That new horse sucked and sucked. Daddy laughed and cried and put his hand on Mamma’s shoulder, and Mamma smiled and told me to go to bed.
“What will you do with it?” I asked her.
“We’ll stay up with it for a while,” Mamma said, “to make sure it’s all right.”
“Are we keeping it in the house?”
“It don’t have nobody else to keep it safe,” Daddy told me.
“What about Dot?”
“We’ll bury her in the morning, I reckon,” Daddy said. “But you got school. So get on to bed.”
“Say your prayers,” Mamma reminded me.
And I did say my prayers. I prayed and prayed to stop seeing Dot that way, dying on the straw with the hulls from my shoes scattered beneath her.
There was a girl in my class at school named Ajita Patel. She wasn’t Holiness or Baptist or Methodist or even Christian. She was foreign, but she didn’t speak with an accent, and when we were doing chapters in social studies on other cultures, the teacher asked Ajita to give a special presentation.
She came to school that day wearing the cutest pants I’d ever seen, green ones with tiny pink flowers printed all over them. And they got tight at the ankles, and at the top where the elastic went, they had strings to pull them tight around her waist, and at the bottom of each string was a tiny bell so that when she moved, she tinkled and chimed just a little. She had on a white shirt tucked into those pants, and her hair was pulled back in a French braid, the kind my mamma didn’t know how to do, and at the bottom where her velvety black braid touched the middle of her back, she had a ribbon made out of the same fabric as her pants. She had silver rings through her ears, and even though she was smaller than I was, she looked so much older.
Ajita stood up and told us about India, about how she was born there in a village but then moved away when her father got a job in the United States. She said that in her country, they had hundreds of gods and everybody worshipped a special one in their houses. She told us about one god who had an elephant’s head and a boy’s body and showed us a statue.
We passed the small statue around the room, and when it came to me, I touched it.
She said that in India, the people worshipped cows, and that they’d never, ever kill a cow to eat.
I thought about all our cows, in the pasture behind the barn, how we raised them and drank their milk and sometimes slaughtered them to cut into pieces and wrap in freezer paper and keep for special occasions and for when the men didn’t kill a deer.
She said that every year, a doctor would come to the village and all the children would gather underneath a tree and get shots.
I knew that shots were bad. We had to take them in order to go to school, but we got them in a building in town, where the walls were all painted white and nurses in uniforms would say, “Owie, owie, owie, owie,” and then stab at your arm while they were talking. And afterwards, Grandpa Herman had to say special prayers over you, and your mamma and daddy had to fast until the knot in your arm went away to atone for all the unnatural chemicals which were the products of man’s sinfulness.
She said that in the United States, they worked hard to bring other Indian families over because in India, people were starving and couldn’t get jobs. And when a bunch of cousins and aunts and uncles immigrated, her family took them into their home and helped them adjust and find a place to live nearby and get jobs.
That part didn’t sound so different from my family.
But I wondered how it could be that Ajita Patel was so proud not to be a Christian. She was a nice girl, who always did her lessons and made good grades on her tests. She didn’t chew gum or talk during class. In the lunchroom, she sat next to me sometimes, and even though I didn’t talk to her, she’d smile at me and I’d smile back, knowing that surely it couldn’t be a sin to smile.
But then I got to thinking that it wasn’t fair for Ajita Patel to perish eternally just because she was born in another country where they didn’t celebrate Jesus.
The next night when James and I came together as prayer partners, we met with Mamma and Daddy and Bethany and Olin and Nanna and Grandpa Herman. The adults didn’t usually come together, but since we were in training, they decided it would be good for us to have an example. We didn’t even have to pray that night. We were there to watch.
Grandpa Herman told us we were spiritual warriors waging a battle for souls, and then he asked us if we knew anybody we’d like to pray for. I mentioned Ajita Patel, saying that she wasn’t a Believer.
“What’d you say her name was?” Grandpa Herman asked.
“Ajita Patel. She was born in India. Do you think she’ll go to Hell just because she was born in the wrong country?”
“Ajita Patel is headed for Hell if she doesn’t know Jesus Christ as her Personal Savior and Lord,” Grandpa said. And that was the end of it.
James cut his eyes at me. He knew Rajesh Patel. I knew that he talked to him sometimes too—because I’d seen them walking together between classes, but I never told on him.
“Who else should we pray for?” Daddy asked, and people threw out names.
“And don’t forget Ben Harback,” Olin said.
I wondered why we needed to pray for Ben.
“Does Ben have a heavy heart?” Nanna asked.
“He’s having some trouble keeping his eyes on the cross,” Grandpa Herman whispered. “He’s been driving off after dark sometimes, and I believe he’s got his eyes on that little backslidden Holiness Corinthian from over at Mossy Swamp.”
“Well, should we pray that he can convert Corinthian?” Bethany asked. “Or should we pray that he redirects his vision?”
“I believe in Ben’s case that we should pray for the latter,” Daddy said.
And then they bowed their heads around the room, and joined hands with their prayer partners, and they began emptying their hearts to Jesus, aloud, shaking and quivering with the intensity of it.
James looked at me, and I looked at James, and then looked back down, trying to imagine us opening up that way before God.
They went on for a long, long time. Sometimes they’d fall silent, and then somebody would remember somebody they’d forgotten to pray for and start in again, and soon the whole room was full of speaking and crying and spitting out all their anguishes to God.
“Guide us, O Lord,” Grandpa Herman said. “And help us know how to help Ben if the time comes that he needs us. Lead our hearts in the ways you would have them to go.”
“Help the children like Ninah,” Bethany called out. “Help them when sin walks into their classrooms, proudly, and other children’s words make them question your holy beliefs.”
“And Lord, we just ask you to bless Ninah and James,” Nanna said. “Teach them to love gently, to confide in each other, and to save themselves for your glory until they’re old enough to understand the responsibilities of adulthood.”
“Amen,” Daddy said.
“And help James and Ninah to know that they can tell you anything, precious Lamb. Help them to grow through you,” Mamma begged.
I’d grown up hearing people pray for me aloud. It never made me very comfortable—when right in the middle of the supper prayer somebody would say, “Ninah’s had a cold all week. Help her see that you’re just teaching her about Jesus’ pain through this illness,” or “Ninah’s having trouble learning the state capitals, Lord, and give her little brain the room to retain the knowledge she needs.”
I never liked it, but it was so completely ordinary that I was used to it. Besides, most of the time it wasn’t me they were praying for. They prayed over everybody, so it’d be just as likely to hear them ask for special blessings for Mustard or Joshua Langston.
But that night when they were praying for me and James together, it felt different.
Afterwards, Grandpa Herman told us that we could hold hands in prayer if we felt the need, but we weren’t to hold hands at any other time. James nodded obediently, and since it was an
unusual circumstance for the prayer partners to meet together in the first place, since usually the prayer partners met separately, all around the compound, James asked them where the two of us would gather.
“I reckon you can go into a room in one of your houses,” Grandpa Herman said, and Daddy nodded.
“Y’all can have the living room and we’ll take the bedroom,” Mamma said.
“Or we could do the same thing,” Olin offered.
As everyone was leaving, James looked at me and smiled, and my heart fell into my pelvis, like it’d been doing so often.
It had to be the strangest feeling in the world—knowing they were giving us permission to spend time alone together, knowing they were trusting us when I couldn’t even trust myself.
And I surely couldn’t trust James.
I wasn’t sure if what I felt was a thrill or a fear, but it was bigger than anything I’d ever known. I couldn’t stop remembering his hand on my leg, his big man’s hand on my long, long leg. And I couldn’t stop reciting in my head, “Ajita Patel is going to Hell. Ajita Patel is headed for Hell.” But I didn’t believe it.
I wondered if she’d felt a man-sized hand on her thigh yet, slipping beneath her soft green pants. And it excited me to think that probably she hadn’t.
All that winter James and I came together as prayer partners, and all that winter he never touched me. He held my hands, of course, and his grip was always sweaty. And we’d sit together and list things to pray for, and then we’d pray, but mostly silently.
Afterwards we’d discuss which of us would go to the gym at the beginning of lunch and wash out our gym suits. The gym teacher, who understood that it wasn’t our fault that we couldn’t wash those clothes at home, kept detergent there for us and a special place to hang them up. Some days he’d wash out my suit, and some days I’d wash out his.
But he didn’t touch me.
Some nights he could have. We prayed in the living room of Mamma and Daddy’s house, and if he’d wanted to, he could have kissed me at the beginning of prayer time, when Mamma and Daddy had just gotten started.
And sometimes, I’d hear Mamma and Daddy crying out and panting, and I’d wonder if they were really praying at all. That secret blushing that goes on inside your skin would fill me up, fill me red and sweet, like exotic fruit from India, and I’d grip James’ hand tighter, hoping he’d feel it too. But he didn’t.
It made me sad—not just because he didn’t put his hand on my leg, not even on my foot. It made me sad because when I saw him, I felt ashamed. We didn’t play anymore or cut up on the school bus. He still sat next to me in Sunday morning services, but he held his head straight up and listened to Grandpa Herman. I still felt like drawing in the Sunday school quarterly—and would have if Nanna had given it to me. Grandpa Herman even started calling on James to pray aloud in church, and he did it like someone seasoned. On Sunday afternoons, he sat with the men and laughed at their stories and paid me no attention at all.
And it made me angry with Nanna for interfering. I remembered how nice it had been when it was sneaky and deliberate, when we were still children and looked at each other out the sides of our eyes and saw all the pleasures of the whole world looking back.
Sometimes when we were praying, I’d open my eyes and watch James’ face, his square jaw left loose so that his bottom lip fell down just a bit, just enough for me to look into the darkness that was his mouth and imagine my whole body hiding there, warm beneath his tongue.
That next spring as it got closer to time to plant the garden, Grandpa Herman decided that the children would be the ones to get the soil ready. So after school, we’d go out and work in the dirt. James and Mustard and Barley would take turns with the hand tiller, and I’d pick up sticks and roots, along with Pammy and John, and carry them over to the edge of the field where we’d burn them later.
It was a big field, and while we worked hard, we played too, kicking clumps of dirt at each other and drawing figures in the soil.
It was out in the field where I talked to James.
Barley was taking his turn with the tiller, and James and I both had armloads of old tobacco stalks to carry to the far end of the field. Pammy and John were working opposite us, on their way back to pick up more, and Mustard was helping Barley.
“Listen,” I said, “if you don’t like being my prayer partner, you can just tell Grandpa Herman to find you another one.”
“Why would I want to do that?” he asked.
“Well—in case you don’t like me,” I told him.
“I like you fine,” he said.
“You do?”
“Yeah,” he said, and stopped and wiped his face off with his sleeve and spit. “Why would you think I don’t like you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re the one who didn’t want to be my prayer partner.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. Pammy told me that when you found out you had to hold my hands, you cried like a girl.”
“I wasn’t crying,” I insisted. “I was cutting up onions.”
“oh.”
“The whole reason they put us together in the first place was because I told Nanna”—and I paused—“I told Nanna that I liked you and to help me figure out a way,” and I paused again. “Well, just a way to see you more.”
“Oh,” he said again, and tried not to smile but did it anyway. “Really? Nanna did it?”
“And ever since—well, you ain’t acted like you wanted to be with me.”
“I wanted to be with you,” he said. “I just thought you were—I don’t know—like them.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, like a Believer, in everything.”
“You mean you’re not?”
“I didn’t say that,” he said stubbornly, and started walking again.
“You’re not a Believer?” I yelled out, and then I started laughing out loud.
He looked back at me and said, “I am too a Believer. But I don’t think for a minute that Rajesh Patel is going to Hell. Or his sister either. And if you think that, you’re just ... full of shit. ”
“I don’t think that,” I said, running to catch up with him, laughing so hard my lungs felt like they might explode from the happiness. “I can’t believe you said that word. ”
Then James crumpled beneath his face. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean it. We have to pray,” he said desperately. He looked like someone just realizing that he’d taken his last breath.
“I don’t care, ” I assured him.
“Well, I care,” he said. “And of course Rajesh is going to Hell. He sure can’t go to Heaven. Where else could he go? We have to pray.”
James fell on his knees right there, pleading with God for forgiveness. I knelt on the ground beside him, listening to him swear that he was a Believer. But I didn’t pray with him. The wind was blowing his curls everywhere. He had the most beautiful curls I’d ever seen. It was all I could do to keep from rolling with laughter on that hard earth.
That night when James and I met together in prayer, we prayed like never before. We prayed out loud.
James said, “Heavenly Father, help David and Laura to conceive a child in your image,” because they’d been trying since their last loss and weren’t having any luck.
And I said, “Thank you, Lord, for Nanna, who’s always there to help us and love us and who still sleeps on nettles for past sins. Please bless her.”
James added, “And help Ben Harback make a decision about whether he wants a life inside this community or outside of it. And help the Patels to come to know you, Lord.”
And I said nervously, “Help me and James to know your love, to be able to share with each other your love.”
And James gripped my hands hard and said, “Let me love Ninah for you, oh Jesus. Let me be the one to show her your love.”
I could feel my hands shaking. I wasn’t sure if he’d asked for the same thing I’d asked for, but I thought his reques
t might be a tiny bit different.
The next day when we got off the school bus, we all went straight to the field, dropping our books at the end of the row. We were almost finished preparing the soil, and we were just in time. It was the second week of March and the seeds needed planting.
But we’d only been working for twenty minutes or so when Daddy trampled across the cleared ground in our direction.
“Hey, Uncle Liston,” Barley called out, and Daddy nodded his head.
Daddy was always either smiling or praying or crying. His face was hardly ever as blank as I saw it then. I knew something was wrong immediately.
“How much y’all got left to do?” he asked.
“Ought to finish it up this afternoon,” James said.
“Well, how ’bout you boys come with me and leave the field to the girls,” Daddy replied. “We need to dig a grave before dark.”
My stomach tried to flip over, but I wouldn’t let it. I took the tiller from James and walked off, not wanting to hear what came out of Daddy’s mouth next, but unable to make my ears cooperate.
“Is somebody dead?” Mustard asked.
“No,” Daddy said. “No. The community’s taken a vow of silence until supper time. Herman will talk to us then. So don’t open your mouths again, okay?”
We all nodded back.
I didn’t want to think about what had happened. I worried that Nanna was sick. I worried that James was in trouble or I was. I knew I needed to keep my mind on Jesus and everything would work out. But I couldn’t.
Up on the hill beside the church, I could see the men with their shovels. I imagined James’ hands callused and blistered from so much digging.
It was so quiet that I thought I could hear things moving beneath the ground.
I thought about human voices, the way they shout and whisper and break, the way they shade each other and dip. I wondered what Jesus’ voice had sounded like, if it was scratchy or booming or stammering or smooth.
I thought about my own voice, lean and low, the way it sounded when I answered a question at school, too loud and always a surprise. I thought about the way my voice sounded in prayers, like a single bell that rings just once but echoes on and on and holds itself in the air and then falls. Or how it hides behind other voices and hopes no one will notice.