The Dirty Parts of the Bible: A Novel (14 page)

Once, I asked her which she liked better: silent movies or talkies. “Silent movies were an art,” she said, “just like ballet. Talkies are just that—people talking. I wouldn’t pay a nickel to hear anybody gab—not even Clark Gable. If I wanted to listen to a bunch of chattering, I’d go to the Bluebonnet Salon.”

Millie was a woman of firm resolve and stubborn opinions. One evening, after she scolded Uncle Will for tracking dirt on the carpet, he snuck up behind her and pinched her ass. Millie jumped and screamed, “Wilburn Henry!” Then she looked at me, her face flustered pink. “He knows just how to get my goat.”

Aunt Millie felt no need to be consistent in her judgments. For instance, she hated talking pictures but loved radio. Every evening, we gathered around the radio, which sat on a big table in the middle of the parlor. In my parents’ house, that same spot was reserved for the family Bible. That summed up the difference between the two households—the radio stood for everything my father was against: worldly music, comedy, the Chesterfield Cigarettes program, and the brewery’s “Old Foam Hour.”

The farmhouse didn’t have electricity, but Wilburn rigged up the radio to run on a car battery. We took turns choosing stations; Wilburn loved the Louisiana Hoe-down and the Texas Roundup; Millie preferred Bing Crosby and Glen Miller; I wanted to hear Jack Benny and Burns & Allen.

“My father said you and him were in a music group,” I told Uncle Will.

“That’s right—the Golden Melody Makers. We still get together every once in a while, JP and me, my boys, and some of the cousins. In fact, you’ll get to hear us in just a couple weeks—if you care to. The Henry family reunion’s coming up in June, and we always put on a jamboree.”

“You ever think of getting on the radio? I’ll bet you could play on the Texas Roundup.”

Wilburn laughed. “I’m too old for that. Besides, we ain’t much to listen to without your father’s voice. Damn, he was good. If only he hadn’t gone all religious on us.”

If only.

+ + +

My first Sunday in Texas, I woke up and found an old suit of Jimmy’s in the back of his closet. Jimmy was a strapping farm boy, and inside his suit I looked like a skeleton. When I came downstairs, Wilburn looked up over his coffee and smiled. “Where you going, boy? You look good enough to get buried.”

“Don’t you go to church?”

“Sure—for weddings and funerals.”

“Oh Wilburn—don’t you tease him.” Millie handed me a steaming cup. “Tobias, you’re welcome to borrow the car if you’d like to drive to church.”

I considered the offer for a second—but only a second. “No thanks.” After attending services three times a week for all of my life, I deserved a vacation. “I just assumed you’d be going, so—”

“We ain’t churchgoing people,” Wilburn said. “We’re the sort of folks your father would call
lost
.”

“I’m not my father,” I said.

“I could see that from the start. If you acted like Malachi, I’d have already kicked your ass out of my house.” At that, we both laughed.

“Last time I seen your father,” Uncle Will said, “he was yelling at me to get on my knees and pray. It was some prayer he learned at Bible college—said if I didn’t say this particular prayer, I’d go straight to hell. Well, I told Malachi that I’d rather go skinny dippin’ in the Lake of Fire than to spend eternity with the likes of him.”

I couldn’t believe that anyone would say such a thing to my father’s face—and I loved Wilburn for it. “What did he say to that?”

“Oh, he huffed that I was damned from the start and there was nothing he could do to help me. Some people are beyond the hope of grace, he said—that was another thing they taught him at Bible school. He went off to that seminary and came back acting all high and mighty, wanting us to call him ‘Reverend Henry’—our own brother!”

“So the seminary changed him?”

“I’ll say. They gave him a certificate, deputizing him to hunt down sinners and claim souls for Jesus. Well, there was nobody left to save around here, ’cept his own family—and we weren’t falling for it. He had to go clear to the other end of the country before he found some folks who’d listen to him. We never heard much from him after that.”

Uncle Will set down his coffee and looked out the window. “A few years back, when Pa passed on, I sent Malachi a letter. Told him Ma wanted him to come down and see her. But he never wrote back.”

It still stung Wilburn, I could tell, and I felt sick that my father had done such a thing.
He deserved to be blinded
.

A
FTER
a week
at the Henry farm, I was no closer to finding Father’s money than when I’d first arrived. But I had gotten plenty of life experience; I’d learned how to lay a barbed-wire fence, how big ten acres is, and that it would take the rest of my life to enclose the latter with the former. My neck and ears were sunburnt to the point of peeling, and I woke up one morning with red sores on my ankles and crotch. They were
chiggers
—little bugs that hide in your socks and underwear and then burrow under your skin. Millie said that they can live off your flesh for months if you don’t suffocate them; she gave me some ladies’ nail polish to paint over the bites, which stung like the devil.

Another day, I sat on the john and felt something like a needle prick my bottom. I jumped up and there, crawling out from under the seat, was a scorpion the size of my pinky. All I knew about scorpions was that they were poisonous, and thought I was going to die—no one was going to suck the poison out of my ass, that much was sure. I ran into the farmhouse with my pants hanging down around my knees. “I’m stung! Poisoned!”

When Uncle Will surmised what had happened, he just laughed. “A little scorpion can’t kill you.”

At least Aunt Millie took some sympathy—she brought me some ice to put on the bite and a bromide fizz to drink. “The poison might upset your tummy,” she said.

I was starting to see some good aspects of life in Remus: it was too cold for flesh-eating bugs or ass-biting insects.

+ + +

That second week, I began searching in earnest for Father’s money. Instead of going straight to dinner after work, I left Craw to explore the farm on my own. I cursed my luck for losing the map; with it, I’d have already found that well. I wanted to tell Craw about the money and enlist his help, but I couldn’t. Who knew how much or how little money Father had buried? I couldn’t promise anyone a cut.

On my second or third day of searching, I ventured to the far north end of the farm, which was bordered by a row of tall cedars. Sweaty and aching after a day of digging holes, the sound of rushing water lured me onward.

Beyond the trees and down a steep gorge was the Paluxy River. It was like nothing I’d ever seen—a swath of pure, blue water winding between huge slabs of chalky white limestone, set off against lush evergreens and bright green cacti. I slid down the hill and entered another world, far from Wilburn’s dusty fields.

I wound my way between the big rocks and scampered over the smaller ones, till I reached the shore. Leaving my boots behind, I waded into the shallows. The water flowed around my ankles, warming my feet and cooling my body at the same time. In a spot where the stone formed a deep pocket, I spotted a school of bluegills—next time, I’d have to see if I could borrow a fishing pole from Uncle Will.

Then I got a strange urge—strange for me, at least. I peeled off all of my sweaty clothes and jumped into the water. When I was in up to my waist, I held out my arms and leaned back, gliding wieghtless on a sparkling bed of sapphire blue. All of my aches and pains melted away.

I wondered why I’d never liked swimming before. Then I remembered that the waters in Northern Michigan are ice-cold even in summer, they’re full of green slime and brown muck, and there’s a good reason why the pond near our house was called Leach Lake.

After twenty minutes or so, I climbed back on shore and gathered up my clothes and boots. The sun was still shining through the trees on the other side, so I decided to climb onto a rock and bake till I was dry. I’d never seen rocks so big, and I felt like a mountain climber scaling them. I’ve always been afraid of heights, so when I reached the top I crouched down, afraid to stand and look over the edge. A ten-foot drop was more than enough to give me the shivers.

I stretched out on a slab of limestone, closed my eyes, and listened to the bubbling water and the buzz of cicadas. It was a strange feeling, being naked in the open air. For as long as I could remember, I’d been embarassed over my body and more than happy to keep it hidden. In fact, I’d only been naked out-of-doors once before—and that was in a desperate attempt to grow pubic hair. When I was fourteen, Eddie Quackenbush told me that cod liver oil was a magical hair-growth stimulant. “I put some on my sister when she was asleep,” he claimed, “and a patch of hair sprouted up right before my eyes. When she woke up, boy was she steamed.”

So I snuck out into the the woods with a bottle of Squibb’s Cod Liver Oil, laid naked on a pile of leaves, and slathered it on my chest, arms, and privates. Of course, nothing happened. But the next day, I told Eddie, “You’re sure right about that oil. Now I’ve got more hair between my legs than the Wild Man of Borneo.”

That got him back good—he went home and took a bath in the stuff.

Lying there above the Paluxy River, I looked down my chest at the scant patch of hair between my legs. At least I had
something
now. My chin was another story—I hadn’t shaved for two weeks, and I was just now getting a five o-clock shadow.

From body hair, my thoughts turned to home. I wondered what my parents were doing right now and how Mama was taking it. She probably thought I was dead. In just over a month, they’d be kicked out of their home and shipped off to the poorhouse. To save them, I needed to find Father’s money and bring it back—but after what Uncle Will had said, I was less sure than ever about returning home. My father didn’t lift a finger to help his own mother in her hour of need—why should I help him? But there was Mama, too … if I didn’t try to help her, how would I be any different from my father?

I dreamed of what I’d do with all that money, all to myself. First thing, I’d buy a long, black Rolls Royce. And I’d get some fancy duds to match—a pinstriped suit and patent leather Oxfords. When Emily Apple saw me cruising down the street, she’d curse the day she met Lars Lundgren. She’d beg me to take her away, but I’d brush her off and say, “I loved you before you had breasts; you should have loved me before I got money.” Then I’d leave her in a cloud of dust and go find the French Lady, whom I’d track down from the studio name on her postcard.

The dream was so vivid that, even when I was roused by the sound of an animal moving through the brush behind me, I swore it was the French Lady I saw scampering over another rock and making her way to the river. Maybe the sun was getting to me.

I squinted, blinked, and squeezed my eyes shut, but when I opened them again, she was still there—a real, flesh-and-blood girl in a long black dress, walking along the shore. I flipped over onto my belly and scooted around to get a better look. Good thing I was laying flat, or she would have seen me already.

The girl dipped her toes into the water and watched the ripples she made. I couldn’t see her face, but her hair was as black as her dress. She bent down to look at her reflection—or something under the water?—and then dropped to her knees. As the river lapped against her waist, she curled forward, pressing her face into her hands. Her shoulders started to shake—was she crying?

Next thing I knew, she was wailing and screaming and slashing at the water like a girl possessed. Finally, exhaused, she threw herself forward into the river. The water was only a foot deep, but that was enough to cover her almost entirely.

I wanted to call out, to ask if she was all right, but then I remembered that I was naked. More than that, my body was having its natural reaction to seeing a girl splashing in water. The flag pole was rising, completely oblivious to the possibility that she was in danger—and equally oblivious to the fact that I was lying flat on a slab of stone.

She floated face down in the water for what seemed like an eternity, the current tugging at her hair and dress. Then her head broke the surface, coughing and gasping, and she struggled up onto her hands and knees. When she rose to her feet, her whole body was shaking and her dress clung to her black and shiny as a seal’s skin. She yelled something that I couldn’t quite make out, but it sounded like, “Dammit—I
am
cursed!”