Lay It on My Heart (11 page)

Seth jiggles his knee, shaking the table. When I look up, he's staring right at me. “Guess how many times I've read the Bible,” he says.

I shrug. I've never read the Bible from start to finish. I always end up skipping Leviticus and Numbers. Right now, I'm still on the book of Jeremiah, the part where God tells him he's going to lay waste to Judah and make Jerusalem a haunt of jackals.

“Three times all the way through.” Seth pushes the red book toward me. “This Bible has four versions all on one page, see? Tell me a verse you know, and I can probably figure out which translation you have. Then we can look it up and see what the differences are.”

“Jesus wept.”

“You know what I mean.”

I could give him “Pray without ceasing,” but I don't want to, because then I'll probably have to hear, in my own house, all about how Seth spent a whole year mastering ceaseless prayer in Africa. When I have let my own prayer slip away again. I think the words now to myself.
Inhabit me, O Lord God
.

Seth pushes up his wire-rimmed glasses, waiting. He seems taller every time I see him, and his eyes are clear brown, like iced tea. Under the table his knee continues to jiggle, and the surface of my milk rocks up against the inside of my glass. “Come on,” he says. “A verse.”

“‘The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.'”

“That's not even biblical.”

“It's Jeremiah.”

“Doubtful,” he says. “Give me another one.”

And because I can't remember exactly where in Jeremiah, I reach for the red-cloth Bible. Seth pulls it back.

“I have school,” I say. “I can't just sit around memorizing the Bible all day.”

“You could read the Bible on the bus, if it was important to you.” Seth's mouth, wide like his mother's, twitches with the challenge. It's like he's trying not to smile, only teasing, maybe, but when I start to smile back, he presses his lips together, serious. “You think reading the Bible is a laughing matter?”

“I read the Bible every day,” I say.

“In some parts of Africa, people can't even read the Bible, because it hasn't been translated into their own language yet. It's something Americans take for granted. Like having enough to eat.”

I go back to my history book with a show of concentration. In the Puritan chapel, an usher carries a stick with an iron ball on one end and a feather on the other.

Seth stands up and walks around behind me, just like a teacher. I have to reread the caption three times. It says that when children misbehaved in church, they got knocked on the head with the ball, and that when adults fell asleep, they got tickled under the chin with the feather.

“I did Puritans last year,” Seth says. “When you're homeschooled you can move at your own pace. What are you, in seventh grade? I'm already in ninth and I'm only thirteen.”

I keep ignoring him, and he returns to his seat and bends his head over the Bible, holding his hair off his forehead with one hand, thumping a pencil on the table with another.

“Seth has an exceptionally high IQ,” says Mrs. Catterson from the doorway. She peels off the rubber gloves, and her smile breaks open over the whole lower half of her face. “He was reading at a very early age, but he was memorizing even before that. He could recite whole children's books before he turned four.”

“Mom.”

On her way across the kitchen, Mrs. Catterson pauses at the table to squeeze Seth's shoulder.

“I really can memorize anything,” Seth says when his mother disappears into the pantry. “It comes in handy for Doctor Osborne's play.”

I flip another page in my book, like I couldn't care less.

“You could be in it,” he says. “Except it's kind of a limited cast. Of two—Doctor Osborne and me.”

“Is it a missionary story?” I ask in spite of myself.

“I'm not at liberty to say.”

“So you can brag about being in it but you can't say what you're in?”

“Hey.” Seth smiles crookedly. “I may be able to memorize, and I may be in a play, and I may have a high IQ, but I'm not saying I think I'm better than you because of it. That would be bragging.”

“I don't even have an IQ,” I say. “I don't need one. I have ESP.”

“ESP is of Satan,” Seth says.

I grit my teeth and force myself not to say anything more. In my history book, I'm getting to the part about the first Thanksgiving, and I try to practice reading and thinking my prayer at the same time, glad for something spiritual to do that Seth can't see. I am hoping to be receptive enough that by the time my father comes home, I can help with his new vision. I may have a spiritual gift to offer by then, or maybe even a calling that will show me how to use it. The problem is, when I think the prayer words, then the words on the page about Pilgrims become shapes, and when I read the words on the page, the words of the prayer in my head just stop.

“Do you know what lust is?” Seth says after a time. His voice is low, and when I look up, he's staring at my chest.

I look down at where my breasts push painfully against my T-shirt, then I bend over my book so that the whole heavy front of me is hidden beneath the tabletop. This brings me so close to the page that I can smell the clean paper, like split wood, and the tangy hint of ink, too.

“It's when a man looks upon a woman and thinks about having sexual relations. ‘Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another,'” Seth reads from the red Bible. “Lust.”

“I know that.”

“Men are weak when it comes to lust,” Seth says. “Doctor Osborne says that sisters in Christ are called to help men practice looking without lusting. Like right now. I'm looking at you and not lusting.”

Receptive or no, I refuse to believe this is my calling. “Stop it,” I say.

Seth grins. “Stop
not
lusting? You want me to stop
not
lusting?”

“I can see why you need socialization,” I say. The grin dies on his face, and I make it through the whole section on Thanksgiving before he speaks again.

“Guess who we prayed for last night? Someone who thinks he's a prophet.”

I snap up to full height in my chair, breasts and all. “You shut up,” I say, dropping my voice to a hiss as Mrs. Catterson enters the kitchen. She opens the refrigerator door, then closes it, turns, and says, “No whispering.” Frowning, she approaches Seth from behind and palms both sides of his face. “I don't know what you and your family practice, Charmaine, but in our home we have a policy of full disclosure.” Seth's face, under his mother's, wears a complicated expression of satisfaction and sorrow. His mother's hands smush his cheeks toward his nose, and his lips pucker up like a fish. “And we never, ever tell other people to ‘shut up.'”

 

Phoebe believes that elegance is a state of mind, not a station in life. Candlelight is elegant. A set table is also elegant. So even when the meal at the RV-cabin is just canned tuna and sliced tomatoes, washed down with powdered milk, I put a cloth napkin in my lap, and I lay my unused knife across the top of my plate, blade in. Polite conversation is elegant, too, and so she tells me about the second-grade class where she subbed that day, and she asks me about being at the house with the Cattersons, which I tell her was fine. She won't mention my father until after dinner.

While I do the dishes, she takes herself outside to the old lawn chair with a back issue of
The Good Word
, and when I come out to dump the dishpan, she tells me that he slept through her visit again.

“He's exhausted still, the doctor says. But his burns are healing.” On her lap, the cover of
The Good Word
shows a green pasture dotted with pale, woolly sheep. “I was reading what he wrote about that one summer. That month he worked down here nonstop, then the next one, remember? When he couldn't get himself out of bed? I should have seen something in that.”

“It was a dark night of the soul,” I say. “Everything went back to normal.”

“Normal,” Phoebe says. “Very often your father sleeps only two nights a week. When he gets worked up.” She fingers the edges of
The Good Word
and watches the river, which tonight is still. Just a quiet splash here and there from a fish or bird. After a time, she opens the magazine to his column, which includes a photo of him peering seriously into the camera.

“When can I visit?” I say.

“Soon,” she says. “Once he's rested, they'll start figuring out if the medication is working, which I guess can take a while. It's different now. Not like the times he got worked up. Then it was like talking to, I don't know. A radio broadcast that couldn't hear me. Now he just seems confused. When he manages to wake up.”

As she's speaking, the crickets fall quiet, but after a few moments of silence they gear back up, hesitantly at first, then throbbing with song. A long way down the river road, someone starts a car.

“I never told you about the first time I met your father,” Phoebe says.

“You told me a million times.”

“My friend and I had been to a wedding in Ohio. This was right after Mother died. We were just passing through East Winder, and we stopped when we saw all the people. It was the funniest thing.”

“Daddy saw you, and God told him you were the one. You told me.”

“This boy,” Phoebe says, like I haven't spoken. She watches the river like she's calling the memory up out of it. “This boy who was getting married in Ohio, this brother of my friend? His bride had been abducted a few years before when she wasn't much older than you. Sixteen, I think. Some man. Her parents were frantic.”

“For ransom?” I say. This part I haven't heard.

“Not exactly. I guess the man did things to her. At the wedding she testified how the Lord restored her virginity. But my friend said the rumor was that when the girl showed up back at her own house she just shut herself in her room for a week and wouldn't talk to anyone. By the time she finally told her parents that she'd escaped a man's apartment and they called the police, the man was gone, and so was all trace of the things he'd done to her.”

Behind me, Titus squeezes himself out of the window over the sink and drops onto the pile of cement blocks underneath, left over from when my father built the foundation. The sun falls fast behind the palisades, but it takes a while for the gorge to grow fully dark. You can look way up to the top of the cliffs and see sunlight filtering through the leaves and shining on the limestone ridge.

“My friend and I talked about it the whole trip back,” Phoebe says. “If the girl was telling the truth, and whether or not your virginity could be truly restored if you lied about the circumstances, and what kind of life her brother might be in for. I'm ashamed to say it, but I remember wondering what it might be like to be abducted. Or to run off with someone. Whatever it was. And that's what was on my mind when God pointed me out to your father, even though I let him think differently. I let him think I was there because I'd heard about the revival. ‘The heart is deceitful above all things,'” she says, quoting Jeremiah. “Isn't that how it goes?”

“‘And desperately wicked,'” I say. “‘Who can know it?'”

“Right,” says Phoebe. “Who indeed.”

Before bed I wash my face and wonder if maybe the man left the girl behind and that's why she shut herself in her room. My father said that during his dark night of the soul he had trouble hearing the voice of God, and he wondered if he'd been abandoned. But in
The Good Word
article, he explains that God was teaching him that he is always there, even when it doesn't feel that way. Unlike people, who are with you when they're with you and not when they're not, no wondering about it.

When I fold back the accordion door to the bathroom, Phoebe is sitting on the narrow tweed sofa waiting for her turn. “I've been thinking,” she says, nodding thoughtfully, like she already agrees with what she's about to say. “It would be nice if we could remember to tell each other ‘I love you' every day. Otherwise whole weeks might go by without either of us hearing those three important words. We can make that the first of our house rules, now that it's just the two of us.”

“I don't need to hear ‘I love you' every day.”

“Yes, you do,” says Phoebe. “You just don't realize it. Come over here.”

I sit beside her on the sofa and she leans over me, inspecting my face. Then she unclips the gooseneck lamp from the kitchen counter and clips it to the tiny windowsill over the sofa. We have two of these lamps in the cabin, with cords long enough for us to fasten them where they're most needed.

“Maybe we'll even write them up,” she says, “—the new rules. And tape them to the wall.”

“We didn't make new rules when he was in the Holy Land.”

“This is different. This time, we don't know what to expect. I might just discover that I like being an independent woman.”

I keep myself very still. Phoebe has a way of trying ideas out, even ideas that she doesn't really mean. But if you challenge her or react in any way, she can start to argue for what she's only been trying out and start to convince herself. The word
divorce
comes back to me from the girl in activity, and I taste tuna in my throat. I have never considered Phoebe and my father anything but a pair, even when they're an unhappy pair.

Phoebe positions the lamp so it's shining right into my eyes. She leans in and plants her thumb on my nose, pushing the tip to one side. I squirm away from her and stand up.

“Come back here,” she says. And because I am afraid that if I don't she will launch back into the subject of her independence, I sit down again. She traps my head between her hands, pins it to the sofa. “Your nose is a nest of blackheads,” she says, then starts going after them with her two thumbnails. On my cheek, her breath advances, retreats, advances again like a small, soft army.