Rapture of Canaan (12 page)

“Honey,” Daddy said, “it’s not the end of the world that the boy took a drink.”

“And the boy will be better off tomorrow, when he’s repented.”

That night I looked out at the cemetery for a long time before I fell asleep. I kept watching to see if Ben Harback would climb out and leave. I thought that if I was in his position, I’d be out of that grave and out of Fire and Brimstone before the sun came up.

I’d been staring a long time before I saw Nanna sitting on the ground not far from the place where the dirt still sat in mounds on the earth. I wondered if she was counseling him, if she was feeling sins of her own and wanted to repent. I don’t know if she stayed there all night. I didn’t want to know.

 

 

 

T
he chicken coop at Fire and Brimstone had been falling down
for as long as I could remember. The boards were so weathered that you could scrape off the outside layer with your fingernail, and after every big storm, somebody had to get a ladder and nail down the rusting sheets of tin that served as a roof. But we’d repaired the chicken coop so many times that the nails could be pulled out of the soft boards with the tips of the smallest fingers.

Pammy and I had been begging for a new chicken house for years. The grown-ups kept laughing at us, saying Fire and Brimstone had better uses for its lumber and how much shelter could chickens need?

But every time it rained, I’d look at Pammy and she’d look at me, and we’d know exactly what the other was imagining. Chickens huddled together, trying to dodge the water that blew in between the cracks of their walls, their skinny chicken legs no thicker than reeds bogging down as they scratched for worms in their muddy floor.

The rest of the family prayed for crops, but for years, me and Pammy had been praying for the chickens. They were our responsibility.

One afternoon when it’d just stopped raining, I badgered Grandpa Herman about it again.

He was half-hidden under the hood of the tractor, fiddling with a wire while Barley cranked it, then shut it off at his command.

“Goodness gracious, Ninah,” he said to me, though he spoke to the motor, “the way you worry about them chickens, you’d think they’d lay golden eggs.”

They
might
lay gold eggs if we treated them better,” I tried. “There’s holes in the walls and holes in the roof. The roost is broken on one side, and ...”

“James,” Grandpa hollered. “Go get some of them leftover boards from behind Clyde’s place and fix the chicken pen before Ninah has a stroke.”

James, who’d been helping Daddy change the oil in the pickup, wiped his hands and headed my way.

“Thank you, Grandpa,” I said—even though I didn’t want the chicken coop patched. I wanted it renovated.

“And get that girl a hammer, and put her to work too.”

“Yes, sir,” James agreed, then turned to me and winked, and laughed because he’d winked at me in front of Grandpa, but Grandpa’s head was still under the tractor’s hood.

 

 

 

Y
’all crazy about these chickens, “James said later, hammering
a one-foot square of plywood over a gap in the structure. “These holes ain’t nothing but windows for the chickens, and now you’re covering them up.”

“Windows have glass,” I argued. “You see glass in any of these holes?” I was working beside him, and doing twice as much as he was. But I didn’t care if he was lazy. I didn’t care much at all.

“You and Pammy are the ones who used to say the holes were windows. Pammy used to claim that when you came to feed them, they’d be looking out and waving.”

“They do sometimes,” I played.

“And weren’t it just last year that y’all tried to get Nanna to make curtains for them.”

“No we didn’t.”

“Did too.”

“It weren’t last year though,” I laughed.

We moved around to the back. James found an old stool and climbed on it to reach some high places, but I hammered a two-by-four at the very bottom. I was still thinking of ways to keep the ground inside dry, and since the earth was muddy already, I could beat the board into the dirt without even needing nails. It seemed so backwards to be sturdying the foundation when the building was already standing.

“That ain’t gonna work,” James said from above.

“Why not?”

“Just won’t,” he said. “And look, you’re dragging the tail of your dress in the mud.”

“So?”

“That ain’t no way for a girl to look,” he said. “Get up. I’ll fix it in a minute.”

“No,” I said, and kept working until I got the board just the way I wanted it. And then James banged his thumb, choked back a curse, and wrapped his lips around the hurting place.

“Look what you made me do,” he said.

“Weren’t my fault,” I laughed.

“Was too,” he said. “You talked back. A woman ain’t supposed to talk back, so a girl surely ain’t.”

For a second, I wanted to knock the stool right from under his self-righteous feet. Then I reminded myself not to fight evil with evil.

And then I did it anyway. I stood up and pushed the stool he was standing on over. He fell into the bushes that surrounded the chicken coop. The branches cracked beneath him, and then he rolled onto the ground.

He landed on a big stob, and his side was bleeding. As little dabs of blood blotted through his shirt, I got real worried about what I’d done.

“James,” I said, and I knelt beside him. “Here, let me see.

But when I pushed up his shirt, he slapped my hand away. “What’d you do that for?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” I just sat there, looking at him as he examined his scrape, studied his shirt, and fingered the little tear.

“Well, you shouldn’t talk to me like that,” I began. “Cause you don’t own me. And you won’t never own me. I know more about this chicken coop than you ever will—” and I stammered and started to cry. “Cause I care about it, and you don’t.”

He looked at me like I’d gone mad.

“And that’s not all, either. You can’t tell me what to do because I know just as much as you, and I can hammer a nail better than you can. And it don’t bother you for your britches to get muddy, so why does it matter if my dress does?”

“Well, that’s what the Bible says,” James declared. “A woman ain’t supposed to do the work of a man.” He was holding his side close, like he was holding in his ribs, and I was worried that I’d hurt him bad, but I didn’t back down.

“Well, if I’m a woman, then whatever I’m doing is woman’s work. Don’t that make sense to you?”

“I reckon.”

“And do you really see anything wrong with the way I hammered that board? Look at it.”

He looked but didn’t have a thing to say.

“I hope you ain’t hurt,” I said. “Let me see it.”

James pulled up his shirt, and there wasn’t much to it. Just a little scraped place edged in blue.

“I’ll say I’m sorry if you will,” I offered.

“For what?”

“For thinking I’m not as good as you and ought to do what you say.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he said.

“It’s what you said.”

“Well, it ain’t what I meant.”

We finished patching the henhouse before time for supper, and in the afternoon grayness, we stood together facing the feeble building, our backs turned to anyone who might walk our way. We pretended to admire our work, our hands joined.

“I know you got more sense than most men at Fire and Brimstone,” James whispered. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

And though I knew James could change his mind quicker than rain could turn to mist, I decided to believe him.

I really wanted to believe him.

 

 

 

“What story you want to hear this time?” she sighed, pretending to be aggravated.

I was staying home sick from school, my face all stopped up from the pollen that had fallen, dusting our doorsteps greeny-yellow like hay cut too soon. Mamma was out in the garden with the other women, tending the plants that had just sprouted up. Some of the men had already quit their winter jobs to begin working on the tobacco beds. The young plants were still protected by polyethylene sheets, but they needed irrigating and then pulling up and setting out into the vast fields.

It was always Nanna we stayed with when we were sick. But no one claimed to be sick at Fire and Brimstone unless it was real. Though Grandpa Herman was the one who meted out most of the punishments, Nanna was the one who believed in education. She didn’t have much of an education herself, but she discouraged us from faking sick by giving each child who stayed home from school a bowl of prunes every thirty minutes until we went to the bathroom. It didn’t matter whether you’d broken your arm or stumbled onto the flu. You ate the prunes.

Nanna believed a good cleaning out would make anyone well. I thought it must be a belief that she picked up from Grandpa. By the time the prunes went through you, you’d eaten three or four bowls, at least, and it seemed to me a fate almost as bad as sleeping in a grave.

I was on my second bowl when I asked her to tell me about Grandpa Herman’s sins.

“Ninah,” she said. “Why in the world would you want to hear about another person’s downfalls?”

“He just seems so perfect,” I said. “And he can’t be. I just wanted to hear about something he did wrong.”

“I think that’s an abomination,” Nanna said, and left the room.

“Well, he talks about
your
sins,” I hollered. “Almost every Sunday.” I could hear her in the bedroom, shoving things around, pulling on a stubborn drawer, then forcing it back in.

When she came back out, she had a jewelry box, and she sat down beside me and opened it up.

“Do you see this pin?” she asked, holding up a ribbon attached to a medal so old that it looked like a penny that had been scraped and softened from switching to a million different pockets.

“Yes,” I said.

“Herman got this pin from serving in the war,” she told me. “Do you know what kinds of things happen in a war?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now I just want you to think for a minute about being in one. I want you to think about the things you’d see, the friends you’d bury. I want you to think about what it’d feel like to choose between shooting a man or coming home a coward. Or think about what you’d do when you came face-to-face with a person your same size—just from different parts of the world with different kinds of plans for it—what you’d feel like if you had to pick up a gun and shoot someone.”

I thought instantly of Ajita Patel.

“Grandpa Herman shot somebody?” I asked her incredulously.

“Course he did,” she said. “He was in the war. And I want you to think about how you’d feel if you went off to war, freezing cold and without your family and barely living, how you’d feel if you got a letter in the mail that only came once every few weeks telling you that our own child was dead, had been dead for a month, and you didn’t know it.”

“Did that happen to Grandpa?”

“Yes,” Nanna said. “It did. And I want you to think about who you’d talk to, all them lonely nights scared to death that the enemy was going to attack you if you closed your eyes. I want you to tell me who you’d trust.”

“God, I reckon,” I said, ashamed.

“I reckon you’re
right,
” she said. “When there’s nothing else there, that’s who you turn to.”

She pulled out a photograph of some men in uniforms, all standing together with their arms around each other’s shoulders.

“That one there,” she said, pointing, “is Herman.”

“That’s Grandpa?” I squealed.

“Handsome, ain’t he? And the man on either side was dead before he come home.”

I didn’t know what to say. Nanna put the photograph back, closed the jewelry box, and walked off to her room.

When she came back, she had another bowl of prunes. I whined and stretched out on the sofa. She came to the end where my head was, and I lifted it up, and she settled beneath me, pulling my hair out of the way and throwing it across the arm of the couch behind me.

She began feeding me the prunes, one at a time, and I let her.

“Your grandpa saw a lot of things he didn’t like,” she told me. “When he came home, he was ruined through and through. It weren’t nothing but the grace of God that made him whole again.

“There weren’t a thing in this world he could do except start over. Now the truth is that Herman weren’t a man of God before that war. He was a drinker and a carouser, and I loved him just the same. He fought and he gambled and he lied as bad as I ever did. But that war changed him. Made him scared. Made him want to hold onto ever thing he had with a grip so hard it could strangle a person if he weren’t careful.

“When he got back, he got involved with the church, started making a family as quick as he could to replace the one boy we had before he left. And i admit, it weren’t the easiest adjustment I ever made. A year before he left these United States, I married him and committed my heart to him forever, and I’m not the least bit sorry for it.”

She popped another prune into my mouth even though I wasn’t finished with the one she’d put in there before.

“We’d been back together for about a year when the church split up, and Herman went about beginning Fire and Brimstone just like a drill sergeant. He organized it and planned it and worked for it for a long time. And he finally got everything that mattered to him in a space big enough for him to wrap his arms around.

“He did it out of love, Ninah. Love and need. He prayed about it and promised God if he’d give him a place where he didn’t have to know fear and didn’t have to remember and keep living with the things he’d seen, he’d run it just the way he thinks God runs Heaven.”

“Do you think God runs Heaven like this?” I asked her.