Jesus Land

by Julia Scheeres

  “You okay?” I whisper.

  She unclamps one of her hands to give me the thumbs-up sign, then clamps it over her mouth again.

  I roll on my back and try to conjure up the beach and the waves and the cozy apartment, but they are gone to me. Someday, David. I listen to the sighs and moans and rustlings around me and close my eyes.

  “Dear Lord,” I pray. “Please help us get there.”

  There came a day when David denied his skin color.

  We were in trouble for kicking a basketball into the television set and shattering the screen, and as usual, David got the brunt of the punishment: He was spanked while I was scolded.

  Afterward, we commiserated over a pile of marbles under the ping-pong table. David squatted on his heels, his butt too sore to sit on, and I felt guilt at our unequal punishments.

  I was still trying to understand the reason for it. I thought maybe Mother was harder on him because she didn’t want him to grow up to be one of those black people on the six o’clock news, the ones who wore orange jumpsuits and handcuffs. The ones who stole and killed and sold drugs. They were the only other black people we knew of.

  “I know why you always get spanked,” I told David that day under the ping-pong table. “It’s because you’re black.”

  He picked up a big marble and dropped it on the pile, knocking the gleaming circles across the carpet.

  “No, I’m not,” he said quietly.

  I looked at him.

  “What?”

  “I’m not black,” he said, louder.

  Upstairs, Mother was banging pans, making supper.

  “Of course you are!” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You’re blacker than the place the sun don’t shine,” I said, parroting a phrase I’d heard flung at David on the schoolyard. I had no idea what it meant, but I knew it was bad and instantly regretted saying it.

  “Shut up!” he screamed.

  Mother opened the basement door.

  “What’s going on down there?” she yelled down the stairs.

  David glared at me before crawling out from beneath the ping-pong table and running to his room.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered a moment later at his unyielding room door.

  CHAPTER 11

  DEAD BABIES

  In the milky predawn, the Third World roosters start croaking as if someone were choking the new day from them and I wake with a shudder. A heaviness presses down on my chest like a boot. This place isn’t some conjured-up nightmare that fades with the morning light, but it is real, and it is an island, and it is inescapable.

  I wonder if David is awake, and whether he’s thinking of me right now as I think of him. If we concentrated hard enough, I wonder if we could learn to communicate by brainwaves alone.

  David, someday we’ll laugh about all this in Florida.

  A distant alarm clock sounds and a moment later Becky unlocks her door and shuffles into the dormitory. She ignites the gas lamp—whoomph—and the room is washed in dreary light.

  “Six o’clock,” she calls. “Everybody up.”

  There’s a collective groan as bodies tumble from bunks and thrust themselves into clothing. The two highest rankers enter the bathroom to do their toiletry while everyone else starts their Room Job. I watch Susan crease her sheets into precise forty-five-degree angles at the corners of her foam pad and try to imitate her. This is my first day on points, and I must score high.

  After five minutes, Becky yells “Time!” and the next two highest rankers enter the bathroom. As Susan stands at the dresser straightening her bottles of perfumes and potions, I’m still struggling to fit the sheets over the floppy foam pad.

  When it’s our turn to wash up, Becky gives me permission to enter the bathroom and stands in the doorway as Susan and I sit on the two exposed toilets and urinate with our eyes fixed on the floor in front of us. The small room has twin sinks, twin toilets and twin shower spigots, everything out in the open like in jail. I need to relieve my bowels, but refuse to do so with an audience.

  “Remember to put your t.p. in the wastebasket,” Becky tells me as I wipe myself.

  After we scrub our faces with cold water and comb our hair, we drape our towels on the rungs at the end of our bunk, making sure they’re perfectly centered with aligned edges, before proceeding to wipe down every surface in our space with bleach-soaked rags.

  At 6:30, there’s a whistle blast and a stampede down the stairway. Becky shadows me as I get permission to go downstairs, to cross the imaginary line dividing the living room into the dining room, and to sit down at the long wood table.

  A large bowl containing a fluorescent pink substance steams in the middle of the table; the girls regard it with suspicion as they drape napkins over their laps.

  Susan leans toward me.

  “It’s oatmeal,” she whispers. “RuthAnn puts Kool-Aid in it.”

  Bruce emerges from the house parents’ quarters buttoning his shirt over his soft hairy middle and pads to the head of the table.

  “Good morning, Bruce!” the girls sing out, their sour faces suddenly sweet.

  “Mornin’,” he responds, reaching for his coffee mug. RuthAnn rushes from the kitchen with a metal carafe to fill it, then takes her place at the mother end of the table.

  We bow our heads as Bruce blesses the pink oatmeal. By the time everyone has slopped the required spoonful into their bowl, there’s only half a serving left for me, but I experience a small thrill at this when I discover that the only thing more revolting than regular oatmeal is Kool-Aid–flavored oatmeal.

  As we eat, we discuss how Bruce slept and what he dreamt about and what he’d like for supper, and when the large blackrimmed clock over the kitchen doorway marks 6:55, we bow our heads in prayer again, before everyone rushes off to do their House Job.

  Since I’m the lowest ranker, I get the bathroom. It’s my job to make it look tidy, despite the large swaths of blue paint peeling off the walls that expose the concrete blocks underneath and the rusted metal ceiling, which looks like someone attacked it with a can of orange spray paint.

  “Bruce will scrutinize your housekeeping skills when you finish,” Becky tells me. Scrutinize. People love that word down here. Scrutinize, scrooge, screw, scrotum. I smirk as I shake smeared toilet paper into a plastic bag.

  As I scrub the porcelain throats of the toilet bowls, Becky talks about abortion. She asks me how many teenagers get abortions in Indiana and I tell her I don’t know. She asks me if I know that abortion is a deadly sin against Gahd Our Maker and I tell her yes. She tells me Gahd sent her down here to convince us troubled girls not to abort His precious unborn babies and I nod and she repeats the story about the church potty and the dawk road.

  When I can no longer stand the pressure in my bowels, I tell Becky I need to use the toilet for private business. She considers my request for a long moment, then agrees to stand outside the bathroom with her head pressed to the door. There’s no lock on the knob.

  When the whistle blows at 7:30, she tells me to drop my cleaning utensils or my points will be docked and I protest that I haven’t finished the mirror.

  “Timeliness is next to Godliness,” she says.

  I give her a sideways look, and she adds: “And cleanliness is next to Godliness, too.”

  Bruce scrutinizes my work, running his hands over the floor and walls, sniffing crevices, peering into corners. He holds up his index finger; there is a gray smudge on the tip.

  “This is not acceptable, eh?

  “Nor this, nor this, nor this,” he says, pointing out more mistakes. There’s goop beneath the shampoo caps, a dead cockroach stuck to the bottom of a wastebasket, pubic hairs in the shower drain.

  We proceed to the dormitory, where he flings open my panty drawer and traces a finger over the bottom of it.

  “There’s grit.”

  He pulls out the drawer and dumps it upside down on the floor. Does the
same with the sock drawer. Stands and squints at my bunk.

  “Look at those corners!” he says, shaking his head.

  I stand beside him, my heart sinking. The angles are more seventy-five degrees than forty-five, but it’s still the neatest bed I’ve made in my life. Bruce rips the sheets off the mattress, and it slumps off its metal brace and falls onto the socks and panties on the floor. I bite my bottom lip and follow him to the closet, where he flings shirts and shoes on top of the mattress. By the time he’s done, it looks like a tornado touched down on my belongings. I survey the damage, blinking away tears.

  “You need to try harder, really think about what you’re doing,” Bruce says. He writes a 2 on my point chart next to Room, Done Well and On Time and another 2 next to House Job, Done Well and On Time.

  “You’ve got five minutes to do your corrections before school,” he says, turning to walk away.

  “As if,” I mutter.

  He whips around, his face a bearded tomato.

  “What did you say?”

  I press my fingernails into my palms.

  “I said, ‘Yes, sir.’”

  He eyes me a second longer, then leaves.

  I bend to furiously rewipe, refold, redo and am still bent when the whistle blows and footsteps pound out the front door to the patio.

  Bruce stamps upstairs as I’m struggling to reinsert the dresser drawer onto its runner; clothes and shoes still litter the floor at my feet.

  “Come on!” he yells. “Everyone’s waiting for you!”

  Panicking, I sprint past him, down the stairs, and onto the patio to join the other girls. Only when Susan turns to me, wide-eyed, do I realize what I’ve done. I dash back into the house, and there’s Bruce, standing in the living room.

  I start to babble an apology, but his face is as unyielding as a concrete wall and I stop. RuthAnn rises from the dining room table holding a magazine and a coffee mug and disappears into the house parents’ quarters, closing the door behind her.

  “Get down and give me fifty push-ups,” Bruce says.

  “What?”

  “Fifty push-ups. Now!”

  I glance down at the gleaming tile floor and at the girls on the patio, and Bruce starts counting “One . . . two . . .” and I don’t know what happens when he reaches three, so I stretch out before him like a crucifix and lower myself to the ground. I’m dipping into my fourth shaky push-up when Bruce squats beside me.

  “Get lower! Count out loud!”

  “I can’t!” I gasp.

  “You can and you will!” he orders.

  My arms fail, and I collapse on the gleaming floor, hot snot and tears burbling from me. I feel no shame at this messy outburst, but rather relief, a lightness that balloons in my chest and replaces the suffocating weight that woke me. I could weep happily for hours on this gleaming floor if only he’d let me.

  “Get up,” Bruce says. “We’ll finish this tonight.”

  Bruce leads the way downhill in my safari hat, his brown hair fluttering beneath the brim, and I swear that if I ever get my hands on that hat again, I will bite it, and I will piss on it, and I will cut it to pieces, and I will burn it.

  Becky catches up to me and lays a hand on my shoulder.

  “I know The Program must seem very difficult to you right now,” she says. “But all these experiences will help you build character.”

  I don’t respond because I know that whatever noise comes out of my mouth will not be human. I shrug off her arm and she falls behind me.

  The boys are singing “Amazing Grace” when we walk into the chapel. Mrs. Madsen, the P.E. teacher’s wife and school therapist, plunks out the hymn on a small piano under a floor-to-ceiling wooden cross at the front of the room.

  We file into the pew in front of David’s house, and when I lift my bloodshot eyes to his, he stops singing. I hold my songbook to my face and try to focus on the words, but singing about grace and mercy just makes me feel more wretched and I begin to sob anew.

  There’s a surge behind me and I turn to see David seething at Bruce as the boys on either side of him grip his arms, holding him back. I slash at my tears with the back of my hand and smile at him. Everything’s fine.

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the last class of the day is “Group” instead of P.E.

  “It’s where Becky teaches us to be proper Christian young ladies,” Susan tells me as we stand outside the History classroom with the other girls, waiting to be let in.

  Becky’s inside, slamming drawers and doors and otherwise preparing a “surprise” lesson for us. She’s put me in the custody of Tiffany, who leans against the wall with her arms crossed, scowling at me.

  When the door swings open, the other girls push past me as Becky gives me permission to enter, walk, sit. At the front of the room, under photocopies of the American and Confederate flags taped to the wall, seven large pieces of cardboard are propped on chairs.

  Becky stands before them.

  “Today’s lesson may disturb some of you,” she says in her high bird voice. “But I’ve given it much prayer, and I believe the Lahd has guided my decision.

  “The topic of today’s lesson is the legalized murder of precious unborn babies,” she says as she walks to the first piece of cardboard in the lineup.

  Susan tilts her head toward me and rolls her eyes—Becky’s talking abortion again.

  “In Ephesians 5:11, Gahd tells us to ‘Take no part in the fruitless deeds of darkness, but instead expose them’ and that’s my intention here today. I special-ordered these posters from the States to do just that, to expose this great evil.”

  She flips over the first poster. It’s a close-up of a doll’s hand resting on a quarter, fingers spread across George Washington’s face, adorable in its miniature perfection. No, it’s not. It’s not a doll’s hand, it’s a real hand, a transparent, guppy-like hand. An amputated baby hand. You can see the webbing of nerves, the shadows of bones beneath the skin. A red jelly oozes from the wrist.

  “Ewww!”

  “Yuck!”

  “Nasty!”

  Several girls clap their hands over their mouths.

  Becky flips over the second poster. A tiny baby curled on a pink sheet next to a small gold cross, napping. Its skin is streaked black, its lips are gray. It looks like a marble paperweight.

  “It looks real,” Rhonda says in a choked voice.

  “Yeah, real dead,” I whisper to Susan. She hushes me.

  Becky crouches next to the poster of the baby paperweight and studies it.

  “This is Sara,” she says. “All these babies have names. They are all Gahd’s children, our brothers and sisters in Christ.”

  The hand she calls Hannah.

  She stands and flips over the third poster. A butchered baby in a bedpan, yellow and quartered like a stewing hen. A tab of flesh pokes out of the crotch—it’s a boy. His head leans uncomfortably against the bedpan, and his eyes are shut, but his mouth gapes open in an eternal scream.

  Someone shrieks. Someone else mewls. There are gasps and moans.

  “Meet Samuel,” Becky says, patting the screaming head. “Little Sammy.”

  She turns the remaining posters, and each one is more gruesome than the last. By the time Becky reaches a red blob of slime she calls Rachel, many girls are crying. Beside me, Susan peeks through her fingers at the gore.

  Becky kneels before the dead babies and contemplates them silently for a long moment. Suddenly she yelps and plunges her face into her hands, and the crying becomes wailing.

  Susan’s lips contort into an upside-down U as she bawls and she wipes her snot on the sleeve of her blouse.

  I look at the posters and the warped faces around me and feel nothing. I have exhausted my emotions and have no more to give. I press my forehead against the cool surface of my chair desk and review the vocabulary from Spanish class. Chair, silla. Window, ventana. Door, puerta.

  After the crying subsides, Becky has us pray for the dead babies and the people who
killed them. We slide to our knees on the cement floor and take turns, each girl trying to outpious the next, and some even addressing their prayers to “Dear Babies.”

  “Heavenly Father,” I say, when it’s my turn, “deliver us all from evil, the living, the dead, and everyone in between.”

  As punishment for getting 1s and 2s in Courtesy and Respect Toward Authority Figures and Attitude and Jobs and a bunch of other boxes, Bruce has me haul rocks during Work Time while the other girls polish silverware or practice folding napkins into fans and bishops’ hats.

  The work consists of carrying a pile of rocks from the field below the house and making a new heap beside the driveway.

  Becky watches me from the deck with her legs dangling over the side as I cradle the rocks in my arms and lug them uphill. When I stop to rest in the shade of the house, she quietly urges me to keep moving, glancing back into the living room where Bruce sits reading The Thornbirds with his feet up and a pillow tucked under his butt. We watched the miniseries based on the book a few years back, and to see Bruce caught up in a torrid affair between a priest and a ranch girl grosses me out. It’s not the kind of book men are supposed to read.

  After an hour, Bruce blows his whistle, but I’ve barely made a dent in the rock pile.

  “Now I’m giving you two casitas,” he says, walking over with the romance novel in his hand.

  He explains that casita is Spanish for little house, and English for running up the hill, a quarter mile from the entrance gate to the top boys’ house, TKB. Normally, he says, he’d assign me one casita for every point under a 3—and so far today, I’ve earned seven such points.

  “But I’m a nice guy and making an exception for you,” he says.

  I stare at my sneakers and wait for him to stop talking before turning to start down the driveway.

  Three boys are pounding up the cement track as I jog downhill, including Boy 0, who staggers behind the others. The TKB group leader swoops past me on a moped and nips at his heels, trying to herd him up the hill, but he won’t speed up. His eyes, when he passes me, are dull, unseeing.