Rapture of Canaan (3 page)

“He who romps through another man’s field and tramples the plants of his labor shall reseed and keep those plants until they bring forth the equal value and shall pay fifty dollars to The Church of Fire and Brimstone as penance.

“He who goes unto another man’s wife and takes her for his own shall come before the church and confess such evils and shall pay five hundred dollars, half to the man from whom he’s stolen and half to The Church of Fire and Brimstone. And if it happens more than once, he shall be cast out of his own community. But if he has left a wife and family, they may remain among the congregation.”

The laws were written in thick booklets that only church-teachers and Grandpa Herman himself were allowed to read. The booklets were old and yellowed, and the pages looked as used as elbows.

There were other things about The Church of Fire and Brimstone that didn’t show up in the religions of the children in my classes at school. We didn’t believe in doctors—because they took the healing power of Christ into their own hands and used it to perpetuate the sinfulness of humanity—or so Grandpa Herman said. When schools first required that children be immunized, the church began teaching their children themselves until the state intervened and Grandpa Herman had to make the exception for vaccinations against measles and diphtheria.

As a child it all seemed so normal. My friends were my own cousins who wore dark dresses made for us by our mammas and nannas. We didn’t associate much with other children in school because we had each other, and we’d been taught that regular Baptists or Methodists lived in sin, that any little girl with britches on her legs was going straight to Hell for trying to be a man, and that those children who learned their numbers off of television shows—even television shows especially made to help children learn—were being damned eternally, would be cast one day into the Great Lake of Fire for worshipping technology instead of the Blessed Redeemer. We didn’t want to be friends with them anyway.

So during recess, I caught up with the other girls whose hair hung down their backs uneven, like horse tails, with the boys who wore dark pants all year around. And in the lunchroom, I could pick out other Fire and Brimstone children just by looking at the table, seeking out the paper bags in which we carried our food—because lunch boxes featured television characters, and we never ate school food since nobody could be sure who grew it.

Even the Holiness children, who also wore dresses, didn’t cut their hair, and carried their lunches, were a threat to our salvation since the year that they’d held a Hallelujah-ween carnival for their children and invited our congregation to attend. Even though nobody was dressing up, Grandpa Herman rebuked them from the pulpit for condoning Satanic holidays, and after that, we cut off all association with the Holiness.

When I was a child, I saw our community as a special place where God’s special children could be safe from the influence of the wicked world. Later, when I was older, I saw our community differently. I saw us like an island. Like an island sinking from the weight of fearful hearts.

 

 

 

N
inah.” Mamma shook me.
“
Ninah!
”

I couldn’t wake up. In the summers, we worked in the fields all day, worked from daylight until dusk, walking miles and miles along narrow tobacco rows, popping the flowers off the tops of the plants with our fingers, popping the suckers that grew at the bottom of the stalk away with our toes, so that big leaves could grow bigger and the flower wouldn’t suck out all the life. By the time supper came, we were so weary that even breathing felt like work. And that night, in spite of the muscles in my legs twitching and shaking, I had fallen asleep at the table. A piece of my hair had coiled into the gravy over my rice.

I jerked up straight, stretched open my eyes to see everyone looking at me. The table I was seated at held twenty, and there were three others just like it in the room. We all ate together, the entire extended family, and at that moment, all I knew was that a lot of eyes were watching mine. I didn’t blink.

My brother David, who was just eight years older, reached out under the table with his foot and tapped at mine comfortingly.

“She’s just tired, Maree,” my daddy said. “Don’t come down too hard on her.”

“Did you say your prayers, young lady?” Mamma asked me. “Before you fell asleep?”

“I didn’t mean to fall asleep,” I answered.

“Don’t talk back,” Mamma warned, not harshly but firm. Mamma had great sunken eyes, and when she was angry, she squinted them so that the lines around them looked like just-plowed fields. I peered into the bowl of potatoes, still too groggy to be clear about what was going on. “And look at me when I’m talking to you,” Mamma added.

I forced my head up.

“Maree,” Nanna said. “This child didn’t mean to doze off.” She shook her head back and forth.

“And I’m not punishing her for sleeping,” Mamma interjected. “I’m punishing her for not saying her prayers. At twelve years old, you’d think she’d have better sense. Did you say your prayers, Ninah?”

“No, ma’am,” I answered.

“Then get up,” she said. “And start cleaning the kitchen.”

So while the rest of them ate, I scraped pots, heaping the leftovers onto a big plate for the dogs. By the time I’d finished washing the pots and draining the dirty water, the women were cleaning off the table, bringing me glasses and plates. They were chattering and singing, but in the background, I could hear Grandpa Herman talking to Daddy.

“Maree’s right,” he told him. “She’s just keeping that girl in line. You got to toughen up, Liston. Loving your child and punishing your child ain’t separate things. You know that.”

And then I turned the water back on, running it clean and drowning out their voices.

About midway through the dishwashing, Nanna dipped her hands into the dishwater too, and our fingers kept hitting each other underwater, and we had to take turns rinsing off the forks and saucers. Whenever I wasn’t careful, Nanna’d steal my dishcloth, yanking it right out of my hands, and I’d splash her a little. Pretty soon, she had me laughing, and then we were both singing along, reminiscing about the old rugged cross with everybody else.

That night before I went to bed, I kissed Daddy goodnight, and he said, “We just love you so much, Baby.”

Then Mamma led me to bed, and when she pulled back my covers, there were cockleburrs and sandspurs scattered all over my sheets, scattered everywhere. I knew there would be.

Mamma got down beside me and we said our prayers together, and she asked God to help me remember him, to help me have the strength to get through hard days and to show respect to my elders.

She helped me settle down on top of all those prickly nettles and when I made a face, she laughed, leaned over me, and kissed me on the forehead. “You know how much I love you, don’t you?” she asked, and because I didn’t want her to leave me yet, because I wanted to keep feeling her hair on my cheek, I said, “Tell me how much.”

So she stayed awhile, beside my bed. She told me the story again of how I was an unexpected gift from God, a child she and Daddy hadn’t planned and didn’t know was coming. Then she said that maybe tomorrow I would get a special blessing for my night of discomfort and wouldn’t feel so tired after working in the fields. And she left.

I couldn’t sleep for a long time. The prickles were sticking in my back, and every time I moved, I got stuck in a new place. I knew I was supposed to remember the crown of thorns on Jesus’ head, how much that must have hurt him. But I just kept thinking about suckering tobacco, about popping off baby leaves so they wouldn’t take away the strength from the bigger ones. I imagined that when I woke up, I’d find little dots of blood on my gown and sheets. But of course, I didn’t.

 

 

 

M
aybe it was a blessing from God, but the next day wasn’t
so hard. I got assigned to a row in a particularly long field next to James, the son of Olin, my brother-in-law, and the stepson of Bethany, my oldest sister. His natural mother had died in childbirth, which happened sometimes since we didn’t use doctors. All day long we stayed together. When he’d get behind, I’d slow down and wait for him, and when I hung back to pop flowers from the tops of very high plants, he’d wait for me—or else he’d step over and bend the stalk so that I could reach it.

The hired man on the other side who wasn’t Fire and Brimstone moved very quickly, but then he’d been suckering and topping for years. We didn’t mind that he stayed ahead because it was easier for us to talk that way.

“Did you get whipped?” James asked me, pausing and peeking at me through the leaves. Something about his eyebrows made him always look surprised.

“Nah,” I told him. “Slept on nettles.”

“Ugh,” James said. “I’d rather just get whipped.”

“I guess I deserved it,” I muttered. I could see his big hands plucking through tussled green leaves, his dark head passing like a target in the spaces between plants. “If they’d been punishing me for falling asleep during supper, I probably would have gotten the strap. But since it was for forgetting my prayers, it was a bigger sin. I deserved it.”

“No you didn’t,” he said. “But don’t say I said so.”

“I won’t,” I promised. And then I began singing, “I Am Bound For the Promised Land,” and James joined in. We stepped out the beat hard in the soil and sang and panted our way down the row.

G
od had mercy on our crops that year. Grandpa Herman said
we must be doing a good job of confessing our sins because God wasn’t plaguing us with too much rain or a drought. Our tobacco didn’t even have blue mold. The leaves on each stalk were so wide and so firm that you could use them to fan your face. We decided to have a celebration in honor of God’s abundance.

On the day when we emptied our first barn, the men barbecued a hog and the women hauled dishes of potato salad and baked beans out to the pack house in the back of a pickup truck.

We finished separating the leaves from the sticks and bailing it in burlap sheets, and then the biggest boys threw each bundle out the back door into a ton truck until the whole truck bed was heaped with huge, soft boulders of tobacco.

We had to wait a little while for the women to set up the food, but Grandpa Herman kept lifting the lid of the cooker and allowing the children to reach between ribs and pull off little strings of meat as snacks. Then we’d suck our fingers, anticipating the feast.

I thought the dinner prayer would never end. All the adults had something to thank God for, and everybody said thank-you for the exceptional crop—even though it seemed to me that one thank-you should be enough. But then we filled our paper plates with more food than we usually ate in a week. It was a regular Christmas at Fire and Brimstone—even though it was only August.

We ate on the pack house porch. Some people sat on the steps, and others dangled their legs off the sides, and others stood behind a table we’d made by putting a sheet of plywood across two sawhorses. We ate until our bellies grew tight, and we washed it all down with iced tea, which was reserved for special occasions.

Afterwards, while the women scraped off the dishes and shared scraps with the dogs and chickens and pigs, the men stretched out on their backs in the sun and dozed. Resting on a work day was a real treat.

The pack house had a second floor where we stored stuff, and there was a door up there too, in the back, that opened up to nothing but warm air and white clouds. Mustard was the one who discovered that the ton truck was parked directly beneath the door, and he dared us to jump down onto the mounds of tobacco below.

When nobody would do it, Mustard said we were all chicken, and he backed up against the far wall, then sprinted across the room and right out the door, leaping through air and onto the cushiony bundles. Barley went next. Then Pammy and James. They giggled so hard they lost their wind and came wheezing back upstairs to do it again.

I was scared to jump and scared we might get in trouble, but I didn’t want to be left out.

“Come on, Ninah,” James hollered up from below, climbing out the back of the truck. “It’s fun.”

I didn’t want to be the only one afraid, so I ran through too, dashing out of the dark pack house and into the light. Even after there was no more floor beneath me, I could feel my feet kicking. And even though I knew if I could just keep my eyes open, I’d be able to see more than I’d ever seen before, I squinted them tight and kept them closed even after I’d landed on the itchy pillows of leaves.

It wasn’t as soft as it’d looked from above, but it didn’t hurt exactly.

I clambered over the truck’s ledge and went to find David. I wanted him to play with us like he used to, but he was asleep in the sun.

“Wake up,” I said as I shook him.

“I ain’t asleep,” he muttered. “I’m just checking my eyelids for holes.”

“David, come on,” I called. But I couldn’t get him to join us.

Then Grandpa Herman pushed himself from the opened tailgate of his pickup where he was sitting. “What are y’all doing?” he asked me, retucking his shirt as he spoke.

“Just jumping out the upstairs door into the truck,” I admitted.

“On that tobacco?” he roared, and I was scared and only nodded.

But Grandpa Herman took me by the hand and walked around back with me. He just shook his head as he watched Barley fly down.

“You’ve done that enough now,” Grandpa scolded. “You gonna mess it up. That might just look like ’baccer, but it’s the clothes on your back and the food in your belly. No more jumping.”

“Just one more time,” Mustard begged. “Please?”

I couldn’t believe Mustard had talked back to Grandpa. I knew he’d probably be beaten good. But Grandpa was in the mood for a circus, I reckon, with the crops faring so well, and he just laughed and said, “Come on down. This is the last time though.”