High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel

by Scott Cheshire

  The faces at church had changed, too. As many brown faces as there were pale, and I could practically see the gears of my parents’ brains turning, trying to process this new information. Regardless, this was good news because the new faces probably didn’t know of Dad’s outburst. Or about me. So we got to arrive and sit and leave in relative peace. City congregations like this one are protean, always changing, just like the city. Picking a different congregation never even occurred to my parents, that I knew of. I spent most of those services thinking about everything but worship. I thought of school, and graduation, and leaving the house. I thought of Bhanu. I invited her a few times, but she’d always decline and then invite me to their temple, which I always politely declined. I told her there were people like her at our church now and she should try it just once. It wasn’t like I was trying to convert her, I hardly paid attention anymore myself. It was more like there was this significant part of my life, and she had no idea of what it looked like, much less meant. I also wanted her to understand that I was going to church again for my mother.

  One Sunday, when the minister onstage spoke of the doomed unbelievers, I couldn’t help but think of Bhanu. That she was doomed. I’d avoided this for how long already, made excuses for me, and for her, for my parents, for God himself, but I could no longer cover my ears. The elder onstage said they were hiding in our homes and in our neighborhoods, the Devil-music listeners, and the adolescent masturbators, the false clergymen of neighboring churches, and closeted atheists, the New Agers and yoga practitioners, and even casual dabblers in the abominable Oriental religions. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs. They would all be punished if they didn’t open their hearts to the Lord. And then I saw Bhanu’s lovely face. I thought of her mother’s bindhi, the bloodred dot decorating her forehead like the center of a bull’s-eye target—she who always had milk and jellied sweets waiting for us in their kitchen, ever since the first time I met the woman, in their kitchen, baskets of peppers hanging from the ceiling, when she took me into her arms and said with her lilting voice: “So this is the young man who has my daughter in a spell. Let me see you.” She set me in front of her like a melon she was considering for purchase, and said, “Okay. Be good to my Bhanu and I will be good to you.”

  I sat there and looked at the minister speaking and I watched his mouth moving but I couldn’t hear a thing. I imagined Bhanu’s front porch collapsing in the swell of a blood-river wake produced by some warring millennial and messianic chariot. I thought of her sweet-smelling hair—coconut!—and I sort of swooned right there in my seat. I wanted to run out of church and do something totally dramatic, like yell into the sky and dare Him to touch one hair on her head.

  That Sunday, because of that sermon, I started my long fight and flight from the angels.

  Sarah asked me once when it was exactly I lost my faith. I told her there was simply no such singular time. No single moment when whatever hairline crack suddenly widened, opening up like a fissure. I don’t even know what caused the crack to begin with. This was a slow and invisible process, practically geologic, but I do know that I didn’t join my parents the following Sunday.

  That next weekend, Dad asked if he could speak with me, alone. I assumed he meant without Mom around, and so I made like I was going to leave the room with him—but he stopped me.

  “Can we talk?” he said.

  Mom was sitting at the kitchen table. Crying, starting to wheeze. She was losing control and I was pretty sure it wasn’t just about me not going to church.

  “Shoot,” I said.

  He said, “Talk. Tell me what’s going on.”

  I said, “I don’t think I can talk about it.”

  “Try me.”

  Mom was recovering her composure.

  Dad said, “Ida. Maybe you should leave.”

  She shook her shoulders, and wiped at her face. Makeup smeared. Without looking at me, she said, “Josiah.”

  I said nothing.

  “Answer me this,” she said. “Do you believe in God?”

  Mom was on to me.

  “You’re angry,” she said, “I know.”

  I expected to see judgment in her eyes, accusation, disappointment. I saw nothing of the kind. Only empathy, and her beaten soul.

  “Me, too,” she said, and stood up. She pushed past my father, briefly took my hand, and then let it fall away. She left the kitchen.

  Dad said I’d grow out of it; it was just a phase. But I never did go back to church. Except then Mom stopped, too. She lost steam. And Dad was only going for her. Dad hardly looked my way anymore.

  This made me bold enough to one day ask him—he was out back watering what grass we had surrounding the concrete patio—I walked right up to him as if I’d been dared to and I said: “Look at me, please, and tell me something.”

  He aimed the hose away, took his time. He looked at me.

  “What about you,” I said. “What’s your testimony? Tell me. I have no idea how you feel. I come from you and so I’m a lot like you, but I’m also not like you at all.”

  He squeezed the hose with his hand and cinched it, so the water stopped and the hose looked like a snake swallowing its food. He was quiet for a few moments.

  Then he said, “Your grandfather. This was a man of great faith. And he was wrong about some things, but he never lost his faith. I’ve been wrong, too, but I never lost my faith.” He looked at me. “How strong will you be?”

  We looked at each other for some time and then I turned and went back to the house. I heard the water jet from the hose and smack the pavement.

  I’m not so sure faith is a thing that can ever be lost. Like every love we have, there’s always remnants deep inside us, in our cells.

  Mom and Dad did agree on one thing, though: that Mom would never get sick again. We’d been washed, a family washed by God’s love and a chemical bath, and if we were to keep that death at bay, above all, we must remain clean. So morning and night we showered. “At rise and fall,” Dad’s words. And, yes, making something so personal the subject of our daily conversations, ritualizing, really, my morning and evening wash and toilet was discomfiting to say the least. It was odd. At first he asked if I’d fully washed myself, made reference to “our unclean fleshly vessels,” which I supposed was my body. Before long, a new rule: he insisted I wash my vessel seven times, no less, the biblical number of perfection. I did this a few times until I no longer did, and Dad made a few passing comments about my skin not looking vigorously cleaned. I didn’t exactly realize what this kind of behavior suggested, that Dad had other issues. Finally one day I had to put a stop to it.

  He tried to open the bathroom door one morning while I was getting out of the shower. No knocking, nothing, he just entered. I threw myself at the door, and it closed on his arm.

  He screamed. Slammed it open. I was naked.

  He was wearing a small towel, barely covering him. His hair was wet, his skin wet and ruddy. Red marks on his arms and collarbones from what looked like a vicious scrub. “Seven times,” he said, and turned, leaving the door open behind him. I moved to close it—he stopped me. He stopped the door. I grabbed his arm and I pulled him back into the bathroom. It was so easy, I remember thinking, He’s so light!

  I pushed him into the clothes hamper, and stood over him.

  He was stunned.

  He was naked now, his towel fallen to the floor. I wrapped a large bath towel around my own waist, covered myself, and left the room.

  He passionately explained to me over dinner one night that his baptism, my baptism, and Mom’s baptism—the original ones, mind you—were false, insufficient in the eyes of God.

  “They lack commitment,” he said.

  We were sitting at the dining room table eating takeout Chinese food, passing the greasy cartons back and forth. Spooning onto our plates. Mom was quiet.

  Dad said, “A sprinkling! Ha!” He was laughing; rice fell from his mouth as he talked. “Baby’s getting baptized! Ha! And these grown-ups dunking thei
r heads underwater. In a swimming pool! How very nice and casual. Ida?” he said. “What can I get for you?”

  Mom shook her head: Nothing, thank you. Her head was wrapped in a floral silken cloth.

  “This is how you were baptized,” he said. “Josiah. You listening?”

  I looked away from Mom, and said, “What?”

  “Can you believe it?” He couldn’t stop laughing. “We’re supposed to take this seriously? You were baptized in a swimming pool. Above ground! I doubt you were underwater more than half a second.”

  I reached for a carton. Dad helped.

  He went on to explain that the original baptismal command required full immersion. We died in that water, were buried underneath and not breathing, which took more than half a second, you bet. Only to be resurrected upon ascension from a symbolic and watery grave. He was positive this should be done every day.

  “Every day,” he said, “we live and die in the Lord.”

  Mom was hardly eating at all.

  One Sunday, I watched her help him distribute pamphlets in our neighborhood, brightly colored Xeroxes announcing “The End Is Near,” rolled into tight tubes piercing the diamond mesh of chain-link fences. She walked slowly, with a walking stick now. But when the overlarge drunk guy from three houses down cursed at Dad from his porch, when he rushed at Dad and pushed him into the hedges, and when he then tried to put my father in a headlock, it was Mom who hit him back. Hard. She scratched at the big man’s neck. She scratched and punched at the skin showing where his shirt pulled open, and she pulled my father away. She swung her walking stick. It all happened so fast that when I ran over to help, the big man had already fallen back on his yellowing grass. Dad’s pamphlet was in a ball beside him. In the kitchen, I watched her scrub blood from underneath her nails. Nobody ever mentioned what happened.

  Bhanu and I often talked about what we would do now that we were out of high school. I wanted to move out as soon as possible, and so did she, but we both knew we were too young to get married. And then in July of 1987, Bhanu went to her cousin’s house upstate for part of the summer. When she left she was wearing jean shorts and a white T-shirt that said “Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?” And one day there, while visiting neighbors, she dove into a swimming pool and she hit her head on the hard concrete bottom. Either nobody else was there, or nobody was watching, but either way, at nineteen, she drowned and that was it.

  I don’t think I cried, not for a long time, anyway. I went to the funeral. Mom and Dad supported this, it was too serious a thing not to. Mom even sent me to get flowers, and told me to say they were from them. I laid them there on a chair at the funeral home without telling anyone who they were from. I walked up to the front of the room, not really prepared for what was happening. I’d never seen a body before. Bhanu was there, looking fast asleep, and peaceful, and I was weirdly pleased just to see her there. I kissed her mother’s forehead, and saw after, in the restroom mirror, there was a red stain on my lips from her bindhi. I went home and kissed my mother’s cheek and I swore I could taste the dormant death cells of her skin.

  * * *

  Bhanu’s accident gave Dad a sense of hope, I think, about me. They had lost me to her, and the accident was a tragedy, yes, he said, “But this is an opportunity for the three of us to get back to how things used to be. We can regroup. As a family.” We were at the dinner table, always at the dinner table, one of the few times of day Mom would leave her room. I don’t remember what we were eating that night, probably takeout again.

  Dad said, “I have an announcement to make.”

  My stomach tightened. I tried not to show any physical response. Mom said nothing.

  He could hardly contain himself anymore. He was fidgeting in his seat.

  “Well?” I said.

  He said, “Not yet.”

  I looked at Mom. Her eyes didn’t say much of anything. I looked back to Dad. “What do you mean, ‘Not yet’?” He was practically bouncing in his seat.

  “Wait,” he said. He stood up, and walked over to where I was sitting, put his hands on my shoulders. Rubbed, squeezed. “Give me a second,” he said.

  He walked over to the window, looked out. Walked over to Mom, stood behind her. She stayed still. I’d been holding my fork in the air all this time. I set it down.

  “What?” I said.

  He started unraveling the cloth on Mom’s head. She tried to stop him, took hold of him by the wrists. But he kept unraveling. He took off the cloth. She sat there, bald-headed. He grabbed her head, hands over her ears, and began kissing her head, here, there, everywhere, kissing her. He threw the cloth against the wall, laughing, “Haha!” He walked back to my side of the table, and then on into the living room, mumbling, and saying things louder. We couldn’t understand what he was saying.

  “We’ll do it here. Right here,” he kept saying. “Right here.” He walked back into the dining room and tried to sit, could hardly contain himself. He stood again, this time with a food carton in his hands. He ate from it, pacing back and forth, dining room to living room, in and out of the kitchen. Sometimes over to Mom, to kiss her head, or grab her head and kiss it. She stayed still. Her head cloth lay on the floor in a crumple. I watched it all as if I weren’t there, as if, if I stayed still enough, he wouldn’t see me. He paced, ate, and paced. Set the carton down. Picked it up again, pacing back to the table.

  “We’ll do it here, do it here, do it here…” He was sweating.

  At some point that evening I picked up Mom’s head cloth and gave it back to her. Dad’s pacing and mumbling had moved to other rooms. Upstairs. At one point, he stood in the bathroom beneath the stairs and scrubbed at his face, looking in the mirror, and calling out the numbers one through seven. Mom went to bed. I started cleaning up the dinner table just as Dad sat back down. He was saying, “Leave it, leave it, leave it…” He had a notebook, and started writing in very small script. It looked like he was making a list.

  Dad had decided he was starting his own church, at home. He’d received a revelation.

  He said, “We’ll invite everyone we knew from the Brothers in the Lord congregation.”

  He was making a list of names.

  “And the neighbors.” He asked me to get him a glass of water. I did. “And you’ll give the very first sermon.”

  He probably assumed that if he could tell the old brothers and sisters from church that I was giving the sermon they’d simply have to attend. According to him, they had been eagerly awaiting my return. I don’t know where he got this information. The idea seemed silly to me, even then.

  He looked up at me, sipping water, his face glowing. “You’ll do it?”

  I didn’t answer. I think he took this for a yes. But it didn’t matter. Nobody came.

  We sat there at the table next week, suit and tie. Mom in a dress. A stack of bagels. Cream cheese. He’d moved the table as far back to the wall and windows as he could, and set up a makeshift podium for me, a tall and slender chest of drawers he brought from his bedroom. He had called everybody, he said. Left messages. Told them it was “imperative” they attend.

  We sat there for two hours. Silent. Until Dad suddenly left the room, the house. We heard the car start. Mom insisted she help me move back the furniture. We put the bagels in a paper bag.

  Would I have spoken? I never thought about it, what I would do if anyone showed.

  That night, at dinner, Dad informed us he’d received a brand-new revelation, a shower was no longer sufficient and I must swear to bathe myself, fully immerse my body underwater, at rise and fall, to keep the house and my mother’s body clean. For me, this was too much to ask. The request was just too intimate. For the first time in my life, death was suddenly a worthy adversary, something worth fighting against, not something to be washed, or massaged, or colored with fear or fantasy.

  A year went by before I could leave and afford an apartment of my own. I had a job at a Radio Shack and I finally cried for my girlfriend. A fe
w years passed before I gave my savings to a coworker who had been developing what seemed a good idea for a video game. We got lucky. And before long, I was living in the future. When did that happen, exactly? Life was about what comes, and this was a frightening time for me because you cannot ever really know what is coming, no matter what, not the hour or the day. I was suddenly hanging out there like a leaf about to fall. But I was getting more and more okay with the idea of falling; everything that ever made me afraid started sloughing off like scales. One by one. Then I started picking them off.

  I went to work one day at Radio Shack suddenly filled with the feeling that I was no longer a Laudermilk, which was thrilling and scary as hell. I gave my notice and decided to make a longish bet on my future. I would take my cash and move to California, where computer electronics meant more money, the magazines said, and because it seemed so far away.

  Finally, one Sunday (always a Sunday!), I went home to say goodbye. I found Mom sitting in the kitchen, at the table, and she was sipping Lipton tea with milk. Her hat on the table beside her. Her white head like a bright pearl doorknob. The blinds were louvered almost closed, the atmosphere of the room more like evening than the midday outside. She wore her blue slippers, her robe. I would be leaving New York in the morning.

  She said, “Come over here.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder, picked at the pilling of her robe. The tea was half finished, so I turned and took the pot from the stove and poured more water in her cup. I said, “I’ll be back soon to tell you all about it.”

  She patted my hand. It was on her shoulder again.

  “And we’ll talk on the phone,” I said. “It’s just a matter of making a living, and nothing else. You know that. This isn’t the place for what I’m planning. California is the place for what I’m doing.”