No one else has missed me anyhow.
This is the sad end of King Saul, Brother Luke is saying, as reported by an Amalekite runaway. He says to King David, here’s King Saul’s armlet. And here’s King Saul’s crown. And David asks, where did you get them? And the Amalekite says I saw Saul leaning on his spear. And the chariots were coming. And the riders were almost there. And King Saul said I’m in the throes of death
And I think I know those throes
And I think I hear the chariots
And I know the riders are almost, almost here
Stand, I pray thee,
upon me, and slay me: (the man said King Saul said)
for anguish is come upon me,
because my life is yet whole in me
I close my eyes.
Brother Luke raises his voice to say that the Amalekite was lying! He thought King David would reward him for killing Saul. For helping him take his own life…
That’s a coward’s way out, Brother Luke says, and the worst of Saul’s faults was that he was a coward. He took his own life, and only a coward does that. And anyone who would help someone do it is a coward too. He reads:
And David said unto him, Thy blood be upon thy head; for thy mouth hath testified against thee, saying, I have slain the LORD's anointed
And then all the worlds of then and now fall apart.
I stand up and smooth my prayer cape. I walk outside.
Damaris follows me out and stands between me and the fields that stretch out of sight beyond her. A horse comes up behind her, and I see the speckles on her face, and the speckles on the appaloosa, and the mystery of the peeled sticks of Jacob, and a sky above her full of stars in blue midnight.
Don’t become like me, I want to tell her.
I collapse into a skin box of me, with thick leather straps that are my hands over my ears, my forearms to my cheeks, my knees to my chest, they can’t pry me open, I won’t bear any more.
Chapter 24
I can see stars in the sky.
I spent the afternoon looking at golden leaves in the trees and distant clouds with edges and other things I never saw. This world is full of things I never suspected.
My new eyeglasses are bright steel blue with other hidden colors, like metal when the torch has been on it, Mama’s gift to me for my tenth birthday yesterday. I’m pretty sure Papa doesn’t approve of the color.
“I want you to see everything clearly,” she says to me, even though she is so weak. “This is my legacy to you. I want you to see.” Her voice is a whisper.
She is lying on her side, and pulls her hand to her chest, the hand that no longer moves on its own. I hate the word stroke but I think it fits, like a thunderclap, or the sudden falling of a bird, shot from the sky.
She said she was hot, so she is lying on top of her down comforter. I think it is like clouds, like heaven. I lie beside her, cupped toward her with our heads touching, and we are a parenthesis.
“What will it be like?” I ask her.
She sighs and seems to be reaching down insider herself to gather up the threads of her voice.
“A place I want to go,” she whispers. “To see as I have been seen.” She waits for enough air for more words. “And to know as I have been known.” She touches my hair and she is wrestling with the air. “But I want to stay with you.”
Her breath replenishes. “You are my treasure, Tabitha Angelica.”
There is a mirror behind her bed. In it, I see outside in the dusk my Papa and the pretty woman. He is touching her hair, too.
“Mama, I can see the stars, even though it’s not all dark yet. Did you know there were stars even before it gets dark?”
I think she is crying but she doesn’t want me to see.
“Yes,” she says, and the last sound of it is as if all her breath is being squeezed out of her. I wait a while because I know it will be hard for her to say more.
“My precious one, go see the evening star,” she says.
I think about this for a minute, because I think the evening star is a bad omen. But Papa says there are no omens. So I go and put my nightgown on, my best navy blue one with the tiny embroidery Mama did of one white daisy on the smocking, and go outside.
My neck hurts from looking up. I have been looking down all my life because I couldn’t see. Now that I can see with my new glasses, my neck doesn’t know what to do. So I lie down in the soft Bermuda grass and see the fireflies coming from a long way off, and the stars coming out of hiding like they were behind Mama’s sheers all along. Though I begin to shiver, I look and look until my eyes hurt and water and the sky is deeper than a bowl of ink.
I have to tell Mama. It’s like the sky is full of pinholes to heaven.
I walk back in to the house. I think I hear voices somewhere, like arguing, but I’m just a kid and that has nothing to do with me.
In Mama’s room, the curtains are drawn. The bedside lamp is pulled to a corner of the table. And Mama is lying on her back. Her feather pillow isn’t under her head, it is beside her. And the ends of it are all bunched up, like someone twisted them.
And Mama’s hand is deep in the comforter, fingers spread like she used to do for me to trace out on paper.
I walk closer. Mama’s eyes are open, but they don’t turn to me.
Maybe it is the new glasses, I think. Maybe I am seeing things. Maybe Mama has always looked like this when she was asleep and I was just walking in. Or maybe she is awake and thinking of heaven and didn’t hear me.
So I take my glasses off and lay them on the table. I stretch myself across the bed and we are now a symbol more silent; we are punctuation.
I begin to cry because I know the truth. I have to go tell Papa.
I run through the house but he isn’t there. I see a light in the barn and I begin to walk slower. I hear their voices, Papa and the woman, Wauneta.
I hide behind a shock of corn.
Papa’s voice is like the wrath of God but I can’t understand the words at first, because they come out like groans.
For the love of God how could you
For the love of God what were you thinking
Help me? Help her?
Just because she said she wanted to die?
For the love of God
For the love of God
For the love of God
Get away from me
And I know I should stand very still behind the corn shock.
I know this because Wauneta is coming back and she has something shiny in her hands.
Here are her glasses, she says.
She knows, says Wauneta, she knows, she saw the pillow.
He is moaning like the Holy Ghost interceding.
You said you wanted her to stop suffering, Wauneta says
You said she wanted to die
You said
You said
You said
I have lost my breath, as though Mama took it to heaven with her. I turn and begin running from the barn and even though I hear Papa’s voice, like it is ripped from his chest calling my name, I run.
I hear the thundering of his running and the whispering of the husks as they brush against his trouser legs. I fold myself up and hide behind a pile of husks. I look down and put my hands over the daisy so it won’t tell.
She got away
She ran like hell
We have to find her
What will we do
My feet are cut and slippery and I know it is blood. Though the stalks claw at my arms and the husks slice and shear my arms I know I have to get inside a corn shock.
Through the stalks, I hear footsteps all around me. The moon rises, with horns, not a hunter’s moon. I see shapes moving through the fields and I must, I must hide.
I must, I must hide.
Chapter 25
Only when someone tries to carry my squareness back to the house do I unfold. Because the someone is Papa. Because I know the truth.
And I only have to say two words: I re
member.
I say them, over and over in a whisper only he can hear. He puts me down.
I sit down hard on a tree stump. There are people all around. Brother Luke tries to come toward me but I don’t want brauching. I don’t want to be healed. I hold my hands out straight in front of me so no one can come near me. I want to remember.
“I had glasses.”
The silence around me is broken by someone who says scornfully, “You never had glasses.” It is Naomi Eckman and she pushes her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose, as if to show me what they are.
Damaris stands before me and it is her eyes, only her true eyes above the milky way, that I can meet. She tips her head to one side. Her mother pulls her away.
“I remember the cornfield.” Talking takes my breath away.
“I remember the pillow.
“I remember Mama’s hand on the bed.”
My voice is someone else’s, calling out a grocery list, or the rasp of corn leaves against a basket. People are shaking their heads and moving away, like you do from a casket when you have seen what you need to see.
I am a drop of dish soap in oily water. Everything rushes away from me in a perfect circle.
But Papa and Sarah before my eyes turn brittle and white-edged as the possum on our back porch that pretended to be dead so long it froze to death one night. They are not touching, but they are standing so close together I can see just a sliver of blue sky between their shoulders.
And Brother Luke is not looking at me, he is looking at them.
Chapter 26
They made a pallet for me in the back of one of our wagons, and all the way to Armstead I heard the muffled rattle of the boxes of borrowed china at my feet and the tiny squeals of wood rubbing wood. Beside me, up against my shoulder, rode an old brown Samsonite suitcase carrying everything I own.
There was a silver tarp over me, suspended in the air like a horizontal sail, terrible as an army with banners. I could see the other buggies and wagons stretched out behind us on the road and thought of a funeral procession. But I knew I was alive, because I was lying on my side.
Palominos with broad blank backs pulled the wagon with noiseless feet on the snow. The whole world was white from the spring snowstorm, like God wanted to erase The Anchor and start over.
Once I looked up and saw Brother Luke was driving the horses. His wife Sister Rebekah sat beside him, swaying with the wagon. The baby she carried cried once or twice, I think. Or someone was crying.
It’s not that I don’t remember other things about the trip. It’s just that they seem smeared into the next days, and those are smeared together too, because I haven’t opened my eyes since I left the wagon.
But today I awaken, and the sun is low in the sky and its heat makes a sunset on my eyelids. I open my eyes, and they feel shy from lack of use.
On the table next to the bed, just inches from my face, is a single tulip in a short glass vase. The water is so clear that at first I think the tulip is standing there dry, but then I see the surface of the water like a whisper holding up a word.
Like the brightness of Jesus’ glory, I think, upholding all things by the word of His power.
That would be Hebrews, chapter one.
Somehow the petals turned translucent by the sunshine, and the spot of color at their base like shame rising to blush, make me feel as if I can look around the room where I am for the first time.
There’s not much to see: the table with the vase, another table with a lamp and a Bible, two closed doors, a straight-back chair pulled up beside the bed.
One of the doors opens and Sister Rebekah enters and closes it behind her. I close my eyes and look at her between my lashes.
I realize that I have never looked Sister Rebekah in the face—not during any of her visits to The Anchor, and not here. And I don’t know how long I’ve been here, either.
She is leaning over me, and there are layers of blankets on me, sealing me up in my coverlet like an envelope. Her arms cross over me and I feel the flatness of her hands as she pushes fabric under me. I think of flailing babies swaddled to protect them from themselves.
I don’t shrink from her touch. I know that Sister Rebekah is a woman without any sharp corners, and I feel safe. When I hear the chair move and her body settling on it, I open my eyes. She is crocheting something.
“Does the tulip have a name?”
She startles, then raises her eyes to me, soft eyes that droop at the outer corners. She looks at the flower and considers.
“Why, I think the name of that variety is Akela,” she says, as if it is the most natural way in the world to open a conversation.
I nod. “I was pretty sure it had a name.”
She musters a smile and a shrug.
“I ordered it special, from a catalogue,” she says.
I nod.
She opens her mouth as if to say something, then closes it again. She sighs.
“Speaking of names, what would you like to be called?”
I want to retort that she knows who I am, then I realize that’s not what she’s asking. And then shame rises to blush on me, too, because I can see Papa looking at me as we drove away from him, standing in front of the rounded edge of all the houses of The Anchor, a stricken face.
I think I’m going to cry. She probes her apron for a handkerchief.
“The last thing you said, the day you came, last week,” she says hurriedly, “you said, ‘My name is not Leah.’”
I raise my hand for the handkerchief and my arm feels weak, boneless. My lips are dry and I have the taste of milk on my teeth. I begin to remember someone putting a straw to my mouth. And broth from something with a lip on it like a cream pitcher. And stumbling on someone’s arm toward a foreign bathroom with tiles slick and cold as ice on the floor.
“My name is Tabitha Angelica,” I tell her. I remember the last time anyone said that name, my mama’s last words.
Outside the bedroom door are the sounds of children trying to be quiet: Hissing whispers, interrupted whines, and repeated soft, unidentifiable bumps.
I look at Sister Rebekah. She cocks her head toward the door.
“Sorry.”
I shake my head. “Maybe I should get up.”
She looks skeptically at me and helps me sit up. I don’t recognize the nightgown I’m wearing. She drapes a bathrobe around my shoulders and I find I have to hold onto her shoulder to walk through the door into the hall bathroom.
I am shocked at my image in the mirror, a thin somebody else’s face perched on somebody else’s bathrobe. But I can’t remember the last time I looked in a mirror, even weeks ago at The Anchor.
“I think I’d like a bath, please.”
Sister Rebekah nods again and shows me the shampoo and towels. By the time I come out of the bathroom I am as tired as if I had run the whole time. But from the kitchen there is the smell of sausages and the pungency of kraut, and other voices.
Brother Luke helps me into my chair and watches me carefully as I eat. No one is restraining the children anymore, and all five of them put on their best manners and only poke one another under the table.
I see stacks of books in a corner of the living room. I’m pretty sure they’re Papa’s books. I wonder why they are here. I wonder if he is here.
Sister Rebekah puts the children to bed and comes into the living room where Brother Luke and I have sat, I realize, for what must be an hour without speaking.
“I would like to offer you something,” he says with the caution you use with a damaged teacup. “I imagine you may have heard of brauching.”
I don’t know why he is talking about this to me. I am weak, but I am not ill. I don’t have a wrenched arm, or a disease. I open my mouth to tell him so. But even as the words rise to my mouth, they have the taste of a lie in them.
I think about what brauche means in German. Ich brauche: I need.
I shrug.
He holds his hands out in front of me, as if I am in a
wagon rut and he is going to haul me out. I sigh and grasp them.
And then he begins to pray. At least I think he is praying, but no words come from his moving lips.
And I have the sensation of a half-filled sack of wheat that shifts its balance and begins to pour itself into the unfilled part.
I feel his hands trembling, yet mine become warm, like they have been cold and asleep and the feeling is returning.
Something falls away from my eyes, like they were crusted from tears and now they’re not. I open them, and Brother Luke looks withered to me.
He says amen.
I say amen.
Sister Rebekah’s moist eyes look toward my bedroom, and I am surprisingly stable as I walk there. I hear his voice, quieter than before, behind me like a backdrop.
“When you’re ready,” he says, “I have some things to tell you.”
I am asleep as soon as I pull the covers over myself. Once, in the night, I think I hear a man’s voice, loud, hurting, calling out words I don’t understand.
Chapter 27
I awakened this morning thinking about the psalm that describes the skies as pouring forth speech. At first I thought I had mis-remembered it, misquoted in my mind. How can something like stars convey information? Words? They could be a symbol, but speech? But when I looked it up in the Bible on the bedside table, I sat for a long time in bed, with the morning light still and cold on the pages, and wondered about that kind of language, the kind that doesn’t have words.
With this coherence, this ability to think things through, I realize that something changed in me last night. I search for a description of it, and then I know.
Last night I came to myself, like the prodigal son did sitting in the pigpen. All his parts, his scattered self came together in a moment, a truth that set him free even though his body hadn’t moved an inch.
And it is by inches that I try to live just one day with what I know.
I wash dishes for Sister Rebekah. I go through the old brown Samsonite that came with me from The Anchor and wonder who packed my clothes. Wrapped in a handkerchief, my mama’s emerald ring falls out from between my two extra Kapps. I take a wire coat hanger and put the ring on the crook of it and hang it and my dresses and aprons and my coat in the closet where children’s clothing has been shoved to one side on the closet rod. I wonder whose room I am in.
What Will Be Made Plain Page 17
