by Julia Watts
“You know, when you was a little girl, I never heard you say ‘I can’t.’ If somebody told you you couldn’t do something, you’d try extra hard to do it, just to prove them wrong. I’ve prayed a lot on it, Chrystal, and I know you don’t believe like your nanny does. I don’t even believe all the way like she does. But I ain’t asking you to believe. I’m just asking you to drive your nanny to church and wait in the parking lot till she’s done. You can get one of the deacons to help her in and out of the building.”
It had always been next to impossible to say no to her mom, and she knew church was the only place where Nanny got to socialize with ladies her own age. “Okay, but this isn’t going to be regular thing.”
“It’ll be just this one time, I promise.”
Nanny had three different “good dresses” she alternated between for church. Today it was the light blue one with the white eyelet jacket and white orthopedic sandals to match. Her hair freshly coiffed from yesterday’s beauty shop visit, she smelled of rose soap and talcum powder. She draped her white purse over her forearm so she could hold onto her walker. “I’m sorry Joyce is feeling poorly, but I’m awful glad you’re taking me,” she said. “I ain’t missed a Sunday unless I was in the hospital.”
“I know,” Chrys said. “Papaw used to say you were at church every time the door was open.”
Nanny grinned as Chrys held the front door open for her. “And he never went but for Christmas and Easter and funerals. He always said, ‘I married a virtuous woman so she’d do the churchgoing for both of us.’”
“I know you said your mama thought you were marrying a bad boy.” She held Nanny’s arm as they walked to the car.
“But he wasn’t bad at heart,” Nanny said. “He was a better man than he let on.”
Once they were in the car, Chrys said, “You’re gonna have to remind me how to get to this place. It’s been a long time.”
“I can’t believe you’d forget as often as you used to go when you was little.”
“I wasn’t driving then.”
Nanny laughed.
The Piney Grove Free Will Baptist Church looked just how Chrys remembered it: a plain white painted house with a small steeple and a hand-lettered sign. The parking lot was gravel, and once upon a time there had been two outhouses behind the church building. But when Chrys was ten years old, she, along with the other children at the church, had had the mortifying experience of going door to door selling candy bars to raise the money to buy the church an indoor toilet.
That wasn’t the only memory that washed over her as she pulled into the parking lot full of pickup trucks and used Fords and Chevys. She could feel the itchiness of the dresses and the stiffness of the patent leather shoes she’d been forced to wear, could feel her belly rumbling in hunger as the preacher preached on and on. She remembered the love from Nanny and the other ladies in the congregation when they talked about how good and big and smart she was, but mostly she remembered fear. Fear as the preacher scolded them like disobedient children, describing how the flames of hell would make sinners’ skin sizzle and pop.
There were also the fear-inducing questions raised by the stories: why did God test Abraham’s faith by ordering him to kill his own child? Why did God torture Job in a way that seemed not only cruel but petty? And as she entered adolescence, the questions became more gender-based: why did Eve get all the blame for original sin? Why were women supposed to be subservient in the church and the home, and what was Paul’s problem with the female gender anyway?
For each question Chrys had asked at home, Nanny had said, “You’re smart, honey, but you can’t outsmart the Lord. There’s only one answer to your questions, and that answer’s faith.”
Chrys felt a light touch on her arm.
“Are you all right, child?”
She didn’t know how long she had been sitting there in the parking lot without speaking or moving. “Yes. Just thinking.”
Some members of the congregation were walking through the parking lot, men with their gray hair neatly parted, wearing Walmart dress shirts and dress pants, women in dowdy floral-print dresses and no makeup. They seemed like the exact same churchgoers from Chrys’s childhood, frozen in time.
“I’m going to go get one of the deacons to help you get inside and settled,” Chrys said.
Nanny looked surprised. “I thought you was gonna do it.”
She supposed Nanny wouldn’t find it funny if she said she feared being struck by lightning if she crossed the threshold. “Oh, I’m not going to the service. I brought a book. I thought I’d just sit under a tree and read until you’re done.”
Nanny’s face clouded. “But this is your home church, honey. Looks like you’d at least want to visit it.”
This was as bad as she’d feared. “Nanny, I’ve got my own church now in Knoxville.”
“But you ain’t in Knoxville today. Couldn’t you just come in as my guest and let me show you off a little bit? You don’t have to sing or shout or nothing, just watch.”
Chrys sighed. Apparently she hated hurting Nanny even more than she hated setting foot in a fundamentalist church. “Okay, but this is the only time I’m going in.”
The inside of the church was just as Chrys remembered: cheap paneling on the walls, a picture of the Last Supper with a WASP-y looking Jesus, and the horrifically hard pews.
A man with salt-and-pepper hair made a beeline for Nanny. He was afflicted with what Chrys thought of as “preacher puffiness”—an affliction peculiar to Baptist ministers who were not fat exactly, but somehow slightly inflated looking, perhaps from all the hot air the job required. “Mrs. Simcox!” he said, grinning. “We are so blessed to have you with us this beautiful Sunday morning. And this lovely young lady must be the granddaughter you’ve been telling us about.”
“Yessir, Brother Higgins, this is Chrystal,” Nanny said, clearly delighted by his attentions.
“Hello,” Chrys said like a grumpy child being forced to make nice with a grownup.
“Your nanny tells me you’re a schoolteacher over in Knoxville,” the preacher said, shaking her hand in a death grip.
“I’m a college professor.” She didn’t mean to sound pretentious, but there was something about the word “schoolteacher” that called up images of ringing a bell outside a little red schoolhouse. To try to sound a little more down to earth, she added, “I teach English.”
The preacher grinned and held up his hands in mock supplication. “Well, I reckon I’d better be careful how I talk in front of you!”
“It’s okay. I’m off duty,” Chrys said.
The preacher laughed far more uproariously than necessary, then strode off to greet another old lady.
As Chrys helped Nanny to her seat, Nanny spoke to a thin, bespectacled, sixty-ish woman holding a fat dumpling of a toddler. “This here’s my granddaughter, Bella.”
“She’s adorable,” Chrys said.
When she walked on, Nanny whispered in Chrys’s ear, “She’s had to take that baby to raise. Its mommy’s on dope.”
Chrys wondered if it was pills or meth, the two drugs that were epidemic in rural Appalachia and were causing many grandparents who’d thought they were done with three a.m. feedings and diaper changes to turn back the clock and do it all over again with their grandbabies. Chrys and Nanny found a spot to sit. It was so uncomfortable that Chrys couldn’t imagine how miserable it must be for Nanny, but since when had Free Will Baptists been advocates of earthly comfort and pleasure?
The preacher stood and intoned, “We are blessed to be together in the presence of the Lord on this beautiful Sunday morning. Join me in singing ‘Bringing in the Sheaves.’”
Just like in Chrys’s childhood, there were no hymnals. Instead the preacher sang a line and the congregation sang it back to him. Chrys was shocked to find that she actually remembered most of the lyrics. When she was little she’d thought the hymn was called “Bringing in the Sheep” and had been disappointed to learn otherwise.
“Preach it,” said a voice in the congregation.
Egged on, the preacher paced, more excited. “When the trumpets sounds, will you be righteous and ready? Or will you be popping open a Pabst Blue Ribbon? Will you be high on Jesus or high on pills? Will you be playing a harp or smoking a meth pipe?”
Chrys thought the last two questions must have been painful for the lady she’d just met. This was the first time she’d heard these particular drugs mentioned in a sermon, but with that exception, the preacher’s words were as familiar as the fifth-rate Last Supper painting on the wall. It was all about either/or: alcoholism or temperance, depravity or chastity, sin or salvation, hell or heaven. There were no in-betweens.
It wasn’t until she was a young adult that Chrys had been exposed to the fields of Christian thought and Biblical scholarship. The Free Will Baptists were opposed to seminaries and learned ministers, whom they dismissed as “educated fools.” The only requirement to become a Free Will Baptist minister was the call to preach, and if some of the preachers Chrys heard growing up were any indication, literacy was not a prerequisite for the job. Once she had heard a young minister stumble over a Biblical passage several times before saying, “The Lord will help me through this word.”
She had gotten so lost in her memories during the sermon that she was taken by surprise when the offering plate was passed her way. She didn’t contribute, but Nanny put in an old, tissue-soft one-dollar bill. There was another hymn, and then the preacher announced the Lord’s Supper. When the tray filled with tiny glasses of grape juice and oyster crackers was passed to her, she held it out to Nanny.
“You can take it, too,” Nanny whispered. “You’ve been baptized.”
She had been when she was twelve, in a muddy river where minnows nibbled at her ankles, not because she felt anything resembling a spiritual experience, but because it was what you did. She shook her head and passed the tray. Nanny placed the cracker on her tongue, then drank the juice, but her eyes looked sad.
In the car on the way home, Nanny said, “I feel foolish.”
“Why?” Chrys asked.
“Because I thought if I could get you back in the church you’d realize you belong there.”
“I don’t belong in that church. I never have.”
“Everybody belongs in God’s house.” There was a catch in Nanny’s voice.
“Nanny, I love you and I don’t want you to be upset, but that particular house of God has too many rules made by man. And you know I have my own church in Knoxville.”
“I talked to the preacher about that place you go to. He said it ain’t even a real church, that it’s just a bunch of heathens.”
Chrys smiled because it was kind of true—many Unitarian Universalists would happily embrace the heathen label. “Nanny, they’re nice people who are open to a variety of beliefs. Do you honestly believe that Free Will Baptists are the only people in the world who are going to heaven? Or do you think heaven might be a little roomier than that?”
Nanny shook her head and smiled a little. “You’ve always asked the hardest questions. Even when you was a little girl.”
Chrys’s cell phone rang, and while she didn’t always answer while driving, this time she was happy for the interruption. “Hello?”
“Hey.” It was her mom.
“How are you feeling?”
“Well, I took one of them pills the doctor give me. So I’m high as a kite but I don’t care that I’ve got a headache no more. Your daddy and brother brung some chicken from that place over by the lake if you want to come eat.”
* * *
Chrys went into her parents’ kitchen to find Mom and Amber setting out paper plates and plastic forks and her dad and brother and niece goofing off and getting underfoot. Chrys grinned at Daddy and Dustin. “So you went out to catch fish and came back with chicken?”
“That’s right,” Daddy said with a toothless grin in return. “The fish wasn’t biting, but the chicken sure was.”
Peyton giggled, and Dustin said, “I put a worm on my hook and felt a tug, and when I pulled it back, there was a chicken on the line, flapping its wings and hollering, ‘Bawk! Bawk! Bawk!’”
“Liar,” Peyton said, but she was still giggling.
“She ain’t the first woman to call him that,” Amber said in a joking-but-not-really tone.
“Come on, Sissy,” Dustin said. “Keep me company while I smoke a cigarette.”
Chrys sat on the glider while Daddy and Dustin smoked. They both held their cigarettes the exact same way, between thumb and forefinger. “I think Nanny’s worried about my eternal soul,” she said. “Why is it that you two can drink beer and skip church and she doesn’t say anything to you, but when I do the same thing, it’s awful?”
“It’s ’cause your nanny don’t expect men to have a lick of sense,” Daddy said. “She thinks women ought to do better.”
Dustin smiled. “I’m glad I’m a man then. It’s easier to live up to low expectations.”
“If your nanny knew the truth, she’d even think your mommy was a backslider,” Daddy said.
“What was that?” Chrys’s mom had poked her head out the door, probably to tell them it was time to eat.
“I was talking about what Nanny would think of that church you go to,” Daddy said, grinding out his cigarette on the porch railing.
Mom looked embarrassed. “Your daddy’s telling tales on me. Don’t tell your nanny, but sometimes when she has another ride to church, I’ve taken to going to that new Fellowship church in town. It’s that big building out by the interstate. It’s real pretty on the inside—all modern, you know—and they don’t care what you wear or how you look. Everything there—the music, the preacher—is just real happy and positive. All that hellfire and brimstone at the Free Will gets depressing.”
“Tell me about it,” Chrys said. So her mom was going to one of those nondenominational churches that seemed to be springing up everywhere—the kind that poured the old wine of Protestantism into new bottles of casual dress, praise music, and sermons with PowerPoint. “We’ll add that to the list of things we don’t tell Nanny.”
“Yeah, speaking of them things,” Daddy said. “How are you doing with your situation, punkin? You don’t look as tore up as when you first got here.”
Chrys felt a sudden sting of sadness, like always when she hadn’t been thinking about the breakup but then was forced to. “I’m better. I think of her a lot but not all the time. And I’m sad sometimes but not all the time.” She didn’t add that she had recently discovered it was possible for her to have feelings for someone else, even if those feelings were fruitless.
Daddy nodded. “It’s kinda like when I lost my arm. At first I felt like it was still there. Then after a while I knew it was gone and I spent a lot of time missing it. But then I got used to it.”
“Yeah,” Dustin said, “but losing an arm ain’t all the way like losing a girlfriend ’cause you’re never gonna think about your arm and say, ‘I’m glad that damn thing is out of my life forever!” He and Chrys and Daddy laughed.
Mom gave a huff and an eye roll and went back into the house, but Chrys was pretty sure she was hiding a smile.
Chapter Eleven
“Nanny don’t get no good channels,” Peyton whined.
“Doesn’t get any,” Chrys said. She did not presume to correct her adult relatives’ grammar, but with Peyton she felt like she ought to at least expose the child to standard English.
“Doesn’t get any,” Peyton said in a clipped, Mary Poppins-ish British accent.
Nanny laughed. “Well, I reckon she put you in your place.”
Amber had called early this morning, frantic because Peyton had
run a low-grade fever the night before which was probably nothing but meant she couldn’t go to daycare, and Dustin had already promised to cut some ladies’ yards in town today, and they really needed the money.
Chrys was going to ask why Daddy couldn’t watch her, but then she remembered one disastrous night from her childhood when Mom had been staying with a sick relative and had left Daddy in charge. Instead of running baths for them (why pay for all that hot water?), he had taken them out in the yard and sprayed them with a hose. Supper had been cold cereal which he accidentally served with buttermilk.
“Bring her over,” Chrys had said.
Peyton was playing with the remote control, flipping rapidly back and forth between morning news shows as though doing so would make SpongeBob magically appear.
“You don’t need to be watching that ole TV as pretty as it is outside,” Nanny said. “You ought to out with your aunt Sissy and help her feed the chickens.”
Chrys had a feeling the chickens wouldn’t be too fond of this suggestion, but she said “Good idea!” anyway and grabbed a bucket of oatmeal and out-of-date milk she had stirred together for the hog.
Peyton followed Chrys outside, muttering, “Princesses don’t feed no chickens.”
“The princesses you like wouldn’t have watched TV either. There wouldn’t have been any. You never see Snow White watching SpongeBob, do you?”
Peyton giggled. “No.”
“But some of those princesses might have kept chickens,” Chrys said. “The eggs from the castle had to come from somewhere, and it isn’t like Cinderella could take her pumpkin coach down to the Piggly Wiggly.”
“You’re so silly, Aunt Sissy.”
Chrys thought of her recent actions in light of this statement: not seeing the infidelity that was happening or the breakup that was coming, healing a little only to get a pointless crush on a straight girl. “You’re absolutely right, Peyton. Now don’t chase the chickens before they’ve had their breakfast. You wouldn’t like it if somebody started chasing you before you’d had your Pop-Tart in the morning.”