“Me neither.”
I rolled over onto my side then, facing James, and I put my hand on his shirt and ran my fingers along the middle of his chest. He was skinny. We both were.
“But if you’re Jesus to me,” James figured, “then when I’m loving Jesus through you, that means I’m really loving a man. Do you reckon that makes me—you know—funny?”
“Jesus ain’t a man,” I giggled quietly. “He’s a spirit. He’s a God. That’s not anything like loving a man.”
“You’re right,” James said, rolling over to face me, and then I flattened back out on my back.
He ran his hands across my abdomen, across those bones that poked up at the place where my hips began.
“They feel like noses,” James whispered.
“If you’re really worried about it,” I said quietly, my voice getting lower and earthing, “then maybe we should ask Jesus for a sign.”
“What kind of sign?”
“I don’t know. We could pray about it and see what happens.”
So we prayed together, then quietly alone, and the whole time I was scurrying through my mind, trying to think of a way to make James certain that what we were doing wasn’t a sin.
Finally, I thought of something that might work.
“Lord,” I said aloud, “I think you’re trying to give me something for James. I’m not sure what it is yet, so please make it clear to me.”
“Thank you, Jesus, for speaking to Ninah,” James prayed.
“The ring?” I pretended to ask God. “You want me to put the ring on his finger?”
“What ring?” James muttered.
“Look,” I said to him with as much sincerity as I could muster. “Jesus gave me a ring for you, to put on your finger. He’s marrying us, James.”
I took his hand in mine, reached for his middle finger, and then slipped the invisible ring down over the knuckle.
“Can you feel it?” I asked him. “It’s gold with little diamonds all around.”
“I can feel it,” James laughed, and then he started crying. “Oh God, Ninah, can you believe it? Wait, I have to ask God if there’s something for you.”
While he prayed, I felt low and wicked, and I expected at any minute to hear a trumpet in the sky, God calling his children home to get them away from someone as evil as me. I felt lower than river sludge, but I wasn’t about to back down.
“Thank you, Christ,” James said. “Thank you for your sign.”
“What’d he say?” I asked.
“He gave me a ring for you too. Give me your hand.”
And he worked his fingers down mine, pausing for a second, then pushing until he fit it in place.
“It’s got rubies in it,” he said. “I saw it.”
“Really?” I asked him.
“Yes!” James laughed and cried and shook with relief. “I’m so glad,” he said. “You’re my wife. At least before God, you’re my wife. Oh, Ninah, I’m so glad you prayed for a sign.”
“I hope nobody can see the rings except us.”
“They can’t,” James followed. “He told me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. We’re the only ones who know they’re there.”
And then James was on top of me again, but it was different—because I knew it was James and not Jesus. I didn’t feel glowing and holy afterwards. I felt like I was made from mud.
I didn’t know what to do. In my bed that night and for nights afterwards, I stared up at the ceiling and prayed for a tornado to come down and suck me up and throw me in a river somewhere far away. I prayed for the ceiling to fall right in on me and flatten my face and scar me up so that nobody, not James, not Jesus, not anybody at all would ever want to touch me again.
I had bad dreams about being whipped in front of the altar. I had bad dreams that James was whipping me, then rolling me over and being Jesus for me, except he wasn’t Jesus. He was Satan. Either Satan or Grandpa Herman.
I woke up sweating, and kept climbing out of bed, creeping to the bathroom where I stood before the faucet. But I couldn’t even turn it on to make sure it ran water and not blood. Because all I deserved was blood.
But I didn’t see any blood. Not anywhere. Not in the faucet and not in the toilet after I peed. Not in my underpants. Not on my sheets. No blood at all.
I thought maybe the rapture had come already and we’d all missed it, the entire Fire and Brimstone community. I knew I had to be living in the years of plague and revelation. There was plenty of food, but I couldn’t eat. I’d seen no stinging beasts, but I jumped for fear of them at every corner.
I knew it was my fault. I’d taken something beautiful like our prayers and turned them into something horrible—just so I could keep feeling good. And I didn’t feel good. Not at all.
Nanna said, “Honey, what’s eating at you?”
And I wanted to say it was a little baby Jesus, eating me up from the inside, eating me like cake. But what I really said was “Nothing.”
“Something’s on your heart, ain’t it?” Nanna asked.
And I fell into her arms and cried like I’d been left behind. As she held me, I thought for sure that that’d be the last time I’d ever feel my Nanna, so soft in spite of her bones.
“Is it about James?”
“Yes,” I wailed. “He’s different now.”
“He’s just growing up, child. And you are too. I know he’s spending more time with the men, but he hasn’t forgotten you. That’s how men are.”
“Can I stay here for a while?” I asked Nanna. “I don’t want to go home.” It was a Saturday, and I was supposed to be helping Mamma clean.
“Yes,” Nanna said. “I’ll run over to your house and tell Maree you’re helping me with my floors. Go ahead and get the broom.”
So I spent the afternoon with Nanna, while Mamma cleaned alone and the men fished. But I couldn’t talk. I cried and my nose poured so hard that I could have mopped the floor with snot, but Nanna didn’t make me work. She brought me a bowl of prunes instead, and each one doubled in my mouth.
I did not sleep on a single nettle. I thought about it. But then I decided that I wasn’t even comfortable when I was awake, so why should I be miserable when I was asleep? I was going to Hell anyway, no matter how many thorns I covered up with, so I didn’t even bother.
James was happier than I’d ever known him. All he wanted to do was kiss on me during prayer partners. He didn’t even try to be cautious about it because as far as he was concerned, we were husband and wife during that hour every evening.
Before, there’d been something graceful about his tentativeness. But all that was gone. Before, all he’d had to do was brush against the skin on the inside of my legs and it was like a glorious electrocution inside. But after we had the rings, the rings that weren’t even real, James seemed clumsy and forceful, and I hated it.
But from time to time, I’d forget how bad things were. Sometimes, when he put his mouth on just the right part of my ear, I’d think that maybe God had been speaking to me, that maybe I wasn’t making the rings up, that if James said God had given him a ring for me, then maybe it was at least partly true.
Then I started wondering if maybe how you made God answer was by giving him the first part of the sentence you wanted him to say.
I thought I was a liar, but I wasn’t certain.
One Sunday in church, sitting between Nanna and James like I always did, with Grandpa Herman right in the middle of his terrible story about how Nanna was a liar who had lied to God by not telling about her mamma’s affair with Weston Ward and an accomplice to murder because she didn’t stop her daddy from being killed, I decided to speak in tongues.
It wasn’t something I’d been planning. And it wasn’t something that God told me to do either. It just happened, all of a sudden, like a rooster that crows in the middle of the day for no apparent reason.
I stood right up and spoke out. I said something like, “Lord, please open my heart and fill me up w
ith your beauty and love. Lord, I’m asking you for your precious gift.”
In front of me, Mamma and Daddy, David and Laura, Everett and Wanda, Bethany and Olin all opened up their mouths and started praying out loud, so loud that I felt like I needed to shout.
“Lord, I’m here. Take me and fill me up,” I said again.
“Praise God,” Grandpa Herman called.
“Help her, Sweet Jesus,” Olin yelled.
All around me, I could feel a heat, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to pass out or not.
“Lord, I want to know you inside and out,” I hollered. “I want to know your hebamashundi welaka oma hebamashundi.”
The only word I knew for sure that I’d heard people speak in tongues was hebamashundi, so I let that one move my lips again and again.
Then I knew I was going to pass out. I was almost certain. I felt sick and weak and carried away. As far as I could tell, God wasn’t leading me anywhere. I was making the words up as I went, and they seized up in my mouth and spilled like lies all over the hard wood floor.
“Help me, Jesus,” I tried. “Help me not get caught in your welamaka oma hebamashundi,” and then I began to whisper or maybe to cry.
Around the church, there was the sound of whoops and Amens and clapping and the strange words that I was making up, making up, and everything was dark on either side of me, but right up front, where Grandpa Herman stood, beckoning me with his arms, it was bright for a second, and then that was gone too and I was sitting back down, out of breath, convulsing inside.
I couldn’t look at Nanna or James. I couldn’t sing aloud with the congregation though I moved my heavy tongue through the song.
Jesus can’t come in until we throw old Satan out.
And I want Jesus in me—cause that’s what I’m about.
So beat me till I’m weary, and whip me till I’m blue
And make a space, Sweet Savior, for no one else but you.
It was the longest day in church I’ve ever known. I couldn’t break the trance I’d induced myself. I walked around for days whispering under my breath “hebamashundi, hebamashundi.”
My mind was slow those days. I worked in the fields and sang with everybody else, but later I couldn’t remember it. I went to supper and picked at my food, but by the time I went to bed, I couldn’t recall what we’d had. I went to prayer partners with James and obliged him as much as I could, and I guess I even talked to him, though I can’t imagine what I said.
Ben Harback, who had recovered from his sickness, finally broke in two. He just came in mad to breakfast one morning and told Grandpa that he was sick and tired of his bullshit, and that he intended to leave and tell the whole world about what Fire and Brimstone had done to him. Grandpa Herman ceremoniously kicked him out, and as Ben was leaving, he yelled things that made the women cover their ears. But I didn’t cover mine. It didn’t even shock me.
And then we had a week of preachings every night after prayer partners, all titled “Vitamins Against Evil” to help the rest of the congregation not fall into Satan’s hands like Ben had done. I sat beside Nanna each night, but I didn’t talk to her, and when she put her hands on my legs to pat them during the sermons, I hardly felt it. We didn’t get into our beds until long past midnight and had to be in the fields when the sun came up, which meant we ate breakfast in the dark.
I knew that I was probably having a baby, and that probably it was James’ baby and not Jesus’. But I didn’t have the energy to do anything about it, to even think about it. So I didn’t.
“Hebamashundi,” I whispered to each leaf of tobacco as I popped it off the stalk. “Hebamashundi,” I mouthed to the hornworms I shook off before I tossed the tobacco onto the drags.
My eyes locked into a blurry, unblinking place. When we’d finished a field, I’d stand at the edge, looking over the stripped stalks with only their tops left and thinking that we’d made ruffles by popping the leaves away. We’d taken the tobacco’s clothes and left it with only ruffles to hide beneath.
The whole time James would pray, I’d say it over and over to God. “Hebamashundi, hebamashundi,” like it was a password into a secret gate that I really needed to get through.
At nights, I didn’t talk to Jesus. I imagined him. I closed my eyes and saw him on the cross, holding azaleas for me, dying for me, bleeding for me, instead of me, and I was jealous of Jesus, who could die when things got tough. It seemed like he got a lucky break.
Do you think that samebody like Ben Harback, who has sinned so terribly and so many times, can still enter the kingdom of Heaven?” I asked Mamma one day as we were putting clothes on the line. I was beginning to worry about my soul and my belly. I’d finally admitted that you can only stay in a trance for so long before you have to wake up and rejoin the world, before you forget how.
“If he does enough penance,” Mamma said. “And if he asks Jesus to come back into his heart.”
“You mean Jesus will leave your heart sometimes?” I said, and handed her a pair of Daddy’s pants. The wet clothes were draped over my arms, weighing me down so much I kept moving to keep from being planted there.
“Oh yes,” Mamma said. “Your body is a temple for the Lord. And if it gets to looking like a pigsty in there, the Lord will just find him another home.”
“But I thought God was always with you,” I said.
“It’s a cooperative effort,” Mamma explained. “God will always be with you, but first you have to get the conditions right. You have to invite him in and mean it. What are you worrying about this for?”
“Cause I don’t want Ben to go to Hell just because he sinned,” I claimed.
“Well, you worry about your soul and let Ben worry about his, okay?” And then without waiting for me to answer, she started singing “The Old Rugged Cross.”
I didn’t join in though. I didn’t even remember that I was supposed to until she turned back and said, “Is something the matter, Baby?”
“No, ma’am,” I promised, and began the second verse.
Then I got to thinking that maybe it was Jesus’ baby—because if we really hadn’t been sinning and had only been knowing Jesus through each other, then it couldn’t be anything but Jesus’.
I counted back and discovered that the baby almost had to be planted inside of me before James and I had exchanged the invisible rings, the rings that only James and Jesus could see.
If God had given a virgin a baby before, he could do it again. I thought I must be a virgin. I had to be. Because in order to not be a virgin, you either had to be married or had to be wicked, and I was halfway convinced that I wasn’t either of those even though I had a few doubts.
I couldn’t imagine why God would want to curse a person like me—because I worked hard and obeyed my parents and prayed and didn’t sass at grown-ups hardly at all. So I decided that maybe it wasn’t a curse.
And then I comforted myself with the knowledge that unless a baby’s supposed to stay planted in your womb, it falls out. It had happened to Laura over and over, and Grandpa said the baby had left her because of sins. So if I was really so wicked and evil, the baby would have left me too.
And I knew that I came to Mamma and Daddy when they weren’t even meaning to beget me, and they’d always said that I was the special child, the one God intended for them to have even though they didn’t plan it. So if I was carrying a child of my own, that had to mean that it was God’s special plan, and God had surprised people before, and they’d survived.
I decided I’d better tell James about it. I thought that if I made it sound like we were getting a special gift, maybe he wouldn’t be upset.
“What?” he nearly shouted. We were in the living room again, with Mamma and Daddy just down the hall in the bedroom.
“Shhh,” I begged. “I think I’m having Jesus’ baby.”
“What do you mean you’re having Jesus’ baby?”
I tried to act excited, but my voice jerked a little. “I’m, you know, with child.” r />
“Ninah, you can’t be.”
“I am,” I said.
“Oh shit.”
“James, don’t say that.”
“Oh hell, fire, and damnation,” he cursed. “Ninah, they’re gonna kill us.”
“Even if it’s Jesus’ baby?” I started to cry. I wanted him to put his arm around me, but he didn’t.
“It’s my baby, Ninah. Not Jesus’.”
“But if I was knowing Jesus through you, then you were just the vehicle,” I tried.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Ninah.”
I don’t know what surprised me more, hearing James’ reaction or realizing that all that time, he didn’t think Jesus was acting through him at all.
“You mean you don’t think it was Jesus—when we touched?”
“No,” he said. “It was me and you, sinning like crazy.”
“But even at first?”
“It was me and you,” he said again, shaking his head. “The Devil comes to man in the shape of a woman. I knew that. But I didn’t think it’d be you.” And he walked out.
I sat on the doorsteps next to Mamma, pulling the silks from corn. At the bottom of the steps, Daddy leaned over a bushel basket, shucking one ear after the other, yanking off the green husks and passing the naked corn to us to clean.
Mamma could pull off a silk without even breaking it, but I always pulled too hard, from the wrong angle, and ended up having to dig out the silks with my fingernail.
As I worked, I thought about what James had said, and I fumed. I wasn’t the Devil. The Devil wasn’t inside me. I was almost sure.
Daddy tossed husks to the ground and with them, the crown of silks curled up and darkened like little-girl hair turned brown.
I always thought of corn as female before it was shucked. Undressed, it turned hard and regular, the kernels lined up like soldiers. Underneath, it didn’t look the way I always thought it should.
I didn’t think I was the Devil, but I wondered if beneath my skin, I was so different I wouldn’t even recognize myself.