Jesus Land

by Julia Scheeres

  “Great.Got any other helpful hints?”

  A muffled piano strikes up a hymn, accompanied a moment later by the mutter of singing.

  Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine

  O what a foretaste of glory divine!

  David looks behind him, then leans forward again.

  “First off, don’t trust anyone down here . . . except your lovable little brother, of course.” A smile flits over his face and I narrow my eyes at him.

  “Seriously,” he says. “Everyone wants to get out of here as bad as you do. The place is full of narks and cheats and backstabbers. Best thing you can do is keep your head down and don’t make a fuss.”

  His flippancy—to use one of Mother’s favorite words—is unbelievable.

  “But it’s your fault I’m down here!” I say loudly, not caring who hears me. “You got me into this! That whole bit about ‘keeping the family together’? I think you just wanted company. I could be an emancipated minor right now! Do you know what that means? Free!”

  “Free to do what? Flunk out of high school and be a busgirl for the rest of your life?”

  We glower at each other and the hymn swells between us.

  Perfect submission, all is at rest

  I in my Savior am happy and blest . . .

  He’s right, of course. That is where I was heading. An image of me as a shriveled-up old woman in a busgirl uniform flashes into my mind. The music ends and a man’s deep voice holds forth, his words not quite loud enough to be clear. I glance at my watch—three minutes left. If we can’t talk for a month, I don’t want our last conversation to end so harshly.

  “So, what happened to you?” I ask him, sweeping my eyes over his “God Rules!” T-shirt and taped glasses.

  “Broke them playing dodgeball.”

  “And this?” I reach across the table to grab his sleeve. “They turn you into some kind of Jesus freak on me or something?”

  He looks down at his chest and shrugs.

  “I got it for Third Level. This and a Study Bible.”

  “How nice. Did they give you a sucker, too?”

  David rolls his eyes and laughs. The Dominican guard walks through the courtyard with his sword and German shepherd, whistling. He nods curtly at us and David nods back. The dog sniffs at something under a picnic table and the guard yanks on the leash, knocking its head against a bench.

  “So, does he use that sword to chop kids up if they try and escape?”

  “It’s called a machete, dufus,” he snorts. “And he’s here to keep the Dominicans out.”

  “. . . and the Americans in.”

  He shakes his head and grabs my wrist, twisting it around to look at my watch. The old-man worry line crimps his forehead again, and I start to wonder whether this is a permanent blemish on his seventeen-year-old face. He looks up at me.

  “So, did they say when I’m coming home?”

  “I don’t know, ask them,” I tell him, as I did in all my letters.

  “But they won’t tell me.”

  His brown eyes beg for good news, for hope, and I think back to the boys’ dark basement room, emptied and reeking of Lysol.

  “I dunno . . . they might have said something about the end of the year,” I lie, pressing my thumbnail into H of the HEL knifed into the table.

  He breathes in sharply, as if he’d been holding his breath underwater for a long time and just broke the surface for air. His smile is one of pure, unfiltered joy.

  “Maybe we’ll both be home for Christmas!” he says.

  Christmas. That’s more than six months away. I plan to be out of here long before that.

  “Maybe, but now that I’m down here, you have to stay with me, you hear?” I say. “No leaving me here alone.”

  He smirks and is about to say something when the prayer room door bursts open and kids pour out; he lifts his head to watch them disappear into rooms on either side of the courtyard. I ignore the commotion, my eyes still trained on David’s face. Say it. You won’t abandon me.

  “You two have a nice chat?”

  Debbie looms over us with a Bible tucked in her armpit, her loose dimpled flesh spreading over the cover under her short sleeve.

  “David, time for class. Julia, let’s get you moved into Starr.”

  “Yes,” David says, as I look down at the HEL in the table. Go away. Leave us alone.

  David stands and walks to my side of the table. I grab his thin wrist in my hand.

  “Guess I’ll be talking at you later, then, bro,” I say. The crease reappears on his forehead, and I don’t want to let him go.

  “Take care,” he says. “And remember not to . . . don’t . . .” He looks at Debbie, then at the ground, shaking his head.

  “I know,” I say, squeezing his wrist.

  I watch him cross the courtyard with stooped shoulders and walk into a dark room, before turning to follow Debbie.

  The van Debbie drives to take me to the girls’ home is a passenger van, also marked with the school’s New Horizons logo. When I open the side panel, prepared to crawl in after my luggage, it’s got four benches.

  Debbie offers no explanation, and I realize, as I sit behind her and fume, that making new students ride for two hours in the back of a cargo van over potholed roads must be part of the “psychological disorientation” tactics mentioned in the school brochure.

  *STARR* is painted on the side of the girls’ residence, a yellow box with a corrugated lid that crouches between the two boys’ homes on the hillside. All three buildings are simply more elaborate versions of the shanties we passed last night.

  When we pull into Starr’s driveway, I drag my luggage over a flagstone patio and through a sliding glass door into a room crowded with furniture. Half the room contains a long dining room table surrounded by wooden chairs; the other half contains iron patio furniture with no cushions. The walls, painted a flamingo pink, clash nauseatingly with the orange-and-green tile floor.

  Despite the crammed space, the room gleams with order and sterility. The sliding windows that open onto a small deck overlooking the valley are invisible but for a blaze of sunlight on the glass. The dining room chairs are precisely spaced along the table, and there is not a plant, book, or personal effect in sight. There is no sign of life whatsoever.

  It reminds me of the time our parents took David and me to the Model Home Show in Indianapolis. The “homes” were double-wide trailers parked in a stadium parking lot: The Kitchen trailer, The Bedroom trailer, The Bathroom trailer. Each space was reduced to its basic function: Here you cook, here you sleep, here you shit.

  I survey Starr’s sterile Dining room-Living room. Here you do time.

  “The house parents are Bruce and RuthAnn McMillan and they come to us from Canada,” Debbie says. “You’ll meet them later; they’re in staff Bible study now.”

  She gives me a quick tour of the building. An archway at the far end of the dining/living room leads to the kitchen, which is also eerily immaculate—no crumbs on the counters, no plates in the sink, no grease on the stove. Each jar in the spice rack precisely spaced, dust-free, with the label facing forward.

  “Looks real clean,” I say.

  “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” Debbie says.

  “So they say,” I mutter.

  She points to a closed door off the kitchen. “That’s the house parents’ quarters. You’re not allowed in there.”

  Out back, there’s a small patio strung with clotheslines. On one wall, a row of brooms hangs over dustpans. On another, mops over buckets, and the strands of the mop heads are spike-straight, as if they’d been hot-picked.

  “A Dominican washes the clothes, but you must wash your own underwear if you soil it with menstrual blood,” Debbie says.

  She leads me up a short staircase to a dark room. Light seeps weakly through a tiny widow at the back and from the crack between the slanted wave of the metal roof and the cement wall. Debbie turns to a tall tank beside the doorway and fiddles with a knob
at the top; the tank begins to hiss and a faint whiff of rotten eggs fills the air. She strikes a match, and whoomph, a fist of orange fire explodes atop the tank then shrinks to a stubby flame.

  The bobbing light reveals a room crammed with bunk beds. Clothes hang from a pole suspended horizontally down the middle of the room. Here again, order reigns supreme: Sheets are snapped tightly over thin mattresses, blouses are buttoned and centered on their hangers, shoes aligned beneath the pole, laces tucked in.

  My bunk is in a corner. Debbie points at the top mattress, a three-inch-thick piece of foam resting on wood slats. Space has been cleared for me along the pole and in the bottom half of one of the rickety dressers that’s separating the bunk beds.

  She excuses herself to use the toilet and I start to unpack, stuffing my clothes into the drawers.

  “Not like that,” she says when she returns. She grabs a pair of my panties and kneels beside the bottom bunk, motioning for me to join her on the floor. I do.

  “Watch carefully,” she says. She folds the panty crotch to the waistband, left side to center, then right side to center, reducing it to a small white envelope, then holds it up for me to admire.

  “There’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything in The Program,” she says. “Even folding panties.”

  I look at her with raised eyebrows and you’ve-got-to-be-kidding smirk, but she’s not. Her face is dead serious.

  The lesson continues. Socks must be rolled into tight balls, bra cups fitted together with the straps tucked underneath, jeans doubled butt cheek to butt cheek, then folded in thirds, every crease perfectly aligned. Every button must be buttoned, every zipper zipped. These things are important, she tells me. My success in The Program depends on them.

  I bend over the polished floor, folding and refolding a pair of panties, and each time Debbie tells me I’m doing it wrong. After several minutes, she shakes her head and stands.

  “You can finish that later. They’re waiting for you at school.”

  We vowed to marry so we could live together forever. In the tree-strained sunlight of the basement playroom, we mapped out our lives. We’d live on the beach, eat nothing but ice cream sandwiches and own dogs. Lots of dogs.

  They called our plans ridiculous, of course. We couldn’t marry, they said, despite the fact that we weren’t really brother and sister.

  So we decided to become real family, blood brother and sister.

  We held the ceremony in the early spring of 1976, in the woods behind our house, under a canopy flecked with dogwood blossoms. Snow still lingered at the bases of the trees, and the shooting star flowers had just begun to push their pointed lavender heads through the rotting leaves.

  We sat side by side on a fallen sugar maple tree and David unfolded his hand to show me the blue thimble-headed tack he’d taken from Mother’s missionary bulletin board. Blue, his favorite color.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  I nodded and squeezed my eyes shut, holding out my hand. The tack bit sharp and quick, and I opened my eyes to see a red bead welling on the tip of my thumb.

  A bell clanged in the distance; Mother calling us to supper.

  “Hurry,” he said.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to prick David; I didn’t want to hurt him. Finally he had me hold the tack skyward and he pushed his thumb onto it.

  Afterward, we pressed our thumbs together, black and white, until our blood ran out the side.

  “Now we have the same blood,” David said, beaming.

  “Now they can’t say we’re not real,” I said, smiling back.

  The evening wind stirred, and dogwood petals drifted down on us like blessings.

  Uphill, the bell pealed impatiently.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE PROGRAM

  Debbie points at a door in the middle of the courtyard. Economics, she says.

  “Your parents signed you up for college prep. They have high hopes for you, and I’m sure you won’t disappoint them again.”

  I approach the door with my backpack clamped against my chest and my heart booming. This is it. Party Impression, Take Two. Debbie stands behind me and watches as I knock.

  “Hello!” a male voice calls from inside the room. I remove my safari hat, fluff my hair, and paste on my Farrah smile before turning the doorknob.

  Seven students sit in a single row at the front of the room as the teacher—a short, thick man—bangs out a list of words on the chalkboard.

  I slip into an empty chair desk next to a girl with a blond bob. She’s cute in an upturned-nose, cheerleader type of way, and I wonder what got her sent down here. I train my Farrah smile on her, but she rolls her eyes and looks away.

  Maybe she has a personality disorder, I think, pulling a notebook and pencil from my backpack. The teacher straightens and slaps chalk dust from his hands. He peers at me through large glasses.

  “Excuse me, aren’t you forgetting something?” he asks.

  “Sorry, I didn’t want to interrupt you,” I say with a carefree laugh. “I’m Julia Scheeres.”

  Someone snickers.

  “Did you ask for permission to enter this room?” he asks.

  I stare at him in disbelief as he rubs his jaw with his hand and looks at me with mock confusion.

  Must ask to move

  Must ask to sit

  Must ask to stand

  Must ask to eat

  This is really happening. Fine. Play the game.

  I stand and start toward the door, but the sound of tongue-clucking stops me short.

  “Did you ask permission to stand?”

  I walk back to the chair and sit down, but the tongue-clucking continues.

  “Did you ask permission to sit?”

  The cheerleader smirks and my cheeks burn. I dig my fingernails into the palms of my hands.

  “Can I get up, please?”

  “Can you speak proper English?” the teacher asks, prompting more snickers.

  “May I get up, please?”

  “Yes, you may.”

  “May I walk to the door, please?”

  “Yes, you may.”

  “May I go out the door, please?”

  “Yes, you may.”

  “May I come in the room, please?”

  “Yes, you may.”

  “May I walk to the desk, please?”

  “Yes, you may.”

  “May I sit down, please?”

  It’s a nightmarish game of “Mother May I?” By the time I’m again seated, I’ve cut four bloody crescents into the palm of each hand.

  The teacher picks up a notepad from his desk and jots something into it, then noisily crosses out what he’s written and walks over to me, bending until his face is level with mine.

  “I’ll give you a break today because it’s your first day,” he says. “But from now on, you give me attitude, and you’ll pay for it. Do you understand?”

  I nod, unable to speak.

  He cups a hand behind his ear.

  “Yes, sir,” I say in a weak voice.

  My pencil shakes violently as I copy the vocabulary list off the chalkboard into my notebook: Unlimited wants, limited means, correcting for externalities, adaptive expectations, absolute advantage.

  When the noon whistle sounds, the other students bolt from Remedial Math and the game of “Mother May I?” starts in earnest. The math teacher gives me permission to stand and walk to the door, but disappears into the mass of bodies crowding the picnic tables before I can ask her to enter the courtyard.

  There’s another zero ranker across the courtyard from me, a boy. He’s as scrawny as a plucked chicken and looks to be about thirteen—a mere kid. He hangs from a doorway in a yellow T-shirt, braying at the staff table.

  “May I enter the courtyard, please?”

  They ignore him. Apparently he isn’t demonstrating proper Courtesy and Respect Towards Authority Figures, one of the categories on the daily scorecard Debbie showed me, along with Attitude, Cooperation, and B
eing Totally Truthful and Honest, Facing Reality. We get points for all of them.

  After braying his request four more times, Boy 0 hammers the doorframe with his child’s fist, muttering cuss words only I can hear. He catches me staring and squinches his face at me; I look away.

  Unlike him, I refuse to call out. I won’t ask permission to sit, stand, walk, to exist, one more time. I simply won’t. I’ll stand in this doorway like a statue until the world ends around me.

  “I said! Please, may I please enter the courtyard, please!” Boy 0 bellows again, his voice growing thinner and higher with each word.

  At the picnic tables, there is no pause in the eating activity; no one even glances in his direction. I regard the chewing faces, the glaring sky, a three-inch, half-smashed cockroach that drags itself over the bricks to my sneakers. I kick it away and it lands on its back next to a cement bench, where it mechanically probes the air with its good legs. After several minutes, it bumps up against the bench and manages to flip itself over.

  The next time it lugs itself to my feet, I press the toe of my tennis shoe onto the working half of its body. It pops, and a yellow pus squirts out.

  A hot wind races through the courtyard and I take off my safari hat and fan my face with it. In the valley below, the sun glints off the rice paddies. Some of the kids cast their eyes in my direction as I fan myself, but mostly they just stare at their plates and chew. None of them talk much.

  A large parrot lands in a palm tree next to the picnic tables, where it screeches down as if it found the presence of humans on this hillside offensive. At my feet, a line of ants streams toward the cockroach’s glistening innards.

  I contemplate the hazy green horizon and wonder which way is home. Not that I have one anymore. At this very moment, Mother is probably in my bedroom, erasing the stain of my existence with rubber gloves and hot bleach, just like she did after David and Jerome left. “Our children are gone,” I imagine her writing to her missionaries. “Now it’s just Jake and me and our dedication to God.”

  Across from me, Boy 0 has sunk to the bottom of the doorframe, where he hunches over, chewing the side of his hand and glaring at the picnic tables.