Lay It on My Heart (7 page)

Sunday-night dinner for us is always a can of tuna mixed in with a can of cream-of-mushroom soup, heated up and spooned over saltine crackers, a meal Phoebe calls “tuna wiggle” because of how it turns gelatinous as it cools on your plate. The trick is to eat it fast. About the time we are sitting across from each other at the kitchen table, in the half dark because the electric lights just seem too hot when it's this muggy, the itching begins to get the better of my father. Under a bright half-moon he drags Daze's old tin washtub from the shed, the big one that I used to splash around in. There's a gallon of bleach in the shed, too, and he empties it into the washtub and adds water from the hose until it's half-full. And then, because it doesn't look like the neighbors are home, he drops his filthy brown robe in the grass, steps into the tub, and squats, wedging himself in until the bleach water rises to his waist. He sits there a good long time, praying without ceasing and killing the poison ivy, the itch that Satan has brought upon him to test his devotion to the Lord's vision.

I'm sitting on the floor of my room with the contents of an old box I keep under my bed spread out beside me on the braided rug. It's a wooden Swinburne's gelatine box Daze picked up somewhere, built to last, with a hinged top and mitered corners. Titus has jumped in and filled the box with his whole body, corner to corner, squeezed in tight as my father in the washtub. You can tell by the way Titus purrs that he thinks it's a good, solid feeling. Some of what I keep in the box is special, like Daze's bone pen from Niagara Falls, which she bought on her honeymoon. A tiny lens at the top of the pen is a viewfinder that shows you the different parts of Niagara Falls, like Goat Island, Horseshoe Falls, and Whirlpool Rapids—all places I would like to see someday. But most of what's in the box is junk. There's a matchbox I saved because it reminds me of a drawer. There's an empty Tic Tac container that still smells good. There's a queen-of-clubs playing card I found on the street in Lexington and pocketed. You can't even have a deck of playing cards within East Winder city limits because they're the tools of gambling. I also keep a small notebook in the box, with a list of things I might like to become, including actress, veterinarian, and prophet. And even though I am not in danger of forgetting the words to my prayer, I jot them down now on the notebook's back page. I know that every time I come across them I will remember to start praying again, if I have stopped. I whisper the words now. “Inhabit me, O Lord God.” I bend down close to Titus's head and whisper them again into one of his velvety black ears, which flattens in annoyance. I tip up the box and he spills out onto the rug. Then I reload it with all my things, arranging them to make space for the Holy Land relics. I also slip in the postcard of Lot's unfortunate wife.

 

I don't know at what point the bleach starts to burn my father worse than the itching. When he manages to throw the washtub on its side and crawl out on all fours, he has red rings from the pressure of the tub halfway up his back. He must understand that his robe has poison ivy oil all over it, but he wants to cover his nakedness, suddenly. To warm the chill that's coming over him. To soak up some of what's oozing from his skin below the waist and down his legs. He clutches the robe to his private parts, then wraps himself in it and sets out for the gas station a mile and a half away. But the pain, the pain forces him to stop at a trailer lit from within like a tin lantern on the side of the road.

When Ruthie Pope opens the door, my burned, blistered father can hardly speak. The robe has stuck to his legs and his privates, which are unspeakably raw. When she peels it away, the lower parts of his back and stomach look skinned. Ruthie Pope is a practical woman, and the first thing she does is cover a patch of her wall-to-wall carpet with a sheet so he doesn't soil it. The second thing she does is grab her cylinder of Crisco and oil my father's naked body from the waist down while four of her seven children watch, open-mouthed and silent. My father, she will say later, pushes air through his lips with pain. He seems to be talking to himself, and Ruthie reckons he's delirious. There's something familiar about him, but she can't put a name to the gaunt, glassy-eyed, bearded face. And he doesn't give her his name, or she would find the number for Daze or for Phoebe. The Peakes and the Popes, old Rowland County families both, know of each other, though it is possible they haven't crossed paths in years. She keeps asking, though. “What's your name, child? What's your name?” and when he finally manages a name, she believes she hears him say he is the Apostle Paul. Then he says it again, and she figures the best she can do for this man, and for any and all concerned, is call the police.

I am closing the lid on the Swinburne's gelatine box, sliding it back under my bed, when the phone rings downstairs. Phoebe has been sitting at the kitchen table, listening to the Sunday-night Christian soap-opera broadcast by the Salvation Army, the stories about streetwalkers and drug users who hit rock bottom in Chicago or Cincinnati and stumble into churches on their last legs, where they meet kind people ladling out hot soup right alongside the gospel.

The radio goes off, and I hear her friendly, public voice fall flat. She's still on the phone with Police Chief Burton, Ezra Burton, when the doorbell rings, and there's Mayor James, having got the first call from the chief who thought Phoebe Peake should have someone with her, should have someone drive her to the hospital. Phoebe either thinks I'm already asleep or is too shocked to think of me at all. For the first time ever, she leaves the house without telling me where she's going and when she'll be back.

At my window I follow the mayor's taillights until his car disappears up Main Street. I stay at the window awhile longer, whispering my prayer, listening to a long, slow train come through and watching the moon, which has risen to sit opposite the cross on the water tower, the two lights hanging on either side of town like the very eyes of God.

T
HEY KEEP MY FATHER
in the first hospital for four days. His legs are covered in gauze, but the doctors leave the more serious burns, in the more serious places, exposed to the air. When Daze and I get there Monday morning, everything but his head and shoulders is shielded by a curtain, for modesty, while he sleeps away next to his IV bag. Someone has shaved his beard and clipped his hair close to his head, which makes him look younger. And smaller. And it's awful the way his jaw has dropped open to one side, his mouth a stretched-out hole. I want to pull the curtain the rest of the way closed so no one can see him sleep this way without him knowing it.

“The bleach did a number on him,” Phoebe says when she finds us in the hallway. “Not to mention the fasting. They want to run a few more tests.”

“Tests?” says Daze.

“They want to rule out a head injury. He said some things when they brought him in.”

“He's exhausted,” says Daze. “My poor boy.” She gives me a hankie, in case I'm about to cry, but I'm not. I'm whispering my prayer so fast my mouth turns dry.

“What's all the muttering about?” says Phoebe.

And Daze says, “Oh, leave her be. It's too much for any of us to take in.”

For the summer, I have an off-and-on part-time job helping Mrs. James clean out her attic, and, with Phoebe and Daze tied up at the hospital, she enlists me again to take my mind off the situation. Mrs. James has her own part-time job in the county clerk's office every morning. Sometimes, like this week, she says she's too pooped by the time afternoon rolls around to go through boxes dredging up the past. So she makes iced tea, and we sit on the couch in the air-conditioning and watch back-to-back reruns of
I Love Lucy
and
Batman
. My father says that television hijacks the mind, filling it with something other than God. We've never even had a set. But as long as the TV's running at the James's house, I don't feel bad about anything. Right up until Lucy does the dance with Ricky and all the eggs break in her shirt, and I start laughing so hard I can't stop, and then there's a bad moment, and a bad sound, a croak, and it's coming from me. It's the sound of laughing switching to crying so fast that my face and neck are wet with tears before Mrs. James realizes what's happening.

She sits with me and pats my back. She calls me “sweet patootie.” She tells me when they made my father they threw away the mold, which is just how some folks are, and that he's going to be fine. She tells me chemical burns are better than fire burns because your insides don't heat up. She gets out her notary-public stamp and lets me notarize a bunch of junk mail envelopes, squeezing hard until the paper takes the impression. It actually does make me feel a tiny bit better for some reason.

Each night, Phoebe brings home brief reports before falling into bed. Tuesday she says he's alert but disoriented. They're making sure nothing gets infected while his skin's scabbing over. Wednesday he's out of the woods enough, infection-wise, to tolerate a brain scan and to meet with a different kind of doctor, a psychiatrist.

Thursday afternoon, Mrs. James feels a migraine coming on and needs absolute quiet. So I sit at my own kitchen table at home, Titus sprawled out beside me, trying to read a book the bookmobile lady thought I might like. It's about a girl whose father is mysteriously away from home. Townspeople are speculating that he ran off with another woman, but her mother is trying to keep a stiff upper lip.

“I hope you've done your Bible reading first,” Phoebe says when she comes back from the hospital. I'm supposed to read the Bible every day before anything else. Right now I'm making my slow way through Jeremiah, for the second time, and I tell her so. She pulls out the chair opposite me and nudges Titus off the table. She's still smiling as politely as she has probably done all day, which makes her look strained, like something she's wearing underneath her clothes—the same outfit she wore to the airport not even a week ago—is too tight.

I wait for the rest of what she has to say, but then I see that she is waiting for me. When Phoebe is very upset, she switches from confiding in me, which forces me to listen, to keeping information to herself in a way that forces me to ask questions. Only she gives me the shortest answers possible, so I learn only as much as everything I can think of to ask.

“Well?” She dips her chin in my direction.

I open my mouth to speak, but I am afraid suddenly of sounding afraid out loud. I am afraid I will start crying again.

“Your father won't be home for a while,” Phoebe says, and waits again. “Why not?” she asks finally, for me. “What's going to happen, Mother? Well, Charmaine, right now it's anybody's guess. He's been moved to a smaller hospital, a facility, really, where your grandmother's second cousin has found him a room. For long-term recovery. In the meantime, things are going to be a little different for you and me.”

I know I should be asking why he can't recover at home, which is what I don't understand. But Phoebe is watching me from across the table, eyebrows raised, mouth tight with expectation. She sighs and places both hands flat on the placemat. She lifts an index finger and we both watch the tendon move around under her skin, rippling the delicate veins.

“How?” I say.

You can see how the question from me makes her feel better, the relieved look that comes over her face just after she is asked and before she answers, even if the answer she's about to give is going to be incomplete or upsetting. “For starters, we're out of money,” she says. “Let me rephrase that. We were out of money and now we are not only out of money, we owe money. Lots of money.”

“To who?”

“To whom. Whom do you think? To the hospital. The first one, not the one he's in now, praise the Lord, which is more of a rest home than a hospital. Daze worked that out, but let me tell you, money's not the only kind of debt.”

She waits for another question, and I cast around for it but my head feels hollow.

“How are we going to get by, you wonder?” says Phoebe. “Well, your mother has put in her name as a substitute teacher. Which will be a drop in the bucket. What else, you'd like to know? Well, your mother has secured a renter for this house. For the next few months. You and I will be staying down at the river.”

“The next few months?” I say. “He'll be gone that long?”

“It's hard to tell what's going to happen,” she says, “but one thing's for sure. We either rent out the house or lose it. And the Cattersons have three months furlough and they can't shift around according to your father's condition.”

My throat is starting to get tight. I bite down hard, and I keep my eyes on the cover of my book. It's blue, with three tiny white silhouettes of the main characters, each in their own series of circles, like you're peering at them through a Slinky or the fat end of a tornado, a vortex, like a black hole, which is maybe what you're supposed to think, since the book is about traveling through space and time. Space and time act differently near a black hole, stretching out, slowing down the closer you come, right up until you get sucked in and pulverized. This is what feels like is happening to the information Phoebe's giving me. My ears suck it in, but my brain pulverizes it. I imagine peering all the way through a vortex, with my father on the other end, tiny, and then I realize that I haven't prayed without ceasing since I saw him in the hospital bed. “What's wrong with him?” I say finally, keeping my eyes on the book cover.
Inhabit me, O Lord God
.

Phoebe is moving her finger again, watching the back of her hand. “They're talking about something gone wrong in his brain. A chemical imbalance.”

I have only ever thought of chemicals as household products like bug spray or ammonia or windshield-wiper fluid or paint. Or like the bleach that burned my father's skin. Substances with sharp odors and warnings and childproof caps. I never knew the brain had chemicals with hazards all their own that could poison you, maybe, from the inside out. A crazy-feeling giggle bubbles up in my throat.