Receptive or no, I refuse to believe this is my calling. “Stop it,” I say.
Seth grins. “Stop not lusting? You want me to stop not lusting?”
“I can see why you need socialization,” I say. The grin dies on his face, and I make it through the whole section on Thanksgiving before he speaks again.
“Guess who we prayed for last night? Someone who thinks he’s a prophet.”
I snap up to full height in my chair, breasts and all. “You shut up,” I say, dropping my voice to a hiss as Mrs. Catterson enters the kitchen. She opens the refrigerator door, then closes it, turns, and says, “No whispering.” Frowning, she approaches Seth from behind and palms both sides of his face. “I don’t know what you and your family practice, Charmaine, but in our home we have a policy of full disclosure.” Seth’s face, under his mother’s, wears a complicated expression of satisfaction and sorrow. His mother’s hands smush his cheeks toward his nose, and his lips pucker up like a fish. “And we never, ever tell other people to ‘shut up.’”
Phoebe believes that elegance is a state of mind, not a station in life. Candlelight is elegant. A set table is also elegant. So even when the meal at the RV-cabin is just canned tuna and sliced tomatoes, washed down with powdered milk, I put a cloth napkin in my lap, and I lay my unused knife across the top of my plate, blade in. Polite conversation is elegant, too, and so she tells me about the second-grade class where she subbed that day, and she asks me about being at the house with the Cattersons, which I tell her was fine. She won’t mention my father until after dinner.
While I do the dishes, she takes herself outside to the old lawn chair with a back issue of The Good Word, and when I come out to dump the dishpan, she tells me that he slept through her visit again.
“He’s exhausted still, the doctor says. But his burns are healing.” On her lap, the cover of The Good Word shows a green pasture dotted with pale, woolly sheep. “I was reading what he wrote about that one summer. That month he worked down here nonstop, then the next one, remember? When he couldn’t get himself out of bed? I should have seen something in that.”
“It was a dark night of the soul,” I say. “Everything went back to normal.”
“Normal,” Phoebe says. “Very often your father sleeps only two nights a week. When he gets worked up.” She fingers the edges of The Good Word and watches the river, which tonight is still. Just a quiet splash here and there from a fish or bird. After a time, she opens the magazine to his column, which includes a photo of him peering seriously into the camera.
“When can I visit?” I say.
“Soon,” she says. “Once he’s rested, they’ll start figuring out if the medication is working, which I guess can take a while. It’s different now. Not like the times he got worked up. Then it was like talking to, I don’t know. A radio broadcast that couldn’t hear me. Now he just seems confused. When he manages to wake up.”
As she’s speaking, the crickets fall quiet, but after a few moments of silence they gear back up, hesitantly at first, then throbbing with song. A long way down the river road, someone starts a car.
“I never told you about the first time I met your father,” Phoebe says.
“You told me a million times.”
“My friend and I had been to a wedding in Ohio. This was right after Mother died. We were just passing through East Winder, and we stopped when we saw all the people. It was the funniest thing.”
“Daddy saw you, and God told him you were the one. You told me.”
“This boy,” Phoebe says, like I haven’t spoken. She watches the river like she’s calling the memory up out of it. “This boy who was getting married in Ohio, this brother of my friend? His bride had been abducted a few years before when she wasn’t much older than you. Sixteen, I think. Some man. Her parents were frantic.”
“For ransom?” I say. This part I haven’t heard.
“Not exactly. I guess the man did things to her. At the wedding she testified how the Lord restored her virginity. But my friend said the rumor was that when the girl showed up back at her own house she just shut herself in her room for a week and wouldn’t talk to anyone. By the time she finally told her parents that she’d escaped a man’s apartment and they called the police, the man was gone, and so was all trace of the things he’d done to her.”
Behind me, Titus squeezes himself out of the window over the sink and drops onto the pile of cement blocks underneath, left over from when my father built the foundation. The sun falls fast behind the palisades, but it takes a while for the gorge to grow fully dark. You can look way up to the top of the cliffs and see sunlight filtering through the leaves and shining on the limestone ridge.
“My friend and I talked about it the whole trip back,” Phoebe says. “If the girl was telling the truth, and whether or not your virginity could be truly restored if you lied about the circumstances, and what kind of life her brother might be in for. I’m ashamed to say it, but I remember wondering what it might be like to be abducted. Or to run off with someone. Whatever it was. And that’s what was on my mind when God pointed me out to your father, even though I let him think differently. I let him think I was there because I’d heard about the revival. ‘The heart is deceitful above all things,’” she says, quoting Jeremiah. “Isn’t that how it goes?”
“‘And desperately wicked,’” I say. “‘Who can know it?’”
“Right,” says Phoebe. “Who indeed.”
Before bed I wash my face and wonder if maybe the man left the girl behind and that’s why she shut herself in her room. My father said that during his dark night of the soul he had trouble hearing the voice of God, and he wondered if he’d been abandoned. But in The Good Word article, he explains that God was teaching him that he is always there, even when it doesn’t feel that way. Unlike people, who are with you when they’re with you and not when they’re not, no wondering about it.
When I fold back the accordion door to the bathroom, Phoebe is sitting on the narrow tweed sofa waiting for her turn. “I’ve been thinking,” she says, nodding thoughtfully, like she already agrees with what she’s about to say. “It would be nice if we could remember to tell each other ‘I love you’ every day. Otherwise whole weeks might go by without either of us hearing those three important words. We can make that the first of our house rules, now that it’s just the two of us.”
“I don’t need to hear ‘I love you’ every day.”
“Yes, you do,” says Phoebe. “You just don’t realize it. Come over here.”
I sit beside her on the sofa and she leans over me, inspecting my face. Then she unclips the gooseneck lamp from the kitchen counter and clips it to the tiny windowsill over the sofa. We have two of these lamps in the cabin, with cords long enough for us to fasten them where they’re most needed.
“Maybe we’ll even write them up,” she says, “—the new rules. And tape them to the wall.”
“We didn’t make new rules when he was in the Holy Land.”
“This is different. This time, we don’t know what to expect. I might just discover that I like being an independent woman.”
I keep myself very still. Phoebe has a way of trying ideas out, even ideas that she doesn’t really mean. But if you challenge her or react in any way, she can start to argue for what she’s only been trying out and start to convince herself. The word divorce comes back to me from the girl in activity, and I taste tuna in my throat. I have never considered Phoebe and my father anything but a pair, even when they’re an unhappy pair.
Phoebe positions the lamp so it’s shining right into my eyes. She leans in and plants her thumb on my nose, pushing the tip to one side. I squirm away from her and stand up.
“Come back here,” she says. And because I am afraid that if I don’t she will launch back into the subject of her independence, I sit down again. She traps my head between her hands, pins it to the sofa. “Your nose is a nest of blackheads,” she says, then starts going after them with her two thumbnails. O
n my cheek, her breath advances, retreats, advances again like a small, soft army.
“You said not to pick,” I say, my voice nasally.
“I’m not picking,” she says. “I’m extracting. Hold still. And all I’m saying, Charmaine, about the rules, is that with me at this new job, I’m going to need some serious support from you. That should be rule number two. Support each other. I always wanted to be a teacher, and now I’ll see if I’ve got the stuff.”
“You’re just a substitute, though. Ow. All you have to do is follow the teacher’s notes and tell people if they can go to the bathroom or not.”
“I don’t need your back talk.” Phoebe’s thumbnails skid toward each other on the side of my nose, and I feel a layer of skin peel away. I wrench my head up from the sofa and clap a hand over my nose. “What I do need, is to hear an ‘I love you’ every day.”
I press my fingertip to my nose then hold it up to her, bright and bloody in the glare of the bulb.
“So you’re bleeding a little,” she says. “Don’t be dramatic.”
While Phoebe gets ready for bed, I slip outside to check for Titus. I like to shut him in at night when I can, but if not, then I’ll leave the window open and he’ll steal in to sleep in the passenger seat or at my feet and wake me up in the morning to be fed. Tonight the moon is thin as a nail paring. Almost not there at all. There is such a thing called a black-hole moon, which I used to think was how the moon got thinner and thinner each month. Like it was disappearing, little by little, into the overwhelming gravity of the black hole at the center of our own galaxy. What it really means is that once a year the moon sits right in front of the black hole, almost like it’s trying to warn us about where it is.
I make my way down to the dock, calling for Titus, hoping he’ll come. Then I’m praying he’ll come, and I catch myself. In The Good Word, my father explains that it’s not that you can’t ask things of God, it’s just that you have to be okay with whatever answer you get back or with his silence. What I want to ask is for Titus to stay inside, where no larger animal can get him and where no teenager, drunken or cruel or both, can catch him and throw him from Tate’s Bridge, which is something that you hear about happening down here. I want to ask for my father to be okay, for things just to go back to the way they were. Or maybe even a little better than the way they were, for him to be just a little more like other people, who sleep every night, and for him to pay just a little more attention to Phoebe so that she will love him as much as she loves me and forget about being independent. But even if, like my father says, God’s silence is an opportunity to appreciate the power of faith, it’s a wretched feeling to ask for something you want so badly and to hear nothing. It’s the kind of silence that turns familiar things, comforting things like the presence of the moon or the way the river smells after dark, strange and a little scary.
You can’t go wrong, though, with the prayer without ceasing. I don’t know how my father manages it even as he’s talking or eating. That’s the part of him that isn’t like other people. The prophet part. I start up now, whispering to the sliver of moon, but later as I’m going to sleep I realize I’ve stopped again already.
From her loft bed over the dash, Phoebe hears me sigh. “You still awake?”
I don’t want to answer, but I do, because our first night here, when she believed me to be asleep, she started to cry, quietly to begin with and then so loudly that the sound carried across the lawn and down the riverbank, where I imagined it spreading out across the water, echoing against the cliffs.
“Isn’t there anything you’d like to say to me?” she says.
“I don’t think so.”
“Think harder.”
“I’m sorry for back-talking?”
“Something else,” she says. “Remember?”
Then I remember, and even though I would be hard-pressed to say I do not love my mother, the words she wants to hear drop from my mouth like reluctant stones.
“I love you too,” she says. “Good night.”
Chapter 7
“I KNOW WHO YOUR DADDY is,” Tracy says in the morning, poking me hard in the stomach as soon as I sit down. “The preacher? I watched him make that trailer of yours into a cabin.”
“He’s not a preacher,” I say, leaning my head against the dirty window.
“You think you’re the only one who’s been to church? I’m baptized and everything. Right there in the river.”
“My grandfather was baptized in the river,” I say. “I didn’t know they did that anymore.”
“Well, they do,” she says. Under her breath she says, “Dumbass.” Then: “Where do they do it at your church?”
“At the altar,” I say. “You just get a little sprinkle on your head. Some altars have bathtubs behind them. Baptismal fonts.”
“Whatever that means,” Tracy says. “We had my sister’s baby baptized, too, but now my mother says if the Lord wants anything else he can come down and tell her himself with a tongue of fire. She says she’ll kill me if I get pregnant before I’m through school. What?” she says at the look on my face. “You want a baby?”
“No.”
Tracy cocks her head. “You got something against babies?”
I blink hard, caught in the net of a question with no good answer. “No. Do you want a baby?”
“Hell, no.”
“Then what’re you asking me for?” I say. I take a deep breath and add: “Dumbass.” I’ve never called anyone a name before, and I like the tiny, stunned gap of silence in its wake.
Half of Tracy’s mouth twists into a smirk. “You got a scab on your nose,” she says.
Outside it’s getting light, the slow, gray way it does down at the bottom of the gorge. I never knew all the different ways dawn could look. The rim of the cliffs above glows brighter and brighter as we climb, and my eyes well up against it. We’re nearing the set of trailers where the Child of God lives. The bus hisses and stops. I close my eyes with dread. This is the point of the morning where I start pretending to be asleep.
“Here he comes,” Tracy says in a low voice. Then, as if she wants to see if I am really drifting off, she tells me, “Sometimes he picks a girl to sit on his lap. He can’t finger nobody, but they can sit there and feel his you-know-what.”
My eyes pop open. I look doubtfully toward Ravenna.
“She don’t drive every night,” Tracy says. “She’s got her class.”
“I know you’re not about to smoke that on my bus,” Ravenna says as Cecil Goode makes his way up the ramp. His head appears over the first seat, an unlit cigarette in his mouth.
“You’re early,” he says around the cigarette.
“Same time I get here every day.”
“If you say so,” says Cecil when he reaches the top of the ramp.
“I say that and a whole lot more,” says Ravenna.
“A whole lot more,” Cecil agrees. He shoulders his way down the aisle. “You got more words in one morning than most people got all day.”
“Pearls of wisdom,” Ravenna says, “cast before swine.”
Ravenna doesn’t move the bus, though, until Cecil’s settled himself in. When the rest of us first get on, we have to get to our seats fast before she lays on the gas and whatever we’re carrying goes flying. But Cecil she waits for, sassing him the whole time, letting him sass her back, even though he’s a kid and white, and even though people down here say “nigger” this and “nigger” that like it’s just information. And he always lets her have the last word, even though she’s black and a woman.
When Cecil reaches our seat, he leans over Tracy. “Hold on to this for me,” he says, “and don’t smoke it, neither.” Tracy pinches the cigarette from his mouth and opens her purse. “Girl?” Cecil says, and I almost answer “She won’t” for her, out of distress, but then he’s looking right at me with his light amber eyes. “What?” he says. “You want your own cigarette?” I open my mouth and try to look somewhere else, which ends up being at his
empty sleeve. My neck burns. “Look at me,” he says. “You were all fired up to look a second ago.” He knocks Tracy’s shoulder with his gleaming chrome claw. “What’s her name?”
“Charmaine,” Tracy says, dropping the cigarette into her purse.
“No,” I manage to say.
“Her name’s Charmaine,” Tracy says, screwing up her face at me like I’ve gone crazy.
“No, I don’t want my own cigarette,” I say.
“Listen up, ladies’ man,” says Ravenna. Her eyes appear in the sliver of one of the complicated rearview mirrors. “I got a route, here.”
Cecil Goode just nods like he’s amused. He moves on by, and I let out my breath.
“Cousin,” Cecil says from two seats back. “You tell your friend there that if she likes to look, there’s a lot more to see.”
“I’m a telephone operator now?” Tracy calls back to him. “You hear?” she says to me.
“Yeah.”
“You scared?” Tracy says.
I shrug and try to move my eyebrows bravely, carelessly.
“You are,” she says. She digs her pen into the seat in front of us, opening up a space between stitches. “You really are a dumbass. He’s only mean because he likes you, and he only likes you because you’re prissy.”
I don’t know what’s hardest to believe, that Cecil Goode likes me, that I am prissy, or that prissy could be why he likes me.
“You know what prissy means?” Tracy asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “Do you?”
“You think I’m stupid?”
“No one ever called me ‘prissy’ before.”
“You’re all carry-your-books-to-school-every-day. You talk like people on TV.”
“Which ones?”
Tracy throws up her hands. “All of them. Or like a teacher. You talk like a teacher, through your nose, like you think you’re better than everyone.” She pinches her nose with her thumb and forefinger. “At my church you just get a little sprinkle,” she says in a high nasal, wiggling her shoulders back and forth. “Baptismal font. I don’t want my own cigarette.”
Lay It on My Heart Page 9