“God, I don’t know.”
I held my breath, waiting for the inevitable “amen” to float off in the undertow, but it never came. Mama dropped her hands and opened her eyes and the blasphemy shook the house with that one unused exhalation.
I never claimed to be a religious person, but the Holy Father had been a perpetual force in my soul for reasons that were never fully explained to me. It was just the way the world spun. Who was to argue? God sat in his heavenly throne and watched us scamper around, scared human squirrels, scavenging the wreckage in which we wasted away. I could never tell if that was a comforting thought or a terrifying one. I could never tell my dreams from my nightmares. Were dreams a glimpse into paradise or were nightmares a taste of Hell? If Heaven existed only in our minds, who was to tell is that the pills and the knives and the ropes and the water wasn’t the way to go?
Mama left us silent at the table and cleaned up the last supper. Papa pretended he hadn’t heard her and began to recite the holy scriptures, encouraging us to join him in the least subtle way possible. I thought Mama was speaking along but when she passed behind me I heard no voice. I pinched my wrist to remind myself that I wasn’t in Hell.
Papa cried himself to sleep more than Mama ever did, and I stayed awake with an uncomfortable feeling in my chest and wished I could be anywhere else. In the morning I would change all the sheets in the house to ensure that his sorrow would not carry through the bed and into his body, but it persisted in the air and in his thin lips and in his ashy blue eyes. When August was born and Mama wouldn’t let him name the child Esther, his Bible grew tear stains and aged wrinkles. Carefully he painted over the blessed letters on the first page and wrote in August in trembling type. Who was to say if it was worse to sin against his wife or sin against his Holy Father? In the morning, Mama would still be there.
August whimpered in her highchair and Papa rose abruptly, but not to save his daughter. Her bright brown eyes defied his own blue ones, and all at once I guessed the truth and sank below my prayers, into my mind, into my nightmares. Mama hummed to herself in the kitchen and Papa’s footsteps followed him from the table to the tired night air. August cried. August screamed. Mama’s humming changed from a flute to a full orchestra and glass shattered on the tile. Matthew closed his eyes and I took his hand and squeezed his fingers and I knew he was falling into Heaven or Hell or maybe nowhere at all.
When Mama and Papa were married, he should have known that the blue flower was his first warning. But she kissed his virgin lips and he didn’t stop her, and when she slipped the flower’s stem into his coat pocket he didn’t stop her, and when she stepped so gracefully from her white dress... Papa’s righteousness got him into more trouble than his sinfulness ever did, and life is unfair and I don’t think I was ever supposed to be born.
Matthew and I followed Papa’s bootprints from the back door to the river, and from the river to the highway, and that was where the dust and wind betrayed us and we sat on the shoulder and hoped a car would drive by. The starlit air blew us Bible pages and we read each one aloud before tossing them back up to be caught by Fate, or the Hand of God, or by the breaths of the Earth to be taken to the next needy soul.
“We never did ask God for Papa to leave, did we, Dinah?” Matthew’s baby voice broke through Hell and settled sadly into his soft lungs. “We never did.”
“No, Matthew,” I said.
“Who’d ask God for something like that, Dinah? Who’d do that?”
I kissed his curls and blinked through my ignorance. The stars stared down at us scornfully, mocking our blind belief and our scripture-saturated minds. In the stillness I heard gunpowder find its violent death, and I drew Matthew close to me and began to sing, closing out the Earth and its cheating ways. Matthew did not yet know to interpret Nature’s unnatural voices and he slept and drifted into Hell again, easily and simply.
Who was to say what anything was, really? Mama’s prayers had paid off, and our lack of prayers died in our lack of sin. Papa’s Bible blew through Earth’s lungs and I wondered if he passed with his faith or with his religion. I wondered where he had found the pistol. I wondered who August would call her father. I wondered what Matthew would remember when he escaped from Hell.
I wondered if I would ever sleep again.
