generations if you keep feeding it.
Phoebe snatches the cookie sheet from me and sets it on top of the oven.
“You never can tell, can you?” Daze says.
When Phoebe doesn’t answer, Daze turns to me.
“No,” I say.
“I guess this means he won’t be going back to work right away,” Daze says.
“We haven’t discussed it,” says Phoebe.
“I think—” Daze begins.
“We haven’t discussed anything,” Phoebe says. She smoothes wrinkles from the two sheets of tinfoil like it takes all her concentration. I sit down and pull my knees up under my chin to see if it makes a difference in the way my stomach feels. It does, then it doesn’t. I want to go find my father, who has stopped off in the living room. Probably to pray. But I don’t want to miss what Phoebe and Daze might say about the situation, either.
“David is a man after God’s own heart,” Daze says, after a time. “But it would be wonderful, maybe, if he finished with this latest”—Daze waves her hand respectfully in front of her, looking for the word—“it would be wonderful, maybe, if he didn’t go back to The Good Word until he was sure he could fully focus on it.” Daze is the one who set my father up with the job in the first place. She doesn’t mind reminding people that the press was started by the late, great Custer Peake, with Peake family money, the rest of which my grandfather ran clean through before he died, but she leaves that part out.
“We haven’t even had a chance to sit down,” Phoebe says through her teeth.
Daze’s hands drop from her chin and hit the table in fists. “I can get his job back, but I don’t know if I can get it back over and over.”
“I don’t need for anyone to get my job back,” says my father from the doorway. He raises his arms to the side, and the sleeves of his robe spread out like wings. “The Lord h
as given me new direction, and everything will be taken care of. Hasn’t he taken care of us so far?”
Phoebe turns to the sink, her back to him, and stares out the window. Her shoulders rise and fall slowly with one deep breath.
“Hasn’t he?”
“I guess he gave me the means to cover your mortgage, praise Him,” Daze says.
“And someday we will pay you back,” says Phoebe, speaking toward the backyard. “And it won’t be soon enough.”
“We had plenty to eat, too,” says my father. “And when it looked like we weren’t going to, the Lord provided.”
At the sink, Phoebe whips her head around so fast her bob whirls into a circle, the swingy ends of her hair crashing into her cheeks. I hold my breath, worried that she’s mad enough to reveal her secret tailoring money. It seems possible my father would do something from the Bible if he found out, like rend his garments or smite himself on the breast, and I say a quick prayer that God will strike Phoebe dumb, if he has to, just for a moment, like he did John the Baptist’s father for not having enough faith. You can ask God for things like that, but it’s not really what prayer is for, and he often says no.
Phoebe keeps talking. “You want to know something? I lived on faith alone because it’s what the Lord told you to do. And I prayed and I took charity from people with their own jobs, people who probably felt sorry for Charmaine.”
“I don’t know about charity,” Daze says. “Charity is for the poor.”
“We would all be so much happier if we came to him like children,” my father says, laying a hand on my shoulder.
“And I did it, I took charity, because the Bible makes it clear that you are the head of this house.” Phoebe is pointing at him, jabbing the air with her finger. “But I have to say, I have to say right now, that I have been a nervous wreck every single day.”
My father nods as though he is considering her words. He looks at Phoebe’s finger, then at my grandmother, then at me. He’s blinking a lot. “I walked the streets of Jerusalem,” he says. “I offered prayers at the Temple Mount. The Lord’s plan is vast and spans the ages, and as I understood that, I was filled with the spirit of Paul’s special mission to the Gentiles.” After he stops talking, his eyes keep moving over the three of us like he’s tracing a shape with them in the air. “Even my body has been changed.”
“Son,” Daze says. “Do you need to sit down?” But he doesn’t sit down or even seem to hear her.
“Are you smiling?” Phoebe says. Her pointing finger sinks to her waist. And he is smiling, right through his beard, and it would be better if he weren’t, but when he gets like this, preoccupied with a vision, it’s pretty much all he can see.
“If you could for once grasp how worry is just unnecessary,” my father says.
I have been a nervous wreck, too, about living on faith alone, but I don’t say this out loud. I want to show my father that unlike Phoebe, whose flesh sometimes gets the better of her, I have enough faith not to worry.
“Am I hearing that you do not plan to go back to work?” Phoebe says. “Is that what I’m hearing?”
“It’s interesting the way everyone uses the word work to indicate what one does for money,” my father says. “I have never stopped my true work. Not once. I am imperfect, and I have not always worked in pure accord with the spirit, but I have never stopped trying.”
“David is a handpicked servant of the Lord,” Daze says. “But, son, remember that you can do the Lord’s work anywhere. Even at a job with a paycheck.”
I am staring at the floor, now, feeling full-on sick to my stomach, either from the cramps or from the fact that we’ve all been waiting for my father to come home, and he’s only been back an hour, and he and Phoebe are already going at it. Beside the doorway where he stands is a heating vent, and it looks like the hem of his robe is dancing with forced heat the way my nightgown does when I stand there in winter to get warm. But there isn’t any forced heat, because it’s not winter. And as I lift my head to where my father’s fingers peek out from his sleeves, I see that they are all spreading out, then coming back together, very quickly, a motion like scissors that travels up his arms and causes his robe to sway.
I say, “Dad,” and when he looks at me now he’s blinking even faster, way too fast, like the fingers and eyes are all being run by the same engine that’s overheating inside him. “Dad,” I say, “are you okay?” And I don’t know where this comes from since I’ve never asked him or any other adult if they’re okay before. And he keeps blinking at me like he thinks he might know me but can’t place how, can’t remember my name. The clutching in my stomach moves up toward my heart.
“Charmaine, go upstairs,” Phoebe says.
“I have a burden,” my father says, talking right to me, as if I’m the only one who can understand. Sometimes I think I might be. “It has to do with the salvation of the people of Rowland County. Not this town, with all its churches, its pharisees, but the dark, lost outskirts. I pray that I am up to the task,” he says, “but I worry that I am not.”
“But you’re willing, right?” I say.
“Daze,” says Phoebe, “Charmaine has some exciting news she might like to tell you upstairs.”
“I am willing,” my father says. “Yes, Charmaine. Charmaine, thank you for that.” He closes his eyes briefly, seems to steady himself, then opens them. “What exciting news?”
“Nothing,” I say, mortified at the thought of my period.
“It’s not that I’m not concerned for the people of Rowland County,” says Phoebe. “I’m just growing more concerned every day for the people of this family.”
Daze stands up too fast and lurches to the right, which is the side that lags, still, from a stroke she had last year. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” she says, though neither Phoebe nor my father has noticed. “I want to hear this news,” she says to me. “And I want to see the clever new school clothes your mother’s made.”
“I’m a Christian, too,” Phoebe is saying. “I’m willing, too. I lived on faith alone for the whole year, too. We all did, if you happened to notice.”
“We were taken care of,” my father says.
“And you said that the Lord said a year. One year. Which is over.”
“I’ve had some further revelation,” my father says.
“We’re just heading upstairs now,” says Daze. As she edges around my father in the doorway, she kisses him on his gaunt cheek, right above the beard, and says, “Son,” but he keeps right on talking.
“The Lord was preparing us, Phoebe.”
I’m standing up now, but I can’t take my eyes off the opening of my father’s sleeve, his scissoring fingers. “I saw lepers, Phoebe. In this day and age. Covered in sores. People who couldn’t feel their own skin burning if they were on fire. And do you know there are children in this very county born with tails?”
“Charmaine,” Phoebe says, pointing to the door.
I follow Daze into the foyer, and the kitchen door shuts behind me. Daze heads up the stairs, limping a little, and I’m careful to go slowly behind her so she doesn’t feel rushed.
In my room she pulls me into a hug.
“I don’t feel good,” I say into her chest, which is bony above her low, flattened bosom.
“It’s an unusual thing, the way God reveals himself to your father,” Daze says. “But there’s nothing for you to worry about.”
“Have you seen any of those children with tails?”
“Not tails,” says Daze. “Not really. Well, tails, but not like you’re thinking. More like little growths along the spine. The county health system leaves something to be desired.”
I reach around behind my back and finger the ridges of my backbone. My womanhood cramps up again. There seems no end to the treachery of the body. But when I share the news with Daze, who as a rule avoids discussion of bodily matters, she congratulates me and gives me Tylenol from a bottle in her handbag. She also fishes out the extra plastic egg of pantyhose she a
lways has on hand for runs and places it on my bedside table. “Now that you’re a woman,” she says. Then I lie down and she sits beside me.
Out my window, the rain is gone and the sky has turned clear. It’s getting dark slowly, and the crickets sound like they’re saying, “OKAY, okay, OKAY, okay,” in a kind of resignation loud enough to drown out the voices of my parents downstairs. The cross on top of the water tower flickers on in the distance, as it does every evening at dusk. Some nights it’s bright enough to wake me up, the white light playing off town rooftops in one direction and, in the other, spilling over the rolling county fields.
When my grandfather died, Daze came to live with us for a while. She used to tell me stories before I went to sleep, the same stories over and over, and even though I am thirteen, and less of a child than I have ever been, I ask her for one now, one that I know by heart. She tells me about the day I was born, how she and my grandfather got the call and sped to Saint Joseph Hospital in Lexington to meet my parents. It was January, bitterly cold, the road from East Winder treacherous with black ice. My grandfather prayed the whole way. At the hospital he took me out of Phoebe’s arms and dedicated me then and there, with his booming evangelist’s voice, to the service of the Lord. Two nurses stuck their heads in to see what the commotion was about and ended up laying hands on me right along with the rest of the family.
Daze tells me how sick Phoebe was afterward and how much help she needed and that she was sorry Phoebe didn’t have her own mother at a time like this but glad she had a chance to step in. Taking care of me as a baby was the great blessing of her “second act,” which is what she calls her middle age. Not that her second act is over yet, she says. Her second act is really just getting started, come to think of it. When she stops talking, things downstairs are quiet. “You hungry?” she asks. I shake my head. “You feeling any better?” she asks.
“A little,” I say, and I am, but I make a face like I’m not, because I know Daze will sit there with me until I feel better or fall asleep, whichever comes first.
Lay It on My Heart Page 2