“A-men,” Wanda shouted, and I didn’t know Wanda had an opinion one way or the other.
“But look at him,” Grandpa Herman continued. “Who could doubt the significance of these tiny hands?”
Then Daddy stood up and said, “Let’s just ask David and Laura to dedicate this child to God’s glory, and leave it be.”
There were mutterings all over the congregation. I looked at Nanna, who kept a blank face, and I looked at Pammy, who looked back at me and attempted to wink, though she winked with both eyes.
So the flustered and reddened Grandpa Herman went ahead with the sprinkling in the traditional way, asking David and Laura to commit to bringing Canaan up in the church. After they’d said their prayer, Grandpa dipped his hand in the water and flicked it into Canaan’s face.
The baby started crying, and the congregation laughed.
But I didn’t think it was so funny. Because Canaan didn’t have the freedom to wipe his own face, even if he wanted to.
When I started back to school that next year, I wore James’ trousers. I knew I’d gotten a lot of mileage out of the community’s questions about Canaan’s holiness, but that didn’t stop me. If I had an excuse to be able to wear pants, I wasn’t above using it.
Grandpa Herman got mad when he saw me, shouted, “Deuteronomy twenty-two: five states that ‘The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man ... for all that do so are abominations unto the Lord thy God.’ ” Then he turned and walked away.
But nobody actually forbid me to zip those pants and walk off the property.
Mamma said, “Well, Ninah!” and kept on washing off butter beans, and Nanna cut her eyes at me sharply, but I could see her trying to hide her smile.
Daddy said I looked real nice, and laughed outright and shook his head.
But Ajita Patel was the one whose compliment meant the most.
“You look so different,” she said. “So grown up.”
“Do you like my hair?” I asked her.
“I love it,” she said. “It’s softer,” and then she reached right up and ran her brown fingers through it and gave me the shivers. “I had long hair too when I was little. But by the time you reach ninth grade—”
“Eighth,” I reminded her. “I’m behind.”
She laughed. “Well, by the time you reach eighth grade, you’re old enough to decide how you want your hair.”
Ajita Patel didn’t wear makeup either, and I decided I didn’t need it.
“Thanks for all your letters,” I told her.
“I would have kept writing,” she said. “But after you had the baby, Pammy stopped coming by to pick them up.”
“It’s okay,” I told her. “I wish we had classes together.”
“Me too. But we still have lunch. We can meet here every day if you want.”
“Okay. I’m making you something.”
“Really,” she said excited. “What?”
“I can’t tell you,” I said. “It’s gonna be a surprise. It won’t be ready for a while.”
Once I started going to school again, it got easier to pretend like Canaan was David and Laura’s baby. Sometimes I felt guilty about it, but I let it be.
On the bus, Pammy said, “Do you reckon anybody ould care if I wore Mustard’s britches?”
I told her she might better think on that one for a while.
And one day at home, Wanda came in and said, “You’re so good with hair, Ninah. Will you cut mine?”
“Really?” I asked her. “You want to cut your hair?”
“Well, yeah,” she laughed. “I mentioned it to Everett, and he said I’d get in trouble, but that he didn’t care. And if all I have to do is sleep on nettles for a night or two, well, that’s not much of a price to get rid of this heavy mess.”
So I pulled out my scissors and chopped Wanda’s hair off.
“Not too short,” she said, and so I left it falling down the middle of her back.
I liked the way cut hair looked. It didn’t need to be short like a man’s but cutting it in general made me feel good. Uncut hair doesn’t grow even, and it hangs down in the middle longer than on the sides so you always look indecisive, like you don’t have an opinion at all.
“What do you think?” Wanda said.
“It’s nice,” I told her.
And Grandpa Herman didn’t even know because Wanda kept her hair up anyway.
But on the day I cut Pammy’s off, all hell broke loose.
Bethany came storming into the house, pulling Pammy by the ear, saying, “Ninah, did you do this?”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “And I think it looks real good on her.”
But I’d cut it up to her neck in a bob, like some of the town girls wore theirs. I hadn’t meant to do it that short, but I kept getting it uneven, and before I got it straightened out, the back of her neck was showing. Since Pammy was young, she didn’t wear her hair up, and there was no way of hiding it.
“Just because you’re special and were chosen for something special by God don’t mean you can go around inflicting the same things on other people,” Bethany told me.
Pammy was crying, and I felt awful for cutting it so short. But it looked great. She had shiny red hair that shone more when it wasn’t held down so heavy.
And when Grandpa Herman saw it, he threw a fit. Right there at supper, in the middle of the meal when everybody else had already seen and was hoping Grandpa Herman wouldn’t.
“Ninah, you might have been given a special gift, but you’re still human and prone to sins. And Pammy, you know that you are a regular girl, subject to the rules of this community. Don’t you?”
Pammy wept like a plant that’s been given too much water, the tears leaking out when there was no place inside left to hold them.
“By the rules of The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God’s Almighty Baptizing Wind, I sentence you both to a night in a grave to contemplate the wages of sin,” Grandpa roared—and I was shocked, genuinely, because I never would have thought hair-cutting would get the same sentence as drinking.
“David, Everett, Barley, Joshua, Mustard, John,” he called to the young men of the church. “Get your shovels.”
“Don’t worry,” I told Pammy. “It’s almost dark. They won’t have time but to dig one grave, so we’ll be together.”
“Promise?” Pammy asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
But then Wanda stood up and said, “Preacher Herman, I’ve cut my hair off too,” and she undid her bun and her pretty brown hair fell down her back, but only to the middle.
And then Great-Aunt Imogene, who was only a handful of years younger than Grandpa Herman, joined us at the front, laughing and saying, “When I saw how pretty them girls looked, I just decided that there weren’t no need in an old woman like me having to carry around a headful. She pulled off the handkerchief she wore on her head, yanked out her bobby pins, and let the gray straggles fall, and they hardly came to her shoulders. But Great-Aunt Imogene kept laughing.
Grandpa Herman stood back, his mouth dropped open like a tailgate, and Nanna broke out laughing, walked up to him, put her arm around him, and said, “Old Man, I believe we need to revise the rule books. They ain’t doing no wrong by wearing their hair different than the ways our parents wore theirs. Times change, and we’re the only ones resisting it.”
But Grandpa Herman pulled away and walked out. He looked like a man who’d been beaten in battle, his wrinkly face pulled and saddened. And I wanted to laugh at him because it was the first time I’d seen him back down. But later that night, all I felt was sorry that he was so hurt, even if the hurting seemed silly.
After school I tended Canaan, giving Laura a break even though Laura wore on my last good nerve. David and Laura were so caught up in their righteous son that they were willing to abide by Grandpa Herman’s rules, every one of them, even though so many of us were joyfully carving notches in other people’s trees and seeing that nobody cared a bit.
We weren
’t really doing a thing wrong. We all had a good sense of right and wrong and nobody wanted to do wrong because wrongs just make you have a hard time falling asleep, and we had too much to do to bring on insomnia. But we were living it up at Fire and Brimstone. Some nights Aunt Kate and Uncle Ernest would pull out their guitar and banjo, and after prayers, we’d sit in somebody’s living room and sing until the yawning took over.
Mostly we sang Jesus songs, but we didn’t bother with the sad ones—like the one where the little girl tells her daddy that he can’t be her daddy anymore because the rapture’s happened and her daddy’s been left behind. We sang about the mansion over the hilltop and flying away to Jesus and about how we were standing on the solid rock. Happy songs with a good beat that kept us awake and together.
On warm nights, we’d sit outside, and they’d play their music, and we’d make up fake musical groups. We’d sing into the water hose, pretending it was a microphone. And one night when Olin and Mustard were singing a duet, holding that hose between them, Daddy turned the water on and splashed it up in their faces right in the middle of “Just a Little Talk With Jesus.” We laughed for an hour about it, and everybody slept good that night.
But there were some who wouldn’t participate. Mamma didn’t come out too often, although a couple of times she forgot her allegiance and did a solo of “Lily of the Valley” before she remembered. David and Laura never joined us. They claimed that they didn’t want Canaan to catch a cold, but we all knew that they didn’t want to upset Grandpa.
And it was no wonder. Grandpa Herman treated David and Laura with more respect and attention than anybody else. He still believed completely that Canaan was the son of God, so David and Laura had more responsibility than anybody else and needed more guidance.
Some nights at Singspiration, which was what we called our gatherings, people would talk about little Canaan who, at seven and then eight months old, was beginning to get irritable. He had a hard time holding onto his rattle. He cried whenever Laura dressed him because it took a long time to get his special clothes on. People felt bad because he couldn’t crawl, and Wanda said she thought he’d have a hard time learning to walk since he wouldn’t have his arms to balance him.
And in the afternoons when I kept him, I played with his hands, thinking if I pulled them hard enough, and if it was God’s will, they’d fall apart just the way the little black vine stem had fallen from his navel after he was born.
But it didn’t happen like that.
He would sit there with me while I worked on his rug. I’d make him a little pallet on the pack house floor and then sing to him while I wove.
By that time, I’d taken one of James’ old flannel shirts and cut it into strips. I was weaving my hair, James’ shirt, tobacco twine, and a part of an old altar cloth into a rug for Canaan, but I was working on it slowly, waiting for the right pattern to happen.
I was also working on a rug for Ajita Patel. Canaan’s rug was on the weaving machine, but Ajita’s was on the loom Daddy built. I wanted hers to be special too. I knew I wanted to use some of the Indian fabric she’d sent to me through Pammy. And I knew I wanted to use some of my hair. But I’d kept Pammy’s hair, because it was so vivid, a color that seemed to want to set the world on fire like I did, and I started weaving her hair in Ajita’s rug instead.
My fingers wound rope over, under, over, under, and I found myself studying my design and forgetting about Canaan, then periodically remembering him and looking over to see him watching the rafters of the pack house, always looking up. It was dark in there, though I kept the back door open and had a big light hanging overhead. From the corners, old spiderwebs long since deserted draped heavy with dust and sagged. Shreds of cured tobacco leaves and bits of twine and dirt from work boots hid in the deep ridges of the old wooden floor, even though we swept it out. I loved the way the pack house smelled, so musky and tobacco-honeyed and oaty like feed sacks emptied of their grains. I liked having Canaan out there with me so that he could learn to love those smells too. And sometimes I’d roll up pieces of old tobacco leaves and weave them into the rugs as well.
Then when Canaan started whimpering, I’d pick him up and carry him over to the corner where it was dark and there were heaps of burlap tobacco sheets hilled up on the floor, and I’d sit down with him there, holding him close, rocking him and trying to teach him to say Ninah.
“Nigh-Nuh,” I’d instruct. “Can you say it? Nigh-Nuh.”
He’d look at me and bob his little head against my breasts and shake his arms.
“Nigh-Nuh,” I’d tell him again, and I couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t talking because he was nearly old enough, and at the same time, I was glad he hadn’t said anything else, like Mamma, before I’d taught him to say my name. I was glad my name had the same sort of sound as Mamma because at least I could pretend.
I felt a pull in my breasts, with Canaan’s face nuzzling there. My milk would not dry up. It’d been eight months, and I still had to pump them out into the sink, and I still had to wear flannel in my bras. Nanna said if I’d quit thinking of Canaan as my own, the milk would go away. But it didn’t.
“Are you hungry?” I asked him. “You must be hungry.”
He kept nestling in, and I was almost glad that he didn’t have usable fingers because he was doing a fine enough job tugging at my breasts with his praying hands.
“No, Canaan,” I told him, and pushed him back like always.
He began to cry, out loud, like his feelings were hurt.
“Shhh,” I coaxed.
But it didn’t help.
I knew that if Laura or David were there, if Grandpa Herman was, they’d have claimed that his bellowing was a plea to the savior. Anytime Canaan cried, people assumed he was calling to God.
Then one day, when he wouldn’t stop tugging at my shirt, when my breasts were leaking, and we were sitting on the tobacco sheets in the darkest corner of the empty pack house, I pulled out my aching breast and let him nurse.
The feeling of lips, even tiny teeth on my lonesome, crusty nipple, pulling at it, dragging from it, smacking and humming as he worked, his seamed hands held up above my breast, the feeling reminded me of times I’d been with James during prayer partners, hoping to not be caught. Canaan tugged and sucked, and I let him, knowing what I was doing had to be wrong because it felt like that milk was being pulled up from between my legs and I heard myself breathing, hoarding that cured tobacco air.
I kept feeding Canaan for a time after that. I couldn’t imagine myself denying him that right. But I felt guilty about it, worrying that by that time, my breast milk might be poisonous. He didn’t get sick though. He got better and fatter, and he started making the noises that come before words, and he managed to stand up on his own even though he kept falling back down on his diaper.
“You see,” Laura said. “If God hadn’t meant for his hands to be together, he wouldn’t be able to stand up by himself at just ten months. You’re a miracle, ain’t you, Canaan?” And she tickled the bottoms of his feet and cuddled him tight.
Nobody even tried to tell her that he was simply normal—because to Laura, that would have been like saying he was retarded. And I wanted to shake her until she broke and all the stupidness jingled out because she just couldn’t understand that what was normal was miraculous enough.
Nights, in bed, I prayed that God would give me a sign if I should stop nursing him. I wasn’t so worried about being caught. It was just that I didn’t want to sin. The risk wasn’t sleeping in a grave anymore—or the strap or the nettles. It was bigger than that.
I didn’t want to hurt Canaan, but I needed to give him something. The milk was all I had left.
Nights, I prayed that God would take my milk away or make Canaan stop wanting it if feeding him was a sin. I prayed for a sign until I got one.
One night I woke up to find the moonlight waltzing in and James sitting at the edge of the bed.
“Hey, Ninah,” he said, and smiled. I’d alway
s heard that in Heaven, all imperfections disappear. But James still had his broken tooth, after sixteen months in Heaven. And after the shock of seeing him had passed, all I could think about was the feeling of that tooth’s slant on my lip. My nipples poured.
“What are you doing here?”
“Just came to tell you you’re doing real good,” he said.
The moonlight shadowed James like a harmony. My eyes were so heavy, but I was afraid I’d lose him if I blinked.
“Is he God’s baby?” I asked him, thinking James would surely know.
“Yeah,” he answered. “All babies are.”
“But James, you know what I mean.”
“It don’t matter. Let’s go see him.” He stood and walked over to the side of the bed where he took my hand and pulled me up. I half-expected to grab air, or to feel his hand cold or dripping wet. But he just felt familiar.
We slipped outside in the frost, crept across the yard. He ducked low, like he didn’t want to be seen, and I started giggling because he was there. When he nudged his way behind the shrubs outside David and Laura’s bedroom window, I heard them rustle. It wasn’t just me.
We looked inside for a long time. Canaan rocked in his crib until he rolled himself over on his side, looking through the slats of wood towards the window.
“He looks like you,” James said.
“No he don’t,” I protested. “He looks like you.”
“You’re doing fine,” James said again, staring at me, encouraging me. I thought I might cry. I thought he might kiss me, and I think I wanted him to. But he brushed my hair away from my face and let his hand graze my ear, then stay there for a long moment before he moved it. I memorized his touch, knowing somehow that I wouldn’t feel him again.
“I have to go,” he said.
“Where?”
“I have to leave,” he repeated. “I’m going to see my boy first.” And then he stepped closer to the house, then looked back one more time. “I hear you when you pray,” he said.