“But he don’t have money,” I worried.
“He’s got a little bit,” Mustard confided. “He didn’t give everything he made this winter to Fire and Brimstone. He saved up just in case.”
“In case what?”
“Well, just in case Great-Grandpa Herman didn’t want you to stay here after the baby came.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s played hooky from church about ever Sunday with me and Daddy,” Mustard allowed. “But nobody else don’t know that, about the money, so don’t go around mentioning it.”
Later it struck me that for everybody to be so upstanding and honest at Fire and Brimstone, it sure did seem like they lied a lot, not telling me about what would happen with the baby, making up tales about where Daddy’d gone. And of all the people I knew at Fire and Brimstone, sometimes it seemed like Nanna, who everybody knew to have a past with lying, lied the least.
The first night that I slept in my old bed, back in Mamma and Daddy’s house, Daddy returned. It was late at night, and I was already asleep when he came to my bed and sat down.
“Ninah,” he called, and I thought at first it must be a dream. “Ninah?”
“Hey,” I said, and sat up. There was a nightlight burning orange on the wall behind him, and it lit him up from the back. “Where were you?”
I leaned into him and started hugging him, and even though he put his arms around me too, it didn’t seem like he was hugging me back.
“I had to go off for a while,” he started. “Had to get some things straight, in my mind ... ,” and I thought he might be crying, so I reached up to touch the skin under his eyes, and he was.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” I said, keeping my thumbs there, pushing the water back.
“Don’t need to be,” he told me. “You ain’t the one.”
“What’s wrong?” I tried. It seemed like so much could be wrong, like Daddy probably had a hundred things to pick from.
“Do you want to stay here?” he asked me. “At Fire and Brimstone? Cause we can leave, Ninah.”
“Who?” I said. “Me and you and Mamma?”
“Me and you,” he said. “We can go somewhere else.”
“Where?” I asked him.
“I don’t know.”
“But what about Nanna?” I said. “And the baby? And Mustard and Pammy?”
“I don’t know,” he echoed.
“I’m not the mother of God, am I, Daddy?”
“Don’t matter, Peanut,” he said. “You’re my heart.”
“Don’t go away again,” I begged him. “If you have to go away again, you’ve got to tell me—because there’s just too much to worry about without having to worry whether you’re okay.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Lay back down,” and he tucked the covers around me. “I got you a present. A weaving machine. A big one so you can keep making your rugs.”
“Really?” I said, sleepy.
“Yeah. It’s out at the pack house though.”
“Stay with me a minute,” I said, and I moved over so he could stretch out.
We rested beside each other for a while, and I held his hand, and it was so cold I knew it must be purple.
“I was over at Ben’s,” he told me. “Just thinking.”
“Did you see the baby?” I asked him.
“Yeah—” he said, and it sounded like the word did a backbend in his throat. “He’s a pretty child.”
Night after night, I slept poorly. I’d go to my window, imagine Jesus on the cross, but when I saw him, he was dead already, his azaleas withered. I’d climb back into my bed and touch my wet nipples and adjust the flannel pads I kept over them to keep my clothes from getting soaked. My breasts ached like somebody had been wringing them, like towels washed by hand, and even when I did fall asleep, I’d wake up if I rolled to either side.
Night after night, I’d creep out of the house, carefully, so I wouldn’t squeak at the floorboards, and I’d tiptoe through the darkness over to David and Laura’s, edge my way behind the bushes that grew up next to their bedroom window, and peek in.
David and Laura slept far apart from each other in the bed. They didn’t even touch, and I couldn’t imagine why you’d bother to share a bed if you weren’t planning on sharing your warmth. I knew that if I had a chance to sleep with James or Jesus or even Canaan, I’d sleep so close that our breathing matched.
I watched them sleeping over and over, sleeping soundly in spite of the baby in their room.
But Canaan wasn’t always sleeping. I could see him best—because they left the bathroom light on, and his crib was pushed up next to the wall closest to the bathroom. He rested on his back because his joined palms made it impossible for him to sleep on his stomach. And sometimes when I’d go there, he had his eyes open.
I tried to talk to him in my mind. I told him that of all the people at Fire and Brimstone, we were the only ones sleeping on our backs, the only ones not sleeping. I tried to tell him that when he was older, if he looked out the window after everyone had gone to sleep, he might see me, standing in my window waiting for him.
I tried to tell him about James, about how nice he was, about how good he could shoot, about how much he liked to play even after he was turning into a man. I wanted Canaan to know how soft the skin was at the place where his ear met his face.
I thought my baby Canaan might be praying without ceasing, but there was no way for me to be sure.
Laura and David showed that baby off like he was a fine car they’d bought in an overseas country that nobody’d ever been to except for them.
Canaan was a quiet baby with loud eyes. Even though his eyes had a film over them, it looked like he’d been seeing things for a long time. Sometimes I’d look into his funny dark eyes and imagine that every little sunburst, every little line was a different way of knowing things. Like he could see things in a thousand ways, all at the same time.
He wiggled his arms around some, but no matter what he did, he still looked like he was praying.
He didn’t cry. He didn’t gurgle or spit hardly at all. It was almost as if he’d been born into this world with a kind of resignation.
And he was heavy in my arms, solid as brownness, which was all he wore even though I’d made him all those outfits. None of my outfits had fit him. I hadn’t anticipated the hands.
“He is so good, ” Mamma would say, holding him in her arms and grinning down on him.
“Yes, ma’am,” David said. “He sleeps like a rock, too. We don’t hardly ever have to get up with him.”
And I started thinking about how hard it would be to be born a messiah. You’d have such a reputation to live up to, and everything you did would be interpreted as a sign. Even if Canaan wasn’t a messiah, people still looked to him as if he had all the answers.
“I think he’s wet though,” Mamma said. “Ninah, you want to go change him?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I answered, and took him out of her arms. Mamma was good about giving him to me whenever she could.
“You can use my bed,” Mamma said, but I took him upstairs to mine.
I loved the scent of his head, so musky and a little like how I imagined the inside of a heart to smell. It seemed like that smell disappeared a bit more every day, but I sniffed for it anyway and planted light kisses on the soft part of his head, nuzzling my face in his thin hair that stood straight up and didn’t cover his whole scalp evenly.
I changed his diaper, and then held him for a long time, just feeling him so real and leaning against my middle. I knew he meant such different things to everybody, but to me, he meant James, and the milk poured out of me while he was in my lap, and my breasts begged and begged.
“Want to see something?” I asked him, and I layed him back, on my pillow so he’d feel soft, and I went to my closet and pulled out the rug I’d made for James.
“Want to feel it?”
I spread the rug out on the bed, picked Canaan up again, and sat the two of us down
beside it. “Your real daddy’s not here, but maybe you can know him a little bit anyway.” With my free hand, I lifted the rug and rubbed the rope part onto the backside of Canaan’s praying hands. “That’s your daddy,” I said, and careful not to let the barbed wire hurt him, just allowing him to feel the lightest scratch, I said, “And that’s your daddy too.”
I didn’t go back to school that year, even after I was healed up from begetting Canaan. I stayed with the women and helped with the household chores, with the garden and even the tobacco beds.
I wore my hair untied, just letting it fling about in the wind and whenever I moved my head. The only person who told me to get it out of my face was Nanna.
“If you don’t tie back that hair, I’m going to cut it at the scalp,” Nanna threatened. “It looks like Mamma’s used to.”
“Well, you said she was pretty,” I joked.
“And she was pretty. But that mess of hair will get you into trouble.”
“Let’s cut it then,” I tempted.
“Herman will have your ass,” she said.
“No he won’t,” I claimed. “Cause I won’t let him.”
“Oh.” Nanna smiled. “Getting brave, ain’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, I won’t stop you. But I don’t know nothing about it.”
I needed more materials for my weaving anyway. I was working on a rug just for Canaan. I took the shears and went into the bathroom and clipped at my hair until it all hung evenly at my shoulders. With every strand that fell, I felt lighter.
When I came out of the bathroom, Mamma was working on a cross-stitching for the baby’s room.
“Have you used up all the blue thread?” she asked, even though she knew I hadn’t been cross-stitching.
“No, ma’am,” I answered her, standing there proud and waiting for her reaction.
“Well, I can’t find it,” she muttered, looking through her sewing kit again.
“I think I’m going out to the barn to work on a new rug for Canaan’s room,” I told her.
“Okay,” she said. “But don’t stay out there more than an hour or two cause we’ll need some help with the cooking,” and then she looked up.
“Ninah!” she said.
“Do you like it?” I asked her, and I swirled around so that it fluffed out before it settled. It might have been the breeziest I’d ever felt.
“It looks ... real nice,” she swallowed, and went right back to work.
Those were times when being the “mother of God” wasn’t a bad thing at all. I hurried out to my weaving machine, carrying my hair with me.
The week before Grandpa Herman was scheduled to sprinkle Canaan in church, I went to Olin and Mustard and told them I needed their help.
“What is it?” Olin asked me. They were scaling and gutting the fish they’d caught at the river, but they stopped long enough to talk. Olin had a fish scale stuck on the side of his crooked nose and didn’t know it.
“Canaan’s being sprinkled on Sunday,” I said.
“We heard,” Mustard answered.
“Well, he’s James’ baby,” I admitted to them outright. “And both of you know that, and I know that—even if nobody else wants to think of him that way. So that makes him your grandson, Olin, and I think you need to be in church when it happens.”
He just looked at me for a time.
“I ain’t going,” Mustard said, and took his knife to another fish.
“I ain’t meaning to be disrespectful, Ninah, because I loved James. And I love you. And I love that baby too. But I don’t believe I can stand to hear Herman preaching and carrying on over that child. And if I have to hear one more time that he’s the New Messiah, I might strangle somebody. That child needs taking to the hospital.”
“Please, Olin,” I said. “This community’s all we got. And Canaan might be a messiah for all we know. Please go to church on Sunday.”
“Don’t get caught up in this craziness,” he snapped. “That’s a perfectly normal boy you had, Ninah. All except for his hands, and it’s just as easy to say he’s patty-caking as he is praying. He ain’t no new Jesus, and we don’t need another one anyway.”
“We need something,” I said. “It’s like a big split’s come in our community, and Canaan might be the one way to get us all back together.”
“I ain’t believing you’re saying that,” Mustard barked. “After all they’ve done to you, you want things to be the way they used to be? You’re crazy.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not what I want at all. But things don’t have to be the same for us to all live together and be happy....”
“I ain’t going to church,” Mustard declared. “And won’t nobody make me.”
But on Sunday, he was there, and Olin was and Daddy. I’d talked to Daddy too, told him that we ought to come together for the baby’s sake, and he’d nodded.
I sat next to Nanna like always. That day she had some little candies in her purse, and we both ate them while Grandpa Herman talked, and I opened that wrapper right up, realizing for the first time that if I made a little noise, it didn’t matter much. Grandpa Herman was making plenty.
David and Laura were sitting on that first pew, holding Canaan, but everybody else was in their regular seats.
“It’s good to have our family back together, in the house of the Lord,” and Grandpa paused for somebody to say Amen, so Everett did.
And then he went off in his normal way, using some passage from Ezekiel as his preaching point, though I didn’t listen that closely.
When it was time for the sermon to be wrapped up, Grandpa Herman started in about sins again, and I knew that he was hoping to see Olin and Daddy and Mustard and probably me all around the altar on our knees when the call was given.
“The good Lord knows all about sinning,” he said. “But he’s a loving and merciful savior, sending his own son to die on the cross for our shortcomings. This morning, our congregation is filled with those who have lived in sin, who’ve experienced Satan’s temptations firsthand. Liston is back with us. Liston, who turned his back on God, refusing to acknowledge that God continues to speak to us in the present as surely as he spoke to us in the past. God bless him.
“And Olin is here again, thank Jesus. Olin whose own losses seemed so big and so mighty that he forgot that God himself lost a son.
“And young Mustard, who’s at that age where he faces the temptations of youth, where he questions everything in ignorance, not realizing that God’s word transcends every temptation, every generation.
“And Ninah. Praise God for Ninah. Her struggles with God are her own, and we are not omnipotent enough to judge her heart. But she has returned to Christ’s flock after an absence, has brought into this world a tiny child whose hands bear testament to the way that we should live.
“We have Wanda among us, who lived a life of sin and left her people and her wicked ways and came to Fire and Brimstone like the woman at the well, seeking God’s sweet love.
“We have others among us who have known lives of sin, and who’ve turned away from evil to embrace goodness and peace. Leila, my own wife, who you all know and love, whose negligence led to the death of her earthly father and whose lies nearly interfered with the administration of justice, is here with us, living proof that a person can be sinful and repent.”
Then in mid-tirade, he broke into prayer, and while he spoke, Mustard gave me a glance that could freeze holy water, and Nanna passed me another piece of candy and shook her weary head.
“God, we just ask that you cover this altar with the bodies and tears of those mentioned. Cover this altar with the hearts of those who have backslidden but want to return to your ways. Lord, I pray that your will might be done here today, and that we might leave this service with a greater sense of your precious love.
“Finally,” Grandpa Herman spoke again, when we’d already raised up our hymnbooks and were preparing to sing the altar call. “Finally, we have in our midst today
, David and Laura Huff, who have tried unsuccessfully to bring forth a child into this world. Time and time again, their unborn have been snatched away from them, when Jesus saw that in one heart or the other, there was a lack, a sin, a question about their salvation. But now, and praise God for it, the Lord has blessed them with this child, Canaan Huff. It just goes to show that after sinfulness, there is repentance, and after repentance, there is the Lord’s great abundance. Won’t you come? Won’t you fall down on your knees here and ask God into your heart? Or rededicate your life to his service and this community?”
We sang the hymn, everyone together, quietly lifting our voices, our darting, shadowy voices. But no one approached the altar.
“Won’t you come?” Grandpa Herman called out. “We have a child in our midst who testifies to the truth of Jesus Christ’s imminent return to this earth. A child with hands held in prayer. He’s a message sent to us by God in his final days. Won’t you come?”
We sang eight verses of the song, but nobody hit the altar. Nobody received tongues. Nobody broke out into prayer. Nobody held us up.
And after the altar call was over, Grandpa called David and Laura up to the front. He blessed some water and lifted Canaan before us. He had to be the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen, and his seamed-up hands looked ludicrous. For a second, I thought I might have sewn him together by accident when I was making all those baby clothes.
“This child comes before God this day as Fire and Brimstone’s reminder to prepare for the rapture. This child comes to us as our New Messiah. And who am I to baptize this infant who will be our new leader? A lowly man baptizing ...”
Then Olin stood up and interrupted him. “Preacher Herman,” Olin began. “What will become of Canaan nobody knows, not in this room anyway. But in the past, we’ve baptized infants and sprinkled God’s blessings on them because we loved them and we wanted to show our in tention of providing them with a childhood filled with the teachings of the Lord. And I believe we should do the same thing for this child, without giving him responsibilities or importance that we haven’t given to the other babies of this community.”