The Penny

by Joyce Meyer

  “Mother boiled my hands with the canning jars. She held them down so long, I wanted to die. Not just because of how the water cooked my skin on the outside, but because of how it killed me on the inside.” Miss Shaw said, “Not many people know how it feels to be so hurt on the inside that you’d rather die than live with it.”

  But I do. Oh, I do. I couldn’t hear past the roaring in my ears. I physically ached for her, in a way I never could have grieved for myself. And yet, I did mourn for myself. Touching Miss Shaw’s wounded hands brought me up against every crippling wound that lay inside me.

  Her bare fingers lay slender and scarred and cool in my palm. I couldn’t take my eyes from them, I suddenly loved them so. “Your hands are beautiful.”

  “Are they?”

  I raised them to my face and touched their coolness to the side of my cheek. “Yes.” I lifted my eyes to hers.

  I began to sob uncontrollably, and Miss Shaw gathered me into her arms and held me in such a way that I felt secure for the first time I could ever remember. She let me cry for a long time until she finally asked me if I wanted to talk about anything. I opened my mouth intending to say no, but the truth started pouring from my lips and did not stop until I had shared everything with Miss Shaw about what Daddy did to Jean and me and how Mama did nothing to help us. I told her how afraid I felt every minute of my life. Miss Shaw cried with me and assured me that she understood and would help me in any way that she could.

  Miss Shaw might never know how telling me the truth about her life had given me courage to tell her the truth, too.

  I told her how I resented Mama and was ashamed that she didn’t love us enough to protect us. Miss Shaw told me that she understood about feeling ashamed.

  “I never wanted to mark her grave, you see. I never wanted to inscribe a name to it that said, ‘My Mother.’ Because to inscribe even that much on her stone meant I had to admit that the person I wanted to care about me the most was the person who made me believe the worst about myself.”

  I couldn’t believe Miss Shaw was telling me these things. I couldn’t believe it had happened in her life, too. She’s done a fine job of hiding it, I thought.

  “After a while, I wouldn’t let myself care anymore. I thought I had buried my pain with her, but actually I buried it inside myself where it silently continued to hurt me. I tried to hide it just as I tried to hide the scars on my hands.” Miss Shaw nodded toward her gloves on the table beside us.

  I reminded her, “But you go and sit beside her. That’s what everyone gossips about. You should hear what they say.”

  “She died soon after, while my hands were still bandaged, before I had the chance to forgive her. It took me a long time to forgive her in my heart. I go to that grave every day to remind her—and myself—that I forgive her now. That Jesus sees our big hurts and our small hurts, and offers grace to heal them all.”

  Her words touched a place deep inside me.

  I’d wanted to trust Miss Shaw for so long, but Daddy had it so I had a hard time trusting anybody.

  “Haven’t you heard that God gives one of his most delightful gifts when he gives people to each other? I believe God has given us to each other.” She paused. “Don’t ever let someone pass off this earth without forgiving them, Jenny. Unforgiveness will hurt you every day of your life. Just see how it hurts me.”

  So many times in the past I’d put a clamp on my heart, refusing to let her see what was inside me. But something broke in me that day, and I finally felt free to pour forth my questions and views about many things. We talked for what seemed like hours.

  “You’ve been hiding your hands from me and everybody else,” I mentioned. “So, are you going to keep hiding them from Del Henry?”

  Her maid, Doris, had brought us a pot of tea, and Miss Shaw filled the cup at my side. I said, “I sure don’t think Del Henry comes into your shop to buy charms for his granddaughter.”

  Color rose in her cheeks. I’d never seen Miss Shaw blush before. I said, “Now that I’ve been to your house, I think you should have Del Henry over, too. I think you ought to have him over for dinner. I know he’d jump at the chance to be with you.”

  All the time I’d known her, I’d never seen her speechless. Because I knew what we shared, Miss Shaw meant more than anything to me now. I wanted to be there for her and save her from being alone. “I knew you liked Del Henry. Anybody could have seen through that plan.”

  “What plan? Jenny Blake, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The bricks. Nobody uses bricks in a jewelry store! You wanted bricks in your window because you knew Del Henry collects bricks. You thought it would give him a reason to come into the store and see you!”

  “Oh, that,” she commented as, barehanded, she sipped her tea with great innocence. “Well, it worked, didn’t it?”

  “It worked.”

  “What more could I ask for, then?”

  “There is another thing you could ask for,” I hinted mysteriously.

  She waited with the question in her eyes. Yes?

  My voice went as conspiratorial as Jean’s was when she told me the latest gossip she’d heard on our party line. I proceeded to tell Miss Shaw everything I’d observed while I’d worked on her watch displays. I told her how Del Henry had checked his reflection in the mirror at least a dozen times, and how he’d adjusted his new suit, and how Joe had teased him because it was from Boyd’s.

  “And there’s something else, too. Be prepared, because one of these days, he’s going to ask you to Rigazzi’s for Italian.”

  “Well, can’t he see?” she said with a little humph of impatience. “That’s exactly what I’d like him to do!” Then, “If Delbert likes Italian, I could certainly bake some lasagna. I could fix veal parmesan. Or even spaghetti and meatballs. What do you think?”

  “How am I supposed to know what you ought to fix him?” I asked her. “You think I know everything?”

  “Oh, Jenny,” she said, laughing. “Sometimes I think you do.”

  Miss Shaw wore a satisfied grin for the rest of my visit and I felt important for my part in it. When I left that evening, even though the sky was already dark and the moon was beginning to appear and I knew Daddy would let loose on me the second I stepped through the door so late in the evening, I felt like I’d stepped out into light.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I couldn’t have known, when I walked along with the jostle of students the next morning, that Aurelia and I were about to start out on one of the most astonishing days of our lives. There wasn’t a thing that could have warned either of us as I shoved my satchel inside my locker and slammed the door hard to make it stay shut. It was only the second day of school and I’d already committed a vast fashion mistake with my satchel. Everybody else carried their books bound by a belt.

  Mrs. Huffines started us off simply enough that day with eighth-grade math. I could only guess that they were working on the same fractions, decimals, and percentages next door in the portables. Mrs. Huffines resembled a homing pigeon as she paced across the front of the room, her derriere swinging to and fro. She was right in the middle of demonstrating how to divide a four-digit decimal number by a two-digit decimal number (you first place the dividend above the division bracket, then you place the divisor beneath it. You multiply them both by ten so they’re no longer decimals but whole numbers) when the sirens began to sound.

  We froze in our seats, looking at each other, trying to figure out what we were supposed to do. The siren keened up the scale and then stayed there, shrieking.

  “Be orderly, please,” Mrs. Huffines said, her instructions suddenly very pointed. “This is an air-raid drill in case of nuclear attack,” she told us in such a calm manner that we realized the teachers had been given prior warning. “The way we take action today might very well save our lives someday.”

  This was about the most exciting thing that had happened to us in a schoolroom since Toby Wallace did his science project on
how the size of a pumpkin relates to the force needed to break it. We filed into the hallway as directed, sat in a line against the wall, and positioned our heads between our knees. Even in this pose we couldn’t help conferring with each other.

  “Expect they’ll take us down the street to the fallout shelter?”

  “It’s happened! The A-bomb. They’ve launched it!”

  With our heads positioned between our knees, it was impossible to tell who was talking. Muffled voices went up and down the line.

  “I’ll bet they saw something coming toward us in the sky.”

  “I think I saw something.”

  “You can’t see anything. You have your head down!”

  “I don’t mean now. I mean then. I saw something in the sky right before the alarm.”

  “Well, I hope you can see the stitches in your pants right now.”

  “Shut up, why don’t you?”

  “We’re goners, all right. It’ll hit any minute.”

  After half an hour of making sure we weren’t about to get wiped off the map, Mrs. Huffines herded us back to the room to pick up on decimals where we’d left off. But suddenly I smelled an odd mixture of smoke and melting plastic. Running to the window, I saw smoke churning out from under the portables’ bathroom. Set loose by the bomb drill at last, Andrew Scott and Charlie Bidden must have seen the perfect opportunity to make good on their cherry-bomb-the-portable-bathroom plans.

  Mrs. Connor compared notes with Mr. Lancaster. “We’re going to have to bring the whole school outside until the coast is clear. I could have told you those weeds would ignite. At least everyone’s accounted for.”

  “Is it cherry bombs?” I asked stupidly.

  She didn’t seem to hear and went right on talking in Mr. Lancaster’s ear. “Portables. What a nuisance. I don’t know whose idea this was in the first place. If these colored children had stayed where they were supposed to stay, in their own brick building, I can tell you for sure that building wouldn’t ignite. Now this is going to be mass hysteria.”

  It didn’t look like hysteria to me. Mrs. Connor liked to make a production out of everything. Except for the excitement over the smoldering grass that threatened to make headway in the direction of the National Bank, and Mr. Lancaster picking up the hose to spray around the portable and douse the blackened grass, the mishap didn’t seem all that threatening. Mr. Lancaster rattled around inside the main building for a while, making sure nothing inside had caught fire. Until he gave us the all clear, we stood in the yard and sized each other up, the portable kids and those of us who went to class in the real-brick building. It was our first chance, as an entire class, to be in the yard at the same time and get a good look at each other.

  “Come on, students.” Mrs. Huffines clapped her hands. “Back inside. We’re free to go and we’re wasting time.”

  But nobody moved.

  “Come on, students. Math is over—and we’re halfway through the history period and we haven’t even started on the lesson.”

  Maybe it was just the same as Monday nights on the Admiral, where everyone was so used to judging people’s worth by the shade of their skin. Maybe somebody made a comment to somebody else, and that’s what got everybody shinnied up. Maybe it started because somebody looked across the yard and thought of the protestors marching with their signs, yelling that different colors shouldn’t mix.

  One minute we were standing around wishing for a way to miss out on history period entirely, and the next, most of the white kids I knew had taken off through the weeds toward the damaged portable, their footprints smudging the burned grass. As soon as they pushed against it, one side of the schoolroom lifted. It hung in the air for the longest time before it dropped to the ground again. The portable pitched to one side like a railroad car jostling over a snag in the track. The other side lifted, smashing down to the ground with splintering wood, shattering glass.

  Kids got on every side, rocking the whole building. Farther and farther it tilted as erasers took wing and wooden chairs cartwheeled out and insulation flew and a spelling book fluttered to the playground like a battered sparrow.

  “Oh, of course you’re not going to do this,” Rosalyn shrieked at me as she jumped in to shove, too. “They can take their portables, all right! Send these things back where they ought to have stayed.”

  Somebody else shouted, “Now this is really rock-and-roll!”

  Aurelia and her classmates huddled around the colored grammar schoolers, their eyebrows knit together in indignation, too shocked to do anything but watch. I saw it all, and the same thing came up in me then that had come up when I faced Darnell on the first day of school. The meanness that had spilled over from Daddy, that I hadn’t known was in me, filled me up until there was no room for anything else.

  Suddenly I wanted to rough up the portables, too. I wanted to stand beneath the rain of glass and listen to the dented tin echo as loud and hollow as a kettle drum. I wanted to be powerful. Not powerful with love, not powerful with greatness, but powerful with the ability to crush something and see it destroyed.

  I felt it soul-deep, a dark authority that urged me on in a voice that sounded like Daddy’s. If I went out and smashed up something myself, maybe that would fend off everything that hurt inside of me. Because the harder I try to hurt something, the more I can keep from feeling the shame in me.

  Rosalyn’s fingers were real cut up, and her knuckles oozed blood when I ran up beside her. Down the way, one of our teachers had retrieved a tire iron from his car and started prying loose the pre-fab panels the way you’d peel away a deviled-ham can. I glanced at Mr. Lancaster and Mrs. Connor to see if they’d get as mad at these grown-up teachers as they’d gotten at the cherry-bomb boys. But they stared ahead like they didn’t see. I guess they figured it was out of their hands.

  With my own knotted fists, I pummeled the ruined walls. I detested my hands because they resembled Daddy’s. I hated my stumpy fingers because they were shaped like his. But even though I loathed the malice rising in me, the harder I hit, the better I felt. Rosalyn glanced at me with approval. I’d moved up several notches in her estimation, I could see. As the portable fell toward us, Rosalyn shielded her face with injured hands, and I shoved the wall so hard that I felt it clear to my backbone. The door flew off its hinges. It lurched onto the other side again, with loose school supplies launching through the shattered windows. Some teacher’s purse must’ve opened up, or somebody’s lunch money must have come free from its handkerchief, because right then, over my head, an arch of pennies sailed out—a spray of stars, glinting copper in the sun, like a gift, pausing in the light overhead, reminding me that Jesus saw, that he cared, that he loved me no matter what I’d done, that he loved me no matter what had happened to me. Everywhere I turned, pennies rained on me like grace. Rosalyn raised her hands to shield her face, and I raised my hands to catch pennies.

  I wasn’t going to let Daddy’s anger turn me into a person like him. I had wanted to break things, and here I was with pennies instead. As I bent to gather them up, their divine message to me ripped the force right out from under my anger. Pennies lay everywhere at my feet, mixed with shards of glass and slivers of asbestos and tin.

  I picked up as many as I could and shoved them into my pockets. Rosalyn kept right on shoving the wall away, and she took it on herself to let me know she thought I was shirking my job.

  “You’re so stupid, Jenny, you don’t even know how to knock a portable building down.”

  Well, no. I didn’t. It had never been high on my list of things to learn. From that moment, seeing what was going on inside me, seeing all those pennies flying overhead, Rosalyn Keys ceased to annoy me. I guess that was the moment I could first see it—how a person’s words said a whole lot more about the person who said them than they did about the person they were said to.

  Leave it to Aurelia to be brave enough to walk right up to me in the middle of the whole thing. I sighed deep. What could she want now, after she’d gi
ven me the cold shoulder and said, in no uncertain terms, that she didn’t want a thing to do with me?

  I soon found out.

  “Jenny, I can’t find Garland.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t find Garland?”

  “He isn’t with his class.”

  “He has to be.”

  “Well, he isn’t.”

  Garland had to be around somewhere, I knew it. With my eyes shaded, I surveyed the kindergarten class assembled in the shade of an ash tree. His teacher sat on the ground in the middle of the pack, playing finger games and reciting stories, anything to keep them from crying. The portable hung in the air again, and in that instant, it got so quiet you could hear the buzz of people talking, the elegant trill of a cardinal in a tree overhead. By the time the portable came down with its resounding crash, Aurelia had gone to check Garland’s class again. When she turned to me from a distance, she shook her head.

  Aurelia must have said something, because I saw the teacher stir. I heard someone shout from one group to another. Garland’s teacher came running with her skirts flailing, sweat sheening her burnt-coffee-colored face, leaving her flock behind to find one little lost lamb.

  The portable slipped sideways and, for one split second, I caught a glimpse inside the window. I could just make out the black silhouettes of the presidents of the United States on the tattered display. Every president from George Washington clear through to Dwight D. Eisenhower. The portrait of Abraham Lincoln, crisp as a kettle, stared into space with a grizzled beard and lips that slipped into a half-smile.

  My heart knotted inside my throat. I shoved my hands into both pockets and felt the warm copper of all the pennies there. Just like the stained-glass wheat I’d spied at Aurelia’s church, that side view of Abraham Lincoln was on every coin I’d just finished stuffing into my pocket.

  When you live with somebody who hits you all the time, you just get used to doing things scared. I grabbed Rosalyn’s arm and she tried to shake me off.