Lay It on My Heart

by Angela Pneuman

  Chapter 2

  IN THE MORNING, THERE’S a small, flat box at the foot of my bed near where Titus is curled up sleeping. Inside are four separate baggies. Two of them hold about a spoonful each of dirt and rocks, and the third holds a large splinter. The fourth looks empty. They’re all fastened at the top with rubber bands, and underneath them is an index card that says what they are in uneven typewriter type: Holy Soil from Bethlehem Hill; Stone from the top of the Mount of Olives; Sliver from the Cross of Jesus; Water from the River Jordan.

  I shake the sliver of wood out onto my palm. Jesus’ cross was so large and heavy that he could hardly carry it up the hill on his back to Golgotha—even if they hadn’t been beating him the whole time. Eventually, he gave out and someone else had to carry it the rest of the way. But no matter how big the cross was, it’s hard to believe that two thousand years of slicing it into souvenir splinters wouldn’t have already used up the wood. The rest, I don’t know. Probably it depends on how high the hill of Bethlehem is, or the Mount of Olives. I picture long lines of nonstop pilgrims carrying away handfuls of pebbles from a mountain for years and years, the mountain shrinking just a tiny bit all the time, until it disappears.

  My father knocks, then swings open the door. He’s still wearing the brown robe, and he still smells like he hasn’t bathed, and I’m wondering if Phoebe let him sleep in the bed with her. Or if, inhabited by the spirit of the Apostle Paul, he even wanted to.

  “Are these real?” I ask him.

  “Everything’s real.”

  “I mean, are they what it says they are?”

  “The River Jordan is a possibility,” he says. “Also the Mount of Olives. Their value may be more symbolic, however.”

  I hold up the empty bag where the water should be.

  “Arid conditions,” he says.

  I pretend to examine the Mount of Olives bag, with its rough gray and black gravel. My father seems calmer this morning, but he’s still blinking a lot.

  “I bought these from a beggar,” he says. “He was crouched against the city wall with a stack of these boxes and a sign that said HOLY RELICS. I gave him my shoes.” While he’s talking, my father’s gaze shifts from the white sheer curtain at my window to my bookcase. The walls of my room are pale yellow with white woodwork, and the furniture, which was Phoebe’s furniture when she was little, is also white. All the bright white things in the room show up in warped miniature on my father’s dark, glassy eyes. His cheekbones have become so sharp you could fit an egg in the hollow underneath each of them.

  “I missed you,” I say, before I can stop myself.

  My father gives me a stern look. “‘Reject all falsity.’ Ephesians four:twenty-five.”

  Then I have to think about what I really meant, because he hears something in my voice that indicates that what I said doesn’t exactly match what I feel. That’s the prophet in him. What I really feel is that I miss him right now, more than I did when he was gone, even though he’s right here in front of me and we’re joined together in the Lord, which is the most important way to be joined. More important than being family, even, because Jesus says in the book of Matthew, “Who is my mother and who are my brothers?”

  My father picks up my children’s Bible and opens it, careful not to let any of my bookmarks fall out. It’s the full New King James Version text, just like in adult Bibles, only it’s illustrated with pictures: Moses parting the Red Sea, Abraham raising the sword ready to sacrifice Isaac, Jesus as a shepherd surrounded by lambs.

  “I started the Christian Education class at church,” I tell him as he turns the thin pages. “At the end you get a new Bible. And you join the church. And if you haven’t been baptized, then you get baptized too.”

  “Baptism is not something you do because you finish a class,” my father says. “You will be ready for baptism when the Holy Ghost comes upon you, and not a moment sooner. Only you will know when the time is right.”

  “Okay,” I say, wondering if you can still get the Bible, which comes in pink or brown leatherette, if you opt out of the baptism.

  “Do you know what’s so special about the word apart?” he says, closing the Bible on one finger to keep his place.

  I want so badly to be able to guess this that my brain turns dusty. At my feet, Titus stretches and resettles himself with his head on the box of relics.

  “Think, Charmaine. What does it mean? Apart.”

  “To be separate from something.”

  “Now break it up and tell me what it means. A part.”

  “To not be separate,” I say.

  My father flips the Bible open again and runs his finger down the page, and suddenly I’m staring at his fingernails, which I’ve only ever seen clean and clipped short. Now they are too long, and some of them look split, and there’s a thin line of grime showing right where each nail meets the skin underneath. “You could say that apart is a perfect word, one that suggests opposite things at the same time. Apart,” he says again, leaving the Bible open on his lap and raising his hands to either side of his head. “Now, a part,” he says, clasping his hands together. “A part of something larger. We are a part of the church because we share faith. ‘For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them,’ Matthew eighteen:twenty. But we must also hold ourselves apart from other believers at the same time because humans are fallen, therefore any human organization, like the church, is also fallen.”

  Now he runs a finger down a page in First Thessalonians, which is the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the church at Thessalonica, a place in the Holy Land my father may have even visited. Titus pushes himself to his feet and does his black-cat pose, with the arched back. My father has liked this in the past, and I wait for him to notice, but he doesn’t.

  “Here’s what I was looking for,” my father says. “Read this.” He taps his dirty fingernail on 5:17. It’s short, almost as short as “Jesus wept,” the shortest verse in the Bible.

  “Pray without ceasing,” I say.

  “In the nineteenth century, C. H. Spurgeon gave a sermon on this verse,” he says, “and in it he makes some practical points about what is unnecessary to prayer. But even Spurgeon may not allow the words their literal meaning. Prayer without ceasing. This is what I have come to believe is possible, Charmaine. I am lining up with the old Russian monk, after all, and his Jesus Prayer.”

  “Spurgeon,” I say. “The Russian monk.” I try to nod like I have some idea of what he’s talking about.

  “Not that I use the same words,” my father says, still tapping the page of my Bible. “The monk used ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me,’ but I prefer a prayer of invitation. And the most important thing is the breathing. With a two-part prayer, you can think the first part as you breathe in and the second part as you breathe out.” He closes his eyes and takes a natural breath in then lets it go. “See? Consider the rhythm.”

  I breathe in and then out. “You do it all the time?”

  “Without ceasing.”

  “At the same time as you talk?”

  “We are capable of much more than we ask of ourselves. Once you get into the habit of praying as you breathe, you can talk and even think about other things at the same time. It has been revealed to me that prayer without ceasing keeps one in a holy state of reception, which is the perfect undergirding for the full armor of God. This is important, Charmaine, as we reach out into the county. And you’re no longer a child. You’re at an age of transition.”

  I wonder, uneasily, if Phoebe has told him about my period.

  “With a spirit of reception the Lord can fully inhabit you,” my father says. “He can lay many things on your heart. You may receive your calling or find yourself manifesting one or more of the spiritual gifts.”

  The spiritual gifts are wisdom, healing, prophecy, miracles, discernment, tongues, mercy. Among others. I try to imagine being known for mercy or miracle working the way my father is known for prophecy. There goes Charmaine, worker of mir
acles, people might say. Then I wonder if that kind of thinking borders on prideful, and I try to imagine myself manifesting the gift of humility. There goes Charmaine the humble. But even that could be prideful, if you think about it.

  “What words do you use when you pray without ceasing?” I ask him.

  “That’s between me and the Lord. And whatever you pick will be between you and the Lord. You don’t have to keep it secret, but I think you’ll find that exposing certain things to the air, even to other believers, can be frustrating. That’s a good example of holding yourself ‘apart.’”

  I nod, but I wish he would just tell me what he prayed so that I could pray the same thing. Sometimes I think that I would rather share a secret with my father than with the Lord, but that’s backward. A prophet helps people get closer to the Lord and the Lord’s will, through revelation and interpretation, pure and simple. You’re not supposed to try to get closer to the Lord just to get closer to a mere human, even if that human happens to be your father.

  “I think I have it,” I say after a moment. “My prayer.” I know he won’t ask what the words are, but I’m disappointed when he doesn’t respond at all. His eyes are closed, and he seems to be listening to the summer sounds outside. The morning insects, the buzzing kind, instead of the chirping evening kind. And the slow, wavelike sound of each approaching car, now drowned out by the train rumbling across Main Street not a quarter mile away. I watch the way he listens, ready at all times for the voice of God, and I breathe in and think the invitation I’ve come up with, words that seem grave and receptive: “Inhabit me,” on the breath in, then out: “O Lord God.”

  My father opens his eyes and follows the motion of the sheer at my window. It picks up the breeze, fluttering out toward my bed before being sucked back against the screen, a kind of breathing of its own.

  At lunch my father drinks tomato juice but slides his grilled-cheese sandwich over to me, which means he’s fasting. His hair is so greasy it looks wet. Between his beard and mustache, his lips are moving again. Possibly a prophecy, possibly his ceaseless prayer, which makes me remember to pray my own. Inhabit me, I think, breathing in deeply. I hold it for a second. O Lord God, I think, slowing down the words in my head so they fit the long breath out perfectly.

  Phoebe tries to catch my eye, but I look down at my food. “How long is this going to last,” she asks my father.

  His mouth moves a moment more before the sound comes out. “I don’t know,” he says, finally. “As long as it takes. I’ll be spending some time at the river.”

  “You just got back,” she says tightly.

  “Is the tomato juice still there?”

  Phoebe closes her teeth and blows air through them. It sounds like she’s deflating. Her face is white except for two high spots of color. “At the river? Yes. The cupboard is full of tomato juice. You can bet Charmaine and I didn’t head down there to deplete your supply.”

  “Phoebe,” I say, because she sounds so mean.

  “She calls me ‘Phoebe’ now,” she says to my father. He nods distantly, like he’s hearing about the weather in another state. “I guess that’s okay with you. ‘Honor your father and mother’?”

  “Your mother is angry,” my father says to me.

  “When was the last time you ate?” says Phoebe.

  “I’ve been fasting for two weeks.”

  Phoebe presses her lips together. Today she has not bothered with lipstick. “I guess that explains a lot.”

  “Jesus fasted,” I say.

  “I realize that,” says Phoebe.

  “I’m fasting.” I push away my grilled cheese. My cramps are gone, and I missed supper last night, and I’m hungry, but my father needs backup.

  “The Lord does not ask growing children to fast. David?”

  “That’s true,” my father says.

  “I’m a woman,” I remind her.

  “Oh, that’s right,” Phoebe says. “I’d forgotten.” She snatches my plate, then my father’s plate, and crosses the kitchen to dump the sandwiches in the trashcan. It is not like Phoebe to waste food, ever. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll take your father down to the river and then we’ll come back here by ourselves, as if he hadn’t even come back from the Holy Land at all. And I, for one, am going to spend some time on my own knees in prayer, because I am not feeling very godly.”

  “We will all be in prayer, then,” my father says. “Which is as it should be.”

  I move my lips, praying as I breathe, in case he happens to notice.

  After lunch we head south, Phoebe grinding through the low gears until Main Street becomes the river road. The open windows turn the Pinto’s back seat into a wind tunnel, and I can’t hear anything Phoebe and my father are saying. But they’re not saying much. I’m figuring it will take a day or two for her to get over being mad and get on board with the plan. Then we’ll all settle in to what my father’s latest vision means to everyday life. Out the rear window, the cross on top of the water tower, unlit, is just a sharper white against the pale, muggy sky. In East Winder, you don’t just pass churches on every corner, like in a lot of towns. Here, there are churches in the middle of each block and more churches in the tiny strip mall with the dollar store on one end and the dime store on the other. The New Beginnings Free Methodist Church meets in a corrugated building in the parking lot of the IGA. And there’s still the old Free Methodist Church, which the New Beginnings Free Methodist splintered off from. There’s United Methodist. There’s Church of God, Church of Christ, Church of Jesus Christ. Church of the Savior, Church of Jesus Christ the Savior, Church of the Holy Savior. Presbyterian, Lutheran, Nazarene, Assembly of God, Christian Church, First Christian Church, First Community—where we’ve been going—Christ Evangelical, and Evangelical Free. There’s the Salvation Army. There’s a small Baptist church, even, though mostly county people go there, since you don’t have to go to seminary to become a Baptist preacher and most people in town are tied up with the seminary. In fact, two out of three East Winder men are preachers, or they’re at the seminary studying to be preachers, or they’re retired preachers living out their dotage, Daze says, in the Custer Peake Memorial Retirement Center. The black community on the other side of the railroad tracks is divided between the African Methodist Episcopal and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion. The nearest Catholic church is over in Clay’s Corner, and the only Jewish people I’ve ever seen are the Jews for Jesus who came through once and put on a musical show in the seminary auditorium. There are missionaries in town, too, home on furlough. Even though my father considers them a refreshing bunch, closer to the practical application of the Lord’s will, he says, than seminarians battling it out over hermeneutics, their kids can be hard to take. They’ve been all over the world, and they like to rub it in. Like Seth Catterson, who went to school with me up to third grade, when his family left for Ghana. He’s back now, and when I saw him in church last week, he said, “Kawula,” then pretended to look confused, hitting his head with the palm of his hand like he couldn’t believe he was so African now that he’d forgotten how to say hello in English.

  North of East Winder, what everyone calls the “city side” of the county because it’s nearest Lexington, the land is wealthy—all tobacco fields and thoroughbred horse farms. But on the south side, what everyone calls the “river side,” it’s scrubby pasture as far as you can see, dotted with cows and hogs and a few swaybacked old mares. The black barns that held tobacco in better days are turning gray as the creosote wears off, and most of them list to one side like sinking ships. The river side is where Custer Peake’s people all lived before the turn of the century. Before the Holiness Movement swept through the South and some great-great-great-uncle Peake was called to preach and ventured into town.

  The old farms just south of East Winder are set back from the road, like they’re holding you at arm’s length. Closer to the river, though, houses begin to creep in toward the road, some with just a ribbon of gravel between the blackto
p and the front door. We pass unpainted porches sagging under dishwashers, electric stoves, upholstered chairs, and one stacked high with bricks and clapboards pulled off from somewhere, nails still poking out into the air like they’re surprised to see the light of day. Almost every rutted driveway has the shell of a truck propped up on cement blocks.

  My father has always talked about the county as a place where instead of turning to the Lord, people turn to the worldly occupations of drinking, fornicating, gambling over cockfights, or listening to country and rock ’n’ roll music that makes the blood boil for more of the same. We pass a yard where two red-haired girls about my age share a cigarette and glare at us. One of them raises her middle finger. “See?” my father says, gesturing to Phoebe as if they’ve been having a conversation about it. As if any of this is new. As if Daze, when she ventures down to the river, doesn’t always comment on the particular type of red hair folks have in these parts. County red, she calls it, and she claims it comes with its own brand of hostility.

  “We’re going to get a flat tire,” Phoebe says as we drive over a sprinkling of brown glass.

  It takes ten minutes total to get from our house in town to the tiny piece of land on the river that’s been passed down through the Peake family for six generations. The road is straight and flat until you hit Tate’s Bridge, which spans the gorge high above the water. Three hundred feet high, to be exact, which everyone knows from the sign the state put up to mark it as a historic site. The bridge is rusted red and older than the Civil War, but the Norfolk Southern trains still make their heavy way across it every couple of hours. The whole thing is held up by two long piers that end in cement feet, each planted into the opposite riverbank far below. So far below that if you look down you start to get that pull that tells you that falling, jumping, even, is what you really want to do. Every so often someone fool enough to climb out onto the bridge slips. Or jumps. When they fish out the body, every single bone is broken.