Lay It on My Heart

by Angela Pneuman

  Phoebe hands me the potatoes and two pieces of tinfoil. “All I’m talking about, here, is to get a little less attached to the things we have. Not to see if we can do without things we actually need.”

  “But we’ll move back home anyway,” I say, crimping the foil around the potatoes. “All three of us. Even if we get less attached to our things.”

  Phoebe perches next to me. She starts to grab my hands, but she ends up laying her hands on top of the potatoes instead, as if we could bake them between us. “You’re more important to me than anything else in the world,” she says.

  I try giving the potatoes a little lift. The cabin feels too stuffy, too damp to be hearing any of this. Phoebe presses the potatoes back down, pushing the backs of my hands into my lap.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Are you really listening?” Phoebe asks. “I said you’re more important to me than anything else in the world. That should mean something to you.”

  “What about Daddy?” I say. It doesn’t seem right to be more important to her than he is. Or for any of us to be ranked in importance at all. Or for her to say it.

  “That’s different.”

  “What about Jesus?”

  “That’s different, too,” Phoebe says. “You’ll understand when you have a child of your own. There’s no bond like it.” She moves a hand to my forehead, pushing back my bangs, which hang into my eyes because I have forgotten my barrette. It makes me even more hot, and I lean away. On the stove, a small pot of water begins to boil. “So?” Phoebe says, standing up.

  “What?”

  “Am I important to you? Because it’s getting harder and harder to tell, these days.”

  “You’re important,” I say, and even though I mean for the words to come out in a careless way that would let her know this conversation couldn’t be less important, they come out thin and strained. “Please,” I tack on, but even that word, sarcastic as it feels in my mouth, sounds more like pleading by the time it hits the air. Like it could mean Please believe me, not Please don’t make me say these things.

  For the first time since my father came back from the Holy Land, Phoebe smiles. She sips from a can of tomato juice and drops two big handfuls of spinach from the garden into the pot. We eat some manner of boiled greens every night, which Phoebe enjoys. She even enjoys the worst part, which is afterward when she splits the leftover water they were boiled in between us, a kind of vegetable tea, to make sure none of the nutrients go down the drain.

  The rain patters on and on against the cabin’s tin roof. I think about what Phoebe’s said, that there is no bond like the one between her and me. And whether or not I believe it, or want it, I feel it, as real and deep inside me as if we shared a single vital organ that neither of us can survive without. A liver. A heart.

  The air coming through the cabin’s small trailer windows feels thick and smells dark and wet, like the tangle of grass and weeds outside. It’s not hard to imagine this tangle on the move, creeping up to and then over the thick logs of the cabin, so slow we don’t notice, until one day the only thing to be seen from the outside is a gentle hill, like an Indian burial mound, with Phoebe and me trapped forever inside.

  Chapter 5

  YOU CAN HEAR THE school bus before it comes into sight, whining down into the hairpin turns of the river road. Soon it rounds the stone foot of Tate’s Bridge, then it’s pulling closer to where I’m standing in the gravel, then it looks like it’s going to run right into me before it stops, and I step back into the wet grass. The doors fold open, and a long-boned black woman in the driver’s seat says, “Hey there, baby, hop on.”

  “Ravenna,” someone yells from the back of the bus.

  “I’m talking right now,” says Ravenna. She looks me up and down, checks her clipboard. All the woman’s hair has been wound into a tight knob on the top of her head, like the handle on a pot lid, and what looks like a tiny piece of straw has been stuck through a hole in her earlobe, where an earring should be. “You Charmaine Peake?”

  I nod.

  She half stands, twisting up out of her seat.

  “Ravenna.” The voice comes from a pudgy, redheaded girl near the back. “You deaf?”

  “Tracy Payne, sit down,” says Ravenna.

  “Just so you know, I’m saving this seat,” says the girl.

  “That’s right. You saving it for Charmaine.” Ravenna sweeps her arm out toward the aisle. “Go on, sit with her,” she says to me. “That’ll be your assigned seat.”

  There are only four other kids on the bus and plenty of empty seats, but I follow the rubber mat toward the red-haired girl, Tracy, who has scooted to the outside edge of the seat bench and crossed her arms. She makes her body so stiff that I have to high-step over her, nearly sitting on her lap. I arrange myself by the window and hold my breath until I can’t anymore, and the whoosh of my breath out reminds me to pray. “O Lord God” comes out in a louder whisper than I mean it to, and Tracy, still shooting hate toward Ravenna, narrows her eyes.

  School’s just starting, and already the bus window is layered in tiny scallops of grime, from the rain. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Tracy stretch a leg into the aisle and withdraw a rusty screw from her jeans pocket. She elbows me hard in the shoulder, then holds the screw up to my face. “Give me lip,” she says, “and I’ll give you something you won’t forget.”

  Except for yellow shadows under her eyes, and the large tan patches where freckles merge together, Tracy’s face is very pale. Even her blue eyes are pale—cold and ghostly, as if more blue used to be there but found the conditions too hostile. She talks like they do down at the river. Lip is lee-yup.

  “This is rust,” she says. “You want to get lockjaw?”

  “I have lockjaw already.” I wiggle my jaw to make it pop. “TMJ.”

  “TMJ?” the girl looks insulted. “Well, I have ESP. You know what that stands for?”

  “Yes.”

  “What, then?” Wuht, they-un.

  Tracy’s words are like little darts, or insects hitting a windshield. They don’t hurt, but it’s hard to have your own thoughts when they’re coming at you. I know what ESP is from a Good Word article on the occult. I just can’t remember what the letters stand for.

  “If you don’t know,” she says, “I’m not going to tell you.”

  Then it comes to me. “Extrasensory perception.”

  “Whatever,” says Tracy. “I can predict the future. I predict you’ll be sorry if you give me lip.”

  I have no idea what to say to this. A kind answer is supposed to turn away wrath, but there’s no question on the table, and she’s not exactly wrathful. Ornery is the word that comes to me. One of Daze’s words. The special kind of red hair.

  “Close your mouth,” Tracy says. “You wanna catch flies?”

  I close my mouth. ESP is kind of like being a prophet in the way you know things other people don’t, only it doesn’t come from God, and whatever doesn’t come from God is of the world, which is Satan’s domain. I would say some of this to Tracy, maybe, but she has propped her foot onto the opposite knee and is digging into the rubber sole of her tennis shoe with the screw like she’s forgotten I’m there.

  From inside the bus, the river road seems narrow as a wire. Every curve feels dangerous, like we might tip over and crash back down the scrubby hill. I breathe in and out. I remember the prayer again. I pray.

  We stop every quarter mile or so to collect kids. Some of them look like they slept in a pile of dirt; some are so clean and red-cheeked they could have been boiled in a pot. Ravenna makes seat assignments right and left, but the bus stays pretty quiet—just the hiss of the brakes and the high drone of the engine as it works harder. Tracy’s eyes have closed, and she sways, trancelike, every time we make a turn. She smells like cigarettes. I feel the sway of the bus, too, but I sit carefully, not wanting to touch the girl’s arm or leg in case it wakes her up.

  Then her eyes pop open so fast it’s hard for me to believe
she’s been asleep at all. “You know who’s kin to me?” she says.

  “Who’s kin to you?” I repeat, stupidly.

  “That’s what I’m asking.”

  “How would I know, though? I don’t even know you.”

  “If you knew, you’d know it,” Tracy says, and closes her eyes again. Her thin lips twitch into a smirk.

  When the bus stops next, Ravenna gets up and pulls a sheet of plywood from behind the driver’s seat. She bangs it down on the steps and latches a latch. There’s a heavy first step on the plank, then it’s step and shuffle, step and shuffle.

  “Here he comes,” Tracy says. “You better not stare at him like you’re staring at me.”

  “Hey there, Cecil Goode,” says Ravenna, peering down the ramp. “You got it, baby?”

  If there’s an answer, I don’t hear it. There’s a couple of thumps and some more shuffling and then the boy’s standing at the head of the aisle. “Child of God” is what I heard him called at church once. His head and abdomen are normal-sized, but his legs look like they’ve been cut off below the knees, and instead of a right hand, a metal claw pokes out of the cuff of his plaid shirt. The other sleeve, the empty one, is tied into a knot right above where the elbow should be. He ignores the handicapped bench behind Ravenna and moves down the aisle toward the back of the bus, yanking his shoulders with a powerful effort that slaps the claw into the back of each seat he passes.

  Is it worse to look or to look like you’re trying not to look? He has the face of an adult, with a heavy ledge of a brow and a mustache trimmed close to his lip. Everything about his head is golden, from his burnished skin to his blond, wavy hair. He even breathes heavily through his nose the way a golden lion might, if you got close enough to hear.

  “Cecil,” Tracy says hopefully beside me. “Hey there, Cecil.”

  He nods at her. Then he lifts his chin and looks down his nose at me, and I feel my mouth stretching into a wild, encouraging smile, as if a smile can convey that I don’t really notice anything different about him, or that, like Jesus, I see only what’s inside.

  That’s when he stops himself by our seat. As he leans over Tracy, a golden curl falls into his eyes. Then his face is in mine, and he smells of pine needles and sweat, and his light amber eyes are hard. What he says is: “I can smell your pussy.”

  I swallow, my face stuck in the smile. “What?”

  He says it again, separating the words with his smooth voice, a higher voice than I would have expected. It sounds golden, too. Musical. “I. Can. Smell. Your. Pussy.” Then he rears back and makes his way on past. Tracy shrinks down in her seat with a proud little yelp, and I turn my burning face to the dirty window and cross my legs as tightly as I can, in case what he said could possibly be true.

  I have worn the homemade Levi’s to school, to please Phoebe. Once inside, however, I duck into the first bathroom I find and dig the dirty Jordache pair from the bottom of the butt purse. I give them a thorough smell in the crotch before I put them on, just in case, but all that comes through is a trace of damp earth.

  The only person from East Winder in any of my classes the first half of the day is Mary-Kate, in homeroom and second period, but her assigned seats are far across the room. The rest of the kids, from the county or from Clay’s Corner, have all gone to school with each other for years, and after we hear about supplies and write our names in the covers of our textbooks, they talk around me while I flip through the pages and try not to look conspicuously alone. I don’t know anyone in fourth-period English either, but in that class, all extra time gets absorbed by freewriting. Today’s topic on the board is “summer pastimes,” but we may also choose our own topics. Freewriting can be anything, says the teacher, a woman in bright red slacks tight enough to show the outline of her bikini panties. As she walks up and down the rows, a couple of boys snicker. Even a letter, the teacher says. Which we can even mail after she checks it for completion. I have my father’s letter with me in the butt purse, and now I begin a letter back to him. I’m in English class, I write. This fall, our first assignment will be preparing and giving a “how-to” speech. When I realize that I have written what the teacher has just said word for word, I erase it. Praying without ceasing is hard, I write instead. But then I wonder if that sounds like I’m complaining about a direct instruction from the Lord, so I erase that too.

  “No erasing,” says the teacher from over my shoulder. “The only criteria for freewriting are that we do not erase and that we keep moving forward.”

  I’ve read your letter a few times, I begin again. Right now we’re doing freewriting, which this page is part of. After I turn it in for a grade, I will be able to send it to you. I have to come up with something to demonstrate. It has to be something I already know how to do, and the title of it has to be “How to ‘something.’” I stop writing. Quotidian was the word of the day this morning in homeroom. It can mean “routine,” or “drab,” and that’s exactly what my letter is.

  Our classroom, like every room in the building, is a flat hexagon with green fluorescent lights that make us all look like we’re coming down with something. The windows are floor-to-ceiling slivers the width of my hand, set so deeply into the cement blocks that the outdoors seems like a distant, separate world. The high school is a mirror image on the other side of a shared lunchroom, which is the biggest hexagon of all. We are bees in a honeycomb. Drones. Already I feel like I’ve been here forever.

  Beside me, a girl with a long brown ponytail writes steadily.

  “No stopping,” says the teacher, behind me again. “Even if you have to write, ‘I don’t know what to write’ over and over, I want you to keep your pencil to paper. Get used to it, men and women, because this is how we’ll start every class period.” On the chalkboard, she has written Miss Shipps, then crossed through it triumphantly to write Mrs. Teaderman underneath, because one of her summer pastimes, this year, was getting married.

  I don’t know what to write, I write. Everyone around me is writing, except for one boy over near the window who might be mainstreamed. Did you get to see the pictures of your brain? Do you still feel the spirit of the Apostle Paul? I’m reading Jeremiah in the Old Testament, and Romans in the New Testament. The part about circumcision. Then I’m embarrassed to have written circumcision, and I cross it out and still try to look like I’m writing. The boy they call the “Child of God” rides my bus, I write, the page now cloudy with smudges. Then I am wondering about the boy and how he holds a pencil, eats his food at lunch, shaves his face around the mustache—all with the claw. I wonder how he goes to the bathroom too, which makes me think of the time I walked in on my father. I had seen a diagram, but I had not expected any of the parts to look like they did in real life. Pinker than skin and with the deflated pouch underneath. Like something that really belonged inside his body, an intestine maybe, that had escaped. It made me sad for him, and for all men. And now my father has burned himself there, which is impossible to picture.

  After fourth period there’s “activity,” for which our English class follows Mrs. Teaderman to the gym and up into the bleachers to an assigned section near the top. I find a seat against the wall as the entire seventh grade files in, a sea of people, with teachers waving their arms and trying to make themselves heard. If you plug your ears and don’t think of them as teachers and just watch their faces, you get a good idea of what they might look like when they are in pain or about to cry. I’m trying to spot Mary-Kate, Karen, or even the red-haired girl from the bus when the bell rings right over my head, loud enough to loosen my brain in my skull. The brown-haired girl with the ponytail is beside me, and she jumps and claps her hands over her ears, too. Down below, the doors on either side of the gym clang shut. On stage, the PE teacher, Coach Doran, steps to the podium.

  “Quiet,” he says into a microphone, which buzzes then squeals. Coach Doran waits for the sound to peter out, then explains that on some days, activity will involve a dance contest or spelling bee. Other days
we can talk or balance our homework on our knees. When one of the sports teams has a game, activity will become a pep rally, and today the cheerleaders are on hand to show us the meaning of school spirit. Coach Doran motions to someone offstage, and in two seconds rock music blares from the speaker above me.

  By now, most of the boys in the bleachers have parked thick slugs of chewing tobacco under their bottom lips. They try to hide it, but if you turn too quickly, you’ll catch them spitting into empty pop cans.

  “Disgusting,” says the girl with the ponytail as a boy wipes his lips with the back of his hand.

  I pull out the letter from my father and smooth it against the cover of my social studies book. I read it once through and start in again, as though it will begin to make more sense.

  “Who’d you get the letter from,” says the girl.

  “My dad.”

  The song ends and then they restart it louder. “Eye of the Tiger.” Beside me, the girl dances with the upper half of her body.

  “I’m going out for cheerleading,” she says. She stops dancing and starts making the rigid motions of a cheer with her arms. “My sister used to cheer at my old school. My used-to-be stepsister. My parents are divorced, too. My dad lives in Omaha.”

  “My parents aren’t divorced.”

  “Then how come your dad’s writing you letters?”

  I look down at the letter in my lap, which is starting to fold itself back into thirds. “He’s just away for a while.”

  “In prison?”

  “No,” I say. I hadn’t considered prison or expected anyone else to. The girl has straight dark eyebrows, and when she speaks, her lips move carefully over a delicate set of braces. After she stops speaking, it is hard to believe her face ever moved, much less that she was talking about prison.

  “Theresa’s dad is in prison,” she says. “It sucks that there’s no one popular in English. No offense.”