A Land More Kind Than Home Read online

  “What people?” he said. “Everybody who really loved her, everybody she loved, they all know what happened.” He pointed at the church. “They were all right inside this church when it happened. Nobody else deserves to know anything more than that. Besides us, nobody in this world needs to know anything at all. It ain’t going to do her a lick of good, and trouble is all it’s going to bring us.” He dropped his hand from his eyes and squinted against the sun.

  “Folks talk,” I said. “Especially in a town like Marshall, especially about a church like this. Putting up newspaper so they can’t see inside ain’t going to keep them from talking.”

  “Well,” he said, “I trust the folks of my congregation to know who needs talking to and who don’t. But if you got any ideas about taking our business outside this church, then I think you’d better tell me now. I need to know that I can trust members of my congregation with the Lord’s work.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, “because I can’t be a part of this no more.”

  “What do you plan on doing?” he asked.

  “I can’t be a part of this no more,” I said again. “I’m leaving the church, and I want to take the children with me.”

  He smiled and just stood there looking at me like he was going to laugh in my face.

  “Is that right,” he said. “You’re just going to take the children out of my church and teach them in your own way, teach them your own beliefs. What do you think gives you the right to do that?”

  “Before the hospital got built I delivered just about every child that ever stepped foot inside this church,” I said. “And I delivered just about all their mamas and daddies, too. I ain’t claiming to be in charge of their spirits, but I have a job to see them safely through this world after bringing them into it. And I can tell you this ain’t no place for children to be,” I said. “It just ain’t safe.”

  “Sister Adelaide,” he said, “I’ve been pastoring this church long enough for you to know that we protect our children, and I can tell you that I wouldn’t never let a youngster take up no snake or drink no poison or nothing like that. But you’ve been here long enough to know that what we do here is the Truth and our children need to see it. Our children need to be raised up in it.”

  “And you should know that children can’t keep no secrets about what they see either,” I said.

  He folded his arms across his chest and kind of rocked back on the heels of his boots. He turned his head and looked out over the river toward downtown Marshall like he was thinking about what I’d said. Then he turned his head and looked back at me.

  “Can you, Sister Adelaide? Can you keep a secret?”

  “I can,” I said. “But I’d rather not know any secrets that need keeping, and I won’t know them if I stay out of your church. A church ain’t no place to hide the truth, and a church that does ain’t no place for me. Ain’t no place for children neither.”

  CHAMBLISS NEVER FORGAVE ME FOR TAKING THE CHILDREN OUT OF that church. He warned me then that in leaving the church I was leaving my life as I’d known it, and that those folks wouldn’t ever accept me the way they once had and that I’d always be an outsider. I told him I wasn’t leaving the church, I was just leaving him, but I knew he was right. I lost friendships I’d had just about my whole life, and it hurt me. It still does. But for ten years I kept those children out, kept them safe. Once the service started, I’d take them across the road and down to the river when it was nice and warm, or folks would just drop them off at my house in the wintertime or if it was raining. We’d have us a little Sunday school lesson, then they’d play outside. Sometimes we’d make things, color pictures, and sing songs. But I didn’t step another foot inside that church for ten years, and I hardly said more than a “hello” to Carson Chambliss in all that time. And for a while there it was real nice, that little truce. I had my little congregation and he had his, and we didn’t have hardly anything to do with each other. I felt like I was doing what the Lord wanted me to do with those children.

  But I should’ve known it couldn’t have gone on like that, and I should’ve known that something terrible was going to happen again. But there was just no way I could have guessed it would happen to one of mine. I tried to keep them children out of that church, and for ten years I did, but that ten years didn’t do nothing for Carson Chambliss but make him ten years older and braver and ten years more reckless too. And here I was on a Thursday afternoon, sitting outside a church I thought I’d never see the insides of again, waiting to talk to a man I was afraid of being alone with. It was the only time in my life I’d ever gone to church out of fear.

  I sat out there in my car with the windows rolled down and my keys still swinging from the ignition, and I stared at the church through all that bright heat and thought about him sitting in there in all that dark and waiting. The sound of that gravel dust getting blown through the parking lot could’ve been bare feet shuffling across the hallway the night before, when Julie was standing in the doorway watching me hunched over the bed in my funeral clothes. I finished folding the covers down, then I turned around and settled myself by the quilt that was slung over the footboard, and I smoothed out my dress and looked up at her. She didn’t have a black dress to wear because she’d had to leave so many things behind right after it happened, and I ended up giving her one of mine. It hadn’t been worn for years, and I reckon it had fell out of fashion well before I’d come to own it, but she seemed glad to have it and it looked just fine on her. She almost looked like a young girl, even though she was a woman a couple years past thirty who’d just buried her son. When we’d come in from the funeral, she’d gone into the bedroom across the hall and closed the door. I heard the old springs on the bed give a creak when she laid down on it. I imagined her in there on that bed with her eyes wide open staring at the ceiling until the room got too dark to see it. Then she’d opened the door and come across the hall with her hair let down just as long and pretty as it could be. About the color of sweet corn. I could see she’d done a little more crying.

  “You fixing to turn in?” she asked me. I nodded my head and tried to smile at her.

  “I was thinking about it,” I said. “You need anything before I do?”

  “No, ma’am,” she said. “I think I’ll be all right. I just want to tell you again how much I appreciate you letting me stay here. Shouldn’t be but just a while. Just till I decide what I’m going to do.”

  “Lord, girl,” I told her, “you can stay here just as long as you’re needing to. You don’t need to make no kinds of decisions, especially not tonight, especially after what all has happened.” She looked down at that pretty yellow hair where it draped over her shoulder and fell down to her chest, and she picked up the ends of it and swished it over her fingers like she was dusting something off her hands.

  “Pastor told me he wants to see you,” she said. “Tomorrow afternoon, down at the church. He said about three o’clock.” She dropped her hair and used both her hands to move it back behind her shoulders, and then she raised her face and looked at me.

  “I wish he could’ve told me himself,” I said. “And I wish he’d been out there today at Christopher’s funeral. Don’t seem right that he wasn’t.”

  “He thought it’d be better if he didn’t come,” she said. “After all that’s happened, I mean.”

  “Is that right?” I said. “A little boy dies during his church service, and he thinks that’s a reason to stay away. It don’t seem right to me.” I stood up from the bed and turned on the lamp on the bedside table and went to the closet where my nightgown hung on the back of the door. “I don’t reckon you want to go down there with me?”

  “He said he wanted you to come alone,” she said.

  “I can’t say I’m too surprised by that,” I said.

  THERE WASN’T A SINGLE CAR OUT THERE IN THE PARKING LOT BESIDES mine and Chambliss’s old Buick. I opened the door and put my feet out on the blacktop and looked across the road where the land slo
ped down toward the riverbank. Downtown Marshall sat about a mile or so up the river, too far away to hear the sounds of cars or people’s voices or other things you might hear on a Thursday afternoon in a little town. It looked to be real still, like there wasn’t even anybody on the streets at all. I looked back toward the church and saw the green field spread out behind it, the trees rising up from the woods farther out at the field’s edge. There weren’t any sounds except for that little bit of breeze and the sound of the river running softly across the street. I climbed out of the car and closed the door and just stood there for what seemed like forever, trying to wrap my head around what might’ve happened up here on Sunday night, trying to imagine what was going to happen to me.

  I can tell you that opening the door and stepping inside that church was like walking right into the dark of night. The newspaper over those windows blocked out the sun, and with that dark wood paneling on the walls it took a good while for my eyes to get used to all that blackness; I couldn’t hardly see a thing until they did. Once my eyes got fixed right, I could see where the broken linoleum tiles exposed the bare cement floors after those coolers had been yanked out. It hadn’t hardly changed a bit in ten years. I followed the floor tiles down the center of the room where the folding chairs parted to lead you down to the front of the church. I could just barely make out Chambliss sitting in a chair right up there on the first row. His back was to me, and he didn’t even turn around when the door closed behind me. He didn’t turn around when he spoke to me either; he just sat there looking straight ahead.

  “Sister Adelaide,” he said. “I was hoping you’d decide to come in.”

  “Julie said you wanted to see me,” I said. “And here I am.”

  “And here you are,” he said. “I’m glad you came. It’s good to have you inside our church again.” He put his arm across the chair beside him and finally turned his head and looked at me. “Come on up here and have a seat by me.” I could see his face good now, and except for that silver hair around his temples, he hadn’t changed. His eyes looked just as cool and distant as they always had.

  I walked down the center aisle past them rows of folding chairs. It was dead silent in there because he didn’t have that window air conditioner on or none of them floor fans running, and that hot, stifling air almost took my breath away. When I got down to the chairs in the front, I saw that he had one of them wooden crates sitting on the floor right by his feet. It had a little hinged trap on the top of it, and I could see that the clasp on the trap was undone. I stood there looking down at it, and then I looked over at Chambliss. He was staring up at me and smiling like he’d just thought of something funny to tell me. His left arm was still across the back of the chair beside him. He took it off the chair and patted the seat.

  “Sit down,” he said. I didn’t want to sit that close to him, so I walked in front of him and took a seat a few chairs over to his right. When I did, he moved his arm and covered his right hand with his left, like he didn’t want me staring at just how awful that burned-up right hand looked. We both sat there real quiet for a bit. I crossed my ankles and leaned forward just a little until my back wasn’t touching the chair, and he just sat there with his feet flat on the floor, his hands in his lap, the left one covering up the right so I couldn’t hardly see it.

  Somebody’d hung all kinds of pictures and calendars on the front wall behind the stage, and just about every one of them had a picture of Jesus Christ on it: Jesus praying in Gethsemane; Jesus at the Pentecost; Jesus holding out his hands to Doubting Thomas to show him the places where those nails had gone right through. From where I was sitting I could see there was an old calendar from Samuels’ Funeral Home and some other ones from a couple of stores in Marshall and Hot Springs and one from the old bank. Some of them calendars were so old you could only look at the pictures because you couldn’t hardly read the lettering on them. In between all those calendars and all those pictures, right there in the middle of the wall, was a big framed painting of Moses taking up a serpent in front of the burning bush. I sat there and looked at that picture of Moses and thought about how he watched that staff come alive right there in the dirt, and I wondered how he must’ve felt when the voice of the Lord commanded him to pick it up by its tail. I looked from that painting to the crate where it sat on the floor in front of Chambliss.

  “I know the sheriff’s been out to see you,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “He has. A couple days ago.”

  “And I reckon he had him a few questions about what happened up here on Sunday.”

  “He had some questions,” I said. “But I didn’t have any answers for him. I told him I couldn’t speak for what y’all do up here in this church. This ain’t my place anymore, even though I’ve been a member of this church for fifty-something years, it ain’t been my place for a very long time. That’s what I told him.”

  “What is your place, Sister Adelaide?” he asked me. He turned his head and looked at me with just about the most blank expression I’ve ever seen on a man’s face. I stared right back at him too, and then something caught my eye, and when I looked down I seen that that awful hand had made a fist and he was using his left hand to try and cover it up, but it was almost like he couldn’t do it, so instead he took to rubbing his fingers back and forth across the back of that hand, and I just sat there and stared at them fingers and I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

  “What is your place?” he asked me again. His fingers stopped moving, and he opened his fist and laid both his hands flat on his thighs. I looked up at him.

  “My place is with the children of this congregation,” I said.

  “Is it?” he asked.

  “That’s where I say it is.”

  “You know your Bible, don’t you, Sister Adelaide?”

  “I do,” I said. “I know it very well.”

  “Then you should know Matthew 9:33,” he said. “If you know your Bible, then you should know it says that ‘when the demon was driven out, the man who had been mute spoke.’ And I reckon you should probably know Matthew 17 too, about the man who brought his son to Jesus because he was sick with a disease brought on by a demon and the disciples didn’t have the faith enough to heal him.”

  “I know both of them stories,” I said. “I’ve read them both many, many times.”

  “They ain’t no stories,” he said. “You can believe me when I tell you that.” He looked away from me toward the front wall where all those pictures of Jesus were hanging up. “Jesus took that boy from the book of Matthew,” he said, “and he healed him. He told the disciples they didn’t have the faith enough, and he promised them that if their faith was even as small as a mustard seed, then they could move mountains.” He looked away from the pictures and turned his head back toward me. “That’s all it would’ve taken, Sister Adelaide, just that little bit of faith, but they didn’t have it. They didn’t have faith enough to cast that demon out. Jesus had to do it himself.”

  “You ain’t no Jesus,” I said. “And Christopher didn’t have no demon in him. He was born that way; I was there when he came into this world, and I can tell you God makes us how he needs us to be. I’d think about that the next time you go off on some idea about trying to change things you ain’t got any business changing. I might be afraid of tempting that kind of power.”

  He smiled at me like he thought what I’d said was funny, but I wanted to tell him that I didn’t mean for it to be no joke. He turned his head back to the front wall and took to rubbing his fingers back and forth across the back of that hand again. Well, I’d had all I could stand of his talk and his little Bible lesson, and I just wasn’t going to sit there and stare at that hand no longer than I had to. I uncrossed my ankles and smoothed out my skirt and got ready to stand up to leave, and when I did that’s when I felt it right there on the back of my neck.

  What he did next I can’t even picture quite good enough to tell just how it happened, but when I felt it on my skin I knew right then what
it was; it felt just like the hand of a dead man, just as cold and clammy as it could be. He grabbed me by the neck just above my shirt collar and forced me to my knees right there in the front of the church, and when he did I heard the toe of his boot kick open the little trap on that crate. He let go of my neck and got ahold of my arm, and before I even knew he was going to do it he’d already stuck my arm down inside that crate, and he used that hand he’d once set on fire to hold it there. I tried to jerk it out, but he was just too strong, and when I tried to stand up he leaned one of his knees down on the back of my shoulders. My feet scraped at the floor, and I kicked at one of the metal folding chairs behind me in the front row. It fell over and the crash echoed along the floor. Chambliss acted like he hadn’t heard it. I kept kicking my feet, looking for something that would help me stand, but there wasn’t nothing there.

  Chambliss stood above me and held on to me tight like I was some kind of hog he was fixing to butcher and he was afraid of me getting away before he’d done it. I tried again to jerk my hand free, but he held it there tight, and I could feel the cold, smooth skin of his fingers where they wrapped around my arm.

  “Shhhh,” he whispered. “Don’t fight it now. Don’t fight it.”

  I gave up then and quit struggling with him, and I can tell you that’s when I took to praying. I closed my eyes and turned my head away from that crate, and that’s when I heard it inside there; it was real quiet at first, like a light wind rustling dry cornstalks, but then that rattle got louder and louder until I just couldn’t make myself pretend it was nothing else. I squeezed my eyes shut just as tight as I could, and I imagined feeling the prick of its fangs, something like a bad bee sting, and I imagined that venom coursing itself through my veins on the way to my heart. I pictured myself pulling my arm out of that crate after it struck me, the skin on my hand already turning black around the two puncture holes and the blue veins rising up all cloudy with poison. I pictured Miss Molly Jameson, how her face had swelled up, how she’d struggled to breathe, how they’d found her laying out there in her yard without the least idea of how she’d got there. I tell you that I thought I was going to die, and I did my best to get ready for whatever it was that was going to happen after I did.