Grandpa didn’t eat with us that morning. Instead, he stood in his pajamas, arms hanging limp, watching some invisible scene through the louvered front-room windows. His absence sped us through breakfast, since Mama’s prayers weren’t nearly as long as his. I spent a few extra minutes shaving my recent whiskers, which were coming in blond and sparse, and then I parted my hair with a little Brylcreem to counteract its tendency to rebel. I waited outside for Daddy and watched Timmy Rogers, the three-year-old boy next door, romp with his new cocker spaniel puppy. The puppy tumbled around the boy, tripping over its own ears. Timmy said didn’t I think his puppy was the greatest ever, and I agreed he sure was. Then Daddy came out to drive me to school in the ’65 Ford Fairlane, its red vinyl seats still smelling new. We got to school before the buses did, and I stood kicking a few pebbles outside the green portable classroom where Mrs. Shiffield struggled to teach French-rolled r’s. I had just stubbed the toe of my boot on the sidewalk when I heard a raspy voice mention Heidi Muller.
I edged my head around the corner. Sammy Watts and Junior Barnes leaned against one end of the classroom. Sammy’s hands poked down deep in his pockets, and Junior sucked on a cigarette. They both wore the kind of blue jeans Reverend Tyler called worldly. Junior bent one leg and rested the sole of his boot against the tin siding. “Soft and easy as pudding,” he sighed, blowing a stream of smoke in front of his sharp chin.
Hurricane season was on us, and the air was hot and heavy. The smoke hung limp and Junior fanned it away. “Vanilla pudding,” Sammy said, reaching for the cigarette. My mouth filled with saliva.
“Tastes like it, too,” Junior said.
“No.” Sammy coughed and grabbed at his own chicken neck. “She didn’t. You lie like a hound dog.”
Junior plucked the cigarette from Sammy’s hand, and the red tip glowed. “Vanilla pudding with just the sweetest cherry on top.”
I swallowed my spit and shifted my feet. Sammy turned and hawked out some bubbly phlegm at my feet.
“Look who’s here,” he said, nudging Junior. “Why, it’s the angel Gabriel. Who’s blowing your horn, Gabriel?”
I clutched my Bible and told them to go smoke in hell. Then I climbed the two steps into the classroom and slouched down in my seat. Mrs. Shiffield’s breasts jiggled like pig bladders as her arm scratched verbs on the board.
“Bonjour, Gabriel,” she said. I sat through the whole hour thinking about Heidi. The bell rang, and I determined to find her right then.
She and some other girls chattered on the other side of the glass doors at the seniors’ end of the building. Voices bounced all around the metal lockers. Heidi wore a short-sleeved sweater made of fuzzy pink wool. A gold heart-shaped locket dangled off the ridge made by her breasts. Just as I said hello, she lifted that locket and stuck it in her mouth. Her lipstick matched her sweater, the ribbon around her ponytail, and the polish on her fingernails. Oh, she was worldly, all right.
I straightened my shoulders and strolled past her to my own locker, where I kept a whole tower of Grandpa’s pamphlets. I found the one I wanted: a green foldover with stories of the Holy Spirit entering a body and flooding it with rapture.
At that moment, Sammy and Junior tugged the glass doors open. Sammy tossed another cigarette onto the floor and squashed it under his boot. They were each almost a foot taller than Heidi and they circled her, their arms darting around like gulls swooping. Sammy chucked her under the chin, and then somehow both boys culled Janice Peters from the group and leaned her against the wall, one snake-veined male arm on either side of her. Heidi bit her lip and color seemed to rush from her sweater to her face. I thrust my pamphlet at her and walked on, pulling open the glass doors and moving out into the dank air to wait.
The other girls streamed out the doors in twos. School buses rumbled out front, waiting to carry us in either direction, north to Florida Springs or three miles south to Kingdom. An uncomfortable pressure had built up in me. I nearly missed Heidi coming out of the building; she’d pulled her ponytail loose and her ducked-down face was almost obscured by her thin, blond hair. I touched her shoulder and she jumped. “Oh, it’s only you,” she said.
“I’m walking,” I told her. “Want to come along?”
She looked over at the kids climbing onto the buses. Sammy and Junior already leaned against the back windows, and Janice sat one seat forward, her face turned toward the rear. “Sure, why not,” Heidi said.
We tramped along the asphalt road between the fields lying outside Kingdom, not saying much. Dragonflies hovered over the drainage canal that ran alongside the road. We passed the field where in summer yellow corn shot up. When I was little, those cornstalks terrified me; I was certain snakes slithered inside the husks.
We grew warm with the walking, and Heidi pulled her sweater away from where it was sticking to her skin. At one point, she lifted her hair off her neck and held it up a while. I struggled to keep my eyes forward and not watch how her breasts rose. I could smell the soap she used and some other scent, like lemons, steaming off her. Out on the horizon, a hawk circled against the low sky. Somewhere below a mouse trembled.
“Why’d you give me that pamphlet?” Her voice sounded very loud in the quiet.
I coughed and stuck my hands in my pockets. “I guess I thought you’d be interested. You looked unhappy there for a minute.”
“Did you hear something about me?”
“Hear what?”
“Nothing.”
We were getting close to town. Ray Mundy’s Esso station lay just ahead, and Ray was busy pumping gas into what looked like the new-model Lincoln. I sped up my pace, and Heidi fell a little behind. “Want a Nehi?” I asked, leading her toward the station. I stepped around the pumps, peering at the car. It was half an acre long, white with blue interior, and all kind of needles and dials on the dash. The driver paid Ray with bills peeled from a wad he stuffed back into his front pocket. I watched him maneuver the car onto the road, then turned back to Heidi. “Grape OK?” She nodded, and I dug out some coins.
We walked into town, sipping the Nehis. Four more blocks and we’d reach the corner where we had to separate. “Did you read it?” I asked.
“Some,” she said. “You think all that’s some kind of cure for unhappiness?”
I shook my head and stopped. The rims of her ears peeked through her hair, making her look young and awkward. I looked down full into her face.
“Happy’s got nothing to do with it,” I said. I looked off in the distance, like I was gathering my words, and then turned back to her. “You know that field south of my daddy’s car lot — the one mostly gone to clover?”
She nodded, squinting up at me. The sun was right at my back and making her teary.
“Once, when I was maybe five years old, my grandpa took me out to the middle of that field while a storm watch was on. We stood there and watched four tornadoes march across that field — great big twisters reaching down and sucking up everything. We planted our feet in that clover, and Grandpa held my hand and tilted up his head, shouting out glory, and I shouted along, too, even though my voice wasn’t near as strong as his. Those twisters passed right by us, not even lifting one hair on our heads.”
She’d finished her Nehi while I was talking. “Here, I’ll take that,” I said, reaching for the bottle. “I go by Ray’s all the time.”
We started walking again, passing Bach’s jewelry store and the bakery next door. A woman and two kids stepped out of the bakery, each kid wearing a chocolate grin and clutching a cookie. I could tell Heidi was thinking.
“Come to church with me sometime,” I said. “You’ll see. Happiness isn’t the issue — what you have instead is peace.”
“Peace,” she said, sighing. “I’d like that.” We’d reached the corner where she turned left. Her folks kept an old cinder-block house swelled near to bursting by the number of people living inside. Catholics. Mr. Muller ran the five-and-dime in town.
I kept heading straight through town to the new house I’d convinced Daddy to buy. Normally I slowed as I got near, to take in the scalloped shingles and the crisp yellow paint and the wrought-iron balcony. But today I practically leaped inside. Bringing over a Catholic, wouldn’t that turn some heads! And maybe Heidi would give me something to repent finally around the bonfire at Bible camp.
Mama was inside, churning noodles in a pot on the white electric stove. The kitchen smelled like mustard. Daddy and Grandpa sat at the kitchen table, not speaking. Grandpa pulled his dentures out and spat onto the teeth, then began polishing them with the corner of his pajama top. Without teeth to structure his face, his head looked like some ancient fruit, a peach maybe, long forgotten in the bowl. Mama’s face had a worrisome crimp in it, and the skin around her nose was white, in spite of the heat of the steam rising from the noodle pot. Daddy leaned back in his seat and drummed his manicured nails on the table. “I’ve been waiting for you, sport,” he said.
I dropped my Bible on the table and Grandpa’s spoon clattered from the edge of his teacup. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I need your help with a customer,” Daddy said.
Grandpa chomped his dentures back in and said, “Never mind that, we got serious problems.”
Mama turned from the stove, her wooden spoon dripping hot water onto the linoleum. “Grandpa had a vision today,” she said.
“Grandma Rose,” said Daddy. “Again.”
I turned one of the green vinyl chairs and straddled it, leaning my arms against the back. “Really? Where?”
Grandpa pressed his dentures up with his thumb and ran his tongue across them. “She was sitting on top of the car,” he said.
“The Fairlane.” Daddy chuckled. “Tell him what she was wearing, Pop.”
Grandpa’s face fired up. “Go ahead and laugh. She was warning us about the worldliness in this house.” He turned to me. “Son, you should have seen! She was all tarted up in lipstick and earrings, wearing this low-cut mini-dress and plastic boots.” Daddy’s chuckling turned into a full barrel laugh; his head tipped back to let it out. “Stop, you,” Grandpa said.
“I can’t help it,” he said, wiping his eyes. “You got to admit Rose in a mini-dress would be a sight. She was built like a tractor tire.”
“Oh, honey,” Mama said. She turned back to the noodles.
Daddy turned and put his arms around her from behind. “I’m sorry, sweetie. She was your mama.” He kissed her neck where the hair fell down from its pins. “But thank the good Lord you took after his side of the family.” His hands kind of smoothed over Mama’s body, and her back arched ever so slightly. He pulled away. “Even if he is a scrawny old turkey vulture now,” he said, looking at Grandpa.
“Oh stop, you two,” Mama said. She turned to me and smiled. “Gabriel, what do you think?”
I looked at Daddy and my brain raced. Then I stood up, frowning, and ran my fingers over the Bible. Grandpa’s face was eager. “Go-go boots, huh? Maybe Grandma was warning us about that dance place just opened up in Florida Springs.” I thought a minute. “Which way was she facing?”
“North.”
“Well, there you are.” Daddy winked at me as I spoke. “She’s telling us God wants us to shut that place down. Best tell Reverend Tyler.”
“And what about the car?” Grandpa asked.
“Will you stop fretting about that car?” Daddy said. “There’s nothing wrong with new things.”
“I don’t like them red seats,” Grandpa said. “They’re worldly.”
“Come on, Gramps.” I moved behind him and rubbed his thin shoulders. “The Bible says God wants us to prosper as our souls prosper. So what’s wrong with being comfortable?”
Daddy and I left for the car lot to meet his customer. The guy wanted to test drive the ’63 wagon. Daddy needed me to sit in the back seat and chatter so the customer wouldn’t hear the rattle in the differential.
The guy was short and round, and he scooted the bench seat up as far as it could go, crunching Daddy’s legs but leaving me room to sprawl. He must have thought I had a river of words in me. After we’d tooled around town a bit and then turned on to the highway, he said to Daddy, “Don’t that kid ever shut up?”
Daddy said to me, “Quiet down,” but his fingers hanging over the front seat were crossed. I flicked my hair up, tried to look younger than I was, and nattered on about homework and lunchroom and Reverend Tyler and the president.
The customer was all-over grins when he drove that wagon off the lot. He’d paid Daddy in cash, and Daddy folded a twenty into my hand. At home after supper Mama cut into a pecan pie and served all of us a hefty piece. Then I went upstairs to pray for an A on my French test and to think about Heidi Muller.
For weeks I softened her. We walked home together often, stopping at Ray Mundy’s for Nehis, sitting on the washroom steps and talking. I asked her what she planned on doing after graduation, and she told me she dreamed of moving to New York. Her one ambition was to work at Macy’s. I held her chin in my hand and studied her.
“Well, you couldn’t sell makeup because you don’t wear any.” She’d given up on the lipstick. “And you don’t look foreign enough to sell French perfume. Actually,” I told her, “you look like the kind of girl who could sell men’s things — you know, ties and stuff.”
She held her face steady in my hand, and when I moved my hand she moved her face, just a little, leaning into the touch. I brought my hand slightly closer toward me and her face stayed with it. When I dropped my hand entirely, she had to scoot back on the steps to keep from tilting over.
“It’s all beans anyway,” she said. “I’ll never be able to leave.” She sighed. “I’ll end up marrying someone around here and having kids of my own and helping my dad at the store.”
Then she gave me a soft look and asked about my plans. I spread my fingers and looked at them. “Whatever God’s plan is for me, that’s what I’ll do.”
She wrapped her hand around my arm. “You’re so good. I’ve never known anyone like you.”
I pulled out my Bible. “Let’s look at some scripture,” I said. I read to her verses from John. I pointed out the errors in her Catholic church. We talked of grace without confession. We’re all sinners, I told her. I stroked her fingers. God understands.
A storm was blowing in from the Atlantic. Breezes lifted her hair and she shivered. She hugged herself, and I caught a glimpse of a lacy bra as her blouse shifted.
I asked her if I could take her for a drive that evening after supper.
Rain gusted in that afternoon, and at home the lights dimmed. Mrs. Rogers and Timmy stepped over to borrow some candles just in case. Timmy wrapped his arms around my leg and told me how scared his puppy was. Mama couldn’t cook supper on the electric stove, so she laid out cold fixings for us. Power wasn’t knocked out completely, just weakened by the storm. The brown light thickened the shadows and made the rolled-armed sofa and chairs in the front room look like beasts hunkered down and waiting. I watched the sheet-metal skies rippling outside the louvered windows. Mama suddenly remembered wash on the line and ran outside; she came back in with wild hair and a flushed face. Daddy took the clothes basket from her and led her by the hand upstairs, leaving Grandpa and me in the living room. I was jangled by my thoughts of Heidi, and I paced while Grandpa fiddled with his dentures.
Noise built up around me — the rain spattering the window, the wind, the creak and roll upstairs — all of it deafening. I lay down on the carpet, pressed my hands to my ears, and heard my blood flooding in my head. I closed my eyes and then I must have slept.
I woke under the burden of one rumbling sound. The storm had passed. The sky was black, with lighter gray patches of clouds, but the air was dry. Grandpa still sat in the same chair, in his pajamas, his hands planted on his spread knees, his dentures in place. He was groaning through “Amazing Grace,” which must have been what woke me. I told him I was off to work a conversion, pulled on my raincoat, snatched up the Fairlane keys, and stepped outside.
The heavy rain had flooded the street with an inch or two of water, which was now percolating through limestone and trickling into the drainage canals that wove through town. The street light at the end of the driveway cast a yellow glow on creatures washed from their hiding places: slugs spotted the lawn, a snake oozed across my path, a blue-bodied land crab stared at me with tiny mica eyes. I picked up the crab by one claw and hurled it out onto the asphalt, and its shell split open.
The ground under the gravel driveway had softened with the rain. A ridge of silt and muck had washed up at the edge where the driveway met the street. The new Fairlane fired right up. I switched on the heater and the defrost and let the interior warm a bit.
I could see how events would unfold. I’d take her down the highway and then turn onto a side road. We’d stop someplace quiet, in a mango grove maybe. Someplace with no one nearby.
I put the car in reverse, but when I backed up, the wheels churned against that ridge between the driveway and the street. I thought about laying down some boards, but I was too distracted to bother. It was a small ridge; I could rock the car over it. I got back in and let the engine run a while longer, thinking.
The heater would roar at our legs and we’d shed our rain things. I’d talk a while and she’d listen, and then she’d bow her head. She’d finally accept the Holy Spirit’s blessing and be saved. She’d cry. In joy, I’d kiss her.
I shoved the gearshift into reverse and rocked up against that pile of mud. I put the car in neutral, revved the engine to get her going, then shifted back and forth, from drive to reverse, the car heaving first one way and then the other, building up momentum.
She’d kiss me back. My hands would find the buttons of her blouse. Her eyes might open in surprise, but then they’d close again. I’d push her further, my mouth at her breast, one hand stroking her knee, her thigh, slowly, slowly. She’d be warm to the touch. Her hand might stop mine, might try to push it away, but my hand would be stronger. Insistent.
I worked the car back and forth, rocking it, forward and reverse, wondering why there was so much resistance, until finally, with one more heave forward and a great lunge back, I was up and over the ridge.
Afterward, I’d pray with her.
I could think of nothing but Heidi as I plowed the car down the street to the corner. I signaled left and checked the rearview mirror, not even registering what I saw. The brown spill seemed just a part of mud and sand. But as my vision spun with the turning car, that huddled brown took on features under the yellow street light.
I wheeled around and drove back to the driveway, just to be sure, but I knew even before I knew. I pulled the car to the curb, yanking the parking brake but not bothering to shut off the engine, and sprawled out the door. Air sucked backward from my lungs, and I struggled for my voice, finally able to shout for help as I ran to the boy stretched across the gravel.
Mrs. Rogers flew out of her house, the puppy at her heels, her hair foamy with shampoo, her pink bathrobe clutched tight with the sash trailing wet behind her. She fell down beside Timmy and placed both hands on his cheeks, and by sheer will, it seemed, forced his eyes open. She didn’t seem to notice or care how her robe gaped. He squirmed a minute, tried to rise, then twisted his head at the sound of the ambulance. He closed his eyes again.
Mrs. Rogers rode with Timmy, and Daddy followed in the Fairlane, all the time muttering that this was “a hell of a thing.” Grandpa had pulled boots and a yellow slicker over his pajamas, and he held my hand in the back seat. At the hospital, doctors and nurses surrounded Timmy and took him away, Mrs. Rogers hanging on to Timmy’s hand beside the gurney. The rest of us waited on tweedy orange chairs in the lounge. Gradually the room filled up with neighbors and members of our church. Grandpa’s prayers rumbled under their voices. Someone pushed a carton of juice onto the scarred plastic table next to me, but I wasn’t interested. I tried to pray for Timmy, but mostly all I could pray was, Please, God, don’t let me go to jail. Over and over I prayed this, my hands folded under my chin.
Slowly, though, people began to question how I’d come to run over Timmy. Mama cast worried looks at me. Daddy was talking to someone on the phone. Then Grandpa stood tall and crusty as a tree and said, “I’ll tell you how this happened.” He pointed a finger at me. “Satan!” he cried, and a stone swelled in my throat. “This boy was on his way to save a soul — a little Catholic girl lost in her papistry. What’s a child’s body to Satan, measured against a soul lost to him forever?”
I swallowed hard and the pressure in my throat eased. Voices in the room picked up, wondering. My mother stroked the hair at the back of my neck. Daddy hung up the phone and sat beside Mama, his hand on her knee.
Finally, Mrs. Rogers stepped into the room and told us Timmy had two broken thighs and a concussion. He was asleep.
“You know what that means,” Grandpa said. “Angels are still battling over him.”
“Oh, Jesus, save our poor Timmy,” someone wailed.
“Go to him, boy,” Grandpa prodded.
Mama squeezed my hand. “Honey,” she said, “you’ve got to pray for him.”
I stood up and reeled. Blood washed from my brain. My vision began to shrink, and the people in the room seemed separated from me by some fold in the air. Mama’s face bobbed in front of me and then was gone. I heard a piano playing. My skin felt damp, but not uncomfortable. Then bright shards of color broke before my eyes, dazzling. I began singing, but not in any language I knew, and the words pulsed with joy. I looked down at my body, fallen on the floor, and then pale hands carried me off into a sea of warm cotton.
As soon as I opened my eyes again I spoke. “I’ve been to see Jesus,” I said, and Mama patted my forehead. Her face was flushed with sweetness.
I lay resting. The lights overhead flickered and Grandpa held his finger to his lips. “Something holy is near,” he said. We all waited. “Everyone, take off your shoes.” Women stepped out of pumps; men unlaced boots. We formed a ring amidst the furniture, holding hands, and we prayed. Tears ran down my face and dripped onto the linoleum where I’d lain. Grandpa told me to speak and I did, calling over and over to Him to cast the demons from poor Timmy. And when my throat finally closed and no more words could come, I whispered, “Amen.”
I shut my eyes. Timmy was asleep and dreaming in his hospital bed. Slowly the warring images would fade from his child’s mind and his eyes would peel open. I opened my own eyes. “He’s healed,” I told the crowd. Mrs. Rogers came back to the lounge to tell us Timmy had awakened.
Grandpa and Mama, our neighbors and church members, even Daddy, stared at me. And then, one by one, they came to where I stood in the middle of the room and knelt. Mrs. Waters told me of her trick knee and how it hampered her gardening. She mourned her prize azaleas. I touched her knee and called on the angels to firm the joint.
Bob Johnson said his back spasmed up after extra hours in his truck. He’d just made a run in from Biloxi and he was clenched now. I pressed the muscles with my fists and touched his forehead, where tension also knotted. I prayed for Jesus to ease his muscles and relax his spirit.
Bessie Millhouse had a glass eye, and the right side of her world was dark. I grazed my palms across her eyelids. The lashes fluttered against my skin. I called on all the power in heaven to grant her vision. I moved to her right to welcome her as she opened her eyes. She pulled her grandmother’s ruby ring from her knotted old finger and thrust it into my hand. “For your good works,” she said.
And then Heidi Muller was there. “I came as soon as I heard,” she said. She looked down, shy, and the fine strands of hair veiled the sides of her face. “I’ve been praying all the way over.” I grabbed her hand and led her down the corridor, turning one corner and then another, moving away from the crowd to where the hospital hummed with silence. We came finally to a long hallway lined with closed doors and lit with flickering light. She leaned back against the wall, and I grasped her other hand, holding both of them together in mine.
Looking at her, I felt a surge from my belly to my knees. Her anklets were wet with rain. The corduroy skirt she wore flared out over the curve of her hips. Her locket flattened her blouse between her breasts, and underneath the white cotton I could see the patterns of lace in her bra. A pulse leaped in the hollow at her throat. Her face was naked with trust, but I knew that deep inside where her heart lay beating, some sliver of doubt caused her pain. I would lift my hands to stroke it away.
“Evangel” originally appeared in Louisiana Literature.
