The Talk-Funny Girl (25 page)

I couldn’t think of any reply. I was imagining a baby girl in the house, my mother refusing to change its diapers, feeding it only when she was in the mood. I was thinking the child would surely die if she didn’t have an older sister there to care for her.

My aunt reached across and put one hand on my knee, which made me jump, but I didn’t move away. “Look at me, honey.”

I turned my face.

“I love you,” my aunt said.

I couldn’t remember anyone ever having said that to me, not my mother or father and not any boy. All I could think to say was “All right.”

“I’m going to make things better now. I promise you that.”

“Things go along good just as now.”

Another wash of water came up into Aunt Elaine’s eyes. I looked away. It was a crying day for the two of us. Through the windshield I saw Aaron’s ugly truck go past, but Aaron didn’t see me, or if he saw me he didn’t wave.

“Look at me please, honey. Things aren’t fine, and they aren’t normal, and there isn’t a God anywhere who wants this to happen to you.”

“Why could he of let it, then?”

“I don’t know the answer to that question. But I know it is going to stop.”

I looked at my aunt’s face then. It was a good face, and kind, but the face of a person—this seemed obvious to me—who did not know much about the way the world worked. Not nearly as much as she thought she knew.

Nineteen

T
he next day, my mother and father didn’t go to church. With the exception of once when my father had hurt himself in a bad fall in the woods, and those weeks when we were completely out of money, it was the first time since I was very small that I could remember staying home on a Sunday morning. Snowstorms, ice storms, the flu and sore throats, lack of decent clothes—almost nothing stopped us from making the trip to West Ober to pray with Pastor Schect. I was fairly certain why my parents weren’t going: The police must have come when I was away and asked them what had been happening at the church. But I wasn’t about to raise the subject.

For breakfast I made myself two slices of toast with peanut butter and honey, and drank two glasses of water to fill my stomach. (With my new earnings I had wanted to buy food for the house, but my father flew into a rage when I mentioned it—which was confusing to me: Hadn’t he been the one who wanted me to work and contribute money? Wasn’t he happy to have the extra income? So, instead of using some of it to buy food, I kept all my share of the money for myself, in an old pair of underwear in the back left corner of my closet, squeezed under a loose edge of Sheetrock next to the cathedral book.) My mother sat on her end of the couch, not offering to cook, not reading anything,
not drinking, not even raising her eyes when I sat at the table. My father had gone out early into the woods, come back to get his keys (still holding his chain saw in one hand, as if it had become like another arm to him and he was unaware of it), and then driven away without speaking to either of us. I wondered if he’d gone to Weedon’s, or to find and hurt Aunt Elaine, or if he’d decided, in spite of the police investigation, to go to the service on his own.

When I finished eating I went into my room, took the book Sands had given me out of its hiding place, and sat on my bed with it opened across my knees. I put the pillow beside it so I could cover the book quickly if my mother came in, and I turned the pages slowly, studying every aspect of the church buildings, every corner and arch, every stone and piece of stained glass and bell tower. Each time before I turned to a new image, I’d say a short prayer, asking God to let me keep working on the cathedral, to forgive me for my sins, not to punish me too badly for missing church. But my prayers had turned mostly empty by that point, just an old habit, almost a superstition.

When I was most of the way through the book, I heard the popping sound of tires on the gravel driveway, but I didn’t hear the usual backfiring and rumbling of my father’s pickup. Thinking it might be my aunt come to check on me, I hid the book under the pillow and stepped into the main room of the house. My mother was locked in one of her trances and hadn’t moved. There was the sound of a car door being closed. I went nearer the window and looked out. I saw a plain black car in front of the house—the police, I thought, at first—and a man standing next to the driver’s-side door with his back to me. But then, before the man even turned around, I realized it wasn’t a policeman. Pastor Schect stood still for a minute, arms hanging at his sides. He turned his head left and right, left and right again, raking his eyes across the neat stacks of stove wood and the patches of spring grass that marked our bare yard like an infestation. He turned around and as he started toward the house he looked straight at the window.

“What on?” my mother said, lifting her head and blinking like a person awakened from sleep.

Before I could answer, there was a staccato knocking.

“Open it, you Majie you,” my mother said in a sleepy voice.

I couldn’t make my feet move. I said a prayer under my breath. The knocking started up again.

“I’ll boy you for sure you don’t open it.”

I went to the door and when I pulled it toward me, Pastor Schect was there on the step, his face knitted and puckered as if someone had taken a needle and sewed the cheeks to the lips and the eyebrows to the forehead in five bad stitches. I looked at his dyed hair, his nose that widened like a horse’s when he breathed. His eyes belonged to a man who was starving to death and hallucinating, seeing me as a piece of food. From where he stood, the open door blocked his view of the couch, and so, after seeing the empty driveway, he must have thought I was home alone. He’d already started toward me, excited, eager, and I’d already taken a step backward, when my mother blurted out, “Who the God would bang doors on us for this hour?”

I watched the surprise wobble across Pastor’s face. He straightened up, breathed through his nostrils once, and strode into the room exactly the way he strode around in church: legs thrown out in front of him, chin back, neck stiff. A wind-up doll playing preacher. I noticed for the first time that he had on a suit, a rumpled brown suit over a white shirt and red tie, and his work boots. “I have come to cast out demons, say,” he yelled as he stepped far enough forward to see around the door and make eye contact with my mother. She stood up and bent forward in a sort of awkward bow and then didn’t seem to know what to do. We weren’t used to having visitors. The awkwardness lasted a few seconds before there was the sound of a pickup in the driveway, another slamming door, and then my father yelling crazily, “Nah! Nah! Nah!” He came running toward the open door and I could see he had the chain saw still in his hand, and sweat and dirt on his face. He’d told
me more than once that whenever he left us alone he worried about someone coming to the house to rape my mother and me. He’d kill the man, he promised. He’d cut the man true in half. For one second I thought my father was going to run right up the sagging steps and start the chain saw as he crossed the threshold, and part of me was hoping he’d cut Pastor Schect into pieces. But when he saw who it was he stopped short, breathing hard, and let the heavy saw hang down by his side so that the veins stood out under the skin of that arm.

Pastor Schect dropped his eyes to the saw and lifted his arms overhead and fluttered them there. “Satan from this house go!” he shouted.

My father squinted at him, took two more fast breaths, and said, “We dint ain’t do it.”

“We dint,” his wife echoed.

“I dint do it,” I said. “My aunt did.”

I felt, at those words, that I would be sick. I felt that Satan surely was in the house then, and had crawled up inside me and taken hold of my tongue. I watched as Pastor stomped around the living room, slapping his hand on various surfaces—the table, the sofa, the walls. My parents had one picture on the wall—a kitten in a basket; my mother had brought it home from the dump in a sentimental moment and my father had banged in a nail and hung it there to please her. When Pastor Schect hit the wall the second time the picture bounced loose and fell. We heard the sound of glass breaking. My father put the saw down at his feet and looked at my mother. He was well into the house now, and Pastor Schect was moving toward my room, ignoring the breaking glass. “Here is the demon’s place, say!” he shouted in his high, raspy voice, standing at the door of my room, looking in. “The demon bed! The demon clothings! Cast them out, say!” Hearing those words, my father turned to me and took half a step but I wasn’t going to wait to see what happened next. I swerved around his arm and ran out the door and past the two vehicles, sprinting for the road. “You Majie you!” I heard my mother yell behind me. “Girl, you come! Douse you!”

But I kept sprinting, turning onto Waldrup Road and not looking back.

I ran as far as my legs and lungs would let me, listening for the sound of a truck engine over the harsh sawing noise of my breath. When I couldn’t sprint anymore I slowed to a trot, my breath coming in big heaves and the soles of my sneakers scuffing the dirt. A coyote crossed the road in front of me, its coat dirt-red and ragged, its long fluffy tail dragging. The animal turned its head once toward me, then slunk into the trees. I angled into the woods on the other side, crossing a rocky stream, breathing hard. Beyond the stream the ground sloped up. I kept going at a fast walk, brushing aside low branches and dodging between the tree trunks and blackberry bushes, listening, listening. In the distance I heard a car engine. A short ways farther up the hill I came upon a boulder with a cleft in it and I laid myself down in the damp cleft and tried to force my breathing into a quieter rhythm. I could hear something through the trees—a car horn being sounded at regular quick intervals, almost in time with every third heartbeat. Beep … Beep … Beep … Beep. I tried to lower myself farther down between the sides of the stone. In my mind’s eye, I could see my aunt talking to me across the seat of her car, saying she loved me, and then I heard what I’d said in the house a few minutes earlier, and my own betrayal seemed like the fingers of Satan reaching up the insides of my breasts, taking hold of my lungs, and throat, and tongue. The horn kept beeping, a sound like geese in the fall sky. I heard the car coming along the road and slowing, then stopping, then the engine was turned off and I heard a door. I tried not to move.

“Girl!” I heard after a few more seconds.

God, God, God, I prayed silently. God, God, God save on me now. Forgive me.

“Girl!” Pastor Schect shouted again. His voice came through the trees like a searchlight. “Let the Satan be taken out from you! Girl, let it now! Come down and let it be taken!”

I didn’t move. I tried to draw slow shallow breaths but I could feel
my heart like a drum in my chest, and the rock pinching my back muscles, and a dampness there as if I was sinking down slowly into a swamp.

There were footsteps, a rustling in the bushes at the side of the road.

“Girl!”

I kept my eyes open, wondering if he’d cross the stream. Above me were spruce branches and beech branches and a weak sunlight filtering through. God, God, God, I mouthed.

“You can’t hide from the Lord of Gods,” Pastor Schect yelled up the hill, but I could tell from the sound of the words that he hadn’t come any farther into the woods. I listened. If there was a truck in the background, if my father was coming, then the streambed and the woods wouldn’t stop him. He’d take hold of me by the hair and lead me down to Pastor Schect and there would be nothing to save me then.

But there was no truck engine, just the sound of another car going past the other way, tires in the dirt, the ping of small stones against the undercarriage. I imagined Pastor Schect turning and waving to the driver like a man of God in his rumpled suit and dark-tinted hair, meditating on the glory of nature. He did not shout again. After a time I heard his footsteps on the road and then the car door closing, but he sat there a long while before starting the car, and then several more minutes before he drove away, and during that time I lay still and let the rock cut into the muscles of my back, and the dampness spread on my shirt and pants. I kept my eyes open and steady and I concentrated on the sunlight and wished and prayed with all my force that he’d leave me alone and not go back to the house and wait. I could face my parents, but I didn’t want to be looked at that way ever again by Pastor Schect, or touched by him, or killed by him.

In time, he drove off down Waldrup Road, away from our house, but still I lay there, waiting for him to return, my back muscles cramping. When I was sure there were no other vehicles coming, that Pastor Schect wasn’t playing a trick, and almost sure my father wasn’t standing down there, silently watching for me at the edge of the woods, I sat
up. I peered through the trees. Nothing. Another minute and I stood, pushing myself out of the cleft in the rock and looking down at the road. Besides a few coins and two one-dollar bills in my pants pocket I had no money with me. I pictured myself walking the rest of the way down Waldrup Road and all the way into town … and then what? Going to Sands at the rectory and asking for money so I could take a bus to Watsonboro? It was Sunday. He wouldn’t be working. He’d be off in the country on one of his drives, or down visiting Aunt Elaine, or going to Boston or New York, to a museum, maybe with a girlfriend. I was hungry and thirsty and chilled from the dampness at the back of my shirt. What if Pastor Schect was waiting along Route 112? Or my father decided to go to Weedon’s and saw me walking past? I thought, briefly, of taking the risk anyway, sleeping at the work site and waiting for Sands to show, but the idea of him finding me there like that, hungry and dirty and afraid—that was too bitter.

When I’d waited a long time, I walked down the hill and across the stream. After a minute or two, I turned left, back toward our house. I prayed as I went, not asking for anything but forgiveness for my moment of treachery, just speaking to God in whispers and asking that.