A Girl Named Zippy (5 page)

BLOOD OF THE LAMB

I
t wasn’t enough for my mom to make me go to our Quaker church every Sunday; in addition, I had to listen to Batsell Barrett Baxter on television as we were getting ready to go.

Batsell Barrett Baxter was either an early example of a telepreacher or else an early example of Claymation. He had no live audience and no flashy suits. He sat dead still in a chair and spoke into the camera without ever moving his head or altering his blood pressure. More a scholar than an evangelist, he told his television audience about the Good News of Jesus Christ with the same energy and enthusiasm that doctors generally reserve for discussion of really bad hemorrhoids. My mom loved him. Sometimes he even had “live” guests, other old and suited and clinically depressed men who had devoted their lives to God.

BBB:
So. Dr. Brown.

DR. BROWN:

BBB:
Your book,
New Life in the Old Testament
, just came out. Here it is. That’s a nice cover. From Agape Press.

DR. BROWN:
Yes.

BBB:
Have you always been interested in the Old Testament?

DR. BROWN:
Yes.

BBB:
Why is that?

DR. BROWN:
Well. Interesting that you should ask that question. I have always felt that . . . [there follows a pause so terrifying and extended that two corn crops fail] . . . our
roots,
as it were, as the people of the
cross,
begin with the
Hebrew
peoples—their fledgling relationship with . . .
God
. . .
;
their inability to abide by His
commandments;
their exile into
Egypt
and eventual passage into the
Promised Land
. . . Jesus Christ is, as it were, the
fulfillment
of the promises made to the Hebrew peoples in God’s
first
covenant.

BBB
: God’s first
. . .

DR. BROWN:
That being the Old Testament, of course.

BBB
: Of course.

My dad would have gotten up long before the rest of us, in order to do his mysterious middle-of-the-night stuff, which seemed to include standing in the yard with the dogs and looking up at the sky while drinking instant coffee so hot his upper lip was always a scalded red. Sometimes he went into his tool shed and moved things around, just a little. He whistled. By the time I got up, miserable and furious, it was still dark outside and his day was half done.

He watched Batsell Barrett Baxter with his arms crossed, his face lit up with a deep and sardonic amusement.

“Whoa. Amen,” he’d say after a particularly bland but coherent point. Or my personal favorite, which he reserved for when my mom left the room: “You know, Zip: Batsell Barrett Baxter was
born
dead.” Dad’s insults made me laugh and groan at the same time, because they were absolutely indicative of the power of being grown up. I not only had to spend countless hours of my life worshipping a God I didn’t believe in, I couldn’t even complain about it, whereas Dad just sat down in his chair and called it as he saw it.

I HAD A FEW TRICKS
to keep from leaving for church on time. I most often used the “I Can’t Find My Other Shoe” tactic, and when that failed, “I’ve Lost My Little Pink New Testament.”

“We’re leaving!” my mom would call out, standing by the front door in one of the patched and remodeled dresses Mom Mary handed down to her. Sometimes she also wore a coat with three-quarter-length sleeves. Sleeves that stopped in the middle of her forearm! Go figure!

“I can’t find my other shoe!” I’d shout back. “You go on without me; I’ll be right there!” And then I’d dig around under the couch halfheartedly, surreptitiously pushing the lost shoe further and further out of my reach. Eventually, exhausted, I’d flop down on the couch in a sprawled position that suggested maybe I’d just spend the morning watching fishing shows with my dad, who would turn almost without turning and give me the one raised eyebrow look which contained the whole of his childrearing philosophy: “I respect every way in which you are a troublemaker, now get up and do what your mother says.”

“Okay, okay, I’m going.” Then I’d have to reach extra hard under the couch for my wayward shoe, sometimes giving myself a crick in the neck that would cause me to sprawl out on the couch again. I occasionally sprawled so long as to merit the thunderous
Zip!
warning which preceded any actual fury. Hopping on one leg, trying to squeeze my foot into a shoe that was inevitably too small, I’d look around the den frantically.

“Daddy! I can’t find my little pink New Testament!” For reasons probably due to his own lack of churchiness, Dad believed me when I said I couldn’t attend Sunday School without my Bible. I’m sure he thought of it as similar to attending fourth grade without a pencil.

The Little Pink New Testament device had worked long and well, so well that I thought of it as permanent. Then one Sunday morning, just as I was about to collapse on the couch in helpless surrender to my heathen fate, Dad reached down under his chair and pulled out my missing Bible.

“Where did you find that?” I asked, genuinely perplexed.

“In the bathroom trash can.”

“You’re kidding! How odd. I must have totally accidentally without even knowing it thrown it away with my old church bulletin last week. How silly of me!”

“Accidents happen,” he said, handing it to me.

“You can say that again,” I said, taking it from him as if with gratitude.

“But just to make sure this particular accident doesn’t keep happening, I thought that from now on you could just give it to me when you get home from church, and I’ll hold on to it for you. Then you’ll always know where it is.”

I sighed and headed for the front door. “Bye, Daddy,” I said, not looking back at him.

“Don’t sigh,” he called out to my defeated back. “And don’t dawdle.”

WHEN I THINK
of getting up for church, it is always winter in our house, but when I think of the actual walk, a small town block—our house and yard and the house and yard of Reed and Mary Ball, who never ever left their front porch—it is always a perfect summer day that will wither in my absence. I had to walk right past my bicycle, which sat in the yard as quietly and expectantly as a good horse; I had to ignore the hopscotch squares Julie and I had drawn on the sidewalk earlier in the summer, because hopscotching in a dress and too-small shoes was a recipe for disaster.

Sometimes the side of the house would exert a strange and supernatural magnetic force upon my body, which would cause me to fly up against it, face first, and stick there. With a great concentration of will I could rip one arm free, and then one leg, and eventually pivot until only my back was stuck. I was like a human fly, moving sideways. Smack, peel, peel, pivot, smack. I sometimes spent whole minutes just trying to pass one little section of the house.

Then there was the backyard, which I was morally obliged to inspect. Who, if not I, would notice a fallen nest; a broken hinge on the back screen door; the lost left leg of my big toothy doll named Jeremy? I stood in the center of the yard and turned around and around until my eyes were jittery, then headed for my dad’s tool shed, a strange little wooden structure that was tilted decidedly north. The door was held closed with a wooden peg that turned, and inside was the most outrageous jumble of tools and chains and traps. The traps were all different sizes and hung from the ceiling and the walls and no way would I ever touch them. Everything in the shed was the exact same shade of gray, except for one little spot of color: my second-grade picture, propped up in the window. I was sporting the favored Pixie haircut and wearing a light-blue jumper my mother made, smiling a little closed-mouth smile that hid my toothlessness.

Stacked on the corner of the work counter were slabs of beeswax, which Dad rubbed on his hands before handling his traps. He coated the traps with it, too; it covered the human scent that might forewarn an animal of danger. My dad’s relationship to the traps and the traps’ relationship to the necks of certain animals was something best not considered too closely.

The beeswax, once a deep and satisfying yellow, had turned an earthy color. The little window through which Dad could look at Edythe’s yard across the street was discolored. Whatever had descended over the whole of this shed was so powerful and complete it even had a smell, and not an unpleasant one. It was a combination of oil and metal, the wooden handles of heirloom tools, and the hides of rabbits and squirrels. I stood still and breathed deeply. I could smell a horse’s tail, and bags of grain, long gone, that we fed to various ducks and rabbits who had come and vanished.

I could vaguely remember a horse named Princess who (could it be true?) was kept in this shed at night. There was just enough room for her to stand without moving, her tail against the wall and her head against the door. One winter morning my brother went out to feed her, and against all physical odds she had turned around in the night, and when he opened the door she reared up and kicked him with both hind legs, sending him flying across ten feet of yard and up against the side of the house. When we came running out to see what had happened, Dan was in a heap on the ground, trying to catch his breath. Two of his ribs were broken and his sternum was bruised. He wore a bright yellow, down-filled coat then, probably a color, like blaze orange, recognized by hunters. He was tall and muscular, but lean, and he unconsciously flexed his jaw muscles all the time, the way some people jingle the spare change in their pocket. Of my parents’ children my brother fared the best, genetically speaking, and was in fact so handsome that both Mom and Dad were reluctant to take credit. Regardless of the fact that he was beautiful, and should have had every advantage because of it, the world was not right for my brother. There was some standard by which he measured everyone, all human activity, without articulating it or giving us any clue where we were going wrong. He was silent and furious nearly all the time. Girls were crazy about him.

The air in the shed was so thick and still I could almost hear it ticking. I could see, in a trick of memory, Princess’s hind legs bursting out of the door of the shed; my brother flying backward, bent in the middle like a man accepting the momentum of a cannonball; his slide down the side of the house and his jumble of long limbs when he landed. An unexpected and corrosive dread overcame me, starting in my stomach. I felt like I was the meal over which two alligators were fighting, and all I could do was stand still and wait for one to win.

I have to go to church before Dad comes outside,
I told myself repeatedly.
I have to go to church.
I stepped outside, blinking at the sudden brightness, like a person just emerged from a stint in solitary confinement. Between our house and Minnie Hodson’s was our clothesline, which caught my eye. My mom had hung out a sheet patterned with fading yellow roses, two pillowcases, and a pair of her own underwear, which caused my sense of unease to billow. As I stood there looking at my family’s laundry, Minnie Hodson slammed out of her own back door, followed by her spaniel dog, Lucky.

The two of them walked around the yard casually. It was a beautiful day. Minnie was feeding her chickens out of a pocket in the front of her apron, making little comforting clucking sounds at them, which they imitated. Lucky sat down smiling, his tail brushing a winged pattern into the dirt of the barren yard. I don’t know how she chose, whether by some fixed criteria or just her own fancy, but suddenly Minnie reached down and picked up a chicken by the neck and spun it in an arc over her head, breaking its neck. Within seconds she had it on a darkened stump, where she cut off its head with a little hatchet she was carrying in the same apron.

She held the chicken’s body upside down for just a few seconds, to drain some of the blood. Lucky surveyed the scene with a curious light in his eyes. I had unconsciously crossed part of the yard, and was now standing under the lower branches of the mulberry tree, still at an age where anything I couldn’t see couldn’t see me. The other chickens had scattered, and now Minnie and Lucky walked toward their back door. I grimaced against the inevitable screech when the door opened and its slamming shut, before they even happened.

And suddenly I felt my dad’s hand on my shoulder. I looked up at him, at where he was standing in a corona of Sunday light, then back down at my shoes, which I had managed to stain with mulberries in the few minutes I stood absolutely still.

“What’s going on out here?” Dad asked, crossing his arms and looking into Minnie’s yard.

“Nothing, Daddy.” I leaned over and spit on my old saddle shoe, then scrubbed at it with my fist. “I’ve got to get on.”

He nodded at me, then turned back toward the house. If blood had a smell, he missed it; if something new and permanent was written on my face, no one was saying so. A cigarette burned in my father’s hand everywhere he went.