Short People (3 page)

“Um . . . Uh-huh.”

“I didn’t know that I had Jesus to turn to.”

“And you, Shawn,
do
know that you have Jesus to turn to.”

“And you’ve got us and we love you.”

“Did Jesus talk to you after you turned to Him?”

“Eventually.”

Shawn beams.

“Have you ever felt like Job, Shawn?”

He can’t remember. Nothing horrible has happened yet in his life. “I guess when I can’t get Jesus to talk to me.”

“Yes, that’s like Job. Good, Shawn.”

“What do you do when you can’t get Jesus to talk to you?”

“I um . . . I keep listening anyway?”

This is the first of Shawn’s correct Jesse Tree answers, and as the month progresses, he racks up more and more of them, making his parents proud and winning their approval of his wish not to receive gifts on Christmas—Epiphany is so much more appropriate.

Over the next year and a half, Shawn carries his copy of
The Way
—a gift from Preacher Dan, given ceremonially during his baptismal coffee hour—with him at all times, leafing through it when he sees something he doesn’t like, the way others might look up a word they don’t know in the dictionary. He judges, and finds wanting, most of what he reads in the
Record Herald.
During recess at school he shakes his head in disgust at the other kids chasing each other around the soccer field in flagrant display of evil Lust. He pounds tables and dashboards as if they are Bibles, rants until spit sprays out of his mouth, his face turning red, his ears burning.

Not even his mother escapes his scrutiny. When, for example, she carts him along to pick out a chair for the living room, she keeps rearranging their route through the store to bring them back to one particularly plush model, dusty rose with indented sky-blue stripes offset at intervals by puffy clusters of pale green-and-yellow flowers. She loves the chair even more than she loved last year’s home splurge, the wall-to-wall heather-gray carpeting. She runs her fingers over the fabric—coy and guilty, daring, blushing like she’s a little girl and not a very Christian one.

Shawn manages to wait until they’re in the parking lot before exploding, but as they walk toward the car, his lecture begins.

“It’s called covetousness, Mom. It’s very, very, very, very bad. You shouldn’t covet your neighbor’s wife. You shouldn’t covet your neighbor’s home. It’s in
The Way.
The Ten Commandments. Those are sins, Mom. You sinned.”

“I didn’t sin, Shawn.” Her voice is already weary and, Shawn thinks, distressingly indifferent given the gravity of what she’s done.

As she starts the engine and pulls onto the access road, he fumes, struggling with ways to prove his point. “Because, even if you didn’t play with the fabric and drool on it and stuff, God would have known you were sinning cause He can see all your bad thoughts. You coveted so everybody could see and that’s . . . it’s really bad, Mom . . . Isn’t it really very bad?”

She watches the road as if he’s not there.

“Mo-o-om?”

“Not right now, Shawn.”

“It’s a sin, though.”

“You’ve already made it clear that that’s how you feel.”

“But, don’t you care that it’s a sin and you just did it and now God saw you sinning?”

“Shawn.”

“And that now you’re going to go to Hell?”

“Shawn, I’m trying to drive.”

He leans forward as far as his seat belt allows, twisting in a fitful attempt to look her in the face. “You don’t care?”

“Not right now.”

“That’s a sin too. That’s an even bigger sin.”

She taps the brake. “Now listen to me, Shawn.” For a moment he’s sure she’s going to yell at him, but instead she swallows and, silently mouthing the words, prays,
God, make him stop,
before accelerating in silence.

“I’m listening, Mom. Mom? See, I’m right and you don’t even care.” His arms snap across his chest and he stiffens and glares at his reflection in the window.

For the rest of the day, he harumphs and sighs and stalks from one room to another, but every time he settles in, there she is, cheerfully trying to spoil his bad mood. He knows she’s not really following him, that she’s doing laundry and paying bills, writing letters and calling friends, but he’s pretty sure that she chooses what to do when based on which room he’s in. He sulks in the kitchen, and she comes and unloads the dishwasher. He sulks in the bathroom, she cleans the litter box. He sulks on the back porch, she hangs the linens, waving to him as she goes. The one room Shawn stays away from is his bedroom; what would be the point of brooding in there, where his mother couldn’t see him nurse his anger. He sulks in the living room, leafing through back issues of
Family Life,
until she says, “Shawn, now I’m going to fold the laundry and watch
Days of Our Lives,
so you can stay or not, but if you stay, I want you to smile for me,” and she roughs up his perfectly side-parted hair. By now, he’s less upset with her for sinning than for being such a grown-up. Her unshakable cheeriness makes him feel childish, and that’s not right—after all, she’s the one who is wrong. He glowers at her from the couch for a while, but she watches her television show and folds his underwear and doesn’t seem to care at all.

At dinner, Shawn politely declines his father’s request that he say grace.

“Shawn.” His father’s eyebrows jackknife and Shawn knows he can’t argue.

“God’s great, let’s eat. And make people be not so covetous. A-men.”

“Thank you, Shawn.”

Throughout the meal, Shawn clatters his silverware. Instead of eating he dissects his favorite made-from-scratch meatloaf. Nibbling a bit of the ketchup-glazed top, he proclaims that it tastes like soap.

“Shawn’s had a bad day,” says his mother, attempting to explain.

Preoccupied with the mound of margarine he’s folding into his baked potato, his father doesn’t look up from his plate. “Something on your mind, Shawn?”

“He’s just angry at me. He’ll get over it.”

“No.”

His father smirks. “No, you’re not angry at her, or no, you won’t get over it?”

Laughing, his mother says, “Both,” and then launches into her side of the story: blah, blah, blah, blah and now she’s getting the silent treatment.

Unable to endure any more slander, Shawn finally blurts out, “Not true! That’s not how it was!”

“Oh? How was it?”

“The way she says it makes it sound all different than how it really happened.” But before he can get the truth out, she laughs. Shawn tries to be Christ-like and keep his dignity as enmity gathers around him. “Dad,” he says, “could you please ask Mom to stop laughing at me now?”

“She’s not laughing at you. She just thinks you’re cute.”

With an attitude like this, Shawn is horrified to realize, his father might also remain with the camels and sinners, unable to squeeze through the eye of the needle when Judgment Day finally comes.

Please, Jesus, make Mom and Dad feel bad for being so mean. Make them know that I just want them not to go to Hell. Tell them I’m right and it’s bad to covet and it’s even badder to poke fun at me if they really love me which I think they don’t. Cause, otherwise, why do they do things You don’t like that might make it so that they won’t go to Heaven? Make them please be better so I don’t have to be mad at them. Thank You. A-men.

Throughout the rest of the meal, his parents chat about the chair, what it looks like, where to put it, did she get a deal. Refusing to eat is the only expression of protest Shawn makes. He shoves the food on his plate from one pile to another, building geometric sculptures with it, chopping the meatloaf, potato and broccoli into tiny fragments of fiber.

His father reaches over him to take a forkful from the pile. “Remember the rule, Shawn. Don’t take more than you’re going to eat. Or else you have to sit here until it’s gone.”

He suffers the penalty glumly, all the more so because it’s his mother who, as bedtime draws near, takes the plate away, scraping the cold landscape of mush into the garbage disposal and releasing him with a good-night kiss on the cheek.

The chair arrives at the house a week later. Shawn’s mother loves it so much she decides not to take the plastic off, for fear that without it the fabric will wear thin and pick up stains, turning tawdry within the year.

To his consternation, Shawn likes the chair as well. Worse, as he enters puberty, urges he didn’t know even existed start crawling inside him like viruses. He knows they’re sins—virtuous thoughts don’t make him feel clammy. Confused and afraid, and mostly ashamed, he carves God’s rules deeper into his brain. He hoards and displays the parts of himself that exemplify his moral fiber. He fidgets and hovers over his good deeds, as if he’s afraid they’re going to break. He scares himself with Scripture. This is the Shawn for the world to see: Shawn the literal interpreter, for whom actions, thoughts and beliefs have palpable, cut-and-dried consequences; Shawn the trooper, who, beacon and map in hand, patrols his life and the lives of everyone else he knows, prodding the Evil out of the kingdom of Good; Shawn the player with action figures, who instead of staging intergalactic battles walks his dolls through the Passion, Crucifixion and Ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ. When he’s able to sustain this level of intense devotion to the Christian life, Shawn knows God is walking beside him. But more and more often, God allows the Devil and his minions to intercede. They pluck him off of the gleaming prairie of God’s country and carry him piggyback into dark places where Evil hangs in the air like car exhaust. Shawn breathes it in and becomes someone else. This Shawn steals snacks between meals. This is the Shawn who, at Camp Corinth, lies silent in his bunk, staring at the springs above him, and wonders if the defiant boys boasting about the girls they made out with, the girls whose breasts they touched in the woods, are lying. This is the Shawn who, wishing he knew what a girl’s breast felt like, caresses his nipple until it’s sore and inflamed. This is the Shawn who wishes to know that of which he condemns. The Shawn who, back home in bed, has been touching his thing, trying futilely to make it grow.

As if reading his mind, Shawn’s mother leaves a book on his bed:
Wait . . . Until You Hear This: A Christian Kid’s Guide to Sex.
The very first chapter explores the topic of onanism. It can make you crazy; if you do it long enough, you become addicted and unable to think about anything else and then you stop washing and stop getting haircuts and flies and worms and things start growing in your head and you finally stop wearing anything but long trench coats and gloves to cover the hairy warts on your hands, and there’s a 97% chance that if you start out onanizing—it’s also called self-abuse—when you’re young, you’ll become a dirty-magazine reader and a premarital sex offender and start showing your member to people you don’t know on the street and this can escalate to things like rape and murder and serial killing. The book has examples, stories from real people who fell into the world of sex sins before they found Jesus and were born again. Shawn reads it so many times that the pages come unglued.

Still, late at night in his room, he can’t stop the minions from pouncing on his bed and insisting that just one more time won’t hurt. Put off righteousness till tomorrow, they say, tonight, they have something to show him. They remind him of the part in
Wait . . .
that describes in scientific terms what happens to you when you onanize. You’re overcome with impure thoughts and your member grows heavy and firm with sex. Once the thoughts have taken complete control of your body and mind and soul, you enter a trance and your member rejects the sex from your being, leaving a gooey white stain on your hand. They remind Shawn that he’s never seen this stain, he’s never felt the sex take hold of his body, that all he’s ever done is yank on his thing until it’s chafed, red and bloated. Shouldn’t he just once find out what he’s missing? He tries to resist them. He protests, “It’s a sin. I don’t believe in sinning.” They laugh at him. They say that it’s a sin because it’s such fun, he’ll see. The stauncher his will, the more conniving the minions become. They open
The Way
to the Song of Solomon. What are those vineyards in bloom? They ask. Can you imagine them? He can and he does. They wear down his will. Don’t you want to arouse and awaken love? This is the Bible, they remind him, that makes it okay. Can’t you see those two breasts like fawns? Come, browse among the lilies. He reaches down and his beloved— whoever she is—dances blurry and half-formed in the olive grove of his imagination. He lets her kiss him and massage him and other things that get hazy because he’s not sure what they are. He lets himself study the way his thing changes shape. It grows and shrinks and grows and shrinks. Later, when he’s exhausted and all that’s come out are clear little teardrops that thread like corn syrup on his finger when he touches them, he wonders if he made the stain. He flips through
Wait . . .
in search of the description. He knows he’s failed—in God’s eyes and Satan’s—because he’s sinned, but not even correctly, the wrong stuff came out, he’s still doing it wrong. And he lies awake, feeling unclean and inhuman, wishing he could die instead of sinning like this. Wondering what God does to sex addicts like him. Terrified of the rapist serial killer he will become when he grows up. Promising God yet again that if He forgives him, just this one more time, it will never happen again. That’s lying, too. It gets so bad that one night—a night when he is actually able to resist, though in order to do so, he has to make a rule that his hands stay above the covers—he wakes up with teardrops all over his underwear.

Convinced that if he doesn’t change his ways soon, his chances at a conversation with Jesus—forget getting into Heaven—will be lost forever, Shawn reads the Christian comic books from Shepherd’s House and listens to
Small One
and
The Kids’ Praise Album
and the whole Monarch collection of children’s records that teach the Fruits of the Spirit and the Ten Commandments and the Seven Seals of the Apocalypse. He asks himself, about once every minute, What Would Jesus Do, though with no word from the Man Himself, he never comes up with an answer. He tells himself it’s not too late, that if he does everything so right that he becomes the rightest person on Earth, God might still catch him in the floodlight He uses to peer into people’s souls and say to Himself, “Gosh, that boy, Shawn Casper, he’s really something. Look at him, Saint Peter. Moses, come see this. He’s only in fourth grade and he’s already the best Christian ever. You don’t see him? Right there. The one with the halo. I’m shining My light on him. It tickles Me all over when I see a kid like that.”