Outside, I could hear Mustard roaring “Noooooo,” and Bethany shrieking out to Jesus, demanding that our family be taken, even if we were to be taken late.
“You can’t be taken late, Beth,” Olin bellowed. “But maybe it weren’t the rapture. We should pray.”
“Help usssss,” Pammy implored, her short red hair shaking across her terrified face.
“Good God, y’all,” Uncle Ernest tried. “All these clothes mean is that Daddy took them off. Maybe he got hot or something.... We need to get back out there and keep looking.”
“That’s right,” Nanna demanded.
“It’s no use,” Aunt Kate moaned. “The lamb has called the roll, and we’ve been left behind. How long will the potatoes keep if we put them in the cellar? Six months? A year? Oh, Jesus ...”
That’s when I remembered Canaan. I knew that if God had really called his special children home, Canaan would be gone. But I didn’t know where he’d been sleeping. I tried to listen for his cries, because surely in all that noise, he’d be awake. But I couldn’t hear him for all the voices lifting off, voices like sirens, voices mourning and cursing and hating. All those voices so heavy and afraid. I worried that the walls and floorboards wouldn’t be able to hold them.
I wandered to the back of the room, stepping around the praying bodies. As new people would come in, someone would say, “Gabriel blew his trumpet last night. The rapture’s happened, and we’ve been left here for the years of tribulation.” The doorway became a heap of bodies, falling one into another and repenting. Daddy stood in the kitchen holding Nanna, both of them watching amazed.
Mamma stood up and wiped her strained eyes. “It’s okay,” she said. “We’ve got to slow down. We’ve got to think logical. This don’t make good sense.” But then Bethany wailed out, and when Mamma touched her, it was like she was consumed again in the horrible dejection.
“Maree,” Daddy called. “Maree!”
But she didn’t pay him any attention. She was too far gone.
I couldn’t stop watching the praying bodies. I saw them all as paper dolls, cut from the same brown sack. What one did, the rest had to do. It was almost as if they thought with one great misshapen mind.
It was almost as if Nanna and Daddy were the dolls on the end, with one hand attached and one hand free, trying desperately to yank the others up.
But I wasn’t attached to anybody, and Canaan was only attached to himself. I knew I had to find him.
Canaan was against the wall on his pallet, yelling like someone about to be sacrificed, though nobody had noticed. I picked him up and held onto him, too tired and too stunned to try to interrupt their shouting.
I tried to remember if Canaan was really holy. I checked his finger to see if the invisible ring was there, but I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel my invisible ring either.
I tried to remember if invisible meant the same thing as imaginary. My mind was so dulled, and the clamor was so impossible to penetrate. I held Canaan to my chest, and as he cried, he sucked at my nipple through Nanna’s dress.
I remembered that on the resurrection day, the graves were supposed to open and the dead were to rise in Christ’s name. But when I looked out the window, all the graves looked normal, and I began to feel relieved.
Fire and Brimstone had turned into a mob. I thought they might all be insane. I thought I must be dreaming, and I knew I’d better wake up quick.
But then Grandpa Herman walked up to the door, looked in at us like we were all crazy. He stood there naked as the day he was born, puzzled and muddy and with sprigs of hair standing up all over his head.
“Leila,” he hollered. “What in the hell’s going on?”
It took a while for everybody to hush. The silence rode through like a wind gust that passes slow, leaving a few leaves to rustle after it’s gone.
“Baby,” Nanna said. “Where you been?”
Everybody looked up at him, standing there without his clothes. There was snuffling and choked-back coughs throughout the room.
“The store,” he explained—like it was the most natural thing in the world. “I went to get you a moon pie.” And he held it out, smushed and dirty but still in its wrapper. “The brown ones you liked when we was courtin. Is that marshmallow inside or something else?”
“Herman,” Nanna said, and somebody handed her a coat, and she wrapped it around him and layed down his hair with her palm.
“Fix him some breakfast,” she demanded.
“Praise Jesus,” somebody called, then “Hallelujah.”
“It was a warning,” Laura shouted. “We’ve been given another chance to get our lives right.” Her eyes looked possessed. I wasn’t sure that I could be a good mother, but I couldn’t leave Canaan with her.
“I want to be the new leader,” David cried. “God’s calling me to do it. I want to lead our people back to God.” As he spoke, he shook one leg like he had something down his pants.
“What makes you think we ever strayed away?” Daddy asked him.
“We’ve been given the biggest sign we could ever see,” David preached. “And praise his name, we’ve been given a second chance to repent, to do all in our power necessary to make our hearts right with God.”
“David,” Mamma said. “We were wrong. We were wrong. We’re just scared. Sit down.”
But the fighting began again. Mustard, who had to be close to splattering, began to curse David and Laura and even Olin for scaring him to death, and he said that there wasn’t going to be any rapture.
People broke out into prayers, and other people grabbed them by the hair and lifted their heads up and said, “Listen! We were wrong. Herman’s back.”
I huddled Canaan next to me and walked right out the room, without anybody paying us any attention at all.
All the way to the pack house, I could hear them yelling. The voices vibrated in my head, and I kept telling Canaan, “You don’t have to hear this. You don’t have to listen.”
I was glad it was still early. I was glad we were out before daytime had a chance to shove the early up into the clouds.
“You don’t have to think about it,” I told him. “You don’t have to dream about it. You don’t have to live this way, and I’m sure as hell tired of it.”
By the time I climbed the rickety steps and made my way into the pack house, Canaan wasn’t crying anymore. But he was shaken and scared, and if he’d been able to use his hands, I knew he would have been grasping for me. Because everybody needs something to hold onto besides themselves every now and then.
“Nobody’s gonna take you away from me again. You want to see your daddy?” I asked him. “You want to go to Heaven right now so we don’t have to live like this?”
I kept a pair of scissors in the pack house to clip my twine and fabric with. I found them and tested them against my hands. They weren’t so sharp, but I thought they’d do the trick.
I wanted to do it fast. First to him, and then to me. I wished I could do it to us both at the same time, but I only had one pair of scissors, and I’d need my spare hand to hold him still.
I took Canaan and the scissors and settled down on the tobacco sheets. The door was cracked, so there was a bit of light, but I didn’t want it to be bright enough for him to see me. I didn’t want him to think I’d hurt him for the sake of pain. Not ever.
A part of me wanted to hurry. But a part of me wanted to do it slow, the way I imagined James had done it, securing that knot around his middle. I wondered what thoughts had gone through his head that day. I wondered if he’d wished for a pocketknife in those last moments underwater. I wondered if he’d had more nerve than I did.
I thought about Nanna’s mamma, pointing that gun at her husband’s back. I tried to imagine her pulling the trigger without a second thought, but I knew that wasn’t how it happened. She’d kept him there, frightened, at gunpoint, pondering what she was doing.
I wondered if she did it for love, if James did it for love, if I was about to d
o it for love or if it was really something else.
“Sit here,” I told Canaan. “I’ll be right back.”
I went to my stack of rugs and took the James rug and the Canaan rug. I put Canaan’s rug beneath us and James’ rug at our back. To finish telling both stories. After we were gone.
Then I held Canaan’s hands in mine, my big, big hands covering his small ones completely, and I hummed to him for a minute. I thought that if I could make him fall asleep, it’d be easier.
He didn’t sleep. I didn’t know how much time I had left. I listened for the voices calling out, but all I could hear was my own memories, Grandpa Herman shouting, “There shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth,” and Nanna saying, “Sometimes you got to hold onto a little bit of rage,” and James saying, “You’re doing real good. I can hear you when you pray.”
When I picked up the scissors, they seemed to act without me, in spite of me, and before I knew what I was doing, I had placed them between his palms and snipped, snipped, snipped his hands apart.
He cried out so loudly that I knew I couldn’t hurt him any worse. He screamed and buried himself in my lap, his hollering mouth at the center of Nanna’s dress, between my breasts, so deafening that I knew it was killing the kudzu in there and his little hands shaking on both sides, free and moving, spilling bits of blood all around us, flicking them onto my wet face.
“Canaan,” I sung to him. “It’s okay.” I don’t know how long I held him like that before I put him down to find something to act as a bandage.
He stood up, and when he teetered, he used his hands to shove himself back up. Then he ran around the pack house squealing, shaking his hands maniacally and splashing the slightest bleeding over the walls and the floor, bleeding from both palms.
I thought he was crying, but by the time I caught him and began to bandage his hands with the leftover flannel from my weaving, I realized his squeals weren’t of pain or terror or anything bad. He was laughing. I could hardly hold him still enough to tie the strips around his little palms that were about to clot on their own.
Then I let him run about, in his baby way so that his little legs moved from side to side, stepping awkwardly. I let him flick his hands. I let him slap his own round face.
“You are so goddamned beautiful,” I told him, and even though I was crying, I understood something new. Something about connections. Somehow, I knew that splitting his hands was like severing a vine, like killing the vine about to strangle not somebody else but me. Me.
I remembered Corinthian’s words that I’d misunderstood all along. “Whee, Jesus,” she’d said. But it wasn’t a curse at all. It was a prayer, and not a frightened one. It was a prayer praising freedom.
I picked him up, and he held on. He held one of my breasts in one bandaged hand and a fistful of my hair in the other.
“Whee, Jesus,” I said, and I kissed his face, his mouth, his head. Then I adjusted him on my hip and began the slow walk back.
When I’ve used up all my rags and lies, rope and hair, fabric and love, when I’m out of twine and my loom is broken and there’s still a story in me, that’s when I unknot and begin the unraveling.
My rugs are never finished. I use the same materials to make them over and over again, featuring something new each time and hearing a different tale. But sometimes they speak the most wisely when they are heaps of fibers on the pack house floor, intermingled and waiting.
If I sit with them silent for long enough, they will talk. Just listening, I can give them tongues. They will speak like prophets.
AFTERWORD
While I was writing this book, I was auditing a course in medieval history at Virginia Commonwealth University. The professor, Dr. Catherine Mooney, gave the class a bibliography of law codes and penitentials, and I found myself curious about the rules and punishments in different medieval societies. I pursued the subject in my studies, and I included variations of these medieval beliefs in The Rapture of Canaan. The laws from Grandpa Herman’s handbook did not come from any single source, but many were influenced by my readings in the following:
The Burgundian Code: Book of Constitutions or Law of Gundobad: Additional Enactments, trans. Katherine Fischer Drew. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972.
The Irish Penitenrials, ed. Ludwig Bieler. Dublin: Scriptores Latini Hiberniae, 1963.
The Lombard Laws, ed. Katherine Fischer Drew. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973.
The Medieval Handbooks of Penance, ed. John Thomas McNeil and Helena Gamer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1938.
Payer, Pierre J. Sex and the Penitentials: The Development of a Sexual Code, 550—1150. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.
Readings in Medieval History, ed. Patrick J. Geary. Peter-borough, Canada: Broadview Press, 1989.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in rural South Carolina, Sheri Reynolds now lives in Virginia. She has taught English at Virginia Commonwealth University, Old Dominion University, and The College of William and Mary. She is at work on a new novel.
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