I thought instantly of Ajita Patel.
“Grandpa Herman shot somebody?” I asked her incredulously.
“Course he did,” she said. “He was in the war. And I want you to think about how you’d feel if you went off to war, freezing cold and without your family and barely living, how you’d feel if you got a letter in the mail that only came once every few weeks telling you that our own child was dead, had been dead for a month, and you didn’t know it.”
“Did that happen to Grandpa?”
“Yes,” Nanna said. “It did. And I want you to think about who you’d talk to, all them lonely nights scared to death that the enemy was going to attack you if you closed your eyes. I want you to tell me who you’d trust.”
“God, I reckon,” I said, ashamed.
“I reckon you’re right, ” she said. “When there’s nothing else there, that’s who you turn to.”
She pulled out a photograph of some men in uniforms, all standing together with their arms around each other’s shoulders.
“That one there,” she said, pointing, “is Herman.”
“That’s Grandpa?” I squealed.
“Handsome, ain’t he? And the man on either side was dead before he come home.”
I didn’t know what to say. Nanna put the photograph back, closed the jewelry box, and walked off to her room.
When she came back, she had another bowl of prunes. I whined and stretched out on the sofa. She came to the end where my head was, and I lifted it up, and she settled beneath me, pulling my hair out of the way and throwing it across the arm of the couch behind me.
She began feeding me the prunes, one at a time, and I let her.
“Your grandpa saw a lot of things he didn’t like,” she told me. “When he came home, he was ruined through and through. It weren’t nothing but the grace of God that made him whole again.
“There weren’t a thing in this world he could do except start over. Now the truth is that Herman weren’t a man of God before that war. He was a drinker and a carouser, and I loved him just the same. He fought and he gambled and he lied as bad as I ever did. But that war changed him. Made him scared. Made him want to hold onto ever thing he had with a grip so hard it could strangle a person if he weren’t careful.
“When he got back, he got involved with the church, started making a family as quick as he could to replace the one boy we had before he left. And i admit, it weren’t the easiest adjustment I ever made. A year before he left these United States, I married him and committed my heart to him forever, and I’m not the least bit sorry for it.”
She popped another prune into my mouth even though I wasn’t finished with the one she’d put in there before.
“We’d been back together for about a year when the church split up, and Herman went about beginning Fire and Brimstone just like a drill sergeant. He organized it and planned it and worked for it for a long time. And he finally got everything that mattered to him in a space big enough for him to wrap his arms around.
“He did it out of love, Ninah. Love and need. He prayed about it and promised God if he’d give him a place where he didn’t have to know fear and didn’t have to remember and keep living with the things he’d seen, he’d run it just the way he thinks God runs Heaven.”
“Do you think God runs Heaven like this?” I asked her.
“I doubt it,” she said, forcing another prune between my lips even after I turned my head away. “But Herman is doing the best he knows. He’s still holding onto what he’s got, and I believe he’s still scared that someday, somebody could come in here and split us apart and he’d be by himself again.”
“I didn’t know that,” I told her.
“He’s not a perfect man,” she began, and then the screen door slammed and Grandpa walked in.
“Leila,” he said. “Do you know if we got any brake fluid?”
“It’s in the barn,” she told him. “At the back—on the second shelf, I believe.”
“You sick, Baby?” he asked me.
“Pollen headache,” I said.
“Ummm,” he muttered. Then, “Get me a glass of water, Leila. My boots are too muddy to walk in there.”
I lifted my head up to let Nanna free. She sat the prunes in my lap.
“She’ll be better tomorrow,” Nanna promised, shuffling off to the faucet.
“I’ll bet she will.” Grandpa Herman laughed.
While she was gone, he reached over to the bowl of prunes and started stuffing his mouth.
“How many bowls has she fed you?” he whispered.
“Three,” I said.
“God bless you,” he said. “Let me help you out.” And he ate some more.
When Nanna got back, Grandpa drank his water and announced, “I got to get back out there. The brakes is squealing on that tractor,” and he leaned down and kissed Nanna on the head and winked at me.
“You see,” Nanna said when he was gone. “That’s love.”
David and Laura lost another baby before April was over. I wouldn’t have known except that Mamma pulled me aside to tell me before James and I met to pray one night. She said nobody had mentioned it because they wanted to give the baby time to settle in Laura’s womb before it became public knowledge.
David was outside tying off some grapevines he’d planted next to the house. I went over to where he was working and stood there until he saw me.
“Hey, Peanut,” he said.
“Hey,” I told him. But I couldn’t think of what to say next. He was looking at me like he was expecting me to say something, and all I could do was notice that his side-burns were beginning to get gray hairs in them. Aging came early at Fire and Brimstone, but David was only twenty-two.
“Something on your mind?” he asked, and stood up, brushed off his hands on his pants.
“I just ... I just wanted to say that I’m sorry about the ... I’m sorry you and Laura won’t be having a baby. I know how much you want to build the family.”
He nodded his head up and down, opened his mouth like he was going to say something, and then shook his head and walked away, leaving me standing by his new vines.
I bent my knees a little and breathed hard.
When he got to the edge of the house, he turned back and said, “Thank you, Ninah.”
It made me crazy how James went back and forth between believing what he’d been taught and believing his own instincts. I knew I did the same thing, but James did it worse. He was like oil and vinegar poured into the same bottle, one minute shaken together and the next minute separated. Cloudy, then clear, then cloudy again.
“Do you think we should be trying to convert the Patels?” James asked me one night.
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“They’ve got their own gods,” I told him. “Suppose it was me and you living in India. Do you think we’d appreciate it if somebody walked in our house with a little elephant-headed statue and told us we should worship it?”
“That’s different,” James insisted.
“Nuh-uh,” I pressed. “It’s exactly the same.”
“But if they don’t know Jesus, they can’t go to Heaven.”
“Maybe they have a Heaven of their own.”
“Ninah, don’t say that. You know that the only way to Heaven is through Jesus Christ. You know that.”
“I don’t know what I know anymore.” I shrugged. “But it just don’t make sense for them to perish in the Lake of Fire when they haven’t even heard about the Lake of Fire. Now does that make sense to you?”
“But if we tell them, then they’ll know about it.”
“But if we tell them and they don’t believe it, then they really might burn forever. The way I see it, they’re better off if they’ve never heard.”
James and I had already begun to sin together, but we’d talked it over and decided that it wasn’t really such a big sin. We didn’t use the entire time for praying to pray. We prayed for a while, and then we talked, a
nd then we prayed to be forgiven for talking. That was that.
We discussed Grandpa Herman and Nanna. The Patels. The things we learned at school that contradicted the things we learned at home.
I was the one who talked James into it. It wasn’t very hard. I just suggested that we could serve the Lord by discussing his beliefs as easily as we could serve him by praying.
He always disagreed with me whenever I said outright that I thought Grandpa Herman was too strict. But underneath it all, I think James questioned him too. After Ben Harback slept in the grave, I mentioned that nobody else made people do that—not the Baptists or the Holinesses. I told him that maybe Grandpa Herman was more worried about keeping the rest of his community under his thumb than about Ben’s soul, and James nodded.
One night he said to me, “Do you think if we prayed hard enough, that Jesus would speak to us through each other?”
We were sitting on Mamma and Daddy’s brown couch with the green-and-white afghan thrown over the back. I leaned my head into the afghan and asked James what he meant.
“Like, do you think that Jesus would say something to you that’s just for you, not for anybody else? Not for the whole world. Just for you. Do you think he might say it through my mouth?”
I bit my bottom lip and considered it. “Like if I was having trouble talking to Mamma, not that I am, but if I was—would Jesus give you advice for me?”
“Yeah,” James said, excited.
“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“Maybe we should pray for that. Because wouldn’t that be good? If you could be Jesus for me and I could be Jesus for you? Wouldn’t that be the best thing?”
“Would that mean speaking in tongues?” I asked. “Cause I’m not sure I’m ready for that.”
James leaned his head back beside mine. “I don’t think so,” he said.
We prayed for it a lot. We met for prayers every night after Ben had gone over the commandments with us, every night after we’d recited, “If a man calls a woman a harlot without substantial proof of her sins, he shall pay a hundred dollars, half to that woman’s husband or father and half to The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God’s Almighty Baptizing Wind.”
“If a man leaves the Church Bread, the Holy Body of Christ, in the place where a mouse can eat it, that man shall pay fifty dollars to The Church of Fire and Brimstone.”
“If a boy pollutes an animal, that animal shall be killed and the boy’s father shall pay two hundred dollars to The Church of Fire and Brimstone.”
None of the laws we recited mentioned the real punishments. Not the fasting or the nettles or the strap or the sleeping in graves. Just the money.
And money was a strange concept at Fire and Brimstone. James and I talked about that too—about how odd it was that Grandpa Herman handled all the money. The money from the crops, the money the men made at their outside jobs, the sin money. Grandpa Herman was the sole banker for our community. He collected it all, and then redistributed it to each family according to their need.
But he didn’t distribute much. Only enough to pay for a few sins each year.
“Wonder what he does with all that money?” I asked James.
“Puts it back into the farm, I guess,’ he answered. “He’s not exactly wearing gold rings on his fingers or anything, Ninah.”
“I know. But think about it. We grow our own food. We make our own clothes. Wonder where all that money goes?”
“Pays for tractors and pickups and new houses. And material to make clothes with.”
“Do you think we’re rich?” I asked him. “If we were rich, we wouldn’t even know it.”
“I doubt we’re rich,” James said.
And sometimes we discussed particular laws. Like the one concerning the pollution of animals.
“How could anyone pollute an animal?” I asked him.
“I don’t know.” James blushed.
“What does that mean? Polluting animals? Like if you smoked and you blew it in their faces?”
“I don’t think that’s what it means.”
“And why would the animal need killing? That would mean it’s partly the animal’s fault, right?”
“I guess so,” he said.
I started laughing. “Well, when’s the last time you walked by a cow and it said, ‘Oh James, will you smoke a cigarette so you can blow it in my face? Or will you pee in my water so I can drink it and be polluted?’ ” I was giggling so hard I had to cover my mouth with my hand. You can get away with a lot of things during prayer time, shouting or crying or speaking in tongues. But giggles don’t usually happen when you’re on your knees.
“Ninah,” James said. “Come on, Ninah. Let’s pray.”
“But I’m still thinking about it,” I tittered. “Maybe what you’d have to do is pick up a bunch of bubble-gum wrappers off the bus and collect them until you have whole pockets full. And then the next time you’re at the barn and a billy-goat calls out, ‘James, pollute me,’ you’d throw them over his head. And maybe they’d still have some gum in them so they’d stick to his hair and then he’d be polluted.”
“Ninah!” James said again, seriously. “We don’t have much time left.”
“It’s funny,” I said. “It’s crazy the things that wind up in that booklet.”
He grabbed my hands, pulled me off the couch and onto my knees, on the rug before him.
“Heavenly Father,” he began, “please bless our community, surround us with your light, and help us to keep our minds on you.” We’d gotten pretty vague at that point.
“Please bless the sick and afflicted, and please give us freedom and power and boldness and wisdom and love and understanding and the very Holy Ghost of God.”
That was something he’d picked up from hearing Everett pray. Everett was good at listing, and he’d taken to listing the same things every time Grandpa Herman called on him.
“And God,” James said, “we’ve been talking to you for weeks now, asking you to speak through us. So I’m begging you now to give Ninah the special words you want me to hear.”
He paused, and I listened. I listened to hear whatever God was telling me. I tried to come up with the right thing, but just got confused and said nothing at all.
After a while, James said, “Okay, God. We’ll keep trying. Please make us worthy and ready to receive your love. Amen.”
“Amen,” I echoed.
One Saturday night late that spring, only a few weeks before school let out and suckers hadn’t even grown on the tobacco so we weren’t too tired from our working yet, the children all met in the church classroom to go over the laws.
Ben Harback had been reciting with us, night after night, but that particular night, he didn’t show up.
“Ben’s late,” Barley said finally.
“Real late,” Pammy added.
“Do you reckon we should tell somebody?” Barley wondered.
“Nah,” Mustard said. “Give him a little more time. He’ll be in trouble big if Great-Grandpa finds out he’s late for class.”
“My fingers hurt so much from shelling them early peas,” Pammy complained. “I think early peas have tougher shells than late ones.” She was trying to make small talk to pass the time, but nobody was in the mood.
“They’re exactly the same,” I chided. “Your finger’s just ain’t used to it yet.”
“I think I’m going to get Grandpa,” Barley said.
“No, don’t,” Mustard insisted. “Ben’ll get in trouble.”
“We could sing,” Pammy suggested. “How about ‘When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder I’ll Be There’?”
“I don’t feel like singing,” I said.
James looked at the clock and rolled his eyes. “If Ben don’t get here soon, we’re gonna be late for prayer partners,” he said to me.
“It’d be okay, I guess. It ain’t our fault.”
“No, it won’t be okay. I feel the power tonight. I need to pray with you, Ninah.”
; “He needs to pray with you, Ninah,” Barley taunted. “He needs to.”
“Ugh,” Mustard whined. “You mean you really like saying prayers?”
“He needs to,” Barley said again, slapping Mustard on the thigh, and they both laughed so hard I blushed for James.
But James ignored them.
“Come on, Ninah,” he said. “I think it’s time.”
“Where can we go?”
“You can do it in the bathroom,” Barley teased. “If you got to pray that bad, you shouldn’t be picky.” And they cracked up again.
James grabbed my hand and pulled me up.
“Holler for us when Ben gets here,” I told Pammy.
We didn’t go to the bathroom. We went to the choir loft, just behind the pulpit where Grandpa Herman gave his sermons. James led me through the little swinging door, and we knelt on the second row where the men stood.
“Lord, I’ve been listening to you,” James said. “I’ve been praying and praying about this, and I know you’ve given Ninah something to say to me.”
We paused, and I listened, but what I heard was the sound of James’ last words hanging near the ceiling.
“I’m here, God,” I said. “I’m listening. I’ve been praying for this too. I want to be the one to give James your special instructions for his life. Please speak through me.”
But nothing happened. Nothing at all except I could feel his hands sweating and trembling. I pulled myself closer to him to hold him steady.
We waited in silence for a while, and then James said, “Lord, maybe I’m confused. Maybe I’m the one who’s summoned to be your holy conduit for Ninah. Give me your words, Precious Lamb.”
He was speaking so honestly, so totally sincerely, and I wanted to keep my heart open to God, but I was trying too hard not to laugh, imagining James as a holy conduit. And then I felt his knees next to mine, so close, and I recognized his breath, warm and tinted with something that smelled like grass, and I wanted to be his holy conduit too, whatever that was.