Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  Walking across the field to the wrought-iron gate, Jude stooped to pick clover blossoms, until she had two bouquets. To one side were the graves of soldiers killed in the War Between the States and of pioneer mothers who had died having babies. Sometimes their babies were buried beside them with toy headstones. Some of the graves had sunk in the middle when the wooden coffins rotted, and several stones had broken off or fallen over.

  Jude placed a bouquet by her grandfather’s headstone, a shiny, red granite obelisque that read: “A savior in life, with his Savior in death.” He had had kind hazel eyes behind thick lenses in wire-frame glasses that perched like a giant insect on his aquiline nose, funny earlobes that hung down like a bloodhound’s jowls, and a cute little double chin that puffed out like a bullfrog’s throat when he laughed. Her grandmother said he had spent hours holding Jude over his head playing Flying Baby while Jude’s father operated on soldiers in the belly of a troop ship in the mid-Atlantic, with torpedos plowing past and alarms screaming overhead.

  Jude remembered sitting on his lap on his screened back porch, watching the Holston drift toward the Smokies. He told stories in his soft mountain drawl about cutting off men’s arms and legs in a big tent by a river in Belgium. About a pit like a buried silo, full of German prisoners. About climbing down into it on a ladder, with a big red cross on his chest so they wouldn’t hurt him. About a muddy field honeycombed with foxholes, where dead trees poked up like broken toothpicks. About tangles of rusted barbed wire that looked like a blackberry patch in the autumn. About men in metal helmets hanging from the wire, screaming while huge birds swooped down to tear at their wounds with sharp beaks and claws.

  Jude’s grandmother had come out of the house to ask, “Charles, do you really think it’s a good idea to tell this child your horrible war stories?”

  He looked up at her through his thick lenses. “She needs to know what she’s up against. I wish I had known. All the soldiers at your daddy’s hospital told me what an honor it had been to lose their limbs for the South. So I thought I was going to march in a uniform and be a hero.”

  “Jude’s a girl, dear, not a boy.”

  “She’s a human being. We’re all in this mess together. That’s the only thing that makes it bearable.”

  For a moment, he looked as if he was going to cry. Jude’s grandmother reached for his hand, as small and supple as a woman’s, with which he had hurled an unhittable curveball, with which he could chip and putt like a professional golfer, with which he could operate by feel in otherwise-inaccessible sites. As she stroked and kissed it, he began to look less miserable. Then she returned to the kitchen to work on her file box of secret family recipes, which had gotten her elected president of the Virginia Club. She claimed the South Carolina Club had nothing to equal her Brunswick stew, which she’d adapted to modern times by replacing the squirrel meat with beef.

  “Did you ever shoot people?” Jude asked her grandfather, standing up in his lap and patting his cheeks with both hands to cheer him up.

  “No. My job was to patch up the ones who got shot, so they could go back to their trenches and kill some more Germans.”

  “But why?” asked Jude. She studied one of his cheeks carefully. Tiny hairs were sticking out of it like dark blue splinters. She wondered if they hurt him.

  Her grandfather shrugged. “Most people are scared as treed coons, and scared people turn nasty.”

  “Scared of what?”

  “Scared of living. Scared of loving. Scared of losing. Scared of dying. Scared.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Not me. I’ll never be scared,” said Jude, not yet having met Ace Kilgore.

  “Not if I can help it, honey,” he murmured, kissing her frown lines.

  SQUATTING BY HER MOTHER’S GRAVE, Jude placed the second bouquet on the edge of her stone, a simple rectangle of cream-colored marble with forked green veins that branched across it like lightning. Her inscription read: “At Rest at Last in the Arms of the Lord.” One day her mother was in the kitchen at home, baking butterscotch brownies and wearing a bulging apron covered with pink roses. The next day she was asleep in a white hospital bed and wouldn’t wake up, even when Jude sang “Rise, Shine, Give God His Glory” right in her ear. And the day after that, she was here in this mound, being kept warm by a blanket of beautiful white flowers that smelled like her favorite perfume. And Jude’s grandmother from New York City was weeping silently by the grave with a dead fox draped around her neck. It had tiny claws and glittery orange eyes. Her husband, Jude’s other grandfather, who wore a gangster hat low over his eyes, kept wiping the orange clay off his shiny black shoes with a white handkerchief.

  In a low voice, Jude began to tell her mother about Ace and the cat. When she got to the cherry bomb, she heard rustling among the dried milkweeds left over from winter. Looking up, she saw the Commie Killers in army fatigues and face masks, crawling on knees and elbows like evil insects, rifles cradled in their arms.

  Jumping up, she looked all around.

  “So,” said Ace, leaping to his feet and aiming his rifle at her, “I guess we better show you what happens to little girls who talk too much.” His father’s colonel hat slipped down over his eyes.

  Jude ran toward the sidewalk. Someone tackled her. They dragged her, kicking and biting, to a sunken grave. Pushing her into it, some held her down while others piled fallen tombstones across the mouth of the hole.

  “A perfect fit!” announced Ace. “See you around, kid, as the line said to the circle.” And the Commie Killers vanished.

  Jude could hear a lone cicada droning like a chain saw from a nearby walnut tree. Six weeks until the first frost, Mr. Starnes always said. She pushed at the stones above her head, but they wouldn’t budge. She tried to figure out how much clay lay between herself and the skeleton below. What if it reached up and dragged her down into the earth in its bony arms? Maybe if she stayed perfectly still, it wouldn’t realize she was there.

  She was so scared that she could hardly breathe. What if the stones came crashing down and smashed her into a human pancake? She wished her grandfather would help her, as he had promised, but he was lying on the other side of the graveyard, probably just as scared as she was.

  She paused in her panic to wonder if the tiny blue hairs on his cheeks would have kept growing so that he now had a long beard, and dagger fingernails like Dracula, and toenails that would one day sprout from his grave like blanched asparagus spears.

  What if a nest of black widow spiders had been disturbed when the Commie Killers picked up the broken headstones? What if the black widows were crawling all over the stones just above her head? What if they didn’t realize that she wasn’t the one who had wrecked their home? She sank as far down in the grave as she could. But then she remembered the skeleton below and tried to twist sideways out of its grasp.

  She lay there in the dark, eyes closed, breathing as little as possible. At Sunday school, the preacher was always talking about how great nature was because it displayed God’s handiwork. But what about black widow spiders? What about copperheads? What about leeches and mosquitoes and bats and ticks and wasps? What about Ace Kilgore?

  Gradually, her body relaxed into the contours of the sunken grave. Ace was right: She fit like Cinderella’s foot in the glass slipper. This was what it was like to be dead, and it wasn’t so bad. If she stayed like this long enough, she would be dead and she could join her mother in heaven and never have to see Ace Kilgore again.

  Billowy white clouds were drifting like spinnakered sailing ships across an indigo sea of summer sky. Beautiful smiling women in white bathrobes were reclining on them, waving as they passed. One woman with curly black hair and full red lips looked exactly like Jude’s mother.

  “Wait!” called Jude. “Take me with you!”

  But they seemed not to hear.

  A dog began snuffling and yelping up above. Jude kept her eyes tightly shut, struggling to return to h
er mother.

  “Jude, are you okay?” called Molly through an opening between the broken headstones. Sidney was beside her, whimpering and flailing frantically at the stones with his paws.

  “I guess so.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll get you out,” said Sandy, freckled face looming in the window of light. “It’s just a question of leverage.”

  THEY SAT IN SANDY’S tree house drinking grape soda through straws that bent like gooseneck lamps. The Commie Killers, shirtless in the hot afternoon sun, were redigging trenches across the street beneath a Confederate battle flag that hung limply from a pole stuck in the mud. The phone rang.

  Answering it, Sandy said, “Oh, hi, Nicolai.” He reached for a notebook. “Let’s see, what do I have for you today? Oh, yes, queen to king’s bishop four. Okay. Talk to you soon.”

  “Moscow,” he explained, running his hand over his cowlick in a futile attempt to smooth it down. “Right, so first of all, Jude, don’t ever play alone again. If Molly hadn’t seen your tricycle, you’d still be in that grave. I can’t spend all day at my telescope watching out for you two. I’m in the middle of some very important chess matches. Why don’t you play with Noreen next door?”

  “She’s a girl,” said Molly.

  “We’re not really girls,” said Jude. “We just look like it.”

  NOREEN AGREED TO LET Jude and Molly be her sons if Sandy would be her husband.

  “Okay,” said Sandy, standing outside the shed attached to Noreen’s parents’ garage, “but I’m the kind of father who spends all day at the office. And my office is my tree house. And only my sons are allowed to visit.”

  “But pioneer fathers don’t go to the office,” said Noreen from the doorway. Her dark naturally curly hair was parted on one side, and a red plastic barrette shaped like a bow held it back from her face on the other side. The frames of her glasses matched her barrette.

  “They go hunting, don’t they?” asked Sandy, walking toward his yard. “Pretend I’ve been eaten by bears. Pretend you’re a widow.”

  “You’re no fun,” said Noreen.

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Well, all right, come in, Jude and Molly.” Noreen stepped aside. “Sit down. We’re having supper.” Supper consisted of dried clay patties served on wild grape leaves atop an orange crate.

  Noreen’s “daughters” were a puling bunch in flared shorts with matching halter tops. Red plastic barrettes shaped their hair into bizarre lumps and mounds, as though their skulls were deformed. Most dandled dolls, nursing and burping them as they ate, and discussing their infant antics in wearying detail.

  “Sister Serena, would you please read our Bible lesson for today?” asked Noreen.

  Serena handed her bundled doll to the girl beside her, then picked up a Bible and opened it at its marker. “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” she read haltingly in a high-pitched voice. “If it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.”

  “Halleluia! Praise the Lord!” shrieked Noreen, keeling over into spasms on the floor.

  Jude watched as the other girls set aside their dolls and writhed on the floor, babbling in something that sounded like double pig Latin. So it was true? “Where I am, there ye may be also.” Her mother was going to come get her and take her to God’s house. Everyone said her grandmother lived in a mansion. If heaven had many mansions, would it be a development like Tidewater Estates?

  Whoops erupted outside. Through the playhouse window, Jude could see the Commie Killers war dancing with feather bracelets at their wrists and ankles. Ace appeared in the doorway in a chicken-feather headdress, a dish towel belted around his bony hips. His face and chest were painted with lipstick lightning bolts. The girls stopped rolling on the floor and began to wail. Holding up his hands for silence, he pointed at Molly and Jude. “We wantum those two shirtless ones. You squaws havum nothing to fear.”

  “No! Don’t take my sons!” Noreen leapt to her feet and shielded them behind her back.

  Ace shoved her aside, and his warriors dragged Jude and Molly into the yard. Ropes knotted around their throats and wrists, they were led toward the Wildwoods.

  “I’m telling!” screamed Noreen. “Momma!”

  “Hush, darling,” called her mother from the screened porch, where the Missionary Society was meeting. “Momma’s praying.”

  “Sandy!” Noreen yelled toward the tree house. “Your sons have been captured by the savages!”

  “YOU‘D BETTER LET US GO,” said Molly, wrists and ankles bound to saplings so her body formed an X. Her ribs looked like a xylophone. “My uncle’s a state trooper.”

  “So what?” said Ace, who was flicking the blade of his jackknife with his thumb. “So’s mine.”

  “What are you going to do to us?” asked Jude, bound nearby. She kept picturing that red-and-green cherry bomb. On top of it all, she felt guilty: Molly wouldn’t be in this fix except for her. Silently, she summoned the Nunnehi, the Cherokee Immortals, who her father had said would emerge from beneath the mountains and under the river to help you if you were in trouble. But no one showed up.

  “We haven’t decided yet, ma‘am. We may play crucifixion. Or we may leave y‘all here as supper for the mosquitoes.” After closing his knife and fastening it to his belt, he walked up to Molly and glared right into her eyes with his dead black ones. “Are you now or have you ever been an agent for any foreign power?” he demanded.

  “Excuse me?” said Molly, screwing up her face with contempt.

  “So you won’t talk?”

  “Talk about what?”

  Slowly, he extracted a chicken feather from his warbonnet. Smiling, he stroked Molly’s armpit with it.

  “Please don’t, Ace,” pleaded Molly in a wimpy voice Jude had never before heard from her. “I’m ticklish.” She began to struggle against her ropes.

  Delighted, Ace continued. The other warriors plucked feathers from their bracelets and joined in on both girls’ armpits.

  Jude caught on quickly, and she and Molly writhed and grimaced, screaming for mercy as loudly as possible.

  Jude was standing on the porch steps before her mother’s mansion in heaven, white columns on either hand. Her mother was in the doorway in a low-cut emerald evening gown, smiling, arms outspread, wavy black hair stirring in the breeze.

  “Momma, is it really you?” asked Jude.

  A siren whined up the hill from town. The boys, feathers frozen, looked at one another.

  “I told you my uncle would get you,” gasped Molly.

  “Holy crow!” whispered Ace, seeing two flat-brimmed hats skimming along above the bushes. The Commie Killers took off through the undergrowth, feathers of torture spiraling to the forest floor.

  BY THE CURB IN FRONT of Sandy’s house was a khaki-and-forest-green highway patrol car, red light flashing on its roof. Molly’s uncle Clarence, holster on his hip, black boots to his knees, opened the back door for Sandy.

  “Wait a minute, Uncle Clarence,” called Molly. “What are y‘all doing?”

  “Arresting him, sweetheart.” He closed the door. Sandy looked through the window at Molly and Jude and shrugged helplessly.

  “But Sandy saved us. You should arrest Ace Kilgore instead.”

  “We come up here in the first place to pick up Sandy,” said Uncle Clarence as he circled the car to the driver’s door, “and he told us about y‘all. But this son of a gun here tapped into the phone line. He’s been calling free all over the world for pert near two year now. He owes the phone company two thousand dollars, plus fines. Your young friend here is in real big trouble, missy.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  ON JUDE’S FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL, Molly, a second grader, walked her along the busy highway past the sign with the winged red horse in front of the Texaco station. As they approached the redbrick school building, which re
sembled the state mental hospital across town, with wire mesh in the window glass and a chain-link fence around the playground, Molly assured her that Noreen’s report of a spanking machine in the principal’s office was untrue.

  “They always say that to frighten the first graders.”

  In the tiled hallway outside her classroom door, Jude saw several children crying in the arms of distraught mothers, clutching their skirts, clinging to their legs, begging to be taken home, like the pictures at Sunday school of sinners in hell pleading with the Lord for salvation.

  Struggling not to be a crybaby, Jude opened the door and marched into the room. She sat down at the desk pointed out by the teacher, whose chin when she smiled almost touched her nose, like the witch in Hansel and Gretel. A piece of manila paper and a box of new crayons with sharp tips sat on her blond wooden desktop, so Jude began to draw a puffy white cloud floating in a blue sky, with a woman in a white bathrobe standing on it, smiling with bright red lips. She made the hair yellow so no one would know it was her mother. As she colored, she began to feel less miserable. She liked the oily smell of the new crayons, the rough texture of the paper against her fingertips, and the bright colors she could spread in any pattern she liked.

  “That’s very nice, Jude,” said the witch, bending over her picture, smelling like flowers that had been left in a vase too long.

  “Thank you.”

  “Is it an angel?” She rested a bony hand on Jude’s shoulder.

  “Sort of.” Jude would never reveal that the angel was her mother. There was no telling what a witch might do with that information.

  “So how do you like first grade?” asked Molly in the cafeteria at lunchtime. She had sneaked away from the second-grade table to eat the peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich from her Donald Duck lunch box with Jude.

  “All right.” Jude took the wax paper off a stack of Oreos Clementine had packed for her. “Except my teacher was making fun of how this boy was holding his pencil, so he threw it at her. And then she spanked him in the cloakroom.” Jude separated an Oreo to lick off the sugary white filling. “School is really scary, isn’t it?”