Rapture of Canaan (15 page)

“Yes.”

“And you consider your behavior to be the behavior of a
Believer?”

“I’ve sinned,” Ben cried. “I’ve sinned awful. But I don’t want to be cast out of this community, Preacher Herman. There ain’t no place else a man can be this close to the Lord, and I want to be close to him. I’m just a weak man....”

“A weak and despicable man,” Grandpa added.

“But I want to make my heart right. I really do.”

I peeked over at James, who sat at the other side of the table. He was staring blankly into his plate. I tried and tried to will him to look at me, but he didn’t. Inside, I felt the worst lonely I’d ever known.

“I haven’t decided what to do with you yet, Ben,” Grandpa Herman said. “I don’t want my community tainted with the sourness of your soul. I have asked God to guide me in my decision, and he hasn’t gotten back to me. If you want to remain among us, then I’ll pray for an answer. In the meantime, you’re sentenced to the cellar, where the door will be bolted and no man, woman, or child shall look upon your sinful face.”

I didn’t know which cellar he was talking about. I didn’t even know we had a cellar, but I figured if we did, it was bound to be full of rats.

“Liston,” Grandpa said. “See this man to the cellar.”

Daddy got up, and Ben followed him out.

“In order to remember the importance of discipline and purity, no one will eat this day,” Grandpa said. “Dismissed.”

We stood up, and the women began collecting dishes, carrying them back to the kitchen. I tried to get James’ attention, but then he called out to Grandpa.

“What is it, son?” Grandpa said, exhausted.

“Could I just talk to you for a minute?” James asked.

My heart jumped into my throat, and I couldn’t swallow it down. I could feel it beating in my neck, and I imagined my neck like a lizard’s, pulsing.

“Ninah,” Mamma called. “Come wash these dishes.”

I went into the kitchen where somebody was drawing the water already. The steam rose up hot from the bubbles.

I thought we’d just be washing the glasses, since nobody used the plates or forks. But I was wrong. We washed them all.

 

 

 

W
hen the dishes were done and Mamma put her arm around
me and led me out of the fellowship hall, Daddy was standing there with Grandpa Herman. They stopped us before we went down the steps.

“Ninah,” Daddy asked me, “did you sit with Corinthian Lovell on the bus today?”

“Yes, sir,” I said quietly.

“Ninah!” Mamma exclaimed, pulling her arm from around me and looking at me like I’d killed a preacher. “Corinthian is the object of Ben’s sins.”

“Why did you blemish yourself that way?” Grandpa scolded.

“There weren’t no seats on the bus left,” I told them. “I forgot my math book and had to run back inside, and when I got back, I didn’t have any place left to sit.”

“That’s understandable,” Grandpa said. “But did you speak to her?”

Both Mamma and Daddy looked at me hopefully, and when I said, “Yes,” they both shook their heads.

“What did you talk about?” Daddy asked.

“She wanted to know about our community. That’s all.”

“So you talked to her about God?” Mamma asked.

“Yes, ma’am. And about Fire and Brimstone too. She was asking about the rules. She wanted to know about what we did in church, and I told her. I thought maybe she wanted to join,” I lied.

“So you were testifying?” Daddy tried to understand.

“Yes, sir.” I looked down.

“But you knew she was a child of Satan, did you not?” Grandpa asked.

I didn’t say anything at all.

“Did you or did you not know that Corinthian Lovell was a wicked girl?” he continued in the same tone he’d just used with Ben.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, for that, I think you have earned the strap,” Grandpa said. “You are neither old enough nor wise enough to take on the responsibilities of conversion. Do I have your permission, Liston?”

Daddy closed his eyes and nodded.

“Maree?”

“My blessing,” Mamma said, and walked off.

I hoped he wouldn’t wait until the next meal and do it publicly. If I was going to be whipped, I wanted it to at least be a private humiliation.

I guess you could say I was lucky.

“Come on,” Grandpa said, and he yanked me by the shoulder and led me towards the church.

Behind me, I heard the fellowship hall door slam, then Nanna asking Daddy what I’d done.

He led me up to the front, to the table in front of the altar where the communion bread and grape juice sat on days when we took Christ’s body.

“Bend over,” he said, “and lift your dress.”

I’d had the strap before, but not since I was little. I wondered if he made all the women lift their dresses. I tried to remember if any woman in the congregation had ever gotten the strap, but it seemed like they just fasted or slept on nettles.

When my dress was lifted and I was tensed up already, he said, “Slip down your underpants,” and I almost died, but I did it.

And then he whacked me again and again, swinging that belt so hard that I could hear it sneering at me as it sliced the air. I didn’t cry though. All that time, I hoped that there wasn’t something about the skin on your bottom that changed when you fornicated. Or some little smell. Some way for Grandpa to know.

But I didn’t consider anything I’d done to be fornicating. There was no way a big word like that could describe anything as nice as knowing Jesus all the way through.

When he was done, he pulled my underpants up and my dress back down in one swift movement, and then he pulled me to the floor and prayed with me, telling God how he was proud to have me in his family and congregation, and not to let me slip into sin anymore.

But I didn’t pray. I kept wondering how James could have done such a thing. I tried to figure out whether Jesus would have told if he’d been in James’ position. I decided that Jesus would never snitch.

On the way out of the church, Grandpa Herman said, “Sometimes I hate having to be the one to carry out these punishments.”

I walked back to my house seething. I wanted to smack James so hard he landed in the Lake of Fire. But only for a second.

 

 

 

I
was late getting to prayer partners, and when I got there,
James was waiting on the couch. But Mamma and Daddy were in there with him too, and they asked James to sit tight while they talked to me.

I went with them into their bedroom where Daddy said, “He didn’t hurt you, did he, Baby?”

And Mamma interrupted to say, “That isn’t what I’m concerned about, Liston.”

“I’m sorry,” I said to them both. “I sinned, and I’ve asked God to forgive me.”

And then Mamma hugged me close and I could smell her skin, faintly eucalyptus and warm. “I am so proud of you, Ninah,” she said. “For being such a strong girl and admitting to your mistakes. You won’t talk with that girl ever again, will you?”

“No, ma’am,” I said, but not loud enough to block out the sound of Mamma’s stomach growling.

“Then go on out to James,” she said, and slapped me on my backside, forgetting, I guess, that Grandpa had just hit me there, but Daddy remembered and gritted his teeth out loud.

“I’ve got to run get my bible. I left it in the bathroom. I’ll be right back,” she said to Daddy, and hurried off.

“He didn’t hurt you, did he?” Daddy whispered once she was gone.

“Not too bad,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” Daddy muttered. “Now get on out there with that boy.”

I made the walk down the hall take longer than it should have. With every step, I asked Jesus to help me not kill James.

When I got in the living room, he was sitting there, his head drooped down, his hands together between his open knees. He looked up when I approached.

“Thanks a lot,” I said sarcastically.

“Ninah,” he began.

“No, shut up. I’m not done talking to you,” I snapped, and then I had to pause to think of what I wanted to say. I was standing directly in front of him, hovering over him, and it felt good to have him sitting there so pathetic and so much lower.

“You know that I didn’t do anything at all on that bus,” I said. “I didn’t do
nothing.
And you know that I’m not like Corinthian, and that I don’t want to be. And you
know
why I sat back there. I mean, it wasn’t like I
chose
to sit with Corinthian Lovell, James, so why’d you get me in trouble?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and his voice broke, the way it did sometimes so that it sounded like he might yodel.

“I never told on
you,
” I said. “And you’re friends with Rajesh Patel.”

“We ain’t
friends.”

“Well, I’m not friends with Corinthian either. But I still got the strap tonight just for talking to her.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Well, if you’re so sorry, why can’t you at least look at me?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said, peeking up for just a moment and then looking back down.

“I thought you loved me,” I said, and then I started to cry.

“Ninah,” he said. “Don’t.”

“Leave me alone,” I told him. “I thought you
loved
me.”

 

 

 

J
ustice comes to everyone, I guess. I don’t know how it can be
that you can wish somebody evil and then feel so bad when it knocks them behind the knees and flattens them on the floor.

I’d been hoping and praying for James to get in trouble. I didn’t want it enough to cause it though. He could have danced naked on the school bus, and I wouldn’t have told. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t wishing.

I’d been saying prayers with James for a week, but we’d reverted back to the old way, where we didn’t talk and didn’t pray out loud and looked forward to the time when we could unclasp hands and go do our studying. I’d half forgiven him by then, but not completely, even though he’d said he was sorry every day and tried to kiss me once before I pushed him back.

Then the last day of school, after Ajita Patel had given me one of those foreign pencils and told me that she hoped we’d be assigned to the same classes next year, Pammy told me about James’ sin on the ride back to Fire and Brimstone.

She was sitting next to me, her books stacked neatly in her lap, and she whispered into my ear, “James has to sleep on nettles for a
week.”

“Why?”

“He polluted his bed,” she said slowly, so quietly that it took a minute for me to process her words.

“What does that mean?” I asked her.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “He soiled it. And Mamma found out and told Daddy, and Daddy got real mad.”

All of a sudden, I figured it out. I remembered the film from school about the things that happen to girls’ bodies and the things that happen to boys’.

“Polluted
it?” I asked again.

“I think he pooped,” Pammy said, and then covered her mouth to keep from laughing.

“But that’s an accident, right? He probably couldn’t
help
it.”

“It’s still a sin,” Pammy said. “And now he has to sleep on pine needles and cockleburrs and thorns.”

“Thorns?”

“Yeah, a whole bunch of them. Daddy went out in the woods and cut them down.”

“That’s awful,” I said.

And later that night when James and I met in the living room, I said, “I heard you have to sleep on thorns.”

“Yeah.”

“That hurts,” I uttered, but it sounded so stupid that I shut up.

“Are you still mad at me?”

“No. I guess not.”

“Good,” he said. “Do you want to go for a walk?”

“Will we get in trouble?”

“Everybody’s praying for the next hour. I reckon we can pray outside as good as we can pray inside.”

So we left. We went out to a tobacco field where the plants were just thigh high and walked in a few rows so that we wouldn’t be visible to anybody skipping prayers that night.

“I’m sorry you have to sleep on nettles,” I said, and I meant it.

“It’s like there’s all this stuff in me,” he said. “And it needs to come out. But every time it does, it’s a sin. I can’t figure it out.”

“That’d be hard,” I agreed.

“Girls don’t have it.”

“But if we’re created in God’s image, then it doesn’t make sense that it would be a sin.”

“It’s the curse of Eve,” he whispered.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s really a curse.”

“Yes it is,” he proclaimed. “You just don’t know.”

“Tell me,” I said, and he started to, but then he stopped.

“Ninah, we can’t. We have to pray.”

“Okay,” I agreed. “That’s fine with me.”

And so James asked again for Jesus to lead us and help us and to speak through us.

But every time he said that part about the speaking-through, it happened. Jesus just whirlwinded around inside me until he got so big that he started slipping out, and I think it happened the same way with James. Jesus just filled us up, so full we had to share it. It wasn’t fornication. Not there, with the tobacco leaves lisping in the warm wind, not with the moon overhead like a spotlight so that God could see from way up above.

Later, I told James that if it helped, he wouldn’t have to sleep on nettles ever again.

Later, I told James that it must be God’s will, because otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to sneak away and get back inside before prayer partners were over.

Later, I told James I loved him like the air, always moving, but constant as a hope.

He brushed off my back each time, and his hands felt like a remedy to all the badness I’d ever known.