Jesus Land. Julia Scheeres
were still mulling over Florida at age twenty, when I was a college sophomore in Michigan and Dave enlisted in the Indiana National Guard. His lot was starting to improve. He bought a secondhand Plymouth Turismo—black with red racing stripes—and on August 1, 1987, he was driving over to show it off to me when he lost control on a gravel country road and slammed into an oak tree.
He died four miles from our childhood home, and nine hundred miles away from Florida.
A part of me died that day, too—the hopeful part. The unfairness of his death, coming just as his life was becoming what he wanted it to be, astounded me. It enraged me. I spent the next two years of college haunting the municipal library and eating from vending machines so I didn’t have to interact with those ebullient, carefree college kids. How I resented their unstained hearts and unclouded futures. My anguish morphed into physical pain: chronic migraines, heartburn I tried to quell with peach schnapps. I no longer had David to counterbalance my tendency toward gloom. He’d always believed that life could—would—only get better. He had been wrong.
After graduating with a BA in Spanish, I flew to Spain, vowing never to return to the United States. Overseas, I tried to forge a new identity. When asked about my family, I’d talk about my other siblings, never mentioning David. I distracted myself with men and dancing and remote sunbaked villages. I fell in love, and then that love fell apart, and I was forced to return to the States.
I enrolled in graduate school to become a journalist; I wanted to focus on other people’s lives instead of my own. And with time, I let David come back to me: in my memory, in my writing. I remembered his ability to make me laugh with his silliness and the feeling of security he gave me, the way he always had my back.
I never did move to Florida. I chose somewhere more progressive and diverse: California. Today, as I walk down the street here past people of every color, I deeply regret that Dave didn’t make it this far. After all these years, the fact of his death is still a sucker punch to the heart. But then I look down at the hand nestled in mine which belongs to my nine-year-old daughter, Davia Joy—my brother’s namesake. Davia celebrates her birthday one day after her uncle’s and sleeps with his stuffed Snoopy in the crook of her arm. They even share a nickname: Dave. Davia cherishes stories about her Uncle David. I relish telling them. Whenever I say “I love you, Dave,” I’m telling both of them.
Because love, I’ve learned, doesn’t end with death. It lives on. Even if it’s painful to remember, we must. Once I let myself think of David after years of running from the sadness of his loss, I felt a small measure of relief. Now I simply accept my grief—as part of the beauty and devastation that pulse, side by side, through every life.
2018
The events in this book took place a long time ago, and involve many people with whom I no longer have contact. In the interest of protecting their privacy, especially that of people who were minors at the time, I have changed names and, in some cases, identifying details.
The time element is compressed for the sake of narrative flow, but the events portrayed herein are true.
It’s just after three o’clock when we hit County Road 50. The temperature has swelled past ninety and the sun scorches our backs as we swerve our bikes around pools of bubbling tar.
A quarter of a mile downwind from Hanke’s Dairy, the stench of cow shit slams up our noses, and we rise in unison, stomping on the pedals and gasping toward the cornfield on the other side.
It’s been two weeks since we moved to the country, and this is our first foray into the wilderness beyond our backyard. Our destination is a cemetery we spotted during a drive last Sunday that Mother insisted on taking after church. While David and I sat in the back of the van glaring out opposite windows, she coasted down dirt lanes, chattering about edible corn fungus, pig manure fertilizer, and other gruesome factoids she’d gleaned from her recent subscription to Country Living magazine.
David nudged me when we drove by the graveyard. It was set back from the road a bit, filled with brambles and surrounded by one of those pointy black fences that circle haunted houses in children’s books, usually with a large KEEP OUT sign on the gate. This fence bore no such sign. We looked at the tombstones jutting sideways from the ground like crooked teeth, and knew we had to return.
We have a thing for bone yards, as we do for all things death-related. It’s part of our religion, the topic of countless sermons: Where will YOU spend ETERNITY? THE AFTERLIFE: Endless BLISS or Endless TORTURE? We are haunted by these questions. If we die tomorrow, will we join the choir of angels or slow roast in Hell? We’re not sure of the answer. So we are drawn to graveyards, where we can be close to the dead and ponder their fate as well as our own.
Once we pass Hanke’s Dairy, we sit back down onto our bike seats. Along the length of the cornfield, a series of plywood squares nailed to stakes bear a hand-scrawled message:
Sinners go to:
HELL
Rightchuss go to:
HEAVEN
The end is neer:
REPENT
This here is:
JESUS LAND
You see such signs posted throughout the countryside: farmers using the extra snippet of land between their property and the road to advertise Jesus Christ. Mother approves. She says the best thing you can do in life is die for Jesus Christ as a missionary martyr, but posting signs by the side of the road can’t hurt either.
“Anything to spread the Good News,” she says.
It was her idea to move to the country. She grew up in rural South Dakota and had been threatening to drag us back to the boonies for years. Dad finally caved in. His drive to Lafayette Surgical Clinic, where he’s a surgeon, is half an hour longer, but now he’s also gotten into the country act, donning his new overalls to drive his new tractor around our fifteen acres.
Our three older siblings escaped this upheaval by leaving for college, so that leaves my parents, my two adopted black brothers, and me.
Jerome, our seventeen-year-old brother, hightailed it out of this 4-H fairground a few nights after we landed. He got into a fight with Dad, stole the keys to the Corolla, and drove off. Hasn’t been seen or heard from since, which is fine by me, since Jerome is nothing but trouble anyhow.
So basically it’s me and David, our ten-speeds, and the open road. And while the country graveyard is puny compared to the one by our old house—Grand View Cemetery, which we visited often in search of fresh graves—it still contains dead people, and that’s what interests us.
It takes us five minutes to pedal past the cornstalks, standing higher than a man’s head, to a cluster of double-wide trailers on the other side. They’re anchored in a half circle, with an assortment of plastic flamingos and gutted vehicles strewn on the bald clay before them. The irritating twang of country music leaks from the trailer nearest the road, and as we sail by, a heap of orange cats lounging in the engine compartment of a rusted station wagon scatters into the dry weeds.
I