The Rapture of Canaan Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  AFTERWORD

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  FURTHER PRAISE FOR THE RAPTURE OF CANAAN ...

  “Ms. Reynolds’s poetic gifts are uncommonly powerful. In The Rapture of Canaan, she tells a truly rapturous love story and presents two unforgettable characters: the teenage heroine and her skeptical but stalwart grandmother, from whom she learns about the acceptance of loss, the pragmatism that must underlie any abiding love, and the place in every heart where God resides, waiting to reveal himself.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A worthy successor (to Reynolds’s debut] ... gracefully written.”

  —The Virginian-Pilot

  CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR SHERI REYNOLDS’S

  BITTERROOT LANDING ...

  “Sheri Reynolds’s haunting voice will stay with you long after you have finished her scary and brilliant first novel. An auspicious debut for a very talented writer.”—Lee Smith

  “An original, lyrically written tale ... a beautifully realized character ... Reynolds aims high and just about hits the bull’s-eye, displaying a self-assurance and a taste for moral and social issues that make her debut a most welcome one.” —Publishers Weekly

  “A wonderfully compelling, powerful, moving, and complex coming-of-age story.” —Booklist

  “A powerful new voice among Southern writers ... Jael is captivating; she is bright, strong-willed, and very believable.”—Raleigh Spectator

  “The book opens with a rush of pure poetry that begs to be read aloud; it’s laced with the sort of language that can lift you off your feet ... a first novel that will be tough to top.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “While Bitterroot Landing is a candid depiction of the acts and scars of abuse, it’s also the unsentimental story of a young woman who reconstructs her defiled youth ... Reynolds brings a fresh look, her prose clear and distinct, to the prospect of reinventing one’s life.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

  “Disturbing ... full of haunting imagery ... a story for our times.”

  —Creative Loafing

  “Close the pages of Bitterroot Landing, and the smell of swamp water and red earth remains. In her remarkable first novel, Sheri Reynolds tells a lyrical tale of abuse, abandonment and self-awareness ... at once gentle and gripping ... a tale of wrenching sorrow and spiritual renewal.” —The Virginian-Pilot/Ledger-Star

  “Sexual abuse has become such a familiar staple of mysteries and other fiction that its central place in this slender first novel is no surprise. What is surprising is how it becomes a spiritual catalyst for Jael, a victim whose search for peace leads her beyond the comfort of professional therapy ... Reynolds transforms an abased and self-mutilating girl into a mystical avatar able to radiate her godly attributes. This transformation is achieved without romanticizing the gritty realness of her life. She is poor and rough, and her harsh life is accurately portrayed. Yet, in her thoughts and actions, Jael is given a lyrical and convincing expressiveness.” —Library Journal

  ALSO BY SHERI REYNOLDS

  Bitterroot Landing

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  fa division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell. Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr. Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,

  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  THE RAPTURE OF CANAAN

  Copyright © 1995 by Sheri Reynolds

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form

  without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in

  violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons edition / January 1996

  Berkley mass-market edition / November 1996

  Berkley trade paperback edition /April 1997

  eISBN : 978-1-440-67378-8

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Mary Smith Cannon

  Thanks to Joy Humphrey for critiquing this book through the mail, to Allyson Rainer for giving me page-by-page feedback, and to Amy Tudor for listening patiently to the sections I read aloud and still agreeing to edit it. Thanks also to my family for answering so many farming and pregnancy questions. And thanks to Candice Fuhrman, my agent, for keeping me going.

  I’ VE SPENT A LOT OF TIME WEAVING, BUT YOU’D never know it from my hands.

  With threads, hair, and twisted fabric, I weave in fragments of myself, bits of other people. I weave in lies, and I weave in love, and in the end, it’s hard to know if one keeps me warmer than the other.

  And when I’m done, I lift the rug from the loom and study it in my fingers. When I back away five feet, it’s bluer or more knotted than I’d remembered. And from twenty feet, it grins at me when all along, I’d thought it pouty. I ask myself, “Is that my rug?” But like anything I make, the rug is never mine. I tell my eyes not to see so much at one time. I flip it over, and from the back, it weeps like someone lost.

  Like all lies, loves, stories, it is imperfect, but I could walk on it. I could fold it over the edge of my bed and use it for a blanket or hang it on the wall. Instead, I wrap it over my shoulders, wear it like a shield, covering myself with a tapestry of views.

  Tell me the story, Nanna, ” I used to beg my grandma, leaning against her in the porch swing, my head nuzzling into the space where her long arm connected to her shoulder, and she’d wrap that arm around me and rub my thigh as though it were a wrinkled napkin that she could straighten out if she worked on it long enough.

  Afternoons in summer, with lima beans simmering just inside and the saltiness drifting out through the screen door, with curing tobacco sweetly ambering on the edge of a breeze and my Nanna holding onto me and waving the gnats away from my face, the ones that kept flying to the corners of my eyes, those were the afternoons that made me love my Nanna best, even though she admitted to being a liar.

  “You don’t want to hear that old story,” she’d protest. “Herman shouldn’ta never put it in that sermon. You’d think the man would know better, with little children listening....” />
  “Please tell it,” I’d plead. “You tell it better than Grandpa,” and she’d pat my thigh a few times in the loving way that almost stings, but doesn’t.

  “I was just about your size, maybe a year or two older, living in Virginia with my mamma and pappa, in a big old house where we roomed in the upstairs and ran the grocery store in the downstairs.”

  “Where’s Virginia?” I asked, taking her hand in mine and running my fingers along the routes of her veins that protruded like groundhog trails in the garden.

  “North. Way up north. We owned the biggest house in the neighborhood, and all the families around loved my pappa because he’d give the children candy when they came in and he’d sell things on credit to people who didn’t have much money.

  “He had the biggest old heart in the world. When the men from the ironworks would come home on Fridays and blow all their money on liquor and then pass out on the street, he’d haul them inside. Had a little cot in the back, in a storeroom, and he’d let them sober up considerable before he’d send them home.”

  “Grandpa says drinking’s a sin,” I’d remind her.

  “Your grandpa committed that one many a time before he got religion,” she remarked. “Don’t you tell him I said that. Anyway, my pappa was the gentlest man in the world, and I reckon that’s why he let my mamma do whatever she wanted.”

  “Tell me what she looked like, Nanna.”

  “She had big eyes that she painted up and lips so pink that she left color on the edges of her cigarettes. Always had a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. And she didn’t put up her hair the way other women did. Left it hanging down her back all the way to her tail,” and Nanna’d reach behind me and tickle at the bones at the base of my spine, and I’d giggle.

  “She was a whore,” I’d yell out the way I’d heard my grandpa yell out in church meeting.

  “Your grandpa has a name for everything, but he ain’t always right,” Nanna’d insist. “Don’t you tell him I said so.”

  “She was a wicked woman, ” I’d yell again, and laugh and kick my feet that stuck out just past the edge of the swing.

  “Weren’t never wicked to me,” Nanna’d say. “I wish to goodness Herman hadn’t put that story in his sermon. Little child like you saying such things.”

  “I’m just teasing, Nanna,” I promised, burying my face in her breast. “There’s good whores. We learned in Sunday school. Like Mary who was Jesus’ friend.”

  “She weren’t no whore. She was a woman of passion.”

  “I might be a whore when I get big,” I told Nanna to make her feel better, and she grabbed me right by the hair of my head and yanked me up.

  “Don’t you never let me hear you say that again,” she said. “I will whip your ass righteously if I ever hear you say that again.”

  I held my mouth wide open at the sound of Nanna cursing, because while it was okay for men to say words like ass, it wasn’t okay for women. But before I could tell her she’d have to say special prayers to be forgiven for defiling her lips, I was crying and Nanna was hugging me again.

  That was the way things were with Nanna. For years and years, we’d sit together in the swing and she’d tell me the story, the same sad story in a hundred different ways. And when my legs grew long enough to dangle down near hers, and when I couldn’t fit my head beneath her arm anymore and had to lean it against her shoulder instead, I began to finally understand the story differently, to understand it in the way Nanna might have—if she hadn’t been the one who had to live it.

  Leila,” I imagined her pappa calling. ”Come help me straighten out the paper sacks under the counter.”

  My Nanna, just past nine and already lanky like me, her hair pulled back into a tight ponytail like the one I wore, climbed out from her hiding place, a dark corner of the store where the edge of the grain bin almost met the edge of a cluttered shelf of plastic combs and soaps and yellowed magazines. She had to squeeze to get through. She’d been growing so fast that she worried that by the time she’d finished helping her pappa, she wouldn’t be able to fit back inside to fetch her crayons and papers.

  When I told myself this story, I always gave Nanna my worries, whatever they were.

  “How much will you pay me?” she’d tease him, romping across the wooden slats of floor and behind the counter where he was waiting for a customer making her way to the register.

  “How much will I owe you?”

  “Hmmm,” she pondered. Sometimes I saw her scratching her chin the way she still does when I ask her a question.

  “How about two hard candies?” he offered, and kissed the top of her head.

  “Let me think about it,” she said, and went to work.

  There were bags in three sizes. The smallest size held only a cup of washing powders or rice, but it’d hold a whole handful of Mary Janes. The next size was big enough for a bag of beans or a whole bottle of beer. But the big ones were Nanna’s favorite. She could fit those bags over her head, cut out eyes and a mouth, and then decorate masks to wear to scare her mamma.

  In my stories, the biggest bags were thick as skin. You couldn’t even punch through them with your fist.

  Nanna heard the delicate bells of the cash register and then “thirty-five cents” in her pappa’s even voice as she made neat stacks beneath the counter.

  “So how much?” her pappa asked again when the customer was gone.

  “How about a line of paper dolls?” she’d bargain. She would have been good at that.

  “Just for straightening out the bags?”

  “Please?” she begged. Her pappa had shown her how to fold a grocery bag back and forth like an accordion in narrow, even strips, and then how to take scissors and cut out half a person so that when you opened it up, you found a whole line of children grasping hands. But little Nanna could never do it right. Her paper dolls had pointy heads or thick arms or feet like clubs.

  “I reckon that’s a fair trade,” her pappa compromised. “But I won’t be able to get to it till later.”

  “Thank you, thank you!” She danced around him. “I need some new dolls to color.”

  Just then a man walked in. I imagined the man with rough whiskers and a scruffy black dog following behind—even though Nanna couldn’t remember all the details herself.

  “Leila, go find your mamma and tell her to come here,” her pappa instructed.

  “Where is she?”

  “Upstairs, I reckon. Or out back. Now run.”

  Nanna knew he didn’t like for her to be in the store when drunks came around. He probably didn’t need her mamma at all. He just wanted her out of the way. So she left, skipping out of the musky grocery and onto the street, waving to neighbors on their porches. Sometimes in my mind, I let Nanna stop to talk to a little boy on his tricycle, riding circles around the block. I gave him blond hair that jiggled as his wheels passed over the cobblestones.

  Then Nanna would race into the house, up the stairs, pulling herself with the rail to improve her speed. She’d run through the airborne dust, spotlighted by the sun angling through the window, and wipe her face with the back of her hand to get the particles off, calling out for her mamma.

  But there was never an answer.

  Nanna’d look in every room, pausing only in her mamma’s bedroom, in front of the vanity where her cosmetics and brush were left out. I imagined her staring in the mirror, touching her own cheek, and wishing it flushed the way her mamma’s always looked. Then she’d throw down the brush she found in her hand and run out of that room too.

  The next part of the story was always the same no matter how many times I told it.

  Back down the steps and out the door, Nanna jiggled the handle of the gate. It was stubborn and wouldn’t catch. So she pulled herself up on the wooden fence and peeked over the side. Her mamma was there, sure enough, sitting on the ground against the side of the house, sipping Coke through a straw right out the bottle. Beside her, a man Nanna recognized—the young man from the ironw
orks who sometimes helped her pappa unload shipments. At first, she was confused. Then she noticed the man’s hand on the middle of her mamma’s back, right at the place where her skirt began, at the place where her body was so shy that it curved inward.

  I imagined Nanna staring at that sight for quite a while.

  But she didn’t call her mamma at all. She climbed down as quietly as she could and then ran, first towards the store to her pappa. But she couldn’t go there. She started to go back upstairs, but remembered how empty it was, without her mamma or pappa, with just the dust hanging in the air.

  So she bolted down the street past boys playing ball, past an old woman pruning her bushes, past the rug-maker’s house and all the way into the cemetery where it was quiet and green and honeysuckled, where she could walk between graves and figure things out.

  I knew how lonely Nanna must have been, but I thought maybe I’d like to live in a city someday—in spite of the drunks and noises. I figured if Nanna’d had a chance to stay there, nothing would have turned out the same. I wished we could have been little at the same time, best friends and next-door neighbors. I would have walked through the cemetery with her. I would have held her hand.

  My grandpa Herman Langston was founder and preacher of The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God’s Almighty Baptizing Wind. I think when he was trying to come up with a name for it, he just couldn’t make up his mind, so he put all his ideas together and acted like a prophet, and nobody said a thing. Grandpa Herman was a big man with red hair and huge freckles that hid in his wrinkles. He wore his blood pressure like the glaze on a loaf of bread, sitting shiny on the surface. According to Nanna, when he was a young man, he used his fists on anybody who crossed him, and as far as I can tell, after he got religion, he did the same thing. Sunday after Sunday, I watched him standing in the pulpit, banging those fists down hard on the podium, saying, “There shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.”