Jesus Land (35 page)

So we’re all eating shit.

We must boil the water we use to clean the dishes and brush our teeth. We’re also allowed to help ourselves to Cokes whenever we’re thirsty.

And this one small symbol of normality—pop—changes our lives. We’re allowed to reach into the fridge and take a green bottle whenever we’re thirsty, and I swear I’ve never been so thirsty in my life. I suck down the cold brown bubbles in five gulps, then reach for another, just because. And when I fetch one for myself, I grab one for Jolene as well, because it makes me happy to see her face light up as she clinks her bottle against mine. Ain’t no liquor ever tasted better.

During Free Time, we gather around the supper table to play Scrabble and sip our pop and giggle as if we were normal teenage girls and not fallen women. We piece the Coke jingle together from memory and sing it in a round.

On the ninth round, Bruce pokes his head out of the house -parent quarters to ask us what we’re singing, and we tell him it’s the Coke song.

“That could be construed as secular,” he says. “I don’t want you singing it.” He sticks Sandi Patti in the cassette player and presses play.

This camaraderie of Coke ends a few days later when the staff locate iodine in a neighboring village, and house pops again become a privilege. The school hires a team of locals armed with machetes to hack up the dead cow and haul it away in garbage bags, and notices are sent to our parents reassuring them that the “water quality issue” has been resolved.

During Free Time, people drift back to their separate corners to write letters or do homework, and once again, Starr becomes a cement box, a place to do time.

Shortly after the typhoid scare, some dark cloud descends upon Preacher Stevie and he starts in with the fire and brimstone.

He’ll call a special function after supper, and we’ll scoot downhill and file impatiently into the chapel, resentful of losing precious Free Time.

One Wednesday evening, Preacher Stevie seems more perturbed than usual. His muscles spasm beneath his dress shirt and his armpits are damp with sweat. As the wind bursts through the wooden slats covering the chapel windows and the gas lamps flicker, he scowls down at us from the pulpit.

“Some of us here tonight,” he says in a smoldering voice, “need to be reminded of the business of Hell.”

He drags out the “e” in Hell as if he were choking on it. H
eeeeeee
ll. The word hangs over our heads like a hatchet, setting people to squirm in their pews. We should be used to Preacher Stevie’s mood swings by now, but it’s still shocking to see him go from Gentle Jesus to Angry God in the lull of an afternoon. I often wonder what sparks this change in him between the time he finishes his one-on-one prayer sessions and the time he rides his moped back to the house in Jarabacoa that he shares with the other single male staffers. Whether it was some student’s prayer-time confession, or too many hours reading the Old Testament in his windowless office.

“. . . and I’m not talking tonight about the H
eeee
ll below,” Preacher Stevie continues, his auburn hair aflame in the gas lamp light. “I’m talking H
eeee
ll that will take place right here on Earth.”

He’s talking Rapture again. I look back at David, and sure enough, he’s eyeing me too. We only just heard about this Rapture thing at Escuela, and wonder why Reverend Dykstra never mentioned it back at Lafayette Christian Reformed.

According to the folks down here, one day there’ll be a bright flash in the sky and we’ll look up to see Jesus hovering in the air above us. He’ll spread his arms, and the true believers will float up to meet Him and to be personally escorted into Heaven.

Now, Preacher Stevie says the true believers could be anywhere when The Rapture occurs—driving down the freeway, mowing their lawn, or sitting on the toilet, when,
poof
! they’ll zoom skyward, slipping through doors and ceilings like Casper the Friendly Ghost. And even the dead true believers will rise from their graves, but it won’t be gross or scary like in
Dawn of the Dead
.

The scary things happen to the folks who are Left Behind, to the unbelievers and Christians who didn’t believe hard enough. Because after the true believers go to Heaven, Satan will take over the world, Preacher Stevie says. Among other horrible things, Satan will force everyone who’s Left Behind to get 666 tattooed on their foreheads, and he’ll set loose an army of demons that have horse bodies, human faces and scorpion tails that go around stinging people to death.

“In those days of misery, you will have one last chance to prove your faith by resisting the Prince of Darkness,” he now says, gripping the pulpit and flexing his large bicep muscles. I try not to notice them. “You will experience pain and torment of every form imaginable. You will cry out to God for mercy, and He will turn His back on you, just as you turned your back on Him.

“And if you fail this last test of faith, He will banish you to Hell, where your pain and torment will increase one hundredfold and never end.”

Hell excites Preacher Stevie. He runs his hands back and forth over his scalp as he talks, and by the end of the sermon, it’s standing on end like a madman’s. He pauses to reach down and pull a Coke from beneath the pulpit, then throws his head back to gulp from the bottle, his Adam’s apple bobbing. I swallow dryly.

“The Rapture’s due any day now,” he shouts, keeping his eyes on us as he bends to set the bottle back on the pulpit’s hidden shelf. “The signs of the End Times are here, just like the Book of
Revelation prophesized. We’ve got nucular bombs and legalized abortion and gay homos on prime-time TV. Evil surrounds us.”

I don’t recall the Bible mentioning any of those things, but perhaps I wasn’t reading it hard enough. Other things confuse me as well. Preacher Stevie says that millions of Christians will be raptured up to Heaven, while John Calvin said only 144,000 souls could fit into Paradise. Maybe God built an addition onto Heaven since John Calvin came up with his figure all those centuries ago, but I don’t dare ask; adults think you’re smarting off if you pry after such details.

On the pew next to me, Jolene fidgets, peeling off her orange fingernail polish and eating it. On my other side, Rhonda breathes in Preacher Stevie’s every word with an open mouth.

“If Jesus appeared in the sky right now, would He take you with Him, or would you be Left Behind?” Preacher Stevie asks us. “If you have any doubt whatsoever, I urge you to rededicate yourself to Him tonight, right here, right now.”

He lifts a jam box from the floor and sets it on the pulpit, then jabs the play button. I already know the music he’ll play before he turns it on, because he ends each hellfire sermon the same way. The hair on the back of my neck rises as Larry Norman’s creepy “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” pours through the speakers, warning of all the evils that befall those who are Left Behind.

I bow my head.

“Please take me with you, Jesus, if you really do appear in the sky,” I pray. Better safe than sorry.

When the song ends, the school therapist slides behind the piano and strikes up “Take My Life and Let It Be.” One by one, a handful of students walks to the front of the chapel as the rest of the congregation sings, holding hands and swaying queerly.
Rhonda is the first to go. She gets on her knees before Preacher Stevie and gazes up at him.

I wait until the last stanza before dropping Jolene’s hand and walking forward. I’m running low on points this week; this might improve my score in the Attitude and Cooperation boxes.

I kneel beside Rhonda, and when I glance over at her, she’s crying. Whether her tears are from joy or sorrow, I can’t tell; her head is turned toward Preacher Stevie, who’s working his way down the line of students, crouching to pray beside each one.

When he gets to Rhonda, she grabs his arm with both hands and pulls him to her, whispering in his ear. He stiffens and says something curt back. She looks scared, he looks angry. They whisper back and forth until the swaying congregation reaches the final chorus, and Preacher Stevie pries his arm from her grasp.

He squats beside me.

“Is it really possible to be one hundred percent pure and free from sin?” he asks in a harsh voice. I turn to him, but he’s glowering at the cement floor between us. Before I can respond, he stands. As he gives the benediction, I puzzle over his question, feeling gypped of my personal prayer. Why is he asking
me
if it’s possible to be free from sin? Preachers are supposed to give us answers, not questions.

Next to me, Rhonda gawks up at Preacher Stevie like a lovesick puppy, her cheeks wet, her mouth moving.

“Help me, God, oh help me,” she wails in a whisper.

God does not help Rhonda.

When she starts complaining of exhaustion and vomiting, she’s taken to a clinic in La Vega for a checkup. That afternoon, when we return to Starr from P.E., her things have been cleared out of the dormitory.

“Preacher Stevie and Rhonda are no longer with us,” Bruce tells us at the supper table. “They had unfitting corporal contact and have been expelled from Escuela Caribe.”

There’s a collective gasp—Rhonda’s pregnant! And free!— and a couple of snorts—I wasn’t the only girl who was suspicious of Rhonda’s sudden zealotry. It’s now apparent that it wasn’t the Holy Spirit she felt moving in her during all those one-on-one prayer sessions, but Preacher Stevie.

Bruce looks at us sternly.

“This is the last time either of their names shall be mentioned, understood?”

“Yes, Bruce,” we reply.

Secretly, I admire Rhonda’s craftiness. Not only did she manage to get laid, she also escaped The Program. She could always give the baby up for adoption and resume her life afterward. Or she could abort it—I’m sure God would also reject the forbidden fruit of a preacher man and a teenage member of his flock. It would make Him look bad.

Over the next few days, I consider the male staffers I could try to seduce—and I’m sure I’m not the only girl who thinks about this—before shuddering with revulsion; none of them are hot compared to Preacher Stevie, and I’m not that desperate. Yet.

As if to ward off such scheming, the school issues a new policy barring female students and male staff from being alone together.

She whose name shall not be spoken got lucky.

After Jerome was adopted, the violence got worse. Hesitation was rebellion; a question, defiance. Father got into the angry act, beating the boys with a belt in the workshop, making them strip to their underwear and bend over a stepladder. Mother chronicled their iniquities at the supper
table, and he disciplined them after reading aloud to us from the Bible. He was the head of the household, the enforcer, the rod and the reproof.

As the violence escalated, David and I began to fight.

Our skirmishes were a way to release the tension festering a scratch beneath the domestic surface. We never knew when our parents would erupt in anger, in a slap or a pinch or a spanking, and it felt better to court violence than to dread its arrival.

We used racial slurs as extra ammo during our brutal kick fights.

“Jungle bunny!” I’d shriek.

“Honkey!” David would yell back.

“Spear chucker!”

“White trash!”

If our mother heard us, she’d make us bite a bar of Ivory. We’d hold it in our mouths while she slowly counted to thirty, the white heat searing our sinuses and knifing tears from our eyes. If, after we’d rinsed our sudsy mouths, she didn’t believe we were sufficiently contrite, she’d have us write lines. John 15:12, 100 times
:

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

We’d glare at each other across the dining room table, as repulsed by each other’s presence as two magnets with aligned poles, and storm off to our separate corners as soon as we’d finished.

Eventually boredom would precipitate peace, and David would slide a bag of pop rocks under my door, or I’d knock on his with The Ungame tucked under my arm.

We could never hate each other for long.

Three months after my arrival, I make Third Level. After I recite the required Scriptures and perform the required calisthenics, Bruce gives me a King James Bible with a white plastic cover, an “I
Jesus” T-shirt and a medal that says “Achievement.”