Jesus Land. Julia Scheeres
They would take a black baby home and call him son.
Such was the theory.
Years later, I learned that the first time my mother touched David, she feared “the black would rub off on her hands.”
Later still, I learned the miracle of my brother’s beginnings. That David was born to a thirteen-year-old girl, three months premature and weighing two pounds—less than a bottle of Jack Daniels. That machines and heat lamps kept him breathing during his first crucial months. That he was placed with a succession of foster families that gave him different names and collected their government checks and shut doors so they wouldn’t hear him cry. They weren’t paid to love the fragile baby with the liquid brown eyes, they were paid to keep him alive.
My parents would keep him alive and save his soul.
David’s in okra and I’m in snow peas. We kneel in parallel rows killing Japanese beetles as the sun bores down on us. We each have different methods of doing this. David plucks the beetles off the leaves with gloved fingers, squeezes them until they pop, then tosses them over his shoulder. I find this repulsive. The ground behind him is littered with their mangled metallic green and copper bodies. My method is to bat them off the plants with a trowel, then press them into the dirt with the blade, where I won’t see their insides squirt out. Sometimes I whack off leaves or vegetables in the process, but at least I don’t see the beetles die. Secretly, I think they’re beautiful.
I pause to swipe my dripping forehead with the back of my arm and look up at the house. A grackle squawks overhead and lands on the clothesline, its purple-black body gleaming in the sun like spilled motor oil. At the end of the driveway, our mutt Lecka lies panting in the shade of her doghouse. Her name means “sweet” in Dutch. Our family tree reaches back to Holland on both parents’ sides, and we attend a Dutch Calvinist church in town where people slap bumper stickers on their cars that proclaim “If you’re not Dutch, you’re not much.” Until this year, we attended a Dutch Calvinist school as well, where all the kids were blond and lanky like me—all the kids except Jerome and David, of course.
Through the dark glass of the upstairs window, I can just make out Mother sitting in the recliner, feet up, a glass in one hand, a Russian-language book in the other. The ceiling fan spins lazily above her. She’s learning Russian because the Communists are persecuting Christians, and there’s a great need for people to smuggle Bibles behind the Iron Curtain to these clandestine congregations. She wants to be prepared should the Lord call her on that mission.
“What if the Commies catch you?” I recently asked her, although I already knew her answer: The best thing you can do in life is die for Jesus Christ.
But I’m not too scared of her being martyred. According to the page marked in her textbook, Take Off in Russian, she’s still learning to ask directions to the toilet and say “I prefer cream in my coffee.” She’s got a long way to go before she can pass herself off as a babushka.
The telephone jingles as I start down a row of cauliflower, and I look up to see Mother rise to answer it, disappearing into the shadows where light from the great room windows doesn’t reach.
Our new house is what they call “ranch style.” There are three bedrooms upstairs—the master suite, my room, a guest room—and one in the basement for the boys. They share it, just like they did in the basement of our old house.
The entire house, bathrooms included, is wired with an intercom system, and every morning at eight Mother blares Rejoice Radio over the speakers to wake us up. It took a while to get used to this. At first I would jackknife awake, panicked that I’d fallen asleep in church. Now when the organ music starts, I thrust my pillow over my head and try to refill my ears with the sweet syrup of sleep until Mother comes pounding on the door.
“Idle hands are the devil’s workshop!” she’ll call through the wood. It’s her favorite saying, along with “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” and “Honor thy father and thy mother.”
The intercom has another important function: spying. Control panels in the kitchen and master bedroom have a black switch that can be flipped to “listen” or “talk.” You can tell when Mother’s eavesdropping because the speakers crackle, but we can’t turn the volume down or off because we get in trouble if we don’t hear her call us.
When David and I need to speak privately, we go outside. We spend most of our time there anyway. Mother’s got romantic notions about toiling the land—or mostly, about her children toiling the land. And with fifteen acres, there’s always something that needs toiling with.
The garden gets the thrust of our attentions. We try to get at it early, before the vegetation perspires in the heat, sending up a dizzying haze that can sting your eyes. We work on our hands and knees, ripping out crabgrass and pennyworts, killing Japanese beetles and cabbage loopers, aerating and fertilizing, all the while swatting at the horse flies and sweat bees that buzz around us.
Although we complain about our chores, there is a satisfaction to poking an itty-bitty tomato seed into the dirt and watching it resurrect and snake into a six-foot vine. David and I take a certain pride in our work, marveling at the two-foot zucchinis and the baskets of ruby red strawberries our hands help produce. Our garden is so bountiful that Mother fills grocery sacks with the surplus to bring to the soup kitchen downtown.
“I bet there’s no Japanese beetles in Florida!” David says, pitching a crushed bug over his shoulder; it lands in the pink and orange zinnias bordering the garden.
“Nope, only geckos.” I pinch off a snow pea and bite through the shell into the sweet green balls inside. “And jellyfish.”
Florida! That’s where David and I are moving when we turn eighteen. Things are different in Florida. Until three years ago, our family drove there every August to a timeshare condo on Sanibel Island. David and I would spend the week running around barefoot and unsupervised. There was a group of secular kids at the complex who hung out with us despite our skin color. Florida’s the place where I first got drunk, first made out with a boy, first got my heart ripped to shreds.
Did it all on our last trip with Alex Garcia, a seventeen-year-old local who lounged around the complex pool in tight white bathing trunks. We flirted all week, and the night before we left, he convinced me to meet him on the beach at midnight. I wore my clothes to bed—carefully pulling the sheet around my neck so my older sister Laura wouldn’t notice—and watched the alarm clock for two hours, my heart racing. When I slipped out to our designated meeting place, Alex held beer cans to my thirteen-year-old face until I passed out. When I came to, he was lying on top of me, his tongue rammed down my throat. I pushed him off and ran away.
“You’re so immature!” he yelled after me.
The next morning I woke with bruises circling my mouth, but despite this, I loved Alex. He was beautiful with his caramel skin and those white trunks. But as we were driving out of the complex to return home, I saw him by the pool, frenching a twenty-two-year-old who’d just arrived that morning. I cried all the way back to Indiana.
“Too bad Jerome screwed everything up for us,” David says, rocking back on his haunches and scowling at me over the broccoli. His glasses are powdered with dust.
“Yeah, we’d be there right now if it weren’t for him,” I say, popping another snow pea into my mouth. I wonder who Alex is kissing this summer.
“I can’t believe Jerome was so dumb,” David says. “I mean, our parents aren’t completely dense.”
I nod and wave away a sweat bee that’s trying to land on my face. Our parents put an end to Florida when Jerome showed up one evening reeking of beer, too drunk to