What Will Be Made Plain

by Latayne C A Scott

  But it is as if what I had just seen was a fire and the smoke of it stays there in my living room with me.

  And for the first time I have some clarity, and I know the story of Abel’s blood has a vindication here. The dead do speak. And they care about people here.

  But that was for Jesus, I tell myself. The dead don’t talk about the rest of us, do they?

  I look at the sunshine outside in the courtyard, and remember Papa and Sarah and Miriam said they won’t come home until near dark. I know that I must have an answer to this.

  I have to use tweezers to get out the tiny scroll of paper that I wedged in the spine of my Bible. Today I have satisfied myself that the dead do speak, and not just figuratively like Abel’s blood.

  There’s another scene, though, that I want to face, today, while I still have the courage. I’ll be the little boy who can jump back into the pool.

  It’s the one in the Book of Revelation, a part that Papa inexplicably passed right over when he was preaching about this book.

  I read the passage, Revelation 6:9-ll, over and over, and then lean my head back.

  I see a Man who is a Lamb, and for some reason that seems reasonable to me because He is also a Lion and a Root, with horns and eyes. He is alive, but he has been killed. It makes sense to me in the same way that the constant motion of the creatures that are wings and have eyes all over them makes sense, the way a wheel in the middle of a wheel makes sense, in what it tells me, not what it shows me.

  These thoughts seem to churn through my mind like the wooden dasher as I make butter, and when they separate out, I see Him standing—and I see all those elements, all at once, because He is like the picture that turns this way and that—and He is looking at an altar.

  It is a stone altar, covered with human blood. I shudder at this.

  And under it are people, and I know they are dead. I know they are dead because the Bible said so. And I know why, because it says so, too: They believed God’s words, and they died for them.

  And yet they stand up and speak. No, they shout. They aren’t exactly doing what Papa says Outsiders believe dead people do in heaven. No harps and certainly no singing, at least right now. They are asking God questions about the injustice of what happened to them. I can’t imagine how ugly their deaths must have been, with all that blood…

  And they want to know one thing and won’t stop asking: How much longer?

  And then each of them stands up and is dressed in a robe that is white like the blue-white lights on some cars at night.

  “Wait a little longer,” a voice says: There is more to come.

  I stare and stare, and listen for more, but the curtains of my theater are closing. And my eyes are opening. But I am satisfied. Now I know for sure.

  They do speak. They do care.

  They see. They know.

  I don’t know whether to lie back and recover from what I have seen today, or to make dinner. So I make dinner, and it’s ready when Papa and Sarah and Miriam return. Miriam is the only one talking, about the auction, and the stores, and the new letter from Ryan. When we are alone after the dishes, she presses a Baby Ruth candy bar into my hand: my favorite. The fact that she brought it to me is as sweet as the chocolate, because she remembers that I once told her Mama used to buy them for me.

  I do not see Mama tonight in dreams. Nor do I see her in the morning when I wake.

  But in the night I see Sarah open the door of the spare bedroom and come out. Her long nightgown is black and even though it is cold in the house since the fire died down, she isn’t wearing a robe or slippers. The hem of her gown sways and swishes against the floor as she walks.

  In the shadows, her sloping shoulders, her face look more lost, more hopeless, than any of the people in Matthaus’ book. She walks over to Miriam’s room and opens her door and looks for a long time at her sleeping daughter who will soon leave her for her new life. I can’t hear her cry but I know she is, because her shoulders are moving up and down. She rubs her eyes the way an infant does, with fists and knuckles, and finally with the heels of her hands.

  She turns and walks down the hallway, into her bedroom and then back out again, to the living room. She lights a lamp and sits in a chair and looks at her hands laid out flat in her lap. On one of her fingers is Mama’s emerald ring, which I would never be able to see from this distance if it didn’t catch the glare of the lamp as she moves it back and forth, a green world inside it, sending pioneers of green slivered light onto the outpost walls of our living room.

  She must have sat there for hours, because I crawl back into bed when it seems that whatever warmth was in the house she is sucking up into her. I get up several hours later and in that cool, unnatural light just before dawn she is still sitting there, looking at the ring.

  She doesn’t see me. And I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t care if she did.

  Chapter 16

  I remember that the day before she died, Mama said she wasn’t cold anymore and asked Papa to take the down comforter off her. Her right side was stilled and numb, she said, because of the stroke; and she curled herself over that part of her, it seemed, as if she could rest on what she could not feel.

  She lay there, like a blue-spotted nightgown full of feathers and bones, until…

  Until.

  I shake my head, because I can’t remember when she died. Not a thing. I’ve never told anyone this. It’s like someone tore those pages out of the middle of my book.

  Mama said that people always get better just before they die. And I am wondering if I am going to disappear myself from the lives of people I know like ripped-out and forgotten pages. So it doesn’t surprise me that I am beginning to feel a sense of anticipation about Miriam’s wedding later this week. Perhaps I am getting better, before I die.

  Thus I am treating this quietness in my mind as a kind of separate thing from who I am. I can’t say I look forward to seeing Matthaus at the wedding because I don’t dare to hope he’ll come. And on the other hand I fear he’ll be there, and will see the way I look, and try to talk to me in ways that would require more than yes and no from me.

  Maybe later. Maybe next year.

  Part of me yearns for Brother Luke, like people of old times yearned for the handkerchiefs and aprons from the Apostle Paul; like Peter’s shadow, like the hem of a garment that might brush against my arm in a crowd.

  But I am chilled, from deep inside. I suspect that I’m more able to believe in dark, crawling things than I am able to find hope in light. It’s that I want to believe the dark things exist, but they are growing inside me. And hope is washing out of me, like color from new cloth.

  Two things happened yesterday, and the first without the second would have put me over the edge.

  What edge? I don’t know. But I was at its rim.

  The wind blew all last week, and no matter how many times I went into the front yard to gather up the dried weeds and leaves and papers that got caught in our pyracantha bushes, it seemed that there were always more.

  But as if granting a wedding blessing to Miriam, the winds stopped late in the evening and yesterday morning was still and crisp. The willow branches that had thrashed about for days now seemed to slump in self-pity, and the fields had a scraped and scoured look about them. Above, a flock of geese—the first I’ve seen this year—flew in a line that looped back and forth on itself in sloppy curls and jumbles, like every time I’ve ever tried to crochet.

  I stood with my back against the sun-warmed front door with a trash bag in my hand, taking everything in before I went to clean the thorny bushes once again.

  Maybe it is because Matthau might come this week (see, maybe I do have some hope) that I wore some of Papa’s leather workman’s gloves, and though they protected me from bloody pokes, the clumsy fingertips made it nearly impossible to drag out things like papers.

  I had to get down on my knees to get out a booklet that had wedged itself into the branches. I tore the shiny cover off the fanned-out pag
es without meaning to, surprised at the staples had held the little thing together through this wind. It was a guidebook for watching television, dated a couple of weeks ago. I thought of how much money and time Outsiders spend not only on their devices but even on books that tell them how to use them, books that are trashed a week after they are used.

  But then I sat down and thumbed through it. Much of it made no sense at all to me. Some of the color pictures were for products that might as well have been written in Chinese. There were many listings for shows about cooking, which surprised me. And quite a few about the Bible and about faith. I didn’t know.

  But this book made all my fears have flesh. Because in that book was confirmation of what Matthaus had told me—things I didn’t yet give full belief to. Things that Outsiders—with more education and more worldly wisdom than I will ever have—things they accept.

  Listing after listing for shows about once-dead, or never-dead, or ever-dead and walking.

  I felt as if I would vomit. I knew that burning this book would not get rid of what it said any more than I’d been able to cremate Matthaus’s book.

  It was the first time in my life I had ever felt hatred. And I didn’t even know who to hate.

  I wondered if the great blue mouth of the devil does not only spew forth, perhaps it gapes open to devour.

  I don’t know how long I sat there on the porch, facing a road of distant, passing cars, full of people who knew things I don’t know. How could they just live in such a world?

  At last I was able to drag the bag of papers and trash around to the back of the house, but it was as if shooting stars and flashes of light made my feet heavy, and I nearly stumbled. I was able to get into the house and saw to my relief that no one but me was home.

  I stretched myself out on my stomach on the thick rug in the middle of the living room and put my head on my hands. I think I slept for a while. Then I reached up to the couch and pulled down my Bible from where I had left it before I went outside. I bent the covers toward themselves and the little scroll fell out, the one where I wrote down the two remaining examples from the Bible when a dead person spoke to the living.

  I couldn’t bear—right now, still can’t bear—to look at what happened when King Saul tried to get a witch to call forth Samuel, he being dead and all. So that will definitely have to wait for another day. Perhaps later, when I feel stronger.

  The sun was shining through the window onto my back like a blessing and I began to feel better—but more lost.

  Who could help me? Where could I learn the truth?

  I decided to try to create a theater, to see the parable that Jesus told about the rich man and the poor beggar Lazarus who ate the rich man’s crumbs from his table. And the first of the story, I could see, but it was frozen and still, like a painting, of the dirt on the doorstep where Lazarus lay with hopeful eyes, the disdain of the rich man’s robes sweeping past his shoulder.

  But try as I might, I couldn’t create that scene after the two men both died. I just couldn’t see it. It was like the great gulf that was fixed was not just between the two men and their situations, it was between me and the story. I couldn’t see paradise. I couldn’t see torment. It was like the curtains just wouldn’t open at all.

  And really, I knew it was a stretch to include this in examples of dead people coming back to talk to the living, because that was only talked about in the parable. Nobody actually did it. Unless you count that we have the dead rich man’s words in the Bible, and I read them, and I’m alive, mostly.

  So after that unsatisfactory experience, I thought about the ridges of the hooked rug under my stomach and how concentrating on that seemed to make the ache inside me feel a little better. Then I opened my eyes and looked forward across the wooden floor, resting my chin on my forearm. It was so still and quiet in the house that when I heard a rustling noise, I looked up.

  There, a couple of feet in front of me, was a high priest. His back was to me, and even when I raised myself onto my elbows, I couldn’t stretch my head far enough back to look up to see his head, just an impression of that white turban. It was as if my own brows were the upper frames to the picture and I could not see beyond them. But I could see the ephod, and the jewels everywhere, and hear the little bells on the front of the garment. They sounded brittle and clear, like icicles falling and breaking on a frozen walkway.

  In front of the priest was a great golden chest about three feet wide, and two crouching figures on top of it, facing one another with wings that stretched and ached toward each other but never touched. But I couldn’t see it clearly, either, because the priest kept turning from it to me, from it to me, from it to me.

  His garments swirled with the repetition: the rustling noise I first heard.

  I gasped and looked back over my shoulder. There was indeed a curtain. And I was inside it.

  I turned again. I could feel the breeze of the turning, the swirling of the robes.

  His feet were bare. I knew Who this was.

  I reached forward and grasped His ankles in my hands.

  “I won’t let You go unless you help me,” I said.

  I realized that these words were in my mind, but I could not make them come out of my mouth.

  “I won’t let You go. . .”

  Miriam said that when they came into the house I was lying on my face, with my arms stretched out in front of me like I was reaching for something.

  I don’t know how long I lay there, and when Sarah said I must have fallen asleep and had a dream, I nodded.

  I sat up, cross-legged with my apron all bunched in my lap and rubbed my hands together. The two women sat on chairs across from me and just stared until I got up and went into the kitchen and began putting away the dishes in the dishrack.

  When I heard them going out the door, I leaned against the cabinets. I couldn’t remember when I ate last.

  But the iron ceiling above me seemed to be rusting through like pinpricks of light in an old tin roof, and when I finished the dishes I made myself a potted meat and onion sandwich and ate it—well, most of it, anyhow. I had forgotten the taste of mayonnaise.

  I knew that I would be able to pray that night.

  And I had a dream of my mother, and this time she was smiling at me, like she did when I brought her dandelions or chains made out of clover flowers to put around her neck.

  I have awakened refreshed. The Armstead people will be here before nightfall. There is a lot to do.

  Chapter 17

  I suppose part of me has become numb. Otherwise I would fall apart when I go out the front door this morning. Of course I’m looking to see what lurks in the pyracantha bushes and am relieved—yes, I actually lean back against the door frame and exhale—when I see the wind has brought nothing last night.

  But then I turn and I see the piece of paper on the rough wood near the hinges, held there by two thumbtacks.

  I know what it is, without even reading it. It’s handwritten, and posted on the door like Luther’s 95 theses at Wittenberg.

  I’ve seen these slips of paper before. But people put them on their own houses in some of the Amish communities, as protection, as reminder. It’s a charm.

  I catch enough of the words to suck that exhaled breath, carbon dioxide and all, right back into my lungs.

  Jesaja 33:19, it says at the bottom, and I think that you can always depend on the prophet Isaiah to get a warning word across. I skim some of the block letters—tiefer Sprache, die man nicht verstehen kann—deep words, it says, that no one can understand.

  And I realize that someone in my own church has put a charm on my house against strange words that no one understands.

  To protect who? Me?

  Or Papa and Miriam and Sarah, from me?

  And as if I want to ratify the accusations, I breathe the only prayer I’ve been able to memorize in Hebrew. Baruch atah, Adonai: Blessed art Thou, Lord.

  I am thinking it would be a good idea to raise my voice an octave, too; but
I don’t really know what an octave higher would sound like. We plain people don’t do octaves.

  And please help me, Lord.

  I say it in German, just in case someone or something is hidden, listening.

  Stehe mir bei, Herr.

  At that moment Miriam, who has seen the door standing open, comes through it. She follows the words on the paper with her index finger and it takes her a long time to sound them out. Her face darkens into a storm as she reads. She tears the paper from the wood, leaving the thumbtacks there, and crumples it as if it were alive and she must crush all spirit from it.

  I cannot look her in the eye. I have brought shame on our house, perhaps even danger, the message implies. She is murmuring to me, holding me, then spitting out words into the air to whoever did this to her sister.

  Her sister. She has never called me that before.

  I believe she would have held me until I stopped crying, but over my shoulder she sees the Armstead wagons coming and she cries out, a little moan, and then she backs me into the house and sits me on the couch and, with mutterings, brings me a big glass of water. As I drink it, she wipes my face. Then she takes me into my bedroom and covers me with a comforter.

  But soon we hear the horses’ hooves on the pavement. She looks at my kerosene lamp, and even though it is only mid-afternoon, she lights it.

  I close my eyes. I don’t want to see anything anymore.

  I hear the bedroom door closing softly and her footsteps, first slow, then running through the house, then slowing as she reaches the back door to leave.

  Ryan, her bridegroom is here.

  And she is gone.

  It is not remarkable to me that no one comes to look for me, not through the afternoon nor into the evening.

  I can hear the children playing freeze tag in the field outside my window, and I become a statue, for the rest of the day, and into the night.

  The stillness in my room seems comforting to me, because there is coming and going in the house as women bring in supplies for the wedding. They are talking and laughing but I am in a cocoon of quiet all around me. Once someone opens the door of my bedroom and throws a jacket onto my comforter.