The Talk-Funny Girl

by Roland Merullo

  When I finished eating I went into my room, took the book Sands had given me out of its hiding place, and sat on my bed with it opened across my knees. I put the pillow beside it so I could cover the book quickly if my mother came in, and I turned the pages slowly, studying every aspect of the church buildings, every corner and arch, every stone and piece of stained glass and bell tower. Each time before I turned to a new image, I’d say a short prayer, asking God to let me keep working on the cathedral, to forgive me for my sins, not to punish me too badly for missing church. But my prayers had turned mostly empty by that point, just an old habit, almost a superstition.

  When I was most of the way through the book, I heard the popping sound of tires on the gravel driveway, but I didn’t hear the usual backfiring and rumbling of my father’s pickup. Thinking it might be my aunt come to check on me, I hid the book under the pillow and stepped into the main room of the house. My mother was locked in one of her trances and hadn’t moved. There was the sound of a car door being closed. I went nearer the window and looked out. I saw a plain black car in front of the house—the police, I thought, at first—and a man standing next to the driver’s-side door with his back to me. But then, before the man even turned around, I realized it wasn’t a policeman. Pastor Schect stood still for a minute, arms hanging at his sides. He turned his head left and right, left and right again, raking his eyes across the neat stacks of stove wood and the patches of spring grass that marked our bare yard like an infestation. He turned around and as he started toward the house he looked straight at the window.

  “What on?” my mother said, lifting her head and blinking like a person awakened from sleep.

  Before I could answer, there was a staccato knocking.

  “Open it, you Majie you,” my mother said in a sleepy voice.

  I couldn’t make my feet move. I said a prayer under my breath. The knocking started up again.

  “I’ll boy you for sure you don’t open it.”

  I went to the door and when I pulled it toward me, Pastor Schect was there on the step, his face knitted and puckered as if someone had taken a needle and sewed the cheeks to the lips and the eyebrows to the forehead in five bad stitches. I looked at his dyed hair, his nose that widened like a horse’s when he breathed. His eyes belonged to a man who was starving to death and hallucinating, seeing me as a piece of food. From where he stood, the open door blocked his view of the couch, and so, after seeing the empty driveway, he must have thought I was home alone. He’d already started toward me, excited, eager, and I’d already taken a step backward, when my mother blurted out, “Who the God would bang doors on us for this hour?”

  I watched the surprise wobble across Pastor’s face. He straightened up, breathed through his nostrils once, and strode into the room exactly the way he strode around in church: legs thrown out in front of him, chin back, neck stiff. A wind-up doll playing preacher. I noticed for the first time that he had on a suit, a rumpled brown suit over a white shirt and red tie, and his work boots. “I have come to cast out demons, say,” he yelled as he stepped far enough forward to see around the door and make eye contact with my mother. She stood up and bent forward in a sort of awkward bow and then didn’t seem to know what to do. We weren’t used to having visitors. The awkwardness lasted a few seconds before there was the sound of a pickup in the driveway, another slamming door, and then my father yelling crazily, “Nah! Nah! Nah!” He came running toward the open door and I could see he had the chain saw still in his hand, and sweat and dirt on his face. He’d told me more than once that whenever he left us alone he worried about someone coming to the house to rape my mother and me. He’d kill the man, he promised. He’d cut the man true in half. For one second I thought my father was going to run right up the sagging steps and start the chain saw as he crossed the threshold, and part of me was hoping he’d cut Pastor Schect into pieces. But when he saw who it was he stopped short, breathing hard, and let the heavy saw hang down by his side so that the veins stood out under the skin of that arm.

  Pastor Schect dropped his eyes to the saw and lifted his arms overhead and fluttered them there. “Satan from this house go!” he shouted.

  My father squinted at him, took two more fast breaths, and said, “We dint ain’t do it.”

  “We dint,” his wife echoed.

  “I dint do it,” I said. “My aunt did.”

  I felt, at those words, that I would be sick. I felt that Satan surely was in the house then, and had crawled up inside me and taken hold of my tongue. I watched as Pastor stomped around the living room, slapping his hand on various surfaces—the table, the sofa, the walls. My parents had one picture on the wall—a kitten in a basket; my mother had brought it home from the dump in a sentimental moment and my father had banged in a nail and hung it there to please her. When Pastor Schect hit the wall the second time the picture bounced loose and fell. We heard the sound of glass breaking. My father put the saw down at his feet and looked at my mother. He was well into the house now, and Pastor Schect was moving toward my room, ignoring the breaking glass. “Here is the demon’s place, say!” he shouted in his high, raspy voice, standing at the door of my room, looking in. “The demon bed! The demon clothings! Cast them out, say!” Hearing those words, my father turned to me and took half a step but I wasn’t going to wait to see what happened next. I swerved around his arm and ran out the door and past the two vehicles, sprinting for the road. “You Majie you!” I heard my mother yell behind me. “Girl, you come! Douse you!”

  But I kept sprinting, turning onto Waldrup Road and not looking back.

  I ran as far as my legs and lungs would let me, listening for the sound of a truck engine over the harsh sawing noise of my breath. When I couldn’t sprint anymore I slowed to a trot, my breath coming in big heaves and the soles of my sneakers scuffing the dirt. A coyote crossed the road in front of me, its coat dirt-red and ragged, its long fluffy tail dragging. The animal turned its head once toward me, then slunk into the trees. I angled into the woods on the other side, crossing a rocky stream, breathing hard. Beyond the stream the ground sloped up. I kept going at a fast walk, brushing aside low branches and dodging between the tree trunks and blackberry bushes, listening, listening. In the distance I heard a car engine. A short ways farther up the hill I came upon a boulder with a cleft in it and I laid myself down in the damp cleft and tried to force my breathing into a quieter rhythm. I could hear something through the trees—a car horn being sounded at regular quick intervals, almost in time with every third heartbeat. Beep … Beep … Beep … Beep. I tried to lower myself farther down between the sides of the stone. In my mind’s eye, I could see my aunt talking to me across the seat of her car, saying she loved me, and then I heard what I’d said in the house a few minutes earlier, and my own betrayal seemed like the fingers of Satan reaching up the insides of my breasts, taking hold of my lungs, and throat, and tongue. The horn kept beeping, a sound like geese in the fall sky. I heard the car coming along the road and slowing, then stopping, then the engine was turned off and I heard a door. I tried not to move.

  “Girl!” I heard after a few more seconds.

  God, God, God, I prayed silently. God, God, God save on me now. Forgive me.

  “Girl!” Pastor Schect shouted again. His voice came through the trees like a searchlight. “Let the Satan be taken out from you! Girl, let it now! Come down and let it be taken!”

  I didn’t move. I tried to draw slow shallow breaths but I could feel my heart like a drum in my chest, and the rock pinching my back muscles, and a dampness there as if I was sinking down slowly into a swamp.

  There were footsteps, a rustling in the bushes at the side of the road.

  “Girl!”

  I kept my eyes open, wondering if he’d cross the stream. Above me were spruce branches and beech branches and a weak sunlight filtering through. God, God, God, I mouthed.

  “You can’t hide from the Lord of Gods,” Pastor Schect yelled up the hill, but I could tell from the sound
of the words that he hadn’t come any farther into the woods. I listened. If there was a truck in the background, if my father was coming, then the streambed and the woods wouldn’t stop him. He’d take hold of me by the hair and lead me down to Pastor Schect and there would be nothing to save me then.

  But there was no truck engine, just the sound of another car going past the other way, tires in the dirt, the ping of small stones against the undercarriage. I imagined Pastor Schect turning and waving to the driver like a man of God in his rumpled suit and dark-tinted hair, meditating on the glory of nature. He did not shout again. After a time I heard his footsteps on the road and then the car door closing, but he sat there a long while before starting the car, and then several more minutes before he drove away, and during that time I lay still and let the rock cut into the muscles of my back, and the dampness spread on my shirt and pants. I kept my eyes open and steady and I concentrated on the sunlight and wished and prayed with all my force that he’d leave me alone and not go back to the house and wait. I could face my parents, but I didn’t want to be looked at that way ever again by Pastor Schect, or touched by him, or killed by him.

  In time, he drove off down Waldrup Road, away from our house, but still I lay there, waiting for him to return, my back muscles cramping. When I was sure there were no other vehicles coming, that Pastor Schect wasn’t playing a trick, and almost sure my father wasn’t standing down there, silently watching for me at the edge of the woods, I sat up. I peered through the trees. Nothing. Another minute and I stood, pushing myself out of the cleft in the rock and looking down at the road. Besides a few coins and two one-dollar bills in my pants pocket I had no money with me. I pictured myself walking the rest of the way down Waldrup Road and all the way into town … and then what? Going to Sands at the rectory and asking for money so I could take a bus to Watsonboro? It was Sunday. He wouldn’t be working. He’d be off in the country on one of his drives, or down visiting Aunt Elaine, or going to Boston or New York, to a museum, maybe with a girlfriend. I was hungry and thirsty and chilled from the dampness at the back of my shirt. What if Pastor Schect was waiting along Route 112? Or my father decided to go to Weedon’s and saw me walking past? I thought, briefly, of taking the risk anyway, sleeping at the work site and waiting for Sands to show, but the idea of him finding me there like that, hungry and dirty and afraid—that was too bitter.

  When I’d waited a long time, I walked down the hill and across the stream. After a minute or two, I turned left, back toward our house. I prayed as I went, not asking for anything but forgiveness for my moment of treachery, just speaking to God in whispers and asking that.

  My father’s truck was still in the driveway, but I didn’t see him. When I came through the door my mother’s eyes hit me like pointed fingers in the face. She was leaning back against the kitchen counter with an open bottle of wine behind her arm. She was wearing a certain expression, something I’d seen several times in the past, a concentrated fury that seemed to say there was nothing, absolutely nothing, she wouldn’t do. “Who’s now gonto be willow-whipped,” she said, and it was the farthest thing from a question.

  I stood still and faced her.

  “Who’s now gonto,” my mother repeated.

  “You and Pa go ahead to whip me,” I said, meeting my mother’s eyes. “Go to whip me and I’m to move out to live at Aunt Elaine. No more of money for you and Pa then. No more of help on a baby.” My legs were shaking. My shirt and pants were wet in back. The hunger seemed to be crawling up and around inside my middle.

  My mother stared at me a long time, stunned, I think, that I was talking back to her that way. And then quietly and deliberately, with just two corners of a smile on her mouth, she said, “Kill you then, you Majie.”

  “Then no all money for you then,” I shot back. A gigantic anger was shaking my lips and making my hands into fists. “Then Pa and you for a baby and no money from me and from at Aunt Elaine. Kill me, go. I’m not afraid of you killed me as you of no money.”

  I wanted to step into the kitchen and grab one piece of bread. I believed I could smell it in its plastic bag there on the counter. But if I did that I thought my mother would take hold of me, hit me with the bottle, cut me with a knife, maybe kill me right there, so I turned and went into my room with her eyes burning into the back of my skull. I changed out of my wet clothes and left them on the floor. I put two pairs of pants and two shirts and one sweatshirt on the bed. Underwear, socks. No one had touched the cathedral book, so I set it on top of the pile of clothes, not caring if anyone saw. Then I lay down on the bed with one hand on the book and I waited. I listened the way my father had taught me to listen in the woods, long before, when I was a little girl and there had been a different feeling in the house. I listened for the smallest sound, a whisper of air, a twig crackling, a word. After a time I fell asleep.

  I was awakened by the sound of the front door banging open. My stomach throbbed. I felt the hard edges of the book against my fingers, and I heard my mother and father talking but I couldn’t make out the words. His low voice. A space. Her voice, higher, insistent, as if she was trying to convince him of something and for once he was resisting. His voice again. I waited for them to come into my room and take me out for my penance, but then there was quiet. The light was changing to late-afternoon light. I heard the front door again, then the truck doors, one after the next, then the engine backfiring and spitting as my father’s pickup went out the drive. Still I waited, expecting some trick. When darkness fell, and I was sure my mother and father had both gone, I got up and went into the kitchen, where I opened a can of beans and ate it with a spoon, without pouring the beans into a bowl and without heating them. I drank three glasses of water and had two pieces of bread, then a Coke, and then I walked outside and around back and threw the two empty cans far into the woods. I went back to my room, took the hidden stash of money and put it in my pants pocket, and sat on the bed for a long time, staring into the open closet. My parents didn’t come home. I thought of what I’d said to Pastor Schect about Aunt Elaine and what it would be like to go to her for help now, after having said that. I imagined looking into her face and having her say she loved me. And then I took the clothes and the book and set them on the floor in my closet. I pulled off my pants and shirt and crawled under the covers and slept.

  In the morning, my parents were still not there. I stood in the shower a long time without using the timer. I made myself two pieces of toast with butter. I took my backpack, put the book and my school papers into it, then two cans of Coke from the kitchen, and set off down Waldrup Road toward the highway.

  Twenty

  Riding the bus to school that day—we were close to the end of the year—I nearly told Cindy about Pastor Schect. It would have meant breaking our unspoken agreement, but I’d kept so many secrets for so long by then that they seemed to have swollen to the bursting point. Cindy and I sat together as we always did, and for a little while we had the middle part of the bus to ourselves, with the boys yelling and wrestling some rows behind. Cindy—short, plump, blond-headed, and barely able to manage her schoolwork in the lowest division—was bubbling over with news. There were two parts to her news. First, she’d heard over the radio the night before that another girl about our own age had disappeared, this one over in the middle of the state, not far from the highway Sands and I had taken on our way to Boston. She hadn’t heard this part on the radio, Cindy added, but her mother had told her there was a witness this time, and the witness claimed the abductor had been a black person, or at least someone dark, dressed in dark clothes, driving a dark vehicle. “I have a feeling it’s going to happen to me or you next,” she whispered when other students had come onto the bus and sat not far from us. “I’m taking a knife with me now everywhere. You should, too.” She reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out a small hunting knife with a three-inch blade. “My dad give it to me.”

  “They would take it away on you, while they see it in school.”r />
  “My dad showed me how to wrap it up in the finger of a work glove. Lookit.” She tugged a leather glove finger out of the same pocket and slid the knife into it. “He said they can’t know it then.”

  I gazed out the window at the new green on the hills and thought about the look on Pastor Schect’s face when he’d come into the house, and what amount of good a knife might have done if he’d found me there alone, or if he’d climbed all the way up to the big rock in the woods. “Of what time was it?”

  “When they took her? Early in the night. She was maybe coming back alone after staying at her friend’s house after church or something.”

  “We didn’t go yesterday,” I said. I was trying to make myself tell her about Pastor Schect, but I couldn’t seem to do it.

  “Why? You always.”

  “My mother was felt sick. She came better now, today.”

  “There’s something else, too … about me and Carl.” Two boys came down the aisle, shoving each other and laughing in a rough way. “I’ll tell you later,” Cindy whispered.

  When school finished, instead of taking the bus home or getting a ride with Carl and his friends, Cindy said she’d walk with me as far as the cathedral. She wanted to see it up close, she said, and Carl was going to meet her at the doughnut shop in his friend’s car and take her riding. We walked from the school down Mitchell Avenue to where it intersected with North Main Street, and we turned and walked down the long slope there, past old Victorians that had once belonged to the factory owners and that stood, some of them freshly painted, behind large front yards. On the long bus ride to and from school, of all the objects made by people, it seemed to me that those houses were the only beautiful thing to see. Maybe the cathedral would change that. Maybe Sands was going to start a trend in town, making things look good for no reason at all.