Jesus Land

by Julia Scheeres

  We grab machetes and shovels and pickaxes and fan out in a row, first scalping the earth, then puncturing it, gouging great holes in the hard soil. Cinnamon-colored dust hangs about us in great lazy clouds, powdering our skin orange and flooding our nostrils with the scent of chalk and old hay.

  Behind us, Ted and the other staffers direct our blades, urging us to keep going, keep digging, keep striving. We pry boulders loose from their cavities like giant rotten molars and roll them downhill. Pile smaller stones onto each other’s outstretched arms. Shovel dirt into wheelbarrows. Dump everything we dig up in a pile at the bottom of the hill.

  As the July sun crawls higher into the cloudless Caribbean sky, so does the temperature. By mid-morning, sweat has glued our jeans and T-shirts to our bodies like sausage casings. I catch David’s eye and we exchange a grim look; the hated chore of gardening was cake compared to this.

  Nevertheless, everyone smiles at the staff and swings their tools with grunts of enthusiasm. We will absolutely score in the Attitude, Cooperation, and Helpful Influence boxes, and we will get out of here that much quicker. Even Boy 0 is acting the good sport, swinging a pickaxe with vigor; he appears to finally have learned that resistance is futile.

  Ted leads us in a hymn sing, and we pant out “God Is So Good” and “Just As I Am” and “Blessed Reedemer” as we slice and tear the earth. When the sun sucks our throats dry, pitchers of warm Kool-Aid are handed round and we guzzle it directly from the pour spouts, not caring whose lips came before ours or that dust and small insects season our refreshment. Such is our thirst.

  At noon we crouch among the dead weeds with dirt-smeared arms and faces and unpack the food baskets prepared by our housemothers. RuthAnn has prepared cheese and lettuce sandwiches and pineapple. We gulp down the sandwiches and suck the pineapple juice from our fingers and ask for more, but there’s no more to give. Such is our hunger.

  In the mid-afternoon, as the sun blasts overhead in the stagnant sky, smiles and muscles start to falter. Saltwater rolls down my scalp into my eyes, my arms tremble, and blisters form on the pads of my hands.

  When the staff’s exhortations to strive harder fail to speed our progress, a ghetto blaster is called forth, fed six fresh D batteries, and placed on the slope above us. The synthesized guitars and thumping percussion of Petra silence our groans.

  Caught in the undertow being swept downstream

  Going against the flow seems like such a dream

  Trying to hold your ground when you start to slide

  Pressure to compromise comes from every side

  Wise up, rise up

  We work with renewed vigor, as if this were real music and not just Jesus music.

  The boys strip off their sweaty T-shirts, and I stop swinging my pickaxe when Tommy tosses his shovel aside and steps back from the growing bank of dirt. He grasps the hem of his red Fear God T-shirt in his hands and slowly peels it over his tan torso, revealing inch by inch his etched stomach and chest, the generous curves of his shoulders and arms.

  He balls up the shirt and pitches it into the dead weeds, then swipes his dripping face with the back of his arm and I gasp at his beauty. The heavy drum track of the Jesus music beats something to life inside me, a spark that flares and expands as Tommy picks up his shovel and tosses dirt into a wheelbarrow, his muscles rippling and glistening in the searing light. And I’m not the only one leering at him with awe and admiration; every girl on the hillside has stopped working to witness this carnal perfection. Such is our lust.

  I walk past Tommy to a water bucket stationed at the side of the trough and lift it to my face, letting the warm fluid splash into my mouth and over my T-shirt as I drink him in.

  My thirst quenched, I stumble over to grab the handles of his wheelbarrow and stand dizzy and dumb in his presence, my shirt sopping and my bra soaked through. His green eyes bore into mine as he slowly spills a shovelful of earth into the wheelbarrow, a corner of his mouth cocked in a knowing smile. I pull back my shoulders and thrust out my breasts the way Susan did that night after Vespers, and his eyes slide over this small offering and linger on my nipples, which poke out like the eraser tips on No. 2 pencils. I feel his steam and smell his yeast and the flame within me leaps and swells as dust swirls around us.

  “Julia, dump that load!” Ted bellows over the moaning guitars. His voice jump-starts time, and I rip my eyes from Tommy’s and push the wheelbarrow downhill.

  As I’m forcing it back up the ragged slope, I notice that the other girls’ T-shirts are also pasted to their flesh with splashed bucket water and that the boys’ movements are hard and alert, and that the air is thick with more than dust. Male and female shapes heave together, arms caressing, as the earth is groped and pounded, chests grazing as tools exchange. Bold stares. Flushed skin. Panting mouths. Everything in sync to the throbbing Jesus music. A peculiar dance executed by a crazed tribe of mud children.

  The staff sense something peculiar in these movements and gather in a circle to press their heads together. I smirk in their direction as I scoop a pickaxe from the ground and, in a delirium of heat and exhaustion and desire, consider how easy it would be for us to turn our blades against our masters.

  As I join the writhing line of bodies, there’s a whistle blast— a long, terrified scream—and I turn to see Ted standing in the middle of the mass grave we’re digging. He motions to the Quemado group leader, who sprints across the dirt and pounces on the jam box, smacking it quiet.

  “Everybody stop!” Ted roars.

  The white noise of the tropical afternoon washes over the landscape as bodies tumble apart and stand to face Ted, blades in hand. He bends to pick up a discarded spade before speaking.

  “Let’s take a group break,” he says, gripping the spade handle in both hands.

  The group leaders post themselves at the four corners of the pit and Becky beckons to us with a downward flick of her hand. We drop our tools and walk to her.

  “For modesty’s sake, I need you girls wearing light-colored T-shirts to change into darker ones,” she chirps in her bird voice. “And please, girls, let’s not spill water on ourselves. We don’t want to waste this precious resource.”

  When we reconvene at the work site five minutes later, the ghetto blaster is gone and the boys have covered chests and sullen faces. We’re instructed to level the downhill rock pile, which keeps us well away from their agitated presence.

  The next five days are a grind of dirt, heat, and hymn-sings. I grit my teeth and fantasize about sitting in the coolness of our cement house, reading a book. Any book, even a Jesus one.

  The next Sunday during Vespers, Ted congratulates us on our hard work before dropping a bomb:

  “There won’t be enough funds to pave the court until next year, and by that time I expect every student here to have successfully reintegrated into society,” he says.

  A hush smothers the chapel. Bugs sizzle and pop in the gas lamps.

  “Seriously, folks, your contribution will be appreciated by generations of Escuela Caribe students to come,” he says. “I am proud of you. God is proud of you.”

  I stare open-mouthed at Ted, then turn to look at David, who shakes his head in disbelief. A week of chain gang labor for nothing. A week behind in school. A week behind in our PRO-gress toward freedom.

  Ted begins to clap, and the staff join in, and after a lag, so do we. I slap my blisters together and glare at the wooden cross behind Ted’s head.

  Why do You let these things happen?

  Susan doesn’t die, but she doesn’t get better either. She spent Work Week sprawled on her bed like a wet rag, rising now and again to stink up the bathroom.

  When she passes out on the toilet one day, they take her to a clinic in La Vega, a village twenty miles away, and she’s found to be a veritable petri dish of the Salmonella typhi bacteria, otherwise known as typhoid.

  RuthAnn, who used to be a nurse in Canada, tells us you get typhoid by digesting fecal matter, but can’t explain how
such matter entered Susan’s mouth. It serves Susan right I think, for being a nark. Eat shit and die.

  Susan’s quarantined in The Hole to keep her from turning into Typhoid Mary and killing the rest of us, and the next day during lunch, a beat-up Toyota with “Ayuntamiento” painted on the sides rattles through the front gate. A Dominican in a gray suit and a fedora gets out, and Debbie rushes over to greet him.

  “He’s from the government,” Tiffany says, pointing at the car with a forkful of potato salad. “That’s what that word “ayunta -miento” means. The mayor’s office.”

  “Like, duh!” I say, glaring at her. I don’t know if he’s government or not, but I don’t like Tiffany thinking she’s smarter than the rest of us.

  We gawk at the stranger as Debbie ushers him through the courtyard to Ted’s office. He’s the first outsider we’ve ever seen on The Property besides the guard and the staff’s cook. At the door to Ted’s office, the man takes off his fedora and turns to regard the picnic tables with pursed lips. I gnaw on my cold cut sandwich and fantasize that he is our savior. That he’s heard we’re being held here against our will and has come to shut the school down and send us all home.

  Five minutes later, he drives away, and my fantasy goes with him.

  But during P.E., he returns. This time the Toyota’s crammed full of Dominicans in suits. Reinforcements. Backups in case the staff resist our liberation. We’re playing dodgeball when the car pulls through the gate and shudders to a stop next to the banyan tree. After Fedora Man gets out, I lose track of him when someone chucks the ball at me and it nearly beans my head.

  For many kids, dodgeball isn’t a game: It’s revenge. It’s their chance to settle a score in a legitimate fashion. As I run and duck and cover my face, I watch the Toyota out of the corner of my eye. The suits have gotten out and are leaning against it; there are four of them.

  The game comes to a halt when the ball hits Janet in the face and she crumples to the ground, wailing. She sobs in the dirt as the rest of us stand around her with crossed arms, impatiently waiting for her to get up so we can finish the game and get started on our Work Time chores.

  Fedora Man reappears with Ted, who hops on a moped and leads the Toyota up the cement drive to the upper reaches of The Property. They wade through the waist-high grass and disappear on the other side of the barbed wire fence.

  After Janet drags herself to the losers’ area under the banyan tree, the game continues, and when the Toyota rolls back down the hill twenty minutes later, I’m standing next to her in the shade. As the car idles a few feet away from us while Fedora Man talks to the guard, the man in the front passenger seat sticks his head out the window. He’s young, handsome, wearing sunglasses and a gold chain that flashes under his open shirt. We regard each other for a moment, and then he sticks out his tongue and flutters the tip up and down in a perverted gesture. I turn my head in shame, and he laughs.

  I will think about his tongue later, when I’m alone with my nail polish bottle.

  When we return to Starr, Bruce breaks the news: Susan got typhoid from cows. There’s a pasture above The Property, and they found a dead cow in the stream that supplies our water, one of those ash-colored Hindu cows, rotting in the shallows and bloated with maggots. Also there’s live cows polluting the water supply with manure. In fact, he says, both the dead cow and this fecal matter may be giving everyone the blues.

  So we’re all eating shit.

  We must boil the water we use to clean the dishes and brush our teeth. We’re also allowed to help ourselves to Cokes whenever we’re thirsty.

  And this one small symbol of normality—pop—changes our lives. We’re allowed to reach into the fridge and take a green bottle whenever we’re thirsty, and I swear I’ve never been so thirsty in my life. I suck down the cold brown bubbles in five gulps, then reach for another, just because. And when I fetch one for myself, I grab one for Jolene as well, because it makes me happy to see her face light up as she clinks her bottle against mine. Ain’t no liquor ever tasted better.

  During Free Time, we gather around the supper table to play Scrabble and sip our pop and giggle as if we were normal teenage girls and not fallen women. We piece the Coke jingle together from memory and sing it in a round.

  On the ninth round, Bruce pokes his head out of the house -parent quarters to ask us what we’re singing, and we tell him it’s the Coke song.

  “That could be construed as secular,” he says. “I don’t want you singing it.” He sticks Sandi Patti in the cassette player and presses play.

  This camaraderie of Coke ends a few days later when the staff locate iodine in a neighboring village, and house pops again become a privilege. The school hires a team of locals armed with machetes to hack up the dead cow and haul it away in garbage bags, and notices are sent to our parents reassuring them that the “water quality issue” has been resolved.

  During Free Time, people drift back to their separate corners to write letters or do homework, and once again, Starr becomes a cement box, a place to do time.

  Shortly after the typhoid scare, some dark cloud descends upon Preacher Stevie and he starts in with the fire and brimstone.

  He’ll call a special function after supper, and we’ll scoot downhill and file impatiently into the chapel, resentful of losing precious Free Time.

  One Wednesday evening, Preacher Stevie seems more perturbed than usual. His muscles spasm beneath his dress shirt and his armpits are damp with sweat. As the wind bursts through the wooden slats covering the chapel windows and the gas lamps flicker, he scowls down at us from the pulpit.

  “Some of us here tonight,” he says in a smoldering voice, “need to be reminded of the business of Hell.”

  He drags out the “e” in Hell as if he were choking on it. Heeeeeeell. The word hangs over our heads like a hatchet, setting people to squirm in their pews. We should be used to Preacher Stevie’s mood swings by now, but it’s still shocking to see him go from Gentle Jesus to Angry God in the lull of an afternoon. I often wonder what sparks this change in him between the time he finishes his one-on-one prayer sessions and the time he rides his moped back to the house in Jarabacoa that he shares with the other single male staffers. Whether it was some student’s prayer-time confession, or too many hours reading the Old Testament in his windowless office.

  “. . . and I’m not talking tonight about the Heeeell below,” Preacher Stevie continues, his auburn hair aflame in the gas lamp light. “I’m talking Heeeell that will take place right here on Earth.”

  He’s talking Rapture again. I look back at David, and sure enough, he’s eyeing me too. We only just heard about this Rapture thing at Escuela, and wonder why Reverend Dykstra never mentioned it back at Lafayette Christian Reformed.

  According to the folks down here, one day there’ll be a bright flash in the sky and we’ll look up to see Jesus hovering in the air above us. He’ll spread his arms, and the true believers will float up to meet Him and to be personally escorted into Heaven.

  Now, Preacher Stevie says the true believers could be anywhere when The Rapture occurs—driving down the freeway, mowing their lawn, or sitting on the toilet, when, poof! they’ll zoom skyward, slipping through doors and ceilings like Casper the Friendly Ghost. And even the dead true believers will rise from their graves, but it won’t be gross or scary like in Dawn of the Dead.

  The scary things happen to the folks who are Left Behind, to the unbelievers and Christians who didn’t believe hard enough. Because after the true believers go to Heaven, Satan will take over the world, Preacher Stevie says. Among other horrible things, Satan will force everyone who’s Left Behind to get 666 tattooed on their foreheads, and he’ll set loose an army of demons that have horse bodies, human faces and scorpion tails that go around stinging people to death.

  “In those days of misery, you will have one last chance to prove your faith by resisting the Prince of Darkness,” he now says, gripping the pulpit and flexing his large bicep muscles. I try
not to notice them. “You will experience pain and torment of every form imaginable. You will cry out to God for mercy, and He will turn His back on you, just as you turned your back on Him.

  “And if you fail this last test of faith, He will banish you to Hell, where your pain and torment will increase one hundredfold and never end.”

  Hell excites Preacher Stevie. He runs his hands back and forth over his scalp as he talks, and by the end of the sermon, it’s standing on end like a madman’s. He pauses to reach down and pull a Coke from beneath the pulpit, then throws his head back to gulp from the bottle, his Adam’s apple bobbing. I swallow dryly.

  “The Rapture’s due any day now,” he shouts, keeping his eyes on us as he bends to set the bottle back on the pulpit’s hidden shelf. “The signs of the End Times are here, just like the Book of Revelation prophesized. We’ve got nucular bombs and legalized abortion and gay homos on prime-time TV. Evil surrounds us.”

  I don’t recall the Bible mentioning any of those things, but perhaps I wasn’t reading it hard enough. Other things confuse me as well. Preacher Stevie says that millions of Christians will be raptured up to Heaven, while John Calvin said only 144,000 souls could fit into Paradise. Maybe God built an addition onto Heaven since John Calvin came up with his figure all those centuries ago, but I don’t dare ask; adults think you’re smarting off if you pry after such details.

  On the pew next to me, Jolene fidgets, peeling off her orange fingernail polish and eating it. On my other side, Rhonda breathes in Preacher Stevie’s every word with an open mouth.

  “If Jesus appeared in the sky right now, would He take you with Him, or would you be Left Behind?” Preacher Stevie asks us. “If you have any doubt whatsoever, I urge you to rededicate yourself to Him tonight, right here, right now.”

  He lifts a jam box from the floor and sets it on the pulpit, then jabs the play button. I already know the music he’ll play before he turns it on, because he ends each hellfire sermon the same way. The hair on the back of my neck rises as Larry Norman’s creepy “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” pours through the speakers, warning of all the evils that befall those who are Left Behind.