Jesus Land (9 page)

He had other residue from his family services days. He’d bang his head against his crib board and fall asleep in his high chair, face-planting in his oatmeal.

I appointed myself his warden and his keeper. I pulled him around by his arms until he took his first teetering steps alone, and clapped my hand over his mouth until he learned to pronounce the names of the objects he wanted.

My name was too difficult for him. He followed me around chanting “Ju-la-la,” and I called him “Baby Boo-Boo” because he was constantly tripping and falling and scraping his skin. I’d kiss away his pain and hush his cries.

He was my baby.

“Jerome’s back.”

David informs me of this as we cross the back field after school. I’m studying the cover of the September issue of
Glamour,
which I pulled from the mailbox after we got off the bus. The perfection of the cover model, dark-haired in a pink argyle sweater, knifes me with envy. Anyone that beautiful
must
be happy.

Debra got me a subscription for my sixteenth birthday.

“Filth, fornication and vanity!” Mother seethed when the first issue came. She threatened to ban it from the house, and I’ve been mindful to keep it out of her sight ever since, hiding it under my mattress just as Jerome used to hide his dirty magazines in the basement ceiling. When Dad found his porn stash, he burned them in the backyard—I watched from my window as the dark smoke and ash rose into the hot afternoon sky—before marching Jerome to the pole barn. When Jerome started hollering, I turned up my radio.

“Did you hear me? I said Jerome’s back,” David says, louder.

“Yeah, I heard you.”

“He knocked on the window in the middle of the night, scared the crap out of me. He had a key, but figured they’d changed the alarm on him.”

“Oh,” I say, scanning an article called “Eat Your Way to Perfect Nails.” The photo illustration shows long blue nails gripping a cantaloupe.

“Boy, is he gonna get it when Dad gets home.” He pauses before adding in a dramatic voice: “In the country, no one can hear you scream.”

I roll my eyes; it’s a phrase he’s parroted ever since we moved out here and he saw Dad’s belt hung on the pole barn wall. He stole it from that
Alien
movie:
In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream
.

At the side of the house, Lecka barks and strains at her chain, shivering with excitement at our arrival, and David jogs ahead of me to play with her.

I imagine the morning’s scenario. Mother would have found Jerome at some point and called Dad at the clinic to recount Jerome’s look and smell and sneering answers to her questions. He’d been gone for three weeks and they didn’t try to find him. Instead, they changed the alarm code, fearing he’d sneak back during the day when the house was empty and burglarize it. Jerome has had a stealing problem ever since he was adopted. When he was little, he stole keys and change from Mother’s purse. Now he steals anything he can get his hands on.

Over the past year, he’s clashed frequently with Father and has taken to leaving for days at a time, staying with friends until their parents throw him out.

There will be hell to pay, now that he’s come home again. Our parents’ child-rearing philosophy is etched into twin paddles
that hang on the basement wall: “Spare the Rod,” and “And Spoil the Child.” Proverbs 13:24.

David waits for me by the back door. I stuff the
Glamour
into my backpack and we go inside together. “Holy! Holy! Holy!” plays loudly on the rec room intercom.

The door to the boys’ room is shut. David walks to it and twists the knob. It’s locked. He shrugs and we go upstairs, where “Holy! Holy! Holy!” booms off the walls and windows. Mother’s at the dining room table with the Bible opened in front of her. Her head is in her hands and her glasses lie on the plastic tablecloth. David looks at me and raises his eyebrows before tiptoeing to the cookie jar.

The ceramic lid clinks just as the music fades, and he freezes, hand in the jar. Mother looks up sharply, a tissue clutched in her hand.

“Oh, hi,” she says in a weak voice. “Was . . .”

Her words are drowned out by opening chords of the next hymn, and I reach to turn down the intercom volume.

“Pardon me?” I ask.

“Was there any mail?” Her voice is brusque now, back to normal. She puts on her glasses.

“Some,” I respond. I walk to her and lay a sheaf of envelopes next to the Bible. It’s open to Psalm 23:
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul. . . . I will fear no evil, for You are with me, Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me
. We had to memorize it in fifth grade. It’s a good passage to read to yourself, Reverend Dykstra says, whenever you feel troubled.

When Mother lifts her head to study an envelope, I notice her eyes are red.

David pours grape Kool-Aid into two glasses and brings one to me.

“So, Jerome’s back?” he asks casually.

Mother’s jaw tightens as she shuffles through the rest of the envelopes, separating the junk mail from the bills.

“I’d prefer not to talk about it,” she says, drawing her elbows into her sides, clamping up.

David and I are both standing next to her, over her.

“Does Dad know?” I ask. I want her to look up so I can see if she was crying. I’ve never seen her cry before . . . if that’s what she was doing. . . . I thought she was too strong for that.

“Of course he knows!” she says in an irritated voice.

“Do you want any help with supper or anything?” I persist. If she really is crying, I’d feel bad for her.

“What I want is some peace and quiet!” she says, shaking an electric bill in her hand, and still refusing to look up at us. “Don’t you kids have homework to do?”

David elbows me and nods toward the basement door. I hesitate—not wanting to see Jerome, but curiosity getting the better of me—before following him downstairs. The door is still locked, and there’s no answer when David knocks. In the kitchen, Mother turns the volume up on Rejoice Radio. The hymn is “Blessed Assurance.”

“Jerome. Open up,” David calls. Nothing. He kicks the door with his sneaker.

Silence.

“Open the door!” he shouts, pounding the wood slab with both fists. The door implodes, sucking David into the room. Jerome stands there, tall and glowering in the shadows. He has turned off the intercom, and the blinds are shut. The room smells sour, like dirty laundry. I follow David inside, and Jerome locks the door behind me. He’s several shades darker than David, almost coal-colored. No one would confuse them for brothers.

David sits on his bed and I walk to the far wall and open the blinds and window to let in fresh air. The popped-out screen still leans against the wall beneath the window frame.

“So . . . where you been?” David says.

“Around,” Jerome says, turning to squint at the bright window; his left eye is swollen shut.

“What happened to your face?” I ask.

He sneers.

“You should see the other guy.”

“What’d you come back for?” David asks. “When Dad gets home . . .”

“To fulfill some basic needs.”

Jerome keeps his one good eye on me. I turn my back to him and lean out the open window, my cheeks flaming. Why didn’t he stay away? It would be better for everyone if he just disappeared once and for all. A flock of grackles falls onto the fruit trees in the back field.

“I got tired of eating beer and potato chips,” Jerome continues. “I really missed our mama’s delicious home cookin’.”

David snickers. I turn back around as Jerome stretches out on the narrow bed next to me, his size-14 feet poking over the end of the mattress. He leers at me, and I walk over to the door and lean against it.

David swivels his legs over the side of his bed to face Jerome.

“Seriously, what are you going to do when Dad gets home?”

Jerome draws his arms behind his head and yawns. His T-shirt is ripped at the neckline, as if someone had yanked on it.

“Yell real loud and act scared,” Jerome says, staring at the ceiling. “But then again, maybe tonight will be different. Maybe tonight I’ll give the good doctor a taste of his own medicine.”

“As if you could!” David erupts, looking at me in alarm.

“Could? Or would?” Jerome snarls. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a lot bigger than the old fart, and a lot stronger.”

“But he’s our dad,” David interjects, half angry, half pleading. “You can’t do that.”

Jerome leaps to his feet.

“Our
dad
? You looked at yourself in a mirror lately, boy? If he was your real dad, do you think he’d get such pleasure out of whipping your sorry black ass?”

He jabs a finger at me.

“He’s not our dad, he’s her dad. Why do you think she gets spared? Because this family thing is bullshit, figure it out already!”

David stares at him with an open mouth, and I chew on my thumbnail. Above us, Mother walks across the great room toward the hallway, her footsteps creaking the wood floor.

Jerome collapses back onto his bed, stomach-down. “Now let me sleep,” he says.

We’ve never heard Jerome talk like this before. As I gnaw on my nail and contemplate the stains in the brown carpet at my feet, I feel both my brothers turn to look at me, and the weight of their stares makes me shudder.

As we eat our frozen potpies, Rejoice Radio drones in the background, and Dad’s imminent arrival hangs over the supper table like a sledgehammer. Mother reads
Guideposts
at her end of the table and Jerome sits next to David, smirking to himself and shaking his head, as if he were remembering something funny. David and I wolf down our food and excuse ourselves, leaving Jerome to linger at the table with Mother. He’ll try, as always, to sweet-talk his way out of punishment, telling her how good the food tastes or complimenting her embroidered Mexican housedress or asking if he can fetch her more ice cream. But it won’t work. It never does.

I go to my bedroom and tune my radio to WAZY 96.5. Blazin’ Lafayette’s Hottest Music, turning up the volume so I can hear Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen” above the strains of “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” playing over the intercom. A news report comes on about the Korean airline that was shot down.

“The body count is now official,” the announcer says. “Two hundred and sixty-nine people were killed on Korean Air Flight KAL-007 when the Soviets launched a missile at it. In a speech today, President Reagan called it a massacre.”

There’s a static-filled pause before the president’s stern yet soothing voice flows over the speakers.

“This is a crime against humanity that must never be forgotten,” the president says, and I shut my eyes.

“Dear God, please keep us safe from Yuri Andropov and the Commies,” I pray.

If there’s a nuclear war, Mother says we have enough provisions to survive for two weeks. The basement cold cellar doubles as a bomb shelter; it’s got concrete walls and a reinforced steel door that are supposed to withstand an atomic blast if it’s over three miles away. The shelves are lined with canned tuna, homemade preserves, bottled water and flashlights. In the vegetable bins are blankets and trash bags, which can double as toilets in an emergency.

“What happens after two weeks?” I asked Mother as she was stocking it.

“We pray,” she said.

In the kitchen I hear the sharp slap of plates being piled together. Jerome must be emptying the dishwasher, still trying to butter up Mother. Dad will be home any minute, exhausted from a day spent bent over operating tables.

I imagine his frustration deepening as he drives toward our house, the bright streetlights of town giving way to the dark
isolation of the country, as he heads toward yet another emergency—his family.

On the weekends he’s not on call, he likes to be left alone to tinker with cars in the pole barn or putt around our property on one of his new tractors. He planted a field of soybeans across from the house and puts on his overalls and snap-on baseball cap to inspect the crop. Sometimes I see him bending over the rows from the dining room window—his tall, narrow-shouldered frame lingering over a plant, no doubt trying to determine its state of health, same as he does all day long with his patients— and think about going out there to keep him company, but don’t know what we’d talk about.

He wasn’t always so distant. When we were little, he used to be playful, tugging on my pigtails as if they were horse reins or sticking David and me in the tiny backseats of his Porsche and zigzagging up the road to make us giggle. But somewhere along the line he dropped out of our lives. He founded Lafayette Surgical Clinic, managing the business affairs in addition to handling a full load of patients, and spent less and less time at home. He became a stranger to us, a stranger who comes around to mete out punishment. A stranger whose presence we’ve come to resent.

I’m in bed reading
Glamour, “
Bring Out the He-Man in Him!” when his Porsche growls into the driveway. I turn my radio down.

I hear the mudroom door swing open and heavy footsteps cross the great room. There’s murmuring, and then heavy footsteps descending the stairs and banging on the boys’ door. Incoherent shouting. Shrieks of pain. I turn off my bed stand light and press the radio to my ear under the pillow, filling my head with “Sweet Dreams” by The Eurythmics.