The Distance Home

by Paula Saunders

  “Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and personal Savior? Do you renounce the sin and pain and confusion of this world, and will you follow our Lord Jesus Christ in every step of your life from this day forward?”

  She was eleven. She nodded, letting the tears roll off her cheeks.

  Wilkerson placed his hands on her head and prayed, and she felt the light and heat, the love and power and blessing. It was true. There was love and power, unending. There was a fountain of protection and forgiveness and renewal all around, showering everyone in light and color continuously, if only you knew how to close your eyes and see it.

  Then Wilkerson put his hands on either side of her face, wiping her tears away with his open palms.

  “You belong to Jesus,” he said to her. “God loves you so much. No matter how hard you tried, you could never measure the depths of God’s love.”

  * * *

  —

  From then on, René sat with the youth group in the very last pew, and when there was a call to testify, she stood and said she’d been saved at the Wilkerson Crusade, telling how since that day she just wanted to do everything for Jesus. Whenever Eve came to church, even from the back row René could sense her embarrassment as the other grown-ups turned to hear René witness and the preacher peppered whatever she had to say with “Praise Jesus” and “Praise the Lord for our young folks bound for glory.”

  “I’m happy for you, René,” Eve said one day on their way home. “I was raised Catholic, and I guess we just weren’t encouraged to make a show of it. But your father’s side is full of preachers. They’re Bible-thumpers from way back.”

  Eve talked about these “so-called Christian” relatives often enough. One of them had tried to French-kiss her in the kitchen while Al stood right outside in the driveway. She thought they were a bunch of hypocrites.

  “Looks like you got the preacher gene,” Eve said.

  And more and more often, René found that the one thing she wanted to do for Jesus most of all was to turn off the vulgar pop music Eve liked listening to on the car radio. “I can’t listen to that,” she’d say, reaching up to switch it off. “I’m a Christian now.”

  Though Eve wouldn’t protest, would simply crease her eyebrows and draw her lips into a thin line, the long, silent drives would be a trial unto themselves, edgy and complicated, unnerving.

  * * *

  —

  When Al finally started coming home again, René would butter him up at the dinner table, telling jokes and stories about her day, debating with him about everything—school, government, Indians—as the rest of the family ate silently, not looking up from their plates.

  “So, he says to me,” Al was saying, telling a story about a man who’d been struck by lightning three times, speaking mainly to René because the others didn’t seem the least interested. “He says, ‘I must be the luckiest guy in the world.’ Ha! Struck by lightning! Blown straight out of his boots! Three times!”

  They both laughed.

  “Luckiest guy in the world, you bet.”

  His stories were outrageous, involving high-stakes poker backed by nothing but lint, midnight falls into waist-high snowdrifts while trying to round up freezing livestock, and natural wonders like meteors streaking green and blue, chasing him as he drove through the darkest prairie nights. René loved them, and through the wide avenue of his joy in recounting them, she loved him.

  Eve saw it differently. “He’s a born cattle dealer,” she’d say as soon as he was out of earshot. “He certainly knows how to shoot the shit.”

  And Leon would keep himself and his ever-growing bald spot as far out of the picture as possible, at every turn running outside or up to his room.

  Then one day, when Eve and René were in the middle of one of their myriad skirmishes, Eve happened to say, “Oh, René, you’re just like your dad,” which meant not that she hated her, exactly, but that she found her repugnant, reprehensible, that René was selfish, superior, unfeeling, ungenerous, a liar.

  After that, if Eve said it once, she said it a thousand times.

  So, even though from all appearances it seemed she was mistaken, René didn’t feel wrong in blaming Eve for what had happened. Whose job was it to protect them if not hers? She was the one. And as René watched Eve becoming more and more angry and distant—striking at whatever came within reach, turning to reveal the steely, slit eyes of a viper—she found herself firmly dug in with Al.

  Still, some days it would seem that all the trouble between them was just a fluke, as if Eve and René had simply been out of step, listening to different music. Without being able to say why, they’d end up sharing goodbye kisses in the morning and fresh-baked cookies in the afternoon. It was unpredictable. Yet regardless of the seeming surface of the day, they both understood that there’d been a shift, a realignment of the planets that no amount of effort could put right, and they were each set, continuously, on their guards.

  21

  Twinkle Toes

  Leon spent most of his time in his room with the door shut, his new PRIVATE! DO NOT ENTER! sign dominating the upstairs hallway. But when he wasn’t home, René would go in and rummage around in his things.

  Mrs. G had taken a trip to Florida and mailed them a Sugar Daddy caramel bar larger than their torsos. “Looks like she’s giving what she’d like to get,” Eve had said, opening the oversized package and holding up the enormous sucker in wonder. “What am I going to do with this?”

  She’d put it high in Leon’s closet, so that was one thing worth going in for. Plus, Leon had his records in there. There was Paul Revere and the Raiders, and Whipped Cream by the Tijuana Brass, the first album Leon had ever bought, which René guessed he’d chosen for the cover with the naked lady sitting in cream, finger in her mouth.

  So René was busy going through his drawers one day when she found them—Marlboro Reds, in a flip-top, about half of them gone.

  “Leon’s smoking!” she called, charging down the stairs.

  Eve smacked her dish towel against the counter just inches from where René had come to a stop.

  “Don’t be a tattletale,” she said. “And stay out of his room.”

  “Okay, but he’s smoking,” René said, putting on what Eve liked to call her high-and-mighty voice, “so you probably want to know.”

  “Go on,” Eve warned, “unless you want something to do.” Which meant she had vacuuming or dusting if René was going to hang around. “Just leave the cigarettes.”

  When Leon got home, he was in trouble, and Eve didn’t bother to hide the fact that René had told on him. She didn’t do anything about it, really, just took away his cigarettes and told him not to smoke. Then Leon ran up to his room and slammed the door.

  He stayed in there all night, coming out only just before bedtime to stand in the girls’ doorway as René was reading a small-print Bible and Jayne was sniffing miniature Kiddle Kologne dolls in their perfume bottles.

  “Stay out of my room, René,” he said, towering over her, somehow inflating himself with righteousness. He was tall, and if she hadn’t known how tender-hearted he was, she might have been intimidated. “Just keep out of my room,” he said again when she didn’t answer, his voice softening, almost pleading.

  “Then don’t smoke,” she said, holding up her Bible. “God loves you, you know.”

  Leon shook his head and rolled his eyes at her like she didn’t have one idea what she was talking about. But she’d also found an envelope in Leon’s drawer addressed to “LeonRStoned” from one of his friends, a kid Al really didn’t like—though, as Eve said, Al didn’t like any of Leon’s friends. She didn’t know exactly what it meant, but she knew better than to tell anyone about it.

  * * *

  —

  Leon continued taking ballet classes even after his junior high gym teacher called him “Twinkle Toes” in fr
ont of the whole school, at assembly.

  “That’s just idiotic,” Eve said when Leon told her. “And inexcusable. I’m going to have a talk with your principal.”

  “Don’t,” Leon said. “I never should have told you. Just leave it alone. Just forget it. It was probably my fault ’cause I was late getting to the gym.”

  These were more words than Leon had put together in three months.

  It wouldn’t have mattered how many seasons René and Jayne had dragged back and forth from the bleachers to the concession stand for Lemonheads and rainbow taffy while Leon pitched shutouts, or how many times Leon had been selected for the all-star team, or that Eve had become so well acquainted with the rules of baseball that she’d been elected official league scorekeeper for the past three years. All anyone needed to know was that Leon studied ballet, which to ranchers and sons of ranchers, cattlemen and sons of cattlemen, farmers and sons of farmers—who’d grown up with an open horizon stretching before them, the smell of earth and grain and hard work filling their nostrils, and the firm belief that they knew what was what and weren’t going to be bamboozled by some fancy, newfangled, citified way of thinking—meant only one thing: homo, freak, weirdo, faggot, queer, fairy, “Twinkle Toes.” And coming up against that was like standing in front of a moving wall of water and asking it to turn around.

  “I know he shouldn’t have been late to assembly,” Eve said to the principal over the phone the next day. “Still, that doesn’t mean a teacher should be able to get away with purposely demeaning a student in front of the whole school. Honestly. My husband and I are going to want to discuss this with you and that P.E. instructor,” she said. “I don’t want this to just be forgotten.”

  “Of course,” the principal said.

  “First of all,” Eve continued, “your teachers have no right to humiliate kids, especially with ridiculous, ignorant remarks like that. And second, for goodness sakes, the gym teacher, of all people, should know that ballet is very athletic. Even professional athletes take ballet class to develop strength and coordination. It’s just asinine.”

  “It’d be good to hear all sides,” the principal replied, obviously amused.

  “Believe me,” Eve shot back, enraged at his condescension, his attempt to turn this into something that looked like it had two sides, something less than a clear-cut violation of manners and trust, “I’ll let you know when my husband’s in town, and you make sure that P.E. teacher of yours is available. I have a few choice things I’d like to say to him. Ignoramus being number one!”

  When Al got back home and Eve told him what had happened, he just looked at her. He just stood there and looked at her, blank.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well?” he said back. “Well, what?”

  “Well, what are you going to do about it, Al?” She was already wound up, already drowning in layers of prefigured rancor and indignation.

  “Well,” Al said. “To tell the truth, I’m certainly not going to make a federal case out of it.” He turned away from her. He was just off the road after a long week and there was already steam coming out of her ears. All he wanted was something to eat. “You got anything a guy can have for dinner around here?”

  “I’ve told that principal we’re coming in for a meeting with that damn P.E. teacher,” Eve said.

  “Oh, Eve. For heaven sakes.”

  She’d gone out on a limb, walked the plank, and now he was going to say, Go ahead. Jump. She should have known. She should have known better.

  “What in the hell do you mean by that, Al?”

  “I mean, I guess you can go right ahead,” Al said. “Feel free.”

  “So, you’re not coming with me?”

  “No. I’m not coming with you.”

  “And if it was René who’d been embarrassed like that, in front of the whole goddamn school, then would you come with me?”

  “What in the sam hell are you talking about, Eve?”

  “I’m talking about you!” Eve said, overcome, the familiar fury and despair welling into her eyes.

  “Then it’s the same old story,” Al said. “No need repeating it.” He was looking in the refrigerator, taking out the cottage cheese.

  “Do you really mean to tell me you are not willing to go with me to talk to those idiots about what they did to Leon?”

  “I think you’ve picked up the general gist,” Al said. “Yes. That is exactly what I mean.”

  “Just like that. Just let your son be treated like a second-class citizen by anybody, by the whole goddamn world.”

  “I’m tired, Eve. I just walked in the door after driving five hundred miles today. I’m not going anywhere, and I’m not doing anything other than finding myself something to eat, apparently. And as far as I’m concerned, this whole ballet deal with Leon is your mess. It’s what you wanted for him, and you got your way. So, if there’s a problem, which I don’t doubt there is—I do not doubt it, no sir—I trust you can handle it. To tell the truth, I don’t know what else you expected. We don’t live in some big city. Lord knows, I tried to tell you that way back. Way, way back.”

  “He’s good at it,” Eve said. “And it’s good for him. You know that.”

  “Be that as it may,” Al said. “It doesn’t change the facts.”

  “I guess I’m not surprised. Why should I be surprised by you acting like nothing around here has anything to do with you?”

  “Now you’re talking,” Al said.

  And that was it.

  Eve stomped off to her sewing machine, filled her mouth with straight pins, and muttered to herself as she lined up some of the alterations that needed doing. And Al sat by himself in the kitchen, eating whatever he could find in the fridge before going to bed and falling into a heavy, snoring sleep.

  Neither of them mentioned it again except from time to time as years went by, generally deep in the middle of the night when they were lost in some bitter, screaming ramblings about what had gone wrong—or when, for René’s benefit and edification, Eve would once again go over the litany of what a shame it was that Al had never stood up for Leon.

  “He’d go in for you,” she’d say to René, like a ricocheted bullet finding its home. “Sure. He’d be right there for you, but not for Leon. You think that might have made a difference?”

  René could only nod.

  “He was always right there for you,” she’d repeat, shaking her head.

  “Yes,” René would say, suddenly introspective and cross, looking for both an easy exit and a rock she could use to defend herself, to deal her own blow. “He certainly was.”

  22

  Revelations

  Emma came to visit and spoke in René’s ear about white slavery, about girls her age being taken, made to do unspeakable things. Emma shuddered to think of it. She was thrilled that René was now a “young person of the Lord,” she said, though René was beginning to wonder. She wasn’t turning out to be a natural Christian.

  When someone in her youth ministry class had unveiled a LIFE, PASS IT ON! poster, René had been the one who’d giggled and poked the girl next to her, raising her eyebrows in the direction of the one cute boy. “Does that mean what I think it means?” she tried.

  “Cut it out,” the girl had growled at her. “That’s not funny.”

  “Such a pretty thing,” Emma whispered, tsking and shaking her head as if René’s fate were sealed. “Don’t trust anyone. Not anyone. You have to be so careful.”

  At school, René’s class had been studying mythology, so Emma’s warnings instantly brought to mind Persephone, who’d been kidnapped by Hades and forced to rule as Queen of the Dead. Each year, she’d be captive in the Underworld until spring, when her mother, the Goddess of Nature, would come to take her home. On Persephone’s return, the sun would shine and green grasses lift their heads, because her mother was s
o overjoyed to see her again.

  But with the way things were going, if René were to be carried off by the King of Hell, she doubted her mother would come for her. More likely, Eve would take her disappearance as a blessing.

  Still, according to Emma, white slavery meant being kidnapped by someone far worse than the Lord of Death.

  “You’ll only wish you could die,” Emma told her.

  At night, while everyone else was downstairs watching Gunsmoke, Emma read to René from Revelation, stressing passages about the devil’s horsemen, the coming earthquakes, the rain of fire, when smoke would rise from the Great Abyss to blot out the sun. The sun would turn to ash, the moon to blood, as stars rocketed from the sky. People would try to hide themselves in the mountains, praying for the rocks to fall and crush them. This was the Great Tribulation, when anyone not marked by the Seal of Christ would be tormented beyond imagining. Emma read and gasped.

  To René, it all seemed somehow familiar. Like Prometheus, who’d stolen fire from the gods and ended up chained to a cliff, his liver endlessly pecked out by a circling eagle, or Pandora, who’d opened a forbidden box and accidentally filled the whole world with suffering—they were all in line to pay, she figured, one way or another. You just never knew how it was going to happen. You could be condemned and left behind to suffer the Tribulation because of a single thought you hadn’t meant to think; opening the smallest gift, you could unwittingly unleash a horde of winged furies; off by yourself, picking flowers, you could wind up being taken straight to hell without having committed a single crime. You couldn’t run from the devil’s horsemen, just like you wouldn’t win fighting a three-headed dog. And you’d never be able to recognize the Antichrist, no matter how hard you tried.

  “He’ll wear a blue turban,” Emma told her. “You have to remember that. He’ll be charming, famous, charismatic. No one will see that he’s really a serpent!”