Lay It on My Heart (4 page)

Now he runs a finger down a page in First Thessalonians, which is the Apostle Paul's first letter to the church at Thessalonica, a place in the Holy Land my father may have even visited. Titus pushes himself to his feet and does his black-cat pose, with the arched back. My father has liked this in the past, and I wait for him to notice, but he doesn't.

“Here's what I was looking for,” my father says. “Read this.” He taps his dirty fingernail on 5:17. It's short, almost as short as “Jesus wept,” the shortest verse in the Bible.

“Pray without ceasing,” I say.

“In the nineteenth century, C. H. Spurgeon gave a sermon on this verse,” he says, “and in it he makes some practical points about what is unnecessary to prayer. But even Spurgeon may not allow the words their literal meaning. Prayer without ceasing. This is what I have come to believe is possible, Charmaine. I am lining up with the old Russian monk, after all, and his Jesus Prayer.”

“Spurgeon,” I say. “The Russian monk.” I try to nod like I have some idea of what he's talking about.

“Not that I use the same words,” my father says, still tapping the page of my Bible. “The monk used ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me,' but I prefer a prayer of invitation. And the most important thing is the breathing. With a two-part prayer, you can think the first part as you breathe in and the second part as you breathe out.” He closes his eyes and takes a natural breath in then lets it go. “See? Consider the rhythm.”

I breathe in and then out. “You do it all the time?”

“Without ceasing.”

“At the same time as you talk?”

“We are capable of much more than we ask of ourselves. Once you get into the habit of praying as you breathe, you can talk and even think about other things at the same time. It has been revealed to me that prayer without ceasing keeps one in a holy state of reception, which is the perfect undergirding for the full armor of God. This is important, Charmaine, as we reach out into the county. And you're no longer a child. You're at an age of transition.”

I wonder, uneasily, if Phoebe has told him about my period.

“With a spirit of reception the Lord can fully inhabit you,” my father says. “He can lay many things on your heart. You may receive your calling or find yourself manifesting one or more of the spiritual gifts.”

The spiritual gifts are wisdom, healing, prophecy, miracles, discernment, tongues, mercy. Among others. I try to imagine being known for mercy or miracle working the way my father is known for prophecy.
There goes Charmaine, worker of miracles
, people might say. Then I wonder if that kind of thinking borders on prideful, and I try to imagine myself manifesting the gift of humility.
There goes Charmaine the humble
. But even that could be prideful, if you think about it.

“What words do
you
use when you pray without ceasing?” I ask him.

“That's between me and the Lord. And whatever you pick will be between you and the Lord. You don't have to keep it secret, but I think you'll find that exposing certain things to the air, even to other believers, can be frustrating. That's a good example of holding yourself ‘apart.'”

I nod, but I wish he would just tell me what he prayed so that I could pray the same thing. Sometimes I think that I would rather share a secret with my father than with the Lord, but that's backward. A prophet helps people get closer to the Lord and the Lord's will, through revelation and interpretation, pure and simple. You're not supposed to try to get closer to the Lord just to get closer to a mere human, even if that human happens to be your father.

“I think I have it,” I say after a moment. “My prayer.” I know he won't ask what the words are, but I'm disappointed when he doesn't respond at all. His eyes are closed, and he seems to be listening to the summer sounds outside. The morning insects, the buzzing kind, instead of the chirping evening kind. And the slow, wavelike sound of each approaching car, now drowned out by the train rumbling across Main Street not a quarter mile away. I watch the way he listens, ready at all times for the voice of God, and I breathe in and think the invitation I've come up with, words that seem grave and receptive: “Inhabit me,” on the breath in, then out: “O Lord God.”

My father opens his eyes and follows the motion of the sheer at my window. It picks up the breeze, fluttering out toward my bed before being sucked back against the screen, a kind of breathing of its own.

 

At lunch my father drinks tomato juice but slides his grilled-cheese sandwich over to me, which means he's fasting. His hair is so greasy it looks wet. Between his beard and mustache, his lips are moving again. Possibly a prophecy, possibly his ceaseless prayer, which makes me remember to pray my own.
Inhabit me
, I think, breathing in deeply. I hold it for a second.
O Lord God
, I think, slowing down the words in my head so they fit the long breath out perfectly.

Phoebe tries to catch my eye, but I look down at my food. “How long is this going to last,” she asks my father.

His mouth moves a moment more before the sound comes out. “I don't know,” he says, finally. “As long as it takes. I'll be spending some time at the river.”

“You just got back,” she says tightly.

“Is the tomato juice still there?”

Phoebe closes her teeth and blows air through them. It sounds like she's deflating. Her face is white except for two high spots of color. “At the river? Yes. The cupboard is full of tomato juice. You can bet Charmaine and I didn't head down there to deplete your supply.”

“Phoebe,” I say, because she sounds so mean.

“She calls me ‘Phoebe' now,” she says to my father. He nods distantly, like he's hearing about the weather in another state. “I guess that's okay with you. ‘Honor your father and mother'?”

“Your mother is angry,” my father says to me.

“When was the last time you ate?” says Phoebe.

“I've been fasting for two weeks.”

Phoebe presses her lips together. Today she has not bothered with lipstick. “I guess that explains a lot.”

“Jesus fasted,” I say.

“I realize that,” says Phoebe.

“I'm fasting.” I push away my grilled cheese. My cramps are gone, and I missed supper last night, and I'm hungry, but my father needs backup.

“The Lord does not ask growing children to fast. David?”

“That's true,” my father says.

“I'm a woman,” I remind her.

“Oh, that's right,” Phoebe says. “I'd forgotten.” She snatches my plate, then my father's plate, and crosses the kitchen to dump the sandwiches in the trashcan. It is not like Phoebe to waste food, ever. “Here's what we'll do. We'll take your father down to the river and then we'll come back here by ourselves, as if he hadn't even come back from the Holy Land at all. And I, for one, am going to spend some time on my own knees in prayer, because I am not feeling very godly.”

“We will all be in prayer, then,” my father says. “Which is as it should be.”

I move my lips, praying as I breathe, in case he happens to notice.

 

After lunch we head south, Phoebe grinding through the low gears until Main Street becomes the river road. The open windows turn the Pinto's back seat into a wind tunnel, and I can't hear anything Phoebe and my father are saying. But they're not saying much. I'm figuring it will take a day or two for her to get over being mad and get on board with the plan. Then we'll all settle in to what my father's latest vision means to everyday life. Out the rear window, the cross on top of the water tower, unlit, is just a sharper white against the pale, muggy sky. In East Winder, you don't just pass churches on every corner, like in a lot of towns. Here, there are churches in the middle of each block and more churches in the tiny strip mall with the dollar store on one end and the dime store on the other. The New Beginnings Free Methodist Church meets in a corrugated building in the parking lot of the IGA. And there's still the old Free Methodist Church, which the New Beginnings Free Methodist splintered off from. There's United Methodist. There's Church of God, Church of Christ, Church of Jesus Christ. Church of the Savior, Church of Jesus Christ the Savior, Church of the Holy Savior. Presbyterian, Lutheran, Nazarene, Assembly of God, Christian Church, First Christian Church, First Community—where we've been going—Christ Evangelical, and Evangelical Free. There's the Salvation Army. There's a small Baptist church, even, though mostly county people go there, since you don't have to go to seminary to become a Baptist preacher and most people in town are tied up with the seminary. In fact, two out of three East Winder men are preachers, or they're at the seminary studying to be preachers, or they're retired preachers living out their dotage, Daze says, in the Custer Peake Memorial Retirement Center. The black community on the other side of the railroad tracks is divided between the African Methodist Episcopal and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion. The nearest Catholic church is over in Clay's Corner, and the only Jewish people I've ever seen are the Jews for Jesus who came through once and put on a musical show in the seminary auditorium. There are missionaries in town, too, home on furlough. Even though my father considers them a refreshing bunch, closer to the practical application of the Lord's will, he says, than seminarians battling it out over hermeneutics, their kids can be hard to take. They've been all over the world, and they like to rub it in. Like Seth Catterson, who went to school with me up to third grade, when his family left for Ghana. He's back now, and when I saw him in church last week, he said, “
Kawula
,” then pretended to look confused, hitting his head with the palm of his hand like he couldn't believe he was so African now that he'd forgotten how to say
hello
in English.

North of East Winder, what everyone calls the “city side” of the county because it's nearest Lexington, the land is wealthy—all tobacco fields and thoroughbred horse farms. But on the south side, what everyone calls the “river side,” it's scrubby pasture as far as you can see, dotted with cows and hogs and a few swaybacked old mares. The black barns that held tobacco in better days are turning gray as the creosote wears off, and most of them list to one side like sinking ships. The river side is where Custer Peake's people all lived before the turn of the century. Before the Holiness Movement swept through the South and some great-great-great-uncle Peake was called to preach and ventured into town.

The old farms just south of East Winder are set back from the road, like they're holding you at arm's length. Closer to the river, though, houses begin to creep in toward the road, some with just a ribbon of gravel between the blacktop and the front door. We pass unpainted porches sagging under dishwashers, electric stoves, upholstered chairs, and one stacked high with bricks and clapboards pulled off from somewhere, nails still poking out into the air like they're surprised to see the light of day. Almost every rutted driveway has the shell of a truck propped up on cement blocks.

My father has always talked about the county as a place where instead of turning to the Lord, people turn to the worldly occupations of drinking, fornicating, gambling over cockfights, or listening to country and rock 'n' roll music that makes the blood boil for more of the same. We pass a yard where two red-haired girls about my age share a cigarette and glare at us. One of them raises her middle finger. “See?” my father says, gesturing to Phoebe as if they've been having a conversation about it. As if any of this is new. As if Daze, when she ventures down to the river, doesn't always comment on the particular type of red hair folks have in these parts. County red, she calls it, and she claims it comes with its own brand of hostility.

“We're going to get a flat tire,” Phoebe says as we drive over a sprinkling of brown glass.

It takes ten minutes total to get from our house in town to the tiny piece of land on the river that's been passed down through the Peake family for six generations. The road is straight and flat until you hit Tate's Bridge, which spans the gorge high above the water. Three hundred feet high, to be exact, which everyone knows from the sign the state put up to mark it as a historic site. The bridge is rusted red and older than the Civil War, but the Norfolk Southern trains still make their heavy way across it every couple of hours. The whole thing is held up by two long piers that end in cement feet, each planted into the opposite riverbank far below. So far below that if you look down you start to get that pull that tells you that falling, jumping, even, is what you really want to do. Every so often someone fool enough to climb out onto the bridge slips. Or jumps. When they fish out the body, every single bone is broken.

After the bridge, the road drops into steep switchbacks that sink you deeper and deeper into the gorge until you hit the bottom. Then it straightens out again to run along the river. Folks live spread out on both sides of the blacktop, but everyone on our side, near the riverbank, built their houses on stilts for when the river overflows. Everyone except us, since our place is really just the old RV that my grandfather used to travel around the country in, evangelizing. After he died, and Daze said she didn't care if she ever saw the inside of the RV again, my father parked it on the river lot and raised it onto a stone foundation that's supposed to hold through all but the very worst flooding. “The wise man builds his house upon the rock,” he'd said. Then he built up log walls around the door, windows, and all the sewer and electrical hookups. He did most of this with the nervous energy fasting brings on. Some of it he did during a dark night of the soul that lasted pretty much one whole summer. Now the RV looks like a real cabin, sort of. There's even a tin roof with just a little pitch to it, like on a lean-to, so the water runs off when it rains and collects in our cistern.