“What’d they do?”
“They had to go home and tell their parents about their sins,” I said.
And then James reached up again, almost too high, just barely escaping the edge of my underpants, and his hand there felt like a thousand ladybugs crawling. For a second, I thought I might lift right off the bed, zip up into the air, and float across the room. I felt like a pine tree in spring. I knew if I opened my mouth again, there was a chance I’d speak in tongues.
“And then?” Barley posed.
I cleared my throat, and James slid his hand back down to my knee, and I quivered all over without meaning to.
“And then they couldn’t walk to school together for the rest of that year. Except they did it anyway. Grandpa Herman would wait for Nanna half a mile down the road, and then Imogene would walk ahead of them and holler back to Nanna if she saw anybody else coming so that Grandpa Herman could duck into the woods.
“And they didn’t even care that they had to wear old shoes that were too tight and left marks across their feet because they were in love and it didn’t matter.”
“That’s a good story,” James said.
“Y’all should go to bed, maybe,” I sighed, and rolled over to face Pammy.
That night I dreamed of Jesus on the cross, on a cross in the field behind The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God’s Almighty Baptizing Wind. I dreamed I was standing at my bedroom window, and Jesus was on the cross, holding a handful of azaleas for me.
I dreamed I went outside in just my gown, and walked up to him. He was too nearly dead to speak, but all he had in his eyes was love for me. And I walked up to the wound in his side where he’d been stuck with a sword. I put my mouth on that wound and began drinking from it, swallowing his blood.
And then the wound in his side became a mouth, kissing me back, and I could slip my tongue into the wound, feel the inside of his skin with my tongue, circle it there, tasting him.
But when I looked back at Jesus, he’d turned into James.
I sat up and peered around the dark room. Bodies lay everywhere, sleeping against walls and beneath tables. I didn’t know where James might be.
I got up and walked to the door, outside, pulled the door quietly and settled on the steps.
It was cold. I stayed there a long time, and then Everett came outside too.
“Ninah?” he whispered, and I jumped.
“Hey,” I said.
“What’s the matter?”
“I had a bad dream,” I told him. “A real, real bad one.” And he sat down beside me and pulled me under his arm.
“Wonder how in the world you could have a bad dream at a youth retreat?” he asked me.
“I don’t know.”
“Is something on your chest?”
All I could think about were the clothespins I should have with me. If I had the clothespins on my chest, I’d be thinking about Jesus’ pain and not the unholy things parading through my mind.
“What if I’m not saved?” I asked him.
“What do you mean? You got saved years ago.”
“I know,” I told him. “But sometimes I don’t feel like I believe enough.”
“You don’t believe? What don’t you believe?”
“I believe, ” I corrected myself. “It’s just that sometimes I don’t feel the way I think a saved person should feel. I try really hard to concentrate on Jesus, but other things get in the way when I don’t even mean for them to.”
“It’s okay, Peanut,” Everett said.
His beard was nestling against my ear, tiny hairs stuck out farther than the rest of it, and even though James didn’t even have a beard yet, I kept thinking of him.
“Why don’t we just pray about it? And you can ask God to come into your heart again, with all sincerity, and then you’ll know you’re saved.”
“Okay,” I agreed, and we prayed. Everett prayed aloud for my salvation, but I prayed quietly, promising God that if he’d just let me go to Heaven when the rapture happened, I’d give up kisses until I was married. I promised I’d never let James touch my legs or even hold my hands, if God would just save a place for me in the sky.
When we were done, Everett kissed my head and helped me find my way back to bed.
But it didn’t help. I still imagined that I’d wake up the next morning, and everyone would have been resurrected except me. I saw myself in the unpeopled room, shuffling through blankets and clothes until I came to the place where James had been sleeping. James with his curly dark hair and slant-eyes. I saw myself lifting his shirt and his pants, sniffing them and settling down at the place where he’d slept, and covering my face with his socks—as if they could protect me from the giant stinging insects.
I decided to concentrate on Jesus’ pain as hard as I could. I put sandspurs in my own bed and pecan shells in my shoes to remind me with every step of how Jesus had suffered. I cut out a picture of Jesus on the cross and taped it to the inside of my underwear for protection—because if I was saving myself for Jesus, I knew I’d better get him there fast.
I was trying not to hobble on the day I helped Grandpa Herman prepare the place where Dot, our mare, would drop her baby. Nanna was out there too, scratching the girl’s mane and rubbing her belly. I’d been cleaning the stall, shoveling manure into a bucket and then raking the dirt neatly in honor of the colt we were expecting.
Grandpa Herman brought out a fresh bale of hay and cut the twine that held it with his knife. He scattered the fresh hay, then leaned up against the fence and breathed in deep.
It was a good smell to me too, the combination of horse and straw. I finished raking the front of the stall, leaned up against the trough where Dot’s salt block rested, rounded on one side from her big tongue, and waited for instructions on what to do next.
Grandpa Herman looked over at me slyly, like he’d figured out something I hadn’t. “What you limping for, Ninah?” he asked me.
“I ain’t limping,” I said.
“Well, yes you are. I’ve been watching you all morning. Is something wrong with your shoes?”
“No, sir.”
“Maybe your feet’s just growing so fast that your shoes is hurting you. Come here and let me see them.”
“They fit,” I answered, walking towards him all the while.
I had to lift my foot up onto the fence where Grandpa studied it. He tilted my boot one way, then the other, then began unlacing it.
“What are you doing?” Nanna asked him, and came over to where we were standing.
“The child’s shoe’s hurting her, Leila,” he said. “I’m just trying to see what’s wrong with it.”
Grandpa Herman pulled off the first boot, then looked at it, looked in it and saw the thick hulls inside. He shook them out into the straw, and I thought I would cry, partly because he’d found the shells and partly because he’d sprinkled the sharp things over the horse’s bed.
Nanna walked up behind me and put her arms around me. “Who told you to walk on hulls?” she asked.
“Nobody,” I said.
“You saying you decided to walk on pecan shells all on your own?” Grandpa Herman asked, and I nodded.
“You’re telling me that Liston and Maree don’t even know you got shoes full of shells?”
“No, sir,” I said again.
“Well, tell me right now what you’ve done wrong that’s so bad you willing to walk on shells when nobody is making you?”
“Nothing,” I promised. “I just wanted to know Jesus’ pain, just a little touch of what it felt like.”
Grandpa Herman laughed outright, laughed big and hard at me, shook his head at Nanna, said, “I swear,” which nobody was supposed to say, and then leaned over and kissed me on my socked foot. “Well, you go right ahead,” he said, and laughing, he walked off.
Nanna didn’t let go of me. She held on even as Grandpa Herman shuffled towards the houses. He turned back once, still laughing, and said, “Next time you get in trouble, girl, you can??
?t use this as your punishment. It ain’t like a savings and loan, you know?”
I thought Nanna might fuss at me for walking on shells, but she didn’t. Instead, she showed me how to massage the horse’s belly, how to coax it to relax. She put my hands right at the place where the colt had dropped so low, and I thought I could feel its curled-up outline in its sack.
Nanna reached right down to the mare’s private parts and rubbed her there too, stretching her and showing me how to prepare her pelt to give when the time came. I memorized her wrinkled fingers and how they moved.
“Why you walking on hulls, Baby?” Nanna finally asked me.
“I don’t know,” I told her.
“You still feeling the flutters over James?”
“I guess so,” I admitted.
“Oh Lord, I thought it might be too late.”
“What should I do, Nanna? I’m sleeping on nettles,” I told her. “I’m praying almost all the time. Do you think a fast would help? Like maybe if I didn’t eat until supper every day?”
“Have you been holding his hand?” she asked me.
“Only one time,” I said, and shamefully closed my eyes.
“Well, a fast ain’t what you need,” she said. “No child your age ought to be skipping meals.”
“What should I do, Nanna?”
“Lord, I don’t know,” she said. She sat down on the hay, and I sat down beside her, and she lifted my chin with the cup of her hand.
“They natural feelings,” she whispered.
“But he’s my nephew.”
“Sort of,” she agreed. “Is James your same age?”
“A year older.”
“Oh, Lordy,” she said, and then she cackled out. “And you done held his hand!”
“One time right after he killed his first deer,” I told her. I wanted to tell her so much more. But Grandpa Herman had held my foot, and I felt like I might have betrayed her somehow, and I couldn’t mention the other kinds of touching.
“Well, you try to stay away from him a little while,” she said. “And I’ll see what I can do.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Just try to stay away from him for a while.”
I was peeling onions and chopping them up with Pammy that day, getting ready for supper. The great pot of stew was cooking, and all the adults were sitting around, drinking hot water with honey and talking about the mare.
“I expect she’ll be having it tonight,” Grandpa Herman said.
“We’ll keep an eye on her,” Mamma said, and Daddy walked over and put his arm around Mamma’s waist.
“Be glad to,” Daddy added.
Nanna went over to Grandpa Herman and straightened his little bit of hair on top that had fluttered off to one side. He reached up and stroked her arm, and they stood that way for a time.
“I been thinking about Ninah and James,” Nanna said. “They’re near about courtin age and seem fond of each other.”
Everybody hushed up to listen to her.
“They’re about the same size,” she went on, confidently, even though Bethany’s eyes looked like they might jump out her head and do a little jig on the table. “And I believe we’d do good if we joined together as a community and encouraged them to spend time together and see whether or not they’d make good partners.”
“Leila,” my daddy said, “they’re ... ,” and he tried to figure out how we were related. “They’re cousins, or ...”
“Ninah’s his aunt, ” Bethany leaped in.
“But not by blood,” Nanna went on. “Certainly by position, but not by blood. And it just seems to me that if we want to keep this community together, there’s no better way to do it than to bring together two children who’ve grown up with the same strong values and sense of place.”
I knew that wasn’t what Nanna believed. It stunned me to hear her say it. She’s lying, I thought to myself, but then I remembered that she supposedly had a history of it.
“Now, Leila,” Grandpa Herman began, and I looked up from the chopping block for the first time, my eyes pouring water, and through the blinking onion-haze, I could see Nanna pinch Grandpa Herman’s shoulder hard. I could see him try to wiggle away.
“Of course, we don’t want them together if they don’t want to be,” Nanna continued. “So I was wondering how it would work if they became prayer partners. It’d just give them some time to spend alone with God, to ask for his guidance, and then they could see whether or not they’d make good mates.”
“That don’t sound like a bad idea to me,” Grandpa Herman finally conceded. “It’s true that James and Ninah have grown up like brothers and sisters, but that kind of love might be a good place to begin a marriage in several years. And they both seem like they got their heads on straight. Ninah’s so worried she’s going to sin that she’s taking measures against it all on her own.”
Out the window, I could see James and Barley and Mustard at the woodpile, swinging axes and splitting firewood. James had taken off his coat and rolled the sleeves of his flannel shirt up to his elbows. Out there working like a man and missing it all.
“Oh, Ninah,” Pammy whispered. “You’re going to have to marry James.” She said it like it was a curse. “In the night, he has gas, and in the mornings, you can’t even stand to walk in him and Mustard’s room.”
I looked at her but didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know, Herman,” Daddy said. “Seems like they’re just too young.”
“They are young,” Grandpa agreed. “But it makes more sense to get them thinking about it early than to have James go weak-kneed over some little Baptist in his class. Some little Baptist.” He smiled and made a motion to his chest like all Baptist girls got bigger breasts, and the men laughed. The women pretended not to notice.
I ran cold water over my hands, shook them off, dried them, and left the room.
Mamma followed me out, towards the bathroom. When I walked in, she came right in behind me, and I was still crying from the onions, but she thought it was something else.
“It’s okay, Baby,” she said, and hugged me. “You got years to make up your mind who you want to marry. And it’s good to have a prayer partner to share your thoughts and worship with.”
I hugged her back, wondering why it was that I’d left that room. A part of me wanted to cry for real. A part of me wanted to thank Nanna, and another part of me wanted to yell at her. A part of me wanted to rejoice and rip from my underpants the Jesus who’d been scratching me for over a week.
By supper time, it was settled. Every evening when the adults had prayer time and the children played or got their lessons, James and I would meet someplace and say prayers of our own. Grandpa Herman made a list on his napkin of things we could begin to pray for, listing the names of the sick and afflicted, the names of neighbors with lost souls including Wanda’s relatives, the names of those among us with losses and hopes and heavy hearts.
After we’d eaten, all the men took James out back and talked to him about his responsibilities. I wondered what he was thinking, worried that he didn’t like me at all, that he already had a Baptist girl of his own and that he was just practicing on me. I wondered if Pammy would tell him how it all happened.
And when Nanna looked over at me later and winked, I didn’t know what to do with my face.
That night the mare got sick, so sick. She’d shake her weak head and blow snot out her nose, and she had foam coming out her mouth and stringy, yellow-green spit. I stayed at the barn with Daddy and Mamma, trying to help Dot have her baby, but she was sicker even than that. We had kerosene lanterns hung at either corner of the stall, but I held the flashlight on her private parts while Mamma rubbed her back and Daddy tried to help her drop the sack.
“Ninah, you all right?” Daddy asked me. “You can go to the house if you want to.”
“She’ll be fine,” Mamma assured him. “She’s old enough to help out.”
But I wasn’t so sure. I wondered if J
ames had seen an animal give birth before. I wondered if they’d send James away if he was out there—the way the men always sent me inside when they cut the pigs.
The baby wouldn’t come out all the way. It was hung up inside her, and she was bleeding bad. Daddy reached his long arms up into the horse and tried to pull, but it still wouldn’t come. I took a towel and wiped at the dangling saliva. Dot stared at me like she wasn’t even seeing me, her big eyes lost in the dark and the pain.
“Is this the way it always happens?” I asked, but neither of them heard me.
And after Daddy had the sack on the ground, in the bloody straw, Mamma tried to get Dot to respond, but she could hardly move, and the blood poured out of her like pee.
The colt was wet and sticky, with bony legs that trembled when she tried to stand up. Daddy was crying, helping the baby out, and Mamma was crying, rubbing at Dot’s face.
“She’s going to bleed to death, Liston,” Mamma said. And then, “Ninah, get some towels.”
But before we could get the bleeding stopped, Dot’s head thudded hard into the straw. Mamma tried to wake her up, slapping at her neck and then rubbing her face, saying, “Come on, girl. Come on.”
Her eyes filmed over like a fish.
Then I looked at Daddy, who was holding the newborn in his arms, the spindly legs sticking out in every direction, and Daddy was kissing its little head, and saying, “It’s okay.”
We took the tiny horse into our house, and Mamma sponged it off with warm water while Daddy ran back to the barn to look for some kind of formula.
“I’ll have to get some tomorrow from the supply store,” he said. “If we strain some milk, do you reckon it will live through the night?” and Mamma said maybe, so I warmed up milk and poured it through cheesecloth.
“We ain’t got the right kind of bottle,” Daddy said.
“A baby bottle will do for now,” Mamma told him, and he went over to Clyde Langston’s where they’d just had a baby to borrow one.