The burning season, p.10
The Burning Season, page 10
Inside the chapel, I take a seat by Amanda and her daughter. “Hey,” Amanda says, squeezing my knee. “The Moores, this time. Did you see?”
“Paul drove me past it just now,” I say. “God’s power is mighty.”
“Praise His name,” Amanda says. “But it didn’t burn all the way.”
“It burned enough, though.”
Her daughter, on the opposite side of her, leans forward, and I give her a wink. She grins and sits back, swinging her feet, legs covered by her long dress.
“It should have burned all the way,” Amanda says, smoothing her dress over the roundness of her belly. She sees me looking and smiles. “Almost five months now,” she says. “I’m finally showing. Here, feel.” She takes my hand and sticks it on her stomach, and I’m not sure if there’s some movement, a fluttering, within her I should be feeling, so I let my hand linger for a moment and then take it away.
“A gift,” I say. “Thank you.”
“Oh, Rosemary,” she says. “It will happen for you. I know it will.”
“We’re prayerful and hopeful,” I say, casting my eyes down at my own stomach, invisible, empty and flat beneath my dress.
“I heard you’re working with Julie Friedrich,” she says.
I nod. “Paul received a God-thought, and Papa Jake confirmed it. He thinks I can absorb her fertility the way the men receive the anointings of the dead.” I put my hands out the way I saw Paul do in the truck, like I was gripping an invisible basketball.
Amanda is nodding, her chin wrinkling as she frowns. “Makes sense,” she says. “Touch is very important. The laying on of hands.”
“Of course,” I say.
“Hey,” she says abruptly. “Julie’s here. She’s in the back with the baby.” I look over my shoulder and see her standing near the door. Now that I’m listening, I hear Lily of the Valley crying, and I watch Julie bouncing her, the fabric covering her knees quaking as Julie moves up and down. “She should feed that baby,” Amanda says. “She’s hungry.” She leans in, angling her head toward mine, speaking in a low voice. “I heard Julie’s seeming crazy. Is that true?”
“Not crazy,” I say, feeling surprisingly protective of Julie. “Exhausted. Overwhelmed.”
Amanda nods. “It’s hard becoming a mother.”
Papa Jake emerges from the wings and raises his hands to greet us, and we all clap for him. Someone whistles. A woman yells, “Papa!” He grins. He raises both his hands again, this time to quiet us.
“The work of the Lord will not be thwarted,” he says. We watch him looking for someone in the congregation, and we know when he finds them because he grins again. “Stand up,” he says, lifting both hands as if he can make them stand with magic. “The Moores.”
They stand up, the four of them—Richard and Molly and their twin boys, younger than Abigail. I imagine the boys waking up, realizing that this time it’s them, the holy fire is happening to them. “These faithful brothers and sister stood up against the world for what was right, for the will of God,” Papa Jake says. “The world approached them in the guise of helpers, saviors, but they were wise enough to know that only God can help us. Only God can save us.” We cheer. Yes! God alone. And you, Papa. You. “This time,” he says, “the world pulled ahead. The holy fire didn’t burn the way God intended, but next time.” He raises a finger, as if he is pointing to God Himself. “Next time, brothers. Next time, sisters.”
Next time, we answer. A promise or a threat or both. Molly and Richard are still standing, though she has let the boys sit down, and she keeps a hand on the shoulder of the one closer to her.
“Let us celebrate,” Papa Jake says, and we don’t even have to ask why or what for. We leap to our feet, we move out of the confines of the aisles as music swells. I spot Paul, who is kneeling between the pew behind him and the pew in front of him, his hands covering his eyes and his mouth moving, but I can’t hear him. I wonder what he’s seeing.
Suddenly there is the sound of glass shattering at the back of the chapel. For a moment, I wonder if it is some new ritual Papa Jake has envisioned, but then I hear screaming, and I whip around, drawn to the sound of an outside force making its way inside our sanctuary. Julie Friedrich is in the back, frozen and silent. Lily is crying. On the floor to her right, not even a foot away, lies a brick. We look to the other window on the other side of the door, and that is broken too. From where I am in the aisle, I cannot see a second brick, but I know it must be there.
We stand stunned, before Papa Jake bellows, “Devils! Look what they’ve done!” All they’ve done is break the glass, but what they could have done is understood, had that brick been a few inches further in, had Julie and Lily of the Valley been standing a few inches further out. “Look what they’ve brought into our house,” Papa Jake says. “They’ve let the evil in.” We have been silent, in shock, but with his voice, we find our own. We shout in anger and we wail, we moan; we tell God He must punish the wicked, we ask that He show no mercy.
Julie hasn’t moved, and I realize I should go to her, that someone should. I rise and hurry to where she stands, splinters of glass like ice around her feet. “You’re okay,” I say, and I’m not sure if I’m asking or telling. There is glass in her hair. She looks up at me and holds the baby toward me, and I take her. A tiny bead of blood blooms on Lily’s cheek. I press my finger to it, but when I take my finger away, it blooms again. I turn around and see that Amanda is behind me with Abigail. “She has a little cut,” I tell her.
“I’ll take her,” Amanda says. “You help Julie.” I transfer the baby to Amanda, who wipes away the blood and then holds her upright, patting and shushing her, and her crying slows. I turn to Julie and pick the glass from her hair, the tiny pieces like ice in my palm.
“She doesn’t want to be with me,” Julie says. “She’s happier with Amanda.”
“She’s scared,” I say. “I’m sure you are too.”
“I think maybe that isn’t my baby,” Julie says.
Everyone has started drifting toward the back of the church, pressing in closer to us. Paul emerges from the crowd and puts his hand on my back. I hold my hand out to him, still cupping the little bits of glass, and he guides me toward a trash can in the corner of the chapel, by the doors. Julie follows and stands by me as I brush the glass off. “Take her home,” Paul says. He presses the truck keys into my hand. I ask him where Rob is, and he shrugs. “No clue,” he says. We both look to Julie, and she shrugs too.
“He left almost as soon as the service started,” she says. “But he seemed like he was up to something.”
“Okay,” Paul says politely, glancing over at me. “Why don’t I just go find him and meet you back at the house?”
“Good idea,” I say, and Paul squeezes my shoulder and jogs off.
“The enemy has been emboldened by their victory against God’s fire,” Papa Jake calls from the front. “They attacked us here! They tried to kill a mother and her child. But they won’t win! They don’t have God on their side.” People have their hands up already, as soon as Papa Jake began to speak, and some are swaying, listening to the voices of angels, to music only they can hear.
“Come on,” I say to Julie. “Let’s go.” I put my arm around her and open the door, the bright morning light invasive in the dim chapel. I look over my shoulder at Papa Jake, who is watching us. He nods at me. “Thank you, Rosemary,” he says. “Care for her. Care for your sister. God bless you both.”
God bless you both, the people say, and I shut the door behind us.
Twelve
In the truck, we are quiet. The radio is tuned to a station Paul likes, playing a sports show with the volume turned very low so that the voices feel private, their conversations urgent and furtive. They repeat the names of players that I barely recognized in my old life, but now when I hear them, I find myself missing these people I do not know, who I would never even recognize if I saw them. I think about tuning the radio to find music—Julie is only a few years older than me, I think, we would have grown up listening to the same bands—but I am already feeling fragile, and Julie seems even more breakable, and I think the nostalgia might actually split us open, kill us. So I turn the radio off. I haven’t driven in a long time, and so it’s easier than I’d think to sit with the silence and focus on what my hands and eyes and feet are doing: tapping the brake as we roll toward a stop sign, pulling the handle for the turn signal, checking the mirrors as we make a left.
I expect Julie to ask about Lily, when she will see her again, who will feed her in the meantime, but she does not. When I glance at her, she’s looking out the window, the back of her head to me, and I see her face reflected in the glass, like a ghost in a mirror. “Julie,” I say because I want to remind us both that she is here, a person, not a spirit caught between worlds. I think of those times, with the boys who were not Paul, how my body had started to feel too light to exist on earth, and I know this is when bad things happen. I say her name again.
She turns to face me. “What?” she asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “Just making sure you’re okay.”
“I’m fine. Here,” she says suddenly, pointing at her house, and I make a sharp turn into the driveway I nearly passed. I stop the truck and turn it off and follow her into the house without asking. She lies down on the couch, puts her feet up, and I notice they are bare, and now I can’t remember if she had even been wearing her shoes in the first place.
I fill up a glass with water from the kitchen sink and bring it out to Julie, but she sets it on the coffee table and doesn’t take a sip.
“Can I get you something else?” I ask. “I could make you a sandwich?”
“Where is the baby?” she finally asks.
“Amanda took her,” I say. “Remember? She’ll bring her back soon. You should rest.”
I expect her to say nothing else, but she sits up. “Did you know I knew Caroline in college?” she asks. “Before she married Papa.”
“No,” I say. “But I know y’all are close now.”
“We lived on the same hall our freshman year,” she says. “At Westbury.” This I knew—that Caroline and Papa had met at Westbury University, a wealthy Baptist school in a small town not too far from here. There are others too who came to Dawes from this school.
“Tell me more,” I say to Julie because I want to hear it, and because there is a tone of voice a person gets when they want to tell a story, a note that says listen to me, I have something to say. When she starts to speak, I realize there were other times too, when I’ve heard that same note, said in the same way: I wanted to name her Evelyn. There’s something wrong with her. I think this isn’t my baby.
She tells me that Caroline is who she has always been, a golden child, Julie says. Hearing this, I imagine a golden sewing needle, delicate and sharp; that is what Caroline is. “And Papa?” I ask.
“He’s just the same too,” Julie says. “He’s always been special.” Yes, I think. Golden in a different way—flashier, like an expensive watch, not a needle. At their school, so many girls were golden in just the way Caroline was: privileged and pretty, smart but not threatening. But while the other boys were rough or funny or athletic, Jake was something else. Magnetic, enthralling, but untouchable. He never dated anyone until he dated Caroline. The rumor was that he never even proposed to Caroline, that she woke up one day knowing she was officially off the market. A ring came later. It just showed up one day sparkling on her finger, winking in the light like a cold and brilliant eye, but if there was a proposal story, no one ever heard it. Oddly fitting, I think, for Jake and Caroline. Too special for an ordinary engagement.
Julie says there was a joke about the little city that housed Westbury—an oddly sized place, too small to be a proper city but a metropolis compared to Dawes—that you could stand on any street corner, throw a rock, and hit a church, but truthfully there were only two churches that anyone at the school went to.
One of the churches was the cool one: moody and artsy, candles burning in the corners, dripping wax onto the floor that stayed there week after week, the slow accumulation of it a kind of art installation. The people who attended wore sneakers and band tees, thick-rimmed glasses. The girls wore bangles on their arms, hippie clothes they ordered from Nordstrom, Free People.
The other church was earnest. This was where Julie, Jake, and Caroline went on Sundays, and then Sundays and Wednesdays, and then every free moment they had. Hearts on the sleeve, hands in the air during worship. People spoke in tongues, and everyone believed it, took it in good faith that this was a true manifestation of the Spirit. People received prophecies, and these too were believed. Healings, yes, Julie saw those too.
But after church, they all went to eat tacos or burgers or went to the pool on warm days. They worked out at the student center, they studied at the coffee shop. They were normal. It was only that their faith was intense.
Every year during spring break, the church took a group of upperclassmen on mission trips to underserved places. One year, Julie says, she heard the pastor just spun a globe, closed his eyes, and pointed, stopping the spinning globe with his index finger. “We’re going to Ukraine!” he said. What if he had landed on Paris? London? I ask. They would’ve gone to Paris or London, I guess. Surely even people in fancy cities need saving, Julie says sharply.
But the year Julie went, Caroline and Jake were going too, and the trip was to Nicaragua. They would spend two days in Managua, then head out to a rural village for a few more days, then take the last two days to rest and play at a modest hotel on the beach. The girls all bought one-piece bathing suits.
The country: a few hours away from the city in a hot van, on a bumpy road. The scenery changed from gray to tan and green, and dust clouds floated up to the windows as the van knocked along. They would be staying in a house owned by a church in-country, twenty minutes’ drive from the village. The girls would help with the children and women in the community, the boys would build things, break things down, swing tools. On their way out to the village each morning, they passed cows in fenceless pastures and chickens roaming in front of small homes. Children peeked and waved at them from behind thin curtains flapping in open windows.
Some of this Julie does not say. Some of it I fill in on my own: the color of the land, the unflattering swimsuits, high necked and athletically cut, the chickens, the children at the window. Some of the details of the churches, I realize, those too are my own, how I envision them, with the candles burning, the rich girls clinging to bohemia, the fervent crowd at the other church, hands in the air, testifying, starving. Those voices on the radio in the truck—I long for a world besides this one.
There was a village boy, Julie says, who was wild. He ran like an animal through the village, spun like a storm in the heat. Did not sit through the lessons the girls taught. He spat and scratched and hit the women. He did not have a mother, Julie says. No one would claim him as their own. He belongs, a woman said in Spanish, to the village. A burden. This woman who was not his mother was the one who every day tried to contain him. Sometimes she would pick him up and hold him on her lap under the shade of a tree by the school, her arms a straitjacket around him. His little chest heaving in and out, body working to run even when he was sitting still.
Usually the mission team ate breakfast at their house, lunch at the village prepared by the women there, and then piled in the van to go back to the church for dinner. But on the last night, the village threw a big party, and the team ate dinner with the locals. There was singing and dancing, and one of the guys from the church’s mission team borrowed a guitar from a man in the village. He sang praise songs from their church back home, and soon it was a full-blown worship service. They were all so tired from the week, from the work of course, but from the community too, from the overwhelming exposure to poverty, from the relentless engagement with other people, some who didn’t even speak the same language, and between the food and the music and the relief of leaving soon, a kind of mania began to build, a frenzy. Hands thrust into the sky, eyes closed, people wept and danced, people sunk to their knees. Julie felt like she had been lifted out of her body, flung out so she could see everything from a higher vantage point, a view more like God’s. What did the villagers do? They sang, Julie says. They danced. We all danced together. She says she can still remember watching Caroline, the bright head of blond hair like a light, as she spun and bobbed, Jake moving beside her but not touching her. The wild boy tore through the crowd. There was the sound of fabric ripping. Caroline stood still, the sky bright with color behind her, and held her tissue-thin skirt together, but it slipped, and everyone could see her legs, tan and firm, and the pale whisper of pink underwear. The boy was laughing at having ripped her skirt. Three girls flanked Caroline, shimmied her away, hiding her from view. Women from the village followed, each offering the clothes off their backs.
The woman who was not the mother of the boy picked him up—he was a small thing, slight but hard and fast as a knife—and she took him to the porch where she sat down on a white plastic chair and held him tightly. He pushed against her embrace, getting an arm loose, flailing, knocking her in the nose, which bled.
The sun was setting, so that bright color began to fade in the dusky light, but when there was still enough light to see by, Julie watched Jake and another boy from the church walk over to the wild boy and the woman. Jake held a tissue out to her, but she couldn’t remove her arms from the boy in her lap, and so Jake held it up to her nose, applying pressure and then gently wiping away the blood.
