Bitter in the Mouth (5 page)

“Prunes
scallion,”
I replied, making a face.

Kelly laughed. She understood that there was something unpleasant hidden within the word “prune” as well as the word “illumination,” so she repeated both words until I begged her to stop.

“Or what
grahamcracker
?” Kelly asked.

“I’ll never
bubblegum
speak
lemonade
to you
cannedgreenbeans
again
pancakenosyrup!”

“You
cannedgreenbeans
never
bubblegum
say any
rice
thing
tomato
to me now,” Kelly said, rolling her eyes.

If you charted our friendship, 1978 was a peak year for us. Our world was small and intimate and complete. We were ten years old. We were in the fourth grade. We had no pets, no siblings, and no crushes. We had our devotion to each other, to Dolly Parton, and, with
Illumination
, our devotion to Jesus. In letter #253, I asked Kelly what that word meant.

“Light,” she wrote back. “Also what happens when we have light. We can see more and better things.” Kelly dotted the
i
in the two
lights
and the one
things
with a heart, an anatomically correct one, complete with left and right ventricles.

Illumination
began with how we felt about Jesus. We started with a list of the things that we loved about Him.

We love you Jesus! because you were a real cute baby
.

We love you Jesus! because your arms are always wide open, and you want to hug us
.

We love you Jesus! because people follow you around like sheep
.

We love you Jesus! because your hair is long and shiny
.
(We think you use Breck shampoo.)

We love you Jesus! because wherever you go you bring your own illumination
.

At the end of the writing of
Illumination
, when we were almost eleven and felt very confident about our faith (which was good, as we were about to stop believing in ourselves), we listed the Ten Commandments and then the ways out of them. Kelly said they were called “Exemptions,” and then she asked, “So?”

“Nothing
tomato,”
I replied.

Kelly took out a small spiral notebook that she kept in her purse—I didn’t have one yet because my father said that everything that I needed should fit in my back pockets—and she wrote down “exemption.” She was keeping a list of words that fired blanks. She thought eventually we would see a pattern. None emerged because she lost interest and then she lost the notebook.

Thou shall not kill, unless thou is killing to save Jesus
.

Thou shall not steal, unless it is to take back what was stolen from thou, which meant it was yours in the first place
.

Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife, unless thy own wife is dead and thou are very lonely
.

Kelly kept our only copy of
Illumination
because she was the scribe. She was the scribe because her handwriting was better than mine. Her handwriting was better than mine because she had written letters even before I came into her life. She told me that the letters had been addressed to Nobody and signed Somebody. Or maybe it was the other way around.

My great-uncle Harper and I were both the confessors that night. My hands, in fact, had been the first to tremble. After our dinner at Bridges, we drove back to Boiling Springs and to his house, a Greek Revival with a pristine exterior painted in “Clotted Cream,” which he proudly noted was a color that he had researched for period authenticity and then had had custom-mixed. Baby Harper began as he usually did: “Linda Vista, come sit by me.” We arranged ourselves on the divan, and he returned to the subject that I had introduced earlier at Bridges. “Now you know your momma is
not
a witch, Vista Girl,” he said. “But when we were both young, I thought she was one too.”

DeAnne and her uncle Harper were only eight years apart in age. That I knew. What I didn’t know was that from the moment Iris and Walter Wendell brought DeAnne down the stairs of the green-shuttered colonial on Piedmont Street, wrapped in the same baby blanket that had covered Baby Harper during his first hours of life, he decided that he didn’t care for his niece, and he told her so every time he was left alone with her. He whispered, “You’re a bag of bones,” into her infant ears. He handed her “Your name is Mud” notes when she began to walk but long before she could read. As his vocabulary developed and hers was still limited to “momma” and “papa,” Baby Harper’s scribbling became more direct and to the point: “Incubus, Succubus, wish you weren’t with us.” When Iris pried these slips of paper from DeAnne’s moist little hands, the ink was already smudged and the messages were beyond reproach. As my great-uncle told this to me, he flipped through the pages of H.E.B. Nine and stopped at a photograph of DeAnne standing beside a cake with eight lit candles. He pointed to her right hand balled into a fist and to what looked like the corners of a handkerchief poking through it. He said
that
was the last note that he ever gave to her. I asked him what the note said. Then I asked him why he stopped.

“I forgive you,” the note said.

When DeAnne turned eight, the age that Baby Harper was when she came into the world, he realized something very important about her, something that was probably inborn and fixed. His niece would never write a note back to him. Not even to ask, “Why?” Baby Harper knew that if he continued to despise DeAnne for simply being (in the way, in between him and Iris, in the center of every family gathering enjoying the grace that belongs only to the youngest of the flock) and, more important, if he continued to let her know it, he would be committing an even greater sin than he had bargained for. The meek shall inherit the earth. Baby Harper wasn’t sure he understood why they would, but he sure wasn’t going to bet against God. His niece, DeAnne, was a Whatley in name and in blood. She hadn’t inherited a drop of the Burch battery acid that flowed through Iris’s veins (and to a lesser extent his own). My great-uncle Harper, and this was the revelation, said that maybe skipping a generation was God’s way of balancing out the world.