The WORDS
I Speak
A Novel
By
Jeffrey McClain Jones
Book 2 of the series
Anyone Who Believes
The WORDS I Speak
Copyright © 2015 by Jeffrey McClain Jones
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the author.
John 14:12 Publications
www.john1412.com
Cover photo from ShutterStock and Gabriel Jones
Cover Design by Gabriel W. Jones
For Lou, Mary, Elizabeth, Jonathan, Blake and Joe—the Tuesday night writers’ group—thanks for keeping me focused and inspired.
Prayer of Opening
Willow closed her eyes with a sigh, disappearing the room around her—the light of the sun, the accumulated furniture and knickknacks of her living room. Her mind crossed that familiar threshold, a crossing that had become a slide instead of a climb these days. And she was with him, with him fully, not just in the periphery of her thoughts, not just in the awareness of his heart inclined toward her. She was with him as she would be with a friend or lover here on Earth, if there were anyone on Earth that she loved as she loved him.
She didn’t think of it as going to Heaven, or even as “living from Heaven,” as her pastor liked to say. She just thought of it as going to be completely with him. The place was not here or there, not Heaven or Earth, but just the place where he is. And there, with him, she was fully alive, fully herself, completely real, like a ball thrown straight and true, hurtling toward true destiny. Muscles she didn’t realize were set tight loosened and reclined, basking in a warm vacation sun.
When she fully surrendered to his eyes, his hands, his smile, the analogies and similes fell short . . . It was like nothing else she had ever experienced, like nothing else she had ever heard described, like nothing she had even dared to dream. And time lost its numbers, forgetting to count, forgetting what counting is.
During the part where Willow was conscious of dancing with him, he started to hum a tune. She discovered that she knew the words to that tune, though she couldn’t remember hearing it before.
“You know that one, do you?” he said, with a smile just inches from her face.
She knew, of course, that any time he asked her a question it wasn’t for his information, but for hers. “Where did I hear it before?” she said, asking him right back.
His smile showed his pride over his clever girl. His eyes seemed to stretch a bit tighter, the lines from their corners extending just a little longer. “You were a teenager,” he said. And, as soon as he said it, she was a teenager again.
She lay face-down on a maroon carpet with little gold and black flecks in it. She remembered that carpet; she remembered tears. It was the first time she had heard him singing over her.
“Oh, yeah,” she said in a warm whisper. As she entered that blessed memory, while she remained in his arms in the present—whatever that is—she launched into an electric ecstasy. All she remembered later was that song.
Yet, even in that state of elevation and captivation, she noted a tug, like an engineer sensing an imperfection to the curve of a wing or the cut of a keel. Even as she reveled in her union with the one who created her and who knew her from the inside out, she hung onto the feeling that no one else would fully understand this experience. She felt the hollow truth that she was alone in the physical world.
By the time she finally opened her eyes again, it was dark outside, and the only light in her apartment shone through her sheer curtains, from the street lamp up the block. She looked around her, as if to see the changes in the room that paralleled the changes polished onto her soul. But the only altered piece among the usual décor was a smile that she couldn’t stop and needed no effort to sustain.
Willow pushed down on the foot rest of the recliner with her feet and threw her weight forward, what little there was to throw. Five-foot-seven and a hundred and twenty pounds at the last doctor’s visit the year before, she would guess that neither of those measurements had changed much. Her weight fluctuated with the fasting and recovery which seemed to arrive two or three times a year now. Fortunately for her, for most people, slim was simply slim and always enviable.
She stood up, sock feet on thick carpet. She stretched her arms above her head, arching her back. This was a new habit she had acquired within the last year, after one final healing of the syndicate of pains in her back and neck. She had to pause to recall physical pain these days, like remembering what it was like to be a teenager or a child.
Willow was no youngster anymore, but, at forty-seven, she felt better than she had at any age in her entire life; that is, once she gained back those fifteen pounds and the countless hours of sleep she had lost the previous year. But she didn’t need to think about that just now. Supper had climbed to number one on the agenda, and not just for her. Her mother was coming over to eat with her for the first time since their reunion a week ago.
What do you serve your mother when she comes to dinner for the first time in your life? What do you say to the woman who stood by and played the helpless victim while you suffered years of twisted abuse at the hands of upstanding citizens and faithful church members?
It would come, she knew; it would all come in due time. But first, to cooking supper, and something quick. Mom would be there in less than half an hour.
Meet Mom
The warm, salty biscuit smell reached her where she sat in her vinyl recliner, staring at the TV, six feet in front of her. She remembered a time when her mother had showed her how to make biscuits from scratch, not those flaky things that came in that cardboard can, not those things she was smelling now. She sipped her beer, sensed the emptiness of the can and tilted it back all the way for the last metallic swallow.
“Hey,” she said, shouting at what felt to her like full volume, but in a voice that her daughter could only hear as a sort of wounded bird call, inarticulate and weak. “Get me another beer, would ya? And make sure ya don’t burn them biscuits again.”
“Okay,” said the girl in the kitchen, whose long limbs anticipated the name she later gave herself. The callused bottoms of her feet made a sound like fine sandpaper on the pocked and cracked vinyl tiles. The girl picked up a hot pad, dark blue with little yellow, white and red flowers on it, and pulled the oven open. Her mom had bellowed just in time. The girl reached in and lifted the warped cookie sheet off of the center rack and dropped it on top of the stove, next to the green beans and the chipped beef and gravy, steaming in two aluminum pots on electric burners. She had turned them down to low so that the burners appeared gray, deceptively dormant, a temptation to young hands to touch, thinking no harm could come from such a plain and harmless looking thing.
“The pastor wants you over to the church in half an hour,” she heard her mother say. Those words sounded like a reminder to go to work or to school, places a teenage girl should be going.
The girl lifted a white beer can from the fridge and stopped in the kitchen doorway, just feeling the cold wet aluminum in her hand. She forgot why she held it there. Where was she going?
“Hey, gimme that beer. Don’t just stand there staring.” Her mother’s voice reconnected that cold can with a purpose, a reason, and the girl shuffled across the worn green living room carpet to where her mother slouched in her chair.
Still adrift from the practicalities of the world around her, the girl thought about who she would have to kill to be free from th
is life. She wasn’t planning a crime. She wasn’t fantasizing about a tremendous disaster that would wipe away all those who caused her pain, as she often did. She was simply calculating how many people she would have to kill to be free, to escape. It was more of a fact-finding mission than an actual plan. One fact she had to face, however, was that she wasn’t going to kill anyone. She couldn’t do it, not even to the one person whose death would put an end to this nightmare. The girl herself.
Instead, she made supper for her mother, who had no job and had plenty of time to cook for herself, or even for her daughter. Since she also had no job of her own, the girl didn’t complain that her mother seemed to have nothing better to do. Why complain? Nothing changed when she did. And why work? There was a judge who made sure that disability checks showed up at the little house every month, and a pastor that made sure that the house had all the necessities. He never brought the beer himself, of course, he had the kid from the convenience store do that.
The girl wandered back to the kitchen, pulled two of the gold and green melamine dinner plates out of the cupboard, allowing the door to stand open as she dished the supper for two. As happened so often for her those days, the next time she checked in, she was rinsing the plates and stacking them in the sink to be washed later, when she got back from the church. Where she had been the past ten minutes, she couldn’t say. Her mother probably didn’t speak to her, disturbing her waking dream. Her mother usually hid in silence on nights when the girl was wanted down at the little white church on the outskirts of town.
With the dishes set and the leftovers in Tupperware containers, she went to the bathroom. After flushing the toilet she looked in the mirror, thinking of brushing her hair. But she decided that was a waste of time. No one where she was going really cared what she looked like, not really.
She stopped in her bedroom, idly considering what to wear. But the image in the bathroom mirror returned to her, to mock the idea that it mattered. She was just a freak, a thing to be used, an oddity of nature to be exploited like the old circus geeks. No one cared how she dressed, as long as she did her tricks for the dark and secret meetings.
When she walked out of the house and started the old Dodge minivan, her heart rumbled like a washer in spin cycle. Her mind, however, slept under self-administered anesthesia.
Thirty Years Later
When Claudia Parker rang the doorbell, of her daughter’s home in Palos Heights, Colorado, Willow had set the table, finished boiling the noodles and cut the vegetables for salad. She went to the door and greeted her mother.
“Hello, Mom,” she said, surprising Claudia with a hug.
“Oh, well, ain’t that sweet o’ you,” Claudia said, her voice hushed and singing.
Claudia had reached the age of seventy that year, part of her motivation for attempting to reconnect with her daughter. Before she was forty, Claudia had been aged beyond her years, the product of dirt-poor farmers who were mean enough to inspire her to leave home at age fourteen. At forty, she had just begun to recover from the weather-beaten look of her youth, part of it spent sleeping on the streets of Kansas City, Missouri.
Now, at seventy, Claudia had recovered more of the human softness one wants to find in her mother. Her hair stood off from her head, a cloud of frizzles, gone almost all white now. She had gradually gained weight over the years, giving her more of a puffy look than the pinched wrinkles she seemed destined for when her daughter was born. A bit shorter than Willow, she looked up at her, over rimless glasses with gold bows that disappeared into her fluff of hair.
“Come on in. Let me take your coat,” said Willow.
“Sure. But Oh, Boy, is it cold out there! I guess it really does get colder here than back in Kansas, like my brother told me before I come out here.”
“It’s the mountains,” Willow said, with a smile. “Come sit by the fire for a few minutes. I’ll turn it on for you and then get a few more things together for supper.”
“Oh, that’s right, you got one o’ them gas fireplaces. Now ain’t that nice this time o’ year.”
Willow noted that her mother spoke as if she were remembering something from a previous visit or conversation, though Willow was sure that she had never mentioned the fireplace to her mother. It was as if Claudia strove to erase the absence between them by pretending it had been bridged some time before this. But this visit—if it was just a visit—had been initiated by her mother out of a long flat desert of separation.
Finishing the chicken stir-fried noodles in the kitchen, Willow stole a look at her mother, who was not sitting by the fire but standing by the mantelpiece studying photographs. Three of those small pictures, in hand-sized gold frames, showed her little girl from days that Claudia could remember. In one, a faded color photo, a three-year-old girl with a ghostly pale face stared wide-eyed at the camera, dressed in a green and red striped turtleneck, uncomfortably perched on the knee of a man whose head had been clipped just above the eyes by poor cropping. Another, a sepia-tinted photo in a black artificial wood frame, showed that same little girl two or so years later, holding up some small plastic toy, perhaps a farm animal, pinched between thumb and forefinger, celebrating a cherished birthday gift. She seemed both proud and uncertain, based on the three-quarter aperture of her eyes. Finally, Claudia examined a picture of herself, holding the hand of that little girl, now eight years old, as an aggressive goat pressed against the low fence of a petting zoo. Claudia looked at the camera, held by some forgotten man in her life, as her daughter kept her eyes on the bigger threat, the greedy little billy goat.
The other dozen photos contained images of friends who had helped to carry Willow from that childhood to the present day. Claudia seemed to be trying to decipher secrets about each of those unknown faces, once she had finished wiping the tears that had entered her eyes with the images in those three photos that she recognized. Her daughter had apparently taken them with her when, at seventeen, Willow found help in escaping her life in that haunted Kansas town.
Claudia noticed Willow’s attention in her direction and decided she had better behave herself, so she took that seat in the Amish rocking chair next to the gas fire. She sat with a pasted-on smile, her mind travelling into the past.
With everything in the kitchen to a safe and settled point, Willow walked into the living room. “Did you notice those pictures missing when I left home?” she said, looking at the oldest photos on the mantelpiece.
Claudia glanced from Willow to the photos and back. “No. No, I didn’t notice.” She took in a preparatory breath and offered the second step of reconciliation, after the first step of coming to Colorado to see Willow. Now she opened a bit of her soul to her daughter. “I wasn’t in such good shape in those days, ya’ know. I didn’t handle your leaving too well, and the preacher and his folks were pretty hard on me, thinkin’ I might know where you went.” She looked toward the window and out to that distant past. “And all I could see then was that I’d done you wrong all along, and that you was right to go away without sayin’ nothin’ to me.”
A sympathetic smile on her pacific face, Willow stepped right up next to her mother and offered her a hand. “You are completely forgiven, Mom. You don’t have to carry any of that anymore,” she said, with only a brief tremor in her voice.
Raising her sparse eyebrows slightly, Claudia looked up into her daughter’s gaze. “Somehow, I knew that was so, even b’fore I got here and seen you. So I know it’s true even more when I see you at peace like this.” She paused just a second and then continued. “And even though I did wrong, and others hurt you bad, I know God has come in and took care of what you needed.”
Willow lifted her old mom from that seat so they could hug and cry together, not shedding tears of sorrow or regret, but tears of relief and gratitude. They had both landed far from where the trajectory of life had been carrying them in those days, and they stood together in the power of that grace, a power beyond both of them, a power to which they both had surrendered.
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When Willow finally pulled away from her mother, she looked at her face-to-face, and, for the first time, Claudia endured that connection without shying away. She seemed to step up from a desire to see, to a willingness to be seen. Willow knew that her forgiveness had been trusted and received. She also knew, from experience, that forgiveness offered in the grand gesture is easier than forgiveness in the tangle of daily annoyances and missed meanings. Living out forgiveness would mark the path with her mother from there on, a path that had taken Willow far, but one she had never before travelled with one of her offenders. That would require a few more a miracles.
A Message for Me?
Willow walked into her favorite coffee shop, Bean Dreaming, set between a hardware store and a fabric shop, a long narrow store wedged into what used to be an alleyway. She waited behind two people, but had already caught the eye of Ciara, the Irish girl who worked the counter early in the morning.
After nodding a mute greeting to Ciara, Willow noticed the woman immediately in front of her in line. Before the powder pale skin, immaculate lipstick and eye makeup, Willow noticed the well-dressed woman’s tension. It struck her as if it emanated an odor, a brassy smell like burned ozone, clinging to her perfect blonde hair. This was one of those things Willow would tell no one, sure that it would count against her sanity and credibility. Nevertheless, with that flag of revelation she knew she would speak to this woman.
Ciara turned to Willow. “The usual, sweetie?” she said, with a lift of her twice-pierced right eyebrow.
Willow grinned wide and nodded. “Yes, please. How are you, Ciara?”
The Words I Speak (Anyone Who Believes Book 2) Page 1
