Jesus Land (16 page)

“He brought this on himself, you know,” I say.

He doesn’t respond. Mother’s in the kitchen, busy at the stove.

“Keep that door closed,” she says. “You’re letting a draft in.”

At supper, I blame everything on Jerome.

“David and I stayed in our rooms the whole time,” I say. “We didn’t want any part of it.”

Dad listens grimly, his steel-blue eyes jostling from me to David, who looks at his tuna and potato chip casserole and says nothing.

“Jerome is officially persona non grata in this household,” he says after I finish. “I’m changing the alarm code tonight, and I don’t want either of you to let him inside. He’s no longer welcome here. Understood?”

“Understood,” I say, picking up my milk glass. Finally, I can sleep in peace.

David is silent.

“David?” Father says.

He nods, but doesn’t look up.

“Heavenly Father,” Dad prays after he’s done reading the Bible, “protect this household from Jerome. Chastise him, dear God, and show him the error of his ways.”

But Jerome doesn’t stay away. On Thanksgiving Eve, I’m in my bedroom racking my brain over an algebra problem when there’s a knock on my window. I look up to see a man crouched in a ski mask and am about to scream when I recognize Jerome’s filthy orange anorak.

He motions for me to open the window, and I glance toward my closed door. David and Mother are in the great room watching television and Dad’s at the hospital. I forgot to close the venetian blinds at dusk, something I started doing last summer after I caught Jerome peering through the glass one night while I changed into my pajamas. He climbed the rose trellis to the broad window ledge, same as tonight.

Snow sparkles in the floodlights attached to the roof and powders his dirty jacket. He hugs his arms to his chest and shivers; he’s not wearing gloves.

We didn’t see him at school this past week, but David found out where he was staying and called to tell him he wasn’t allowed home. So why did he come back? Why doesn’t he leave me alone?

No way I’m going to invite him into my bedroom after he forced his way in so many times before. I look back down at the squiggled rows of quadratic equations in my algebra book. I’m failing the class and the final’s next week.

Jerome raps his knuckles on the window again, and I stand without looking at him and walk into the great room. They’re watching
Little House on the Prairie,
the only show Mother lets us watch besides
The Waltons
and
National Geographic
. Wholesome TV, she calls it. Good family values. I pull up a chair beside David, but don’t tell him what happened. He’d want to let Jerome in.

“Jerome’s in the pole barn,” David tells me the next morning, on our way to Thanksgiving service.

We’re sitting in the back of the van as Mother drives herky-jerky past empty fields and gusts of wind shove us toward the rims of dirty snow lining the road. Hymns blare over the van speakers and David leans forward so I can hear him.

“He came to the window last night, but I told him I didn’t want trouble with Dad,” he says. “I gave him a blanket but couldn’t get him food because the motion detectors were on.”

The internal alarm’s red lights zigzag the great room and rec room; normally we use it only when there’s a breakout at the county jail. Now we use it to guard against a break-in by Jerome, a little late.

Mother stomps on the brakes at a yellow light, and the van’s rear end skitters sideways into the next lane before she straightens it.

“Why didn’t you tell him to leave?” I ask David. In the front of Hippensteel Funeral Home, a large mechanical Santa waves to passing cars, its arm yanking right for a beat, then left.

“He doesn’t have anywhere else to go,” David says. “Besides, he’s our brother, our responsibility.”

“Not mine,” I say.

They put the same stupid Santa on that corner every year.

“Not your what?” David asks.

“Not my responsibility,” I say. “He’s a problem, and I wish he’d just stay away.”

“I don’t know why you hate him so much,” David says loudly, falling back against his seat. “What’d he ever do to you?”

His outburst causes Mother to turn down the hymns.

“You kids bring your study Bibles?” she asks, looking into the rearview mirror.

We both hold up our Bibles.

“Good,” she says, cranking up the hymns.

We have Young Calvinists before church, and Mother has Adult Bible Study.

Five of us Young Calvinists gather in a low-ceilinged room on the second floor of the church building, David, me, Rick Hoolsema, and a couple of kids from Lafayette Christian. As we walk in, I nod at Rick, who broke things off with me after our closet kiss, saying “it just didn’t feel right.”

We meet here twice a month, shoving the warped ping-pong table against a wall and pushing the sagging, donated couches into a circle.

Reverend Dkystra bustles in, looking reduced without his billowing black robe, and writes the meeting’s topic on a whiteboard as we take turns with a carafe, pouring hot water
into Styrofoam cups, then stirring in packets of powdered chocolate.

THE IMPURITY OF ALL MEN
, he writes in block letters, underlining
IMPURITY
three times. David and I exchange a glance as we stir our chocolate: sex is Reverend Dykstra’s favorite topic. He thinks teenagers are obsessed with it, that our minds are filthy-full of it, and it’s all he talks about when he’s got us alone in this room.

“Adolescence is a difficult age,” he says once we’re all seated. “Your body is changing, your hormones are raging, and you become curious about sexual things.”

In the parking lot below, a car engine turns, wheezing and straining, before falling silent again. Reverend Dykstra, standing before us in a blue suit, scans the room dramatically.

“But as Christian young people, you need to ask yourself the following question: Can you do the hanky-panky on Saturday night and shake it all around, and still call yourself a child of God come Sunday morning?”

His question booms off the walls, which we painted pea green last summer to symbolize our budding Christian identity. Everyone stops sipping their chocolate and is seized by an abrupt fascination with the frayed purple carpet.

As usual, Reverend Dyktsra is trying to be cool by using what he thinks of as teenage slang. I sneak a look across the circle at David, whose eyes are shining with mirth. Good. He’s not sore at me over Jerome.

As Reverend Dykstra rails against the sins of the flesh, I think about the promise I made Scott last Friday during lunch. We were in a stall in the basement girls’ bathroom, practicing kissing, and he kept trying to put his hand down my jeans, and I kept shoving it away. He was getting peeved.

“I won’t be your boyfriend unless we do it,” he said, his hard-on pressed against my leg. “I’ll find someone else. There are lots of fish in the sea.”

We’d spent the final fifteen minutes of every lunch hour last week locked in that stall, hoping no one would walk in as we wrestled in silence, Scott trying to stick his hands different places and me slapping them away. I wanted to take it slow, so our first time would be special, so it would be making love, not just sex.

Scott scoffed when I told him this.

“Sex is sex,” he said. He narrowed his eyes. “Besides, I didn’t think this would be such a big deal for you, considering . . .”

I grabbed his head and stuffed my tongue in his mouth to shut him up.

“Fine, I’ll do it,” I said after coming up for air.

Reverend Dkystra pauses to drink from his coffee mug and his sudden silence makes me lift my head. The other Young Calvinists are still staring at the ground with hot chocolate going cold in their hands, but David’s staring at me.

“Stop spacing,” he mouths when Reverend Dykstra turns to set his coffee mug on the ping-pong table. He clears his throat before continuing in his preacher voice.

“And you may think that playing with yourself is a fine substitute for carnal knowledge, but don’t be fooled,” he says, pounding the top of the bookcase beside him with the side of his fist. “You must have unholy thoughts to masturbate! You must sin!”

He pauses weightily. “I’m here to tell you today that you can’t jack off with Jesus!” He pounds the bookcase to emphasize each word, unaware of the obscene gesture he’s making. You. Can’t. Jack. Off. With. Jesus.

Around me, there’s weight-shifting and throat-clearing, and I slap a hand over my mouth and pretend to cough, my eyes burning with stifled laughter. David’s also got a hand over his mouth, but I look away before my eyes meet his, lest we both burst.

During the church service, Dad joins us during the second hymn, sliding into the pew and sharing the Psalter Hymnal with Mother, but his pager bleats during the sermon—Unselfish Abundance—and he leaves as Mother sighs and shakes her head.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” Reverend Dykstra tells me as I file past him after the service. He squeezes my hand in his, and I want to pull my hand away, remembering his obscene gesture during Young Calvinists.

“Where’s Jerome?” he asks.

I glance after Mother, but she’s halfway across the foyer, wading toward the coat room with David. She’s got no time for greetings today; our relatives are due in from Chicago.

“Home sick,” I lie. “Strep throat.”

It’s the first thing that crosses my mind. How could I begin to tell him the truth? I look down at the tips of his black loafers, which poke out under his robe, hoping he doesn’t have a special preacher radar that detects lies.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says, finally releasing my hand. “Tell Jerome I’ll be praying for him to get better.”

We walk into the house welcomed by the thick brown smell of the twenty-five-pound Butterball mother stuck into the oven before church. She rushes to tie an apron over her Sunday dress and peer through the oven window.

“We’re going to feed Lecka before company gets here,” I tell her, glancing at David. He nods.

“Take her the milk rinsings, and come right back to help,” she says, pulling on oven mitts. She’s a nervous wreck today, as
she always is when her housewifey duties are on display. As she pokes the turkey with a long-handled fork, I swish water through the cereal bowls stacked in the sink and pour the cloudy white liquid into a glass. Mother says milk rinsings give Lecka needed calcium.

David holds the door open for me as we go outside into the blinding whiteness; the sun is a pinhole of light overhead, the sky blank of color. It’s begun to snow again, and great curtains of it blow over our bodies as we crunch over the frozen grass to Lecka’s doghouse. She strains joyfully at her chain, her shaggy winter coat snarled with knots and the hay that insulates her doghouse. We dodge her dirty paws as we look for her bowl.

“It’s gone,” David says. “Weird.”

I follow him into the pole barn, closing the door quickly behind me. The air in the lofty metal space reeks of fertilizer and grease, and the small windows punched in the walls cast a dreary light over the concrete floor; it takes my eyes a few seconds to adjust. I shiver; for some reason, it feels colder here than it does outdoors.

We walk around the John Deere tractor and there’s Jerome in a dark corner, crouched in a nest he’s constructed from hay, and dirty rags and the blanket David gave him, still wearing his prison orange jacket and black face mask.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” he says, his breath rising in gray puffs to the high roof. “I’ve been smelling that bird all morning; must be close to done by now.”

He folds the face mask up and his eyes are bloodshot and his nose runny with yellow snot. He smiles at me and I look away. There, at the edge of his nest, is Lecka’s bowl, the fake meat nuggets floating in red ice.

“You eating dog food?” I ask him.

“Nah, it ain’t thawed,” Jerome says. “But I was kinda getting hungry.”

He blows his nose on an oil-streaked rag. My fingertips sting with the cold and I take a step backward, impatient to be gone.

“We’ll bring you food right after we eat, Jerome, I promise,” David says.

“Maybe I should just ring the doorbell and ask for table scraps, you know, in the spirit of Christian charity and all that,” Jerome says, flinging the rag on the floor.

“Fat chance,” I say, stuffing my hands into my coat pockets.

Jerome erupts in laughter, then starts coughing, snot rattling his lungs. He pounds his chest with his fist. Maybe he’s sick after all. Maybe he’ll die.

David throws him a concerned look.

“You need anything else?” he asks Jerome.

Outside, the brass bell clangs. Mother, calling us in. I start walking to the door.

“Wait!” David yells after me.

He shakes himself out of his coat and hands it to Jerome, then looks at me. I reluctantly unbutton my brand new green felt jacket—bought with four months of babysitting money at Sears —and toss it to Jerome, who drapes it over his head and shoulders like a shawl. I wince; the tag said I have to wash it by hand.

“Say hello to the relatives for me,” Jerome says. “Tell them to come visit when they get a chance.”