Rapture of Canaan (28 page)

“And young Mustard, who’s at that age where he faces the temptations of youth, where he questions everything in ignorance, not realizing that God’s word transcends every temptation, every generation.

“And Ninah. Praise God for Ninah. Her struggles with God are her own, and we are not omnipotent enough to judge her heart. But she has returned to Christ’s flock after an absence, has brought into this world a tiny child whose hands bear testament to the way that we should live.

“We have Wanda among us, who lived a life of sin and left her people and her wicked ways and came to Fire and Brimstone like the woman at the well, seeking God’s sweet love.

“We have others among us who have known lives of sin, and who’ve turned away from evil to embrace goodness and peace. Leila, my own wife, who you all know and love, whose negligence led to the death of her earthly father and whose lies nearly interfered with the administration of justice, is here with us, living proof that a person can be sinful and repent.”

Then in mid-tirade, he broke into prayer, and while he spoke, Mustard gave me a glance that could freeze holy water, and Nanna passed me another piece of candy and shook her weary head.

“God, we just ask that you cover this altar with the bodies and tears of those mentioned. Cover this altar with the hearts of those who have backslidden but want to return to your ways. Lord, I pray that your will might be done here today, and that we might leave this service with a greater sense of your precious love.

“Finally,” Grandpa Herman spoke again, when we’d already raised up our hymnbooks and were preparing to sing the altar call. “Finally, we have in our midst today, David and Laura Huff, who have tried unsuccessfully to bring forth a child into this world. Time and time again, their unborn have been snatched away from them, when Jesus saw that in one heart or the other, there was a lack, a sin, a question about their salvation. But now, and praise God for it, the Lord has blessed them with this child, Canaan Huff. It just goes to show that after sinfulness, there is repentance, and after repentance, there is the Lord’s great abundance. Won’t you come? Won’t you fall down on your knees here and ask God into your heart? Or rededicate your life to his service and this community?”

We sang the hymn, everyone together, quietly lifting our voices, our darting, shadowy voices. But no one approached the altar.

“Won’t you come?” Grandpa Herman called out. “We have a child in our midst who testifies to the truth of Jesus Christ’s imminent return to this earth. A child with hands held in prayer. He’s a message sent to us by God in his final days. Won’t you come?”

We sang eight verses of the song, but nobody hit the altar. Nobody received tongues. Nobody broke out into prayer. Nobody held us up.

And after the altar call was over, Grandpa called David and Laura up to the front. He blessed some water and lifted Canaan before us. He had to be the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen, and his seamed-up hands looked ludicrous. For a second, I thought I might have sewn him together by accident when I was making all those baby clothes.

“This child comes before God this day as Fire and Brimstone’s reminder to prepare for the rapture. This child comes to us as our New Messiah. And who am I to baptize this infant who will be our new leader? A lowly man baptizing ...”

Then Olin stood up and interrupted him. “Preacher Herman,” Olin began. “What will become of Canaan nobody knows, not in this room anyway. But in the past, we’ve baptized infants and sprinkled God’s blessings on them because we loved them and we wanted to show our in tention of providing them with a childhood filled with the teachings of the Lord. And I believe we should do the same thing for this child, without giving him responsibilities or importance that we haven’t given to the other babies of this community.”

“A
-men,” Wanda shouted, and I didn’t know Wanda had an opinion one way or the other.

“But look at him,” Grandpa Herman continued. “Who could doubt the significance of these tiny hands?”

Then Daddy stood up and said, “Let’s just ask David and Laura to dedicate this child to God’s glory, and leave it be.”

There were mutterings all over the congregation. I looked at Nanna, who kept a blank face, and I looked at Pammy, who looked back at me and attempted to wink, though she winked with both eyes.

So the flustered and reddened Grandpa Herman went ahead with the sprinkling in the traditional way, asking David and Laura to commit to bringing Canaan up in the church. After they’d said their prayer, Grandpa dipped his hand in the water and flicked it into Canaan’s face.

The baby started crying, and the congregation laughed.

But I didn’t think it was so funny. Because Canaan didn’t have the freedom to wipe his own face, even if he wanted to.

 

 

 

W
hen I started back to school that next year, I wore James’
trousers. I knew I’d gotten a lot of mileage out of the community’s questions about Canaan’s holiness, but that didn’t stop me. If I had an excuse to be able to wear pants, I wasn’t above using it.

Grandpa Herman got mad when he saw me, shouted, “Deuteronomy twenty-two: five states that ‘The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man ... for all that do so
are
abominations unto the Lord thy God.’ ” Then he turned and walked away.

But nobody actually forbid me to zip those pants and walk off the property.

Mamma said, “Well, Ninah!” and kept on washing off butter beans, and Nanna cut her eyes at me sharply, but I could see her trying to hide her smile.

Daddy said I looked real nice, and laughed outright and shook his head.

But Ajita Patel was the one whose compliment meant the most.

“You look so different,” she said. “So grown up.”

“Do you like my hair?” I asked her.

“I love it,” she said. “It’s softer,” and then she reached right up and ran her brown fingers through it and gave me the shivers. “I had long hair too when I was little. But by the time you reach ninth grade—”

“Eighth,” I reminded her. “I’m behind.”

She laughed. “Well, by the time you reach eighth grade, you’re old enough to decide how you want your hair.”

Ajita Patel didn’t wear makeup either, and I decided I didn’t need it.

“Thanks for all your letters,” I told her.

“I would have kept writing,” she said. “But after you had the baby, Pammy stopped coming by to pick them up.”

“It’s okay,” I told her. “I wish we had classes together.”

“Me too. But we still have lunch. We can meet here every day if you want.”

“Okay. I’m making you something.”

“Really,” she said excited. “What?”

“I can’t tell you,” I said. “It’s gonna be a surprise. It won’t be ready for a while.”

Once I started going to school again, it got easier to pretend like Canaan was David and Laura’s baby. Sometimes I felt guilty about it, but I let it be.

On the bus, Pammy said, “Do you reckon anybody ould care if I wore Mustard’s britches?”

I told her she might better think on that one for a while.

And one day at home, Wanda came in and said, “You’re so good with hair, Ninah. Will you cut mine?”

“Really?” I asked her. “You want to cut your hair?”

“Well, yeah,” she laughed. “I mentioned it to Everett, and he said I’d get in trouble, but that he didn’t care. And if all I have to do is sleep on nettles for a night or two, well, that’s not much of a price to get rid of this heavy mess.”

So I pulled out my scissors and chopped Wanda’s hair off.

“Not too short,” she said, and so I left it falling down the middle of her back.

I liked the way cut hair looked. It didn’t need to be short like a man’s but cutting it in general made me feel good. Uncut hair doesn’t grow even, and it hangs down in the middle longer than on the sides so you always look indecisive, like you don’t have an opinion at all.

“What do you think?” Wanda said.

“It’s nice,” I told her.

And Grandpa Herman didn’t even know because Wanda kept her hair up anyway.

But on the day I cut Pammy’s off, all hell broke loose.

Bethany came storming into the house, pulling Pammy by the ear, saying, “Ninah, did you do this?”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “And I think it looks real good on her.”

But I’d cut it up to her neck in a bob, like some of the town girls wore theirs. I hadn’t meant to do it that short, but I kept getting it uneven, and before I got it straightened out, the back of her neck was showing. Since Pammy was young, she didn’t wear her hair up, and there was no way of hiding it.

“Just because
you’re
special and were chosen for something special by God don’t mean you can go around inflicting the same things on other people,” Bethany told me.

Pammy was crying, and I felt awful for cutting it so short. But it looked great. She had shiny red hair that shone more when it wasn’t held down so heavy.

And when Grandpa Herman saw it, he threw a fit. Right there at supper, in the middle of the meal when everybody else had already seen and was hoping Grandpa Herman wouldn’t.

“Ninah, you might have been given a special gift, but you’re still human and prone to sins. And Pammy, you know that you are a regular girl, subject to the rules of this community. Don’t you?”

Pammy wept like a plant that’s been given too much water, the tears leaking out when there was no place inside left to hold them.

“By the rules of The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God’s Almighty Baptizing Wind, I sentence you both to a night in a grave to contemplate the wages of sin,” Grandpa roared—and I was shocked, genuinely, because I never would have thought hair-cutting would get the same sentence as drinking.

“David, Everett, Barley, Joshua, Mustard, John,” he called to the young men of the church. “Get your shovels.”

“Don’t worry,” I told Pammy. “It’s almost dark. They won’t have time but to dig one grave, so we’ll be together.”

“Promise?” Pammy asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

But then Wanda stood up and said, “Preacher Herman, I’ve cut my hair off too,” and she undid her bun and her pretty brown hair fell down her back, but only to the middle.

And then Great-Aunt Imogene, who was only a handful of years younger than Grandpa Herman, joined us at the front, laughing and saying, “When I saw how pretty them girls looked, I just decided that there weren’t no need in an old woman like me having to carry around a headful. She pulled off the handkerchief she wore on her head, yanked out her bobby pins, and let the gray straggles fall, and they hardly came to her shoulders. But Great-Aunt Imogene kept laughing.

Grandpa Herman stood back, his mouth dropped open like a tailgate, and Nanna broke out laughing, walked up to him, put her arm around him, and said, “Old Man, I believe we need to revise the rule books. They ain’t doing no wrong by wearing their hair different than the ways our parents wore theirs. Times change, and we’re the only ones resisting it.”

But Grandpa Herman pulled away and walked out. He looked like a man who’d been beaten in battle, his wrinkly face pulled and saddened. And I wanted to laugh at him because it was the first time I’d seen him back down. But later that night, all I felt was sorry that he was so hurt, even if the hurting seemed silly.

 

 

 

A
fter school I tended Canaan, giving Laura a break even
though Laura wore on my last good nerve. David and Laura were so caught up in their righteous son that they were willing to abide by Grandpa Herman’s rules, every one of them, even though so many of us were joyfully carving notches in other people’s trees and seeing that nobody cared a bit.

We weren’t really doing a thing wrong. We all had a good sense of right and wrong and nobody wanted to do wrong because wrongs just make you have a hard time falling asleep, and we had too much to do to bring on insomnia. But we were living it up at Fire and Brimstone. Some nights Aunt Kate and Uncle Ernest would pull out their guitar and banjo, and after prayers, we’d sit in somebody’s living room and sing until the yawning took over.

Mostly we sang Jesus songs, but we didn’t bother with the sad ones—like the one where the little girl tells her daddy that he can’t be her daddy anymore because the rapture’s happened and her daddy’s been left behind. We sang about the mansion over the hilltop and flying away to Jesus and about how we were standing on the solid rock. Happy songs with a good beat that kept us awake and together.

On warm nights, we’d sit outside, and they’d play their music, and we’d make up fake musical groups. We’d sing into the water hose, pretending it was a microphone. And one night when Olin and Mustard were singing a duet, holding that hose between them, Daddy turned the water on and splashed it up in their faces right in the middle of “Just a Little Talk With Jesus.” We laughed for an hour about it, and everybody slept good that night.

But there were some who wouldn’t participate. Mamma didn’t come out too often, although a couple of times she forgot her allegiance and did a solo of “Lily of the Valley” before she remembered. David and Laura never joined us. They claimed that they didn’t want Canaan to catch a cold, but we all knew that they didn’t want to upset Grandpa.

And it was no wonder. Grandpa Herman treated David and Laura with more respect and attention than anybody else. He still believed completely that Canaan was the son of God, so David and Laura had more responsibility than anybody else and needed more guidance.

Some nights at Singspiration, which was what we called our gatherings, people would talk about little Canaan who, at seven and then eight months old, was beginning to get irritable. He had a hard time holding onto his rattle. He cried whenever Laura dressed him because it took a long time to get his special clothes on. People felt bad because he couldn’t crawl, and Wanda said she thought he’d have a hard time learning to walk since he wouldn’t have his arms to balance him.