The Rapture of Canaan Read online

  Ben Harback just stared at us all, his eyes cast down as if he was looking at a tobacco leaf covered with a breed of worm he’d never seen before.

  I thought about Mustard, all alone, the only brave voice, the rest of us sitting like eggs, just waiting.

  “It’s not about the notch or the tree,” I whispered.

  “What did you say, Ninah Huff?” Ben asked sharply.

  “It’s not about the notch or the tree either,” I said louder. “It’s about claiming something that doesn’t belong to you.” I couldn’t tell whether I was getting us into trouble or getting us out of it, but it was a huge chore, no matter what it was, and my voice shook. “It’s like if we told Grandpa Herman that we deserved to be paid for picking up leaves in the field when the field doesn’t really belong to us at all and he already takes care of our needs.”

  “Yes,” Ben sighed. “Thank you, Ninah.”

  But I knew my explanation wasn’t quite right.

  Mustard looked at me like he couldn’t believe what I’d said, and then Ben attacked him directly.

  “And you will understand one day too,” he said to Mustard, “if you listen instead of speaking.”

  For the rest of that night at church, we all recited, obediently, and nobody else spoke out. But my ears were still hot, burning almost as fiercely as the inside of my chest, like nettles, and the whole time I prayed quietly that Mustard wouldn’t have to spend the night in a grave to contemplate the wages of sin, prayed that I wouldn’t.

  Later that year, when the men loaded up bundles of tobacco on big ton trucks and hauled them off to the warehouse to be auctioned, when school started again and I climbed on the bus and found myself twenty miles away, at a big school where seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-graders teemed through the halls like ants and I couldn’t pick out another Fire and Brimstone anywhere, later that year I had a change for the worse.

  It started with the bleeding. I wouldn’t have known what it was except that they showed us a film at school, and Nanna had mentioned it to me once, briefly. I still didn’t want anyone to know. I hid my underpants in a box that first month, pair after pair until I was forced to sneak into Pammy’s house and steal some of hers, the lining so white it made me cry.

  Then there was my hair, so heavy that it hurt my neck to carry it, so heavy that when I leaned my head over the side of the tub on Saturdays to wash it, I couldn’t pick my head back up until Mamma lifted it and squeezed the water out.

  “Her head stinks,” the girl sitting behind me in social studies would whisper to the girl to her left. “Why doesn’t she wash it?”

  And I’d turn around to see them waving their hands in front of their noses and smiling conspiratorially, but not at me.

  When I washed my hair on Saturday, it was still wet on Sunday, and if it was braided, it didn’t dry until Sunday night.

  Then there was the problem with my chest, my nipples behaving like somebody had scared them, trying to crawl back inside of me just when everybody else’s were showing off. It wasn’t easy to undress for gym in front of all those girls who had bras. I couldn’t do gym in a dress. I couldn’t tell Mamma or Daddy because if they knew the school issued us shorts and T-shirts, they’d call up and make a scene. James had already warned me not to. In the few years since the school had required dressing out for gym class, the handful of Fire and Brimstone children had kept the secret. It was our only chance to prove that we had legs.

  That was the year that Everett married Wanda, and they moved behind us into a cinderblock house between David and Laura’s and Bethany and Olin’s. I was the only child at home then, living in the house behind Grandpa and Nanna’s. To the right of Grandpa and Nanna’s, nine other houses filled with Fire and Brimstone relatives sat in a field like great mushrooms. All the houses were gray, and mostly they looked just alike. But to the left of Grandpa Herman’s house, in the next field, the church emerged from the ground like a peasant’s castle.

  All I had to do was stand on the doorsteps, and I could yell out to anyone at all. If I filled my lungs enough and imagined them the color of Jesus’ blood, I could call out so loudly, so clearly, that even the third cousins on the other side of the compound might hear. But it wasn’t the same, being the only child in the house. It didn’t matter that we were always together or that when I leaned out my bedroom window, I could see inside the other houses, the land all around us, the two new houses being built, the Fire and Brimstone fields. It didn’t really help that I could see the barns, the pigpen, the chicken coop, the silo where we kept the grains, and beyond, all the woods that belonged to us too. It wasn’t enough to make up for the lonely.

  I missed the days when I was small enough to climb into bed with Mamma and Daddy and stretch out on Daddy’s belly, tapping out hymns on his shiny front teeth while Mamma played my back like a drum and we all sang together.

  Evenings when Mamma and Daddy sat out on the doorsteps talking to David and Laura, who were expecting a child that next March, when I knew I was inside alone, I crept into their bedroom, pulled back a blanket, and buried my face in their sheets, sniffing for something that would fill me up.

  At Fire and Brimstone, we all looked alike, and that made me lonely too. We didn’t all have the same color eyes or the same textured hair, but it really didn’t matter. Our shadows came in two varieties: male and female.

  We were all lanky. We all dressed alike. We slept in the same hard beds and washed with soaps made from the same iron pot. All the men wore beards clipped close and work boots that left the same muddy tracks. All the women pulled their hair into buns and left their faces bare for the sun to adorn as it would.

  We may as well have been skeletons, unidentifiable. We may as well have interchanged our bones.

  I used to pray that God would stunt my growth and keep me little—so at least my frame wouldn’t be confused with anyone else’s.

  Pammy was the relative closest to my size, and as we grew towards being lost in bodies all the same, I’d do my best to make my shadow different, even from hers. Afternoons as we marched through fields, I’d study our shapes bruised on the ground and pull myself up taller or fling out my arms to keep from getting confused about which shape belonged to her and which shape belonged to me.

  It was the middle of October when David knocked at our door before daylight. I heard him downstairs, crying to Daddy about how Laura’s unborn baby was demanding to get out. By the time I was dressed, Mamma and Nanna, Bethany and Wanda, the aunts and women cousins all sat in the living room inside David and Laura’s house, praying and drinking hot water with honey. Laura was in bed. Nanna made her keep her feet up, forbid her to even stand to go to the bathroom. Pammy and I peeked in from the windows, listening to whispered words like “spotting” and watching Nanna remove soiled towels from between Laura’s legs, watching Laura crying until Mamma crawled into bed beside her and held her head.

  We crouched down in the bushes, and Pammy, who had a face like Grandpa Herman’s, speckled as a trout, asked, “Will it die?”

  “Yeah, it will die,” I snapped at her. “If it comes out now, it probably won’t even have lungs yet. It won’t be able to breathe.”

  “But God’s wind’s almighty,” Pammy insisted. “It won’t die if God doesn’t let it.”

  “Even God won’t be able to help it if it don’t have lungs,” I whispered back.

  “Yes he will,” Pammy sniffed. “God can do anything,” and she stomped off, leaving me sitting behind the bush alone.

  Pammy and I were in charge of the chicken coop. It was time for us to get the eggs, only an hour before the bus would come to pick us up and take us away for the day. I hurried to join her, running down the dirt road and feeling the morning air hit at my bare legs in the places where my socks had already slipped down.

  By the time I caught up, Pammy was crying hard, and she looked at me and yelled, “You don’t have no faith.”

  “I do too,” I said.

  We fed the chickens. She thr
ew them the corn, and I threw them the laying mash that we kept in metal trash cans beneath an oak tree. While they were eating, we entered the lopsided doorway of their dark old pen that smelled hot and like a secret no matter how cold it was outside. We walked around opposite walls, lifting the eggs from the nests, wiping the ones streaked in manure onto the straw, and placing them in our baskets. Above us on the rafters, one old hen who had missed the breakfast call squawked out, scaring us both, and fluttered awkwardly down to the ground. Pammy jumped, and I hollered. The chicken ran out through the door, out into the sunlight.

  I laughed to see Pammy jump, and she laughed to hear me holler, and we forgot, for a minute, about David and Laura’s baby. On the way back to the houses, we were chattering and laughing about the big red hen. And then we remembered.

  Passing by the barn, we picked up Mustard and James and our second cousins John and Barley, who’d been feeding the pigs.

  “Wonder what Laura did?” Barley asked us.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Grandpa Herman said she’d sinned. Said unconfessed sin was what made that new baby want to leave.”

  “That’s not true,” I hissed.

  “That’s what Grandpa Herman said,” John insisted.

  Hardly any women were at breakfast at all. Just Aunt Kate and Aunt Velma, who had cooked. Even the “good mornings” were somber, and we picked up our toast, eggs, and ham off the serving line, carrying it to the table without saying a word.

  Most of the men were there, and midway through breakfast, Pammy called out, “Where’s Grandpa Liston?” I hadn’t seen my daddy since early. I didn’t know where he could be.

  “He’s at the barn,” Ben Harback answered, then paused to finish chewing what was already in his mouth. “Working on that baby’s crib.”

  Nobody said a thing. I didn’t look up, but if I had, I know I would have seen the other men giving him glances full of fury. It wasn’t the kind of thing he should have said out loud. Ben Harback had come into the congregation several years earlier and claimed the beliefs almost as though he’d made them up himself. But he wasn’t family, and he didn’t know the unspoken rules, the ones you couldn’t find in Grandpa Herman’s booklet. He didn’t know that when other people are in pain, you don’t talk about it. You let them feel what they’re feeling in private. You leave them alone.

  Just before the bus came, I ran into David and Laura’s house to kiss Mamma goodbye. She was in the room with Laura, and Bethany wouldn’t get her for me.

  “She’ll be here when you get back,” Bethany said.

  “Will Laura be okay?” I asked her.

  “She’ll be fine,” Bethany assured me, and shooed me out.

  On the bus that morning, I sat with James. I had the seat facing the window though, and I didn’t look his way. I stared out, through the fogged-up glass, watching Fire and Brimstone get smaller and smaller and trying to talk myself out of choking on something big and angry in my throat.

  When we got home from school that day, Nanna was the one who gave us the news that Laura wouldn’t be having a baby and wouldn’t be feeling like talking for a time. David was with her, but everyone else was in the cemetery behind the church where they were laying it to rest. James asked if the children could go to the burial, and Nanna said yes.

  I watched them all take off running with their books, their black shoes kicking up dirt behind them.

  “I don’t have to go, do I?” I asked Nanna.

  “Won’t bother me if you stay here. You can help me cut up taters.”

  I told Nanna I needed to do something first, and she didn’t ask any questions. I dropped my books on the doorsteps and ran the other way, towards the barn, to the place where Daddy’d been building the crib.

  I swung open the barn door and slipped inside, to the very back where the saws and lumber and tools were kept. The crib was finished, small and perfect, sturdy legs and sanded boards, low so that Laura, who was short, could easily reach in. He’d even carved a swirly design onto the headboard. And while I was sad about the baby that wouldn’t be, I might have felt the most sadness for Daddy.

  When I got back to the house, Nanna was standing outside listening. There were raised voices coming up from the cemetery, almost like yelling. It didn’t sound like preaching though. It sounded strange and uneven.

  I took her hand and we hurried to the burial sight where Daddy was crying out, shaking his fist at Grandpa Herman and saying, “Don’t you ever say a thing like that again.”

  “Liston, those aren’t my words. They’re God’s words. ‘The wages of sin is death,’ ” Grandpa Herman said calmly.

  A few people in the midst nodded their heads in agreement, but Daddy shouted out again, “That’s not what God meant!” and he stormed away, Mamma hurrying to hold onto him, hugging herself into his side against the cold.

  Nobody talked much about Laura and David’s loss, but everybody grieved it, I guess. Even old Grandpa Herman finally kept his nasty opinions to himself, and the community healed over, quietly, with nobody picking at scabs.

  But sometimes things hide beneath healed-up places. Flies lay eggs inside the gashes on cows and kittens, and then the wounds swell up, even after they’re closed over, and unless somebody opens the wound again to release the worm, the thing inside keeps growing and burrowing its way out, painfully, blindly, persistently.

  Maybe that’s what happened to me. Even two weeks later in church, when Laura caught the spirit, stood up, began dancing around, chattering out a prayer that changed into a language nobody knew, even seeing her recovered and filled with God’s strangeness, I hurt inside. It felt like something was trying to come out, something starving.

  I was sitting between Nanna and James when it happened, too old to eat candy in church and too young not to wish for it. In front of me, Daddy was calling out his prayers and Mamma was crying again, her hands held up as if she thought God was going to fill them with kisses. Nanna kept her face straight ahead, pretending to listen though I suspected that in her mind she was retelling old stories in new ways. Beside me, James scraped the dirt from beneath his fingernails and flicked it onto the floor. I looked at his hands, almost as big as a man’s, with his fingers widening at the tips like spatulas.

  I felt the way you feel sometimes right before you go to sleep, when all you want to do is sleep, and then suddenly, when you’re almost there, when your mind goes dizzy and it’s almost like you don’t have a body at all, you remember how long the night is, how you might not wake back up. And like a shock, you’re sitting straight up, scared to do the thing you’ve done every day of your life.

  And Laura began wailing out, stood up, and the congregation urged her on, their voices growing like mudslides. She shook and cried, her syllables tripping over themselves until she wasn’t saying anything we knew, and the words she said sounded hard and maybe like curses in other languages.

  “Praise be,” Grandpa Herman yelled.

  “Forgive me, Lord,” I could hear my daddy saying, his back in front of me curled like an apostrophe, the bolts of his spine threatening his skin, and his head leaned against the next pew. “Forgive me for doubting your holy and righteous word.”

  “Thank you for your strength, my King,” David called.

  “Without you, I would be nothing,” Laura chanted. “Without you, Oh Heavenly Prince, I would be lower than the ohlaba hebamashundi weya komo dhikam laticalama hebamashundi,” and as she spoke, her voice went higher and higher, and her breathing got stronger, and then she was panting and squealing, crying, “Help me remember thy awe-some and bewechya walabebeya komo hebamashundi,” and I was embarrassed. Embarrassed to be hearing her voice, stretching up like violin strings, tighter and louder and screeching and punctuated with her frantic breathing. Embarrassed to know what her tongue must be doing inside her mouth, rolling all over itself like it couldn’t help it. It sounded like something she should do somewhere else. Not in church.

  And I was embarrasse
d to be sitting next to James, hearing it all, though we’d heard it all our lives. And I was embarrassed because Laura wasn’t even ten years older than me, not even eight years older, and I didn’t want that to happen to me. Not ever.

  And I was embarrassed that God had never shared with me his language, had never given me special words, his almighty baptizing wind.

  And I was embarrassed to think that I might find it in some other place.

  Sometimes if we’d finished our chores and there was still a little bit of daytime left, the children could get permission to go horseback riding. We rode two or three to a horse even though there were usually enough horses to go around. It was easier to talk that way.

  One afternoon we were out in the woods, with me and Mustard and James on one horse and Barley and Pammy and John on the other. It seemed like the girls always got sandwiched between the boys, and that day, I was protected by Mustard from the front and James from the back.

  We’d already crossed the creek and had ridden to a hilly place with trees on either side so that I had to keep ducking to avoid being swatted by the tiniest branches. We’d gone farther on the horses than we usually went, and I was secretly hoping we’d end up at the pond where the boys went swimming sometimes but the girls were only allowed at baptisms since the water was rumored to be dangerous. I was hoping I’d get to explore.

  “Let’s take them to the top and run down fast,” Barley called, and buried his heels in his horse’s sides to make him go.

  “Don’t do it, Mustard,” James warned from behind me.

  But Mustard kicked the mare we were riding too, and she took off unexpectedly, making me hold tight onto Mustard, who was holding the reins, and making James grab onto me like I was sturdy as a pine, even though I wasn’t.