The Arms of God: A Novel

by Lynne Hinton

  He had told them of the closet in the girls locker room that was never opened and bore a significant keyhole and he was the one who stole the science test out of the library two days before it was given. He had even relayed the conversation he overheard between Mrs. Calloway, the math teacher, and Mr. Greeson, the principal, a conversation that prompted a certain amount of vandalism at Mrs. Calloway’s house.

  The three boys recognized Roy’s desire for inclusiveness; but they had not been quite ready to allow someone a year younger to be a fourth partner in their reign at the school. So they baited him for useful information and then they would dismiss him.

  Roy was playing a pretty good game, his sister thought, having scored six out of the twelve points his team had. But they were still losing to Billy Ray and the eighth graders, who only had one more basket to get twenty-one. The game had been going on for quite a long time; and they were sweaty and flushed, having played with more than the usual amount of scrapping.

  The afternoon was starting to fade and Roy had the ball when Billy Ray said it. He was dribbling, just getting ready to pass it to Monkey Ramos, the boy with the longest arms on the playground, when the name stopped Roy in his tracks and froze the play of the game.

  Everyone around, the Bartlett twins who were playing hopscotch next to the road, Davie Ramos, Monkey’s younger brother who was standing on top of a mound of dirt playing king of the hill with a few other boys, Olivia and Tree who had stopped swinging and were comparing the sizes of their hands, and Molly Simpson who had just dropped her bike in front of the flagpole, all heard Billy Ray when he said it. It was loud and unmistakable and it fell so hard and fast it stung even the ears of those not watching.

  “Do something, Hangman!”

  Apparently, Billy Ray had not thought of it before. He had noticed the red ring around the younger boy’s neck. Everyone had. But unlike a too-short haircut that called out for names like “Jughead” or “Big Ears,” or a new pair of glasses balanced on a nose to be called “Four Eyes,” having a sore birthmark clinging to the inside of a collar was almost too frightening to bother with. It was like picking on a child who lost his arm or whose mother had died. There were simply some things that children, even the mean ones, knew were too unkind.

  But for Roy Jacobs, the name Hangman fit. It was perfect. Neat and ordered and completely justified. So Billy Ray did not or would not, even if teenage boys could do such a thing, take it back.

  When he said it, the name sounded so quickly and deliberately that it stunned Roy, opening himself up to a steal and the winning basket. After that it was over. The surprise in his eyes was all the proof that the boys needed to accept the christening. And all that the sucker punch to Billy Ray did was to write the name in stone.

  Frog pulled Billy off of him but only after a string of blows that ripped across the younger boy’s face. Roy got up fast and walked away, heading toward the area where his sister was playing, the ballplayers laughing behind him.

  When her brother was right beside her, Olivia jumped off the swing. She wasn’t sure what she would do, what she could say; but she felt clearly the need to defend him, protect him, comfort him. In spite of how he had treated her in the past, he was family, kin; and he, even to a little sister, was still just a boy.

  “Roy,” she called out to him, but he didn’t stop or glance in her direction. “Roy, wait,” she yelled again. “We’ll go home with you.” And Tree jumped from her swing, landing beside her friend. They started to run, trying to catch up.

  The boy immediately turned around and faced the girls. His face was squeezed and tight. “You stay away from me.” His voice was low and angry and the white of his eyes flashed. His hands were at his side, balled into fists. Blood pooled in the corner of his mouth.

  “You come near me and I’ll kill you,” he said, louder this time.

  And the brother Olivia knew so little about picked up a rock and threw it in their direction. It hit Olivia sharply just above the right elbow. She yanked her arm across her chest, hurt, and grabbed it with her other hand. A bright red swelling immediately appeared.

  She lifted her eyes to see her brother pick up another rock. Quickly, she pulled Tree with her and both of them backed away, shocked and frightened at the boy who had just been named.

  They turned and ran to the swing set, a few of the children gathering around, while Roy, blasted and wild, dropped the stone and headed into the woods alone.

  * * *

  Although Olivia knew little about her own brother, she knew lots of things about her best friend’s sibling, E. Saul. He was the open book she read and they practically knew each other’s thoughts. Neither of them slept very well at night; so the girl would often sneak out of the house and find her neighbor in the garden or sitting on the porch.

  The first few evenings she came over, he sent her home, telling her that it was too late to be outside, and walked with her back to her front door. After doing that a number of times, however, and especially after she came home bruised from her brother’s violent rock throwing, he decided to allow her to stay, letting her fall asleep on his lap while he leaned against the front steps.

  Olivia knew that her neighbor wrote long and lovely poems with words and phrases she never understood but that she liked to hear. She knew that he carried seeds in his pockets and that he always kept an eye of worry on his sister Tree, that he thought his mother worked too hard. The little girl knew that her neighbor missed her brother’s friendship and that he was troubled at night because of a terrible nightmare.

  Unlike Roy, E. Saul found no solace in the hours of darkness. The women in the house thought the young boy stayed up late to read; but the truth was that he did not want to sleep. He fumbled with the night trying to shorten it or disguise it or avoid it, anything to weaken or halt it; but it still always came. And it never came alone. For with it was the terrifying story that played itself across his mind like a moving picture.

  In his dream, he told his young neighbor, there were three spiders with threadlike legs and small paunchy bodies, eyes, tiny and black. They hurried along a silver tightrope that wound itself around E. Saul’s bed. The one in the middle carried a white milky sack, thrown upon its back, glowing like a bulb. The narrow legs steadied the paunchy body and balanced the sack while the other two spiders led and followed like guards trying to protect the one who ran in the middle.

  There was a fourth spider that was stronger and faster than the others. Its legs were long and jointed in the middle, which permitted it a faster gait. It had a hairy body, fatter, with bulging slits for eyes that shifted as it trailed the three smaller spiders that seemed to be running from danger. This one, round and sturdy, crawled along a web that ran perpendicular to the other; and all four spiders met at a corner formed by the lines of silver, dropping into E. Saul’s bed.

  The three slender spiders stumbled in terror, scurrying across E. Saul’s sheets, the sack still balanced across one’s back. The fourth spider chased them, first one, then the other, its legs quick and nimble, until it spotted the one with the sack and directed its hunt toward it.

  “Here is where I can’t decide what to do,” he said to Olivia as they sat on the porch, early in the black hours of a summer morning. “I don’t know if I should kill all four spiders or just that one that is chasing the others.”

  He closed his eyes and leaned against the steps, remembering how the spindled spider draped itself across the milky sack and opened its mouth, its large, gaping mouth. “I never know what to do,” he confessed to his sister’s best friend, both of them hidden in darkness.

  Olivia never responded to her neighbor when he told of the dream; she just moved closer to him, dropping her head against his shoulder or nudging herself beneath his arm. They would sit that way for hours until the little girl fell asleep and then he would loosen and fall too; and they would sleep that way the rest of the night until one of them would wake just before morning and hurry them both to their respective beds.
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  It was how they managed the hot summer nights and the loss and the disappointments they both assumed. It was sweet and harmless and a simple spread of comfort for the two children.

  E. Saul found that planting seeds helped with the soreness of the nightmare and the drama he tried so hard to forget. His fingers digging into the cold earth seemed to soothe the festering heart pain as the smooth red clay lifted out the stinging that lay buried beneath the surface of his skin.

  He planted flower bulbs, spaced evenly around the walkway, believing that a fortress of tulips and buttercups, hyacinth and iris, lilies and dahlias, would guard his nights and his family by a moat of loveliness that could hold aside troops of evil.

  Behind the house was a small patch of garden where vegetables were his defense. Half-runner snap beans curved along a trellis like barbed wire. Straight and crook-necked squash, cucumbers, and sugar babies lay nestled in the vines that lay bridged into the ground, a green and golden impasse. Stalks of sweet corn towered the rear of the fort, a trench dug just beyond. And down at the creek where the soil was wet and fertile he would bury the seeds of fruits and baby the earth that comforted his webbed and troubled mind.

  Only in his gardens could he close his eyes without a struggle and lay with his thoughts unshadowed by memories. Sometimes in the late afternoon or the ending hours of morning you would see the young boy asleep with a smile as he lay by the creek or over in Gethsemane surrounded by the sentry of sunflowers.

  He was gifted with the soil just as he was with words; and often the two worlds of vision moved into each other so that his poetry was as rich as wet earth and his gardens grew full of stories.

  There was perhaps no one who sensed E. Saul’s gifts as much as Mrs. Masie Williams, who still bore hard her pain for her son. After Elton’s death, everyone tried to pull her away from the other side; but she straddled that place between life and death unable to yield to either world. She talked at great length to voices no one else could hear and mumbled in whispers to the silence that followed her like a shadow.

  She could seem just as lucid as rainwater at times and then, right in the middle of an easy conversation about the weather or the price of tobacco, she would stare way behind someone’s eyes and tell them to leave her alone and start fighting, yanking at the air.

  Nelda was the only child who could tolerate her mother’s choice not to choose and the grief that covered her up like skin. She was the only one who stayed with her, the other two children having left long ago. Nelda would sit by her mother’s bed late at night, stroking the wrinkles from her brow and cradling her in Bible verses and songs about the Jordan. Mrs. Williams would fold up like a baby and search her daughter’s eyes as if there she might find a rope or bridge to pull her completely over. But there was never enough.

  Ruth and Miss Nellie thought it was a good idea to share the bounty of E. Saul’s talents with the bereaved woman; so at first they would take his flowers and vegetables to Mrs. Williams and later they would send E. Saul or the girls.

  And though his neighbor’s name had fallen hard, it was only a few weeks later when the season was ripe and hot and flourishing in his gardens that Mrs. Masie Williams, still swallowed up in grief, balanced herself between the two worlds just long enough to anoint E. Saul.

  “Well, look here, Mama, E. Saul and the girls have brought us some of beans and corn; and what are these, darling?” Nelda opened the door wide to let the girls and the freshness in.

  “It’s turtlehead flowers,” Tree said, coming up the steps, Olivia following close behind. “The bloom looks like a face poking out of a shell.” E. Saul waited and then walked in with them. “Olivia found them near the creek.”

  Mrs. Williams was sitting at the kitchen table staring into the rows of jars that lined a shelf near the sink. She did not hear her daughter or pay any attention to their guests or the things they brought them.

  Tree walked to her side and placed the flowers near her hands that rested on the table. Olivia moved toward the table and followed the old woman’s eyes to the jars. There were pints of green beans and peaches. Then she glanced again at the woman and saw the pure streaks of silver that marked the rows in her hair reminding her of the broken tightropes E. Saul spoke of in his dreams. She turned to see if her neighbor had noticed, but he was standing near the door with Nelda.

  “Mama was just telling me how she used to love to hear your grandmother sing. I told her that I didn’t know Miss Nellie used to be a singer.”

  Tree shrugged and turned toward her brother while Nelda shut the door and went over to the sink. She began rinsing off the beans, already planning to snap them for supper.

  E. Saul pulled out a chair and sat next to the old woman. Tree and Olivia stood behind him. They saw that the old woman’s eyes were small behind her glasses and cloudy. But from left to right they moved following the file of canned vegetables and fruit. Her fingers lifted and fell as if she were counting in her mind and then she stopped and dropped them in her lap. They all watched her without saying a word.

  “What’s happened to all the colors?” The old woman was speaking to the jars. “There just don’t seem to be any colors anymore.”

  Nelda glanced over at the children, worried that her mother might frighten them. But they remained unchanged.

  “Over there behind the catfish pond, Nelda, you remember?”

  “Yeah, Mama, I remember.” She turned to the sink weary from her mother’s memories.

  “There used to be the tiniest dandelions over there, like little drops of honey balanced on spare streaks of green.” She rubbed her finger and thumb together.

  “And the sky, it don’t seem to be so blue. Have you noticed that, how the sky ain’t so blue?” She faced the visiting boy, stopped and waited for an answer, then went on.

  “I remember when the days were nothing but brightness. Strict golden sunlight that melted everything into color. The lines, they were clearer back then, won’t no gray. Clear blue sky and the nights were nothing but sheer blackness decorated with pinpoints of white.” She punched at the air with her finger. Then she paused, thinking.

  “And Easter morning?” She laughed as she remembered. “Now, children, there was the color!” She waved her hand across her face. “Not just nature am I speaking of; I’m talking of the folks who came to church.”

  Her face became alive. Nelda turned to see the delight that had poured into her mother’s voice. The girls grinned at each other. E. Saul sat silently.

  “The men, they would strut down that center aisle at church, oiled up and slicked down and ease into them oak backseats with their crisp brown suits and bright yellow handkerchiefs.” She pushed at her hair. “Their shirts were boiled white, then ironed flat and adorned with a tie that would sting your eyes. And they looked good, child. God hisself had to smile at them men celebrating the Resurrection looking so good.

  “And the women? Now they weren’t about to be outdone by no men.” She traced the neckline of her cotton shift. “They’d feed their children dried beans and poke greens for days on end; but neither they nor their children were going to go to church Easter Sunday looking poor.

  “All the women, young and old, had one dress that was packed away in brown paper and neatly saved in the bedroom trunk. It lay beneath newsprint or one clean sheet so that there’d be no snags from the lid. And they would wear them dresses to church smelling of cedar and lavender splash, holding themselves tall and proud, ’cause they was fine!”

  E. Saul and the girls were entertained, enjoying everything the old woman was remembering. They were thinking about Easter morning and the way they had always participated in the celebration.

  “Pink chiffon with pressed silk ribbons. Purple queen lace edged along the seams of a royal crepe skirt. Starched blouses so stiff they rustled beneath their arms and orange velvet hats with a real-live ostrich feather hemmed in at the side. Yessir, then there was some color.”

  The corners of her mouth dropped and she turn
ed to face the boy sitting closer to her than anyone else had in a long time.

  “Just don’t seem to be no color no more, E. Saul”—she paused—“except ’round your house.” She studied him, hard, like reading a book.

  “You sure enough got the colors over there. They fall from your fingers and it’s a gift.”

  She fidgeted with the flowers that lay between her elbows.

  “You the Color Man, E. Saul Love; and you got ’bout all the color left ’round here. ’Bout all that’s left.”

  She faced the boy she had now named while one tear fell from her eye and splashed onto the table and split into drops. And for just a brief moment the three children watched as she stood completely on one side.

  A bean snapped and she hurried halfway back; and E. Saul, newly named, quickly led the girls out the door and home.

  I’ve got a question

  ’spect I’ll ask the sky

  how many deaths do angels die?

  There is an answer

  maybe time will tell

  just make a wish

  drop a penny in a well.

  I’ve got a question

  guess I’ll ask the ground

  is everything lost always found?

  There is an answer

  maybe time will tell

  just make a wish

  drop a penny in a well.

  I’ve got a question

  this one I’ll keep

  is it best to dream only when I sleep?

  There is an answer

  maybe time will tell

  just make a wish

  drop a penny in a well.

  —ES, OJ, AND TL

  THE JUMP ROPE SONG

  Six

  “Roy’s got another black eye.” Tree saw him as he walked up the driveway.