Baptism for the Dead

by Libbie Hawker

  “He wants you to know that He is proud of you, that you have great strength. Maintain your inner strength, turn to your sisters in the church when your spirit needs supporting, for in their righteousness they will uphold you. Be open to the voice of the Holy Spirit – your life’s calling will come soon. But you must be listening to hear the call.

  “I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.”

  When I open my eyes the sun has set, and James looks ill, the color all drained from around his mouth.

  The men’s hands leave my head. The awkward moment that always follows a blessing, when those who have delivered it wonder whether it was real, just for a heartbeat, before the zeal of having done God’s work overtakes them again. The awkward moment that always follows a blessing, when the one who received it tries to perceive a change in her life, any noticeable effect.

  And then the smiling, the tears of gratitude (Danae and Katherine, not me), the conversation that turns tactfully away from what we all just witnessed, and me listening for the call of the Holy Ghost with a contrary ear.

  “Well, who wants brownies,” I say, and everybody is relieved.

  6.

  Monday. Heat of day. Days growing warmer. Sun-touched flies along the verge of the road, bike chains ratcheting, Adam talking low and excited about...what?

  X with his Adam eyes, one invisible in the depth of the pillow, watched as my head fell back in a tangle of hair. A kick of air leapt up from the bed with my movement, the smell of sweat and love and hotel room all mingling at once and subsiding.

  “I’m going to do it,” I told him. “I’m doing it for both of us – James and me.”

  “You’re going to come away?”

  “Yes.”

  “With me?” He sounded so glad.

  “Yes. I have my own money saved up from the job I had during college. I can pay my own way.” Without dipping into James’s income. That seemed wrong. “I want to get out of here. What else is out there? I want to see it all.”

  “You’ll love it all. I know you’ll love it.”

  “And James – he needs to get out, too. This place will destroy him. He needs to go be who he is.”

  We stayed silent for a while. X’s one visible eye filled me with some powerful emotion I could not quite place. I was following a sign into the wilderness. I was a blind pilgrim. I was afraid.

  “How do you think he’ll react?” I asked.

  X thought about it. His eye closed. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I hope he’ll be happy about it, with time.”

  “Me too. I don’t want to hurt him. I love him.” When you love a man, you accept what he is. All of him, even the parts he can’t show you. “Doesn’t it bother you, that I still love James?”

  “You wouldn’t be who you are if you didn’t love James.”

  “I’m not going to tell my family. I’m not even going to say I’m leaving. They’ll find out everything anyway. It doesn’t matter if I never tell anyone. Everybody will know.” Silence.

  “I’m going to do it tonight. Before I lose all my courage.”

  “Okay.” Pause.

  “Do you think he’ll be okay, X?”

  “I’m sure he will. It will take him some time to get used to it, that’s all. Some day he’ll thank you for it.”

  Once I’d decided, once I knew, X rose up to his knees, bent over me like a worshiper at some holy altar. His lips, tense as if to hold back a secret or a song, touched my left breast, my right, so lightly, pressed against my navel and twitched, grazed against my knee.

  Afterward, when the day grew late and began to cool, just before the storm shuddered past the town, I got up from his bed and dressed to tend to my evening’s task.

  7.

  When James ran out into the potato field I didn’t quite know what to do.

  The night as shot with stars, a big white spool of them unwound across the sky. I watched the stars near the horizon as I walked slowly after my husband. How many stars there are, how many. I tried to remember the names of all the constellations but...but nothing came to mind, just the elegant movement of X’s hand, drawing. X was my tether to purpose. The memory of him in the golden light of the hotel lamp kept me fixed to my duty. Poor James.

  The soil of the field broke beneath my feet. The plants slept in their orderly rows, optimistic leaves colorless in the night, ankle-high, their little white flowers just beginning to emerge, spreading a blanket of white on the earth all the way out to here the field met the dark distant mountains. Potato flowers bear no seeds. Imperfect flowers, they are called. But that night in the starlight they were at least beautiful, and their simplicity was a comfort.

  Far ahead of me, James dropped to his knees. His crying voice rose up over rows of white. When I reached him I lowered myself to the ground. We knelt together in a furrow, in a posture of prayer; I took him in my arms.

  “It’s okay.” His head on my shoulder, sweet James who always smiled at me, who always had a joke to tell. James who looked about him so carefully at a world waiting to spring its traps. He cried. I held him tighter.

  When I arrived home from X’s hotel, James seemed inclined to settle in for a quiet night. But I had made up my mind to do what I had come to do.

  “I don’t know what I believe anymore,” I had admitted to him. “But I know this isn’t right, what this life does to you and me. It’s not right and I don’t want it. I don’t want any of this anymore.”

  We had a bad argument. Bad. You just didn’t bring it up around James, ever – what he was, his nature. If nobody ever talked about it, he could deny it, even to himself. He could deny it at least until he had to break away for a few days. Golf with the guys. Distantly, I knew I should be angry with him for not being strong enough to change. But my God, it’s so hard to be angry with someone you pity. And if you knew him, truly knew who he was right down to the center of his soul, then you had to pity James, burned as he was by the hopeless weak sunshine of this life. Pity him, even though they all thought he was doing the right thing.

  “It’s okay,” I told him.

  We had fought, oh yes. He had screamed at me like a trapped animal for saying I would turn my back on the Church. His rage was terrifying, a part of him I had never seen before, my James who was always so carefully controlled. That blessing the men had given me was supposed to cure me of my pall. James didn’t know what to do with a wife who wouldn’t be cured.

  And then I had told him, very calm, that I wanted to know his name – the man in Idaho Falls. Who was it he loved? Because I knew he didn’t love me. The look on his face pulled me right off my feet, the fresh, awful wound in his eyes weakening my knees, taking my legs out from under me. But somehow I stayed standing straight and he was the one who buckled; he turned and ran.

  He ran from the house, across the dark stillness of Poleline Road, over the ditch, out into the field. I followed him, thinking, What a beautiful night. There is nothing wrong here. We’re making everything right.

  James crouched in the soil. “I don’t want to be like this. I just want to be normal.”

  “You are normal. This is what you are. This is how you were made.”

  “I want a normal life.”

  “But.”

  James caught his breath, choked and coughed, and smoothed his face with his hands, those neat beautiful hands. He was calmer when he said in a flat voice, “But I can’t stay away from him. I know it’s wrong, but I can’t stay away.”

  I held his hand. I rubbed the backs of his fingers, gently, the way X had done to me when we held hands on R Mountain, alone above the valley. “Maybe you shouldn’t stay away. Maybe it’s better for you to be with him.”

  “Don’t say that. I can’t stand to hear that. Don’t you think I’ve thought that a million times before? I love you; I don’t want to leave you.”

  “Oh, James, I love you too. I do. I’ll always love you. But you don’t love me the way you love him. You know that’s the truth.”
>
  The field was so quiet. The night was so cold. Cold nights are good for potatoes; the white blossoms nodded in a brief, brisk wind. James shivered.

  “His name is Brian.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve been unfaithful. I’m so, so sorry.”

  I thought about it for a minute. I rubbed the back of his hand as if it was a good-luck charm.

  Finally I said, “It’s all right. Really. It’s all right with me. I forgive you.”

  This was the wrong thing to say. James tore his hand from my fingers and groaned, pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “No. You can’t forgive me. You can’t just be okay with this. No one can forgive me. It’s wrong to cheat and it’s wrong for me to be...like this.”

  “I don’t like that you cheated. But I forgive you. I understand why you did it. You love him.” “I love you. You’re my wife.”

  “I know you love me, James. But I’m a woman. I’m not Brian.”

  “Please don’t say his name.” He whispered this; his voice cracked; it was barely there at all.

  “I don’t see why you should keep him a secret. Love isn’t anything to be ashamed of.” I could feel James holding his breath, fearful. “Brian!” I shouted. The potatoes stirred. “He’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  James stared at me. I had never seen his eyes so wild, so intense. “Are you crazy? This...” he hit his chest with a fist, hard, right over the heart “...is wrong. It’s immoral. It’s bad. This isn’t love; it’s disgusting.”

  “I don’t want you to say that ever again. I don’t care what everybody in town thinks. I don’t care what the Church things. The Church isn’t the whole world, you know. There are other churches out there. There are other people out there. There are people who don’t even care about God, who don’t believe.”

  “I’m not just this.” And now there was a shocking potency in his voice, real conviction. I had never heard his voice do this before, rise up with such vigor and confidence. His voice was a tower. “I’m a husband, and a professor, and a member of the Church. I’m all those things at the same time. Do you know what it’s like to juggle all those things? I’ve tried to find some balance in who I am my whole life. I can’t just overturn everything to go off chasing some man because it feels good.”

  Yes, James, I know what it’s like to hide. Mimicry, disguise, disruptive...I know. “He’s not just some man. He’s Brian. He’s more than just some man.”

  I waited for him to speak. The ground was so cold. The chill crept through my jeans and pressed itself into my knees, my shins. But I held still, kneeling and waiting for James to speak.

  “I met him in college,” he said at last, defeated. “He was the first person I’d ever met who understood what it was like to be me. Because he was the same. Same story, same experience.”

  “You’ve been with him ever since college?”

  “No. We were just good friends for a long time. We only...we only started that when I moved to

  Rexburg to take my job.”

  “Oh.” When he met me. Funny, that it hurt to hear those words, even for a moment, when I’d already made up my mind to forgive and cut us both free. Still, it touched up the memory of our sweet three-month courtship with a sour aftertaste. “What did he think, when you married me?”

  James’s laugh was bitter. “He hated it. By then he’d given up on the Church.” He fell silent. His breath was barely visible in the starlight, a faint wisp of vapor. “He’s always tried to get me to go along with him, to give it all up. But I just can’t. It’s a part of me. I can’t turn my back on my life.”

  “It’s why you married me. Because the Church is the biggest part of you.” I had known all along, ever since our wedding night – before then, if I am honest with myself – but the fact of it still hurt. No matter how rational I was, no matter how generously I had resolved to act, there was still a part of my heart that was wounded. I was still a woman discarded.

  “I married you,” he said firmly, “because I love you.”

  “You love me like you love your sisters. Like you love your friends. And that is honest love, I know. But you don’t love me like you love Brian.”

  I half expected him to make some defense, or at least an objection. But instead: “I can’t marry

  Brian.”

  We both waited for the other to speak. The sky shouted with stars.

  “You would if you could.”

  Far out in the field, the great long bracketed framework of the irritation system settled, creaking. It was a lonely sound, a sound with finality.

  “Yes. If it was right, I would.”

  “Who decides what’s right for you, if not you, yourself?”

  “God.” He drew the word out, fearful, high-voiced, a child’s voice in the dark. James, my good husband, I loved you so much that I couldn’t bear to see this shame on you anymore.

  I stood. My knees ached with the cold. I felt the sting of the pavement summers and summers

  ago, saw Adam picking his shirt up from the sidewalk.

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Honey, come on. You don’t need to...”

  “Yes I do. I need to say it and you need to hear it. It’s all bullshit.” Adam! I never knew what it meant to say words like these so sharp and fierce until the spit flew from my mouth. I reeled from the power of my own words, and they came louder and harder. “If you believe in God, then you must believe that He made you the way you are. He had a reason for making you this way. It’s men who have made you wrong.”

  “Stop it. You can’t talk that way.”

  “What way?”

  “Like you don’t believe. Like I’m the only one who believes.”

  “I can’t believe in this. Not this. You’re not the only one who’s affected, you know. Look at the life I’ve had to live, pretending I’ve got a real relationship with a man who really loves me. Because that’s what’s right. That’s what they all expect of us. I don’t care anymore what they expect. I need to be who I really am. And so do you.”

  “Don’t do this.”

  “Stand up, James.” He stared at me, wide-eyed, his breath a startled puff of pale blue. “Stand up.”

  He stood. My voice a crane. He stood.

  I took him in my arms. The way my head fit just under his chin, the warmth of his familiar arms around me, the solidity of his back with its two identical bars of half-toned muscle. I concentrated on the feel of his back under my palms. This was our last moment together, I knew it – our last moment as husband and wife. I was about to kick his safe illusion all to pieces. I breathed deep to firm my resolve, and I smelled his soap, his aftershave very faint and fleeting, the smell of our home embedded in his sweater. You have such a lovely home, I always think that. James and me, lovely.

  “I’m done. I’m not doing this anymore. You’re not doing this anymore.”

  “No.”

  “I’m going to go away for a while. I need to get out of Rexburg until I can figure out where to go next.”

  “No.”

  “I think you should get out, too. Go spend the rest of the summer with Brian.”

  “Please. Please don’t do this. God, please, don’t let her do this.”

  “Go be in love for the rest of the summer, James. You deserve it. You need it. So do I.”

  “But my job is here.”

  “Not in the summer. You’re off all quarter.”

  “And our house....”

  “We’ll figure out what to do about it when we’ve spent some time apart.”

  “Please don’t do this. This isn’t what I want.”

  I pulled away from him. The little imperfect flowers shivered all around us, all the way out past the endless web of irrigation pipes, out to the place where the Bench fell off the edge of the world.

  “You’ll thank me for it later. I promise you will. Go be in love. Please.”

  Hand in hand, both of us weeping, we stumbled back across the rows of
silent plants, back toward the even squares of light across the empty road. Lights on in all the houses – families saying their prayers, getting ready for bed. One of those identical squares of light was our house, the lamp we left burning. Inside, our home was lovely and warm and pulling away from us, vanishing on an unreachable horizon.

  In our bedroom, we undressed and climbed under our comforter, and held each other, naked and innocent and familiar, until sunrise.

  8.

  The roads in Rexburg are too wide. I had always thought so, but never realized I had always thought so until I was leaving.

  This Space for Lease in white shoe paint flaked off a window across from the hotel.

  James and X nodded to each other, suspicious, territorial, cautious faces neutral for my sake. They broke off a curt handshake quickly.

  I hugged James one last time, held him to me long, with equal measures of fear and relief. “I’m going to pray,” he said. “I’ll pray for you too.”

  I nodded. “That will be good for you. To pray.”

  Cars passed, chiropractors and professors. Their obedient polished wives in the passenger seats watched James and his wife hugging outside the Best Western, sped by the brief flash tableau, and then back to musing over dinner. Pork loin. Roast chicken. Almondine.

  James and I promised to call each other. He promised to head straight for Brian and Idaho Falls. He promised to enjoy his summer, but there was a heaviness in his eyes and I knew it would be harder for him than I had hoped. I couldn’t regret this. This was for him as much as for me.

  X’s portfolios and boxes and bags were stacked neatly in the back of his SUV, the dust-colored hybrid. He took my bags and settled them among his own, where their shapes and textures agreed.

  The engine vibrated lightly.

  Then there as the buckling in, the shifting about in the unfamiliar car seat, the adjusting of air and radio. And the backing out, and my eyes stinging at the sight of James turning resolutely away from me, ducking back into our sedan; the dizzy spin of the planted sidewalks as X wheeled his car around, pulled out onto the too-big road, accelerated past the Circle K, the pie shop, the tire store.