by J. J. Murray
"Shh, Ruth," Tonya cracked, "we in church"
Naomi took my hand. "It'll get better."
"How you know, Naomi?" Tonya asked. "You still a virgin "
"I have some knowledge of these things," Naomi said.
Tonya flipped a hand in Naomi's face. "You ain't gettin' it; you just don't get it." Tonya turned to me. "Did he warm you up?"
"No," I said. "He stayed on his side of the bed."
"I didn't mean it that way," Tonya said, shaking her head. "Did he meet your man in the boat face-first?"
I reddened even more. I was so naive back then. "Please, Tonya."
"We are in the house of the Lord, Tonya Lewis," Naomi said. "Act proper."
Tonya stepped in front of Naomi. "You tell that man of God if he want a piece of your heaven, he got to row row row your man in the boat. No licky, no sticky. He don't lick the coochie, you ain't no hoochie."
"I'm not listening to any of this on the Lord's day," Naomi said, and she walked away.
"Um, thanks for your concern, Tonya, but we're new at all this. We'll just have to take things slow, I guess"
Tonya hugged me. "Don't just take what you can get, girl. You gotta learn to get what you can take ... till you can't take it no more. All that man needs is a little schoolin', and you is his teacher. Hell, he little enough. You just wrestle his little pointy head down there, and don't let up till you satisfied."
I laughed. "I can't do that to the good reverend"
"You want a nice sex life?"
"Of course, but-"
"Take that man to school."
I didn't do what Tonya suggested, but ... We made out okay. And as Jonas's sermons warmed up, so did he. It was all so new and exciting, gettin' some just about every other night! My man in the boat was a little lonely, but at least Jonas put my ocean in motion. I almost felt guilty Sunday mornings still thinking about the night before or the morning of (those were rare), but in my joy I played the hell out of that organ. I always wondered if anyone knew that I pulled out all the stops on Sunday mornings after a good humping by the good reverend.
And then ... I got pregnant. Jonas was so happy, the church was happy, Tonya and Naomi were happy, I was glowing, we started planning the baby's room-
And I miscarried after only two months. My placenta just ... collapsed. I wept, Jonas wept, the congregation wept, Tonya and Naomi wept. I felt like a failure till
I got pregnant again not two months later, and Jonas announced the news from the pulpit to glorious applause. We painted the baby's room, even put up a wall border full of little animals peeking out of the forest. This time I took more precautions, got more rest, ate right, took my prenatal vitamins like I was supposed to, saw Dr. Duckworth once a week, slept as much as I could-
And miscarried again, this time at three months. They called it a spontaneous abortion and never told me why it happened. It just did.
Folks in church looked at me like I was a sinner, looked at me like I wasn't holy enough to hold a child to term. "Fuck 'em," Tonya told me. "I'll pray for you," Naomi promised. Jonas? He mourned for seven straight days ... then went right back to work, and another month later, I was pregnant again.
Dr. Duckworth put me on bed rest once I made it to three months, even made house calls or called the house to check up on me. He checked me for infections (negative), anemia (negative), lupus (negative), diabetes (negative, though I got a warning about my weight), and fibroid tumors (negative). I was cleared to have this baby. Jonas, to his credit, waited on me hand and foot, putting up with my complaints for his weak-ass, no-salt-or-pepper cooking, letting Tonya and Naomi visit whenever they could, even putting that crib together by himself with only a little fussing at the directions. It felt so wonderful to show a little pumpkin poking out of my stomach at five months, knowing I was having a little boy who we'd call Jonas, Jr., so fulfilling to see my bellybutton pop at six months
Jonas, Jr., was stillborn at six months. We didn't even put an obituary in the paper, didn't have a funeral, and I almost didn't have a husband. I'd hear Jonas weeping in the baby's room, crying out to God. I tried to cry, I really did, but I couldn't. I think I was too scared to cry, maybe too ashamed to cry. I had let this marriage down again.
Dr. Duckworth recommended me taking a break after nearly a year of being pregnant, and Jonas agreed. I was, after all, the size of a house, my titties the size of watermelons, just one of my legs as thick as Jonas's whole body. I wasn't much to sleep with at the beginning, but now ... Jonas tried to stay with me in our room after that, but he said he couldn't sleep and ended up sleeping on the couch downstairs.
I couldn't sleep either. My husband downstairs for the last two months, my baby's room empty, my heart aching, my body bloated. That's when I finally cried-alone and decided it wasn't my lot in life to be someone's mama. It just wasn't God's will. Then Jonas, for whatever reason, made a visit to my bed, unspeaking, did his business, and left.
And got me pregnant again.
This time, we took absolutely no chances. The church raised money to put me up in the hospital when I reached six months. I spent nearly ninety days in there, visited, I think, by every member of the church at least twice, flowers on every available space. They even held mini prayer meetings around and over me, we got two of the night nurses to join the church, and I felt the spirit of the Lord moving in me. Tonya and Naomi finished the baby's room and brought me snapshots, and Jonas stayed with me till visiting hours were over every night-
The baby, a boy, was born full-term by C-section ... with an Apgar score of one. He didn't cry out, didn't make a sound, never opened his eyes, and died while I was in the recovery room.
I cannot explain what I was feeling back then without using the word "empty." Lying empty in recovery alone with my hands empty because Jonas was taking a walk to grieve, I almost thought of taking my own empty life. One little, empty bubble in the bloodstream into one of those tubes, and that would be it. One little, empty pocket of air to fill my empty heart. I cried silent, empty tears and refused to be consoled by anyone, their words as empty as my two arms.
Once again, we didn't name the baby or have a funeral because Jonas didn't want our shame to be in the paper or paraded in front of the church. That shame lived with me at home. I had no words to comfort Jonas, and only Tonya and Naomi were there to comfort me. But when they left, the shame was still there, taunting me from the unblinking face of my husband, cursing me from the empty crib, haunting me in dreams where I would hear a child crying ... and could never find the child.
Twenty months pregnant and nothing to show for it. I felt cursed. I closed the door to the baby's room one day, and I vowed never to open it again. Jonas returned to his couch, me to my tears, and another one of my children ... to God. Four children I should have had. I didn't like God that much. I felt betrayed and abandoned because He was taking much more than He was giving. I turned to Psalms for comfort and only heard David's cries to the Lord. I tried to pray, but the words that left my lips had too much venom, too much hate.
My body was a hot air balloon with two ham hocks for arms, round floppy breasts, a tight shiny face, all on a set of long heavy legs. Huge. I became huge. The wife of skinny Reverend Borum was as big as God's house, filling the organist's bench. Oh, I tried off and on to lose what genetics and four pregnancies had put on, and Jonas tried off and on for the next five years to make us another child; but all those potluck dinners, those weddings ... I ate my way through a depression that never ended. I'd see a child, any child, and feel the weight. I'd play the organ and feel the weight of all those eyes on my back. I'd pass that closed door next to ours and feel heavier.
And ... That's when it started. Seven years into our marriage, Jonas got the itch. I know that's cliche, but once he got it, he had to scratch it. At the church. Every night. With his new secretary. A divorced woman. A slut. A harlot. A ho. Who shall remain as nameless as the children I should have had.
After yet another night of "I'm w
orking late at the church," I hired me a private investigator named Joe Beverly, a white man who only charged if he got results. He brought me those results only a few days later. I paid Mr. Beverly two hundred dollars, and he gave me twenty-four snapshots. "I'll keep the negatives," he said. "Unless you'd like them, too, for, oh, five hundred more?"
"These will do," I said, and I looked at the pictures in angry wonder. He never made that face with me! Where'd he learn that position? Damn, the man looks right funny with that bony ass of his. But up in the window of his study for all the world walking by to see? How'd Mr. Beverly get these pictures of them right in Jonas's study? What part of the Bible they studyin'anyway? Sodom and Gomorrah?
I confronted his ass with the pictures that very night. "How could you? You call yourself a man of God, and you're nothing but a motherfuckin' hypocrite!"
"It's not me," he said with a straight face.
It felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. "So it's just someone else who looks like you fuckin' the church secretary in your study?"
"That's not my study."
I held up the one with the two of them at the window. "And that's not the watch I gave you for Christmas?"
"No. It's not me, Ruth."
"You a lyin' son-of-a-bitch, Reverend!" I held up the one with her in his swivel chair and him with his head between her legs. "That ain't the computer you use? And that ain't your banker's lamp? And that ain't the birthmark you got on your ass?"
"Like I said, that isn't me, and that isn't my study."
I balled up my fist and looked at it for the longest time. It was big as Jonas's nearly bald head. I could push it right on through that pointy nose and make him have to walk backward the rest of his life! "Get the fuck out my house."
He tried to hug me, but I stepped back. "This is all a big misunderstanding, Ruth"
"What the fuck don't you understand about `get the fuck out my house'?"
"You're overreacting, Ruth. Those pictures could be of anyone. With the right equipment, someone could have superimposed faces that look like ours doing those sinful things. Do you really think that I'm capable of doing those things?"
"As many times you been in my bed lately, hell no!" I waved the picture of him munching the secretary's coochie. "And you ain't never done this to me! But now I know why you ain't been draggin' your ass to fuck me, and pretty damn soon, Antioch gonna know who you fuckin', too" I shook the pictures in his face. "These will go right nice up on the announcements board!"
His eyes dropped. "You wouldn't do that, Ruth. It'll make you look bad, too" Say what? He puffed up his chest. "Look at what that fat woman reduced our poor reverend to. It's a shame he married a bitch in disguise."
"What the-Bitch! I got your bitch right here, mother-" And that's when I hit my husband dead in the chest with a fist as big as his head and knocked his skinny punk ass across the room and over the couch. Shit, Muhammad Ali didn't have nothin' on me. I rushed in for the kill, but he was too quick, getting off the floor and scurrying like the cockroach he is through the kitchen and out the back door.
I immediately called Tonya. "What should I do?"
"Kill him," she said. "No, wait. Stone him. That's what they do to adulterers in the Bible, right?"
Naomi, as usual, said the opposite. "Pray about it, Ruth"
"God ain't been listenin' right to me, Naomi," I said. "I asked for a good man and got this motherfucker."
"You'll be in my prayers, girl."
I decided not to kill him, and we were secretly separated for two months with him sleeping in his office at Antioch. We kept up appearances ("For the sake of the church," he begged me), me at the organ playing as loud as that old organ could, him at the pulpit practically whispering his sermons, afraid to even look at the congregation. Eventually, his sermons started to cool off without my help, the board met to talk to him, and he told them that I had kicked him out of the house for no good reason. He blamed me for his weak-ass sermons!
When the board called me in, I had the pictures in my purse and was fully ready to air out all of Jonas's dirty draws. "Please reconsider, Sister Borum," Millard Rutledge, the head deacon, said.
"Reconsider what?"
"Think of the effect this separation will have on our church, your church, this community," Deacon Rutledge said. "So far, we've kept a tight lid on this thing, but all it takes is one person and .. ." He folded his hands in prayer. "We cannot have this scandal. Whatever has come between you and Reverend Borum must be resolved, and the sooner the better."
"Or what?"
They didn't have a ready answer for that question. They looked at each other, they looked at their hands, and they looked to heaven for the answer. Deacon Rutledge sighed and said, "Or your husband will be out of a job, and by extension. . ."
I'll be out on my ass, I thought. Can't get spousal support from an unemployed man, now can I? And it ain't like the want ads are full of openings for adulterous black preachers. "Don't y'all even want to know why I kicked him out?"
"That is not our concern," Deacon Rutledge said. "The marital problems you are experiencing are nothing each of us hasn't encountered" I doubt that. "I imagine your, um, difficulty in childbirth may have had something to do with it." Say what? "At any rate, we have to think of the future of the church. That is a much more important concern"
I shot my hand into my purse ... then slipped it out. God, I prayed, if I show them these pictures, this church will be ruined, my husband will be ruined, and I'm sure in a twisted way that I'll be ruined more than I already am. Please, I'm askin' ... Please help me make the right decision.
"Mrs. Borum?"
"I'm thinking." I looked at their leathery, wrinkled faces. I've got gossip material in my purse to last y'all till Jesus comes back. "I'll take him back, but only under one condition."
Deacon Rutledge sat up straighter. "Name it."
"Fire the secretary."
They blinked at each other for a while and asked that I leave the sanctuary while they "considered" my request. An hour later, they called me back in. "The board has decided," Deacon Rutledge said, "that it will ask for the secretary's resignation. If she refuses to resign, I'm afraid that there's really nothing the board can do. You see, we hired her in the first place. Firing her would reflect badly on us ""
Oh, we wouldn't want that. "If she isn't fired by noon tomorrow, I will send several revealing pictures of the reverend you chose and the secretary you hired to a local TV station making it very clear that this board hired her."
Another blink-fest. I could almost feel little puffs of wind coming off their wrinkled eyelids.
"Don't worry. I'll make sure they spell your names right."
Another hour of waiting. "The board has decided," Deacon Rutledge said, "to offer the secretary a generous severance package-"
I cut his ass off. "You gonna pay off the bitch that's been fucking my husband in the pastor's study right upstairs in this very building?!" I pulled out a pen and a scrap of paper while flies buzzed around all those open mouths. "I got to write this shit down" I scribbled a series of loops. "This information and my pictures on TV ... Y'all is toast! There will be headlines in the paper for weeks"
They fired the secretary that very evening, and I let Jonas come back into my house despite Tonya's warning ("Dogs always return to their vomit, girl"). Naomi, of course, was glad. "All things work together for good, Ruth." But I had some rules for Jonas, my "Ten Commandments," that he had to follow or else: "One, you clean up after your damn self. Two, you cook for your damn self. Three, you wash your own damn clothes. Four, you iron your own damn clothes. Five, you do your own damn dishes. Six, you put the goddamn seat down every goddamn time you use the goddamn toilet! Seven, any of your shit left lying around, I throw it out in the street. Eight, you sleep in the damn basement. Nine, you will be home from that church or whatever duties you have before the sun goes down. Ten, you will never cheat on me again or I will cut your little dick off and nail it to the
altar."
For six months, I had it made. I treated that man like the shit that he was and liked every bitchy minute. I'd hover around him as he cleaned up the kitchen or the bathroom, whispering, "You missed a spot, Reverend Bone-'em ... Bet you didn't miss any of that ho's spots ... Bet you put the love of God up into every one of her nooks and crannies ... Scrub hard-sin don't come out with just a little Dutch cleanser ... Wasn't your last shitty sermon about sins being leopards with all them spots that just don't come out?" I knew it was a cruel thing to do, but Jonas had to be held accountable in some way. The church board wasn't gonna do shit, so I had to.
And then ... I softened up. It takes work to be a bitch, and I wasn't a very good one. I was out shopping with Tonya and Naomi, and we stopped to eat at a little restaurant in the mall.
"How are you holding up?" Naomi asked.
"Fine."
"You still workin' his ass to death?" Tonya asked.
"Every second of every day. He's supposed to be cleaning that house all day today. I just love to see that man down on his knees ""
"That's the way, girl," Tonya said. "Treat a dog like a dog.
Naomi threw her napkin on the table. "Now, that isn't the way, and both of you know it." She turned to me. "Haven't you punished that man enough?"
"No."
"What gives you the right?" Naomi asked.
Tonya slapped the table. "She got every right! Man of God or not, her husband still a man, and he been a dog"
"He made a mistake, a bad mistake," Naomi said, "but I'm sure he's asked for God's forgiveness. And last time I checked my Bible, it isn't up to any of us to punish anyone. `Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord."'
"You'd be talkin' differently if it had happened to you, Naomi," Tonya said. "Why you always got to be holy anyway?"
"It's the right way to be," Naomi snapped. "It's the only safe way to be ""
Tonya rolled her eyes. "And that's why you the oldest virgin in Calhoun."
"And it's why you aren't, Miss Sleep-With-Any-ManWho'll-Buy-The-Pizza!"
I had had enough. "Stop!" I pushed my plate to the side. "I'm no good at being mean, y'all. Bein' a bitch makes me feel good, but only for a moment. I go to bed every night sad. I don't want to be sad no more"
