Five Minutes in Heaven

by Lisa Alther

  Jude held the letter to her nose and took a deep whiff, gazing at the photo on her nightstand of her mother smiling into the camera, holding Jude’s cheek to her own, black hair waving around her face like seaweed around a drowning swimmer.

  Jude remembered the poor dead doll she’d left lying on the operating table. She got up and cradled it for a moment in her arms. Then she hurled it into the back of her closet and slammed the door.

  Hiding the shoe box under her bed, Jude worked on the letters whenever the coast was clear. One evening, Clementine asked as she carried corn bread in from the kitchen, “Miss Judith, what you be doing alone in your room all the time, honey? You ought to be outdoors playing with the other children.”

  “Nothing. Reading. Thinking.”

  “I guess we’re raising an intellectual here, Clementine,” said her father as he cut the meat loaf. He still wore pale green scrub clothes from the hospital and looked very handsome with the candlelight reflecting off the ever-larger bald patch on his head.

  “What’s an ‘interlectual’?” asked Jude, swinging her legs in her chair, pretending she was pumping really high in a swing.

  He laughed. “An intellectual is someone who knows what the word intellectual means.”

  “I don’t want to be one anyway,” said Jude with dignity. “I want to be a medical missionary. Either that or a person who makes little girls’ shoes that aren’t silly.”

  “Same difference,” said her father. “One heals souls and the other heels soles.” He practically fell into his plate laughing.

  Jude liked seeing him so happy all of a sudden. But it bothered her that he never stared anymore at the photo of her mother in the wine bottle when they sat together in his brown leather chair listening to John Cameron Swayze. Her mother was talking in her letters about how much she missed him, but here he was cavorting in back alleys with a floozy. It just wasn’t right.

  “I don’t get it.” Jude looked to Clementine for clues to her father’s hilarity.

  Clementine shrugged and limped toward the kitchen in her huge white shoes. Apparently, her arthritis was acting up, which meant rain was coming soon.

  Her father sighed. “I wish there were some intellectuals around this place,” he said, passing her the corn-bread squares, “to appreciate my bons mots.”

  “Ain’t nobody here but us chickens,” drawled Clementine from the doorway. It was the punch line from a joke they all loved.

  As Jude and Clementine giggled, her father shook his head.

  JUDE AND MOLLY CLIMBED into Jude’s father’s army-surplus jeep. When Jude was younger, he used to wrap her in a blanket and let her sleep on the backseat while he paid house calls back in the hills. If she woke up, she’d sneak over to the lighted windows, through which she might see tall, thin mountain people with gaunt faces and hollow eyes. Sometimes she’d watch her father lance boils or stitch wounds by lantern light.

  Her father drove them across the pasture behind her grandmother’s house and down through the Wildwoods, the olive hood bobbing and the power lift clanking on the back. The mountains lay spread out below them, a lumpy crazy quilt of rust and mauve and mustard and dark green.

  As they sifted the dark loam along the riverbank in the slanting golden rays of the setting sun, Jude’s father told Molly the story about his grandfather’s mother, Abigail Westlake, whose forebears had lived in bark lodges by the river for centuries, fishing the slow-drifting waters and hunting the steep slopes of the Wildwoods. Later they put up a log cabin, growing corn and grazing cattle on the rich bottomland. By Abigail’s time, they had built a plank house, brought slaves from Charleston, converted to Christianity, learned English, and begun wearing white people’s clothing. Abigail’s brother married a missionary from Baltimore.

  One day, white soldiers came with rifles to round them up and march them off to a reservation in Oklahoma. When her brother tried to escape, a soldier shot him in the head. Coming home from gathering herbs, Abigail watched this from the Wildwoods, then hid in a cave while an unfamiliar white family moved into her family’s house.

  After several days, a neighboring farmer found her, nearly dead from cold and hunger and fear, and carried her back to his cabin on the ridge. He himself had recently arrived in America, having been evicted from his croft in the Scottish Highlands. He confronted the new family in her house and ordered them to leave. After they obligingly moved out, they burned her house to the ground. Jude’s father pointed out the cellar hole, which was now overgrown with a tangle of Virginia creeper. An early frost had turned the leaves the scarlet of spilt blood.

  Abigail learned from relatives who had survived the forced westward trek that her parents and sisters had died of typhoid in the Ozarks. As she lay in bed week after week trying to recover her will to live, she told the farmer about the dances in this valley when she was a child, at which warriors carrying red-and-black clubs painted their faces vermilion and circled their eyes with scarlet and black. About her cousins, who came down on horses from the deep mountain coves wearing deerskin leggings and embroidered hunting shirts and red-and-blue turbans, to watch the violent all-day ball games on the playing field downriver. About the shamen, who raked the ballplayers in their loincloths with turkey-quill combs to grid their flesh with blood for good luck. About the prophets who had recently begun painting their faces black and proclaiming the end of the Cherokee people.

  The farmer told her about having his hut in the Highlands burned down around him in the middle of a winter night because he refused to leave to make way for a herd of sheep. About his wife and baby, who died as he dragged them from the fire. About being forced onto a ship in Ullapool with his young son, bound for no one knew where. About being dumped at Cape Fear on the Carolina coast and wandering across the Smokies in search of an unoccupied spot where he could farm in peace. About the recent Cherokee raid on his cattle, during which his son had disappeared.

  Having loss in common, if nothing else, the two fell in love and married. Their son, Jude’s great-grandfather, grew up learning from his mother which parts of which plants to use for which ailments. When he became a man, people arrived at his new log house from all over the region for his remedies. During the War Between the States, he patched up soldiers brought to him by both sides, but he refused to join either, having also learned from his mother a certain skepticism about the projects of white men, whatever their proclaimed creed.

  Jude looked up from her digging to study her father. He had a big crooked nose just like her grandfather—just like the Indian on a buffalo nickel. And his cheekbones were so broad that his mahogany eyes seemed to be peering out from inside a cave. People always said Jude’s eyes were just like his. While he talked, the valley came alive, with painted warriors paddling canoes up the river and shooting deer with arrows in the Wildwoods. With teams of men in loincloths catching balls in the nets of woven squirrel skin at the ends of their long wooden spoons. With bayoneted soldiers herding little children like cattle. With blazing houses and screaming people.

  But when her father stopped talking, it all vanished and everything fell silent, except for the whirring of grasshoppers in the withered alfalfa and the cawing of a crow from the top of a sycamore.

  Her father scraped soil from a pointed shard of rock and handed it to Jude. She and Molly looked at it. It was shiny black with a vein of white down the center and pointed wings at the top for tying it to an arrow shaft.

  “Hang on to that,” her father said. “Some ancient cousin of yours probably made it.”

  Jude kept inspecting the chipped edges of the arrowhead with her fingertips. It seemed strange that all that was left were these bits of rock, herself and her father, and her father’s stories, told to him by his grandfather, who was told them by his mother. At school, they played a game called Gossip in which everyone sat in a circle and one person whispered something in the ear of the next, who whispered it to the next, and so on. By the time it had gone around the circle, it was completely wr
ong or stupid.

  They drove up to the Wiggly Piglet, which featured an outline of Porky Pig in flashing neon, with a slogan beneath that read: “Our pigs are dying for you to eat.” A high-school girl in a cowboy hat and boots arrived to take their order of pulled-pork sandwiches and peanut-butter milk shakes. As the girl strutted away, Molly reported that she had had goose bumps on her thighs below her short shorts.

  After the waitress returned, carrying their order on an aluminum tray that she attached to their car window, Jude asked her father, “Why did the soldiers want to march Abigail Westlake’s family to Oklahoma?”

  “The white settlers wanted their land,” said her father, handing out the wrapped sandwiches. “That soil along the river is very rich from centuries of flooding.”

  “But that’s not right, just to take it like that.”

  He smiled faintly as he unwrapped his barbecue and poured extra sauce from a tiny paper cup onto the coleslaw atop his pork. “No, it isn’t. But the Cherokees were sitting ducks. They believed that land belonged to everyone. It never occurred to them that it could be taken away.”

  “But you said they owned slaves?”

  “Yes.”

  “Negro people like Clementine, who had to do all the work for free?” A speaker attached to the restaurant roof was blaring Hank Williams singing “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love with You.”

  “Yes.”

  “But that’s not right, either,” said Jude. The barbecue sauce was so spicy that her nose was starting to run.

  “No, it’s wrong. Very wrong.”

  Jude sat beside Molly on the backseat, sucking her milk shake through a straw, trying to figure out how the same people could be right and wrong, both at the same time. She glanced at Molly.

  “When your grandfather told you those stories, did it make you sad?” Jude asked, watching the cowgirl write down the orders of three boys in ducktails who were sitting in a convertible with an elevated rear end and an elaborate chrome tailpipe. PARTY DOLL was painted on the fender. She and Molly had already decided to be waitresses here when they grew up, so that they could wear the cowgirl outfits.

  “Yes. It made me sad to know that people would treat each other that way. It still does.”

  “Why do they?” asked Jude, determined to get this settled once and for all.

  “Ah, the question of the ages.” He wadded up his wrapper and napkin and stuffed them into the paper bag.

  “But what’s the answer?”

  “Jude,” he said, “I’m afraid you may be one of those people who spend their lives searching for that answer.”

  “But what is it?” Jude was starting to feel frantic, as though this was a joke that everyone knew the punch line to but herself.

  “Well, I don’t know exactly, baby.” He turned around to look at her in the light from the flashing neon pig. “The Cherokees used to say that beneath different appearances, all creatures are merely manifestations of the Great Spirit. So that those who harm others unnecessarily disturb the balance of the universe and therefore harm themselves. But many people nowadays seem to feel separate and superior, so it doesn’t bother them so much to hurt others.”

  “Which do you believe?” Molly asked.

  “You don’t need to believe or not believe something once you experience it.”

  Jude and Molly looked at him blankly.

  “That means I agree with the Cherokees,” he said.

  Jude and Molly looked at each other. Jude thought that if anyone hurt Molly, she, too, would feel the pain. But if someone hurt Ace Kilgore, she’d feel glad. So which category did she fit into?

  Your daddy’s so sweet, Molly gesticulated in wolfspeak as he carried their trash to the can and handed their tray to the goose-bumped cowgirl. Jude felt proud of him.

  Since her parents were out of town, Molly spent that night at Jude’s house, and she taught Jude a game she’d just invented called Pecan. Jude lay on top of Molly, stomach-to-stomach, chest-to-chest, nose-to-nose. They looked cross-eyed into each other’s eyes. Then Molly began to giggle. Jude could feel Molly’s chest and stomach trembling and heaving beneath her own, so she started giggling, too. Soon it was impossible to tell who was and wasn’t giggling.

  Molly grabbed Jude’s wrists and forced her over onto her side. Then she scrambled to her knees and sat astride Jude’s chest, pinning her arms above her head. Breathing heavily, she look down at Jude with triumph, eyes so fierce that they were almost purple. “I could pin you like this with one hand tied behind my back,” she announced in her husky voice.

  “Probably,” said Jude. But she hadn’t been fighting back very hard because she had been too interested to find out what Molly would do next.

  Before they fell asleep, they agreed that Pecan was such a good game that they should play it a lot, taking turns lying on top.

  THROUGH THE BARE BRANCHES across the cave mouth Jude watched the river wind through the valley, a slithering brown snake. Holsteins stood to their knees in the water, patches of black spread across their barreled backs like continents on a globe. A hawk, fringed wing tips fluttering, swooped and dipped and floated on a column of air that was spiraling up from the valley floor. The Smokies rippled like blue sand dunes to the edge of the earth. Wispy puffs of smoke rose up from the mountain coves, where farmers were curing their tobacco.

  A dozen yards below, Ace Kilgore was yelling commands to the patrolling Commie Killers, unaware of Molly and Jude overhead. Jude’s father had shown them this cave, high up on a cliff, concealed by a thick tangle of mountain laurel, where Abigail Westlake had hidden while soldiers down below marched her family off to their deaths in the Ozarks. Jude and Molly were sitting on a cushion of pine needles, quiet as hunted game, playing Trail of Tears. They had even persuaded Sidney to halt his amiable panting.

  Although she tried her best to stay out of Ace’s way, Jude often stole glances at him on the playground or in the lunchroom or around the neighborhood. If she and Molly were wolf boys trying to pass unnoticed on the fringes of the forest, Ace was a wolf boy who had refused to come in from the wild. He was completely untamed, frightening but also admirable.

  The Commie Killers swept down the cliff face on their mission of national security. Jerry Crawford, Ace’s best friend, brought up the rear. He was much taller than Ace, but he always hunched over in an attempt to be the same height. A couple of the others, twins with sleek dark hair whom Jude and Molly called the “Panther Twins,” were stronger and faster than Ace. But they always trailed around after him like docile guard dogs, executing his nefarious orders without a flicker of hesitation.

  As their shouts faded, Jude extracted Girl Scout cookies and strawberry sodas from her knapsack. She handed Molly a candy cigarette, lighting it for her with an imaginary match. Cigarette dangling from her lips, Molly dealt hands for Over the Moon. Setting aside their soda bottles, they began drawing, exchanging and discarding in an arcane pattern understood only by themselves, since they had invented this game in which low cards were worth more than high ones. Sucking their cigarettes, they cheered and giggled and cursed.

  When the game ended, they used the cards to outline the floor plan of the cabin they were going to build on the ridge overhead when they grew up. It would be filled with books and records, and there would be a separate room for drawing and painting. Outside would be a stable for their dogs and horses, with a fenced-in paddock. Their jobs at the Wiggly Piglet would pay for it all.

  Jude inspected the floor plan that stretched across the pine needles. “What’s that room for?” she asked, pointing.

  “I just added it,” said Molly. “It’s for our babies. We can each have one.”

  Jude looked at her. “Oh, no, you don’t. Not me.”

  “But it would be fun.”

  “Babies kill you.”

  “Not always they don’t.”

  “Molly, I don’t want you to die. Promise me you won’t have a baby.”

  “Okay. Relax, Jude. It was
just an idea.”

  Stomach knotted, Jude looked out the cave mouth as a huge, puffy white cloud drifted past like a giant cotton ball. Her mother was reclining on it, dressed in a skirted bathing suit, a white rose in her black hair.

  “Is something wrong?” asked Molly.

  Jude had told no one about sometimes seeing her mother. Everyone said she was dead. But Molly was her best friend. They told each other everything. “It’s my mother.”

  Molly glanced around the cave. “Where?”

  “Out there. See that cloud?”

  Molly looked out the cave mouth. “Yeah, it does look kind of like a woman.”

  “No, I mean my mother is there, riding on that cloud. Lying on that thing that looks like a throne. Wearing a bathing suit. Now she’s waving at us.”

  Molly stared at the cloud for a long time. “I don’t see her, Jude,” she finally said.

  “You don’t?” Jude blinked her eyes several times and then looked back at the cloud. Her mother was still there, tossing her a kiss.

  “No. But I believe you, Jude. I believe she’s really there.”

  But Molly’s frown lines didn’t go away, even after they returned to Over the Moon.

  Finally, Jude rested her handful of cards on the pine needles. “What’s wrong?” she asked, worried that Molly might be wondering if she really wanted to be best friends with someone who saw ghosts.

  “Nothing.”