Jesus Saves (2 page)

Two: GINGER

She pulled one sweaty leg out from under the sleeping bag. Ginger had it since grade school and the material, faded pink gingham on one side and powder blue flannel on the other, smelled faintly of sweat. The ceiling creaked above as her father shifted in his sleep. Saturday nights were always restless for him and lately he was upset about the trustees at church. Last week, she went upstairs to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and found him sitting in the family room reading his Bible by the television's muted light.

She pulled her pillow over her head. Some nights she felt more dead than others. Last winter Ted's tires locked on a patch of ice and they'd skidded into the guardrail. Afterward she'd felt dead, as if she'd
passed over to the other side. She felt this way again because of the deer. Like they'd all died. Father. Son. Holy Ghost. They'd been crooked and devious in their paths so their paths led down into death.

The furnace kicked on and the house shook as all the vents jiggled to life. The basement was crowded with damp boxes of family memorabilia stacked on boards in case of flooding. Blue dryer lint clung to every surface and spiders meditated in the corners. Her father's old jazz records leaned against one wall; plastic toys on metal shelves filled up another. Even in the dark she recognized her doll Kimmie, her toy cash register, and the telephone with the eyes that swayed this way and that.

Ever since her mother died nobody slept deeply. Just after the operation, her mother lay in bed, watched TV, read from pamphlets on breast reconstruction, on living with cancer. She cried, sometimes quietly, but usually she'd cry and scream and yell about how she wasted her life, that all the women in the Ladies Guild could go to hell if they didn't like the way she dressed. God was nothing to her and the idea of redemption was bullshit. She never swore, so when she did, it was like a demon inside her. She didn't believe in God anymore. The body, she'd say over and over, was just shit and you can't turn shit into anything else. Liquid built up inside the stitches and when they changed the gauze, it was wet and fetid.

She leaned over, pulled the side table drawer, got her cigarettes, knocked one out, then flicked the lighter, watched the paper ignite and the purple smoke loosen and rise. When her mother first found out she had cancer, she read books about aroma therapy and crystal intervention; she ate brown rice and steamed vegetables and listened to tapes about positive thinking and curing yourself through creative imagination. Her face was always flushed then and her life
reduced to anxious waits between doctors’ appointments. To her father's horror, she went to the healing ceremony at the local Pentecostal church, had snake oil rubbed on her forehead. When the preacher's hands rested on her head, she said she felt a definite sense of purity and release.

Pentecostals believed that the end time was near and Ginger believed it too. She heard the universe was expanding and this was why time went forward, but she'd heard too that at some point the universe would begin to contract and then time would start backward. The point of change would be some kind of apocalypse, and then all of history would rewind itself like a video. Jesus had the power to make time go backward, like when he raised Lazarus from the dead. This was what was meant by
risen from the dead.
The dead would get their flesh back and be born again out of their coffins and lie in the hospital and then they'd open their eyes and their hearts would start and they'd get better and go home and live all the way down until they were children and then little babies and then they'd go back inside their mothers and melt to nothing and this would go on and on until all of history played itself backward, until people lived in caves again, until they evolved back into apes and then to fish and then tiny amoebae, until everything was in that electrified mud puddle and the lightning would take back its kiss of life and the earth would explode and time would be no more.

Her father was talking in his sleep again, the words muzzy. His mattress heaved sideways like an imbalanced boat and she heard his feet land solidly on the floor and the springs uncoil as he stood. She snubbed the cigarette out against the bed frame, waved her hand to dissipate the smoke, then slid down into the sleeping bag, pressed her head against the pillow and pretended to sleep. She didn't want
to talk about God. It was always so humiliating. His footsteps were frantic and reckless in the hall; then the basement door pulled open and his surplice billowed down the stairs.
Had he slept in his church robes?
But once her eyes adjusted, she saw it was just a pile of dirty sheets draped down the steps and a cold draft caught in the stairwell, shifting and rattling the door on its hinges. He was still in bed, restlessly rolling sideways, yelling out, “Her spilled blood will pass for moonlight.”

Amen,
Ginger thought,
crucify the flesh.
She reached out from under the flannel and grabbed the lighter, pushed her thumb against the flint; a tiny sunset appeared, blue-green core, the arch of transparent orange and creamy wavering light on top. She brought that flame so close to her eye she felt its moisture heat up and evaporate.
Jesus come down,
she prayed,
and save us from our miserable selves.

Ginger's T-shirt twisted around her sweaty stomach and blood swelled against her temple. She opened her eyes. In the dream she'd approached the deer in the woods, slowly, with her hand outstretched, like when she was little and wanted to get close to rabbits or birds. The deer reached out its front leg; the black hoof curving around her fingers like soft tar.

Her father was talking upstairs, practicing his sermon, trying to convert the medicine cabinet. It wasn't eight yet, but he'd been up for hours and she'd heard his footfalls creeping around the kitchen as he had his long meditative breakfast of black coffee and buttered toast. Sometimes he'd sneak cigarettes and play his jazz records, the volume just barely audible.

Last night's red wine pickled her mouth and she felt fragile. Her breasts were sore and there was that mysterious feeling in her lower stomach. But the blood and the horrible cramps were still a week away. Sometimes they got so bad she felt like she was fighting an invisible adversary, one that punched her in the stomach and then reached up into her gut.

It was Sunday morning. The air told her, as did the light. Every object looked hollow and inconsequential. Today the material world was little comfort and she felt anxiety rise in her chest until she had to muffle a cough. She couldn't decipher his words, but she listened to his voice rise and fall theatrically, tried to judge if he had butterflies in his stomach. “It never gets any easier,” he'd say to her if she caught him coming out of the bathroom, the blood drained from his face, nervousness widening his pupils.

She listened to him walk down the carpeted hallway, back into the kitchen, where he paused to put on his long black coat, pick up his Oxford English Bible with the sermon pressed inside, and leave the house through the kitchen door. He started the car, but it wasn't until Ginger heard him back up and accelerate down the road that she threw off the sleeping bag, pulled up her jeans, and climbed the dark stairwell into the light of the house.

His breakfast dishes sat in the sink and she washed them, gazing out the window through the gray woods to the cars, blurs of metallic color rushed by on the highway. She got a cup of burnt coffee and sat in the family room, used the remote to turn on the TV. There was a fat little man with a lacquered hairpiece saying
Be healed
on one station and the technicolor Bible story of the ten commandments on another. She looked at the religious paintings behind her. One showed a dank and rotting woods but as you followed the trunks up,
the sick leaves turned to Easter lilies and the light was pale and blue at the top. The other was of a little ark, floating on a dark and dangerous river. On a marble shelf below was the soapstone bust of an African woman a missionary had given to her mother.

She rose in a languid way, like a person morally oppressed by heat, and staggered down the hall to her father's room, layover his unmade bed, then opened his closet. Most of his clothes were black, short- and long-sleeved minister shirts and plain black pants. In the drawers were T-shirts, some with worn logos from former church softball teams, his white underwear, and endless pairs of mismatched black socks. In the top drawer was a leather box, and she took it to the bed and opened it. Inside were horsehide cufflinks from when he was a boy and the Celtic cross her mother gave him for a wedding present, a tiny cross lapel pin he wore in the hospital, and a yellowed newspaper clipping from his ordination, pennies, paper clips, and one German coin.

She closed the box, careful to return everything to its original place, then walked across the hall to her old room and flung herself onto the bed. The room was painted pale peach and there was a pressed-wood chest and desk, both painted white, and a pink rug in a hue her mother called salmon. While she was sick her mother slept here and the smell of ammonia clung to the curtains. At the very end her mother became sweet like a baby, blank-eyed, talking gibberish. After morphine, her lids drooped and she'd sleep. But an hour later she'd arch her back and scream until the nurse had to strap her in a white muslin jacket with metal hooks that held her to the bed frame.

At first her father sat at her mother's side, held her hand, sometimes touching her flushed cheek, the edges of his mouth turned
down with sympathy and his eyes glassy and red. He'd nod his head, agreeing with everything she said, about how unfair life was, how it didn't seem to make any sense. Sometimes he'd say something about the mysteries of God's Will, about cultivating strong faith, and her mother would get angry and ask him to leave the room, say she didn't like to hear him talk nonsense. Near the end, her eyes grew wild and desperate; she'd called him in to pray, but she wouldn't hold his hand, kept insisting that he grasp the hand of Ginger's old teddy bear. He'd finally relented and bowed his head, his body brittle with embarrassment. Her mother didn't believe in God anymore and she just laughed. After that, he rarely came into the room, just hovered at the doorway, asking the nurse if she needed anything.

Ginger opened the closet and took down the shoe box from the top shelf that held all of the sympathy cards they received when her mother died. Most had little animals on them, blue birds and bunnies’ or a Jesus in soft focus looking wise and demure. One woman wrote in a shaky cursive script that God needed her mother in heaven, that he'd looked down from the clouds, seen her suffering, and decided she'd be better off with him. She took a skirt from a hanger and pulled it up around her waist, fastened the button. The floral skirt was the one piece of her mother's clothing she'd kept and though she knew the people at the church thought she was crazy, she wore it there almost every week.

She needed to hurry; if she wanted to get to church before the sermon, she'd have to start walking now. It was late enough to walk along the highway in peace, without members stopping to ask if she needed a ride.

*  *  *

The hymn swelled, one of the old ones, its melody ponderous and Germanic. The usher pressed a bulletin into her hand and she slid into the last pew, a position saved for latecomers like herself. She was lucky. There weren't many typos in the bulletin this week. In the announcements that counted—the special thank you to Herb Clayton for making and donating the guest-book stand in the narthex, and the notice for the youth group dinner featuring com dogs, and the Martin Luther movie Wednesday night—everything was spelled correctly. She'd seen that movie a hundred times, always admiring Martin's short earnest hair-do and the part when rain blew in the window and he fainted because he was so afraid of God. The altar flowers, white carnations, yellow mums, red gladiola in a pulp paper vase, were given by Mr. Mulhoffer in memory of his beloved mother, the legendary Eva Mulhoffer, whose sauerbraten was as important to the history of the church as the founding ministers. It was Mulhoffer who put up the money for this new church. He argued in congregational meetings that the downtown area was dead, filled with drug addicts and petty criminals and that the future of the church was in the suburbs, where his pressed-wood furniture factory was located, down the highway, not far from the interstate entrance. He'd made a fortune in cheap colonial bedroom sets, Formica dinettes, couches that looked like overweight lazy-boy recliners. It was junky stuff, but Mr. Mulhoffer was not an unappealing man. He wore his white hair short and his pants pulled up over his big belly, and he was charming and friendly to everyone. But Ginger didn't like him because he believed unequivocally that anything new was better than anything old. His wife shared her husband's fanatical love of the new. Every Saturday she came by the church to urge Ginger's father to wear the new vestments, the minimal
alb and the thin red stole with the machine-embroidered Alpha and Omega. Her father told Ginger that in the new vestments he felt like an alien in a bad sci-fi movie.

She watched him sitting on the wood slab suspended from the white brick wall, jotting down notes on the pages of his sermon. He looked anachronistic in his silk-lined robe, the cuffs edged with ornate lace; these vestments looked better in the old stone church, with the detailed cherry-wood altar and the gold glass lanterns hanging from the ceiling.

The organist pressed hard on the crescendo shoe and the congregation bellowed.

And though they take our life
/
goods, honor, children, wife / yet is their profit small
/
these things shall vanish all / the city of God remaineth.

The lights dimmed for the sermon. The stained-glass windows cast red, yellow, and lime green auras over members sitting at the edge of the pews. She'd never get used to the white brick walls and geometric stained-glass windows of the new church. Her father told her the building was modeled after some modern church in France. The original probably had an exotic feel, Mediterranean or Middle Eastern, but this replica, with its track lighting and wall-to-wall red carpeting, felt generic as an airport.