Covenant Child

by Terri Blackstock

  Amanda rose and went to the bathroom, turned the faucet on, and splashed some water over her face. She looked at her face in the mirror, puffed with misery. She hardly recognized herself. She turned back to the door and saw Joan leaning against the casing, her arms crossed.

  “I hate this!” She scrubbed the towel too hard over her skin. “What am I supposed to do? Call HolCorp and tell them to clean me out an office?”

  “Honey, that’s exactly what you ought to do,” Joan said in that childlike voice. “You call up there and you tell the acting CEO that you’d like for him to call a board meeting, and then I’ll go with you.”

  Amanda turned around. “You’ll be there? Why?” “Because I’m quitting my job, Joan said, ”and I'm hiring myself as your assistant“. Amanda almost smiled. “My assistant?”

  “Somebody’s got to do it, and it might as well be me.” Joan came in and took her by the shoulders. “You’re the best friend I’ve got, Amanda, and darn lucky if you ask me, since I’m the most efficient administrative assistant in town. You can ask any boss I’ve ever had. In fact, my boss, Mr. Miller, will probably throw himself across a railroad track and beg me to stay. But I’m committed to you.”

  “Would you really do that, Joan?” She set the towel down and stepped toward her. “Because it would help me a lot. I don’t have any focus. I don’t know which direction to go. I need somebody who has some skills.”

  Joan struck a ta-da pose. “I’m your girl.”

  Amanda finally gave in to that weak smile, and Joan pulled her into a hug. “You’re gonna get through this, Amanda. And so are the girls. You’re not alone, and neither are they. You have me, and they have each other. That’s why God made them twins.”

  She accepted Joan’s tight hug and dug deep enough in her heart to find her gratitude for her friend.

  That night, Joan slept in the room Lizzie and I used to share; she didn’t want Amanda to be alone.

  But when Joan was sound asleep, Amanda sat on her bed under the glow of the yellow lamplight, her legs folded beneath her, and paged through Jack’s Bible, searching for some comfort.

  She came to a yellow highlighted passage in Jeremiah 31. Jack had found it important, so she ran her fingers over the page as she began to read at verse 15:

  Thus says the LORD,

  “A voice is heard in Ramah,

  Lamentation and bitter weeping.

  Rachel is weeping for her children;

  She refuses to be comforted for her children,

  Because they are no more.”

  Thus says the LORD,

  “Restrain your voice from weeping And your eyes from tears;

  For your work will be rewarded,” declares the LORD,

  “And they will return from the land of the enemy.

  There is hope for your future,” declares the LORD,

  “And your children will return to their own territory.”

  She touched her mouth and leaned back on her pillows. God was speaking to her through Jack’s highlighting pen. Once again, He was telling her to be patient. To wait. That it would be all right. That her children would someday return. She was to work now, in anticipation of her reward.

  She started to cry again, but this time it was not from grief. This time her tears were of joy, for the Lord had mercy on her and had spoken to her in a clear voice tonight. He was telling her to wait, to trust, and to get up and move. He was telling her that He would give her the strength for whatever lay ahead of her.

  He was telling her that He would be with her.

  Christ knew of her suffering, for He, too, had grieved over His children. He had wept over Israel and said that He’d wanted to gather them like a hen gathers her chicks under her wings . . .

  He had suffered grief and abandonment and tribulation. He had even suffered pain and death. He had felt forsaken.

  But there had been joy to come.

  For the first time since her whole nightmare had begun, Amanda thought ahead to that joy. God would not leave her nor forsake her. And so she made the decision, sitting there on her bed in the yellow glow of light, that she would trust His promise, no matter how long it took to fulfill.

  NINETEEN

  For the next few months, the money made life at the Krebbses’ house a little happier for us, and we started to settle in. Eloise took to wearing hats and shoes that hurt her feet; Deke bought a brand-new Cadillac and opened a no-limit account at the casino down in Vicksburg.

  They planned to buy a new house, but before they could find the right one, Deke lost most of the money in a poker game.

  Things promptly got bad again.

  They never did buy that house, so we continued sleeping in that tiny room on the single twin mattress, with sheets that hadn’t been changed since we’d moved in. We learned that tears did no good, that they only got you locked in closets. We began to get food from the cabinets if it was in there when we needed it. Otherwise, we did without.

  Eventually, when Eloise and Deke had lost so much money that they couldn’t pay their mortgage, we moved to an old trailer and waited for the next annual installment.

  The woods behind our trailer became our personal playground, and the television became our teacher.

  Kindergarten came with the same fanfare as our birthdays, which meant no one paid much heed to it. Some mornings, we got ourselves up on time and made it to the bus stop. Other mornings, we didn’t. No one seemed to care one way or another. Eloise and Deke stayed at the casinos all night, leaving us to our own devices, with no supper or bedtime, no bath or homework.

  When we got home from school each day, Eloise and Deke were usually sound asleep, their snores shaking the rickety trailer. At the barking dog or the closing door they would wake up and yell for quiet. Then, after a series of cigarettes and cups of black coffee, they would head out to the casino again.

  As the days and years went by, we forgot that Amanda had ever existed. Our father remained some distant memory with as much mystery as that surrounding our mother.

  We heard often about the money Eloise and Deke had won, but we didn’t understand about inheritances or squandered fortunes. And on the rare occasions when we intercepted a letter addressed to us, Eloise would grab it and launch into a tirade about how Amanda had stolen the lion’s share of our inheritance and was responsible for the way we lived now.

  As we grew older, I learned to hate the mysterious woman who had robbed us of what was ours . . . this woman named Amanda Holbrooke.

  TWENTY

  The town of Barton was situated off of Highway 49, just south of Yazoo City. It was largely agricultural country, full of cotton crops, soybeans, and catfish farms. Two businesses employed most of the nonfarming residents of town: a paper mill and a chicken-processing plant. The air over the town was poisoned with the competing smells that clung to your clothes and blew through your windows, floated in the creeks, and blew through the vents of every building in town. It attached itself to our cars and our lawns and our trees.

  We got used to it, though, and after a while didn’t smell it anymore, except when the wind blew up just right and stirred the stink around. On the rare occasions when we could get far enough out of town to breathe clean air, the stench always surprised us when we returned.

  The stench came in waves at our house. When Deke gave the casino the last of the first installment of our inheritance, he went back to work at the chicken plant and came home daily smelling of rotten slime. The smell would never wash completely out of his clothes, and his shoes reeked so badly that Eloise took to lining them up on the front porch of the trailer to get them out of the house.

  The woods behind our trailer became a place of mystery and adventure, from which an occasional moccasin or cottonmouth would slither and torment us until Deke would go out with his deer-hunting rifle and blow its head off. Eventually, though, we overcame our fear of those snakes and ventured deeper into the woods.

  We learned where all the paths had been cut by hunters try
ing to make easier passages to their deer stands, and we found that, by following them, we could get anywhere in the town of Barton. One path led to the library, where Lizzie and I spent many muggy afternoons. Lizzie loved to go for the air conditioning, but I loved to read.

  One day when we were eight, Lizzie and I hung out at that library after school. She lay on one of the vinyl couches in the children’s section, her feet hanging over the arm. I sat on the floor, deeply absorbed in The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner.

  Lizzie stared at me. “Why do you like that book?”

  “Because these kids are like us. Homeless, kind of.”

  “We’re not homeless.” Lizzie twirled her hair around her finger and flopped her feet off the end of the library couch. “We just wish we were.”

  “See, these kids are supposed to go live with their grandfather, only they’re afraid of him, so they live in this boxcar and pretend that they have parents and people looking after them, when all along they do it for themselves.”

  “I’d be scared to live in a boxcar. Steve Crawley says there are rats in them.”

  I sneered. “Steve Crawley lies. Besides, this one doesn’t have rats. They fixed it up like a real house. Where’s your imagination, Lizzie?”

  “Not in some ratty boxcar.” She got up and stood on the couch cushions and feigned a gymnastics dismount, without ever having mounted in the first place. She leaped down from the couch and waved to the invisible Olympics crowd. I went back to reading.

  She lay back down. “I wish Little Women and The Secret Garden weren’t checked out.”

  “You’ve read them over and over. Why don’t you find something new?”

  “Ah . . . Ah cain’t,” she said, in some fake Southern accent that she’d heard in some television movie. She threw her wrist over her forehead and pretended to faint. I knew she was pulling a Sleeping Beauty, so I got up and kissed her on the lips. She started to giggle and pushed me away, and I wrestled her back down. “Oooh, you’re so by-ootiful! Give Prince Charming another big smooch, why don’tcha?”

  We were making too much noise, because Mrs. Hallitop came around the bookshelves and shushed us. “If you girls can’t behave in here, you need to go on home.”

  So I checked out my book and we headed to our woods. One path led to the truck stop just near the highway, where we could watch strangers from out of town come and go with sour looks on their faces, probably from the smell of the air or the sour stomachs they had from eating the greasy food.

  The path that crossed over the railroad tracks was our most frequented path, for we found that if we reached the tracks, we had a straight shot to downtown Barton, which consisted of a rotting hole-in-the-wall they called City Hall, a small strip mall with a Dollar General Store, an antique shop called Trash and Treasures, and a barbershop where unemployed men hung out all day shooting the breeze.

  It was at that strip mall . . . on that very day . . . that Lizzie and I learned the art of shoplifting.

  We hadn’t meant to do it. It wasn’t like we set out to become thieves. No one ever told us that stealing was wrong, but we knew it, just like you know that it’s wrong to set someone’s house on fire or bust them in the mouth.

  We didn’t know why it was wrong, and no one ever tried to tell us. But even if they had, I’m not sure it would have mattered.

  What did matter was that when we made it home from the library that day, we saw that the dog had gotten hold of Lizzie’s doll, which she had named Eliza, sort of after herself. The dog had dragged it by its dress into the backyard, and Lizzie found it facedown in a mud puddle. From her reaction, you would have thought she’d found me lying there, drowned in mud. She picked it up, cradling the muddy, ravaged doll in her arms, and began to wail with heartbreaking anguish.

  I didn’t know how to comfort her, so I picked up a rock, gritted my teeth, and threw it at the dog. I missed, but he cleared out of the yard, no doubt fearing more missiles aimed for his head.

  Lizzie still cried, her nose running and her face red and wet, and I went to her and put my arms around her. “Shhh, it’s okay, sweetie. Let’s go in and give her a bath.”

  Through her tears, she nodded, and I escorted her in.

  She brought the doll into the bathroom, and we ran a bath for it in the sink and washed the mud out of Eliza’s hair and off of her soft little body. She was never meant to be bathed, not in the cloth part of her body, but we didn’t know that. The mud and water stained her torso, tainting her beauty, and the dog had left teeth marks on her face.

  Her hair stuck up every which way, like some kind of punk rocker. And the dress was ruined. The dog had chewed it and ripped its skirt to shreds.

  Lizzie got under the bed and cried with that baby, keeping her voice real low since Deke always threw us in the closets when we cried. I don’t know why she felt the need to get under the bed, except that it was some shelter from flying fists . . . and the mattress muffled the sound. It was dirty and dusty under there and made me sneeze. But Lizzie always grieved under the bed.

  I got my baby, which I had named Missy, and thought of taking off her dress and giving it to my sister. But then my baby would have been naked. I considered the fact that it might make us even—that mine still had pretty hair, and hers would have a pretty dress. I knew it would have gotten Lizzie out from under the bed and made her feel better.

  But I couldn’t do it. The dog had come after her doll, after all, and if she hadn’t left it where he could reach it, it wouldn’t have happened. Mine had been under the covers of our bed. She should have put it somewhere safer, I thought. She deserved what she’d gotten, and I didn’t deserve to have to suffer for her mistake.

  Then I had an idea. “Lizzie, we can go buy Eliza another dress.”

  “I don’t want another dress,” she said, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

  “But we can get one of those princess dresses they have at the Dollar General. Maybe it’ll have a crown with it, and if it doesn’t, we can make one.”

  She looked up at me. I knew that was a good sign that she was listening. “That pink one with the lace?”

  “Yeah, that one. Come on out, Lizzie. Eliza doesn’t like it under there, and she’s already scared enough.”

  I finally coaxed her out from under the bed. She came out, and I gave her a dirty T-shirt to wipe her face on.

  “I want the pink one with the lace,” she said. We’d spent many hours in that store, dreaming over those pretty dresses and bathing suits and pant sets that would have fit our dolls. “But we don’t have any money. How are we gonna buy the stupid thing?”

  “We’ll pick up Coke bottles along the way and sell them over at the recycling plant,” I said. “Or even better . . . we’ll go to the truck stop and look for change that’s spilled out of the truckers’ pockets. We always find change there, Lizzie.”

  “Those dresses cost ten dollars! Do you know how much change we’d have to find?”

  I was really getting aggravated. “Well, if you want to be that way about it, just go back under that bed. But I’m going shopping.”

  Lizzie got all pouty-lipped, clutching her doll against her. “I’ll come. And if I see that dumb, stupid dog, I’m gonna kick it right in the teeth.”

  “You do, and he’ll drag you off.”

  Lizzie put her doll on the bed, carefully hidden under the covers in case the dog returned. Then we headed out to the woods and got on the path that led to the railroad track.

  Lizzie’s spirits lifted as we made our way down the tracks. She always liked to walk like a beauty pageant queen on the runway, waving at her admirers along the way. I had this thing I liked to do. I would run and leap, then count the crossties to see how many I’d crossed. I would get way ahead of her, then wait for her graceful gait to catch up to me. Then I’d run and leap again.

  Today, she wasn’t prancing or waving, and when I leaped and looked back, it took her forever to catch up. I hated that dog. He wasn’t anything like a pet. H
e was some mutt that Deke had brought home for hunting. He didn’t even have a name, just roamed around our muddy yard looking for something to tear up.

  I hated to see Lizzie so sad.

  “You want to go to the truck stop to look for change, or to the Dollar store and see how much the dress costs?” I asked her over my shoulder.

  “I know how much it costs.” She said it like I was the one who had chewed up her doll.

  “Well, you don’t have to be snotty about it. I helped you wash her off, didn’t I?”

  She didn’t say anything, and we got to the place where the tracks crossed a road, and I made a big deal of jumping over the track, then tried a cartwheel, but fell on my bottom. She caught up to me.

  “What if they sold it?” Her eyes grew wide and dark at the thought.

  “They didn’t sell it. We were just in there yesterday, and it was still there. They might have got some new ones, though.” My eyes got big as I thought of the possibilities. “Maybe they got in one of those shiny gold kind, with shoes and a crown.”

  Lizzie looked up at me, suddenly interested. “Maybe.”

  We walked through the men standing out in front of the barbershop, smoking their cigarettes and smelling like sweat and Deke’s shoes. We pushed into the Dollar General Store. The clerk was on the phone.

  “She ain’t fooling nobody. She’s as pregnant as the day is long. I always expected that from her, didn’t you? The apple don’t fall far from the tree, and you know what they say about her mama . . .”

  She never even looked up as we went in.

  We found the toy aisle, and Lizzie pushed ahead of me and rushed to the doll clothes. She flipped through the flat little boxes, looking for the one she wanted. The long, pink dress she’d had her heart set on was still there.

  “Ten bucks,” she said, waving it at me with I-told-you-so anger. “We don’t have it, and we’re not gonna get it.”

  “Who says we have to have money to buy it?” I asked in a whisper.

  “Well, they’re not giving them away.”