by LOTT, BRET
I was thirteen, and the Sunday before had made the decision to come forward after Pastor’s invitation, and make my public confession of Jesus Christ as my Almighty Savior. The sermon over, the congregation standing and moaning out “Nearer My God to Thee, ” I’d simply made my way along the pew and past Missy Cook without looking at her, afraid that if I caught her eye she’d give some genuine smile, the possibility of that happening a dire threat to any peace I planned to find in Jesus.
Once in the aisle, it was easy, I only walked forward the few feet to the pulpit Missy Cook always sat in the second row on the center aisle and waited for Pastor to come down, ask me what I wanted, then present me to the congregation.
But once his hand was on my shoulder, I saw this wouldn’t be as simple as I’d thought, somewhere inside his eyes was love, I could see, easy and pure, a shine I hadn’t expected, his hand on my shoulder not nearly as heavy as I’d figured it would be. He said, “What is it, Miss Jewel?
” I closed my eyes, not wanting this man’s hand on my shoulder, the same one that’d tried to pat my head twice before. Not wanting to see in his smile that he was only a man, one who loved God the best way he knew how. My teeth clenched, I’d had to push the words from me, “I want to accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.”
“Praise God, ” he said just loud enough for me to hear above the roll of verses being sung behind me, people all with their eyes on me, Missy Cook chief among them.
The hymn ended, the long last Amen dragged out for days before the organ went quiet. The only sound left was the whisper of a hundred bamboo fans. Pastor held my shoulders, and turned me to face the congregation.
My eyes were still closed.
“Through the powerful grace of God our Heavenly Father, ” he began, and I could feel his fingers tense with the words, as though by squeezing my bones he might instill the Holy Spirit in me, “Miss Jewel Chandler has come humbly before our congregation to declare publicly her acceptance of Jesus Christ as her Personal Lord and Savior on this day.
She will be baptized into the glory and righteousness of God our Father next Sunday afternoon, and I am sure it is her wish that everyone here be present to welcome her into God’s precious fold.”
That was when I opened my eyes, only to see Missy Cook, a lace hankie to her broken-glass eyes. She was crying, her shoulders heaving with some divine relief, as if she’d had the largest part in my coming to the Lord.
But of course it hadn’t been her. It hadn’t been Pastor, either, the sermon he gave that morning lost to the great abyss most every sermon I’ve ever heard has fallen into. It wasn’t the congregation, which had doubled by the time it’d made its way to the bank of the Pearl to watch Pastor and me, the two of us in white robes that took up the river brown as soon as our hems touched water. None of them, I knew, were there to see Jewel Chandler be baptized, but were there to see Missy Cook’s granddaughter be baptized. They were there more to give respect to the rich old lady in town than to witness the Holy Spirit descending upon me. l No, what I’d expected I’d see when I came up from the water was a new world in which the quiet and practical God I knew had become the strange and moonstruck one Cathe ral’d found, on the Wednesday after she’d been baptized, the two of us were out back of Missy Cook’s, her hanging up wash, me reading out loud to her from one of my old Mcguffey Readers. Then I heard the wet swish of material dropped to the ground. I looked first at Cathe ral’s feet, where one of Missy Cook’s finest white sheets lay in the dirt. Then I looked at Cathe ral. She stood with her shoulders up, fingers stiff at her sides. Her face had gone slack, her eyes back in her head.
She spoke, and the words from her mouth all rolled out in a ball, syllables and throat sounds and hard breaths I recognized from nowhere.
She was speaking in tongues, I knew, and my knowing that seemed a miracle of my own.
I dropped the book, stood with my hands clasped together in prayer.
Still she went on, the song moving up and down some scale only angels knew for certain. I felt myself begin to cry, the sound so beautiful, so filled with a god who’d love you enough to bestow on you a freedom from the same old words that chained us all.
Then Molly was there with us, moving toward Cathe ral still speaking.
She took Cathe ral by the shoulders and gently shook her, said, “No, no, no, child, you can’t be doing no speaking now.”
Cathe ral’s words began to thin down, the sounds broken and tired, until finally she closed her eyes, let her shoulders fall.
My hands were still clasped. Neither Molly nor Cathe ral had even looked at me yet. I took a breath, said, “Why does she have to stop?
” I swallowed, my tongue dry and thick.
Molly put an arm around her daughter’s shoulder, Cathe ral’s face wet with sweat, her arms limp at her sides. “Because, ” Molly said, her eyes on Cathe ral, “that what the Apostle Paul say. He say, Wherefore let him that speaketh in a unknown tongue pray that he may interpret.
They ain’t no one to interpret here.” Cathe ral, eyes still closed, leaned into her momma’s shoulder. Molly whispered, “We got to wait for Sunday, that’s what we got to do, ” her words not meant for me, but for her daughter, words suddenly earthbound and the same as always.
That freedom Cathe ral’d found was what I wanted, a freedom, too, that let her look me straight in the eye for the first time since I’d known her. Since that day in the back yard she’d searched out my eyes, hung onto them with her own. That was the freedom I was after, what I figured God must have given her, freedom from this earth and its words and what you knew your only role here would ever be. That would be my triumph over Missy Cook, the abounding w.. grace of God. All I need do was to confess Christ and be baptized, the only two things required to enter the new Jerusalem.
Ushered to the shore, though, after Pastor had held me under, I felt no different. There was a God, I knew, and he dwelt in me, took care of me.
He was a God who so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, so that I might not perish, but have everlasting life. This much I knew was true.
When Missy Cook took my hand and pulled me to her, and I heard the slow murmur of Hallelujahs around me, a sound like the vague roll of summer thunder it might have been, I realized it was all information I’d had before. I’d believed all along, my standing before the congregation and immersion in dirty river water only thin symbols of what had first to be in the heart. Cathe ral and I were of the same God, I knew, but the face of Him she’d seen would never be the face I would come to know. The piece of God I’d gotten wasn’t the flamboyant and exotic one she’d found. The God I’d found was the same one who’d answered my fervent prayer with the death of both my daddy and momma, blessed me with Missy Cook and a crowd come to see what the next generation of Cook looked like sopping wet and crying.
“Cathe ral, ” I said again, and now I was wringing my hands on my apron.
“You want to come in? ” She shook her head. Behind her, Nelson dropped the cigarette, and I saw in the darkness the failing orange light disappear beneath his foot.
She said, “First Corinthians fifteen five say, I would that ye all speaketh with tongues, but rather that ye prophesieth, for greater is he that prophesieth than he that speaketh with tongues.”
She looked down, the same old Cathe ral, the only difference I could see being in her face and the skin drawn taut over bones, her mouth grown thinner. She looked up at me. “Nelson tell me you with child again.”
I nodded, smiled, though I felt certain she couldn’t see me for the kitchen light behind me. “I guess Leston told y’all, ” I said, and looked past her to Nelson, quick disappearing in the growing dark.
He said, “Yes’m.”
“I come to prophesieth unto you, ” Cathe ral said, her eyes still on me.
She moved her shoulders beneath the quilt, pulled it tighter around her.
“I come to prophesieth unto you about coming hardship you or nobody ain’t
ever be ready to bear.”
I tilted my head, stopped with my hands in the apron. I lost my smile, though I’d wanted to show Cathe ral how pleased I could be at my age with a baby on the way. But I figured it wasn’t the baby she was talking about. I said, “You know about my James heading off to the War? ” I dropped the apron, put my hands together in front of me. The night was growing colder as we stood there. “Because even though I love my James, ” I said, “God will bless him and us both, and his being gone one way or the other will be a hardship we can live through. At least that’s my prayer.”
“I don’t know nothing about James, ” she said, and blinked. Nelson said, “We don’t know nothing about that.” His voice curled through the black around him, the words coming to me like an echo.
She looked down again, moved her foot on the ground. The light from the kitchen grew stronger the darker the world became, until now she stood in a hard rectangle of light from the doorway behind me, my shadow on the ground her only interruption.
She poked her heel in the dirt, tapped it twice, took in a deep breath.
She lifted her head to me, swallowed. “I say unto you that the baby you be carrying be yo’ hardship, be yo’ test in this world. This be my prophesying unto you, Miss Jewel.”
Nelson leaned into the light, reached toward her. All I could see of him was his arm and shoulder and head in the light from my kitchen.
His hand touched her elbow, and he glanced up at me, then at the porch steps.
“Come on, now, ” he whispered.
Cathe ral didn’t move.
Slowly I shook my head, made myself smile. “What are you saying? ” I said. “Why do you say this? ” Cathe ral smiled, let the quilt loosen, slip an inch or so off of her neck. “The Lord say to tell you, Miss Jewel, ” she said. “You and me both know He work in mysterious ways.
But this not any mystery. He telling you right out. He letting you know. He smiling on you this way.”
I felt my palms begin to sweat out there in the cold. I went to the edge of the porch, moved down one step.
“Momma, ” Billie Jean called out, on her voice the whine she’d perfected in the last year or so, “close the door or come back inside.
It’s cold!
” “Momma? ” Annie said.
Nelson gently pulled at her elbow. “Come let’s go, ” he whispered.
But Cathe ral and I were still looking at each other. I moved down another step, then another, until I was only a foot or so from her, her eyes on mine, her smile still there.
I put out a hand, cold with sweat, held it in front of me. I wasn’t
..
.
smllmg anymore.
From beneath the quilt one of her hands appeared, took hold of mine.
She squeezed down with some unknown might. l “We sorry, Miss Jewel, ” Nelson said, and now he tugged at her arm. “We going on home now. We don’t mean to burden you.”
“The Lord smiling down on you this way, ” she said again, and then Cathe ral let go, her hand disappearing into the quilt. She moved out of the light.
I tried to watch them go, but they were lost to me even before they made it past the repair shed. There was no moon out, not enough stars to do any good. Just God above with some plan for us all.
I didn’t know what to think, whether to believe her or not, and I tried to imagine how news like this could be of help, and whether that unaccountable piece of God Cathe ral had hold of could be trusted to figure into the stone wedge of Him I knew.
The light I stood in broke to pieces, shadows falling about me, and I turned, looked up to the doorway. There stood James and Wilman and Burton, the three of them, all my boys, crowded into the doorway.
Wilman and Burton pushed at each other for room, while James, a boy suddenly taller than I ever imagined he might become, stood still, one hand to the doorjamb. “Momma, ” he said, “what’s going on out here? ” I shrugged, uncertain myself. I only knew I was cold out here, and that somewhere along the road headed away from Purvis walked Nelson and Cathe ral, the dark of no consequence to them. And I knew there was a baby in me. “Nothing, ” I said, and I shrugged again.
“Jewel, ” Leston called, the word neither question nor demand. Only my name.
“I’m here, ” I said, and started up the steps.
CHAPTER 5.
OUR HEADLIGHTS CUT THROUGH THE BLACK WOODS BEFORE US, THE ROAD into Purvis unfolding like some mystery, a place I’d never been before. The baby’d been trying to make its way out for the last fifteen hours, my mind long past battling with making sense of this world. There was only movement, darkness, light, an old, oiled road, and Leston hunched up over the steering wheel, a cigarette at his lips.
“Just hold on, Sugar, ” he whispered, and I thought I might have seen the tip of the cigarette bobbing with the words. “Sug, you just hold on.”
“Sug, ” I managed to get out, and closed my eyes, the work of keeping my lids open too much to bear. “Sug, ” I whispered again, and thought of how I hadn’t heard him call me that in years, not since we were newly married and still in the years when whatever future a future that would account for five children bore in these Mississippi woods seemed somebody else’s life, not our own.
But then we must have hit a pothole or someplace where rains had dug into the road, because the world sank beneath me, and I fell what felt two feet deep into the seat, my ears filled with the roar of our slamming on through it, and I let out a yelp through no choice of my own, both hands on my belly.
“Son of a bitch, ” Leston whispered. “Son of a bitch, Sug.”
The other five had been born at home, all of them so quick that with Wilman there hadn’t been time enough for Cathe ral to make her way over to deliver him. James’d taken the longest with his six hours, Cathe ral’s presence each time as much a comfort to me for her friendship as for her skill at midwifing.
This time she’d been to my door faster than any time before, showing up not an hour after I’d sent Burton for her, Cathe ral all puffing, the washed-out blue dress that hung on her sweat through, her hair pulled back and knotted. Her eyes were right on mine as she came into the bedroom, Annie sitting in bed beside me.
“Now you move on out of here, baby-doll, ” she’d said to Anne, though her eyes were still on mine. “Our Lord be blessing you soon enough with another brother or sister, but right now you go play with the ones you got.”
Annie had looked to me, and I’d turned to her, smiled, though I could feel another wave moving into me. “Go on, ” I said.
She slid away from me and off the quilt, dropped to the floor, her nye-nye tight in one hand. She backed out the room, and I heard Wilman say from just outside the door, “Annie, let’s go out and we’ll play kick the can, hey? ” then the shuffle of feet down the stairs.
“This one be the quickest yet, you think? ” Cathe ral’d said, smiling now.
I’d started to nod, but the pain swept into me, mindless pain that wouldn’t even let me answer her, and she’d taken my hand, squeezed it hard. I closed my eyes, felt her settle herself next to me on the bed.
Id sent Burton first to Cathe ral’s, then to find his father, the crew working its way through the woods out past Jacob’s Ferry Road, a good four miles from Cathe ral’s. I hadn’t counted on them showing up for quite a while, maybe even after this baby was born, new life in here a giant surprise for Leston when he drove in. Then I heard the engine on one of the trucks moving up the road outside, the slam shut of doors, the hurried banging upstairs.
I opened my eyes, saw the two of them moving into the room, Leston, hat in hand, eyebrows furrowed, Burton just behind him, his hair wet, cheeks flushed. Cathe ral stood, moved away and to the washstand beneath the one window, her back to us, and Leston came toward me. He let go the hat with one hand, and touched my cheek. He smiled, and I could smell gunpowder and pine tar and engine oil all at once.
I said, “What time is it? ” and heard how weak my voice h
ad become, a clouded whisper in the room.
Cathe ral looked over her shoulder at Burton, who hesitated only a moment after he’d met her eyes.
“Momma, ” he said, “I’ll be outside if you need anything else.” He crossed his arms, held them tight to his chest. I nodded, said, “My big man.”
He looked down, embarrassed, but then smiled, said, “Take care, Momma, ” and he was gone.
“It’s five-thirty, ” Leston said, both hands at his hat again, and the old pictures of bearing my other children started coming in, Leston awkward and delicate when Cathe ral came, as if he were a guest come to visit the near-dead in his own home, the shapes in the hard stucco of the ceiling in this room, shapes I turned into mountains and foreign countries and the grown-up faces of the children I was bearing as I lay here, my fingernails digging into the pine headboard above me until blood came from beneath my nails with the last few pushes, each child I had James and Billie Jean in the cabin on Rosehill Road, Wilman and Burton and Anne right here as Cathe ral surrendered them to me, wiped clean and swaddled, ready for my breast.
“You be passed out for a time, Miss Jewel, ” Cathe ral said, still at the washstand, and then I realized what Leston had said, Five-thirty.
I’d sent Burton a little past one to Cathe ral’s.
“Five-thirty? ” I whispered, and Leston seemed to move back from me, still smiling.
“We would have been here a touch earlier, but Burton lost himself in the woods for a time.” He paused, swallowed. “How soon before this one? ” he said, and he touched my cheek again, this time his fingers there for only an instant before he brought them back to the hat.
“Only the Lord know, ” Cathe ral said. She came back to the bed, touched her wrist to my forehead. “Right now, Mr. Hilburn, you be a better help to God and his mercies you head on downstairs. I let you know what going on up here.”