Chapter 1 #2
In my first memory, I was four, and my father was healing a thirteen--year--old boy who had cancer.
We were in the white clapboard church that was always too hot in summer, even when the fans were all blowing, and Simon was slumped in a chair in front of the pulpit.
My father, in his sonorous voice, prayed over Simon, helping him out of the chair.
He put his hands on Simon’s chest, right over his weak, damaged heart.
“Feel the power of God,” my father intoned, and Simon fell backward into his mother’s arms, slain in the Spirit.
When he roused again, this time standing on his own, my father said, “Are you healed?” and when Simon nodded, the entire congregation praised the Lord.
I do not know if my father really healed Simon that day, mostly because I was not entirely sure he was sick. I’d seen him running around earlier that week with some other boys, playing ball. He died a year later, not from a heart problem, but because he got drunk and overturned an ATV.
These were the kinds of thoughts my father tried to drum out of me when I was growing up as the daughter of Reverend Ezekiel Owens, the Evangelical preacher of the Church of the Living Word in Borden Springs, Alabama—-a tiny town nestled in a valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Lord knows I wasn’t like my little sister, Adie, whose first sentence happened to also be the shortest sentence in the Bible: Jesus wept.
She had strawberry--blond ringlets and blue eyes and roses in her cheeks, and everyone said she was heaven--sent.
Me, I got whispered about. Rebellion was a splinter in me I could never quite dig out.
By the time I was thirteen, I knew I was in trouble.
Although God should have filled every empty space in me, I was always starving.
Not for food, but for art. At school, I’d taken a drawing class, and it felt like being reborn.
When I had a sketch pad in front of me, or an easel with paints, I could be anywhere; all I had to do was imagine it.
So I drew faces of people I did not know and had never met.
I painted cities I had never traveled to.
I did still lifes with fruit so ripe it split down its seams, juice running onto the table.
I sketched ladies in broad--brimmed hats, drinking wine; beaches made of sand as white as sugar.
When I didn’t have charcoal or a paintbrush, I’d draw on the steam of the glass in the shower and wipe it away.
I’d sketch in the flour left behind from a loaf of bread I was kneading.
I’d doodle on the margins of my math textbooks.
I went to the public library and looked at the mismatched features in Picasso’s work, the rosy flesh of Renoir’s nudes.
I ran my fingers over photographs of David’s marble abdomen, I felt the grief weighing down the Virgin’s shoulders in the Pietà.
I was an addict, and art was my drug of choice.
The only person in my family who knew about this was Adie, who kept my secret, because the only thing my sister loved more than God was me.
One day my father preached a sermon about love. “Love is need,” he said. “It’s transactional.” I turned the sentence over in my head. I needed to draw. I loved the act of creating something from nothing, but I didn’t see it as a transaction. I received joy, but lost nothing.
Except money. I used school supplies when I could, but yesterday, Satan had been sitting long enough on my shoulder for me to slip ten dollars out of Mama’s shiny patent handbag when she was in the kitchen, and I’d bought myself watercolors and a pad at the one general store in town. No one knew, not even Adie.
My father was still commanding the room, his voice gathering thunderclouds. “Now some will say . . . need? That’s base. That’s involuntary. They will say no, love is a choice.”
As always, Adie and I were flanking my mother in the front pew. Mama was as serene and still as Beecham Lake at dawn.
When Daddy morphed into Reverend Owens, he was electric.
His hair, always combed back from his forehead, fell over one eye, displaced by excitement.
Fire blazed behind his amber eyes. “So do we need Jesus?” he challenged.
“Or do we love Him?” He glanced around the congregation.
“The answer is both.” He took a step forward until he was staring right at me. “Do you need Jesus?”
I was frozen, like a deer. He knew. He knew I’d taken money from Mama; he knew I’d bought myself art supplies, a pursuit that was frivolous and ungodly.
YES! the congregation replied.
He broke off eye contact with me and crossed the dais to bellow at the other side of the church. “Do you love Jesus?”
YES!
His hands came up, his eyes rolled back in his head. “Hallelujah!” my father cried. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God!”
I was not pure of heart.
Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. I ducked out of the pew and ran to the back of the church, locking myself in the handicapped bathroom. I started praying, promising that I would tell my mother what I had done; that I would become an honest, devout girl.
But as a trickle of blood ran down my leg, I realized that wasn’t what Satan had in mind.
The only person who knew I was dying was Adie. She had followed me to the bathroom to make sure I was okay. When she saw the mess, she pulled me a new dress out of the charity bin and ran to get my mother, who marched me out of the church toward our house. “We need to have a talk,” she said.
I ducked my head, muttered a yes ma’am, and followed her up to the bedroom, where she and Daddy slept.
I started shivering—-I had enough memories of being punished here, bent over this bed while my father wielded a metal hairbrush.
But instead, she took me into the bathroom and clasped my face between her hands.
“Eloise,” she said, “you’re a woman now. ”
It took me a moment to realize that she didn’t know I’d stolen money, and another moment to feel stupid for not connecting what was happening to my body to menstruation.
But then, no one had ever talked to me about it, and I had been excused from the films showed at school in health class due to religious exemptions.
All I knew was that being a woman meant you could have a baby.
I didn’t realize that there was such a mess involved.
As she pulled out sanitary pads, my gaze fell to the bottle of pills on the counter, which Mama took every day.
They sanded her edges and made her a little blurry, from her soft voice to the way she moved like gauze in the wind.
But it was better for her to take the medicine than to not take it.
When she ran out of her pills, she would take to scouring the house in the middle of the night or speaking in tongues.
Once, she got so sad, she did not leave the bedroom for a week.
“This is Eve’s sin,” my mother explained.
“Once a month, we bear it.” She explained to me how to use the pads as my cheeks got redder.
When she started talking about boys, and how I could no longer get too close to them because terrible things would happen, I thought I might die not of blood loss, but of embarrassment.
But then she took me into the bedroom and unraveled my moonlight hair from its messy ponytail.
She took a white ribbon from a bird’s--eye maple box on her nightstand and started to French--braid it into the strands.
It was how my mother always wore her hair.
“So God can find you more easily among the sinners,” she said, her hands working.
When she finished, she tied it off. “Tomorrow, we’ll get you some white dresses. ”
As the wife of the preacher, Euphemia Owens always wore a white dress. It made Mama look like an angel on earth. I guess she meant for me to be one, too.
She never did find out about the money.
A month later, my father held a purity ceremony in the Church of the Living Word for young women like me.
There were six of us dressed in virginal white.
My father quoted Romans 13:14 as he invited us up to the dais.
On it was a long table, covered with a red tablecloth and candles, and a chair for each of us to sit in.
It looked like a set for a Valentine’s Day film, or maybe a vampire movie.
“Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh,” he said.
As he spoke, he placed an Oreo on a plate.
“Now, God is sovereign over the universe, but Satan rules over earth. Between Satan’s influence and man’s flawed free will is where sin lives. ”
The congregation was there to bear witness, but the only people on the dais were us girls.
My father walked toward me first, holding out the plate. “Spit on it, Eloise,” he said.
I looked at him, alarmed, but there was no way I was going to defy him in front of everyone.
So I spat. He brought the Oreo to the next girl, and the next, asking them to do the same.
“Who wants the first bite?” he asks, holding the cookie out to the congregation.
“Anyone? Of course not. No one wants a cookie that has been spoiled. And no one wants a girl who is impure.”
Then he beckoned five men sitting in the front pew—-the fathers of each of the girls. “Men, please join your daughters.”
Each man stood behind his daughter, except for mine. My father walked the length of the table. In front of each girl, he placed a red card with a heart in the center. True Love Waits, it said at the top, and there was a vow written below it.