Rapture of Canaan by Sheri Reynolds Read Free Book Online Page A

sounded strange and uneven.
    I took her hand and we hurried to the burial sight where Daddy was crying out, shaking his fist at Grandpa Herman and saying, “Don’t you ever say a thing like that again.”
    “Liston, those aren’t my words. They’re God’s words. ‘The wages of sin is death,’ ” Grandpa Herman said calmly.
    A few people in the midst nodded their heads in agreement, but Daddy shouted out again, “That’s not what God meant!” and he stormed away, Mamma hurrying to hold onto him, hugging herself into his side against the cold.
    N obody talked much about Laura and David’s loss, but ev erybody grieved it, I guess. Even old Grandpa Herman finally kept his nasty opinions to himself, and the community healed over, quietly, with nobody picking at scabs.
    But sometimes things hide beneath healed-up places. Flies lay eggs inside the gashes on cows and kittens, and then the wounds swell up, even after they’re closed over, and unless somebody opens the wound again to release the worm, the thing inside keeps growing and burrowing its way out, painfully, blindly, persistently.
    Maybe that’s what happened to me. Even two weeks later in church, when Laura caught the spirit, stood up, began dancing around, chattering out a prayer that changed into a language nobody knew, even seeing her recovered and filled with God’s strangeness, I hurt inside. It felt like something was trying to come out, something starving.
    I was sitting between Nanna and James when it happened, too old to eat candy in church and too young not to wish for it. In front of me, Daddy was calling out his prayers and Mamma was crying again, her hands held up as if she thought God was going to fill them with kisses. Nanna kept her face straight ahead, pretending to listen though I suspected that in her mind she was retelling old stories in new ways. Beside me, James scraped the dirt from beneath his fingernails and flicked it onto the floor. I looked at his hands, almost as big as a man’s, with his fingers widening at the tips like spatulas.
    I felt the way you feel sometimes right before you go to sleep, when all you want to do is sleep, and then suddenly, when you’re almost there, when your mind goes dizzy and it’s almost like you don’t have a body at all, you remember how long the night is, how you might not wake back up. And like a shock, you’re sitting straight up, scared to do the thing you’ve done every day of your life.
    And Laura began wailing out, stood up, and the congregation urged her on, their voices growing like mudslides. She shook and cried, her syllables tripping over themselves until she wasn’t saying anything we knew, and the words she said sounded hard and maybe like curses in other languages.
    “Praise be,” Grandpa Herman yelled.
    “Forgive me, Lord,” I could hear my daddy saying, his back in front of me curled like an apostrophe, the bolts of his spine threatening his skin, and his head leaned against the next pew. “Forgive me for doubting your holy and righteous word.”
    “Thank you for your strength, my King,” David called.
    “Without you, I would be nothing,” Laura chanted. “Without you, Oh Heavenly Prince, I would be lower than the ohlaba hebamashundi weya komo dhikam laticalama hebamashundi,” and as she spoke, her voice went higher and higher, and her breathing got stronger, and then she was panting and squealing, crying, “Help me remember thy awe-some and bewechya walabebeya komo hebamashundi,” and I was embarrassed. Embarrassed to be hearing her voice, stretching up like violin strings, tighter and louder and screeching and punctuated with her frantic breathing. Embarrassed to know what her tongue must be doing inside her mouth, rolling all over itself like it couldn’t help it. It sounded like something she should do somewhere else. Not in church.
    And I was embarrassed to be sitting next to James, hearing it all, though we’d heard it all our lives. And I was embarrassed