by Haven Kimmel
UNTIL MY SISTER got married and left home, I didn’t really have a proper bedroom. The room next to my sister’s, which was really for storage, had a bed in it, and I sometimes slept on that, and in the winter I slept on a cot next to the stove. Mostly I slept on the couch in the living room, in an army-green sleeping bag that had flannel duck hunters inside, rifles raised.
When I lay down on the couch to go to sleep the night of my sister’s slumber party, the girls were all still upstairs, and my parents were in the den watching television, behind the heavy curtain that divided the two rooms. I fell asleep on my back and dreamed that a fat green troll was sitting on the arm of the couch running his ugly fingers through my hair, which caused me to wake up mightily disturbed, only to realize that there really was something on the arm of the couch and it really was in my hair. I had no option but to scream. My sister and her friends came thundering down the stairs and my parents came running in from the den, and there was my cat, PeeDink, curled up and purring, happily chewing on a big chunk of my hair that was actually still attached to my head.
There were big laughs all around, except from me.
“Stupid cat,” I grizzled, glaring at him. “Why would he be wanting to eat my hair, anyway?”
“If you ever washed it you might attract fewer animals,” my sister said, much to the enjoyment of her guests.
“Yeah, well you wash it,” which was no kind of come-back, so I just got in my sleeping bag mad. The chewed part of my hair was damp and smelled like cat food.
My parents went back in the den, but my sister and her pals stayed in the dark living room, whispering. Our living room was quite large, thirty-three feet long and nineteen feet wide, so there was room for all of us, but still. I was trying to sleep.
They gathered down around the window seat. One of them had an idea that the others were disputing, but not heartily. I heard my sister say, “My mom would kill me if she knew,” which didn’t prevent her from fetching a candle and some matches.
They sat down in a circle not far from the end of the couch where I lay. I couldn’t imagine what they were doing, but it was so quiet and whispery that I got tickle-chills on my back. I hoped it would go on all night. They lit the candle, and one of the Debbies, the most brazen of them, began to speak.
“Dublah, Dublah, Dublah! We call you forth from the land beyond,” she said, eerily, and after a few seconds of silence, “Call him forth, dummies! We’re all supposed to do it!”
And the rest of the girls responded, “Dublah, we call you forth,” but they didn’t do it much together, and somebody started to giggle.
This went on for a few minutes, Debbie leading and the rest following raggedly behind, and then they fell into a more rhythmical pattern. The candle flickered on the ceiling and on the portrait of my grandmother Mildred when she was sixteen. The portrait was in profile, and I stared at it every evening as I tried to fall asleep, and every evening the lips began to move. I hated that picture. I felt that my grandmother was trying to tell me a terrible secret I didn’t want to know. I could, of course, have just asked her if she had some secret, since she only lived in New Castle and had a telephone. In life she was a skinny, sharp, and pinchy woman of little intelligence who had been abusive to my mother. She was loved by none of us. But in portrait, sixteen and beautiful, she was rich and insistent in her strangeness, and I found her much more interesting.
Listening to the whispers at the end of the couch, and looking at my grandmother moving her lips so desperately, I thought of the most frightening picture in the house. It was called St. Veronica’s Handkerchief, and the artist had painted Jesus’s head complete with the crown of thorns and little drops of blood running down. His mouth was slightly open, and his eyes were closed and looked bruised, as if he had been dead for a few days. His eyes were closed, that is, until one took a few steps back from him, and then they opened. They were dull and dark and somehow still dead, and once they opened it was hard to make them close again. I could walk toward the picture and then backward, forward and back, and make Jesus’s eyes open and close many times. I could stare at it until his lips, too, began to move. On the whole it was one of the most gruesome sights I had ever beheld, which included the chewed-off paw of Petey Scrogg’s starved rabbit.
Right in the middle of my reverie I realized what my sister and her friends were doing. They were holding a seance, which was one of the most wicked and wrong things it was possible to do. It was way worse than coveting your neighbor’s ass, for instance, because it involved the Devil, who, once he got into your house might never leave, like flying ants. My heart-rate doubled, and I felt like my eyes would fly out of my head. They were calling forth a little dead boy. They were trying to make a little dead boy come sit right on the couch with me.
Across the room from me was a tall skinny window. The top of the window was only a couple feet from the ceiling, which was ten feet high. I found myself looking at the sky, hoping to see the moon, or at least some familiar stars, so I would know I had not sunken into some Devil pit from which there was no hope of return. I knew that if I could only find the strength or the will to call my mother she would come in and break this spell with one fierce wave of her hand, because my mom would simply not abide the Devil in her house, nor any little dead boys, either, but as I was mustering up my courage, I saw him, and not at the foot of the window, on the ground, but at the top, in the trees.
It was not Dublah, the little dead boy, it was Jesus. He was all white and filmy, like Casper, but there was no mistaking his hair or his beard or his long white nightgown. He simply floated there, and looked at me. He didn’t beckon with a long skinny ghost finger, and he didn’t try to tell me secrets I didn’t want to know. We just looked at each other, and his look felt like a holding, like being held and lifted all at once. And that feeling of comfort was so distinct and powerful that I suddenly had the strength to speak.
“I see him!” I whispered, but so powerfully and sharply that it was more like a yell.
The girls froze. They turned as one and looked at me like captured birds, then looked where I was pointing. For just a moment as they turned he hovered there, but then he vanished.
“He was there, at the top of the window, I saw him!” I said, sitting up. The girls leaped up and surrounded me on the couch.
“Who? Who did you see?!” they asked, all talking at once.
“It was Jesus! He came out of the trees! He was in the window!”
They began to laugh, nervously. They told me I had been dreaming, and that Jesus must have been pret-ty tall. I was encouraged to be quiet, so Mom would not come in and ask what the girls had been doing. My sister told me she would get me a new jump rope if I kept the dead boy a secret and I was no fool—I agreed.
But I had to tell; Jesus is not something one can keep a secret, and the next day I told both my parents and my brother. I left out the part about the seance in order to get the jump rope. My sister trusted me to honor a bargain.
No one believed me. Most everyone was kind about it, but it was clear they thought I had been dreaming, or was still overly excited about waking up to find PeeDink in my hair. It didn’t matter that I could describe him perfectly, or that I knew I had been awake; it didn’t matter that he came out of the trees, just as I had always suspected; Jesus had not appeared in my window.
AT CHURCH THE NEXT WEEK, when it came time to testify, the regulars stood up and thanked God for all the blessings of the week before. Some people asked for the strength to carry their burdens with grace. I shivered inside, hoping my mom would not speak. She often did, on account of how grateful she was for everything, most especially God’s love, but this week she just sat still, as if my hard hoping had worked on her and held her to the pew.
Then Hazel Deckerd, a few rows up, stood and said she felt like the Lord was leading us in a day of song, which were my favorite days. I had to nod in agreement, as if the Holy Ghost had spoken to me, too. In our church there were great singe
rs, and on the music days we just stood up and sang one song after another, as people called them out, and the first song Hazel called for was a rouser. By the time we reached the chorus we were singing as one body, swaying and raising our arms in the air. I hoped the God I didn’t believe in could hear us, and that somehow the sound would travel out the open windows and down to my yard:
He Lives! He Lives!
Christ Jesus lives today.
He walks with me and talks with me
Along life’s narrow way.
He Lives! He Lives!
Salvation to impart.
Don’t ask me how I know he lives,
He lives within my heart!
* * *
ESP
Dan was not quite three when Melinda was born, and where he had been boisterous, boyish, energetic, and strong-willed, she was placid and curious and sweet. Lindy brought to the world a brand of sympathy that set her apart from other people; my mom used to say that Melinda was like a living, breathing antennae, sensitive to all conditions: animals, people, the weather.
Dan was six, almost seven, and Melinda was four. Mom had been reading, shall we say, quite a bit, and one of her fascinations at the time was with intelligence, particularly the extrasensory variety. In a magazine sent to her by Duke’s Institute for Parapsychology she found a children’s ESP test, a simple thing involving a screen between the parent and the child, and a group of cards marked with easily identifiable shapes: a sailboat, a ball, a book, a train, and a doll.
Dan went first. Mom explained to him what she was going to do, that she was going to choose one of the five cards and pick it up, then look at him. All he had to do was tell her which one she was holding, and she would keep track of the ones he got right.
She picked up the first card, the sailboat. “Okay, Danny. Now you tell me which card you think I’m holding.”
He answered immediately. “The sailboat.”
Mom picked up the next card. “Which one this time?”
“The ball.”
“And now?”
“The ball again.”
Danny guessed correctly the first fifteen times, and then, as Mom remembers it, a look passed over his face, something just faint and flickering, and his next ten guesses were wrong. Fifteen out of twenty-five.
They started over, and in the second round he got two out of twenty-five right, and in the third round he answered them all incorrectly. By the end he would barely look at her, and when she said they were finished he stood up and left without a word. Mom looked at his scores. She tapped her finger on the table. Then Melinda walked in, her eyes full of daylight and the sweet mystery of her personality, and Mom performed the tests without the same intensity she’d given to them for Danny, and Melinda got eighteen out of twenty-five correct the first time; twenty the second time, and on her third attempt she correctly named all twenty-five.
Mom sent them out to play, then consulted the magazine on the results. As she understood it, the law of averages would suggest that most people could get five out of twenty-five correct. Scores above that suggested a telepathic gift; scores below five were also suggestive. What Melinda had done was obvious: she was a receiver. But what Dan had done was more subtle: he was a blocker. He had the gift to guess the answer, and so he refused to give it. Mom put her head down on the table and thought about his other characteristics. He was fiercely stubborn as a baby, and when he got to be a toddler, almost no punishment would work with him. Our doctor suggested that she merely take away, temporarily, something he loved, and the first time she did so, Danny turned on her and said, “I don’t want it anymore.” She was nervous about what would happen when he entered school.
Melinda’s scores, especially, bothered Mother so much she burned the cards. But she continued to test the two of them in small ways. If she looked hard at Melinda’s back, for instance, Melinda would turn around almost immediately. But if Mom looked at Danny’s back, he stiffened, then left the room.
“SO ARE YOU SAYING Danny and Melinda both had the ESP?” I asked my mom after she told me the story of the test.
“Yes. It’s not that simple, but basically, yes.”
“Well, then. I must have it, too. Where’s those cards? You better test me.”
Mom said she had thrown away the original cards, but she could make some more. We sat down on opposite sides of the dining room table, a bunch of books propped up between us.
“Okay. Do you remember the designs on the cards? A sailboat, a ball, a book, a train, and a doll?”
“Yeah, yeah, go on.”
“All right, I’m holding up a card. What is it?”
I thought a moment. “It’s a horse.”
“Sweetheart. A horse isn’t one of the choices.”
“Right. It’s a big pine tree wavin’ in the wind.”
“Honey, there are no pine tree cards.”
“Oh. Right. It’s one of them nasty billy goats with an antler.”
Mom sighed, then put her little homemade cards in a pile. She said I’d done really well. I jumped up and ran outside to see if I could melt rocks with just the force of my mind.
* * *
INTERIOR DESIGN
Decoupage hit Mooreland pretty hard, as did antiquing, and hand painting one’s own ceramics. My dad was especially good at decoupage, and made a number of very beautiful things to hang around the house. My personal favorite was the Bill of Rights, which he burned around the edges and affixed to a large flat piece of cherrywood. He screwed a ring into the top and it hung on the wall in the living room. I used to stand and study it. It survived until one afternoon when Dad was trying to repair the wiring in an outlet below it. At that time we had a cat named Abednego who performed no end of evil tasks, and as Dad knelt there, Abednego went scampering right up Dad’s back, using, of course, his claws. Dad raised up in alarm and hit the Bill of Rights, causing it to fall squarely on the back of his head, and before I knew what had happened, Dad had grabbed the plaque and slung it in fury across the room. He missed the cat, but hit the window seat, and the wood cracked in half. Abednego was nowhere to be seen—he was in pursuit of other happinesses, no doubt—so I picked up the wood and tried to fix it, but it was beyond repair.
A few minutes later I heard the cat upstairs in my room, patiently and thoroughly knocking my glass doll collection off my dresser. The dolls came from Avon, and were filled with perfume. The bottom half (which held the cologne) was glass and the top half was plastic, but the two parts were the same color, and made to look like one beautiful, expressive thing. I had a blue girl in a dress holding a basket; an ivory girl in a swing, laughing; a green girl with a lamb; and my personal favorite, a wedding girl.
Dad turned to antiquing, a process by which a new thing was made to look old. In general the technique involved painting an object one color, then putting another coat of paint of a different color over the first and wiping it with a cloth, allowing the first color to show through. His largest project was a heavy ammunition box on wheels that he designed for housing our family photographs. He first painted it a sort of beige color, and followed it with a khaki green. It was very successful. When he was finished, what had originally just been a wooden box now looked like something you might buy at an auction, by accident.
Everyone in town turned on to ceramics at the same time. A local woman opened a little shop in an abandoned gas station at the south end of town, and it became a popular place to spend an evening. My mom liked painting small, pretty things. For her first grandchild, my niece Jenny, Mom made a bowl that looked like a bed; the top was a rabbit, sound asleep. On one side Mom painted Jenny’s name and birth date, and on the other, a quotation from a John Donne poem: “I am a little world made cunningly.” She filled it with chocolates and gave it to Jenny for Easter. It was so pretty I wanted to break it.
My dad liked ceramics, too. He painted a plaque for the wall of the den that stayed there for y
ears. It showed a little cowboy, standing with his legs apart, swinging his two six-shooters. The cowboy’s hat was pulled down all the way over his eyes. The surface of the plaque was pocked with what appeared to be bullet holes, and it read ANOTHER DAY, SHOT TO HELL.
Debbie Newman was the undisputed master of the hooked rug. She was so advanced that she even designed her own. Over the fireplace in the Newmans’ living room was a hooked-rug picture of Big Dave’s best horse, the late Navajo. I sometimes sat and watched her at work. Her fat little hands just flew over the surface of the mesh. The hooked rug is made with an apparatus that has a wooden handle and a complicated and cruel-looking hook and lip combination. I could never figure it out, even though Debbie tried to teach me, nicely, a half a dozen times. Julie was no slouch herself when it came to hooking a rug, but she had no patience with me, so I gave up. Julie could also draw and paint very well, and as we got older her paintings began showing up around the house. They were all of horses. Sometimes a cowboy.
Joyce, Rose’s mom, could flat-out copy a masterpiece painting. It was shocking. She would set up an easel, get out her oil paints, choose a painting she liked from a book or magazine, and set to it. Voilà. Within a week there that painting would be, and in this way William and Joyce were able to go even one step farther in making their house the most winning and sophisticated in town. She painted Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, an old-timey-looking picture of a boy and girl on either side of a stump, and a young black boy with a bunch of violets. I can’t repeat, for its rudeness, the way Joyce referred to this last picture. There was no harm done in saying this word in Mooreland, however, because there was not a single black person within or even near the town’s borders, and never had been. All the way up until I was born the signs marking the town limits had borne a warning to anyone of color about the sun setting on them in our town. I’m paraphrasing. Saffer’s General Store, which sat empty across Broad Street from our house, had been one of the secret state headquarters for the KKK, back in the 1920s, or so rumor had it. Even so, I was forbidden by my mother from using certain words to designate people of other races. It didn’t occur to me to want to; I’d never met a black person.
