And then his mouth was next to mine, and he was speaking into my mouth, and I hoped it might be Jesus, so I didn’t pull away.
“Lord, I’m not sure what you’re telling me,” he whispered right down my throat. “I’m not sure that I’m feeling you right, but I want to, Jesus,” and then he kissed me like a waterfall, and I kept my mouth wide open until he called out, “Ninah, this can’t be right. We have to pray.”
So I said, “God, I think we’re getting mixed signals. You have to lead us cause we’re in the choir loft and Ben Harback’s late, and we don’t know what to do.”
“Give us the strength to wait until we’re ready, Jesus,” James mouthed.
I couldn’t stop looking at his mouth.
“Please help us, Lord.”
And then I leaned into him and kissed him on the throat and at the place where his soft shirt rested against his neck.
“Ninah,” he said. “We have to pray. We have to pray!”
“That’s what we’re doing,” I said, and ran my lips across his eyelid.
And then God spoke. Really fast. And then I knew him like I’d never known him before.
Later, I couldn’t stop looking at James. It was the only thing that made the burning okay. We were the ones who finally told Grandpa that Ben Harback hadn’t arrived. We walked right by the classroom where the others were still waiting, walked out into the night that whirred with crickets and cicadas, walked right up to Grandpa’s door where I knocked and James said, “Ben didn’t come. Ninah and I left because we need to go home and pray.”
Nanna was there, and she looked at me, and I looked back at her for too long.
James took my hand, in front of them both, and led me to my house, where Mamma and Daddy greeted us and told us to mention Everett to God because he had a special need.
We didn’t remember Everett. We didn’t remember much.
I couldn’t stop looking at James, who had something in him as sweet as I imagined wine to be.
If Ajita Patel was right and we came back to this earth again and again, throughout eternity, I knew James must be Jesus himself. And he had chosen me.
Ben Harback didn’t show up that night, not in the classroom where Pammy and Mustard and Barley and the others waited until Grandpa Herman burst in on them, all red-faced and panting and made them copy down the first six chapters of Revelations. He didn’t show up at Great-Aunt Imogene’s house either, where he slept in an extra room. He didn’t come home at all.
But I saw him that next afternoon. We were working on our language arts modules, and I was at the grammar station, next to the window, working with Ajita Patel on semi-colons, when I looked outside and saw him in the bus parking lot slouching between two buses, talking to Corinthian Lovell.
Corinthian was several years older than me, but she’d been held back so many times that we’d lost count. She had blond hair that fell just down to the shoulders, and she made a habit of frosting her eyes with colors that didn’t appear in nature. She was from a backslidden Holiness family where the girls still wore dresses all the time, but her family didn’t abide by the real laws, and Corinthian wore tight skirts cut up to the middle of her thighs. I wondered if her mamma knew about her lips, bright red, or if she painted them on each morning after she left.
Corinthian rode my bus from the junior high back to the elementary school in the country, but she switched buses there and went off towards Mossy Swamp while our bus kept going towards Fire and Brimstone. I wondered if she’d be on the bus that afternoon or if she’d sneak off with Ben.
“Ninah?” Ajita whispered.
“Hmmm?”
“Do you have an extra pencil? I’m out of lead.”
I looked down at her pencil, the kind that looked like a pen except it had an eraser that you pumped downwards to get sharpness.
“Not that kind,” I told her, “I have a regular one.”
“That’s fine,” Ajita assured me, and smiled.
So I gave her my extra pencil, feeling a little embarrassed because it had bite marks around the eraser, and went back to work. Those were the first words I’d ever said to Ajita Patel. I wondered if it made us friends.
Even after I got back to my grammar, I couldn’t stop wondering if maybe in secret, Ben Harback prayed with Corinthian the way that I prayed with James. Because if that was the case, whether she was a backslidden Holiness or not didn’t matter. That kind of praying was outside the realm of judgment.
When the last bell rang that afternoon and Ajita returned the pencil to me, she said, “I can get you one of those plastic pencils. We have a whole box of them in my dad’s office. They’re kind of nice to write with.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
James was waiting for me outside the building. We’d discovered that if we sat on the bus together, the other children didn’t pick on us as much—or maybe it just didn’t matter.
“Come on,” he said. “We’re not going to get a good seat.”
I hurried away with him and was almost at the bus before I realized I’d left my math book in the language arts room.
“I forgot my book,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I was already running when James hollered out, “You don’t have time. You’ll miss the bus.”
I dashed down the empty halls into the classroom, picked up the book, and ran back. The bus door was already closed, and the engine was cranked when I banged on the door, and the driver gave me a nasty look and opened it.
All the seats near the front were taken. A fat boy from the special education classes sat next to James, who looked at me apologetically and shrugged as I walked past him.
“Sit down,” the driver yelled, and then the bus moved and I staggered forward.
There were no empty seats except at the very back where Corinthian sat with her bag thrown into the vacant space next to her.
She pretended not to see me, looking down at her fingernails which were painted exactly the same shade as her lips, and I stood there looking at the seat and waiting.
“Sit down,” the driver hollered again, and I picked up her bag and plopped onto the vinyl cushion.
Some of the kids nearby tittered and whispered, and Corinthian rolled her eyes, tossed back her hair, and continued to ignore me.
At the back of the bus, things were different. That’s why James and I usually rushed to get a seat at the front.
Some bad girls just ahead of me, who dressed like Corinthian but were my age, started singing a song.
I got a boy with a foot-long pecker. I’m gonna let him put it in.
I know Mamma taught me better, but screwing boys just ain’t no sin.
I ain’t gonna tell my mamma, for she would just smack me hard.
I’m gonna screw him in her bedroom, on her sofa, in her yard.
Then they’d look back, waiting for me to react.
“Hey, Corinthian,” one of them said. “You like your new seatmate?” And they both broke out into giggles again.
From the front of the bus, James kept looking back, checking on me, and I’d wave at him to make him think everything was okay.
“I think your brother’s worried about you,” she said to me finally. “I think he’s worried about your soul.”
“He’s not my brother,” I answered. “He’s my boyfriend.” I liked the way it sounded when it came out.
“Ain’t you Fire and Brimstone?”
“Yeah,” I said. “So?”
“I didn’t think they’d let you have boyfriends at Fire and Brimstone.”
“Well, I got one,” I bragged, acting tough.
“Does your mamma know?”
“Yeah. She don’t care.”
“That ain’t what I heard,” Corinthian spat. “I heard at Fire and Brimstone, you can’t even touch each other until you’re married.”
“Just cause that’s the rule don’t mean everybody obeys it,” I said suggestively.
“You for real?” she laughed. “You
and your boyfriend doing it?”
“That’s private.”
“You ain’t doing it,” Corinthian insisted. “You don’t even know what it’s like.”
“I might,” I answered.
“I know about Fire and Brimstone,” she said. “Y’all crazy out there, staying up all night in church and stuff. You wouldn’t have time to do it if you wanted to.”
“Are you gonna marry Ben Harback?” I asked her.
“Fuck no,” she said.
“I think he loves you,” I told her, shaking off the shiver her language was giving me.
“Ben’s crazy. Talking about God all the time. I ain’t interested in that.”
“Well, why are you sneaking off with him then?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s kind of cute.”
She was looking at me by that time, like maybe she’d forgotten who I was and how I looked and where I lived. I looked at her lips too, wondering how it would feel to smooth color over them, wondering if it kept them warmer in the winter or kept them from breaking open.
“When you wash your mouth off, does that color stain up the rag?” I said before I even thought about it.
“What?”
“The lipstick. Does it leave marks on the washrag?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, looking at me like I
was the stupidest person she’d ever seen. “So do you know Ben?”
“Yeah.”
“Does he have a girl—out there at Fire and Brimstone?”
“No.”
“He stayed in our barn last night,” she bragged. “He hates y’all.”
“Well, why don’t he leave then?”
“You can’t just leave. Everybody knows that. Y’all’d come find him and assassinate him or pull him back by his ears.”
“That’s not true,” I defended.
“Plus, he’s got this thing about Jesus or something. I can’t figure it out. They let you fuck at Fire and Brimstone?”
I blushed. “Not before you’re married,” I said.
When we got to the elementary school, I moved up to the front of the bus with James before everybody else got on.
“What were you talking to her for?”
“I didn’t say all that much,” I said, and looked down at my math book, at my pencil case on top. Inside it was the pencil Ajita had used.
“Corinthian’s dirty,” James mocked.
“That’s a stupid thing to say,” I told him. “She’s just a person.”
“She’s a wicked woman,” James announced. “All you gotta do is look at her to see that.”
I opened up the pencil case and took out the one Ajita had borrowed. I opened a notebook and began writing my name over and over, pretending to do homework but really just feeling that pencil in my hand, imagining how it must have felt in Ajita’s hand. It felt like a secret even though it probably didn’t count as one. But it was something I knew that James didn’t. I thought that if Ajita had germs on her fingers, then they were on mine by that time, and it was a funny kind of sharing that I craved.
When we got home, there was another vow of silence, but nobody had to dig a grave.
And when we went in for supper, there was no food at all. The tables were set, and we took our seats behind empty plates, all white, and I kept staring at the plate, at the edge of my reflection in the plate.
Grandpa Herman gave another sermon, an angry one about Hell. But I didn’t listen. All during that hungry supper, I looked into the empty plate, staring at my lips and thinking about how much better they’d show up in the ceramic shine if they were painted red.
I thought about Corinthian and imagined her as my great-grandmother, who wasn’t a wicked woman and didn’t know a single thing that I hadn’t learned already. The only difference in me and her was that she was brave and had money to buy lipstick, and I didn’t.
I didn’t feel guilty either. Not for imagining myself painted up while Grandpa Herman called Ben Harback before the congregation and officially condemned him.
I wanted to talk to James. I wanted to explain to him how Corinthian probably just needed to be loved, to tell him that if she was really seeking the pleasures of the flesh, she’d surely look for someone more wild than poor Ben Harback.
The one thing we did have for supper was water, and I sipped at mine until it was gone.
“Did you or did you not engage in pleasures of the flesh with the young woman from Mossy Swamp?” Grandpa hollered.
“I did.”
“Did you or did you not know her biblically?”
“I did,” Ben said.
Around the room, I could hear the air racing out of all the lungs, as if everybody in that room realized at one time that they’d taken into their lungs Ben Harback’s air. All around the room, people held their breath.
“Fornication,” Grandpa said, “is grounds for being thrown out of this community. Is that what you want, Ben Harback?”
“No, sir,” Ben mumbled.
“Fornication is grounds for being tossed sidelong off the streets of Jasper, through the Pearly Gates, and into the Great Lake of Fire. Are you aware of that, Ben?”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“Did you force this young woman?” Grandpa asked.
“No, sir.”
“Do you intend to marry her?”
“I’d like to marry her,” Ben began. “But she ain’t a Believer.”
“But are you a Believer?”
“Yes.”
“And you consider your behavior to be the behavior of a Believer?”
“I’ve sinned,” Ben cried. “I’ve sinned awful. But I don’t want to be cast out of this community, Preacher Herman. There ain’t no place else a man can be this close to the Lord, and I want to be close to him. I’m just a weak man....”
“A weak and despicable man,” Grandpa added.
“But I want to make my heart right. I really do.”
I peeked over at James, who sat at the other side of the table. He was staring blankly into his plate. I tried and tried to will him to look at me, but he didn’t. Inside, I felt the worst lonely I’d ever known.
“I haven’t decided what to do with you yet, Ben,” Grandpa Herman said. “I don’t want my community tainted with the sourness of your soul. I have asked God to guide me in my decision, and he hasn’t gotten back to me. If you want to remain among us, then I’ll pray for an answer. In the meantime, you’re sentenced to the cellar, where the door will be bolted and no man, woman, or child shall look upon your sinful face.”
I didn’t know which cellar he was talking about. I didn’t even know we had a cellar, but I figured if we did, it was bound to be full of rats.
“Liston,” Grandpa said. “See this man to the cellar.”
Daddy got up, and Ben followed him out.
“In order to remember the importance of discipline and purity, no one will eat this day,” Grandpa said. “Dismissed.”
We stood up, and the women began collecting dishes, carrying them back to the kitchen. I tried to get James’ attention, but then he called out to Grandpa.
“What is it, son?” Grandpa said, exhausted.
“Could I just talk to you for a minute?” James asked.
My heart jumped into my throat, and I couldn’t swallow it down. I could feel it beating in my neck, and I imagined my neck like a lizard’s, pulsing.
“Ninah,” Mamma called. “Come wash these dishes.”
I went into the kitchen where somebody was drawing the water already. The steam rose up hot from the bubbles.
I thought we’d just be washing the glasses, since nobody used the plates or forks. But I was wrong. We washed them all.
When the dishes were done and Mamma put her arm around me and led me out of the fellowship hall, Daddy was standing there with Grandpa Herman. They stopped us before we went down the steps.
“Ninah,” Daddy asked me, “did you sit with Corinthian Lovell on the bus today?”
&
nbsp; “Yes, sir,” I said quietly.
“Ninah!” Mamma exclaimed, pulling her arm from around me and looking at me like I’d killed a preacher. “Corinthian is the object of Ben’s sins.”
“Why did you blemish yourself that way?” Grandpa scolded.
“There weren’t no seats on the bus left,” I told them. “I forgot my math book and had to run back inside, and when I got back, I didn’t have any place left to sit.”
“That’s understandable,” Grandpa said. “But did you speak to her?”
Both Mamma and Daddy looked at me hopefully, and when I said, “Yes,” they both shook their heads.
“What did you talk about?” Daddy asked.
“She wanted to know about our community. That’s all.”
“So you talked to her about God?” Mamma asked.
“Yes, ma’am. And about Fire and Brimstone too. She was asking about the rules. She wanted to know about what we did in church, and I told her. I thought maybe she wanted to join,” I lied.
“So you were testifying?” Daddy tried to understand.
“Yes, sir.” I looked down.
“But you knew she was a child of Satan, did you not?” Grandpa asked.
I didn’t say anything at all.
“Did you or did you not know that Corinthian Lovell was a wicked girl?” he continued in the same tone he’d just used with Ben.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, for that, I think you have earned the strap,” Grandpa said. “You are neither old enough nor wise enough to take on the responsibilities of conversion. Do I have your permission, Liston?”
Daddy closed his eyes and nodded.
“Maree?”
“My blessing,” Mamma said, and walked off.
I hoped he wouldn’t wait until the next meal and do it publicly. If I was going to be whipped, I wanted it to at least be a private humiliation.
I guess you could say I was lucky.
“Come on,” Grandpa said, and he yanked me by the shoulder and led me towards the church.