Jesus Land

by Julia Scheeres

  The turkey darts against the fence of our legs trying to escape, and the girls squeal and the boys kick it. And everyone’s hee-hawing, and dang if this ain’t the most fun ever been had at Escuela. When the bird lowers its warty head and tries to penetrate the space below my dress, I knee its dirty feathers and it yelps and careens away.

  After a while, Ted grows tired of these antics and motions to the guard, who shouts in Spanish and tackles the bird. He struggles to his feet with his hands clenching the turkey’s neck and holds it aloft like a trophy as it claws his chest and everyone titters. The Dominican jabbers in his language and grins, but the bird is silent because he is choking it. Ted drags a tree stump into the middle of the circle and the guard stretches the bird’s long neck over it.

  “David!” Ted calls, beckoning with his arm.

  My brother throws me a look of doubt and apprehension before trudging over to Ted with the machete drooping at his side. They consult over the prostrate bird, with Ted pointing down at it and murmuring and David standing stock-still. And then Ted barks “now!” and the Dominican leaps away and David raises the machete and turns his head and slams down the blade.

  There’s silence.

  And then there’s pandemonium.

  For the turkey is yet alive.

  It lurches to its feet with half its head dangling to the side and blood spurting from its neck like some demonic fountain. As it flails about in a blind bloody circle, there’s a communal screeching and several girls erupt into tears and a boy shouts “holy shit!” and Susan collapses into Becky’s arms.

  David stands in gaping horror before this monster he has created, his blue suit splattered red. The Dominican yanks the machete from his hand and swings it at the bird like a baseball bat; its head and a piece of neck soar through the air and ricochet off the trunk of the banyan tree before falling back onto the field. The Dominican kicks the headless body over then stomps on the neck until the bird stops convulsing.

  By the time the Annual Escuela Caribe Thanksgiving Holiday and Worship Celebration has ended, the other girls are clutched into a bawling knot and a boy is horking into the dirt. Yep, best darn fun ever.

  We eat it in the courtyard. A couple of kids suggest that they’d rather scrub toilets or haul rocks or do anything else besides participate, but Ted will have no such nonsense.

  “Waste not, want not,’” he lectures them.

  We sit at our picnic tables and the bird reappears on a platter, fat and brown and naked. Ted carves it to pieces and makes sure everyone forks a slab onto their plate and I exchange a grim look with David, who’s changed into a clean tan suit.

  After he blesses the food, Ted turns to a jam box set on a cement bench and presses the play button. The high girly voices of the Vienna Boys’ Choir rise from the speakers.

  The turkey flesh is pink and spongy and tastes slightly of soap. I hold my breath while I chew, and down the table Susan chews with tears running down her face as Becky rubs her back. Ted gets up and cranks up the volume on the jam box.

  The late-afternoon air is damp with the gathering rain and a chill wind rips through the courtyard. I press my goosebumped legs together under the picnic table and shovel the spongy pink flesh into my mouth, chewing as little as possible before swallowing as the queer girly voices scream “Edelweiss” in my ears.

  The staff make it clear that I won’t get Fifth until I:

  Break up with Scott.

  Apologize to my parents.

  They don’t say these things outright. Rather, Bruce tells me that he’s concerned about my PRO-gress. He says my parents feel I haven’t internalized The Program’s values and worry that I’m still “under the influence” of a certain young man back in Indiana.

  Okay. It’s true that I wrote my parents a letter telling them my sex life was none of their business. But that was back on Level 1, before I’d fully realized what I was doing. We haven’t broached the subject of my deflowering again, either in letters or in my one parental phone call (a five-minute conversation over a buzzing and echoing phone line at Ted’s house where he sat across the table from me, and my mother updated me on the goings-on at Lafayette Christian Reformed and I yelled “what?” periodically for lack of anything better to say).

  After Bruce tells me his concerns about my PRO-gess, I sit down immediately at the dining room table to write two letters. One to Scott (“I think there was, like, way too much fornication in our relationship”) and another to my parents. This is the hard one. What, exactly, should I apologize for?

  “Dear parents,” I write, before grabbing the pen in my fist and carving a black hole in the page. I rip it from my notebook, crumple it into a ball, and stare down at the blank new sheet.

  When I was little and teachers had us make Mother’s Day cards in art class and told us to write “I love you” inside, I’d write “no” somewhere near the phrase. I no love you because I know you no love me.

  Is it wrong to dislike your parents? What if they disliked you first?

  I scrawl words on the fresh page before I think too hard about them.

  Dear parents,

  I recognize that I haven’t done the best job in the past, but I’ve been working hard during the past six months to become a better daughter and Christian and human being. I have ended things with Scott and hope things can be better for us. Sorry for everything.

  I bite my lip and sign “Love, Julia” at the end, instead of my customary “bye, Julia.”

  Bruce and Becky read the letters before I seal them in their envelopes and Bruce nods and Becky pats my back and I look down at the table. This isn’t defeat. This is survival.

  I become Starr high ranker the next Sunday, setting a school record for reaching Fifth Level in the minimum amount of time. I stand before Bruce and quote the required Scriptures, then lower myself before him to do the required calisthenics. When he pins the Leadership medal onto my T-shirt, I beam at the sour faces of the other girls. Losers.

  Tiffany is especially pissy about my promotion; she recently failed to make Fifth when Becky caught her smoking matches in the bathroom because she’d forgotten to jam shut the door.

  That evening, while we are luxuriating in the hot shower that is the foremost high-ranker privilege, I catch a whiff of rank coffee and look over to see her standing with her legs apart, massaging her neck and pissing a dark yellow stream onto the tiles. Her urine merges with the water flowing over my feet to the drain.

  “Hey!” I shout.

  “Hey what?” Tiffany shouts back, still massaging her shoulders.

  “Quit pissing on me!”

  She grabs the shampoo bottle from the ledge between us.

  “You’re insane!” she says in a dismissive voice.

  I turn to face her.

  “Don’t do it again,” I say. “Or else.”

  “Or else what?” she asks, finally looking at me.

  She squeezes shampoo onto her head without another word and I rush to finish my shower. As I rinse off, I glance at her and she’s got a smug smile on her face that I’m tempted to slap off. Instead I grit my teeth and leave the bathroom. I’m too close to winning the game to fuck up now.

  The Christmas tree is a branch, painted white. We try to gussy it up with popcorn and ribbons, but ultimately, it’s just a dead tree branch.

  Starr is in a mournful state, with everyone struggling to adjust to the dead branch and the fact that they are not going home. Part of the deal for most kids was that if they agreed to attend Escuela Caribe, they’d be home for the holidays. And although they may be hardened reform school kids, it still breaks their hearts that their parents lied to them.

  At Starr, there are a lot of red eyes at the supper table and a lot of sniveling after lights-out.

  The pain of not being home for the Great Family Holiday is especially sharp for David. Although he’s made First Level again, on many days during P.E. he doesn’t even bother chasing the ball, and now I’m the one urging him on with pleading eye
s.

  During Free Time, I often see him doing casitas, his thin body pushing slowly uphill, then stumbling down it. I watch him from Starr’s patio, silently cheering him on. Don’t give up, David. Remember Florida.

  On a joint parental phone call, our parents shout their plans for us over the crackling phone line at Ted’s. We are still forbidden from communicating, so I repeat everything our parents say (What? I’m flying back in June?) so David knows what’s happening, and he does the same.

  After I graduate Escuela Caribe, they’re sending me to Portugal for the summer with a group called Teen Missions to help build a missionary compound. In the fall, I’ll attend a Christian college in Upland, Indiana. I’ll be home for the shortest time possible between these events to “avoid problems,” they say.

  David—who’s almost a year behind in his studies—will transfer to the sister school of Escuela Caribe in Marion, Indiana, in January. No, he can’t go back to Harrison or live at home, they say when he asks. It’s Marion or the Dominican Republic. He picks Marion.

  By the time we hang up, it’s abundantly clear that neither of us will ever again return home to live. We’re on our own.

  This news doesn’t surprise me, but it harms David. On the way back to The Property, he stares out the van window with a wooden face, and doesn’t look at me once. He’s finally realized that his Brady Bunch dream will never come true. He’ll always be the outsider, seeking to belong. To family, to society, to something. I sense his sorrow and long to reach across the seat to grab his arm and remind him who I am—his sister, always—but Ted’s wife is sitting behind us, scrutinizing.

  On Christmas Day, we gather in the chapel during a rainstorm to listen to Ted tell us that God gave the world the gift of His Only Son and that our parents gave us the gift of Escuela Caribe, and how both these gifts will redeem us.

  Candles are passed around and we sing carols with our faces illuminated by the dancing flames. I can’t see David because he’s sitting behind me, and this frustrates me.

  We exchanged gifts through Debbie earlier in the afternoon. I gave him a blue dress shirt and he gave me a hat to replace the one Bruce ruined. It’s a man’s fedora, dark brown. It sunk to my eyebrows when I put it on, but made me smile all the same.

  “Tell him ‘Merry Christmas,’” I said to Debbie when she dropped it off at Starr. “And ‘Happy New Year,’ too.”

  In the flickering chapel, the therapist plays “Silent Night, Holy Night” on the piano, and Susan and Janet, seated on either side of me, start to cry. I get a lump in my throat and hastily blow out my candle, splashing hot wax on my dress. Susan looks at me with a wet face and raised eyebrows. I give her a dirty look, and she turns away.

  I set my candle on the pew beside me and dig my fingernails into their grooves, staring in silence at the wooden cross at the front of the chapel. You will not break me.

  During the summer of 1983, when we were sixteen and still a few months away from the time when everything started to fall apart, David’s favorite song was “Our House” by Madness.

  He bought the single and played it over and over again on his cassette player. The song is about a large, boisterous family doing routine domestic things like getting ready for work and school and a mother who sends her kids off each morning with a small kiss. It’s about a nostalgia for this blissful mundanity, about a family that manages to stay joyful despite daily pressures. It’s about the family David longed for.

  CHAPTER 18

  FLORIDA

  We are given a parting gift a few days before David returns to Indiana.

  A weekend trip to the beach, accompanied by the P.E. teacher, Peter, and his wife, Marie, the therapist.

  Ted calls us into his office one afternoon to announce this surprise and to give us permission to communicate again. He skips his usual “Jesus is watching and listening and knowing” speech and simply tells us to have fun.

  “You’re practically adults now,” he says, shrugging and lifting the palms of his hands in a helpless gesture. “There’s not much more The Program can do for you.”

  We leave The Property late on a Friday afternoon in an Escuela Caribe van, bumping down the mud-and-rock roads of the mountains to the sandy flatlands of the coast. During the three-hour ride, the Madsens play jazz instead of Sandi Patti, and David and I sit behind them, jiggling our knees and pointing out at curiosities in the passing landscape.

  We arrive in Sosua, a fishing village on the island’s north shore, as the sun melts golden orange into the ocean. Our hotel is on the beach, a stucco block building with rickety metal balconies. The therapist and I stay in one room, David and the P.E. teacher in another.

  There are cigarette holes burned into the bed sheets, but the mattresses are thick and lush, and when Marie goes into the bathroom, I take off my shoes and bounce on mine silently to celebrate.

  The four of us eat a supper of fried plantains and pinto beans in the dingy hotel dining room, then play Concentration with a beat-up pack of cards we find in the lobby, and go to bed early. I fall asleep instantly on the soft mattress, lulled by the swish of waves, and, for once in a very long time, am not woken by the cries of nightmaring girls.

  On Saturday morning, the four of us line up our beach towels and read through a box of American magazines that were left at the hotel. They are months old and filled with information that was sometimes reported back to us, and sometimes not.

  We knew, for example, that President Reagan had been reelected and that a new edition of the New International Version of the Bible had been released. We did not know that Duran Duran had released a new album or that Three’s Company ended its seven-year run. Important moments in history have passed us by, and it dismays us.

  David and I don’t want to abuse the privilege of being together, so we stick close to our chaperones. We wade in the ocean when they do, buy conch fritters and coconut popsicles from street vendors when they do, return to our towels when they do.

  After supper, Tootsie is playing on a tiny black-and-white television in the hotel lobby, and the Madsens let us watch it despite the sex and the profanity and the man in a dress. The screen keeps dissolving into rolling gray static, but David and I sit in rapt attention—it’s the first TV we’ve seen since we left the States. The Madsens laugh at the funny parts as hard as we do.

  “Don’t tell Ted,” Pete says, winking.

  Saturday night, I lie awake for hours on the soft mattress, watching the salty breeze billow the balcony curtain, listening to the waves, and thinking about David.

  Tomorrow is our last day together. The last day of our childhood, really. We’re about to take separate paths in life, and don’t know when we’ll see each other again.

  Maybe we’ll meet up in the fall, when I start college and David’s finishing high school in Marion, fifteen miles away. But he’ll be eighteen in June, and why would he stay in reform school when he’s not marooned on an island or obligated by law? As he says, you don’t need a diploma to be an actor.

  What will become of him? Of us?

  After surviving Escuela Caribe together, I cannot imagine life without the daily comfort of his presence. Nobody knows me as well as he does. Who will be with me when life grows unbearable, and force me to laugh despite myself? And how will I know he’s okay if I can’t read his eyes? These are the thoughts that keep me awake as the sea breeze billows the curtains.

  “Why don’t you two go off and spend the day together?” Marie suggests at the breakfast table the next morning. “I’m sure you’ll want to catch up before David leaves.”

  We exchange a wide-eyed look before shrugging and looking nonchalant. If we show our excitement, they might change their minds.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “We’ll meet you back here later,” Pete says.

  “What time, six?” David asks.

  “Make it eight,” Marie says.

  We walk barefoot into the sunshine and cross the empty white sand beach to the end of the h
orseshoe-shaped bay, following the lapping waves to a small rise where we could see the Madsens coming if they tried to sneak up on us. Better safe than sorry.

  We unfurl our towels and sit down.

  The ocean spreads turquoise before us, and seagulls swoop and cry over pastel-colored fishing boats rocking in the center of the bay. Somewhere beyond the horizon lies Florida, and the United States, and our future.

  We sit in our swimsuits staring at the bay and contemplating all this in silence. The sun beams down on us, already tingling hot at ten o’clock. This is an important day, and we both know it. The knowledge juts awkwardly between us, and I almost wish the Madsens were here to distract us.

  I scoop up a palmful of sand and let it rain through my fingers and David draws up his knees and hooks his arms around them.

  We watch a pelican dive-bomb the water and surface with a flash of silver in its beak. It tosses its head back and the fish tumbles into the leather bag of its gullet, snap, snap, swallow.

  Where to begin talking? How to begin sorting out everything we’ve been through? Jay’s punch and The Pastor’s dirty threat and Indiana before that, the shameful times I turned my back on him, and the time he kicked me in the stomach and when he sliced his wrist and when Dad broke his arm. It is not our habit to talk about such things. We don’t know how to do it.

  I unzip my backpack and take out a Glamour and a Sports Illustrated.