Lay It on My Heart

by Angela Pneuman

  “But if there’s a translator, then it doesn’t have to be private,” says the other adult woman. She’s also blond, but heavier set. With her Bible, she holds an old issue of The Good Word, the one with my father’s revelation on fasting.

  “In Ghana lots of people speak in tongues,” Seth adds.

  “It’s more a matter of church unity,” says Connie Bowls. “Of time and place.”

  “Once I even translated myself,” says the second blond woman. “Translation is one of the gifts of the spirit.” She looks pointedly at me. “Like prophecy.”

  “Prophecy is an Old Testament gift,” Seth says, beating his pencil against the rubber sole of his shoe. “Speaking in tongues is a gift of Pentecost. Acts. New Testament.”

  “I thought speaking in tongues was from the Tower of Babel,” says Mary-Kate. She and Karen wear their hair in identical French braids, while I have managed only to pull my bangs straight back into a barrette. I wonder if either of them has started her period, but I’m glad you can’t tell from looking.

  “The Tower of Babel is where different languages come from,” says the seminary wife. “Like French and Spanish.”

  “Something like that,” says Connie Bowls, nodding.

  “My father says the Lord has always spoken to him in plain English,” I say. “And there are plenty of prophets in the New Testament.”

  “What do the prophets have to foretell in the New Testament after Christ already came?” Seth asks.

  “What about interpretation?” I say. “What about revelation? What about John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul? What about Agabus? What about Philip’s daughters?”

  “Debatable,” says Seth, though I doubt he even knows about Agabus and Philip’s daughters, since most people just skim over their mention.

  Connie Bowls smiles brightly. “This lofty discussion falls right in with today’s scripture from First Corinthians, where Paul says the church has one body but many parts. A role for every member. Let’s get quiet, for a moment, and contemplate some of the ways the disciples supported the early church. Then we’ll write down what this says to us about our responsibilities today.”

  I don’t even have to crack open my Bible to write prayer and outreach, and to come up with examples, the most obvious being prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane and the writing and preaching of the apostles throughout the New Testament. Today, I write, this means supporting the church in prayer and witnessing to others. And, I add for Seth’s benefit, being open to new revelation from the Lord. When I look up, everyone else is scowling down at their Bibles, turning pages, except Seth, who has also finished. He pulls a thick square of paper out of his back pocket and unfolds what looks like a script, with a broad white margin on the left.

  I love plays. Seth and I were in one together, a church play, back in the third grade. It was directed by Dr. Osborne, a man in town who is famous for never marrying, for having never known a woman, biblically. In addition to directing plays, he teaches sermon delivery at the seminary. In the play, Seth and I were supposed to be husband and wife. When he came home from work, he was supposed to kiss me, which we both refused to practice, and the night of the performance he came toward me like an attack and banged into my cheek with his teeth.

  “Is there a new church play?” I ask him after class.

  “By ‘church,’ do you mean a play about church or a play for church?”

  “Either one.”

  “In that case, the answer is yes.” He refolds the paper and pushes it into his pocket.

  Connie Bowls places one hand on my shoulder and the other on Seth’s, as if this will help us get along. “It’s nice to have you and your family back from the mission field, Seth,” she says. “And Charmaine, I know you’re glad to have your father home from the Holy Land.”

  “Yes,” I say, even though he’s been home all of a day and a half and he spent last night down at the river, not at home.

  “Ghana’s farther away than the Holy Land,” says Seth.

  “Maybe one day I’ll be lucky enough to see both Ghana and the Holy Land,” Connie Bowls says as she steers us toward the door. She is so nice to everyone that I don’t know how I’m going to explain about not getting baptized if the end of class comes upon me before the Holy Ghost does.

  My father doesn’t show up for the main service like I thought he would. I’ve assumed that the heat of his revelation has been cooling into a new workable vision, and that he will ease back into being not just apart but also a part of the community. As much as he ever is. Usually when he’s fasting down at the river and needs to get home for church or any other reason, he walks to the tiny gas station in Tate’s Bend and calls Phoebe from the pay phone. Today, though, Daze, Phoebe, and I sit by ourselves in our regular pew. The two of them take turns telling people that yes, David got home okay, but he’s still exhausted from traveling.

  The sanctuary of First Community is big and barn shaped, with a red-carpeted floor that slopes down to a stage in front and two small alcoves in either corner. The choir sits on the right, and on the left is the worship band, a group of seminarians with two electric guitars, two acoustic guitars, a drum set, and a keyboard. Their warm-up sounds like a bag of cats. The windows that look out over the bank parking lot are wide open, but the ceiling fans just churn up stale, hot air. The only other windows, near the ceiling on the opposite wall, open not to the outdoors but onto the Upper Room, domain of the Youth Group leader, Pastor Chick. This is the year I’m finally old enough for the Sunday-night meetings, which will start up again when school does.

  As the band launches into the first song, Daze hands me a funeral-home fan and raises her eyebrow. The song is called “Spirit of the Living God, Fall Afresh on Me,” which my grandmother lumps under “contemporary music,” a category she cannot abide. Melt me. Mold me. Fill me. Use me. The side of her lip curls up like the words taste bad. Sometimes I try to stand, unsinging, beside her until we get to a respectable hymn like “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” or a gospel song like “I’ll Fly Away.” But if Phoebe catches me not singing, she switches places with Daze and pokes me until I open my mouth.

  Soon a woman to my left slips out from the pew and heads down the center aisle. Then another woman on the right a few pews up. Then two more women, then three, all while Daze’s face becomes more and more grim. The women are headed to the spirit-flag box mounted on the wall of the choir loft. The flags are decorated with felt crosses and doves and flames. One red flag has a pair of hands that are supposed to look uplifted in prayer. But they’re both left hands, and the cutting job on the felt makes them look creepy, with craggy, too-long fingers and wrists that just end like they’ve been hacked off. The hand flag is almost always the last one picked, but today, the thin, blond woman from my Christian Education class timidly lifts it from the box. Probably she’s too new to know which one she’s choosing. The other women, including Seth’s mother, spread out in front of the stage and wave their flags in time to the music. The idea is that the flags help lift people’s hearts in prayer, and that flag waving is an opportunity to get more people involved in worship, which is one reason we stopped going to the United Methodist Church, with its one-way delivery of the gospel. That’s not to say, however, that First Community supports dancing any more than it supports speaking in tongues. And even though most Sundays it would be hard to call what’s happening up front dancing, today the thin, blond woman is wiggling her hips just a little, as she jerks the hand flag back and forth. Every few seconds she changes it up, swaying the flag to one side and kicking her foot to the other, like the chorus girls from Daze’s old movies. Several people in the congregation bring their hands to their mouths, and Daze and Phoebe steal a quick look at each other. The question to ask yourself, if you feel moved to keep time with music in church, is whether you intend to call worshipful attention to the Holy Ghost or whether you’re inviting lustful attention to your own body. Watching the open-mouthed smile on the thin, blond woman’s face, it�
�s hard for me to believe that she means to be inviting lustful attention. I am imagining the church she comes from, where people freely speak in tongues when they are baptized. Maybe they dance in the aisles, too. I want to run down front and warn her, but I just stand there while everyone gasps as she raises the flag over her head with both hands and begins twirling in joyous, oblivious circles. She is so caught up that she doesn’t even notice the other flag wavers, who one by one lower their arms to watch. In a unanimous, unspoken decision, they file past her in a slow line, and by the time she opens her eyes and stops twirling, the rest of the women are already replacing their flags, dropping them into the box with a hollow thock we can all hear just below the music, turning away from the thin, blond seminary wife as she stops twirling and scurries to catch up.

  Later I will find out that during this church service my father, down at the river, is tramping around in the scrubby woods at the base of the limestone palisades. I have seen the way he does this when he thinks no one is watching. Tears on his face, eyes lifted toward heaven, allowing the Holy Ghost to descend upon him. Maybe this time he has his eyes closed, imagining the Apostle Paul from when he was still Saul, struck blind on the road to Damascus. Maybe he’s just wrapped up in his prayer without ceasing. What he is not doing is watching where he is going, or he would never have stumbled into poison ivy, which is the first plant he taught me to identify. By the time he realizes it, his robe is already tangled in the underbrush, but he struggles on through the scrub, not wanting to interrupt his communion with the Lord. The itching won’t come until later on, anyway. Even then, it will seem like nothing more than a nuisance, a distraction like hunger or worry. He will ignore it all day Sunday, first while Phoebe and I are having dinner with Daze in the cafeteria of the Custer Peake Memorial Retirement Center, then while Phoebe sits at our kitchen table scouring the Lexington Herald-Leader for employment ads, telling me that even though doing this counts as working on the Sabbath, it’s okay because our ox is in the ditch. He will ignore it while Phoebe and I head back to church for the evening service to listen to Seth’s father give his presentation about their school in Ghana.

  Sunday-night dinner for us is always a can of tuna mixed in with a can of cream-of-mushroom soup, heated up and spooned over saltine crackers, a meal Phoebe calls “tuna wiggle” because of how it turns gelatinous as it cools on your plate. The trick is to eat it fast. About the time we are sitting across from each other at the kitchen table, in the half dark because the electric lights just seem too hot when it’s this muggy, the itching begins to get the better of my father. Under a bright half-moon he drags Daze’s old tin washtub from the shed, the big one that I used to splash around in. There’s a gallon of bleach in the shed, too, and he empties it into the washtub and adds water from the hose until it’s half-full. And then, because it doesn’t look like the neighbors are home, he drops his filthy brown robe in the grass, steps into the tub, and squats, wedging himself in until the bleach water rises to his waist. He sits there a good long time, praying without ceasing and killing the poison ivy, the itch that Satan has brought upon him to test his devotion to the Lord’s vision.

  I’m sitting on the floor of my room with the contents of an old box I keep under my bed spread out beside me on the braided rug. It’s a wooden Swinburne’s gelatine box Daze picked up somewhere, built to last, with a hinged top and mitered corners. Titus has jumped in and filled the box with his whole body, corner to corner, squeezed in tight as my father in the washtub. You can tell by the way Titus purrs that he thinks it’s a good, solid feeling. Some of what I keep in the box is special, like Daze’s bone pen from Niagara Falls, which she bought on her honeymoon. A tiny lens at the top of the pen is a viewfinder that shows you the different parts of Niagara Falls, like Goat Island, Horseshoe Falls, and Whirlpool Rapids—all places I would like to see someday. But most of what’s in the box is junk. There’s a matchbox I saved because it reminds me of a drawer. There’s an empty Tic Tac container that still smells good. There’s a queen-of-clubs playing card I found on the street in Lexington and pocketed. You can’t even have a deck of playing cards within East Winder city limits because they’re the tools of gambling. I also keep a small notebook in the box, with a list of things I might like to become, including actress, veterinarian, and prophet. And even though I am not in danger of forgetting the words to my prayer, I jot them down now on the notebook’s back page. I know that every time I come across them I will remember to start praying again, if I have stopped. I whisper the words now. “Inhabit me, O Lord God.” I bend down close to Titus’s head and whisper them again into one of his velvety black ears, which flattens in annoyance. I tip up the box and he spills out onto the rug. Then I reload it with all my things, arranging them to make space for the Holy Land relics. I also slip in the postcard of Lot’s unfortunate wife.

  I don’t know at what point the bleach starts to burn my father worse than the itching. When he manages to throw the washtub on its side and crawl out on all fours, he has red rings from the pressure of the tub halfway up his back. He must understand that his robe has poison ivy oil all over it, but he wants to cover his nakedness, suddenly. To warm the chill that’s coming over him. To soak up some of what’s oozing from his skin below the waist and down his legs. He clutches the robe to his private parts, then wraps himself in it and sets out for the gas station a mile and a half away. But the pain, the pain forces him to stop at a trailer lit from within like a tin lantern on the side of the road.

  When Ruthie Pope opens the door, my burned, blistered father can hardly speak. The robe has stuck to his legs and his privates, which are unspeakably raw. When she peels it away, the lower parts of his back and stomach look skinned. Ruthie Pope is a practical woman, and the first thing she does is cover a patch of her wall-to-wall carpet with a sheet so he doesn’t soil it. The second thing she does is grab her cylinder of Crisco and oil my father’s naked body from the waist down while four of her seven children watch, open-mouthed and silent. My father, she will say later, pushes air through his lips with pain. He seems to be talking to himself, and Ruthie reckons he’s delirious. There’s something familiar about him, but she can’t put a name to the gaunt, glassy-eyed, bearded face. And he doesn’t give her his name, or she would find the number for Daze or for Phoebe. The Peakes and the Popes, old Rowland County families both, know of each other, though it is possible they haven’t crossed paths in years. She keeps asking, though. “What’s your name, child? What’s your name?” and when he finally manages a name, she believes she hears him say he is the Apostle Paul. Then he says it again, and she figures the best she can do for this man, and for any and all concerned, is call the police.

  I am closing the lid on the Swinburne’s gelatine box, sliding it back under my bed, when the phone rings downstairs. Phoebe has been sitting at the kitchen table, listening to the Sunday-night Christian soap-opera broadcast by the Salvation Army, the stories about streetwalkers and drug users who hit rock bottom in Chicago or Cincinnati and stumble into churches on their last legs, where they meet kind people ladling out hot soup right alongside the gospel.

  The radio goes off, and I hear her friendly, public voice fall flat. She’s still on the phone with Police Chief Burton, Ezra Burton, when the doorbell rings, and there’s Mayor James, having got the first call from the chief who thought Phoebe Peake should have someone with her, should have someone drive her to the hospital. Phoebe either thinks I’m already asleep or is too shocked to think of me at all. For the first time ever, she leaves the house without telling me where she’s going and when she’ll be back.

  At my window I follow the mayor’s taillights until his car disappears up Main Street. I stay at the window awhile longer, whispering my prayer, listening to a long, slow train come through and watching the moon, which has risen to sit opposite the cross on the water tower, the two lights hanging on either side of town like the very eyes of God.

  Chapter 4

  THEY KEEP MY FATHER in the
first hospital for four days. His legs are covered in gauze, but the doctors leave the more serious burns, in the more serious places, exposed to the air. When Daze and I get there Monday morning, everything but his head and shoulders is shielded by a curtain, for modesty, while he sleeps away next to his IV bag. Someone has shaved his beard and clipped his hair close to his head, which makes him look younger. And smaller. And it’s awful the way his jaw has dropped open to one side, his mouth a stretched-out hole. I want to pull the curtain the rest of the way closed so no one can see him sleep this way without him knowing it.

  “The bleach did a number on him,” Phoebe says when she finds us in the hallway. “Not to mention the fasting. They want to run a few more tests.”

  “Tests?” says Daze.

  “They want to rule out a head injury. He said some things when they brought him in.”

  “He’s exhausted,” says Daze. “My poor boy.” She gives me a hankie, in case I’m about to cry, but I’m not. I’m whispering my prayer so fast my mouth turns dry.

  “What’s all the muttering about?” says Phoebe.