Jesus Land (11 page)

“Please God, make him stop,” I prayed.

Jerome had always acted differently than David. Maybe, at seven, when he was adopted, he was too scarred to let us be his family. He also came from a long line of foster homes, but was already a petty thief and a liar when he entered our household.

Our parents believed David needed a playmate—one of his own kind—so they brought Jerome home for David’s sixth birthday. They should have known that David and I were fine just by ourselves. We were best friends, and Jerome didn’t change that. He was a bully who stole toys and played too rough, and for the most part, we avoided him.

As we’ve gotten older, and Father’s beatings have become more frequent, their blackness has finally united them. They are the outsiders, the basement-dwellers, Mother’s failed mission to Africa. The black boys who get whipped by the white master. But while David still longs for a Hallmark card type of family— all frilly love and special occasions—Jerome has struck back, through me.

Over the years, I’ve noticed a pattern. After Dad beats him, Jerome comes to find me.

I’ve never told our parents our repulsive secret. While most children turn to their mothers for comfort, that’s never been the case in our family. If I was sick in grade school and had to stay home from school, Mother would grumpily attend to me, making it clear that any extra claims I made on her time were a hassle. I’d frequently wake up vomiting in the middle of the night and would seek out my sister Laura, not my parents. Laura would help me wash the filth from my blanket in the bathtub, whispering comfort and quietly running the water, so as not to disturb them.

There’s another reason I’ve never told. I don’t want to be responsible for Jerome’s yelps of pain, or fresh welts on his back. You don’t do that to your brothers, you don’t nark on them.

I just kept hoping and praying he’d leave me alone.

The fingernail scissors continue to jab at the tumblers. The alarm clock on my bedside table says it’s 2:20. The house is quiet. My parents are asleep two doors down. I roll onto my back and fling the sheets from my body. Let it be quick.

The button lock finally pops and Jerome gently pushes the door inward, lifting the brass knob to ease the stress on the hinges. His massive form fills the doorway and I turn my head toward the wall so he can’t kiss me. That’s one thing he hasn’t
taken from me. A kiss should be special. I hear him lock the door and creep toward my bed. The mattress tilts under his weight. By the time he touches me, I’m far away.

I breathe deeply, pretending to be asleep, falling through layers of numbness, sensation draining from my body like dirty bath water. My mind flits through a collage of images and thoughts—a horse galloping across a field of clover, the conjugation of To Be in French, the marigolds on Deb’s table. At some point, the collage fades, and time fades, but somehow I remember to keep breathing.

When I wake Sunday morning, the sheet is tucked around my shoulders and the door is closed. A choir sings “Abide With Me” on Rejoice Radio, and the welcoming scent of coffee wafts down the hallway from the kitchen.

Only when I pull my nightgown over my head do I notice the dried blood on my breast and remember Jerome. The tan circle around my left nipple is broken and raw; it’s happened before. In my faraway place, I don’t feel pain. I thrust myself into my Sunday dress, trying not to think about it.

We both bear our scars.

Lafayette Christian Reformed is forty minutes away by car—an epic journey by Lafayette standards—but it’s the only Calvinist church in town and so we must go there.

We’re always late, and today is no exception. In the van, Mother jerks the wheel right and left and stomps on the gas and brake pedals, as if she were pantomiming driving rather than actually doing it. Father is on call at Home Hospital, and David, Jerome, and I each have a bench to ourselves in the back of the van.

We hurtle down thin country lanes while Amy Grant croons “Sing Your Praise to the Lord” over the tinny speakers.

Next to a cornfield is a Jesus advertisement:

But unles you

REPENT

You will

PEARSH

Farther down, someone has changed the wording of another message with spray paint:

Get DOWN
on yer KNEES
pads
and PRAY!

Jerome, sitting behind me, leans forward.

“Do you know what that means?” he breathes into my ear.

I scoot away from him, to the far side of my bench.

The line between town and country in West Lafayette is sliding as subdivisions creep onto farmland. “Quality Manufactured Home Living,” announces a billboard at the side of the road. Behind it is a row of identical small houses, each with white vinyl siding, a gray shingled roof, two windows, and mud for a front yard. Instant houses—half a step above trailer parks.

Our church, in downtown Lafayette, is a severe brick structure surrounded by scruffy Victorians that have been divied up into apartments for poor people—the kind of people who don’t go to our church.

Mother barrels into the parking lot and slides the van into the first empty slot. Her face is pinched as we hustle toward the three arched doorways of the church entrance, but the moment
we enter the foyer she transforms, smiling and greeting people in her sweet telephone voice.

We kids sulk by the coatroom, watching her flit from person to person. She’s in her element. She’s well known in church circles for her charitable work with Vacation Bible School and the ministry to shut-ins. It’s the next best thing to being a missionary for her: a chance to save souls, to receive gratitude, and to focus on something other than her unhappy family.

I dig around in the bottom of my purse for the Red Hots I swiped from the cupboard before church and dump several into my mouth, biting into their spicy cinnamon hearts. David holds out his hand and I pour a few into his palm. Next to him, Jerome leans his long body against the coatroom doorframe, crosses his arms and closes his eyes.

A woman with a blue poof of hair—Mrs. De Jong of De Jong Hogs fame—shuffles over to us. She’s been old for as long as I can remember, wearing the same long black cardigan every Sunday, morning and evening, summer and winter, year after year. A yeasty odor spills off her as she comes to a wobbling halt in front of Jerome.

“Hello, Davey!” she shouts, patting the sleeve of Jerome’s salmon-colored suit. “Don’t fall asleep, now!”

Jerome slowly opens his eyes and looks down at her. She smiles, her face splintering into a spider’s web of lines.

“He’s Davey,” Jerome says in a surly voice, nodding at David. “I’m Jerome.”

“What’s that?” Mrs. De Jong reaches up to fiddle with her hearing aid, and it buzzes loudly. Her eyes glaze over while she flutters her fingers behind her ear until the noise stops.

“What’s that, Davey? I think I can hear you now.”

Jerome thumps his chest with his fist.

“Me, Jerome,” he says, before pointing to David. “He, Davey.”

Mrs. De Jong waves her hand dismissively. “Oh, Jerry! It’s so hard to keep you boys straight.”

No one has called Jerome “Jerry” since seventh grade, when he surged over six feet and insisted on being called “Jerome.” His face clouds over and he leans forward, dwarfing the old woman.

“The same thing happens to me with you whities,” he says, grinning. Mrs. De Jong nods enthusiastically, her hearing aid obviously broken. “Y’all start looking the same to me after a while, too.”

“Jerome!” I gasp.

Mrs. De Jong finally picks up on Jerome’s menacing body language, and her smile fades. She looks confused.

“I just wanted to say hello,” she says, doddering away. I give Jerome a dirty look, but he’s back to leaning against the doorframe, his eyes closed.

At the front of the sanctuary, the choir launches into “Come Ye That Fear Jehovah.” Mother returns from working the foyer and herds us to the usher stand, where Mr. Kylstra, a large grim man with a roll of skin bulging over the back of his suit collar, leads us down the aisle. I go first, followed by Mother, then the boys. We walk down the thread-worn red carpet toward our pew, spitting distance from the pulpit.

When there were eight of us, the parade went like this: oldest sister, middle sister, youngest sister, mother, father, youngest brother, middle brother, oldest brother. Everyone neat and ordered. Our entrance always caused a stir as people turned our way in nodding approval. I imagined their papery whispers: “Raising those black boys as if they were family. Talk about Christian sacrifice.”

The sanctuary is a hot cave. The tiny openings at the foot of the towering stained glass windows aren’t big enough to let air in, and the three giant fans that hang from the ceiling merely redistribute the heat. The smell of our church—of chalky plaster and dusty carpets and dark, moldy spaces—is as familiar to me as the smell of our home. We’re here every Sunday morning and evening, and during grade school, we’d return for Wednesday night Catechism class and Saturday morning Calvinettes and Cadet meetings.

I rifle through the pew back and pull out a fan, a tongue depressor stapled to a cardboard square. The one I pick has a picture of a little girl in a pink dress clutching a Bible on it, and I put it back and choose another, this one of a quaint white chapel surrounded by autumn trees. New England somewhere, a fantasy church I’ll never see.

At the front of the sanctuary, the choir director, Norm Seetsma, brings the choir to climax and then stillness with a series of epileptic movements. The singers sit in unison, and the men pat their foreheads with white hankies.

Reverend Dykstra steps through a side door to the left of the choir and climbs a small carpeted stairway to the pulpit. He’s a small man in his forties, with a fat pink head and bulging gray eyes that make him look like he’s about to cry. He raises the arms of his black robe in a silent benediction—a giant vulture stretching its wings—and heads bow around me. His robe billows as he blesses us, stirred by a small fan at his feet.

In the pew in front of us, the Van der Slew spinsters, Hansje and Uda, sit side by side in matching blue pillbox hats, their heads wobbling faintly. Spinsters and widows make up much of the congregation. They clump together in groups of two or three, sometimes accompanied by a crusty artifact of a man.

Our church is dying.

The young blood has drained to those modern churches where the preachers wear jeans and the choirs have been replaced by musicians wielding electric guitars. But we Calvinists ignore these changes, stubbornly clinging to our creeds and ceremony even as Reverend Dykstra urges his shrinking flock to “dig extra deep” during the offerings, which more and more frequently are taken twice during each service.

We rise to sing “Lead on, O King Eternal”—Mother’s soprano soaring above the voices around us—before sitting for the first collection.

Elders in dark suits move down the aisles shepherding brass offering plates up and down the pews, and I place the fifty cents Mother gave me onto the red velvet circle on the bottom. The elders, deacons, and ushers are all men. When I was in grade school, I wanted to be an usher like my brothers but was sent downstairs to the nursery instead. That’s where the women work, in the basement—changing diapers, organizing potlucks, and teaching Sunday school. In the basement, out of sight.

After another hymn the elders make a second sweep up the aisles, this time carrying silver trays containing cubes of Wonder Bread and glass thimbles of red wine, the Body and Blood of Christ. As I pass the wine tray to Mother I inhale the syrupy aroma and long to taste it.

David, Jerome, and I are the only worshippers in sight with empty hands. None of us have stood before the congregation to make Public Profession of Faith and proclaim Jesus Christ as our Personal Lord and Savior, so we can’t take Communion. Our classmates at Lafayette Christian all made Profession in seventh or eighth grade, but the three of us have held out. I don’t know what the boys’ reasons are, but I know my own: During the Profession
ceremony, you must swear to forsake the secular world, and I’m not ready to do that yet. There are too many secular things that I like. Van Halen. MTV. Dancing. My friend Elaine, a Jew.

Behind the pulpit, Reverend Dykstra pinches a piece of Christ between his thumb and index finger and raises it over his head.

“Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: do this in remembrance of me.”

He sticks Christ in his mouth and chews, and the congregation follows suit. He then drains Christ’s blood from his silver wine goblet in one long gulp, and the congregation mimics him with their glass thimbles.

Rick Hoolsema, my seventh-grade boyfriend, sits a few rows ahead of us in his family pew, and I watch him take Communion. Watching the back of Rick’s head kept me awake during Reverend Dykstra’s long-winded sermons when I was twelve, as I waited impatiently for the service to end so we could sneak off together. As soon as Reverend Dykstra pronounced the final “amen” and bustled down the aisle toward the narthex, Rick and I would rush up the back stairway to the windowless attic, where we’d feel our way through fusty stacks of Psalter Hymnals and the cool satin of hanging choir robes to a cushionless sofa. There, we’d sit facing each other in the darkness, taking turns running a fingertip over each other’s palms, without speaking, as bats fluttered overhead and cars honked faintly in the parking lot. After Rick’s glow-in-the-dark wristwatch marked five minutes, we’d slip back down the staircase to reunite with our families.