Just Beneath My Skin (13 page)

AFTER HALF AN HOUR JAKE'S
dad comes and gets me. I am nearly falling asleep in the sun. He is still dressed in his preacher clothes. “Come inside for a minute, Nathan.”

I follow him out of the sun into the shadows of the church. It is cooler than when it was full of people. The sun shines through the stained glass window above the altar. It glows. In the glow, Jesus is surrounded by children.

I can read. I can read real good.
Suffer the little children to come unto me
, the words say at the bottom of the window.

I ask Jake's dad why Jesus would want the little children to suffer.

“It doesn't mean that,” he says. “It means
let
the little children come unto him. ‘Suffer' is another word for ‘let.'”

“Then why don't he just say ‘let'?” I ask.

“You shouldn't question what Jesus does or does not say,” says Reverend McNeil. “It's isn't proper.”

“Sorry,” I say.

“Besides,” says Jake's dad, “Jesus walked the Earth a long time ago, and things were said differently then.”

“As long ago as Alexander?”

“Alexander the Great?” he says, looking surprised.

“That's him,” I say. “As long ago as that?”

“Not quite as long,” says Jake's dad. “How do you know about Alexander the Great?”

“I'm named after him,” I say proudly, and I tell him all about my father giving me that name. I don't say Jake, 'cause I can tell he's like Mom and doesn't like to talk about it. When I'm done he says, “Well, Alexander the Great lived more than three hundred years before Jesus. He was a heathen.”

“What's a heathen?”

“Someone who doesn't believe in God. It was okay to be a heathen before Jesus was born, because those people didn't know any better. But now is a different story. A person can go to Hell for a long time for not believing in Him after He was born.” Jake's dad looks at me hard and I know what he's thinking, 'cause I remember the talk he had with Jake at breakfast.

“I believe in Jesus,” I say.

“Do you?”

“Irene Lang says Jesus is a part of everything. That He's just beneath everything, like the Earth or air, something that's always there but that sometimes you don't think about or can't see. But it's holding you up and keeping you alive just the same.”

“Irene Lang sounds like a wise woman.”

“She also says Jesus helps those that help themselves.”

“That's also true,” says Jake's dad.

“Jesus is just beneath the skin,” I say, thinking of Jake.

“Amen,” says Jake's dad.

THE LAST MONTH BEFORE MY
mother died she didn't come downstairs at all. Doctors came and went. We had to be quiet so she could sleep. At night I sometimes heard her cry out and my father would get up and go in and give her more morphine. I was not allowed to have friends over. Even in the yard I had to be quiet because the sound could carry up to her room and disturb her. I used to like throwing rocks at the power lines where the sparrows were lined up, and seeing them all fly off at once if I managed to hit the wire. I didn't stray far from home that summer, in case my mother wanted to see me, so I got pretty good at chasing off the sparrows, until my father came out and said the twang of the wire when I hit my mark was disturbing my mother and would I please stop.

“Besides,” he said. “Those birds are God's blessed creatures. You have no right to disturb their rest.”

Most times, that last summer, I would take a rod and go fishing in the river beside our house. You weren't allowed to fish with a reel in the river after April because you might hook a salmon, but I was too young to manage a fly rod. Normally my father wouldn't have let me fish either, but that summer he didn't care. Apparently trout weren't quite as blessed as sparrows
and at least I wasn't disturbing my mother. Sometimes, when being in the house got to be too much for him, he would bring a lawn chair out and sit and watch, though he had a walkie-talkie with him in case my mother needed something. She kept the other one in her room, though she hardly ever used it.

Doctor Bell told me once after my mother died she endured more pain without the use of drugs than any person he'd ever seen. She never complained. She never got mad, like sick people are sometimes supposed to do because everyone around them is healthy and they are dying. She never asked for the morphine that I remember, and so the only times my father gave her some was when she made those cries in the middle of the night.

Later I thought how much my mother must have been hurting to cry out against her will like that.

I REMEMBER JOHNNY HAS A
phone.

He hates paying for it, and he rarely answers it, but he needs one in case his supplier calls on short notice and he has to make a quick pickup.

“Business expense,” Johnny says about it.

I decide to give him a call, after Dad and Nathan leave for church, to see if he's come down and back to his senses. That would be a lot safer than sneaking back on his property and taking the car without talking to him. Maybe if he is all right he'll just offer it to me. I dial his number from memory in my father's kitchen. He answers after only one ring.

“What the fuck you want?” comes Johnny's voice on the line.

“Hey Johnny,” I say. My palms are sweating and it feels like the phone is gonna slip right out of my hand. But my voice is steady. I keep it steady, as I sit down in the kitchen chair, the phone still to my ear.

“Hey McNeil,” Johnny says. “Where are ya?”

I don't see any point in lying. He'll know where I'm at anyway. “At the old man's,” I say.

“Ahuh,” says Johnny. “I figured. I wasn't sure if I got you in the river. I looked around a bit, but I didn't find nothing.”

“You didn't get me,” I say. “I guess I got lucky.”

“Lucky's the word,” says Johnny. “I had you dead-to-rights, motherfucker.”

“You still mad?”

“Who me?” says Johnny. “Never was mad to begin with, bub.”

“You still want to kill me, then?”

“Maybe,” Johnny answers. “Depends on my mood when you get here.”

“But why, Johnny?” I say. “It doesn't make any sense. You'll go to jail. I'm dead. What good is that?”

Johnny doesn't say anything for a long while. Finally, just when I'm about to say something, he says, “I told ya: you've changed. Who says you get to get away, McNeil? Who says you're so much better than the rest?”

“I'm sorry, Johnny.” It's all I can think of to say. I hate myself for sounding so weak. But I am doing it for Nathan.

“You coming for the car?” Johnny says finally.

“I need it,” I say. “I gotta go back to work tomorrow.”

“Come get it then,” says Johnny. “I ain't gonna stop ya.”

“You're sure?”

“I'm sure,” Johnny says. “Just come get the fucking thing before I change my mind.”

MY GRANDFATHER TOLD ME MY
grandmother became a Christian down in that well while she waited for someone to come and rescue her from the fire. She prayed for a full day straight, with nothing to eat, her little boy crying, and standing in cold water from the waist down. They rescued her eventually, when men from the volunteer fire department came to see what was left of the house. They pulled my father out first, and then my grandmother, who fell down on her knees and started praying to God and thanking Him for saving her life and the life of her son.

For two days she and my father were put up in the Masonic Hall, where the North River Fire Department Auxiliary made up beds and cooked food for those burned out in the fire. They finally tracked my grandfather down in the logging camp up north, and brought him home. When he found my grandmother in the Masonic Hall she was kneeling beside her bed, praying. Already my grandmother had decided my father was going to be a preacher.

After they moved into the farm in Middlebridge, she made him sit down every day and learn his letters straight from the Bible. By the time he was ten he could quote that thing backwards and forwards. My grandfather complained he was living with two saints.

I know how my grandfather felt. When I was kid, whenever I did something wrong, my father would drag out sayings from the Bible and make me listen to them. It seemed like the Bible had something to say for every subject on Earth. By the time I was sixteen I was so sick of hearing it I swore I would never crack it open once I got out on my own.

My mother knew the Bible too, but she rarely quoted it.

Some people are cows, and some people are horses, and there isn't anything on God's green Earth will ever change that.

“NATHAN,” JAKE'S DAD SAYS. “I
want to talk to you.”

We are still sitting in the front pew. We both look up at Jesus suffering the little children to come unto him. Jesus is dressed in blue, and all the little children are dressed in red and yellow and green and they look real good. Nobody looks poor in that window, 'cause their clothes are too clean and bright and full of light. I get so wrapped up in looking at all the children suffering unto Jesus I forget to answer Jake's dad.

“You hear me?” he says. “I want to talk to you.”

“Yes, Mr. McNeil,” I say.

“Reverend McNeil,” he says.

“Reverend McNeil,” I say.

“Does your mother beat you?” he says then.

Suffer the little children.

“No,” I say.

“Jake says she does.”

“If Jake says she does then maybe she does,” I say. “But I don't remember it.”

“She never hits you. Or hurts you? Or knocks you down?”

“No sir,” I say. “Once I fell down and I broke my collarbone, and Jake thought she did it, but she didn't. I really fell down, and Jake didn't know.”

“Why would Jake tell me such a thing, then?”

“I don't know. Maybe he didn't tell you exactly.”

“He told me exactly,” says Mr. McNeil. “He says she beats you a lot, and that's why you're coming to live with him.”

“Maybe it's true,” I say. “But I don't remember it.”

“Nathan,” says the Reverend. “I want you to tell me the truth now. Does your mother beat you?”

Suffer the little children to come unto me, sayeth the Lord Jesus.

Dressed in purple and red and yellow and green.

IT TAKES ME ALMOST AN
hour to walk from my old man's place to the River Road. I could have hitchhiked. I used to hitch that road when I was a teenager and wanted to get into town and away from my dad for a while. The one good thing about being a preacher's son is that people always pick you up. There were always people coming back from Dad's sermons in North River, because there was no Baptist church there, just United. They would pick me up on Sunday and say, “You're Reverend McNeil's boy, ain't you?”

They would talk to me about God in the car, as if because my father was a minister I wanted to be one too. I couldn't tell them that being a minister was the last thing I wanted to do with my life. I didn't know if I even believed in God. I used to believe. The last time I remember believing was before my mother died and I looked up into the stained glass window in the church during one of my father's sermons, the one that shows Jesus sitting with all the children, and I felt warm and good and safe for the first time since my mother got sick.

I thought it was God.

Later on, after my mother died, I thought it was the heat, or the way the stained glass window looked so good with the sun
shining through it and all those children dressed in such bright colours.

IT ISN'T UNTIL I GET
to the River Road that I remember what I am doing and start to get worried. I keep expecting Johnny to step out from behind a tree with a gun and say, “Rejoice and tremble, McNeil,” like he did in my dreams. It takes me a half hour to walk that road, though it is only a kilometre and I could have done it in ten minutes. I'm not in any hurry to get there. I keep thinking about the bruise on Nathan's rib cage, and how he looked up at me with such a trusting look on his face.

Kids got nowhere to go when their parents don't treat 'em right. They're stuck there like they're in prison, until they're eighteen or so and they can get out on their own. If I get out of this alive, I'm giving Nathan a better life.

The river flows only one way.

AFTER MY MOTHER DIED, THINGS
got too quiet in our house. In the evenings my father would go into his study and work on his sermons. I would sit at the kitchen table doing my homework. I was a pretty good student, because my father made sure I did all my homework. After I was done he would check over my facts and figures and make sure everything was correct. If it wasn't, he would make me sit down again and do it until I got it right. Sometimes I sat there for three hours or more and my father stayed in his study, the two of us not saying a single word to each other. At ten o'clock my father would get up and come out into the kitchen and tell me it was time for bed. I would lie in my room and hear my father weeping to himself in what used to be his and my mother's room at the back of the house. I could picture him in there, lying face down on the bed, his face buried in his arms. That was the only time I remember feeling sorry for my father, and it was then I realized he wasn't God. He was only a preacher, a man of God, and they weren't the same thing.