Lay It on My Heart (27 page)

“And then?” says Mrs. Teaderman.

“And then, I don't know.” I check the ceiling again and then I
do
know. When I look back at the class this time, I meet everybody's eyes, one by one, no pretending. “If he's near, he can show you things,” I say. “Things you want to understand, like if you have a calling. But if he's near, he's also going to know—even if you've been careful not to ask for anything in particular—what's more important to you than he is. And if something's more important to you than he is, then you are not a person after his own heart. And if you're not a person after his own heart, when you screw up you're going to feel his justice, which you deserve, instead of his mercy, which you don't.” I am surprised to find myself pointing out at the class, just like my grandfather points in the famous revival picture.

“Well, okay,” says Mrs. Teaderman in a wrapping-things-up voice. But I'm not finished.

“Because you're going to screw up,” I say. “No matter how hard you try to follow the Bible, to pray without ceasing, or whatever, you're never going to get it all the way right. Not even with the New Testament, which is supposed to show you how to live once and for all. Like a how-to speech. But the New Testament is pretty much the worst how-to speech in the world. If the New Testament tried to tell you how to make a sandwich, then your sandwich would never, ever turn out. And when you end up with what you deserve, when God starts taking things away, the Holy Ghost is supposed to be the comforter.” I find the pet-speech girl in the second row, looking confused. “Pets are a lot better,” I tell her. “A lot more comforting.”

The class is silent. The pet-speech girl nods vigorously, and the girl next to her with the open allergy mouth looks stunned. Mrs. Teaderman brings the fingertips of both hands to her temples, as though her head aches.

“Any successful speech,” she says, speaking with her eyes closed, “is followed by a Q and A.” In the first row, Kevin is already waving his hand. Mrs. Teaderman opens her eyes. “Kevin, make this appropriate.”

“Are you a Jesus freak?” is Kevin's question. It's actually a question everyone in the Youth Group has been prepared for by Pastor Chick, a question everyone in East Winder, probably, has been preparing for since birth. A “Did you know him?” kind of question like the one posed to Peter after Golgotha. We're supposed to offer a proud “yes” and give thanks for the opportunity to take a stand. But I just take a deep breath and hold it as a clean, cold wave of godlessness rushes through me.

“No,” I say finally. “Not anymore.” I listen hard in case a cock starts crowing somewhere, but there's just Mrs. Teaderman saying, “Enough,” to Kevin, who has raised his hand again, and “Thank you, Charmaine,” to me.

“You're crazy,” Kelly-Lynn says when I get to my seat. But she's smiling with half her mouth, like she can't help herself. The class is still whispering about my speech while Kevin is walking to the front for his turn. But all he does is imitate Mrs. Teaderman's peanut-butter-sandwich example with grilled cheese, and all he's brought in is a couple of slices of bread from the cafeteria, and he's so nervous that he drops his one prop on the floor, and everyone laughs at him, too. By the time he's finished, the class has forgotten all about my prayer speech, except Mrs. Teaderman, who hands me the grading sheet as I file out the door. The speech counts for a quarter of my grade for the term, and when I unfold the paper in the hallway, it has a big A- in red at the top.

 

I always thought that godlessness would feel like being trapped in a huge, hopeless sore throat, filled with the ache of despair, with sides too steep and slippery to climb out of. Instead it's a sharp, clean opening, like a crevasse in rock, an emptiness where all the effort used to be. The feeling has a nervous edge, and I catch myself laughing out loud about nothing I can name as I walk to the bus.

Anything, it seems, can be said. On the bus, when Cecil Goode shuffles past Tracy and me and tells me it's my lucky day, I say, “Sure it is,” just to let him know I don't believe he means it.

Tracy jabs me with her elbow as Cecil stops behind our seat. “You asking for it?” His delivery is careful, right down the straight, strong line of his nose.

“Move on by, Cecil,” Tracy says. “You nuts?” she says to me, blue eyes wide.

“He's full of talk.” I've never in my life said someone was full of talk.

Behind us, Cecil heaves himself into his seat.

“What?” says Tracy under her breath. “You want to, now?”

I shrug. The part of me that has feared what might happen feels defiant. And then there's the part of me that thinks about it sometimes, when I have to cross my legs until my blood feels like static electricity. This, I realize with a tiny shock, must be lust. The girl version.

The sky looks gray and heavy, and as we make our way through the county toward East Winder, a few drops of rain splatter the dirty window near my face. Even with the sub driving, the bus stays quiet, like we're all breathing in the same thick air that could put us to sleep. When we hit Main Street, Tracy points past me to the orange brick of First Community. The marquee reads
MAIN EVENT: FRIDAY NIGHT, SCAVENGER HUNT AND YOUTH LOCK-IN
in its bowed-out tin letters.

“I'm coming to that thing,” she says, “where we go around and ask people for stuff.”

I have almost forgotten about Operation Outreach, which seems to be moving right along without my prayer to prop it up. Without my father's vision too, probably.

“A church party in East Winder,” she says. “God's own Holy Land.” Then quietly, still looking past me, she says, “I know where your dad's at. My mom heard it. I had a aunt that went crazy. Started off eating chalk and ended up chewing off her fingernails in Eastern State.”

I consider saying he's not crazy, then I think,
What difference does it make?
I explain about the chemical imbalance in his brain, how they're fixing it with medicine. But who's to say that chemical imbalance and crazy aren't the same thing? What if chemical imbalance is actually what crazy means?

“When's he coming home?” she says.

“He's not,” I say. “He's going someplace else.” Even in the sluggish bus air, my voice sounds clean, like a thin, clear transmission from some other world, where you say anything you want and just ride cleanly above all the words. “He thought he wasn't crazy his whole life, but now he thinks he was, and so that makes everything he did before maybe crazy, so he's not doing anything he did before. Like live with us.”

“That's a man for you,” Tracy says, nodding. “Crazy or no. That's how they do.”

Which is one way of looking at it. But if my father were like other men, then he would have gotten someone pregnant, like Tracy's dad did, or he'd have had a midlife crisis and gone bankrupt, like Kelly-Lynn's dad. Or gone to jail like Theresa's dad. Or even just gone from not crazy to crazy, because what I never heard of was anyone moving the other direction, coming back from crazy that you didn't even know was crazy at the time and turning everything upside down by being normal.

Tracy studies my face. “You get to stay in the trailer-cabin, then,” she says finally. “You get to keep riding this bus.”

“I guess I do.”

It's raining heavily now. The wettest September in recent history, everyone says. We've passed the elementary school and the water tower and crested the hill on the way out of town, and now we're driving through spongy, depressed-looking fields as far as you can see. A wet brown leaf blows against the window and sticks there. Not a maple leaf with a pretty pattern, but a plain old oval-shaped leaf, and I study its veins and I listen to the bus tires hiss and then I realize that Cecil Goode hasn't said anything more the whole ride home, not to me or any other girl, about sitting on his lap. I peek back at him, and he's staring out at the wet fields, too.

Then we're at his stop, and the sub is bending over to fix the ramp. Before Cecil is halfway down the aisle, I'm on my feet and pushing past Tracy.

“Where you going?” she says, moving her legs for me to get by, but I don't answer.

“You get off here?” the sub asks when I reach the front, and I mumble that I have to see my granny, and he doesn't know any better. I scoot on down the wet, raw plywood ramp after Cecil Goode and stand there in the mud, rain pelting my head while the bus lurches into gear and pulls away. Cecil stops and pivots slowly on the shorter of his short legs.

“You lost?”

I look away across the road at four buildings I've only seen as we drive past. The two mobile homes and two outbuildings. There's a big propane tank in the yard, a light blue bullet speckled with rust.

“You following me?”

I hear him, but the clean feeling gives me the sense that I've stepped out of time again, like I'm observing myself from a long way off, from the future, maybe. “Which one do you live in?” I ask.

He jerks his head toward the smaller mobile home, the one parked right up against the hillside underneath where the limestone starts to go bald, the one that looks like it's been spray-painted brown. The only car in the yard is an old station wagon up on cinder blocks. But Cecil doesn't cross the road toward the trailer. Instead, he turns toward the river side of the road, where there aren't any buildings for half a mile either way.

As I follow him, the rain begins to let up. This high, we can hear the bus whining down through the switchbacks below, and farther below that, the river rushing swift and brown on the floor of the gorge. Then those sounds disappear under the big sound of a train, so close up here that it ricochets right through my body. Soon it edges out onto the bridge.

Cecil's gait is slow enough over the grass that I could easily catch up with him, but I keep myself back a ways. He takes a big stride on his longer leg and then kind of swings the other one up with it. I think how his whole life is like this, every movement something he has to try to do. He disappears with a dip in the land, and when I get to the drop-off, he's sitting on a large overturned tree underneath another tree, and he's using the metal claw to fish out his cigarette pack from his shirt pocket.

He bends his head to the pack and finds the end of a cigarette with his lips. “There's a lighter in my jeans,” he says. “Make yourself useful.” And I can just hear his voice, underneath the heavy sound of the train, soft and purposeful as a touch.

I move closer and look down into his hair, which is darker where it's damp. There's a fine copper stubble on his jaw. A “ginger,” Daze would call him. He smells like cigarettes already, but also like my father, which means, I think, that they use the same shaving cream or soap.

I have never touched a boy's pants before when a boy is in them. The stitching around the pocket feels stiff and familiar, just like the stitching on my own jeans. I find the lighter with my thumb and forefinger and extract it. It's beat-up metal, not plastic, with a gold-and-black star labeled
U.S. ARMY
.

“No hurry,” Cecil Goode says, and then I abuse my thumb against the lever until it catches, and I hold the tiny flame to the end of his cigarette, hoping I'm doing it right. He inhales deeply, watches the train for a moment, exhales, then turns back to me. “You want one?” he says, the cigarette moving up and down.

“No, thanks.”

“What'd you get off the bus for, then?”

I have expected him to know, somehow, from his insinuations, and now I peer down uncertainly at the river. There are a lot of things I could say to him that would be true.

“You always say it's my day, and then nothing happens,” I say, “and you should stop saying it or do something about it. I can take it. I can take what's coming.”

“Girl, what are you yammering about?” he says. Like he hasn't been warning me for weeks.

“And also, God laid you on my heart one time.”

“He what?”

“Charmaine,” I say. “My name's Charmaine.”

“I don't care what your name is,” he says. Then he laughs and blows smoke out of the corner of his mouth. “You wanna sit on Cecil's lap like the big girls do?” For the first time I can remember, he smiles. He has very straight, very white teeth. So white and straight they might not be real. Everything about his face and head is square, like magazine pictures of men.

“You're handsome,” I say, before I can stop myself.

Cecil Goode throws back his head and laughs again. “You sound like my granny,” he says. “You're handsome,” he mimics in an old-lady voice. He's not being mean, though. The ash on his cigarette is about an inch long now and creeping toward his mouth, and he leans forward and clicks something with his tongue and the ash falls to the wet grass. “What?” he says. “Don't tell me you want to be my girl.”

I shake my head. I could not in a million years explain what it is that I want from this boy, only that it holds me here. His eyes are the lightest brown. Yellow almost. Golden. They call him “Child of God,” but he might be an angel. The big male biblical kind. An archangel like Michael. Or Gabriel.

“You could show me your tits,” he says. “I wouldn't mind that.”

The suggestion sends a sweet, scary throb through my body. Below my womanhood, down my legs. I glance again toward the road, but we're over the knoll and out of sight. When I turn back to him, he's frowning. “What,” he says. “You after this?” He ducks his head toward where his right sleeve is always tied in a knot. “How about you see what's under the sleeve if you show me your tits?”

If anyone had asked me what was underneath the tied sleeve, I would have guessed “a stump.” Like the smooth, short thigh of Lt. Col. Evans at the Custer Peake Memorial Retirement Center. Now I'm not sure.