Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  As the Starnes’s truck pulled away, Jude’s father took her sticky hand to lead her into the den, unaware that the swells were running high and their ship was about to capsize. “My daddy and I love your cakes,” he said. After turning on the radio, he sank into his brown leather armchair. John Cameron Swayze was talking about soldiers being brainwashed by the Communists in Korea. “Oh, Lord,” her father said with a sigh. “Poor, suffering humanity.”

  “Why do they always bring us those awful hams?” asked Jude.

  “That’s how they’re paying me for Mr. Starnes’s appendectomy.”

  “Money would be nicer.” She stroked the back of his chair. The leather was crazed with age cracks like the inside of an ice cube.

  “No doubt. But they don’t have any. Besides, some people consider country ham a delicacy.”

  “Not me.”

  “Yes, I know.” He smiled.

  “Daddy, why are some people so mean?” Jude straddled the arm of his chair, facing the back. It was her new horse, named Wild Child. The other arm was Molly’s, which she’d named Blaze. That afternoon, they had been lassoing Molly’s boxer, Sidney, in midgallop with pieces of Clementine’s clothesline. Time after time, they played “Git Along, Little Dogie” on the record player—until Clementine marched in and turned it off, announcing, “Miss Judith, if I hear ‘yippy tie yay, tie yo’ one more time, I gonna bust all your daddy’s furniture into firewood and chase y‘all round the backyard with a carving knife.” Impressed, the girls had switched to Ocean Liner.

  “Well, I guess they’re mean because they’re unhappy.”

  “But you’re unhappy, and you’re not mean.”

  He looked at her. “What makes you think I’m unhappy, baby?”

  “Because you miss Momma.”

  He frowned and lowered his head. “That’s true. But I used to be happy when she was here. Maybe that’s the difference. People who’ve never been happy are mean. The rest of us are just sad.”

  She could smell his aftershave lotion, like cinnamon toast. Leaning over, she licked his cheek. The stiff hairs prickled her tongue and the cinnamon lotion tasted disappointingly bitter, canceling out the sweetness of the caramel frosting.

  “Don’t, Jude,” he said, frowning and wiping his cheek with his hand. “That tickles.”

  Wrinkling her nose, Jude tried to scrub the terrible taste off her tongue with the back of her hand. Then Wild Child reared, hurling her off his back and into her father’s lap. Leaning her head against his chest, she shoved a thumb into her mouth and felt his heart thudding against her cheek like a frog’s throat.

  “Baby, don’t suck your thumb, please. It’ll push your front teeth out. You’ll look like Bugs Bunny.”

  Jude giggled.

  “Don’t you think you should wear a shirt?” he asked. “You’re getting to be a big girl now.” He patted her pale smooth belly.

  “I don’t want to be a girl.”

  “How come?”

  “Girls are too boring.”

  “So you want to be a boy?”

  “No. Boys are too scary.”

  “Well, what do you want to be, then?”

  “I want to be in heaven with my momma.”

  He said nothing. When Jude looked up, his eyes were wet and red.

  “I have a friend,” offered Jude. “She lives in the new house next door. She’s named Molly. She’s going to be in the second grade. She doesn’t like shirts, either.”

  “That’s good, baby. I’m glad there’s someone in the neighborhood now who’s closer to your own age. I don’t want you playing with Ace Kilgore and those other big boys. They’re too rough. Promise me you’ll stay away from them?”

  Jude said nothing for a long moment. She didn’t like to lie. But she wasn’t really lying, since she now meant to stay as far away from them as she could. “I promise,” she finally said. “Can I spend the night at Molly’s house sometime?” She twisted around in the chair until she was reclining in the crook of his arm.

  “Sure. If it’s okay with her parents.” He was gazing at a photo on the end table—of Jude’s mother in a low-cut gown, standing inside a wine bottle.

  “Why’s she inside that bottle?”

  “She wasn’t really. It’s trick photography. It was an ad for a winery.”

  “She was pretty, wasn’t she?”

  “She was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” He was looking at the far corner of the ceiling, where Clementine’s dust mop had missed a spiderweb. “I was an intern in New York. I first saw her surrounded by photographers on a corner near Central Park. She was wearing this big old picture hat the wind kept trying to blow off. I just stood there staring at her until she got annoyed and asked them to make me leave.”

  Mr. Starnes had said Jude looked like her father. Did that mean she wasn’t beautiful like her mother? “Why did she have to die?”

  “Well, I came back home from the war in France, and we were very happy to be together again. So we decided to give you a baby brother. But your mother’s brain started bleeding. She became unconscious and the baby died in her stomach. And then she died.”

  “But I didn’t even want a baby brother.”

  MOLLY’S MOTHER INSISTED THAT Molly say her prayers, even though Jude was there, so the three of them knelt by Molly’s bedside, beneath the pink dotted swiss canopy, as Molly recited her blessing list, which included her bicycle, Stormy, and her dog, Sidney. She concluded, “And God bless my new pal, Jude, and keep her safe from harm. Amen.”

  “Do you want to say your prayers now?” Mrs. Elkins asked Jude.

  “I don’t have any.”

  “But you need prayers, Jude. It’s easy. Just try.”

  So Jude mumbled, “God bless my dad, and Clementine. And Grandma. And my momma in heaven. And Mrs. Elkins. And God bless my new pal, Molly, and keep her safe. But not Ace Kilgore. Amen.”

  Mrs. Elkins looked at Jude questioningly as she smoothed her blond pageboy with one hand. But then she just stood up and folded back the bedspread. “Good night, sleep tight, and don’t let those old mosquitoes bite!” she called as she closed the door.

  Molly and Jude scrambled up on the bed. Each grabbed a pillow. Every time Sidney tried to crawl onto the mattress, they beat him back with the pillows. The bed was a raft, adrift on an ocean full of ravenous sharks with flashing white teeth. Sidney crouched down on his front paws, cropped tail wagging frantically. He began to bark.

  “Oh, shut up, Sidney,” muttered Molly, dropping her pillow. “Sharks don’t bark.” She collapsed with a bounce on the mangled sheets.

  Sidney crept up the bed and slithered between Molly and Jude, where he lay panting dolefully in time to the pulsing locusts outside. Molly’s father had started snoring down the hall, like a monster growling in a cave. He looked like a monster, too, with dark, curly hair all over his arms and eyebrows that stuck straight out like the bristles of a toothbrush. Molly said he drove around to farms buying cowhides that got cut up and turned into belts at the tannery Sandy Andrews’s father owned.

  Molly went downstairs to the kitchen, wearing only her shorty pajama bottoms. When she returned, carrying two bowls, she paused for a moment, framed by the doorway, bare chest tanned and smooth except for two pink nipples like cinnamon valentine hearts. Her black hair, which Jude had never seen unbraided before, was floating around her face the way Jude’s mother’s hair did in a photo on Jude’s bedside table. In that photo, she held Jude’s chubby cheek against her own on Jude’s first birthday. She had a white rose in her hair, perfect white teeth, and pale dreamy eyes.

  “Why are you staring at me like that?” asked Molly when she reached the bed and handed Jude a bowl of raspberry sherbet.

  “I didn’t realize you were beautiful,” replied Jude.

  “I am not,” said Molly, eyes blazing in the faint glow coming through the window from the streetlight. “If you want to be my friend, take it back right now.”

  Crossing her fingers, Jude sa
id, “Okay, I take it back.”

  Leaning against the quilted headboard, they licked the tart sherbet off their spoons in a strained silence.

  “Do you like God?” Jude finally asked.

  “Sure. He’s okay.” Molly offered her spoon to Sidney, who daintily poked at the sherbet with his large pink tongue.

  “I don’t.”

  “How come?”

  “He took my mother to His house. She wants to come back home now, but He won’t let her.”

  Molly set her bowl on the bed for Sidney to finish. “Well, I guess I don’t like Him anymore, either, then.”

  Jude decided that Molly was her new best friend.

  Once the lights were off in all the houses down the street, they pulled on their shorts and tiptoed down the carpeted stairs and out the front door. The locusts were so loud that they seemed to be gathered inside Jude’s head. Swarms of fireflies were making the star-specked night sky sparkle like a black diamond. Jude and Molly trotted across the straw-strewn lawn, the dew chilly on their bare feet, Sidney at their heels.

  At Sandy’s house, they found the hose coiled behind the foundation shrubs as Sandy had promised. Dragging it across the street, they stuck the nozzle into a Commie Killer trench. Then they re-crossed the street and turned on the faucet that protruded from the foundation bricks.

  Crouched behind the geometrical yews, ducking a circling mosquito, Jude asked, “Why do you think Ace is so mean?”

  “Momma says people are mean because they get up on the wrong side of bed in the morning,” said Molly, arm draped across the panting Sidney.

  Jude broke a piece off the tall triangular bush beside her and sniffed it. It smelled like the golden liquid Clementine mopped the kitchen linoleum with. She held it out for Molly to sniff. A hoot owl started calling in the Wildwoods.

  Every time sleep threatened, one poked the other with an elbow and they gazed blearily at the constellations scrolling past overhead. Jude pointed out the Pleiades and told about how the Cherokees used to make would-be braves count the number of stars in the cluster. They discussed the difficulties of needing glasses before glasses had been invented. Then Molly explained that stars were actually light shining through holes in the night sky. Behind the black, everything was white.

  “Maybe that’s where your mother is,” said Molly. “Behind the sky.”

  “Is that really true?” Jude asked. “Or did you make it up?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  At the first hint of dove gray in the eastern sky, as a pale silver sliver of crescent moon arced above the headstones in the cemetery on the hilltop, they turned off the faucet and dragged the hose into Sandy’s parents’ toolshed.

  “VERY FUNNY,” SAID ACE as the two girls pedaled past the abandoned construction site the next morning, purple circles under their eyes like bruises.

  “What?” asked Molly.

  “That.” Ace pointed to the sea of orange mud where the Commie Killer headquarters had been.

  “What happened?” asked Molly, blinking her baby blue eyes.

  Jude chewed the inside of her lower lip to keep from grinning.

  “You tell me, pukeface.”

  “Did it rain again last night?” asked Jude.

  “Tell your parents to start saving for your funerals,” said Ace, gazing at them through his opaque black eyes like Sergeant Friday on “Dragnet.”

  JUDE PEDALED LIGHTNING TO HER grandmother’s large white brick house on the next block to welcome her home from her trip to Savannah for a Daughters of the Confederacy convention. “I told your granddaddy,” she once explained to Jude, “if he expected me to leave behind my beautiful colonial Virginia, he’d have to build me a new dwelling place. I wasn’t gonna live out my life in his hillbilly shack.” After constructing his bride’s neo-Georgian mansion and leasing the farmland in the valley to Mr. Starnes, Jude’s grandfather sold off the rest of his family farm for house lots and a golf course. Her grandmother named the resulting development Tidewater Estates. Jude and her father now lived in the “hillbilly shack,” a rambling house of chinked logs built by Jude’s great-grandfather, a half-Cherokee herb doctor.

  Jude remembered removing the knitted mitt from her grandfather’s three wood so that he could tee up in his backyard and drive his golf ball across the river to the first green of the golf course, whose fairways scaled the foothills like a grassy roller-coaster track. Then he descended the cliff to the river’s edge, put his golf bag in a boat, and rowed across the water to continue his game. Having been a left-handed bush league baseball pitcher before his conversion to medicine, he had a golf swing that was the envy of the county.

  Following her husband’s death the previous year, Jude’s grandmother circled the globe twice on the Queen Elizabeth, sending Jude postcards and dolls from each country. Jude steamed the stamps off the cards and saved them in an album. And she removed the elaborate national costumes from the dolls to amputate limbs and extract organs. Then she stitched the incisions with needles Clementine threaded for her, as she had watched her father do when she went with him on house calls to hill farms.

  Jude mounted the brick steps, white columns on either hand. Standing on tiptoe, she lifted the knocker hanging from the teeth of a huge golden lion head. A row of shiny cars waited by the curb, so her grandmother was probably having a club meeting. She went to one almost every day she was off the high seas—bridge club, garden club, Junior League, Bible study group, DAR. What Jude liked best about her grandmother was how glad she always seemed to see Jude. If you interrupted most adults when they were with other adults, they looked at you as though you were a skunk wandering in from the woods.

  An unfamiliar young woman in a starched white uniform and ruffled black apron answered the door. “I reckon you be Miss Judith?” Her front teeth were gapped like a derelict picket fence.

  Jude nodded. Her grandmother always hired farm girls from the part of Virginia where she herself had grown up. Her father had been chief of staff at the Confederate Veterans’ Home on the outskirts of Richmond. They had lived on her mother’s family farm on the Rappahannock River near Fredericksburg, which had supposedly been a land grant to her forebears from King James I for their agreeing to leave England. Jude’s grandfather, descending like the Troll King from the misty mountains to the west, had done his residency at the Veterans’ Home, wooing and winning the boss’s daughter in the process.

  “Your grandmaw, she’s having her a Virginia Club meeting this morning,” the girl said. Accustomed to chopping tobacco and herding cows on hillside pastures, the maids usually found Jude’s grandmother’s recipe for gracious living as incomprehensible as Jude did. They rarely lasted longer than a few months.

  Through the hall archway, Jude could see women in pastel summer suits and flowered hats seated around card tables covered with embroidered linen cloths, eating chicken à la king from flaky pastry shells with her grandmother’s Francis I forks, which had silver fruit all over the handles. Her grandmother always insisted this silverware would be Jude’s when she died, but Jude didn’t even know how to cook. When she grew up, she planned to go for dinner every night to the Wiggly Piglet Barbecue Pit on the Knoxville Highway, where waitresses in short shorts, cowboy boots and hats, and lariat-string ties took your order at your car window.

  Sandy Andrews’s mother was saying, “But you know, I think I like Tennessee almost as much as I do Virginia.”

  Jude’s grandmother answered, “Yes, but I believe you get a better class of people in Virginia, don’t you, Mavis?”

  Fortunately, Jude’s grandmother had insisted that Jude’s father drive her mother across the state line to a Virginia hospital when she went into labor with Jude—so Jude would be able to attend these meetings when she grew up.

  Her grandmother spotted Jude in the doorway. “Why, hey there, darling!” She stood up and strode over on spike heels so high that she looked like a toe dancer. Her silk suit was the color of a robin’s egg, and the skirt just barely
covered her kneecaps. Her hair was also blue, and at her throat was the pearl necklace she wanted Jude to have when she died. In the center were big creamy-pink pearls separated by tiny knots, and the pearls got smaller and smaller toward the ends. The necklace was very pretty, but Jude wished her grandmother wouldn’t always talk about dying. When she bought a silver Cadillac in the spring, she’d said to Jude, “This will be the last car I’ll ever buy on God’s green earth.” (Apparently, she thought she might buy another in heaven.) And each time Jude saw her now, she said, “Honey, this may be the last time you ever see me alive, so take a good long look.”

  “Evelyn, go get my little Virginia granddaughter a Popsicle,” said her grandmother. As Evelyn headed toward the kitchen, she whispered, “Honey, where’s your shirt at today? Virginia girls always wear shirts.”

  Evelyn returned, thrusting a cardboard box of Popsicles at Jude.

  Her grandmother said, “Now, Evelyn, I’ve taught you better than that. Remember, you’re in high society now.”

  Evelyn stomped back to the kitchen and returned with a monogrammed silver tray holding several Popsicles.

  Jude took a cherry one, saying, “Thank you, ma‘am.”

  Her grandmother murmured, “Darling, you don’t need to say ‘ma‘am’ to the servants.”

  LICKING HER RED POPSICLE, Jude pedaled to the cemetery at the end of the block. She wished her grandmother would stay home more often. When she was gone, Jude tried to avoid going past her big, empty house because it made her feel sad and lonely. What if one day it really was the last time Jude saw her alive, as had already happened with her mother and her grandfather?