Rapture of Canaan by Sheri Reynolds Read Free Book Online

breakfast call squawked out, scaring us both, and fluttered awkwardly down to the ground. Pammy jumped, and I hollered. The chicken ran out through the door, out into the sunlight.
    I laughed to see Pammy jump, and she laughed to hear me holler, and we forgot, for a minute, about David and Laura’s baby. On the way back to the houses, we were chattering and laughing about the big red hen. And then we remembered.
    Passing by the barn, we picked up Mustard and James and our second cousins John and Barley, who’d been feeding the pigs.
    “Wonder what Laura did?” Barley asked us.
    “What do you mean?” I said.
    “Grandpa Herman said she’d sinned. Said unconfessed sin was what made that new baby want to leave.”
    “That’s not true,” I hissed.
    “That’s what Grandpa Herman said,” John insisted.
    Hardly any women were at breakfast at all. Just Aunt Kate and Aunt Velma, who had cooked. Even the “good mornings” were somber, and we picked up our toast, eggs, and ham off the serving line, carrying it to the table without saying a word.
    Most of the men were there, and midway through breakfast, Pammy called out, “Where’s Grandpa Liston?” I hadn’t seen my daddy since early. I didn’t know where he could be.
    “He’s at the barn,” Ben Harback answered, then paused to finish chewing what was already in his mouth. “Working on that baby’s crib.”
    Nobody said a thing. I didn’t look up, but if I had, I know I would have seen the other men giving him glances full of fury. It wasn’t the kind of thing he should have said out loud. Ben Harback had come into the congregation several years earlier and claimed the beliefs almost as though he’d made them up himself. But he wasn’t family, and he didn’t know the unspoken rules, the ones you couldn’t find in Grandpa Herman’s booklet. He didn’t know that when other people are in pain, you don’t talk about it. You let them feel what they’re feeling in private. You leave them alone.
    Just before the bus came, I ran into David and Laura’s house to kiss Mamma goodbye. She was in the room with Laura, and Bethany wouldn’t get her for me.
    “She’ll be here when you get back,” Bethany said.
    “Will Laura be okay?” I asked her.
    “She’ll be fine,” Bethany assured me, and shooed me out.
    On the bus that morning, I sat with James. I had the seat facing the window though, and I didn’t look his way. I stared out, through the fogged-up glass, watching Fire and Brimstone get smaller and smaller and trying to talk myself out of choking on something big and angry in my throat.
     
     
     
    W hen we got home from school that day, Nanna was the one who gave us the news that Laura wouldn’t be having a baby and wouldn’t be feeling like talking for a time. David was with her, but everyone else was in the cemetery behind the church where they were laying it to rest. James asked if the children could go to the burial, and Nanna said yes.
    I watched them all take off running with their books, their black shoes kicking up dirt behind them.
    “I don’t have to go, do I?” I asked Nanna.
    “Won’t bother me if you stay here. You can help me cut up taters.”
    I told Nanna I needed to do something first, and she didn’t ask any questions. I dropped my books on the doorsteps and ran the other way, towards the barn, to the place where Daddy’d been building the crib.
    I swung open the barn door and slipped inside, to the very back where the saws and lumber and tools were kept. The crib was finished, small and perfect, sturdy legs and sanded boards, low so that Laura, who was short, could easily reach in. He’d even carved a swirly design onto the headboard. And while I was sad about the baby that wouldn’t be, I might have felt the most sadness for Daddy.
    When I got back to the house, Nanna was standing outside listening. There were raised voices coming up from the cemetery, almost like yelling. It didn’t sound like preaching though. It