Jesus Land. Julia Scheeres
for heatstroke,” Mother, a nurse, warned us before we left. “If you get cramps or diarrhea or start to hallucinate, walk your bikes.”
Sweat drips into my eyes, warping the landscape, and I lift my T-shirt to wipe my face, flashing my bra at the empty world. Ahead of me, David rides shirtless, his scrawny torso gleaming like melting chocolate. He’s draped his T-shirt over his head and tied it under his chin like a bonnet. Like a girl. As if he didn’t look dorky enough with those black athletic glasses belted to his head with that elastic band. If anyone from Harrison sees us, we’re doomed.
William Henry Harrison is our new school; Hick High, the townspeople call it. There will be 362 people in our class, compared to twelve at Lafayette Christian, our old school, and we don’t know a single one of them. These are farm kids who’ve known each other since they were knee-high to a rooster, kids who’ve probably never seen a real live black person before. Kids who worry us a lot.
I stand up and stomp on my bike pedals, trying to catch up with David and tell him to put his shirt back on, but he’s on his second wind and flying over the crumbling pavement at enormous speeds. I yell at him and he rolls to a stop in the shade of an oak tree, turns and grins as I glide up beside him. I stand over my bike, panting, and point at his head.
“What’s up with that?”
“Keeps the sweat outta my eyes.”
“Looks queer.”
He shrugs and pushes his glasses up his nose.
“Come on, take it off. Someone might see you.”
“So?”
“Do you want people to think you’re some kind of weirdo?”
He shrugs again and stares across the road at a herd of cows trying to cram themselves into the shade of a small crabapple tree. His jaw is set; once David’s brain has clamped onto a notion, there’s no unclamping it.
I shake my head and reach into the grocery sack strapped to his bike frame for a can of strawberry pop. When I yank off the metal tab, warm red froth bubbles over my fingers.
“Gosh darn it!”
I hand the can to David.
“Go on and drink your half.”
We’re saving the other can for the graveyard. I lick the sugar from my fingers and watch a cow, this one with a black body and white face, plod after the shadow of a small cloud that drifts across the pasture. When the shadow slips over the fence, the cow halts, lifts its tail, and spills a brown torrent onto the ground. I wrinkle my nose and turn to David.
“Remember when we used to ride to Kingston pool to swim every day?”
He stops drinking and peers at me sideways. His face is dry while mine drips sweat; maybe there’s something to his bonnet notion after all.
“’Course I remember, dufus. That was just last summer.”
“Point is, we never knew how good we had it, compared to this.” I swipe my arm across the landscape: corn, cows, barns. More corn.
“Could be worse,” David says, giving me the pop can.
“How’s that?”
“We could be dead.”
“Well, yes. But this has gotta be the next best thing.”
He snorts, and I drain the can and drop it back into the sack.
We push off and are just gaining momentum when a long red car with a jacked-up rear end barrels around the corner ahead of us. It races in our direction, the thrum of the motor getting louder and faster. Suddenly, it lurches into our lane.
We swerve down a small embankment into a cornfield, crashing hard into the bony stalks and paper leaves. The car blurs by amid hoots of laughter.
David untangles himself from his bike and offers me a hand up. I charge up the embankment to the road.
“Stupid hicks!” I scream after the car, as it evaporates into the horizon. “Frickin’ hillbillies!”
David walks over to stand beside me.
“They must be bored too,” he says. He shakes his head at the blank horizon and reties his bonnet. He always takes things calmer than I do.
We’ve seen the country kids before as we’ve traveled back and forth to town for church or supplies. We’ve seen them slouched against pickup trucks, sharing round tins of spit tobacco. Lounging on plastic chairs in front yards, watching cars go by. Maneuvering giant machines through the fields, their bodies dwarfed by metal.
They are alien to us, as we must be to them.
So much for the famous “Hoosier hospitality.” When we moved to our new house, no one stopped by with strawberry rhubarb pie or warm wishes. Our neighbors must have taken one look at David and Jerome and locked their doors—and minds—against us.
David and I shove back onto County Road 50, determined not to waste our journey. We clear a small rise and spot the cemetery a quarter mile ahead.
“Race you!” David shouts.
We crouch behind our handlebars, and David gets there first, as always. We lean our bikes against the fence, which is coated with a fine layer of orange rust, and walk around to the gate. It creaks as I push it open. David rushes past me to a gray block of marble just inside the fence that is roped with briars. He tramples down the vines and squats before it.
“Here lies Mabel Rose Creely,” he reads as I peer over his shoulder. “Born April 18, 1837, dyed November 9, 1870.”
He looks up at me with a smug grin.
“They spelled ‘died’ wrong.”
“Like, duh.”
I pick my way through the brambles and crooked tombstones to a large tablet set off by itself in a corner and tap it with my shoe to flake off the mud plastering its surface.
“Check it out!” I call to David. “Enus Godlove Phelon! He’s got your same birthday, June 2, 1851! Died October something . . . I can’t make it out.”
“What’s that name again?”
“Enus Godlove Phelon.”
“Anus?”
“No, Enus! With an ‘E.’”
“What kinda name is that?”
“A redneck name, for sure!”
We snicker and kick about for more stones. As I crouch to read them, I try to put the car out of my head and focus on the dead people beneath our feet. This is serious business, and I’ve got serious questions.
First, there’s the appearance of the folks in the boxes. Do maggots fester in their eye holes like in horror movies, or do they stay pickled like the frogs in Biology class? David thinks it takes about two hundred years for a person pumped full of formaldehyde to turn into a skeleton, but I’m not so sure . . .
Then there’s the Afterlife question. Where is the soul of the person I’m standing on right now—Heaven or Hell? Were they satisfied with their lives, or did they want more? If they could go back and do it all over again, what would they change? Is Heaven all it’s cracked up to be?
As I’m contemplating all this, I detect a movement out of the corner of my eye and raise my head. The red car. It prowls noiselessly along the cemetery’s edge and rolls to a stop beside our bikes. I look at David, who’s bent over a marble cross, cracking up over some dead woman named “Bessie Lou.”
“David.”
“. . . better name for a cow, don’t you think?”
“David, stop it!”
His head shoots up at the alarm in my voice, and he follows my gaze to the car—four