Saint Monkey

by Jacinda Townsend

  Sims sat in the room and watched him grind in the circles with his pencil and finish the test just as fast as he had back in June, and he tapped his forehead, Lindell said, like he was making sure the day was real.

  “Stay put a minute, boy,” he said. Lindell tapped his foot and twirled his hat brim while Sims compared the answers from Lindell’s first and second tests. “You changed one,” Sims said. “You changed the one you got wrong the first time.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lindell said, trying to be right nice so maybe the man would let him leave. “Between now and then, I’ve added the word ‘phaeton’ to my vocabulary, courtesy of Webster’s Dictionary. It’s a type of ancient carriage—did you know?”

  Before Sims touched Lindell, he tapped his own forehead all over again. “Son,” he said, testing Lindell’s shoulder like he was seeing if it was flesh, “do you know you are the only recruit in the history of this office to score in the ninety-ninth percentile of the AFQT? You qualify for Coast Guard. Air Force. Hell,” Sims said, and with his excitement, his hill accent started to show up, “you could probably go to pilot school. You could do radar repair. Hell, son, smart as you are, you could make a general.” Sims nodded fast. “How about it, son? Air Force or Coast Guard? I got to re-send this test, but that’s just a formality.”

  “Sir, as I said before, what I really want is to play in the band, so—”

  “Right, right. They don’t put tubas on boats. We’ll sign you up for the Air Force.”

  Sims fixed him right up the minute the test come back, and I do remember when Lindell got called down to Lackland, since it was about that time me and Audrey got baptized. We weren’t that good of friends, then, I reckon because we were the girls what got picked on most in school, and we knew that running round together’d be kind of like water rising only so far as its own level. That spring when Lindell left we were both fourteen, which at Second Baptist is kind of like being seventy, if you ain’t been saved—the preacher will mind you that much over your lost soul. Matter fact, me and Audrey was the oldest girls in church who still ain’t accepted the Lord. Mama was still living then, and she kept saying it was because we reckoned we was smarter than anybody else. I think we was both just angrier down in our hearts.

  I still wouldn’t of been saved, neither, weren’t for Audrey Martin, for warn’t no holy feeling sent me to the front of the church to that empty folding chair, no voice of God nor no dream of Moses neither. It was jealousy, p.o.d. jealousy, what sent me up there to that deacon and his empty chair.

  Lindell was down in Texas mailing home half his pay, which meant Audrey was getting picked on a lot less, because ever time her mama opened that envelope full of money, she stopped drinking long enough to hit the stores. Audrey still talked more proper than any of us thought necessary—she couldn’t help herself on account of that book-eating daddy of her’n—but her mama went down to Taylor’s and bought a pair of saddle shoes with the middles so black, people couldn’t hear how long her words were for staring at theirselves in the shine. Her mama bought fancy little writing pens with caps to match the color of ink inside, and lace bobby socks enough for ever day of the week. Which left me kind of the odd girl out at school. So, that last Sunday of revival, when Audrey ran up there and flopped her sadicty ass down in one of them three folding chairs, I got mad as hell.

  Reverend Owington been talking that day about Pharisees or Saducees, or maybe plain old Jews—I don’t remember myself which, because naturally all us children sat in the back pews and did everthing but listen. We whispered, and we drew notes and flowers on the church bulletins, and we linked our feet and swung them in a chain all the way down the pew, and we always had a right good time until someone got too loud or slapped somebody else upside the head, and then Reverend Owington would stop his sermon to make us all go set on the front row. Even then—matter fact, specially then—we didn’t listen, because setting up front, we was all struck deaf with fear. All three of them preachers could watch our arms and legs then, and all our mamas and daddies and grandmamas and schoolteachers could watch the backs of our heads to see if we moved. We rocked on our haunches to toughen them up for when we got home. One Sunday, when we got called to the front of church, Imagene peed her dress.

  Anyway, back pew or front pew, we children never heard the sermon, lessun the preacher got to talking about lust or sins of the flesh, but that ain’t necessarily speaking for Audrey, because she always been just the type to actually listen to grown-up talk and make sense of it. Whatever it was Pastor said or didn’t say that Sunday about them Pharisees, it got Audrey up out of the back pew and sent her straight down to that folding chair. It was so close after the end of the sermon that Owington was still wiping sweat off’n his forehead, and a couple of old ladies was still passed out on the floor from getting happy. Harry Greaves, the biggest fattest deacon in church, was standing to the side of those three rusty chairs he always got out for Invitation, and the church was on their feet singing and looking right at nobody but him, which always made him fiddle with his jacket buttons. You’d think he’d of got used to people looking at him after all them years of Invitation, but ever Sunday faithful, he got up and we got up and us getting up made him fiddle with his jacket buttons, and generally nobody joined church anyway, so the chair stayed empty, which made him fiddle with his buttons even more.

  That Sunday Audrey went down there, Greaves got hisself all spun into action, nodding and asking, “Let the church say amen.” Audrey’s Great-Aunt Hesterline started stamping her feet and screaming, “Thank you, Jesus!” Danaitha didn’t cry nor shout. She just bent a lazy crook in her mouth, smiled so small she might just as well have been watching a dead leaf sail down the river. She didn’t have to get herself happy about Jesus no more on account of she was getting that good Army money through the mail and that was better’n anybody’s revival. It like to make me spit nails.

  So just when Harry Greaves got out his pencil and pad and Miss Aileen started playing the last verse of “I Do, Don’t You?” and Deacon Britton got up and started folding one of them rusty chairs, just when it looked like Audrey might be the star of the show that day, I went on down there myself. When I stood up off the back pew, Britton unfolded that chair right quick, and Miss Aileen started her song over at verse one. It was the longest walk, down that church aisle. Felt like ten mile. A walk full of knowing I warn’t doing right, and wondering if God might cause the roof to fall in on my head. While I was walking, the church got about two thousand times louder. Them ladies down front had came to, but two girls getting right with Jesus ’stead of one like to make them pass out all over again. All the old people got to stamping their feet and carrying on, and the air got thicker and hotter, and my mama started crying into her dress sleeve, and Imagene and the other little girls got to laughing and making faces at me from the back pew, because by then, the sanctuary was so whipped up, wasn’t nobody watching them.

  When Harry Greaves came over to my chair and pushed his glasses back up his nose, his face didn’t seem real at all—seem like he was made out of bean wax. “These young ladies come to be baptized in the name of the Holy Ghost,” he said, but I stopped remembering my own physical body, my heart and my lungs and my hands, and then I stopped remembering there was even such a thing as the earth we was spinning on, and then I fell out.

  “The Spirit just took you for a spell,” my grandmama said later, but Imagene funned on me all week, falling out on the floor and then making her voice waggle up and down like the Holy Ghost. She got more and more fancy with the voice part, until Grandmama heard and came out to the kitchen to whip her with a little green switch she made Imagene go break off the hydrangea bush herself. That just made her do it silently, falling out on the couch so she wouldn’t make any noise, and then holding her hands straight out for waggling her ghost fingers. I was a grown girl, going on fourteen, but something about it like to make me cry.

  The next Sunday like to make me cry even harder, because Pastor made us
stand right in the pool—with our feet soaking in all that cold, dirty water—for all the singing and scripture what went on before it was our turn. Mama give me a good breakfast—­eggs and smoked ham and coffee—but when a little piece of scum bubbled up from somewhere and started floating across the pool like it was alive, my breakfast started roiling round in my stomach. My ministration done come early that month, and I kept wondering whether there was any blood on the back of my white dress, on account of the cold making it come faster. My hands and feet was already getting waterlogged, and it was a little bit of hell right there in that church. Audrey’s mama had got her a swim cap from in town so her hair wouldn’t draw up and lose its press, and Audrey was standing there looking like a spaceman, and that made me like to cry too, because it reminded me I wouldn’t be sinning no more on this earth. And then, if I got through my whole lifetime without sinning, I’d end up in heaven with nothing to do but watch a bunch of sheep playing harps for the rest of eternity, with not even a game of spades to keep my mind busy. I couldn’t think round how long eternity might be—forever would just never finish. It scared me just about to death. To stop the tears from running out, I made myself think about how my hair was going to curl up and be even prettier when it got wet: there’s one thing I had on old Audrey.

  The cold water made my cramps pound like little men was beating hammers in my stomach, and long about ten minutes I couldn’t even feel my feet (that’s how cold the water was), but Reverend Owington just kept on talking. “Therefore we are buried with Him by baptism into death, that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in the newness of life.”

  Was only the second time I seent Audrey without her big old Poindexter glasses, and I was watching the side of her head, studying on how her nose curled under and looked just like a button, when she turned to me and smiled, for a long time, like we weren’t standing in all that freezing water. She was that happy to be getting saved. She believed in the whole Bible thing, I reckon, and when she reached out and held my hand, I reckon I did, too.

  “For if we have been planted together in the likeness of His death,” Pastor said, “we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection.” He took Audrey by the forehead and dunked her, and while she was under, I squeezed her hand to keep her safe and felt her heartbeat jumping around her palm. She came back up looking like an egg, with the white plastic all dropped down over her eyes, which she’d popped wide open like she’d seen some miracle down there in that dirty water, and it scared me, because I started to figure that since I ain’t come to be baptized out of holiness, I might see the red devil down there instead. “Knowing this,” Pastor said, and he took and turnt me to such an angle that I had to let go of Audrey’s hand, “that henceforth we should not serve sin.”

  He dunked me ’fore I could even ask him to please not, and when Audrey went under it’d felt like a long time, but when I went under I was out the water ’fore I could even see if there was more scum at the bottom of the pool. We was both shivering, and seem like the louder the singing got, the colder I felt. Mean old Miss Hesterline came with two towels, and Audrey took her swim cap off and her hair stood up in all kinds of places. It’d lost ever last bit of its style, but Audrey didn’t even bother to try and pat it down some. Both our mamas was setting on the front pew just a-crying. Imagene was setting there too, but she wasn’t making any faces and she wasn’t even trying hard not to. She just looked sad, probably because she figured I wouldn’t be serving sin with her no more.

  Next day at school, ’fore the first bell, I tried to set down with Audrey on the building steps. She was so deep in her book I could only see her glasses, and her eyes behind them were some wet, like she was taking a fever. When I got down next to her she even turnt a page before she noticed I was breathing in her ear, but I didn’t care what was eating her mind. I couldn’t of told you then, but I believe I was trying to get some more of that good feeling she give me when she squeezed my hand.

  “How does it feel, being a Christian?” she asked me.

  “Well, you’re one too now, aren’t you?”

  “I guess so,” she said, all disappointed that I wouldn’t have much to say on the matter.

  I could of told the truth, and it weren’t that I was afraid she’d tell anybody else, but more like I didn’t want to upset her. I like cookies and juice at Sunday School, and the way Miss Aileen puts a little twist on “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” and how good Deacon Hines looks all dressed up in a suit, and I believe in church more’n I believe in God, I could of said, but it would of been overdoing things, like swatting a dead fly just to watch its wings fly off. She smiled at me again, just like she had the day we got baptized, and now that I knew what her eyes looked like without them glasses, it seemed like a shame she’d got herself to wearing them by reading all them books.

  “I feel . . . ” she started, and her eyes swam around all big behind her glasses. “I feel different inside. Like I got all this still and quiet in my head.”

  Well, I reckon she did feel special, on account of she’d probably had a big day of it that Sunday. I suppose her granddaddy had fixed her a big fish dinner after church, and her mama maybe give her another new dress, and she maybe gone down to the Colored store to take a long-distance call all the way from Texas. But there was two of us girls in my family, and things was never that proper in our house, and an hour after I got baptized, I was scraping grease out the pork chop pan while I boiled the water for washing. “Maybe you heard the Lord’s voice a little louder’n I did,” I told her.

  “Jesus has no favorites,” she said back, and she closed the book she was reading, which had Cane written on the front in fancy gold letters.

  She was trying to make me put some work into getting that special feeling back. “Bye, Sister Christian,” I told her. I stood up and brushed the dirt off my dress. “Tell your nose to have a good time in that book.”

  LACKLAND

  Meantime, down in Lackland, Lindell was telling that story reel how it seemed like he was calling on the Lord ever five minutes. It was his first time not sleeping under his daddy’s roof, and those first few nights in the Army’s hard bed, he actually cried. Seem like all the kitchen knew how to do was bread and gravy, and Lindell watched the rest of the soldiers gobble it on down, but the gravy looked too mysterious for him to even sniff it. So he just ate bread, which stopped up his bowels. The Army issue socks bothered his feet something terrible, and he’d be practicing how to wrestle the enemy to the ground when he’d have to duck away from the man he was fighting to itch his foot. He wrote home in all them letters how he was about ready to audition for the Army band; how he done learnt how to set out in the desert with no water, just like Jesus; how the sky over Texas was bigger and oranger and more mindful of the good Lord than the sky in Mt. Sterling. He wrote Danaitha that he was a better man and he wrote Audrey that his belly was hard as two tree trunks, wrote them that he might be stationed in Omaha or even in France, that they might could come live with him overseas and eat little paper-thin pancakes with sugar sprinkled on top. But he didn’t believe one smear of it, he told that reel. Was a piano down in the mess hall, but Lindell was too scared of his training instructor to go over and play it.

  ’Stead of taking a bath in the water Danaitha boiled on Saturday nights, he had to take showers under cold Lackland water, straddling his poor itchy feet over a rusty drain in the middle of the concrete floor. He always felt the other forty-nine soldiers in the showers with him was laughing at his shrinking balls, even when they wasn’t, and the soap the army handed out never really rinsed off, so his feet itched even more powerful. By the time he finally got called up to Mississippi, he done figured out a way to wash his entire body in ninety seconds so he’d have another ninety just to rinse his feet. Lindell’d left Mt. Sterling trying to move hisself to higher ground, but he said that by the time he finished the rounds ever day, he reckoned he warn’t the magical Negro
he’d thought he was. At night, when he laid in the pitch-black barracks and listened to the boy in the top bunk worm his hips around and spoon out loud through his soup of dreams, Lindell thought he might oughta cut his own feet clean off.

  After all he been through in Lackland, he felt like a king when he got on the bus to Biloxi. They’d just built a new barracks and mess hall, and put fancy toys in their electric labs that he couldn’t wait to get his hands on. He spent one long night on the bus not asleep but looking out the window at the flattest land he ever seen. No tall trees to speak of—just lone bushes standing like simpletons under the power of the moon. Round midnight, the bus ran longside a train, and on the sides of the boxcars, his mind put movies of all that marching he’d done. It’d started ever morning at four thirty, when the T.I. blew his whistle, and it hadn’t ended till ten o’clock at night, when all them soldiers marched theyselves off to the barracks and over the cliffs of hard sleep. They marched to the undersides of jet planes and they marched to the hot gymnasium for push-ups, and then they marched to a clearing where they got down on their bellies and crawled through the mud like gators. It’d got so even when they was supposed to be walking normally, Lindell felt an urge down in his spine to march. Said it made him appreciate Mt. Sterling and the feeling of going nowhere, on account of he ain’t never been so tired in his life as he was trying to get somewhere. He was like Jonah, he reckoned—he done got out the whale’s belly, but he was all covered in spit. The force promised less marching in Biloxi, and more time off base at night. They promised shorter mess lines, too, though they ain’t promised better food. And they ain’t promised not one thing about the White peoples of Biloxi, Mississippi.