The size of Freda Graves amazed me: the sweep of her arms describing Heaven and earth, the mass of gray curls grown full and tangled, the legs so solid that each step looked final, rooted for a thousand years. She seemed too big for her own house. The ceiling hung low, too close to that furious head. Unlike other adults in my world, she did not loom large in memory as she shrank in real life. She was great in the mind and in the flesh.
When she ceased her praying, the crowd stilled. They barely seemed to breathe. Slowly, Freda Graves began to speak again, a pantomime of passion, waving her hands, staring at first one follower and then another. The words came faster and faster. At last her gaze rested on one man. She pointed and said nothing.
She’d chosen Bo Effinger. He stretched out on the floor and the others gathered around him, laying their hands on his thighs and belly, his neck and chest. Bo was six and a half feet tall, with white hair, no eyebrows, and the biggest feet I have ever seen on a human being.
Freda Graves laid her hands over his face and prayed again. The others mumbled too, each one taking a turn. Joanna Foot and Minnie Hathaway, Myron Evans and the Lockwood twins — Eula and Luella — Elliot Foot, Lyla Leona, and half a dozen more. All of a sudden, Bo began to tremble. His fingers twitched and his legs shuddered. The people holding his arms and legs put their weight into him to keep him from thrashing, but Bo Effinger was a big man and the ripples jerking through his wiry muscles nearly lifted him off the floor.
The big man rolled to his stomach, pounding the floor with his fists, beating the rug with the feet of a giant. This is how being born must have been for Bo Effinger. He was a trapped child. His mother gained fifty pounds carrying him. The bones of her brows thickened and her palms grew wide. She swore he was the size of a calf when he finally came, and she kept crying out, “Cut me, cut me,” but Dr. Ben wouldn’t do it. He took the forceps to Bo’s head, pinched and yanked. Mrs. Effinger often told this story to account for Bo’s slow ways and missing eyebrows. She said Dr. Ben ripped them clean off her baby’s face and they never grew back.
Bo was still flopping, a great fish beached in a storm. One by one the other worshipers pulled away, afraid of his huge hands. Only Freda Graves still touched him, her fingers on his head, her face turned up toward the cracked plaster of the ceiling.
Now everyone spoke at once, praying and weeping in pantomime, each one alone with God. Joanna Foot rolled from side to side, her fat round body rocking, a curled-up ball of flesh. Her husband crouched near a chair. He pushed his glasses up on his forehead and rubbed the bridge of his nose where the wire-rims had made his skin red and sore. His lips barely moved.
The Fat Lady was not as fat as Joanna Foot. She wore a dress of emerald green with huge, loose sleeves. When she raised her arms, the cloth spread like dark wings above her head.
Minnie Hathaway twirled, an old ballerina who’d lost her sense of balance. Her red lips exaggerated each strange word, like secrets whispered to a lover in a crowded room.
I looked for Myron and finally spotted him in the darkest corner of the room, his face turned to the wall, his spine a curve of shame.
Everyone jabbered at God in a private language; I wondered how He could hear them all. The only ones saying the same prayer were the Lockwood twins. Eula was short and dark and Luella large and fair. Once they were identical, but disease had stooped and bent poor Eula, and a one-week marriage had turned Luella’s hair white at an early age. But they still thought as one. They wore matching sweaters, pale pink with pearl buttons. Their dresses were always made of real silk, their stockings sheer and gray. Hand in hand, eyes screwed shut, heads together, they spoke in the same tongue, and smiled, eyes still closed, as if they had both heard God answer.
But I don’t believe even the Lockwood twins understood each other. No man in that room knew what mysterious force moved in him. No woman recognized her own words. Some were lifted by joy, some stricken by holy pain. One danced, one twitched, one hung his head, but not one fell to his or her knees.
We Lutherans sat in neat rows, bowed our heads, mumbled in unison. Reverend Piggott reminded us of our flaws and failures. But here, in this room, people jumped and shouted, wailed and were forgiven.
Freda Graves surveyed her flock, a smile growing, tears or sweat rolling down her cheeks. All at once her body tightened. She sensed me: a spy at the window. She glared at the unclosed blind, at my gray eyes. She knew me, I was certain. I flattened myself against her house, directly under that window. The blind shot open; light flashed above my head.
I heard her palm hit the glass and felt it like a slap on the inside of my chest. I made a mad leap, hit the alley at a gallop, knocking over her garbage cans as I swung through the gate. The metal cans rolled across the gravel, raising such a clatter that lights popped on all over the neighborhood. People stuck their heads out their windows, shouting at things they couldn’t see, banging windows closed, slamming doors, yelling at me and then at one another as if they had been holding back for months.
By the time I reached the place where I’d stashed my bike, I tasted blood in my mouth and realized I’d bitten deep into the inside of my lower lip. I pedaled down the middle of the street where I was safe beneath the yellow glow of the streetlamps.
I got home at ten and found Mother sitting at the kitchen table, her eyes red and swollen. She knew my lies. I saw her sick with worry all these hours, thinking I had run away for some reason neither one of us could fathom, imagining I had disappeared at the edge of town. I was ready to fall on my knees and confess, ready to promise never to tell another lie as long as I lived.
But she didn’t scold, and I realized her suffering had nothing to do with me. The house was too quiet. The air had the stillness of rooms inhabited only by women. Then I knew: Daddy wasn’t there.
The uncut cherry pie sat in the middle of the table, a mute accusation in the perfect latticework of its crust. I put my hand on my mother’s shoulder, lightly, afraid of her sorrow, how it bled from her body into mine. She reached up and squeezed my fingers, denying me my pity. “It’s nothing,” she said. “You get on up to bed. School tomorrow.”
Much later I heard Father fumbling with the lock. He tripped on his way up the stairs and cussed. Mother had locked herself in the room where her own mother had slept and died. Daddy pounded at the door. Minutes after he stopped I heard the sound echoing down the hall.
I lay in bed, thinking of the prayer we used to say at the table before we ate: Father, we thank thee for these mercies. I thought of the Lord’s Prayer in church, all our voices raised at the same time with the same words, until the chapel hummed with the pulse of a song beyond music, a song strong and low enough to reach the tired, overburdened ears of our Father in Heaven. And I thought of myself as a child and Nina as a child, our little hands folded, our sweet high voices together: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul will keep.…
I was afraid as I had never been afraid because I knew I had no words, I had no voice to talk to God.
9
MY PARENTS lived in silence for the better part of a week. Every day Mother worked in her garden, jabbing her yellow spade into the cracked earth until the whole bed was black and moist. Soon her poppies would blossom, their blooms unfolding, petals drooping. Poppies are more delicate than roses. A hot day destroys them, a hard rain leaves them in tatters. But their stalks are tough as little trees, woody and dulclass="underline" nothing touches them.