Baptism for the Dead

by Libbie Hawker

  “I hate this place,” Adam said.

  “I know.”

  “What do you think a big city’s like?”

  “How big? New York big?”

  “Sure.”

  I bent over the box to find my next projectile. Adam wore shorts; the darkness of the hairs on his shins struck me as very mature. I wanted to touch his perfect, geometric knees. Instead I grabbed a cereal bowl. “I don’t know. I guess it would be real busy and crowded. But I think I’d like it.”

  “Better than Rexburg,” he said. There was something uncertain in his voice, something fearful.

  “Better than Rexburg.”

  We threw our dishes together. The bowl and the cup struck almost at the same time. When the crash sounded, I recalled in vivid colors the look and sound of Adam cursing, picking himself and his bike up from the sidewalk, a spray of spit falling from his lips. On the cement pad, shards spread outward in fantastic patterns of chaos. I knew at the moment of impact that Adam was like a sliver of glass under my skin, pushed in deep where it could never work its way out again.

  5.

  It would never do to allow anyone in Rexburg to catch wind of the fact that Adam and I were in love. Sixteen was the officially sanctioned age for romance; we were two years shy. In order to maintain the summertime freedom that facilitated our secret passion, we had to keep up an appearance of trustworthy innocence. My personal goal was an air of wide-eyed, dimpled naivete, haloed in ringlets, and I chased that image with the focus of a serious athlete.

  With sly calculation I allowed myself to be seen several times a week on the front porch, poring over the Scriptures, apparently just for the fun of it. I would dress in modest capri pants, in the sweetest pastel colors, sleeved cotton tops, not too tight, hair in good-girl pigtails, and I wore a furrow of concentration between my brows which I practiced daily in the mirror. I also practiced the distracted half-wave and half-smile with which I returned neighbors’ greetings before pushing my nose back into my reading. If one can call it reading. My eyes moved over chapter and verse and vaguely some disembodied voice narrated unheard words inside my skull, while my eyes saw only the hairs on Adam’s shins, or the creases in the skin over his clean angular elegant knuckles. And several times a week I followed the neighborhood boys to the park to join in ball games or tree-climbing or joketelling, or any of the other simple things adolescent Mormon boys do in the summer under indifferent skies. I really had no interest in any of the neighborhood boys, or in their ball games. I participated because it was my camouflage. The more I rough-housed, the more the town would see what I wanted it to see: a tomboy who made a habit of running wild with boys, that was all, her chaste braids flying in the wind. Hardly unusual to see her roaming through the sunglowing weeds in a vacant lot with that Adam boy, the lenses of his glasses flashing white in a hot sun.

  In the evenings just before dinnertime, body still reverberating with the echo of an Adam afternoon, I would sprawl on the grass of Porter Park with my girl friends. We nibbled candy bars or played M-A-S-H in our lined notebooks or made paper fortune-tellers, and talked about boys in hushed tones. I whispered along with them as if I knew nothing, as if I was the pure and good girl my modest clothing and soft smile suggested. I feigned shy interest in other boys our age and avoided all talk of that Adam kid. Katherine, Russi, and Danae tossed their hair in the sun and planned their futures: which boys they would marry, what they would name their children – and I went along, nodding and grinning, drawing on eye-spots to conceal myself in the tallgrass tangle of their righteousness.

  It was on one of these girls-only evenings in the park that I made a near-fatal mistake. The shock of my blunder firmed my resolve to keep my head down and blend into Rexburg’s background at all costs. This is how it happened, as near as I can remember:

  The four of us sat cross-legged beneath the birches. Above, the sky and the leaves conspired together. Katherine was all doe eyes and long white-blond silk hair; she picked blades of grass and twirled them between her fingers until they wilted and crushed and gave up their sweet summer smell. Her voice was as modest and subdued as leaves moving.

  “Do you remember Sharlet? She was that sophomore who always wore hats and her family moved away in February. It’s because she got pregnant. She’s going to have a baby any day now. She might have had it already.”

  “What?” Danae was doubtful. Her face was already blossoming with the pimples that would permanently scar her cheeks later in life.

  “It’s true. They moved to Pocatello. Her whole family left because they were so ashamed. My mom told me. She heard it in Relief Society.”

  Silence. We digested the rumor. I flopped backward into the grass to disguise the special thrill of terror I felt in my guts, the one I hoped did not show on my face.

  “Well, I don’t blame them,” Katherine went on, “for being ashamed. Everybody would die of shame if I did something so bad. My family would probably drag me off to Timbuktu and I would just die.”

  “I’d never do that,” Russi said. We didn’t ask her what she meant. We all knew. I knew. “It’s disgusting!”

  The other girls giggled. I stayed flat in the grass and said not a word.

  “Well.” Katherine resumed shepherding our conversation with her usual gentle, melodic control. “I’m really sorry for her family. I mean, imagine feeling like you had to leave over something your daughter did.”

  “Pocatello.” Danae stuck out her tongue.

  “That’s what happens when you go against Heavenly Father,” Katherine said sagely. The girls nodded. Then – and I am still not sure why – I sat up.

  “Who knows,” I said, wondering what on earth I was thinking. “Who knows if it’s really so bad.”

  They all stared at me.

  “I mean, maybe Sharlet was in love. Don’t you think it’s sad that she had to move away from the guy she loves?” Katherine: “I can’t believe you’d say that. If she loved him she should have saved it for their wedding night.”

  “Well, what if God’s not real? Then what’s she saving it for?” Russi gasped and covered her mouth with her hands.

  “Just think about it. What if?”

  Katherine adopted an expression of pained disgust, deep disappointment. She was the charismatic one of our bunch, the popular girl, and when she turned that look on me I felt sick – literally sick, on the verge of throwing up right into the grass where we sat. In a rush my mind caught up with my mouth and I asked myself what I’d thought would happen, why would ever say such a thing to anybody who was not Adam. What were you thinking, what were you thinking?

  In Katherine’s wilted frown I felt the whole crushing weight of the town, the only world I knew, and the vastness, the finality of rejection from that small but very real universe. Perhaps I couldn’t help my doubts but I could keep them to myself, and in doing so I could avoid ever seeing that look again on Katherine’s face, or on anybody else’s.

  I made myself laugh. “I was kidding, you guys. Come on. I was just joking.”

  “That’s not funny. You shouldn’t joke that way.”

  “Lighten up. It was just a joke.”

  Katherine turned away from me. “I still don’t think it’s funny.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  **

  I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t like you, Katherine. I’m sorry the neat, defined life you loved so well never made me happy.

  Truly, I am sorry. How much pain I could have avoided if I’d been like you, complacent and accepting and contented and good.

  **

  In the grass that evening under the birches, with my friends shrinking away from me, giggling with discomfort at my dangerous sense of humor, I realized that I could only be free with Adam. He alone understood me; he alone was like me. When we turned eighteen we would marry and move away, to some city, New York big. We’d find a place where we could ask all the questions we wanted. Nothing would constrain us. Nothing would quiet us. We had four more years
in this town, and then together we would cut ourselves free.

  I lay back again on the lawn, let Katherine carry the conversation to safer ground, felt the flush slowly leave my face. I watched the leaves smile in the wind, and I thought of Adam looking out over the valley...Do you believe in God at all?...and the mountains folded into mountains, and the leaves into leaves, and the wind moved it all with a voice that was quiet and subdued, but never stopped speaking.

  6.

  Wind. Early August. Dust devils in the fields along the highway. After the requisite ball game I returned home for lunch, changed my clothes, and, shivering, remounted my bicycle. We were to meet on the Bench, at the remotest construction lot. The lot had seen no activity in a long time; Adam suspected it would remain abandoned until fall. My legs had grown stronger that summer from all my breathless biking. I no longer needed to push my bike up the hill. I rode so fast, in fact, that I arrived at our appointed meeting place a half-hour early, and expected to wait alone for Adam to arrive. But his bike was there already, slanting in the weeds against the pale green metal box of a ticking transformer.

  I found him sitting inside the half-built house, sheltered from the neighborhood’s eyes by a wall of flat, warm, naked wood. His back was to me, resting against one in a rank of two-by-fours that would eventually become a bedroom wall. He heard my feet on the bare, stony earth but did not look around. He just stared out at the valley stretched and drying in the sun.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  Silence. Nothing.

  I came to sit beside him, hugged my knees to my chest. With my temple resting on my knee I watched his sad, solemn face. There were motes of dust caught up against his glasses, and the motes reflected the afternoon glow. Those eyes I loved so well, obscured by a haze.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He was tense and quiet. I thought maybe he would break up with me. I thought maybe guilt had overwhelmed him at last, or he had heard the rumors about the pregnant girl whose family moved to Pocatello.

  Then he turned to look at me, and the sun flashed on the particles of dust over his lenses. I blinked. The haze was gone. He watched me with those fantastically blue eyes. I saw that it was something worse than guilt. He did not speak for a long time, and my guts were all lit fuse, waiting for his revelation. When his voice came at last, tears came, too, sudden, tinged yellow in the afternoon light.

  His parents were divorcing. He was moving with his mother to Seattle. He would be gone in two weeks. Gone.

  I put my arms around his shoulders, but my hands were awkward and stiff. I kissed his hair. I love you, I said, and he said nothing.

  In the desperation of that bleak afternoon, I gave everything I had to Adam’s keeping. Soon enough we would be separated forever and only a few shards of this summer would remain buried in our skin. Dust devils in the valley stretched up and into the sky, conduits between heaven and earth that faltered and faded. We pressed ourselves into each other’s flesh, scored the clay of ourselves with one another’s nails. In the striped shadow and light of the unbuilt home I distilled Adam upon my soul, and he has remained there all these years, through everything, dew-beaded, salt and summer.

  7.

  In spite of my best efforts, still I feel I have failed to show you what Rexburg is. Everything is meaningless outside the context of the setting. You must understand the place to understand the story.

  Listen:

  Monday evenings the park is deserted. Every family is at home, gathered around a game board. Dad is the banker. He keeps the pink and yellow undersize dollar notes in neat little stacks. His mind is on the computer where he has hidden all his pictures of barely-eighteen girls in a folder labeled “Presentation for Client Meeting.” The girls are tanned, their little breasts sharply pointed, their eyes dull, their mouths half-open in expressions of unquenchable lust or unfathomable disappointment.

  Mom plays the iron piece. Her hair lost all its luster years ago; it’s soft and rounded; she will put it up in curlers tonight, like every night, and recall when she was first married, how it thrilled her to brush her hair in front of her new husband, how he would watch her do it, come stand at her side and touch her shoulder and lead her to their bed. And she would think, Foreordained. For all of eternity I waited for you. And now she cries at night from the pain of guilt because she thinks about her friend’s husband, the man with the big hands and the smile lines that curve across his cheeks, his bold laugh and his lively eyes.

  Each of their children – the dog, the shoe, the race car – they build up their fortunes and collect their cards and think, When I grow up I will have a family just like this one. Just like my own.

  Relief Society meeting. The newest married girl shows off her two-carat diamond and pats her hair to be sure it looks just right. Everyone has brought a dish to share; the casseroles with lids are all labeled with strips of masking tape. They all look the same. The initiate samples every dish and compliments each woman on her cooking. She is thinking of the new husband waiting at home, his neat hands cradling a 7-Up in a sweating glass with ice. They were foreordained. This was all arranged ahead of time. Their children wait beyond the Veil to be called forth from her body, from her beautiful young body that was made by her Heavenly Father to be a vessel for life, a gift for her good, good husband.

  His feet are up on the coffee table – she can see him, just so – his black trouser socks still on, just the way he looked in the pre-existence.

  All of this planned, proscribed. Life after life carved in stone, life after life inscribed on leaves of gold. Golden plates hidden in the dark.

  **

  No, this isn’t clear – not yet. Let me try again.

  **

  The red gem of the Gem State.

  I can tell you that the streets are planted with shade trees, and every summer afternoon brings a gentle thunder shower.

  I can tell you that the high school boys work in the potato fields all summer, moving pipe, saving up a tithe to pay their preselected wives when they return from their requisite routine missions.

  I can say that the houses on the hill have open floor plans with plenty of natural light.

  And all of this is true. This is Rexburg on the surface, and the surface is like the tense, bland skin on boiled milk.

  When I was a little girl there was a pool in the biggest park. A bright, decrepit carousel played calliope music and spun endlessly beside the pool, rattling, uneven, all summer long. When school was out I swam there almost every day with my brothers and sisters. A wooden hut in the park sold snow cones – my favorite flavor was tiger’s blood, which was all the flavors mixed together with a distinct artificial note of coconut. My mouth stained red as I ate it, wandering the straight paths through the park, reading the boles of paper birches where teenagers had written their initials on the peeling bark in blue ballpoint pen. Each successive summer the old names were gone, flaked away, and new names appeared in their places, same identical hearts pierced by same straight arrows.

  They filled in the pool the year I turned eight, moved the carousel across the grounds to house it in a forbidding dark wood fortress that choked the music in. Where there was pale turquoise water and horseplay, now there is a flat uniformity of grass, and they tore the snow cone hut down.

  The trees peel off their unmarked bark. Every other week the grass is mowed and stray birch leaves are raked up, and the park is all green quiet, except for the breeze that leads in the brief routine storm.

  Go out from the edge of town, past the shirtless boys laboring in the fields, earning money for the wives they are yet to meet.

  Go beyond the cemetery, beyond the lush line of the creek dark with cottonwoods.

  Go to where the soil is still fertile but too rocky to tame, where the ground splits into fissures, heaves, craters.

  These are the lava fields. Shining college and pure white temple spire and Relief Society and Family Home Evening, fore-ordainment in the pre-exist
ence: all of it is built on the dome of a shield volcano.

  The planet is asleep. But one day it will wake to the shout of a golden trumpet, and when it stirs, this town will be a vault of fire. American Pompeii: women frozen, smiling their identical smiles at identical electric ranges; dogs curled back in resigned arcs; men with their socks petrified to their feet.

  The children, who will be the first to know that ruin has come, will leave their homes and run for the potato fields, and when the blast of heat reaches them they will be mannequins of ash, ashblonde hair and great leaping strides, arrested in their individual patterns of chaos, a V of birds shot down in flight.

  8.

  I was almost twenty-three when I met James, and that is why I married him. That, and he was good at making me laugh, and he loved books as much as I did. But mostly it was because I was getting old.

  My sisters had begun to worry. My mother was pressuring me. My friends had all long since claimed their returned missionaries and hung the same glossy portraits on their walls: groom dipping bride on green-gold sward, temple of opal and crystal rising in the near distance, bride in modestsleeved gown with bouquet of roses, red and white, or of lilies, pink and white, or of callas, bloodpurple and white. Sixteen by twenty, matted and framed. My walls were bare. And I was almost twenty-three.

  I met James at the singles’ ward the one and only time either of us attended. We both figured that fact alone was some kind of message from God. I had gone only because it was expected at my age, unattached as I was, and sat through the sacrament meeting with an increasing sense of futility punctuated by the rhythmic clear plastic clatter of empty thimble cups of water tossed back into the sacrament trays. Drained little cups rattling.

  I noticed James right away because his hands were so fantastically graceful, grasping the handle of the silver tray so smoothly, swinging it to the side, holding it for the next man in the pew to take and sip his consecrated teaspoonful of salvation. His hands made me smile. Physically he looked like all the other men in town: tallish, thinnish, short-haired, neatly dressed. But his hands were more descriptive, more refined. They moved like a music conductor’s, measure and beat and sway.