Jesus Land (2 page)

David nudged me when we drove by the graveyard. It was set back from the road a bit, filled with brambles and surrounded by one of those pointy black fences that circle haunted houses in children’s books, usually with a large
KEEP OUT
sign on the gate. This fence bore no such sign. We looked at the tombstones jutting sideways from the ground like crooked teeth, and knew we had to return.

We have a thing for bone yards, as we do for all things death-related. It’s part of our religion, the topic of countless sermons:
Where will YOU spend ETERNITY? THE AFTERLIFE: Endless BLISS or Endless TORTURE
? We are haunted by these questions. If we die tomorrow, will we join the choir of angels or slow roast in Hell? We’re not sure of the answer. So we are drawn to graveyards, where we can be close to the dead and ponder their fate as well as our own.

Once we pass Hanke’s Dairy, we sit back down onto our bike seats. Along the length of the cornfield, a series of plywood squares nailed to stakes bear a hand-scrawled message:

Sinners go to:

HELL

Rightchuss go to:

HEAVEN

The end is neer:

REPENT

This here is:

JESUS LAND

You see such signs posted throughout the countryside: farmers using the extra snippet of land between their property and the road to advertise Jesus Christ. Mother approves. She says
the best thing you can do in life is die for Jesus Christ as a missionary martyr, but posting signs by the side of the road can’t hurt either.

“Anything to spread the Good News,” she says.

It was her idea to move to the country. She grew up in rural South Dakota and had been threatening to drag us back to the boonies for years. Dad finally caved in. His drive to Lafayette Surgical Clinic, where he’s a surgeon, is half an hour longer, but now he’s also gotten into the country act, donning his new overalls to drive his new tractor around our fifteen acres.

Our three older siblings escaped this upheaval by leaving for college, so that leaves my parents, my two adopted black brothers, and me.

Jerome, our seventeen-year-old brother, hightailed it out of this 4-H fairground a few nights after we landed. He got into a fight with Dad, stole the keys to the Corolla, and drove off. Hasn’t been seen or heard from since, which is fine by me, since Jerome is nothing but trouble anyhow.

So basically it’s me and David, our ten-speeds, and the open road. And while the country graveyard is puny compared to the one by our old house—Grand View Cemetery, which we visited often in search of fresh graves—it still contains dead people, and that’s what interests us.

It takes us five minutes to pedal past the cornstalks, standing higher than a man’s head, to a cluster of double-wide trailers on the other side. They’re anchored in a half circle, with an assortment of plastic flamingos and gutted vehicles strewn on the bald clay before them. The irritating twang of country music leaks from the trailer nearest the road, and as we sail by, a heap of orange cats lounging in the engine compartment of a rusted station wagon scatters into the dry weeds.

I curse myself for wearing a dark T-shirt in this booming heat. We haven’t seen another human since we walked outside and would have stayed indoors ourselves if boredom hadn’t driven us into the farmland.

“Watch for heatstroke,” Mother, a nurse, warned us before we left. “If you get cramps or diarrhea or start to hallucinate, walk your bikes.”

Sweat drips into my eyes, warping the landscape, and I lift my T-shirt to wipe my face, flashing my bra at the empty world. Ahead of me, David rides shirtless, his scrawny torso gleaming like melting chocolate. He’s draped his T-shirt over his head and tied it under his chin like a bonnet. Like a girl. As if he didn’t look dorky enough with those black athletic glasses belted to his head with that elastic band. If anyone from Harrison sees us, we’re doomed.

William Henry Harrison is our new school; Hick High, the townspeople call it. There will be 362 people in our class, compared to twelve at Lafayette Christian, our old school, and we don’t know a single one of them. These are farm kids who’ve known each other since they were knee-high to a rooster, kids who’ve probably never seen a real live black person before. Kids who worry us a lot.

I stand up and stomp on my bike pedals, trying to catch up with David and tell him to put his shirt back on, but he’s on his second wind and flying over the crumbling pavement at enormous speeds. I yell at him and he rolls to a stop in the shade of an oak tree, turns and grins as I glide up beside him. I stand over my bike, panting, and point at his head.

“What’s up with that?”

“Keeps the sweat outta my eyes.”

“Looks queer.”

He shrugs and pushes his glasses up his nose.

“Come on, take it off. Someone might see you.”

“So?”

“Do you want people to think you’re some kind of weirdo?”

He shrugs again and stares across the road at a herd of cows trying to cram themselves into the shade of a small crabapple tree. His jaw is set; once David’s brain has clamped onto a notion, there’s no unclamping it.

I shake my head and reach into the grocery sack strapped to his bike frame for a can of strawberry pop. When I yank off the metal tab, warm red froth bubbles over my fingers.

“Gosh darn it!”

I hand the can to David.

“Go on and drink your half.”

We’re saving the other can for the graveyard. I lick the sugar from my fingers and watch a cow, this one with a black body and white face, plod after the shadow of a small cloud that drifts across the pasture. When the shadow slips over the fence, the cow halts, lifts its tail, and spills a brown torrent onto the ground. I wrinkle my nose and turn to David.

“Remember when we used to ride to Kingston pool to swim every day?”

He stops drinking and peers at me sideways. His face is dry while mine drips sweat; maybe there’s something to his bonnet notion after all.

“’Course I remember, dufus. That was just last summer.”

“Point is, we never knew how good we had it, compared to this.” I swipe my arm across the landscape: corn, cows, barns. More corn.

“Could be worse,” David says, giving me the pop can.

“How’s that?”

“We could be dead.”

“Well, yes. But this has gotta be the next best thing.”

He snorts, and I drain the can and drop it back into the sack.

We push off and are just gaining momentum when a long red car with a jacked-up rear end barrels around the corner ahead of us. It races in our direction, the thrum of the motor getting louder and faster. Suddenly, it lurches into our lane.

We swerve down a small embankment into a cornfield, crashing hard into the bony stalks and paper leaves. The car blurs by amid hoots of laughter.

David untangles himself from his bike and offers me a hand up. I charge up the embankment to the road.

“Stupid hicks!” I scream after the car, as it evaporates into the horizon. “Frickin’ hillbillies!”

David walks over to stand beside me.

“They must be bored too,” he says. He shakes his head at the blank horizon and reties his bonnet. He always takes things calmer than I do.

We’ve seen the country kids before as we’ve traveled back and forth to town for church or supplies. We’ve seen them slouched against pickup trucks, sharing round tins of spit tobacco. Lounging on plastic chairs in front yards, watching cars go by. Maneuvering giant machines through the fields, their bodies dwarfed by metal.

They are alien to us, as we must be to them.

So much for the famous “Hoosier hospitality.” When we moved to our new house, no one stopped by with strawberry rhubarb pie or warm wishes. Our neighbors must have taken one look at David and Jerome and locked their doors—and minds—against us.

David and I shove back onto County Road 50, determined not to waste our journey. We clear a small rise and spot the cemetery a quarter mile ahead.

“Race you!” David shouts.

We crouch behind our handlebars, and David gets there first, as always. We lean our bikes against the fence, which is coated with a fine layer of orange rust, and walk around to the gate. It creaks as I push it open. David rushes past me to a gray block of marble just inside the fence that is roped with briars. He tramples down the vines and squats before it.

“Here lies Mabel Rose Creely,” he reads as I peer over his shoulder. “Born April 18, 1837, dyed November 9, 1870.”

He looks up at me with a smug grin.

“They spelled ‘died’ wrong.”

“Like, duh.”

I pick my way through the brambles and crooked tombstones to a large tablet set off by itself in a corner and tap it with my shoe to flake off the mud plastering its surface.

“Check it out!” I call to David. “Enus Godlove Phelon! He’s got your same birthday, June 2, 1851! Died October something . . . I can’t make it out.”

“What’s that name again?”

“Enus Godlove Phelon.”

“Anus?”

“No, Enus! With an ‘E.’”

“What kinda name is that?”

“A redneck name, for sure!”

We snicker and kick about for more stones. As I crouch to read them, I try to put the car out of my head and focus on the dead people beneath our feet. This is serious business, and I’ve got serious questions.

First, there’s the appearance of the folks in the boxes. Do maggots fester in their eye holes like in horror movies, or do they stay pickled like the frogs in Biology class? David thinks it
takes about two hundred years for a person pumped full of formaldehyde to turn into a skeleton, but I’m not so sure . . .

Then there’s the Afterlife question. Where is the soul of the person I’m standing on right now—Heaven or Hell? Were they satisfied with their lives, or did they want more? If they could go back and do it all over again, what would they change? Is Heaven all it’s cracked up to be?

As I’m contemplating all this, I detect a movement out of the corner of my eye and raise my head. The red car. It prowls noiselessly along the cemetery’s edge and rolls to a stop beside our bikes. I look at David, who’s bent over a marble cross, cracking up over some dead woman named “Bessie Lou.”

“David.”

“. . . better name for a cow, don’t you think?”

“David, stop it!”

His head shoots up at the alarm in my voice, and he follows my gaze to the car—four white bodies emerge from its interior—before standing to untie his T-shirt and slip it over his narrow shoulders.

They’re farm boys, our age. Bare-chested and wearing cutoff jeans and baseball caps. You can tell they’re farmers by their sunburns: Their faces, necks, and arms are crimson but their torsos are pasty, as if they’re wearing white T-shirts. If you looked up “redneck” in the dictionary, they’d be there to illustrate, and I’d say as much to David if they weren’t marching toward us with tight faces.

They halt in a row behind the fence. I glance at David. Behind his smudged glasses, his eyes are wide with fear.

“Whatch y’all doing?” the tallest one asks as a cow moos in the distance. He takes off his Caterpillar cap and fans his face with it.

“Just looking!” I say breezily, as if this was Montgomery Ward’s and these boys were salesmen come to check on us.

“This here’s the final resting place of my great-great-grand-daddy!” yells a boy with a Snap-On Tools cap.

The tallest boy tugs a piece of field grass from the ground and sticks the end in his mouth. He chews it slowly and saws his eyes back and forth between David and me.

David’s mouth is gaping. I step between him and the farm boys, still grinning.

“We just moved out here from town and . . .”

“Obviously y’alls ain’t from around here, else you wouldn’t be in there,” says a third boy—this one in an International Harvester cap.

The runt of the litter, an acne-scarred boy in a Budweiser hat, grabs the fence in his fists and shakes it violently, rattling our bikes. Behind the tall iron grate, his stumpy body heaving back and forth in anger, he looks like a caged monkey having a tantrum.

“This here’s an American cemetery!” he shouts. “Only Americans are allowed in there! It’s the law!”

I take a deep breath and look back at David, who’s now gaping at the trampled brambles at his feet.
Close your mouth.

“That’s fine,” I say, shrugging. “We’ll just leave, then.”

I move toward the gate, and the human fence behind it, listening for the rustle of David’s footsteps at my back.
Move.

“What’s wrong with blacky?” the runt asks. “Cat got his tongue?”

He lifts his Bud cap and orange hair falls to his neck. I ignore him, keeping my eyes on the road beyond him, the road that will lead us to safety. He moves aside at the last moment to let me push open the gate. I’m on a hair trigger. If they so much as breathe on us, I’ll bloody their eardrums with my screams. I stop and wait for David to walk through the gate, then follow him to our bikes.

The farmers are at our heels.

“That darkie your boyfriend?” one of them asks to a burst of snickers. I pull my bike upright and wheel it forward so David can get his.