Lay It on My Heart (6 page)

“I'm not resentful,” I say, clenching my jaw in pure resentment.

“It's not every woman who could be a helpmeet to your father. Hear me? It's no walk in the park. But the Lord brought us together. So I don't need a teenage girl telling me about God's will. I have my own front-row seat, and I'm barely hanging on.”

I drop my head and keep it low, but I can feel the women behind Phoebe, listening.

“When someone speaks to you,” Phoebe says, “please respond.”

“Okay,” I say.

“I am at the end of my rope. You get that, right?”

“Right.”

“This is hard,” she says.

“I know.”

“What do you know?”

“That this is hard.”

Phoebe sighs again. “Your tone is unkind.”

“I don't know what you want me to say,” I say.

“I don't want a puppet,” Phoebe says, “but I don't think a little compassion is too much to ask for.”

I am trying to think the prayer while I talk, but it stops and starts around the words I say out loud. Still, I like having something private in my head, especially when Phoebe starts in on compassion. I heard her telling Daze, while my father was away, that she worries about my “diminishing capacity” for it. This includes my capacity to understand that the world does not revolve around me, as well as my capacity to imagine what it might feel like to be another person and to imagine what that other person might like to hear in order to feel better. But Phoebe has it wrong, because even though I say I don't know how she feels or what she wants to hear, it's not true. I do know. She wants me to tell her how sorry I am that this latest thing with my father is hard on her. She wants me to say that I will start helping her out in little ways around the house. Doing my chores without being asked and taking over some of her chores, too. I know she'd like to hear this because this is the kind of thing I used to be able to say to her when she was overwhelmed or worried, like during the summer of my father's dark night of the soul. And when I said these things, she would hug me and cry a little harder and tell me I was sweet. I remember what it felt like to want to say these things, too, but whatever made me want to has flipped over inside me into the most intense not-wanting-to that I have ever felt about anything.

The women who have been listening to us gather their trays and move to the trashcan. One of them sneaks a look back and shakes her head, just barely, in disapproval or disbelief or disgust. First this embarrasses me, but then it makes me mad, more mad than I am at Phoebe, even, and I stare right back at the woman. I keep myself from blinking until she stops shaking her stupid head and turns away. By the time Phoebe turns around to see what I'm looking at, the women are gone, the glass door of McDonald's already closed behind them.

E
VERY SUNDAY, BEFORE THE
main service in the sanctuary, my Christian Education class sits in a circle of folding chairs in a cinder-block room of the church basement. Besides me, the teacher, and two adult women, there are these two girls I know, Mary-Kate and Karen, best friends joined at the hip, and now Seth Catterson, the missionary boy back from Ghana. This morning, one of the women, a thin, blond seminary wife, starts us off by saying that in her old church whenever anyone was baptized, they spoke in tongues. “Baptized not just with water,” she says, “but with the Holy Ghost.” The teacher, Connie Bowls, nods so hard that her soft, powdery skin quivers. It's like she's agreeing, but she's not. No one will expect the blond woman to speak in tongues at First Community Church, Connie Bowls explains. In fact, First Community considers tongues to be a private prayer language. To be used in private. The seminary wife writes this down on her notepad.

“But if there's a translator, then it doesn't have to be private,” says the other adult woman. She's also blond, but heavier set. With her Bible, she holds an old issue of
The Good Word
, the one with my father's revelation on fasting.

“In Ghana lots of people speak in tongues,” Seth adds.

“It's more a matter of church unity,” says Connie Bowls. “Of time and place.”

“Once I even translated myself,” says the second blond woman. “Translation is one of the gifts of the spirit.” She looks pointedly at me. “Like prophecy.”

“Prophecy is an Old Testament gift,” Seth says, beating his pencil against the rubber sole of his shoe. “Speaking in tongues is a gift of Pentecost. Acts. New Testament.”

“I thought speaking in tongues was from the Tower of Babel,” says Mary-Kate. She and Karen wear their hair in identical French braids, while I have managed only to pull my bangs straight back into a barrette. I wonder if either of them has started her period, but I'm glad you can't tell from looking.

“The Tower of Babel is where different languages come from,” says the seminary wife. “Like French and Spanish.”

“Something like that,” says Connie Bowls, nodding.

“My father says the Lord has always spoken to him in plain English,” I say. “And there are plenty of prophets in the New Testament.”

“What do the prophets have to foretell in the New Testament after Christ already came?” Seth asks.

“What about interpretation?” I say. “What about revelation? What about John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul? What about Agabus? What about Philip's daughters?”

“Debatable,” says Seth, though I doubt he even knows about Agabus and Philip's daughters, since most people just skim over their mention.

Connie Bowls smiles brightly. “This lofty discussion falls right in with today's scripture from First Corinthians, where Paul says the church has one body but many parts. A role for every member. Let's get quiet, for a moment, and contemplate some of the ways the disciples supported the early church. Then we'll write down what this says to us about our responsibilities today.”

I don't even have to crack open my Bible to write
prayer
and
outreach
, and to come up with examples, the most obvious being prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane and the writing and preaching of the apostles throughout the New Testament.
Today
, I write,
this means supporting the church in prayer and witnessing to others. And
, I add for Seth's benefit,
being open to new revelation from the Lord
. When I look up, everyone else is scowling down at their Bibles, turning pages, except Seth, who has also finished. He pulls a thick square of paper out of his back pocket and unfolds what looks like a script, with a broad white margin on the left.

I love plays. Seth and I were in one together, a church play, back in the third grade. It was directed by Dr. Osborne, a man in town who is famous for never marrying, for having never known a woman, biblically. In addition to directing plays, he teaches sermon delivery at the seminary. In the play, Seth and I were supposed to be husband and wife. When he came home from work, he was supposed to kiss me, which we both refused to practice, and the night of the performance he came toward me like an attack and banged into my cheek with his teeth.

“Is there a new church play?” I ask him after class.

“By ‘church,' do you mean a play
about
church or a play
for
church?”

“Either one.”

“In that case, the answer is yes.” He refolds the paper and pushes it into his pocket.

Connie Bowls places one hand on my shoulder and the other on Seth's, as if this will help us get along. “It's nice to have you and your family back from the mission field, Seth,” she says. “And Charmaine, I know you're glad to have your father home from the Holy Land.”

“Yes,” I say, even though he's been home all of a day and a half and he spent last night down at the river, not at home.

“Ghana's farther away than the Holy Land,” says Seth.

“Maybe one day I'll be lucky enough to see both Ghana and the Holy Land,” Connie Bowls says as she steers us toward the door. She is so nice to everyone that I don't know how I'm going to explain about not getting baptized if the end of class comes upon me before the Holy Ghost does.

My father doesn't show up for the main service like I thought he would. I've assumed that the heat of his revelation has been cooling into a new workable vision, and that he will ease back into being not just
apart
but also
a part
of the community. As much as he ever is. Usually when he's fasting down at the river and needs to get home for church or any other reason, he walks to the tiny gas station in Tate's Bend and calls Phoebe from the pay phone. Today, though, Daze, Phoebe, and I sit by ourselves in our regular pew. The two of them take turns telling people that yes, David got home okay, but he's still exhausted from traveling.

The sanctuary of First Community is big and barn shaped, with a red-carpeted floor that slopes down to a stage in front and two small alcoves in either corner. The choir sits on the right, and on the left is the worship band, a group of seminarians with two electric guitars, two acoustic guitars, a drum set, and a keyboard. Their warm-up sounds like a bag of cats. The windows that look out over the bank parking lot are wide open, but the ceiling fans just churn up stale, hot air. The only other windows, near the ceiling on the opposite wall, open not to the outdoors but onto the Upper Room, domain of the Youth Group leader, Pastor Chick. This is the year I'm finally old enough for the Sunday-night meetings, which will start up again when school does.

 

As the band launches into the first song, Daze hands me a funeral-home fan and raises her eyebrow. The song is called “Spirit of the Living God, Fall Afresh on Me,” which my grandmother lumps under “contemporary music,” a category she cannot abide.
Melt me. Mold me. Fill me. Use me
. The side of her lip curls up like the words taste bad. Sometimes I try to stand, unsinging, beside her until we get to a respectable hymn like “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” or a gospel song like “I'll Fly Away.” But if Phoebe catches me not singing, she switches places with Daze and pokes me until I open my mouth.

Soon a woman to my left slips out from the pew and heads down the center aisle. Then another woman on the right a few pews up. Then two more women, then three, all while Daze's face becomes more and more grim. The women are headed to the spirit-flag box mounted on the wall of the choir loft. The flags are decorated with felt crosses and doves and flames. One red flag has a pair of hands that are supposed to look uplifted in prayer. But they're both left hands, and the cutting job on the felt makes them look creepy, with craggy, too-long fingers and wrists that just end like they've been hacked off. The hand flag is almost always the last one picked, but today, the thin, blond woman from my Christian Education class timidly lifts it from the box. Probably she's too new to know which one she's choosing. The other women, including Seth's mother, spread out in front of the stage and wave their flags in time to the music. The idea is that the flags help lift people's hearts in prayer, and that flag waving is an opportunity to get more people involved in worship, which is one reason we stopped going to the United Methodist Church, with its one-way delivery of the gospel. That's not to say, however, that First Community supports dancing any more than it supports speaking in tongues. And even though most Sundays it would be hard to call what's happening up front dancing, today the thin, blond woman is wiggling her hips just a little, as she jerks the hand flag back and forth. Every few seconds she changes it up, swaying the flag to one side and kicking her foot to the other, like the chorus girls from Daze's old movies. Several people in the congregation bring their hands to their mouths, and Daze and Phoebe steal a quick look at each other. The question to ask yourself, if you feel moved to keep time with music in church, is whether you intend to call worshipful attention to the Holy Ghost or whether you're inviting lustful attention to your own body. Watching the open-mouthed smile on the thin, blond woman's face, it's hard for me to believe that she means to be inviting lustful attention. I am imagining the church she comes from, where people freely speak in tongues when they are baptized. Maybe they dance in the aisles, too. I want to run down front and warn her, but I just stand there while everyone gasps as she raises the flag over her head with both hands and begins twirling in joyous, oblivious circles. She is so caught up that she doesn't even notice the other flag wavers, who one by one lower their arms to watch. In a unanimous, unspoken decision, they file past her in a slow line, and by the time she opens her eyes and stops twirling, the rest of the women are already replacing their flags, dropping them into the box with a hollow
thock
we can all hear just below the music, turning away from the thin, blond seminary wife as she stops twirling and scurries to catch up.

Later I will find out that during this church service my father, down at the river, is tramping around in the scrubby woods at the base of the limestone palisades. I have seen the way he does this when he thinks no one is watching. Tears on his face, eyes lifted toward heaven, allowing the Holy Ghost to descend upon him. Maybe this time he has his eyes closed, imagining the Apostle Paul from when he was still Saul, struck blind on the road to Damascus. Maybe he's just wrapped up in his prayer without ceasing. What he is not doing is watching where he is going, or he would never have stumbled into poison ivy, which is the first plant he taught me to identify. By the time he realizes it, his robe is already tangled in the underbrush, but he struggles on through the scrub, not wanting to interrupt his communion with the Lord. The itching won't come until later on, anyway. Even then, it will seem like nothing more than a nuisance, a distraction like hunger or worry. He will ignore it all day Sunday, first while Phoebe and I are having dinner with Daze in the cafeteria of the Custer Peake Memorial Retirement Center, then while Phoebe sits at our kitchen table scouring the
Lexington Herald-Leader
for employment ads, telling me that even though doing this counts as working on the Sabbath, it's okay because our ox is in the ditch. He will ignore it while Phoebe and I head back to church for the evening service to listen to Seth's father give his presentation about their school in Ghana.