Found in Translation (12 page)

I was always the last person chosen for a team in phys ed, and I’d experienced that kind of exclusion from kindergarten straight through high school. College was bound to be the same. I wasn’t any more an athlete than a home repairer.

I wondered if I’d finally overcome my youthful klutziness the way I outgrew a childhood allergy to chocolate. My inability to use my hands constructively without breaking something was one of my least admired childhood traits, and Mom and Dad forbade me to use a hammer or saw for any reason.

At the time, I couldn’t see why they made such a big deal about the huge holes in the wall of my room. After all, it was my room. Maybe I should have kept the holes small enough to put a 20 x 30–inch poster over—if not a framed 11 × 14 picture.

Permission to use a screwdriver was conditional on one or preferably both parents’ being present to supervise. My most skillful efforts to fix things around the house—I had the best of intentions then, just as I did now—had cost them a small fortune in real repairs.

As the team captains took turns selecting team members, they wouldn’t need to know about my ineptness to realize that Miss Priss was their least desirable choice. In school, a team could only use a specified number of kids. But here, everyone would be chosen, and last place would be the ultimate humiliation.

Jesus’ teaching about the first being last and the last first wasn’t as encouraging as it should have been.

And having to stand here—as short as I was, they’d overlook me if I sat down—while eighteen mostly male pairs of eyes assessed the availability of more than a hundred better choices made it tough to keep from swearing silently.

But I’d been good so far today and managed to convert this yet-unspoken curse into a “Blazes!” instead. My parents disapproved of saying darn, dang, or heck because they sounded too much like the “real thing,” but—under these circumstances—avoiding the real thing beat the, uh, eternal hot oven broiler out of worrying about my parents’ silly rules.

I’d be the last one chosen. I had no doubt of that. I was the smallest, and everyone but Aleesha would still be angry with me today. I wasn’t naive enough to believe that laughing with me earlier signified forgiveness or acceptance.

Not only would I be last, I’d end up with the biggest, burliest, most brutish boy as my team captain, and he’d pay me back for yesterday by sticking me with the dirtiest and most deplorable tasks.

Then the happiest of realities set in. Charlie told us to number off from one to eighteen.

The team captains wouldn’t do the choosing. In fact, they had to number off, too.

I ended up on team #8. My captain was an ugly guy named Frank. I could tell from the expression on the back of his head that he’d love assigning the most awful jobs to me. When he turned to face me, he looked angry—almost rabid—about being stuck with me. That’s when I recognized him as Mr. Take-No-Prisoners.

I wasn’t sure if Frank disliked me because he was unforgiving, because of my recently acquired “Miss Prep” reputation, or because he didn’t like people and it wasn’t me at all; but I was dying to hold my fingertips in his face and shout, “See, Frank? I’ve already cut off my fingernails so I can do my best. Have you filed down your fangs?”

But I was satisfied that God, Aleesha, and I were the only ones who knew about my nails. Both personal prayer and sacrificial nail clipping should be done in a closet.

I was okay about Frank, though. I could put up with anything now. God had calmed me down enough since last night to assure me I could meet today’s challenges gracefully.

We’d gotten up early enough and formed teams so quickly that Charlie and Rob started leading the teams to their building sites at 9:15. I couldn’t understand why boy genius Neil accompanied them as they went from villager to villager, but they managed to communicate sufficiently well to place the intended owner of a specific house on each team.

We posted the team numbers on homemade signs at the front left corner of each tiny lot. Since they were sequential, I thought of them as house numbers. The houses would be on both sides of Santa María’s single street—just as they’d originally been—with the so-called Passover Church and the mess tent dividing the residential area into two sections.

Thinking about the decreased number of cottages needed almost made me cry. How many people did that twister kill?

I’d never witnessed the aftermath of a natural disaster before, and dwelling on this one would nauseate me if I didn’t start thinking about something else.

Charlie and Rob came back around to give each team its assignment. Although they assigned most of the teams to the “glamour jobs”—measuring and cutting boards to the right length for the infrastructure—they asked the remaining five teams, including team #8, to clear off the foundations. Frank looked like they’d asked him to chew nails.

More accurately, he looked like he wanted to spit nails.

I was tempted to offer him a good swear word but decided against it. If he had a sense of humor, I hadn’t seen any sign of it yet. Maybe he belonged to one of those always-serious denominations that never dances, goes to movies, or smiles. I giggled to myself wondering how he would react to somebody speaking in tongues. Maybe I could get Aleesha to pretend to do that sometime.

Regardless of Frank’s dour attitude, I was elated. I was ready to be faithful and flexible and do whatever he asked me to do. Since I’d gotten pretty good at bulldozing my room at home whenever the floor got too buried in stuff to walk on, today’s assignment would be a badly clichéd piece of cake.

Clearing rubble would be much the same, I thought, except we wouldn’t have to watch out for valuables.

Before we could cart away the debris, we had to dismantle the smaller pieces of the three houses the twister hadn’t carried elsewhere. Some of them weren’t that small, and we would have to break them down more. We could probably do our part in a couple of hours.

Crowbars, axes, and sledgehammers, here I come. Mom and Dad, you can’t speak one word of protest. Destruction is the rule today, and I’m in hog heaven.

I looked closely at one of those sledgehammers. I was impressed. Although it was bigger than me, at least my figure was slightly more feminine than its handle.

Frank handed me a short ladder and told me to whack away at something that was about to fall anyhow. But before I could put my fear of heights beneath me and start climbing, I heard loud voices.

“We have to take all three buses back,” someone said. Who …? Oh, maybe the lead driver, the one whose language was worse than mine had ever been.

Rob didn’t give an inch. “No one in this village owns a car, and there aren’t any telephones out here. We’re not going to be left without something to use in case of an emergency. We paid for these buses to remain here … we could make all three of you stay.”

I couldn’t see the lead driver, but I could picture his face glowing a fiery red. “You’re not keeping us here for two weeks in this godforsaken place.”

“You go. You take two buses and only two buses. You hear me?”

The driver let loose with a long string of expletives, and several minutes later I heard the sound of two bus doors hissing shut like a pair of angry turtles.

I waited for my heart rate to go down a bit and started up the ladder, crowbar in hand. But God must not have intended for me to get very far.

Or was the Devil interfering?

A
lthough I still felt a little spacey when Rob guided me to the front row opposite the driver’s seat, I wasn’t nearly as dizzy as I’d been the previous night after hitting my head. At least I didn’t land on my noggin this time.

“Your arm is broken,” Rob said quietly. “It looks like a clean break, if years of parenting and grandparenting have taught me anything about fractures.”

The pain throbbed and radiated throughout my entire upper body far too much for my tastes. In a wilder-than-Wild West setting like Santa María, I wondered if anyone had a bullet I could bite.

I settled myself as comfortably in my seat as I could and pressed my head against the window. I thought about something Rob told me a few minutes earlier.

“I woke up during the night,” he said, “aware that you were out there without a sleeping bag. I got up and brought my spare blanket to the edge of the field, but I couldn’t spot you and couldn’t chance terrifying the other girls by tiptoeing around and shining a flashlight in their faces. Tiptoeing?” He laughed. “Trying to walk through the trash between the sleeping bags, I would probably have fallen on someone. What would my family and my church think if Charlie had to send me home early for such misbehavior?”

After a good giggling spell, I told him Aleesha had helped me find a blanket.

“Thank You, Lord,” he whispered. How many times now had Rob proven himself the opposite of who I thought he was at orientation?

He apologized for needing to have a quick powwow with Charlie before we left, but Charlie needed instructions on handling things while Rob and I were gone. Before going off to find his partner, he handed me a bottle of water and several acetaminophen.

“I hope this helps.”

I closed my eyes and tried to keep from thinking. Although I refused to dwell on this morning’s incident, I realized that—just like hitting my head on the rock last night—it shouldn’t have happened. I never used the word accident to describe anything that greater care would have prevented.

I sighed loudly. No one heard it but God, though.

Unable to silence my thoughts completely, I tried thinking about something else.

From where I was sitting, I could see the tiny building we kept referring to as a church. It fascinated me. Despite Santa María’s near annihilation, the building not only looked intact but showed no visible signs of damage. Only the immense buildup of debris in the yard, several feet deep in places and pressing firmly against the door and base of the building, gave any indication that the storm had come anywhere close.

God alone knew where all the rubbish had originated. Surely this storm really had been a twister. But since we rarely felt the effects of hurricanes in my part of Georgia and the only tornadoes I’d seen were on TV and in movies, I didn’t have much to base my opinion on.

Some people might attribute the building’s survival to the tornado’s spasmodic, unpredictable nature; others might call it coincidence—pure luck. But the only explanation that worked for me was God’s intervention.

The building didn’t seem to fascinate the villagers the same way it did me. If anything, it appeared to terrify them, and that fascinated me even more. Even during the short time I’d been sitting on the bus, I’d seen them walk across Broad Street rather than walk near the building. If a child wandered too close, a parent snatched her back just as if a moving car had been approaching.

I couldn’t help thinking that the structure could have been anything—a school, a storehouse, a hospital. Even a church that looked nothing at all like a church. But it obviously hadn’t been used for anything in many years. Why had they let a perfectly good building go unused? And why hadn’t they housed the elders and the children there after the storm?

I could guess at an answer to my last question: Their ordeal had probably left them too weak to clear a path to the door. They couldn’t have gotten anyone inside. Not without concerted, energy-draining effort.

I wondered when the villagers had last been inside.

I wanted to know so many things about Santa María and her people that I caught myself wishing I could speak even a little Spanish.

I
’d overheard Rob and Charlie talking earlier about clearing the litter from the doorway and using the Passover Church as a break room—a refuge from the sun. They’d keep bottled water inside, along with a number of snacks.

Charlie and Rob had called for volunteers to clear a narrow pathway to the door, and the four willing workers seemed cheerful about their filthy task. They probably just wanted to be the first team members inside. But despite their motives—good, bad, or indifferent—they were typical, dumb males.

They shoveled the litter with rectangular scraps of wood and dumped it just out of the pathway instead of carrying it somewhere else to dispose of. They might as well have been kids shoveling snow from one side of the sidewalk and dumping it on the other side. Whenever the villagers got around to cleaning the churchyard, they would have just as much to cart off as if these guys hadn’t done anything.

I closed my eyes. I couldn’t stand watching those four boys any longer. Sure, we’d be able to reach the door when they finished, but the churchyard would resemble a junkyard more than it did now. Even though the building probably wasn’t a church, the appearance of the yard offended me.

If by any chance the building had ever been a church, the condition of the yard was a sacrilege. God had to feel the same way I did.

Opening my eyes, I watched the volunteers making what they undoubtedly considered good progress. But as far as I was concerned, they hadn’t even started. I wished I could make the churchyard look decent.

Fat chance of that with a broken arm.

W
ell, Kim,” Rob said when he got back on the bus, “I’d call this a tough break, but I don’t want to make light of today’s misfortune. Especially after yesterday.”

I smiled.

“That’s okay. I should have stood my ground—”

“Stood on the ground, you mean?”

I giggled.

“I should have stood my ground and stood only on the ground and refused to go up that ladder. I’m terrified of heights.”

“You were less than fifteen inches off the ground when you fell. That’s what I don’t understand. Does your acrophobia normally kick in at such a low altitude? You were barely airborne yet.”

Although Rob smiled after making a Pastor Ron-type joke, I could tell from the way he wrinkled his face that he was trying to help me relax.

“Sometimes.”
Do I dare to be honest?
“But this time I was so focused on my task I wasn’t conscious of being in the air. I’d die before I told anyone else this, but I fell when I caught my heel in my cuff and didn’t realize it. The manufacturer didn’t design these slacks as work clothes. The shoes, either.”