Right out loud, I said, “It’s Jesus’ baby. I’m having Jesus’ baby,” and then I turned to Laura and Wanda, who were standing on the doorsteps with their mouths dropped open, clean jars in their hands, and I said, “I’m having the child of God.”
I don’t know what they took me in the church for. I guess they thought I wouldn’t lie if I was in the church. But they had it all wrong. I didn’t set out to lie or anything, but by that time, it didn’t matter where I was. Church or no church, truth and lies all looked the same to me by then. It didn’t matter where they took me. There was no telling what would come out of my mouth.
Everybody but Olin was there though. Grandpa Herman held me by the arm up at the front while the entire community filled in the first few rows of seats. Everybody sat so close, shoulder to shoulder, with Pammy between Bethany and Wanda, and Mustard between Wanda and Everett, and Nanna between Everett and Mamma and so on. From the front where I stood, it looked like they were blocking me in, like they were using their bodies to keep me from running away.
Grandpa Herman didn’t bother with the fornication sermon. He jumped right in with the questions.
“Does your condition have anything to do with James’ untimely death?” he asked me.
Mamma wailed out so loudly that Grandpa said, “Maree, honey, we need to be able to hear the girl’s answer.”
“No,” I said.
“What’d you say?” he scolded.
“No, sir,” I corrected.
“Was James the father of this baby growing in your womb?” Grandpa’s thumb was trying to break my arm.
“No, sir.”
“Are you telling me that you and James were not guilty of fornication?” he bellowed, and I knew that no matter what I said, he wouldn’t believe me.
I could see Daddy doubled over, his head on his own knees. Nanna kept her gaze straight ahead, but she didn’t look like she was listening. David and Laura both looked into their laps while Everett watched Grandpa and Wanda watched me. But poor Pammy was the one I was worried about most. She had her head buried in Bethany’s jacket.
Mamma kept crying and snuffling, but she looked like she had a candle in her head, burning, and I could see it flickering wild behind her eyes.
“No, sir,” I answered. “Me and James never fornicated.”
“Well, who in God’s name have you fornicated with, Ninah?”
I thought it must have been Jesus giving me courage because I had enough courage for two people—or maybe three.
“I’ve never fornicated with nobody,” I claimed.
“And I reckon you’re going to tell us next that you ain’t with child either,” Grandpa Herman proposed. As he talked, he ground his hand harder into my arm.
“I’m with child,” I said. “It’s Jesus’ baby.”
“Blasphemy,” he shouted, and he slapped me down. “In the Lord’s own house!”
Pammy screamed and didn’t stop. I was on the floor, and at first all I could see were the boards, little brown rectangles, fitting neatly into each other. I thought I’d like to be just one little wooden rectangle fitted so neatly into the floor. Then Daddy was there, offering me his hand, helping me up, and I could hear Mamma wailing out, joined by Wanda, I think.
There was blood on my face, maybe from my nose. I wasn’t sure.
“Sit down, Liston,” Grandpa said.
“You will not strike my child again,” Daddy spewed. “No leader threatens his people that way.”
I looked down, dizzy. Drops of blood fell between pauses, splatting one wooden rectangle of floor. I watched a drop trickle along the board’s outline, wishing I could pour myself into the spaces between boards.
“Everett,” Grandpa Herman said. “Get your daddy, son.” And Everett staggered over to where Daddy was standing beside me.
“Come on, Daddy,” Everett tried, and he put his hand on Daddy’s shoulder, but Daddy shook it off.
“She has to be punished, Liston,” Grandpa Herman shouted. “The girl is standing up here pregnant, telling us that this unborn child belongs to Jesus. ”
“I will not leave her,” Daddy said. “I ain’t opposed to punishments, but I am opposed to violence. Ninah ain’t safe up here without me, and I ain’t sitting down.”
Then Mustard jumped up and said, “I ain’t sitting down either!” but before he could get to the front of the church, Everett had caught him and held him off.
“Noooo,” Mustard cried, tossing his head like a caged-up horse, “Noooooo,” and I thought he was going wild, punching at Everett like it was his fault.
I looked to Nanna, trying to will her to do something, but only her body was there. Her eyes were gone far away. Back to Virginia, I thought. Back to the house where her daddy died.
“Tomorrow morning at eight A.M.,” Grandpa Herman said, “Ninah Huff will be dunked for blasphemy. Tonight, there will be no supper.”
Daddy held me close to him, walking me back to the house. Mamma didn’t come with us. I don’t know where she went.
When we got to the house, Olin was there, standing on the doorsteps. He didn’t say a thing, but he held the door and kissed me on the head before I went inside.
I guess all the madness made me stubborn. It might have dazed my thinking a little bit too because I didn’t even notice that there was dried blood on my face until much later when I was sitting in bed and some flecks scabbed onto my blanket.
I figured Grandpa Herman was planning on starving me to death. That’d be one way of getting rid of a baby. If I died from not eating before the baby was born, then the baby’d die too and everything would be settled.
And if that didn’t work, maybe he was counting on me catching pneumonia from being dunked and dying that way. Either way, he was planning on killing me.
But I knew I wouldn’t die.
I prayed that night. I told God I knew that the child was his and that if he was planning on seeing it grow up and make something of its life, he’d better help me out.
I read in the Bible about Mary and wished there was more to know.
I knew my baby would be born with an invisible ring on its finger, one like I’d given to James. I knew he’d be a special leader for us—one strong enough to tear down Fire and Brimstone and start again—even if nobody could see the ring.
And I fell asleep the way I reckon people fall in love, without even knowing it’s happening.
Early that next morning, I woke to the sound of bells ringing. At first they were far away, and then they were right in my ear, Mamma standing there dressed all in black and ringing a bell so close that the sound seeped into my pillow and clanged under my neck. Bethany on the other side of the bed, dressed in gray, moved her wrist like a machine so that the bell hit opposite Mamma’s, uneven and terrible instead of beautiful, the way a bell should be.
“Hey,” I said, not remembering at first what they were there for.
But then Grandpa Herman yelled, “Silence,” and I jumped—because I hadn’t known he was in the room.
The bells kept ringing as I stood up and then followed them out, still wearing my nightgown with James’ shirt over it, not even putting on my shoes. Outside, everybody was waiting.
We formed a ridiculous parade, walking down the dirt road, that sand so cold on my feet. Mamma and Bethany kept ringing the bells, walking beside me. Grandpa Herman led the way. And behind us, everybody except Olin shuffled along.
It was like walking through a dream.
I wasn’t sure if Daddy was there, and I didn’t think I was supposed to look behind me, but I did it anyway and saw him with Everett and David. Pammy tried hard to catch my eye, but I wouldn’t look at her and only saw her tiny wave after it was too late to wave back.
Grandpa Herman didn’t slow down even when we came to the woods. But the straw and sticks and briars hurt my feet. Because I couldn’t keep up, he had to shorten his strides.
It wasn’t raining just then, but it looked like it might at any minute. I couldn’t
tell if the dreary sky came from the weather or the earliness. I kept looking at the clouds, waiting for God to rapture me, thinking that maybe I’d had it wrong all along. Maybe I’d be the only one called home when the angel sounded his trumpet. Maybe they’d be left to perish, and I’d live it up in Heaven with Jesus and James and my baby.
In case I was right, I prayed quietly that God would take Daddy too. And Pammy and Mustard and Nanna.
And maybe Mamma and Wanda and the rest of them, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted them all up there with me. That’d make Heaven a lot like Fire and Brimstone, and that just didn’t seem all that heavenly.
We walked for a long, long time, right along the creek until it widened out at the far end of the property into the pond where James had died. And I knew then that I was being punished for more than blasphemy, but I couldn’t let myself think about James. Not just then.
I thought instead about alligators. I knew there were alligators because I’d seen them once before, when we were baptizing Wanda. I decided maybe Grandpa Herman was planning on killing me by dunking me in the water right where the mother alligator had her babies. Because unlike my own mamma, I was almost sure that a mother alligator would raise holy hell when somebody messed with her young.
The bells got louder and louder in my head even though it felt like everybody was far away from me, like they couldn’t touch me if they wanted to.
I told myself it’d be like a baptism.
Mercifully, we didn’t go to the part of the pond where James had tied his rope and walked out. That would have been too much for Mustard and Pammy and Bethany. We filed along the opposite bank, around dying cattails and withering huckleberry bushes. There was a big upright tree on that side of the pond with limbs thick as washtubs, and somebody had built a stand into it. I’d never noticed the stand before and tried to figure if it was put there for men to sit in while hunting for deer or if it’d been used before for dunkings. The thick plank stretched between two giant limbs that leaned way out over the water.
I’d never seen a dunking in my lifetime. I wasn’t even sure what a dunking was.
As I was climbing up the tree’s makeshift ladder, with David in front of me and Everett following behind, I tried to recall if I’d seen Nanna in the procession. I couldn’t remember seeing her.
I scraped my knees against the bark, reaching high for each wooden slat and pulling myself up, wondering if Everett was looking up my nightgown, if he could help it.
When I got to the top, I followed David out on a limb. I had to straddle it and scoot myself along, and the bark rubbed hard at the inside of my thighs, rubbed the skin off of me, it seemed.
I was glad to have James’ shirt. The day was chilly and damp and so strange. I pretended that the shirt was James, wrapped around me all the way, and I pretended that I wasn’t alone—even though I knew better.
When I had crawled onto the flimsy board, way up above the water, I looked down at the people behind me, their faces so unfamiliar it was like they were somebody else’s family. They were all watching Grandpa Herman tying a tiny wire cage onto the heavy rope that Everett held from the top of the tree-ladder. And even though I knew it wasn’t the rope once tied to James, I couldn’t help thinking of it, the way it smelled wet—like an old rug left out in rain.
I could feel the board sag beneath me, not like it was going to give, but like it was thinking about it. I thought maybe I should jump before they had a chance to do whatever they had planned. I wondered if I’d hit bottom if I jumped, if I’d break my bones and be in too many pieces to swim away.
Too bad it wasn’t the river. If they’d taken me to the river, I could have swam underwater until I was far from them. But in a pond, there was nowhere to go.
Everett made his way along the limb, to the place where the plank bridged branches. David sat on the branch to my right, and Everett sat on the branch to my left, and I sat in the middle, my long, long legs dangling, and I stared down, stared out at the broken tree and imagined its underwater arms waiting for something to grab. I stared far beyond the pond, where the land belonged to someone else.
Everett slid the cage down the plank to me. Fortunately the plank was sort of wide.
“Toss that rope to David,” he said.
So I passed the rope along.
David tied his end of the worn-out rope to his limb. Everett tied his end of the rope to his limb, and then they dropped the cage into the water to make certain that the rope was long enough.
I reminded myself that the James-rope was still coiled up on the floor of my bedroom closet, where I’d hidden it months earlier.
When the cage hit the water, it didn’t sink right away. It went down slowly as water passed up through all the holes. It was made of the same wire we used to fence in the chicken coop, heavy wire with square holes almost as big as slices of bread. Then they grabbed the ropes and pulled the cage back up, all the way up to me, where it dripped on my nightgown and chilled my arms.
“Pull it up on the plank,” David instructed. “Now balance it, that’s good. And open that little flap right there.” He pointed. “And crawl in.”
“Be careful,” Everett said. “Don’t fall.”
I shook like that spider suspended over the pits of Hell by a thread, the one Grandpa Herman referred to in his sermons ever so often.
“You gotta turn around,” Everett told me. “You gotta back in so you can close the door.”
It’s a miracle I didn’t fall off—not that it would have mattered. They’d have made me swim out and climb up to the plank again. But I didn’t fall. I trembled as the plank beneath me swayed, but I turned around up there, on my hands and knees, and I backed into the cage so small that I had to squench up like a rock. It was hard for me to find a place for my arm once I’d fastened the hook.
“Ready, boys?” Grandpa Herman called.
“Yeah,” one of them yelled, but I was so turned around that I wasn’t sure if it was David or Everett.
And maybe it was the fear, because I had plenty of that, or maybe it was the feeling of being captured in the air, because capturing usually happens on the ground when at least you’ve got the earth to support you, but for whatever reason, everything around me got loud. They were praying down there, voices that didn’t sound like voices at all. It sounded like clapping and whistles and moans. And I couldn’t tell what was happening because all I could see was the wire and the plank, my face pressed next to that damp wood.
Then Grandpa Herman gave a sermon that I didn’t hear like words. I heard it like rain and things blowing in wind, and then I realized that it was raining and the wind was real.
And then I was dropping hard, and I kept my eyes open so I could see the water coming for me, getting closer and closer until it was nothing but a shining, and I fell faster than the cage so that my skin pressed against it, and there was a cold wire barrier like a cross cutting between my nose and my mouth, and I felt like each of my breasts had slipped through a different hole.
When I hit, the water stunned me, not from the temperature but from the hardness of it. I felt like I’d hit a table or a floor, not water, and I didn’t even realize I was sinking or that my mouth was full until my ears bubbled.
Before I knew I was under, I could feel myself pulled up, a foot at a time. My backside was in air before my face was.
The praying continued as they raised me, bit by bit, and the water that had been on me dripped off—first like juice, then like seeds.
I wondered if I was as heavy as I felt. I looked out at the fallen tree across the pond and remembered that people weigh more when they’re wet. I wondered if David and Everett’s arms would give out.
But then I heard, “Let her go,” and I fell again.
I tried to cover my face with my hands that time, but I couldn’t make them let go of the cage, holding onto it like it was all they knew to grip.
Then underwater, I promised my lungs that I’d take in more air the next time. I let out a little
air each time I felt them lifting me, but I couldn’t tell how long it would be before I’d find air again. I couldn’t tell how deep I was, and I didn’t want to open my eyes.
When I was out of the water that time, I managed to tilt my head so that I could look at the congregation, and though I was too far away to see expressions, I could tell that the man who was walking away was Daddy.
I didn’t care. It was Nanna I wanted to see, and she was there.
The third time before they dropped me, I sucked in so much air that it hurt, but I let it all out without meaning to when I spanked through the surface.
I mouthed “hebamashundi, hebamashundi,” feeling the murkiness saturate my tongue, and that time when they pulled me out I was coughing.
I wondered if they’d stop if I repented. I wondered if I cried out or prayed aloud or begged, if that would be enough.
But I didn’t.
Up in the air, the cage rocked and swung. I wondered if they’d stop if I vomited.
Then in the water again, in the dirty water, I decided to breathe. Breathe like James, burst my lungs, and be done with the whole damned thing. I’d breathe he-ba-ma-shun-di, one syllable at a time, and by the time I was through I’d be in Heaven. And I almost did it, too, except I opened my eyes, for one last peek at the things we see alive, and I saw the bottom.
It was brown and soft, and there were pieces of sticks and logs, and there were moving shadows in the distance, maybe of fish, though my splashing kept them from swimming nearby. I wondered if James had opened his eyes.
There were things growing, even in autumn, even underwater, and as I got farther and farther away from them, as David and Everett heaved me up, it seemed like they were a miniature world, underwater, operating by different rules, knowing different things to be true, and thriving all the same.
I decided I couldn’t die. Not when I had a baby living in me, depending on me, a baby who could change things. I knew there was something inside me that could imagine a different world and make it so.