The Dirty Parts of the Bible: A Novel (24 page)

I peeled another.

Then another.

“No!”

Brown flakes floated through the air like the dead leaves of a Michigan Fall.

Staring speechless at the smothering rubble, I felt like a man watching his house burn down. All of that searching, waiting, trying to fulfill my father’s wish—I couldn’t fathom what I had just lost.

Sarah covered her face. “It’s all my fault. It’s the curse.”

“Please—don’t say that.”

“But your whole journey—for nothing—”

I tossed the butt of my hundred-dollar cigar into the fire. “I found you—that’s something.” I wrapped my arms around her, put my hand under her chin, and lifted Sarah’s face to mine. “You’re worth more than anything.” Our noses touched; her lips brushed against mine.

Then she pushed away. “What’s that smell?”

I pulled off the talisman. “This?” I drew my arm back to toss Craw’s charm into the river, but Sarah stopped me. “It’s not that,” she said, covering her nose. Then I smelled it, too: like a dead animal rotting in the sun. Was it that damn poultice of Craw’s on my ankle? No—the stench seemed to be coming from the fire.

A cloud of thick, black smoke billowed out around us. “Must be an animal fell in the fire,” I said. Sarah started coughing. I fanned my shirt at the flames, but that only made matters worse. Smoke clogged my nose and stung my eyes. Sarah gagged.

In an instant, the fire exploded and flames ripped through the smoke. The blast of white-hot light threw us back against the rock, searing our skin. I rolled on top of Sarah to shield her, then struggled to my feet.

A column of black smoke rose from the flames, towering above us. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, it twisted into the shape of a man’s torso. Flames spiraled up the spectral body, flashing across what seemed to be a broad chest and thick arms. Sarah grabbed my leg.

High above us, a pair of red eyes lit up like burning coals. Streaks of flame revealed a face, bubbling and dripping like melting wax. Sarah screamed. I tore at my collar—where was the talisman?

The Indian stretched out an arm of smoke and flame towards me. As it came closer, the arm twisted into the form of a snake slithering through the air. It coiled in front of my face, singeing my eyebrows with its heat. Sarah held up her rosary. “Don’t you dare touch him!” I squeezed my fist and realized that I’d been holding the talisman all along.

I hurled the catfish heart into the fire and yelled the first thing that came to mind. “Go to hell, you damn blasted son of a bitch!”

The talisman exploded in a great puff of white smoke. A screech pierced the air, and the demon writhed backwards, pulling the snake around his own neck. His waxen face stretched wider and wider, then collapsed in on itself. He sputtered, wheezed, hissed, and finally sank into the flames, vanquished.

As the white smoke flushed the black smoke away, our fire died down to its original size. The only sign of our battle was a curled strip of snakeskin sizzling on the ground by my feet. Sarah picked up the charred skin with a stick and tossed it into the river. Both dazed, we watched the demon’s last remains dissolve to dust and float away.

Sarah put her arm around my waist. “Where’d you learn to cuss like that?”

I blew the ashes off her shoulder. “From my mama.”

“I can’t wait to meet her.”

For what seemed like an eternity, we stood there watching the water ripple by. Then I felt something swell up inside me. No, not in that part of me—though I was swelling down there, too. I felt like a child on Christmas morning, my chest about to burst with excitement. Sarah was my gift—the best gift imaginable—and I needed someone to thank.

I pressed my cheek against Sarah’s hair, closed my eyes, and—for the first time in months—I prayed. “If you’re up there, thank you. Please grant us many years together under the same roof. And while you’re at it, maybe even a baby.”

When I opened my eyes, Sarah looked up and whispered. “Six babies.”

Did I really know what I was getting myself into?

F
ATHER’S
money wasn’t a total loss. There was almost ten dollars in coins at the bottom of the satchel—just enough to buy two golden bands at the pawn shop.

Sarah was hesitant about the idea of a courthouse wedding. “It doesn’t seem real if it’s not in a church.”

“The Bible says that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. That means wherever you are, there’s my church. You’re a cathedral.” She smiled and let me carry her up the courthouse steps. For once, my Scripture knowledge came in handy.

Half an hour later, we were pronounced man and wife. Some people put more effort and money into the wedding day than they do into the marriage itself, then it’s all downhill from there. I was happy for a simple start; things could only get better.

On the way out of town, I stopped by Western Union and sent a telegram to my parents:

MRS. ADA HENRY

REMUS MICHIGAN

=I AM ALIVE= TELL FATHER MONEY WAS ALL ROTTEN=COMING HOME SOON I HOPE=WILL THINK OF SOMETHING=

=TOBIAS=

=PS GOOD NEWS I AM MARRIED TODAY=DO NOT WORRY SHE IS BAPTIST=

I left off the Catholic part. What Father didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.

Back at the Henry farm, everyone was surprised and thrilled by our announcement. Uncle Will threw his hat up in the air and ye-hawed, while Aunt Millie bawled and blubbered as if I was her own son.

I was worried how she’d react, but even Sarah’s mama was happy. “I thought this day would never come,” she kept saying. She hugged and kissed me and said I’d make a wonderful son-in-law, but I could tell she wasn’t as excited about me as she was about her grandchildren-to-be.

I knocked on Craw’s shed, but there was no answer. Inside, on his mattress, he’d left one last gift: a little brown jar labeled “Catfish Liver Salve.” Was this Craw’s idea of a wedding present? There was a note in his own handwriting:

Cures warts, goiters, liver spots, and scales over the eyes caused by bird droppings. Apply directly to affected area and rinse with warm water. Repeat three times.

Next to that, I found a blue hardback book,
Sex Secrets in Marriage
by Dr. Herman Waldo Long. Where the heck had he found that—the pawn shop? Good old Craw.

I finally came clean and told Wilburn and Millie about Father’s accident and the lost money. I detected the hint of a satisfied smile on Uncle Will’s face, but he offered to take up a collection among the relatives.

“Father won’t take charity,” I said. “That’s why he wanted me to keep it a secret.” I didn’t have any problem taking charity, though. For a wedding present, Wilburn gave us an old Model A that he’d been repairing in the barn.

“Only one string attached,” he said. “Y’all hurry back to Texas. Don’t go disappearing on us like your father.” I promised we’d be back—and maybe I could convince my parents to return, too. As crazy as it seemed, I dreamed of Father rejoining the Golden Melody Makers and getting them on the radio. I could hardly imagine what it would be like to hear him pour his heart into a real, honest-to-God song.

Just as Sarah and I were about to leave, Uncle Will came out onto the porch holding an apple crate full of papers. “Almost forgot,” he said. “Malachi’s been getting mail here ever since he left. Only a letter or two a year, but it adds up.” He packed the crate into our trunk. “Don’t know why I saved these—guess I figured he might come back someday.”

I looked down at my feet. “I almost forgot something too—your boots.” I started to pull them off.

Uncle Will put his hand on my shoulder. “You keep those. No matter where you go, you’re a Texan now.”

+ + +

We didn’t get to make love on our wedding night, or the night after. The trip to Remus was a three-day’s drive on hard leather seats, and Sarah’s body was as sore as mine by the time we got there. Consummating our marriage was turning out to be a bigger challenge than fighting the demon. After all we’d been through, though, and with my parents’ fate in the balance, sex wasn’t the first thing on my mind. Well, maybe it was, but I did a good job of pretending otherwise.

When we pulled into my drive, Father was sitting on the porch with a red bandana across his face, strumming his old guitar. I was shocked—I thought he’d smashed it years ago. Mama came running out to meet us. They hugged Sarah and declared that she was the daughter they’d never been able to have. “The Lord has brought joy from ashes,” Father said. “I’m grateful for all that’s happened—even my blindness. My only regret is that I’ll never see my grandchildren with my own eyes.”

I was beginning to wonder if there’d ever be any grandchildren. No way was I going to make love for the first time in my old bedroom, right down the hall from my parents.

That evening, I asked Father what he meant when he said he was grateful for his blindness. “Ada was mad as a wet hen when she found out I’d sent you away,” he said. “She thought sure you were dead. To pacify her, I told her to fetch the Bible and read to me from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ ‘love your enemies,’ ‘turn the other cheek’—I hoped something would sink in and keep her from killing me.”

Father tilted back his head. “But as she read, I realized that I was the one who needed it. My eyes were opened—figuratively, at least—and I heard the words of Jesus as if he were speaking directly to me. The more she read, the more I saw myself—not in Jesus or his followers, but in the Pharisees, the teachers of the law. All these years I’d been fighting my enemies, I missed out on the most important thing: love.”

He pointed to the bandana around his eyes. “I was so stubborn, God had to blind me to show me the truth.”

In his moment of epiphany, Father seemed to forget that he was blinded by a bird, not God. Then again, Scripture says that the Spirit descends as a dove and works in mysterious ways.

+ + +

The next morning, I brought Father the crate of letters Uncle Will had saved for him. Most of them were from the same place: “Artesian Mfg. & Bottling Co., Waco, Texas.”

When I asked Father if that rang a bell, he had to think about it for a minute. “Now I remember. One of my friends convinced me to invest money in a new industry—soda pop, I think it was. Let this be a lesson to you, son—never waste your money on some fool scheme.”

I opened the most recent letter. The fool scheme in question was Dr. Pepper soda. “Dad—it says here that your original investment of twelve dollars is now worth fifteen thousand.” I dropped the letter in amazement.

Father slowly shook his head, then grinned. “Which goes to show you, son—don’t listen to a word your old man says.”

About noon, when Brother Lester and the Baptist elders dropped by to give Father his one-day eviction notice, they were shocked to find us celebrating. “Brothers,” Father told them, “as the great Davy Crockett once said, ‘You can go to hell—but as for me, I’m going to Texas.’” As we yipped and hollered, the elders tumbled out the door and ran away, falling all over each other like the Keystone Cops.

In all the excitement, I almost forgot Craw’s catfish liver salve. That afternoon, I asked Father to remove his bandana, and I smeared the pungent brown paste over his eyelids. All I said was, “Don’t ask what it is, but it might help.” I rubbed it on and wiped it off twice, with no change in the cloudy white film over his eyes. Then, the third time, the scales peeled back, flaked off, and floated away like snowflakes. Father threw his arms around me. “I was blind, but now I see—praise be to God.”

Maybe the Spirit works through catfish entrails, too.

+ + +

That evening, after packing up the few belongings I cared to take back to Texas, I brought Sarah to the stump behind the house and dug up my secret lockbox.

I was a bit embarrassed to show her at first, but we both had a good laugh over the French Lady. “You kind of look alike,” I said. “Maybe it’s the black hair.”

“And our armpits,” Sarah said. “I gave up shaving when I swore off boys.”

I took my page of hand-copied verses from the Song of Solomon, and we hiked out to the lake. There, we lay on the grass in the cool night air, and I read the verses to Sarah. Years before, when I’d written them down, they seemed so dirty. Now, they seemed the most beautiful and innocent words in the world.