Rapture of Canaan (34 page)

I wondered if she did it for love, if James did it for love, if I was about to do it for love or if it was really something else.

“Sit here,” I told Canaan. “I’ll be right back.”

I went to my stack of rugs and took the James rug and the Canaan rug. I put Canaan’s rug beneath us and James’ rug at our back. To finish telling both stories. After we were gone.

Then I held Canaan’s hands in mine, my big, big hands covering his small ones completely, and I hummed to him for a minute. I thought that if I could make him fall asleep, it’d be easier.

He didn’t sleep. I didn’t know how much time I had left. I listened for the voices calling out, but all I could hear was my own memories, Grandpa Herman shouting, “There shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth,” and Nanna saying, “Sometimes you got to hold onto a little bit of rage,” and James saying, “You’re doing real good. I can hear you when you pray.”

When I picked up the scissors, they seemed to act without me, in spite of me, and before I knew what I was doing, I had placed them between his palms and snipped, snipped, snipped his hands apart.

He cried out so loudly that I knew I couldn’t hurt him any worse. He screamed and buried himself in my lap, his hollering mouth at the center of Nanna’s dress, between my breasts, so deafening that I knew it was killing the kudzu in there and his little hands shaking on both sides, free and moving, spilling bits of blood all around us, flicking them onto my wet face.

“Canaan,” I sung to him. “It’s okay.” I don’t know how long I held him like that before I put him down to find something to act as a bandage.

He stood up, and when he teetered, he used his hands to shove himself back up. Then he ran around the pack house squealing, shaking his hands maniacally and splashing the slightest bleeding over the walls and the floor, bleeding from both palms.

I thought he was crying, but by the time I caught him and began to bandage his hands with the leftover flannel from my weaving, I realized his squeals weren’t of pain or terror or anything bad. He was laughing. I could hardly hold him still enough to tie the strips around his little palms that were about to clot on their own.

Then I let him run about, in his baby way so that his little legs moved from side to side, stepping awkwardly. I let him flick his hands. I let him slap his own round face.

“You are so goddamned beautiful,” I told him, and even though I was crying, I understood something new. Something about connections. Somehow, I knew that splitting his hands was like severing a vine, like killing the vine about to strangle not somebody else but me.
Me.

I remembered Corinthian’s words that I’d misunderstood all along. “Whee, Jesus,” she’d said. But it wasn’t a curse at all. It was a prayer, and not a frightened one. It was a prayer praising freedom.

I picked him up, and he held on. He held one of my breasts in one bandaged hand and a fistful of my hair in the other.

“Whee, Jesus,” I said, and I kissed his face, his mouth, his head. Then I adjusted him on my hip and began the slow walk back.

 

 

 

W
hen I’ve used
up
all my rags and lies, rope and hair, fabric
and love, when I’m out of twine and my loom is broken and there’s still a story in me, that’s when I unknot and begin the unraveling.

My rugs are never finished. I use the same materials to make them over and over again, featuring something new each time and hearing a different tale. But sometimes they speak the most wisely when they are heaps of fibers on the pack house floor, intermingled and waiting.

If I sit with them silent for long enough, they will talk. Just listening, I can give them tongues. They will speak like prophets.

AFTERWORD

While I was writing this book, I was auditing a course in medieval history at Virginia Commonwealth University. The professor, Dr. Catherine Mooney, gave the class a bibliography of law codes and penitentials, and I found myself curious about the rules and punishments in different medieval societies. I pursued the subject in my studies, and I included variations of these medieval beliefs in
The Rapture of Canaan.
The laws from Grandpa Herman’s handbook did not come from any single source, but many were influenced by my readings in the following:

The Burgundian Code: Book of Constitutions or Law of Gundobad: Additional Enactments,
trans. Katherine Fischer Drew. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972.

The Irish Penitenrials,
ed. Ludwig Bieler. Dublin: Scriptores Latini Hiberniae, 1963.

The Lombard Laws,
ed. Katherine Fischer Drew. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973.

The Medieval Handbooks of Penance,
ed. John Thomas McNeil and Helena Gamer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1938.

 

Payer, Pierre J.
Sex and the Penitentials: The Development of a Sexual Code, 550—1150.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.

Readings in Medieval
History, ed. Patrick J. Geary. Peter-borough, Canada: Broadview Press, 1989.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in rural South Carolina, Sheri Reynolds now lives in Virginia. She has taught English at Virginia Commonwealth University, Old Dominion University, and The College of William and Mary. She is at work on a new novel.