Lay It on My Heart (15 page)

“That's why God laid you and your family on my heart.”

“What's going on over here with you two newbies?” says Pastor Chick, approaching in his expensive shoes. He grins first at me, then at Seth, then rocks back in the shoes and grins at both of us at the same time.

“How can you tell if someone's a prophet or not?” Seth asks. “Nowadays.”

I look at my sneakers. The white shoe polish is peeling off now, making them look even older than they did before.

“Prophets, huh,” says Pastor Chick. “Parts of the Bible that are most helpful to me were written by prophets.”

“Like Jeremiah,” I say.

“But there are false prophets,” Seth says. He looks slyly at me. “Jeremiah himself says so: ‘They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord.' Chapter twenty-three: verse sixteen.”

“To be sure,” says Pastor Chick, scratching his chin. “To be sure. But to answer your question, I don't know how you tell them apart. I haven't reached that level of clearance with the Heavenly Commander in Chief. He tells me I have enough to worry about in my own heart. Whether ole Chick Collins is being false or true. Know what I'm talking about, soldier?” Pastor Chick punches Seth in the elbow. “But I do have the low-down on the brownie situation, and Missus Whitson is serving up seconds.” He gives Seth a push and says, “Go get 'em, brother.”

Then Pastor Chick turns to me, and I'm struck by something astonishing. His own Operation Outreach, with the three county people God laid on my heart, fits right in with my father's vision, with the spirit of the Apostle Paul and his ministry to Gentiles. I wonder if Pastor Chick would be interested in hearing this. I wonder too if he would be interested in trying out the ceaseless prayer. But Pastor Chick never stays in one place for too long. He is already winking at me and turning in his shoes and across the room slapping Conley on the back before I can say anything, even thank you.

I
KEEP THE FLYERS FOR
the Main Event in the butt purse, in the bookmobile copy of
A Wrinkle in Time
, so I can pull one out quickly as the opportunity arises. I have another letter from my father in there, too, which I have waited until school to read, away from Phoebe's curiosity. This one's written on the back of a printout from his brain scan. The sheet has ten brains, in two rows, perched on ten skeleton necks.
Everything you feel shows up on the brain
, he writes.
Happy, sad. Afraid
.

The brains are identical except for the white blotches in different places, brain to brain, like a traveling storm. Or like those storms on the surface of the sun, where after a minute of staring at them you can't tell what's actually there and what's coming from your own eye.

I am having trouble hearing the voice of God
, he writes.
That's happened before, but it's different now. And my thoughts are different, too. I used to think many thoughts at one time. Now each one comes slowly. I see it coming, like a car on the road, then I think it, then I wait for it to fade. It all takes so long. To write too. They tell me this is the medication. It's possible that God's words are also coming that slowly, and I'm not receptive enough in my current state to put them together
.

His handwriting is still loose, but at least his sentences are making better sense.

We're doing Operation Outreach at church
, I write back during freewriting.
And guess what? The three people God laid on my heart are county people, and they can already see the light within me
. I glance over at Kelly-Lynn, who raises one bored eyebrow and keeps writing.
This letter could be like an epistle, like Paul wrote to the people of Galatia and Thessalonica. I hope reading hasn't gotten as slow as your thoughts
. I print DO NOT READ across the top of the page for Mrs. Teaderman, words I will erase before giving the letter to Phoebe to deliver. I don't want to make him more confused.

I'm making friends with the people
, I write, shaking my head to get rid of the memory of Tracy calling me prissy, of Cecil's hard stare.
And after I bring them to the Lord, I can help you with the rest of the county. And I am praying without ceasing a lot—
which will not be a lie, exactly, if I redouble my efforts starting right now. Part of an epistle's purpose is to shore up the spirits of those in captivity. With my pen, I make a small hatch mark on the ball of my thumb, and promise myself to make another one every time I catch myself not in prayer.

 

“Does your dad have a brain tumor?” Kelly-Lynn says during activity, pointing to the printout.

“I don't think so,” I say, though the possibility almost appeals to me. A tumor could be removed, maybe, once and for all.

Under the letter on my lap, I'm holding
A Wrinkle in Time
, with the Main Event flyers poking out. All I have to do for Operation Outreach is hand one to her. My hand tingles, poised on the edge of doing this, but then cowardice floods my stomach and I hold back.

Kelly-Lynn eyes the book. “My mom's boyfriend has lots of books,” she says. “Last night he flushed her cigarettes down the toilet and she called him a fag.” She stops talking and peers into my face, and I'm wondering if she's observing the light of the Lord within. I am peering closely at her, too, at the gentle way her eyes lead into a small, straight nose. Even as I show her my teeth in what I hope is a beatific smile, it is sinking into me that I don't look anything like Kelly-Lynn and that I wish I did.

“Your scab's getting smaller,” she says. “How's your boyfriend?”

“Okay,” I say, alarmed by the way untruths return. “I saw him last night.” I imagine this lie to be one of the things that comes between me and the Lord, making it harder for me to keep up my prayer. Which I have stopped, again, and so I dig out my pen and make another hatch mark on my thumb.
Inhabit me, O Lord God
. Out of nowhere, I hear myself sharing an actual truth with Kelly-Lynn. “He wants to look at my, you know.” I dip my chin toward my chest and feel my neck grow hot.

“Tell me about it,” she says. “It feels funny once you figure out what they want, but then you get used to it.”

“Lust,” I say with some authority, wondering if lust shows up on your brain in its own white storm.

The flyers for the Main Event are right there on my lap. I say the prayer a few more times. I separate one of the flyers with my fingertips and take a deep breath, preparing to smile so invitingly at this pretty, indifferent girl that it will seem as though a great idea has just occurred to me. But when the bell rings, Kelly-Lynn turns her head the other way and I end up slipping the flyer into her bookbag instead. Which, depending on how the Lord wants to look at it, could be seen as cowardly or as taking advantage of an opening he may or may not have provided himself.

 

“You tell your mother to watch herself around Morris Osborne,” Daze warns me after school as she loads the washing machine.

“She says it's nice of him to help out,” I say.

“There's helping out, then there's helping out. Some people just can't stop helping out. You can bait those types like fish with the lonely and the sick.”

“He says he's been friends with Daddy since they were kids.”

Daze frowns.

“Or has known him,” I say.

“It's hard for people not to know people in this town,” says Daze, “whether they want to or not. But it's true, Morris Osborne came around when they were boys. Right up until his mother showed up at our back door and said, ‘Morris, there's nothing wrong with your own house.' She was proud that way, and your grandfather believed in preaching from the pulpit, not meddling one-to-one. Which is exactly the kind of man Morris Osborne turned into, a meddler. In everybody's business, and when everybody means a married woman, living on her own for now—a moderately attractive married woman like your mother—and the oh-so-helpful person in question is a bachelor, well then . . .”

I think of how Phoebe called Dr. Osborne “Morris.” How she admitted the hard times.

“There's some married folk who should have thought better of it, for sure,” Daze says. “But there's plenty never-marrieds who would have been well served. So don't talk to me about helping out.”

“Okay,” I say, hands up. Daze is almost never cross with me.

“Sorry, doll,” she says, softening. “Your mother's still young.”

“She's almost forty.”

“She has a pert figure,” Daze says. A shadow of worry crosses her face. “Let's pray your father gets home soon.”

 

The next day, while our English class makes lists of possible how-to speech topics, I watch for some sign that Kelly-Lynn has found the Main Event flyer, but it doesn't come.

“How to cheer,” Kelly-Lynn says, when called upon to share the best of her brainstorming options. “How to babysit.”

Mrs. Teaderman prompts her to be more specific, to show how one writes one's own cheer, or how to care for infants.

“How to sew,” I say when it's my turn, and then, “How to sew a skirt.”

“Those might be complicated props,” Mrs. Teaderman cautions.

For freewriting, I tell my father that two of my three people are already on board with the Main Event. This is on the inventive side, but it will motivate me to invite Tracy right away, before he gets my letter or I lose my nerve.
I feel in my heart that if I get them to the Main Event, the Lord will guide me from there
. I'm not sure I feel this in my heart, exactly, but I am trying to have faith. Then I am erasing the “I feel in my heart” part and writing “I have faith.”

“No erasing,” Mrs. Teaderman says.

Maybe by the time I see you, maybe this week? I will have reached the last person. Maybe I can invite them all to more things, maybe to see me playing Ruth
. I stop writing but keep my pencil tip to the page. I would like to show him how much I remember about biblical lineage. Ruth, a Moabite, descendent of Lot's unfortunate wife, is an ancestor of David, who is an ancestor of Christ. But my father knows all this and knows that I know he knows, and trying to impress him never works. In a town of seminarians, he considers biblical knowledge a duty, not something to be congratulated for.

 

“How come you only ride the bus home sometimes?” Tracy asks me after school. She's already in our seat, waiting. “I seen you getting on that other bus. That town bus.”

“I go to some people's houses,” I say. “Where's Ravenna?”

“Cigarette break,” Tracy says. “And it's not Ravenna, it's that damn fool sub.”

This morning, Tracy's hair was a scraggly mop and her face was blanched white, bare of makeup. Now all her hair has been slicked back into a tight ponytail that bushes out behind her in a giant ball of frizz. She has lined her eyes in bright blue and applied so much mascara that her eyelashes look thick and spiky as thorns.

After the junior high lets out, there are ten minutes before the high school bell. That's the time they give Cecil Goode to make his way to the bus, and now he emerges from the building with the skinny textbook-burning kid. When Cecil moves slowly enough, he walks with less of a hitch. Almost with a swagger. And the skinny guy's talking the whole time, or singing, using his hands to play an invisible guitar. When they reach the bus, the skinny guy hooks the bag he's been carrying crosswise over Cecil's chest, taps him on the back, then hunches away down the row of buses.

The sub has started in on his second cigarette behind the bus while Cecil waits at the bottom of the steps. He's still waiting when the high school bell rings. Then the school doors open and kids start to swarm out onto the lawn.

“That bus driver should fix the ramp,” I say.

“He will,” says Tracy.

“Before the other kids get here, though.”

“All right,” Tracy says. “Don't have a conniption.”

But as the first of the high school kids reach the bus and clamber aboard, Cecil is still waiting. Then there's a hollow banging as he starts swinging his claw into the side of the bus next to the door.

Finally, the sub, a gray-haired man in jeans, emerges from around back, climbs the steps, and struggles with the plywood while the rest of the kids keep collecting on the blacktop.

“Any day now,” Cecil says. When the ramp's finally in place, he lurches up it more violently than usual. He falls into his seat behind us with a grunt, and I can hear him trying to catch his breath. I'm thinking it's got to get to him, having to wait for other people's help. Two seconds later, though, he's pitching his voice in my direction. “Looky who it is. Cousin, you tell that girl she's next.”

Tracy arches one of her nearly invisible eyebrows me.

“I'm not going to sit on his lap,” I tell her. “No one can make me.”

“It's just for a second,” Tracy says. “Just until you can feel his thing. If you don't do it, you have to take what's coming. You get a choice, like truth or dare.”

“What do you mean, ‘what's coming'?”

“Hard to say,” Tracy says.

I hunker down and push my forehead against the dirty window. The rest of the river kids jostle each other down the aisle with a lot more noise than they make when Ravenna's behind the wheel. The bus feels heavy as it fills up, sinking a little on its tires. It smells different than it does in the morning. Even more strongly of cigarettes, and then I see that one of the girls coming down the aisle is still smoking.

“You wish,” says the girl to a boy behind her.

“What,” says the boy, pushing at her back. “What?”

Through it all, the sub just stares out the windshield at the emptying lawn.

“It doesn't hurt none,” Tracy says.

“Did you do it?”