JEWEL (7 page)

He quick looked from me to Leston to me. “Today’s a fine day because I signed up today. That’s why it’s a fine day.”

Leston turned back to his food. He leaned forward, his forearm on the table, and forked up a piece of ham. He said, “You aren’t old enough.”

Slowly James lost the smile. “I signed up to sign up today, ” he said.

“It’s a new program the enlistment officer downtown let me in on. So when I turn seventeen next month, I’ll be in the Armed Forces.” He smiled again, this time even wider. He lifted one hand a little above the table, slapped it down. “Imagine that.”

But I’d imagined this day all too much already, his news nothing of the surprise he’d figured on it being. Leston and I’d both known a day like this one would be coming, a war we’d taken our sustenance from all along now laying claim to our son like a bad debt we owed.

Billie Jean sighed, let out, “I can’t wait to see you in a uniform.

It’ll be so glamorous, ” and James laughed, shook his head again.

I hadn’t moved, one hand on the small shoulder of my baby Anne, thankful she still had years I couldn’t imagine before she’d be out of this house, and suddenly I saw all my children lined up and waiting for a meal like this one, when each in turn would give up the love and care we had for them to a future no one could count on, and for some reason I thought of Missy Cook dead and gone for near on twenty years, every moment she was alive filled with the bitter taste of a daughter who’d left her for a Choctaw halfbreed. You could take your child’s leaving, I saw, with either hate or love, no matter what doom or good luck they seemed headed for. Only hate or love, there wasn’t any ground between.

I reached a hand across the table to James, held it out for him.

Leston, still with his arm on the table, still not having looked at his son, only took in another bite of ham.

James took my hand, held it tight, his smile only growing. There was no spite here, no malice aimed at his daddy, what I knew Leston believed moved his son to work at a mill instead of for him, and now made him want to join up and fight in a war we made our living from.

Here was only our son, our oldest child.

I said, “God will bless you, ” and I felt my eyes begin to fill. All the children were listening, this moment none of us ready for. Though Leston’s eyes were to his plate and nowhere else, I was still glad for my oldest’s hand in mine, for my youngest next to me, the rest of my children quiet and watching, glad, too, for the baby inside me, already growing.

And just as my eyes brimmed, one smooth warm tear slipping down my cheek, there came a knock at the kitchen door. It was a quick sound, three crisp knocks and nothing else, and I stood, let go James’ hand and smiled down at my children, all of them watching me, mouths open.

Their mother was crying, and I tried for a moment to think of another time I’d cried in front of them. There was nothing I could recall.

I knew the knock, that strange authority Cathe ral’d taken on the older she got, and when I opened the door, there she stood, across her shoulders an ancient and frayed wedding ring quilt against the cold.

Light from the kitchen fell down to her at the bottom of the steps, filled her eyes. She was looking right at me, staring at me. I swallowed, touched the back of one hand to the tear at my eye. I smiled.

“Cathe ral, ” I said, and took a breath.

Her eyes glistened in the light, her mouth closed tight.

I heard a noise behind her, the scrape of boots on hard ground out there. A small orange ember rose up, grew, died down. Nelson was with her, smoking a cigarette some ten or fifteen feet behind her.

“Go on, Cathe ral, ” he whispered, and the night air came into me, and I shivered, the same huge and awful shiver I’d begun my day with when Leston’d pulled back the sheet.

Still she stared at me, this ability of hers to look me in the face for as long as she wished something she’d found, I knew, when she was born again, baptized in the Pearl River when she was-fourteen. She’d found Christ, she’d told me the next day, a little past two years after my momma’d died, Missy Cook trying to hold me by the throat every day of it. Each night after my momma died I’d been the one to turn off my gas light, and I’d taken to playing with Cathe ral as often as I could, even let Missy Cook know I was teaching her to read and write. For these transgressions, Missy Cook’d had Molly take a switch to Cathe ral, had spent three months straight coming into my room at night and turning up the gas, then turning it down again, even had Pastor come to the house each Thursday afternoon for a year, the two of us sitting in the parlor as though he were holding some kind of court. He asked me time and again if I knew disobeying Missy Cook was a sin, and if I knew teaching Cathe ral to read and write was almost nearly as bad. Then he’d go on to ask me how I felt about my momma perishing, and about whether or not I thought she might be in Heaven. Pastor never took his eyes off me, the two of us certain Missy Cook stood just outside the room, listening to all that went on. I never broke, never surrendered to him that I did all of this to give some sort of honor to my momma’s memory, what I thought she’d want me to do.

It wasn’t but a month after Cathe ral’d found Christ that I’d been baptized in the Pearl myself, the same Pastor working on me whatever magic the Holy Spirit had given him to save my soul from the ravages of sin. When I came up from under water, Pastor’s hand at my back and lifting me, I’d expected to see a new world, one somehow clearer and more delightful, leaves on trees brighter, greener, the sky some miraculous shade of blue. Instead, I’d only rubbed my eyes, then opened them to the same trees, their dull green branches heavy with late summer air, the sky a pale and hazy blue, the river itself the same thin wash of brown.

I was thirteen, and the Sunday before had made the decision to come forward after Pastor’s invitation, and make my public confession of Jesus Christ as my Almighty Savior. The sermon over, the congregation standing and moaning out “Nearer My God to Thee, ” I’d simply made my way along the pew and past Missy Cook without looking at her, afraid that if I caught her eye she’d give some genuine smile, the possibility of that happening a dire threat to any peace I planned to find in Jesus.

Once in the aisle, it was easy, I only walked forward the few feet to the pulpit Missy Cook always sat in the second row on the center aisle and waited for Pastor to come down, ask me what I wanted, then present me to the congregation.

But once his hand was on my shoulder, I saw this wouldn’t be as simple as I’d thought, somewhere inside his eyes was love, I could see, easy and pure, a shine I hadn’t expected, his hand on my shoulder not nearly as heavy as I’d figured it would be. He said, “What is it, Miss Jewel?

” I closed my eyes, not wanting this man’s hand on my shoulder, the same one that’d tried to pat my head twice before. Not wanting to see in his smile that he was only a man, one who loved God the best way he knew how. My teeth clenched, I’d had to push the words from me, “I want to accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.”

“Praise God, ” he said just loud enough for me to hear above the roll of verses being sung behind me, people all with their eyes on me, Missy Cook chief among them.

The hymn ended, the long last Amen dragged out for days before the organ went quiet. The only sound left was the whisper of a hundred bamboo fans. Pastor held my shoulders, and turned me to face the congregation.

My eyes were still closed.

“Through the powerful grace of God our Heavenly Father, ” he began, and I could feel his fingers tense with the words, as though by squeezing my bones he might instill the Holy Spirit in me, “Miss Jewel Chandler has come humbly before our congregation to declare publicly her acceptance of Jesus Christ as her Personal Lord and Savior on this day.

She will be baptized into the glory and righteousness of God our Father next Sunday afternoon, and I am sure it is her wish that everyone here be present to welcome her into God’s precious fold.”

That was when I opened my eyes, only to see Missy Cook, a lace hankie to her broken-glass eyes. She was crying, her shoulders heaving with some divine relief, as if she’d had the largest part in my coming to the Lord.

But of course it hadn’t been her. It hadn’t been Pastor, either, the sermon he gave that morning lost to the great abyss most every sermon I’ve ever heard has fallen into. It wasn’t the congregation, which had doubled by the time it’d made its way to the bank of the Pearl to watch Pastor and me, the two of us in white robes that took up the river brown as soon as our hems touched water. None of them, I knew, were there to see Jewel Chandler be baptized, but were there to see Missy Cook’s granddaughter be baptized. They were there more to give respect to the rich old lady in town than to witness the Holy Spirit descending upon me. l No, what I’d expected I’d see when I came up from the water was a new world in which the quiet and practical God I knew had become the strange and moonstruck one Cathe ral’d found, on the Wednesday after she’d been baptized, the two of us were out back of Missy Cook’s, her hanging up wash, me reading out loud to her from one of my old Mcguffey Readers. Then I heard the wet swish of material dropped to the ground. I looked first at Cathe ral’s feet, where one of Missy Cook’s finest white sheets lay in the dirt. Then I looked at Cathe ral. She stood with her shoulders up, fingers stiff at her sides. Her face had gone slack, her eyes back in her head.

She spoke, and the words from her mouth all rolled out in a ball, syllables and throat sounds and hard breaths I recognized from nowhere.

She was speaking in tongues, I knew, and my knowing that seemed a miracle of my own.

I dropped the book, stood with my hands clasped together in prayer.

Still she went on, the song moving up and down some scale only angels knew for certain. I felt myself begin to cry, the sound so beautiful, so filled with a god who’d love you enough to bestow on you a freedom from the same old words that chained us all.

Then Molly was there with us, moving toward Cathe ral still speaking.

She took Cathe ral by the shoulders and gently shook her, said, “No, no, no, child, you can’t be doing no speaking now.”

Cathe ral’s words began to thin down, the sounds broken and tired, until finally she closed her eyes, let her shoulders fall.

My hands were still clasped. Neither Molly nor Cathe ral had even looked at me yet. I took a breath, said, “Why does she have to stop?

” I swallowed, my tongue dry and thick.

Molly put an arm around her daughter’s shoulder, Cathe ral’s face wet with sweat, her arms limp at her sides. “Because, ” Molly said, her eyes on Cathe ral, “that what the Apostle Paul say. He say, Wherefore let him that speaketh in a unknown tongue pray that he may interpret.

They ain’t no one to interpret here.” Cathe ral, eyes still closed, leaned into her momma’s shoulder. Molly whispered, “We got to wait for Sunday, that’s what we got to do, ” her words not meant for me, but for her daughter, words suddenly earthbound and the same as always.

That freedom Cathe ral’d found was what I wanted, a freedom, too, that let her look me straight in the eye for the first time since I’d known her. Since that day in the back yard she’d searched out my eyes, hung onto them with her own. That was the freedom I was after, what I figured God must have given her, freedom from this earth and its words and what you knew your only role here would ever be. That would be my triumph over Missy Cook, the abounding w.. grace of God. All I need do was to confess Christ and be baptized, the only two things required to enter the new Jerusalem.

Ushered to the shore, though, after Pastor had held me under, I felt no different. There was a God, I knew, and he dwelt in me, took care of me.

He was a God who so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, so that I might not perish, but have everlasting life. This much I knew was true.

When Missy Cook took my hand and pulled me to her, and I heard the slow murmur of Hallelujahs around me, a sound like the vague roll of summer thunder it might have been, I realized it was all information I’d had before. I’d believed all along, my standing before the congregation and immersion in dirty river water only thin symbols of what had first to be in the heart. Cathe ral and I were of the same God, I knew, but the face of Him she’d seen would never be the face I would come to know. The piece of God I’d gotten wasn’t the flamboyant and exotic one she’d found. The God I’d found was the same one who’d answered my fervent prayer with the death of both my daddy and momma, blessed me with Missy Cook and a crowd come to see what the next generation of Cook looked like sopping wet and crying.

“Cathe ral, ” I said again, and now I was wringing my hands on my apron.

“You want to come in? ” She shook her head. Behind her, Nelson dropped the cigarette, and I saw in the darkness the failing orange light disappear beneath his foot.

She said, “First Corinthians fifteen five say, I would that ye all speaketh with tongues, but rather that ye prophesieth, for greater is he that prophesieth than he that speaketh with tongues.”

She looked down, the same old Cathe ral, the only difference I could see being in her face and the skin drawn taut over bones, her mouth grown thinner. She looked up at me. “Nelson tell me you with child again.”

I nodded, smiled, though I felt certain she couldn’t see me for the kitchen light behind me. “I guess Leston told y’all, ” I said, and looked past her to Nelson, quick disappearing in the growing dark.

He said, “Yes’m.”

“I come to prophesieth unto you, ” Cathe ral said, her eyes still on me.

She moved her shoulders beneath the quilt, pulled it tighter around her.

“I come to prophesieth unto you about coming hardship you or nobody ain’t ever be ready to bear.”

I tilted my head, stopped with my hands in the apron. I lost my smile, though I’d wanted to show Cathe ral how pleased I could be at my age with a baby on the way. But I figured it wasn’t the baby she was talking about. I said, “You know about my James heading off to the War? ” I dropped the apron, put my hands together in front of me. The night was growing colder as we stood there. “Because even though I love my James, ” I said, “God will bless him and us both, and his being gone one way or the other will be a hardship we can live through. At least that’s my prayer.”