Rapture of Canaan (31 page)

“Okay,” Nanna promised. “But first you need to go to sleep.” She rubbed at his head until he dozed off, still patting his bleeding face to stop the cuts from running.

I stood in the doorway watching, worrying about Nanna, who would never put him in a home. I wondered if maybe David and Laura had been right—that we shouldn’t use hospitals because it interfered with God’s plans. I thought perhaps the bigger issue was that other people’s lives changed for the worse when something interfered with God’s plans. I wondered if he’d have died quietly if we hadn’t taken him to the hospital, if it would have preserved what dignity he had left.

Later, Nanna made me promise not to tell.

That day’s story wasn’t the one I was looking for. I was sure that the kudzu had doubled or even tripled since that morning.

 

 

 

B
y March when the tobacco beds were seeded and it was time
to begin the garden, Canaan was able to walk around a little. He had a hard time keeping his weight even and fell to one side or the other. And he bruised a lot because he couldn’t block his falls with his hands. But he didn’t complain about it much, and he’d work himself back up, waver for a moment, then find his balance and run a few feet before he stumbled over his own toes and crashed.

After his strokes, Grandpa Herman didn’t remember that Canaan was the New Messiah. On good days, he’d hold Canaan on his knee and say, “Now whose baby is this?” Sometimes he’d tickle him. And sometimes he’d study his hands, pulling at them until Canaan cried.

The family’d been debating all winter who should take over Fire and Brimstone. Daddy and Uncle Ernest jointly took control of the finances. They gave money to each household to buy necessary goods, but apparently they gave out more money than Grandpa Herman ever had. Nearly every person at Fire and Brimstone ended up wearing a new watch. Nobody went about flaunting them, but I began to notice wrists taking on different appearances, black bands and white, faces that blinked and others with long gold hands. Barley got a diving watch, and he hadn’t even been swimming since James died.

All of a sudden, people began to realize they preferred red over blue, or flowers over plaids. I thought it was a good thing.

But no new single leader was chosen. We put it off week after week. Mamma said we had to wait because Grandpa might get better, but Mamma was wishing hard and thinking cloudy. Even the doctors couldn’t say for sure what his chances of recovery were. Some days, he was almost himself, walking around the community and giving everybody instructions on how to do whatever they were doing—even though his instructions didn’t make much sense. But some days he didn’t remember even Nanna.

So for the first couple of months of that year, we met in church just like always. Different men took over the sermon, taking turns preparing the scripture. And because Olin’s views of Christianity were so different from David’s or Everett’s, we could never be exactly sure what sort of preaching would be coming our way.

I worried a lot about who would take control. I wished it could be me. I thought to myself that I’d have a good argument, even if it was temporary. If I argued that I was the mother of the Messiah and that I should hold the post until Canaan was old enough to speak his wisdom, I knew it’d keep David from grabbing the reins.

But I was a woman. Not even a woman. Not quite even sixteen years old. I knew I didn’t stand a chance.

I thought Nanna would make a good leader, but then she was a woman too. I hoped maybe Daddy would step into the position, but I knew Daddy didn’t like those kinds of responsibilities.

I thought maybe we should split the farmland and hire a preacher from outside.

Some Sundays in church, Canaan would holler out during the service, like all babies do, and some people would say, “Amen” or “Hallelujah” while other people would shake their heads. It was hard to know what to believe. And even though we were praying plenty, it was hard to cut through the tension enough to make contact with God. The edginess hovered in our air, and I think that when our prayers hit against it, they bounced off in all kinds of unheavenly directions.

By that time, I’d stopped even trying to get Laura and David to let me take Canaan off alone. They’d let me play with him as long as somebody else was around, but even when I held him during Sunday services, they looked at me suspiciously.

Nanna got mad about it. She started having Bethany or Pammy sit with Grandpa Herman in the afternoons so she could take Canaan for a walk. Then she’d bring him to the pack house and stay with me while I was weaving.

“How are you?” I’d ask her.

“Fair to middling.”

“How’s Grandpa today?”

“Oh, he’s all right, I reckon. I fed him collards for lunch, and he didn’t even complain. He hates collards, but he can’t taste anything anyway, so I might as well fix what I like.”

By that time, we’d stopped eating together at every meal. We only had supper together. Breakfast and lunch were private by then. Private and awfully lonely.

“Does it make you crazy, Nanna? Having to tend him every minute?”

“No,” she said somberly. “I took him as husband for better or for worse.”

“Do you ever wish he’d just—die.”

“Sweet Jesus, child! I don’t reckon you know what love’s about after all.” Then she dropped Canaan from her hip onto the floor and whispered, “I’ve thought about it. But that ain’t my place to decide. And God only gives a body what a body can stand.”

Canaan took off across the room, and I ran after him, picked him up, and shook him in the air until he giggled so hard that me and Nanna were both giggling, even though neither of us were happy. The best thing about baby laughter is that it can revive even the sore at heart.

“This here’s a nice one,” Nanna told me, stroking her hand across the half-finished tapestry. That’d look real pretty on your mamma’s living room floor.”

I carried Canaan over to the corner, collapsed on the heap of tobacco sheets, and motioned Nanna over to me.

“Come tell us a story,” I said.

“Ninah.” She smiled. “When you gonna grow up enough to be satisfied with the happenings of the day and not the things of the past?”

“Come on,” I pleaded. “For Canaan. Please?”

So Nanna sat down next to us, and I leaned Canaan up against my lap and nestled underneath Nanna’s arm. She patted me, and I gently rocked Canaan, and in the afternoon haze passing in through the window, light descended downwards, and we could see the dust twirling and dizzying through the air.

“What story you want to hear?”

“The one about the day she killed him.”

“Why don’t you tell it? You know it better than I do by now.”

I situated Canaan in my arms and encouraged his yawns with my swaying. “You were coloring your paper dolls, right? And you’d just had supper. What’d you have for supper anyway?”

“Corn bread and ham,” Nanna answered.

“Really?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“So you were coloring, and your mamma was in the back with your daddy.”

“My pappa,” she corrected. “I called him Pappa.” But I already knew that. It was just a mistake.

“And then you heard the gun go off. What’d it sound like? ”

She considered for a minute. “Like a tractor tire blowing out.”

“And then you kept coloring, waiting for something else to happen, but nothing did for a long time. You waited and waited and scribbled redness on all your dolls.”

“And then Weston Ward stopped by,” Nanna took over. “I reckon probably he had helped Mamma to plan the murder, although nobody ever prosecuted him.”

“Do you hate him now?” I asked her.

“For what? For loving my mamma so much that she decided to get rid of Pappa?”

“Yeah.”

“Or for ruining my childhood by taking me away from both Mamma
and
Pappa?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I don’t like to harbor hatred in my heart, but there might be a little bit there for him.”

“And what about your mamma? Do you hate her too? Even a little bit?”

Nanna pondered, ran her fingers at the back of my neck where the hairs just began, pinching and feeling with her bony loving hands.

“Grudges are bad things, Ninah,” she said at last. “There’s only so much room in one heart. You can fill it up with love or you can fill it with resentment. But every bit of resentment you hold takes space away from the love. And the resentment don’t do no good noway, but look what love can do.”

I watched the rectangles of light on the wooden floor, narrow in all the darkness but bright enough to make up for being so small.

“Like with you,” Nanna continued. “If you’d wanted to, you could have been so mad about this baby going to live with David and Laura that you built up spite inside rather than goodness. But then you’d be so busy feeling angry that you wouldn’t be able to appreciate what he feels like in your arms, sleeping that way.”

“No,” I disagreed. “I can do both at the same time. I can love him and still feel mad.”

“Well, sometimes you got to hold onto a little bit of rage.” Nanna nodded. “You got to have something to spit out. It’s what wakes you up in the morning. It’s what keeps you breathing. But if you keep too much of it, it will sour everything else around.”

“Do you have some rage towards Grandpa?”

“A little bit,” she admitted. “Just a tad. But mostly it’s love. Except on mornings when he pisses the bed.”

I could tell she was trying to lighten the subject, so I let her.

“Does he really do that?”

“I put some plastic over the mattress. I tell him not to worry about it.”

Then Nanna kissed my head and took Canaan out of my arms, swaddling him in her own coat. “I better get this child back home before Laura comes after us with the butcher knife.”

When she walked through the light in the doorway, she sent the airborne dust cascading in whole new places.

 

 

 

I
don’t know exactly how long it was
afterwards
that Grandpa Herman wandered away one day, but it was still late winter or maybe the earliest, earliest part of spring. The men hadn’t even quit their winter jobs.

The women had decided to replace all the curtains in the church, so they’d set up sewing machines in the back of the fellowship hall and placed the supper tables so that they could cut out cloth on them. It was a community-wide endeavor, and I think that everybody hoped that the new curtains would restore something Fire and Brimstone had lost but no one could name.

And the children were all at school.

The way Nanna tells it, she was sitting in her house with Grandpa Herman. He was having a particularly good day and had already been out for a brief walk before he came inside to rest. She fed him his lunch and stayed there until he dozed off in his chair.

Since Grandpa usually slept for a couple of hours in the afternoons, Nanna slipped out the house, careful not to disturb him, and walked the short distance to the fellowship hall. She had grown so lonely, it seemed, and the times she spent away from Grandpa were the times when she resurrected her spirit. She told me every now and then that it was hard to see a good man sink to Grandpa Herman’s place. Grandpa had become as unpredictable as weather, a star that flickered on somebody else’s whim.

Nanna didn’t stay there long. She put the pins in the bottom of one curtain so that Wanda could hem it. And she put on some water, waited for it to heat, and then made hot water with honey for everyone working. As soon as she’d had her cup, she headed back home, just to be on the safe side.

But when she got there, Grandpa was gone. She didn’t panic at first. He was having a good day, and she knew he’d probably just gone out for a stroll around the fields. She checked to make sure he’d taken his coat, and he had.

So she went to the fellowship hall, but none of the women had seen him. Great-Aunt Imogene told her not to worry, that he’d probably gone to check on the cows. But Mamma put down her scissors and went to help Nanna look.

They didn’t find him.

They checked to make sure he hadn’t taken his truck. Nanna’d had to hide the keys from him, and she worried at first that Grandpa Herman might have found them and tried to drive away. But the keys were still hidden. The truck was still parked.

There were a lot of fields at Fire and Brimstone, and when he didn’t turn up nearby, Mamma went back to the fellowship hall and rounded up the rest of the women to help scout the place.

Laura took Grandpa Herman’s truck and went to get the men.

By the time we got off the bus and made it to the houses, the men were looking too. Everybody was in a tizzy, and I walked up to Nanna and layed my head against her chest. She wrapped her arms around me, and I could hear her heart racing like somebody dancing in Sunday shoes across a hardwood floor.

“Now, Herman’s all right,” Daddy said. “We’ll find him. Has anybody started supper? Cause we gonna need to eat tonight, and Herman will be hungry when he gets back. Leila, will you make us a pound cake?”

Everybody knew that Daddy was just trying to get us distracted, to get us all working and not worrying so hard. But I could see concern in his folded shoulders.

“I don’t know, Liston,” Nanna answered weakly.

“Please, Nanna,” Pammy tried. “We’ll find him.”

So Nanna went with Aunt Kate and Great-Aunt Imogene and Laura to the kitchen, and the rest of us set out to find Grandpa.

“Everett and Olin’s done gone off in one truck,” Daddy said. “David, why don’t you take another one, and Mustard, you go with him. Barley, go check the barn, and Ninah, you and Pammy take the henhouse and the pigpen.” He kept talking until he’d sent every person somewhere, and then Daddy and Mamma went off on their own.

It was Bethany who turned up the first clue.