Back in the air, suspended like a promise, I listened to them praying, hollering out, and I heard Grandpa Herman yell, “Pull her up another five feet before you drop her again. She ain’t getting much impact.”
But then Nanna said, “She’s had enough.”
The praying stopped. Everything stopped except the rain and the wind and my strong, strong heart.
“I said pull her up another five feet,” Grandpa hollered.
“And I said that’s enough, ” Nanna spoke.
I dallied over that pond for what seemed like a long time, crouched above the water, closer to Heaven than Grandpa, with all my doubts draining out. And if the rapture had happened right then, if I’d heard the trumpets, I knew that I’d have been the first one to get to Jesus because David and Everett would be slowed down by the trees, but I’d lift right off, and plus, I wasn’t as heavy as either of them, though I carried two souls.
Nanna put me to bed, and I slept.
But I wasn’t so brave in my dreams. They kept making me cry. First I dreamed I had barbed wire in my chest, coiled around my ribs, and for some reason, my heart was growing bigger and bigger, and my heart couldn’t see the barbs waiting there to pierce it. I tried to find someone to unravel the wire and take it out, but everybody I told kept saying, “It’s there to keep your heart from swelling up so much. Your heart will see it in time and shrink back down.”
Then I dreamed I was dead, but walking around. I kept begging James to bury me, but he’d say, “You ain’t dead. Look, you’re walking around.” But my skin was already falling off, every step was a mile, and nobody would bury me.
Then I dreamed I had the baby, and it was crying and I couldn’t make it stop. I tried to feed it, but it wouldn’t eat. I shoveled spoonful after spoonful of food into its mouth, but it kept spitting all over the church, covering the pews and the altar and the pulpit with strained vegetables. Finally, I started laughing. There was baby food everywhere, and then the baby started laughing too, hard and like an old, old man, coughing in his laughing, and he said, “It’s a joke on you. I’m ninety years old, and I’m not your baby.”
Then I dreamed I walked to my bedroom door, opened it, and found Mamma and Daddy in my bed, being carnal. There were candles all over the room, and I could see that there were peppers in the bed with them, all around them, hot peppers, red and green and all over the mattress. But they didn’t know that there was another bed up above them, at a forty-five-degree angle from the headboard, and it was about to drop down.
“Daddy,” I called.
But he said, “Ninah, get out of here.”
I wanted to tell him about the other bed, threatening to drop and crush them there on my sheets. I wanted to tell him that on top of that other bed, Grandpa Herman stood with his bible, preaching crazy about the wages of sin and fornication. They couldn’t hear him, but I could see him there in his brown suit, holding up his bible, his other hand over his heart, and Mamma and Daddy holding each other and moving on all those hot peppers without knowing.
“Mamma,” I cried.
“Close the door,” she said.
And then I was sitting on the doorsteps, crying because Mamma and Daddy were about to die in my bed, and it started snowing. I didn’t have on any shoes, so I tried to get up to go inside, but the door was locked.
It was autumn and not cold enough to snow, but the snow was falling everywhere, surprisingly, and I didn’t have on any shoes.
So I sat on the doorsteps, and the snow fell over my feet, and I cried because my feet hurt so much. Then my arms got so long I could bang on the door, banging and banging, hoping Mamma and Daddy would hear.
But when the door opened, the ninety-year-old baby was there, and he said in his gravelly voice, “What do you want?”
And then I was standing up and he let me inside. My feet were as red as Grandpa Herman’s face, and the baby said, “Did you boil your feet?”
“No,” I said. “They got stuck in the snow.”
And the ninety-year-old baby who wasn’t mine said, “No, you dangled them in the pits of Hell. Your feet are burned. There’s no snow here.”
I woke up at Nanna’s house, and I didn’t leave. The spare bedroom and a sitting room were separated from the rest of the house by a swinging door. And that front part of the house became my home. I was left in Grandpa Herman’s care, so he could witness to me and read the Bible and try to win me back into Christ’s fold. The whole time my stomach grew, I stayed at Nanna’s, making baby clothes and sleeping. I didn’t eat with everyone else. And I wasn’t allowed in the church until the baby was born and dedicated to Christ and until I repented.
I only went into the other part of the house to use the bathroom, and even then, I didn’t go when Grandpa Herman was home. Even though I had to pee all the time, I held it—or else I did it in a basin and poured it out the window. I never went to the bathroom when Grandpa Herman was around.
Mamma never came to see me, though sometimes I’d hear her in the next room, talking to Nanna, asking about me and speaking so loudly that I knew she wanted me to hear. She must have been yelling.
“How’s Ninah,” she’d say.
“Doing good,” Nanna’d answer. “I’m sure she’d like to see you.”
“I don’t want to upset her,” Mamma’d answer. “It’s too soon.”
I found bags and bags of leftover fabric in the closet in the spare bedroom. Nanna went through it with me and said she’d forgot about most of it and that I could make some baby clothes if I wanted. She helped me drag out an old sewing machine that worked just fine once we got the bobbin replaced, and I went to work, cutting out little gowns and blankets and Indian-style pants.
Daddy came to see me almost every day. He never knew what to say, and so he’d talk about the weather.
“It’s been cloudy.”
“Yes, sir,” I’d answer.
“We need the rain.”
Sometimes he’d tell me about how Barley had the sweets for Melanie Evans, a younger cousin from the far side of the compound. Or he’d tell me about how Mamma had put on his old trousers while she was painting my bedroom because she didn’t want paint to spill on her good dresses.
“Mamma wouldn’t wear trousers.”
“That’s what I thought too,” he said. “But she did. Don’t tell your grandpa.”
I worked at that sewing machine until my eyes got bad, worked late into the nights whenever I couldn’t sleep. At first my seams weren’t so neat, but they got better and better. I didn’t know if it’d be a boy baby or a girl baby, so I made clothes for both. I averaged two or three little outfits a day, only regretting that we didn’t wear bright colors, because even if the rest of us wore browns and deep greens, babies should get to wear red and orange and yellow if they felt like it.
Pammy and Mustard and Barley would sit at Nanna’s kitchen table and tell her about their grades at school. From the distant wall, I’d listen, though it was always hard to hear Pammy since she said everything as if it were a secret.
“I got an A in gym class,” she told Nanna.
“Well, that’s great,” Nanna praised.
“I can do more sit-ups in one minute than anybody else in my class.”
“You’re a strong girl.”
“Can I have an orange?”
“Go ahead,” Nanna would say.
“Can I talk to Ninah?”
“You know your great-grandpa don’t allow that.”
“But he’s in the woods,” Pammy’d argue. “Can I?”
“I won’t be the one to stop you.”
Then Pammy would walk over to the swinging door and say, “Ninah, are you there?”
“Yeah,” I’d answer.
“Thank you for that skirt you made me with the little shorts inside,” she’d compliment.
“I’m glad you like it. If you’ll let Nanna wash it, your mamma won’t never know about the shorts.”
“I’ll wash it in the bathtub,” she said. ?
??Barley’s got a crush on Melanie.”
“That’s what Daddy tells me,” I’d answer—because really, there was no real news at Fire and Brimstone. The whole time I’d talk to her, I’d rest my head against the door, not hard enough to make it push towards her, but just lightly, hoping that Pammy’s head was doing the same thing on the other side.
“Corinthian said to tell you hey.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. She asked about you on the bus.”
“That’s nice.”
“She wanted to know how big your belly’d grew, but I told her hardly nobody was allowed to see you, and she rolled her eyes.”
“That’s just how Corinthian is,” I laughed.
“Oh, and Mustard’s quit going to church.”
“What?”
“He says if Daddy don’t have to go, then he don’t have to go either.”
“Bethany don’t make him?”
“She tried, but Daddy said that Mustard could stay home with him. And last Sunday, they went out to check the traps while everybody else was in preaching.”
“Bet Grandpa Herman’s mad.”
“He’s about decided they’re heathens. Mamma cries about it all the time. She goes over to Granny Maree’s—to your house—and they pray for a miracle for the community.”
“Hey, Pammy, will you look in your storage closet and see if you find any material y’all don’t need? Cause I’m making baby clothes.”
“Okay.” I heard her getting up.
“And, Pammy, if I write a letter, will you deliver it to somebody at school?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Come back next week,” I told her, thinking by then I’d know the right thing to say to Ajita Patel, who I missed more than anybody, almost.
Grandpa Herman would come into the sitting room with me, but we didn’t talk about anything but God. He wasn’t rude or brutal or anything. But every time, he’d begin with the same question.
“Are you prepared to admit to fornication?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, let’s go over the Apostle Paul,” and then he’d begin Bible study with me, patiently, as if he knew that I’d come back, sooner or later, come back to Fire and Brimstone in my heart.
“Let us pray,” he’d say, and I’d bow my head.
“Heavenly Father, we ask that you help Ninah to admit to her mistakes, to think about the Scribes and Pharisees who condemned the prostitute, to think about the prostitute who admitted to her wicked ways, to think about Jesus, who condemned no repenting sinner. Lord, we ask you to help Ninah admit to her mistakes so she will be open to Jesus’ love instead of his condemnation.”
But I didn’t pray with him. I saved prayer for myself, for sacred times when I could be alone with God and my baby.
All the time that I was growing and my baby was growing within me, all that time that I spent alone, I prayed that God would show himself to me, would come visit and help me strangle the lonely.
He came to me in a thousand ways. Sometimes he came like a lamb for me to cuddle and nurse. Sometimes he sat on my bed and beat out hymns on the bottoms of my feet. Sometimes he rode in on the wind, his curly hair long and thick as mine, blown all over his head so that I was almost sure he was a woman, and he’d pull up my dress and put his mouth on my stomach and talk to the baby.
Sometimes he came like a thief in the night. Sometimes he wore lipstick. Sometimes he sent James.
Tell me a story, ” I said to Nanna. My sinuses were all stopped up even though I didn’t think I had a cold. It was afternoon, and my feet looked plump as unpicked squash. They never looked that way in the mornings.
“All right,” Nanna said. “What story do you want this time?”
“Tell me about February—when the baby comes.”
“It’ll be a cold day,” Nanna started. “And you’ll wake up hurting.”
“Bad?”
“Not at first.”
“Worse than period pains?” I asked nervously.
“That’s how they’ll start.”
“Skip ahead,” I directed. “Up to the point where it’s born.” I was sitting in a chair with my feet propped up, embroidering a rabbit on a little smock I’d made, and Nanna was across the room hemming a sheet. She looked tired. Her face had begun to look like an old apple, soft and not shaped quite right.
She stopped sewing but didn’t look up.
“What’ll happen?” I asked her again.
“Honey, I just don’t know.”
“Who’ll be here?” I tried, and I switched to fishbone stitches because I needed my stitches to be interlocking and secure.
“I don’t know.”
“You’ll be with me, won’t you?”
“I reckon so,” she said. “Don’t know where else I’d be.”
“Will it get stuck in me? The way the mare’s did?”
“No, Baby,” she said. “It’ll make its way out.”
“Well, what will happen?”
“Ninah, I can’t tell you that story because I just don’t know how it will be.”
There was something sad about her that day. I was scared because she wasn’t reassuring me, not hardly at all, and I was scared that if I didn’t change the subject, she was going to leave me too. I’d been by myself so much.
“Will you tell me a different story?”
“Maybe,” she said, stopping to pick up another spool. “If you’ll thread this needle for me, I’ll try to think of one for you. I can’t hardly see in here. The light’s bad.”
She hobbled over to where I was sitting, handed me the needle and thread, and then backed out of my way so I could get more light.
“The eye of a needle is like the gateway to Heaven,” Nanna said. “Hard to tell who’s going to be on a straight enough path to get through it.”
But I knew that it took more than being on the straight path. You had to be stiff enough not to bend when you tried to pass through. You had to be careful not to slip to the left or the right and think you were going through the middle all the time. It took me three or four tries before I got that needle threaded, and then I tied it off good so that I wouldn’t have to do it again for a while.
“Do you remember your dreams, Nanna? Your pregnant ones?”
She smiled for a second before she spoke. “Oh yes. Before Harold was born, the son that died when Herman was in the war, I had a dream that somebody stole him right out of my belly. I thought I’d woke up with a flat stomach and that I’d give birth during the night without waking up at all, and that somebody had been there to take him away.
“Then with Maree—or it might have been with Ernest—I dreamed that my baby didn’t have a face.”
“That’s scary,” I said.
“You don’t sleep the same when you’re with child. You have all kind of dreams. You having many?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and I was about to tell her some when she picked up on a story.
“I was pregnant with Harold before Herman went off to the war. We hadn’t known it for too long when they called him away, and then he was up in Pennsylvania for a time in army training before they shipped him overseas.
“I decided I’d go up to see him one time before he left and talked Imogene into going with me. Uncle Ernie carried us all the way to the train in his wagon. And that was bumpy riding as you might expect. Imogene rode up on the seat with Uncle Ernie, and I stretched out in the back because I was sick as a dog, having to lean my head over the side every now and again.
“Me nor Imogene neither one had ever ridden a train before. I remember it was one of the scariest things I’d ever seen, long and stretched out like a great big spine. Most of the cars were for carrying coal, I believe—not people. But we crawled on it and found some seats. Imogene was little for her age, about the size of Pammy, though she was probably fifteen at the time. And she had to carry both our bags because it was all I could do to stand up, I was nauseated so.”
I imagined Nann
a and Great-Aunt Imogene as me and Pammy, seeing us on a train and wishing we could ride one, even though I knew it’d probably make me sick just then. But I’d have done it if James had been in the army, about to go overseas and waiting to see me.
“That train was rickety and noisy and swayed this way and that. Seemed like I could feel that baby in my belly, sloshing around. But after a while, I didn’t feel so sick anymore. I reckon you can get used to anything if you put up with it for long enough,” and she paused.
The curtains I’d made for Nanna’s sitting room were heavy and kept out most of the light. Even though it was the middle of the afternoon, it felt later, and I yawned.
“So me and Imogene talked for a while, and then she fell asleep, and I just looked out the window, watching all the trees and fields go by, thinking that surely sooner or later, the land would get different and we’d go over a mountain or something. But we didn’t. Kept going over rivers though. Once we got up into Virginia, we kept crossing over rivers with big rocks in them, and those rivers up North are a lot wider than the ones we got here. They stretch out so far you’d think they were the sea except for all the rocks.
“Me and Imogene got tired of talking and working on our embroidery which we’d tooken along. There was a man who came around selling things, and Imogene bought a pack of playing cards from him.”
“No she didn’t,” I laughed. We weren’t allowed to play cards at Fire and Brimstone—or even touch them if children took them to school. Cards meant gambling, and that was one of the Devil’s favorite pastimes. We’d been taught all our lives that touching cards was a quick ticket to Hell.
“Oh yes.” Nanna smiled. “Imogene bought us a deck of cards, and we opened them up just giggling. We weren’t Fire and Brimstone yet—nobody was. But the Baptists didn’t allow cards neither, and young women especially weren’t allowed to have them. It had to be one of the biggest freedoms I’d ever known, touching them things. Course we didn’t know how to play them. So we divided them up by colors and then by numbers, and we studied the pictures of the King and the Queen and the Jack, and I made up a story for Imogene about how we were going to London to meet them.”