We Sinners

by Hanna Pylväinen

  The kids behaved worse than usual, maybe because the eye of Howard was not upon them, and twice Pirjo had to carry Uppu out. Once Warren turned around, as if to look at the clock in the back, but really to look at people’s faces, to see if they knew something he didn’t know. It didn’t matter, he told himself—he could not be picked. If God was doing the picking, he realized, he was safe, for this room, this congregation, these hundred, hundred and fifty people—they might not know about him, but God did.

  The sermon ended. There were announcements. The newlywed who read them aloud seemed nervous. He held the papers in his hands, read haltingly. Bible class, Sunday school, the kitchen committee would be meeting at Peggy Maki’s to chop the carrots and potatoes for the pasty sale. He paused. The board would be holding a special meeting on Tuesday to discuss the new minister. Warren Rovaniemi was asked not to attend.

  Warren did not turn his head, but he tried to look at Pirjo. She stared straight ahead. After the hymn, everyone seemed to disappear from the pew. Pirjo chatted almost ferociously, almost hysterically, about anything but the board meeting. The kids had vanished, like animals who could sense earthquakes and smell storms in the penultimate minutes. He kept his hands in his pockets, looking to fiddle with some change, but his pockets were bare.

  * * *

  On Wednesday at work he had a package. It was the size of a child’s shoe box and its stamps were not flags or hearts or famous people perched against a white background, but instead the stamps were stained red and pink, flushed with color. There was a card from Shyam: To the World’s Best Boss. When he opened the package there were many layers of bubble wrap, and when he finally removed them all he was left with was a small figurine, the size of his palm. It was a god of some kind, with many arms, each arm extending out from the torso like a windmill. Each hand was cupped slightly, as if preparing to hold something.

  He brought the god back to his desk and set it on top of the printouts of a presentation. All morning he felt like the statue was studying him. The phone rang and he jumped slightly, afraid it was Howard calling to say he must serve, he must be minister, but each time it was an ordinary thing—Pirjo, wanting to know if he could stop for milk; his boss, wanting to know if he’d heard how those fuckers on the third floor had screwed up this time—and each time the statue stared steadily on. Its placidity unnerved him slightly, its arms impossibly and evenly distributed.

  At home he set the statue on the kitchen windowsill.

  “Look at this,” he said.

  “In a minute,” Pirjo said. She dropped potatoes into an empty pot.

  “Cool, Vishnu,” Tiina said promptly. How did she know these things? How is it, he wondered, that his kids were always ahead of him?

  The little girls wanted to hold the statue. They whined, arms up toward the sill. “It’s not a toy,” he said.

  The phone rang. The sound was coming from the living room, or from the foyer. No one moved to answer it. He walked to get the phone, but he couldn’t find it, it was buried somewhere, under the cushions, or under the couch, or under the pile of newspapers. The ringing stopped, and he gave up. When he came back into the kitchen Tiina was holding the god, studying it carefully. He ground his jaw so tight it felt as if his teeth would actually cave in against each other. “You didn’t hear me?” he said. He picked up a piece of mail from the counter—a bill from the violin shop, all those rentals they never paid—and pretended to look at it, to give himself something to do.

  “You didn’t hear me?” he said again, through gritted teeth. He felt something in his mouth crumble. He felt with his fingers—his crown had broken. On his fingers were bits of gold and dirtied tooth, and he bellowed out, mute, crude, like a beast with no gift of speech.

  KEEPERS

  HER PLAN HAD been to clean in the middle of the night, so her mother would wake to an empty kitchen sink, but as she stood in the foyer, the bathroom fan beating loudly and uselessly, the mess before her made her want to cry; being in a family of eleven made her want to cry, the way someone had soaked up the dog’s pee but not thrown away the paper towel, the way that responsibility divided by eleven meant no one was really responsible.

  Carefully, she threw away the peed-on paper towel, the banana browning in a lunch bag. She stacked backpacks, she sorted shoes in the shoe bin, and she was sweeping up a mound of dirt when she heard a car door close, and turned to see Tiina walking toward the house. She looked at the clock—it was a quarter to five in the morning. Tiina opened the door and stared at Leena, at the pile of dirt. She brushed the snow off her shoulders, off her hair, then headed up to their room, leaving a watery trail.

  When Leena heard her mom’s feet in the hallway she hadn’t finished the kitchen. Her mom appeared in her panty hose and a blouse and watched her scrape a film of jam from the counter. “It looks like an elf came last night,” her mom said brightly, pinching her butt. “Go wake the big girls, will you please, chunk, lovey,” she said, heading to the bathroom to blow-dry her hair. Leena went up to her room. The big girls lay immovable in their beds. Tiina’s clothes were piled on the floor. When she pushed at Tiina’s shoulder she rolled over, naked, and Leena tried not to stare at the slump of her breasts.

  “Shit,” Tiina said, opening her eyes angrily, “everything is just shit today.”

  * * *

  On the highway her mom passed back a hairbrush, and Tiina pulled at her hair, flicking water from her shower. “How come I’m not blond like everyone else,” she said. “How come I’m fat?” Her mom snapped that it was a sin to talk that way. All of her children were beautiful. “What’s that?” her father said. He was almost deaf in his right ear. Tiina had said it was because when he was in the Heresy he listened to music, but Simon had said that was stupid, no one ever went deaf that way, but either way, it was impossible for Leena to imagine her father nodding his head in time to a beat.

  Leena looked out the window, at people in smaller vans heading to larger churches, churches with steeples and stained-glass windows, where people rose and knelt and dipped their fingers into bowls of water. She watched her mother reach out and smooth one of her father’s carefully trimmed curls. He reached his hand out and she took it and the rest of the ride they held hands, straight into the church parking lot, her father spinning the wheel with the palm of his left hand.

  At church the organist was late, and they asked Tiina to play. Leena watched her walk to the bench, searching for signs of hesitation, signs of guilt about where she’d been last night, but Tiina’s face was smooth, and when she played her toes slipped confidently over the pedals. During the last verse her dad rose and Leena heard his bad knee cracking up the aisle. Her dad cleared his throat. “In the name of the Father—and of the Son, and of the—Holy Ghost,” he said. Leena folded her hands, right thumb over left, the same way her dad did, which he had said once was less common, a sign that Leena must like order in the world, which was probably true.

  * * *

  In the middle of the sermon Tiina unfolded a note, not meaning for Leena to read it, but Leena saw it: Did he really call your thing a pussy? The word pussy was underlined, like something proud and important. Tiina folded the note back up, quickly.

  Leena felt herself flush, just reading it. How did Tiina do it? How did she just sit there? she wondered. She studied Tiina’s nails, looking for flecks of polish, but she didn’t see any.

  Stop doing this to Mom and Dad, she wanted to say to Tiina, they can’t take it. Tiina didn’t see how Mom had cried when she had run off with the car, she didn’t see how Dad sat on the couch with the Bible, late into the night, waiting for her to come home. Tiina didn’t pay the price of her own antics—the little kids did. Sometimes her mom said Tiina would grow out of it—Leena didn’t know if this was really true. But Tiina’s heart could be softened, Leena knew; once she had been taking a sauna, and she had heard her dad come downstairs and start ironing his shirt, and a few minutes later Tiina had followed. The way her dad had built the sauna in t
he basement she could hear everything through the vent, and Leena had stopped pouring water on the rocks, just listening. They were talking softly, but Leena knew—the whole house knew—that her dad had forbidden Tiina to go hear the famous violinist play the Sibelius. Do you know, Tiina had screamed, I am the only violinist in the country who is being forbidden to hear the very piece they are working on? And she had threatened to throw her violin, but of course she never would—she loved it too much. For several minutes there was only the sound of the iron, its hard hiss, its soft song. Then Tiina had begun to cry, and there was the sound of her leaning or crumpling against the washer, and her dad must have set the iron down and walked over to her. He forgave her. He said he loved her. I love you, he had said, and Leena had let the words be for her, too—she knew how hard it was for him to say these things. I love you too, Dad, she had thought, from the bench. I love you, Tiina.

  Really it was almost a relief to hear him speak in his sermons. She could not recall a single conversation with him that was as long as one of his sermons, and so when he spoke she listened intently, as if trying to memorize what he sounded like when he talked at length. But he was always so serious in his sermons, always deep in the recesses of some troubled emotion. What was it like, she wondered, to minister to your own children? What did they look like to him from up there? Did he know things, had he heard Tiina sneaking out? Did he try to say the things that would reach her? He tried so hard. Once she had watched him icing the backyard, so they could skate. For night upon night he had stood out with the hose in his big Coleman boots, just thickening and thickening the ice. Why is Dad like that? she had asked her mom. Aren’t you glad I married him? was all her mother had said.

  “Sometimes our trials are personal ones,” her father was saying. “I know for myself,” he said, “I never see my sister anymore, who, as many of you know, long ago chose the world over the flock of the believers.” Leena was listening now, and she could tell everyone was, even Tiina—her parents never spoke about their pasts, or even about their families.

  “Even when I … called my father,” he went on, “to tell him I had repented, that I had received this most precious gift of faith—that was the last conversation we had for some years.” He looked down at his hands and for a few tense moments did not look up or speak. Then he said that sometimes he missed his family, that only a few days ago he had called his sister, and he had spoken to her about the Word, and how he could forgive her for even that great sin of unbelief. But she didn’t want to hear it. That’s how unbelievers are, he said. The Word makes them so uncomfortable, they can’t stand to hear it. That’s its power, he said, so great is its power.

  Somewhere in the back of the congregation someone lifted their hand. “Believe all of your sins forgiven in Jesus’s name and precious blood,” her dad said, and then a few more hands went up and he had to say it again, and again, “Believe all of your sins forgiven, all sins forgiven,” the words becoming more and more mumbled, more and more important, and she saw how he looked at each person, raised his hand up toward each hand. She felt struck suddenly by the need for him to see her, to see his own children, to forgive her, or maybe them, and for the first time in her life Leena raised her hand—she saw his surprise—but he said the words to her like anyone else, and her face grew hot with the attention, and she crept her hand back down. She half wanted to turn and say something to Tiina, to see if the proximity of the absolution had made her feel something, but Tiina only took a gum wrapper and folded it into a tiny hat, and a still smaller boat. Even during Communion, when her dad read the liturgy, Tiina looked bored. “Verily, verily, I say unto you,” her dad read, “… and together with the thief on the cross”—Leena loved that, and together with the thief. Most of all Leena loved “Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven”—sins being loosed and let go and gone, all of them keepers and loosers of one another’s sins. But Tiina chewed another piece of gum, folded another boat.

  When Communion started Leena watched her mother kneel at the altar, the back of her shoes thin and dirty. She watched her dad as he held out the wafer. The big girls and Nels rose to get in line for Communion, and at first Leena was relieved that Tiina would at least have to face that, that hypocrisy, but then Tiina turned and walked back up the aisle and out the sanctuary door. Brita and Nels just looked at each other, but their mom was bowing her head, and their dad was raising the plate of wafers, and the little kids were kicking at one another, and finally Brita and Nels went up to the altar without her.

  Leena looked around. She got up and walked slowly, as if nothing important was happening, and she went down to the basement, where she checked the bathroom, but there were only the two Waaraniemi girls playing with the faucets. In the nursing room, there were four mothers with cloths over their shoulders. She wound up at the back steps and opened the door as quietly as she could, wondering if her dad could hear the door’s tired squeal from where he stood, feeding her siblings the wafers.

  Outside the snow was damp on her arms, and the churchyard looked empty. The bush out front, which made small berries that they popped in spring, had only thorns left, and though each spot in the parking lot was full there was no one around, like a graveyard, the cars markers of people but not the actual people. She walked to their van and opened the door—it was where she would go, the only private place—and looking in she saw the tip of one of Tiina’s shoes hanging off the backseat. She got in and shut the door.

  “Get out,” Tiina said. “Please.” She was talking into the seat, and her voice was muffled.

  Leena dug below the bench and pulled out a sleeping bag. It smelled a little bit like pee, but she threw it over Tiina.

  “Little Leena,” Tiina said at last, “you are too sweet.”

  “No,” she said. She thought about telling Tiina about all the books she had stolen from the school library. How when she cleaned the house she kept all the change, all the loose bills, how when they were at the grocery store she felt like dancing to the music. She had hated kids at school, kids who asked if they had electricity, who said they were Amish. She had envied all of her sisters, especially Julia, the family beauty, but even Tiina she had envied, with her confidence, and Brita too, Brita’s capability with everything, cooking and cleaning and getting good grades and never complaining.

  “You want to know something?” Tiina said. Tiina sat up and swung her leg over the bench. She climbed next to Leena. She pulled the sleeping bag over their chests. She considered Leena carefully. “Okay,” Tiina said, “he’s not from church.”

  “Oh.”

  “He’s cute,” Tiina said. “I promise.”

  “An unbeliever,” Leena said.

  “Well, yeah,” Tiina said, and she smiled, like Leena had pointed out something new and wonderful. “Don’t worry, okay,” she said.

  “Are you going to ask—” Leena said.

  Tiina took her hand and Leena had the sensation of being very small and, on the beach, their mother calling, Take your buddy’s hand, everyone take your buddy’s hand, don’t lose your buddy.

  Minutes passed, and the snow thickened.

  “I’m cold,” Leena said. As if bidden, the front door of the church opened and their father appeared. He wasn’t wearing a coat. His tie wavered with the falling snow, and he was looking their way.

  “Quick,” Tiina said. She threw herself to the floor of the van, pulled the sleeping bag over her. “Come on,” she said. Leena lay flat on the bench. They heard the sound of footsteps approaching, the sound of the van door opening.

  “Are you actually hiding?” her dad said. “Get up, get out of there. It’s freezing, get inside.” He began to walk away.

  Still on the floor, Tiina curled her legs into her chest. “Just go,” she said.

  “Just come,” Leena said, from the bench.

  But neither of them moved. The van door stayed open, and the snow fell, and the wind
blew falling snow into the van, and onto Tiina’s hair. For many seconds the snow did not melt. Leena was so cold she rubbed her legs together, but still she did not leave, wanting only to be kind, and feeling that waiting was the only kindness left.

  EYES OF MAN

  PIRJO KNEW SHE wasn’t supposed to buy a television. Believers did not use televisions. But she walked into the electronics warehouse anyway, her two teenage sons with her to deal with the salesmen who would look down on her, who would not realize she was trying to look down on them. At least Simon and Nels seemed to know about these technology things, each tall and thinned now, though Simon the taller and the more sarcastic of the two, with his perpetual boredom that she found so disturbingly effective. “This way, Mom,” Simon said, and he walked efficiently, and she followed, trying not to feel the music—those thick insistent beats always scared her, the way they made her feel more alive—and when they reached the hundred TVs, a hundred screens displaying a hundred men pulling at a hundred lapels, she turned her head away before the boys saw her looking, hurrying to where the TVs were smallest and squattest.

  Of course Warren had made it very plain that he did not want a TV. Learn math like the rest of us, he’d said, eyes closed, hands atop his hill of stomach, looking oddly wider than the kitchen bench he always napped on. But Donna Keranen had given her the math videos already anyway, and she knew she could fly through them, and in a month she could take her certification exam, and she would teach again; and besides it was absurd, it was really not that big a deal, a small TV, what could it do. They could watch that Lewis and Clark video the neighbors had stuck in with the giveaway bag of clothes.

  “Mom, just pick one already,” Simon said. The two boys stood staring at the TVs, their blond heads eerily similar from behind, but Nels’s hair short and serious, Simon’s hair long and flopping. Nels leaned in to examine the details on a TV’s tag.