Rising Above Shepherdsville

  For my mother, Kathryn E. Hannebaum “pins”

  1

  f-i-r-m-a-m-e-n-t

  firmament (n.)

  the sky, viewed poetically as a solid arch or vault

  There I was, Mama, standing in the tall grass right next to Redeemer Baptist Church, the day after the Fourth of July, when I spied what I would have sworn on a heap of Bibles was an angel rising straight up to heaven. Enormous white wings spread and soared above me in a sunset so pink and gold, it promised miracles—even here in Shepherdsville, Ohio—a place badly in need of divine intervention, if you ask me.

  I never imagined in all my life I’d end up there—the tail end of nowhere without even a Kmart in sight. If I’d had my druthers, Mama, I’d have stayed at home in Paint Creek at Lilac Trailer Court, but I couldn’t have said a thing about it, even if I’d wanted to. At the beginning of June, Ray dumped me at the farm with Aunt Bernie, like a stray pup without a basket.

  Ray’s caterwauling about ditching me started a few weeks after you’d been gone. He’d gotten in the habit of parking me for days at his mom’s house while he was on the road. Old Shirleen didn’t have a say in it one way or the other either. She did her best—fed me stale-bread bologna sandwiches and Kool-Aid, trying without success to get me interested in Days of our Lives and General Hospital, fiddling with the rabbit ears wrapped in tinfoil on top of her old black-and-white TV.

  One night Ray showed up, downright pie-eyed. He stumbled up Shirleen’s front steps and accidentally yanked the screen door off her house. He stared at that screen door like it had up and bit him, Mama.

  “I am fed up trying to fix things, Dulcie.”

  He laid his wobbly head down on Shirleen’s old dinette table and just gave up on me.

  “I’m not your daddy, by God, so I can’t be responsible for you no more. You’d be better off with your own relations.”

  Ray packed up the trailer on Lilac Court the next day. He moved his stuff to Shirleen’s house. Then he put your knickknacks in boxes, along with your clothes, and sent them to the Salvation Army. He hauled me out to the truck cab, my jeans and T-shirts packed in your old suitcase. He strapped Maybelle to the rear, her rusty spokes and handlebars poking out every which way, then loaded my first-place tri-county spelling bee trophy, along with my dictionary, into a Kroger bag and tossed it behind the driver’s seat.

  He tucked the small wooden box with the brass plaque—LITTLETON FUNERAL HOME—between us on the seat and drove me to Shepherdsville in a thunderstorm, smoking Kools, while I looked out the window at endless cornfields, hoping he’d change his mind. I thought about what Ray had said about not being my daddy, how he couldn’t be responsible for me, and that I’d be better off someplace else. I wish I could have told him he was wrong on all counts. First off—though he wasn’t my daddy, he’d done a pretty good imitation of it for almost my whole life. Second—even if he wasn’t around as much as we wanted him to be, Mama, he always showed up to fix my bike tires, or make the best grilled cheese sandwiches, or if I’d had a bad day, cheer me up with a dumb joke and make me laugh so hard milk would shoot out my nose. Ray is the definition of responsible. Third, and most important of all—I knew I wasn’t going to be better off at Aunt Bernie’s farm. I didn’t know her from a stray cat. But I did know Ray. I knew he wasn’t going to change his mind and he wasn’t going to say another word. The only sound for a hundred miles was the squawking of his CB radio and the thunk-thunk-thunk of the windshield wipers.

  When I showed up with Ray, first thing Aunt Bernie did—after looking me up and down like I’d fallen off a manure truck—was hand me a Bible and start a crusade for my soul—church every Sunday and Bible reading every night. She also threw in housecleaning, dish washing, and feeding the hogs, for good measure. I guess Aunt Bernie imagined it couldn’t hurt my chances at the Pearly Gates if I had suffered the burden of manual labor, in addition to having spiritual guidance.

  Owing to her close personal relationship with the Lord, she figured I’d be a shoo-in with the Almighty if she dropped me off at Redeemer Baptist twice weekly in the evenings, for what has become my own personal abomination on this earth—Reverend Love’s Youth Bible Study Group.

  Surrounded by endless talk about heaven and the hereafter, it’s no wonder I imagined an angel in the sky that night. According to Reverend Love, back in biblical times angels popped up like weeds all the time, appearing to people willy-nilly, here and there, with some kind of proclamation or other.

  I didn’t expect one would show up in Shepherdsville, next to a dirt parking lot—smack in the middle of nowhere—in 1977, to deliver a message to a twelve-going-on-thirteen-year-old girl. Nope, I didn’t think even President Jimmy Carter could manage an angel on earth in modern times—though, Aunt Bernie suspected it wasn’t pure coincidence that the president and Jesus had the same initials.

  If I hadn’t wandered away in the overgrown patch behind the building to find a cool breeze, wanting to escape the heat for just a minute before my descent into that dingy old church basement and the impending gloom of a long evening of Reverend Love droning on about eternal damnation and sin, I would have missed that swan.

  For that’s what it was, Mama, only an earthly bird in flight, and not an angel at all. High above the treetops, rising like a rocket shot into the heavens, that majestic creature soared and took my heart along with it. Its wings gleamed, so pure and downy I wanted to reach up and touch them. The ease of that swan as it lifted into the sky made me want to climb aboard its back and fly away—far from Shepherdsville—back home to you, instead of standing by a ditch, next to a rickety church, clutching a raggedy Bible.

  Redeemer Baptist probably hasn’t changed one iota since you were a girl, Mama. The church is still a mishmash of old white clapboards nailed together, leaning every which way. The tired dirt-brown doors hang catawampus, repainted so many times, they don’t close right. A rusty brass bell hangs near the entrance, with a long tattered cord that Reverend Love pulls to call us inside to worship. The oversize cross on top of the roof is downright pitiful in its need to call attention to itself, and makes the whole building seem to say, I know I don’t look like a church, but this here cross is proof.

  Knowing you’d stood there, once upon a time, was a comfort. The landscape in front of me was like a faded watercolor: the waving field of patchy grass and poison oak; the weed-infested cemetery; the picnic area sprinkled with rickety tables; the rusty swingset leaning sideways in the gravel; the big oaks standing guard by the edge of the church property, surrounded by endless pasture. At the far end of the field, a broken-down fence with a NO TRESPASSING sign invited brave souls who might dare cross it.

  For the first time in the days since you’d been gone, Mama, something joyful welled up inside me. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but a sliver of water seemed to appear beyond the thicket of trees, like a mirage shimmering in the distance, beckoning me away from there. The sky hinted of things to come; a tinge of possibility lingered, right there with me. I knew I’d best get inside before Bible study began, but I hesitated, held fast by my desire to rise into the coming night air, right out of my church shoes, held aloft by those giant wings.

  Inside the church the choir began their practice for the service come Sunday. A current of air whispered to me, carrying the words of a hymn, their meaning as mysterious as the swan’s appearance.

  Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

  Let me hide myself in thee; . . .

  When I soar to worlds unknown . . .

  In a few weeks’ time, those voices would sing at my baptism—the event that Aunt Bernie and Reverend Love had arranged, Mama, in cahoots with the Lord, to save my soul and cure me of what they called
my “affliction.”

  My silence.

  I hadn’t spoken a word—not one—since you’d been gone, Mama. Not one sound in over two months. When I was called on to speak, I couldn’t. My words had dried up and blown away somewhere, and no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find them.

  After not getting a peep out of me, Ray took me to the mental ward of the Ross County hospital. The nurses gave me little pink pills. When I wasn’t sleeping, people in white coats shined lights into my eyes, lodged tongue depressors in my mouth, inserted needles, and wreaked tests upon me for six days, like the deadly plagues in the Bible.

  On the seventh day they brought me into an office. Ray sat in a wooden chair holding on to his International Harvester hat, his eyes blinking and twitching when he saw me.

  “She’s had a trauma,” the doctor said. “Take her home.”

  Then he handed me a small notebook with one of those yellow happy faces on it, and smiled.

  “Write down what you want to say.” He shook hands with Ray. “Time will take care of it.”

  Ray walked me out to Shirleen’s battered-up station wagon, muttering under his breath. “Time will take care of it, my butt.” He jerked the handle, opened the car door, and practically shoved me inside.

  He got in and said, “If you don’t stop this right now, I am telling you . . .” He gripped the wheel, his knuckles white. “I can’t lose my dang job, calling in sick, taking you to doctors all over creation. You need somebody to watch over you proper. I got to go back on the road. Shirleen’s too old to help out much. I can’t be expected to take care of a girl by myself—especially one who doesn’t say a blessed word.”

  I opened the notebook the doctor had given me and wrote: Go to H-E-double matchsticks, Ray. You’re not the boss of me. He said I was just stubborn. Maybe I was, because my voice was still on the loose, a runaway that had packed up and left.

  Imagine, Mama. Me—winner of the Paint Creek spelling bee, pride of Ross County, tri-county regional winner—washed up. The girl who’d stood in a gymnasium full of people, armed with definitions, pronouncing words as loud as you please—speechless—struck dumb.

  Dumb—that’s what they called me down in that church basement, along with a few other words I don’t care to repeat.

  “Dumb.” Webster’s definition: “lacking the power of speech.”

  D-u-m-b.

  Even when we didn’t have anything else, we always had words, didn’t we, Mama? All those nights with the television on the fritz, Ray off trucking somewhere, we traded the big blue Webster’s New World Dictionary back and forth, warming our feet next to the electric heater, going through the spelling lists, word after word.

  We collected the best ones like pretty rocks, looking for the shiniest ones to put in our pockets like precious souvenirs. Those words, you said, were our magic spell against unpaid bills, mac-and-cheese dinners, and the holes in our shoes. You said they would circle us and keep us from wanting: “infinitesimal,” “ameliorate,” “miraculous,” “obsequious,” “grandiloquent,” “percolate,” “bellicose,” “mercurial.”

  Like an incantation, the words conspired to get us out of the trailer court—sail us out of there. You wouldn’t have to serve another piece of pie at the Starliner Diner, or worry about Ray carousing at every honky-tonk on Highway 70, because I had a trick bag full of words.

  We had a plan, Mama. With those infinitesimal words, I’d get a spot at Briarwood Academy, where the rich kids went. With those miraculous words, I’d go to college. With those grandiloquent words, we’d get out of the trailer court forever.

  But you found your own way out of Lilac Court.

  Without any warning, I lost you . . . and I lost all the words.

  As I watched that swan disappear beyond the trees, my skin pricked into little bumps down my arms. Remember what you always told me, Mama?

  Goose bumps are a sign that a thing is true-blue, a way your body tells your mind that something is real and right in front of you.

  Nope, there was no angel with a message.

  Even if Gabriel himself had come down into the parking lot, stood on a picnic table with a megaphone, and hollered, “Dulcie Louise Dixon, you need saving!” I wouldn’t have believed it.

  I knew that swan was a sign, Mama. We both know the truth of it. There are some things you can’t be saved from.

  Nobody was going to save me from that church basement.

  Nooo-buddy.

  So I put down Aunt Bernie’s Bible, and ran.

  2

  s-a-n-c-t-u-a-r-y

  sanctuary (n.)

  a holy place; a place of refuge or protection

  With no idea what lay ahead, Mama, I followed that swan. My feet sang a hushed song as I swished through the wild grass along the fence line. When I came to the NO TRESPASSING sign at the far corner of the field, I stopped.

  I glanced back at the church—not a soul in sight—no sign of Reverend Love. The weathered wood fence lay in pieces on the ground. The lonely cemetery was barely visible from where I stood.

  I considered my next move—whether or not to cross to the other side. “Trespassing” was a mighty word in church. Reverend Love prayed every Sunday, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

  I gathered that curiosity wasn’t exactly the same thing as trespassing. Aunt Bernie had pointed out to me that curiosity was why the mouse who kept trespassing in her kitchen had ended up with his tail nipped off. But I figured that old mouse would never get the cheese if he didn’t have a sense of adventure. Maybe that was why he kept coming back—he knew that the cost might be worth the risk.

  I stepped over to the other side easily, but not before I ripped the new church dress Aunt Bernie had insisted on buying me at Marva’s Dress Shop in town.

  When I first came to Shepherdsville, she discovered that all I had in my suitcase were jeans and T-shirts. She was horrified. “These will not do in the Lord’s house,” is what she said, her face pursed up like a hundred-year-old prune. She bought me two ugly dresses from Marva’s with bows and pouffy sleeves—things I wouldn’t wear to a dogfight.

  There I was, Mama, the torn hem of my ugly dress hanging down, lopsided, as I picked my way into the wooded thicket past the fence line. Tiny burrs attached and burrowed into my knee socks. My hands stung from nettle scratches as I pushed my way through the overgrowth. Something pulled me forward, tugging me farther into the trees, their mighty trunks circling round like guarding soldiers. Over my shoulder the church disappeared from view.

  I pushed past dense weedy patches until I stumbled into a clearing of waist-high stalks and reeds. An enormous weeping willow greeted me, long tendrils dancing before me in the sun. Cattails and wild irises hid a treasure—the sliver of water I had glimpsed from the field behind the church.

  It wasn’t a real pond, more like a marshy green teardrop fixing to dry up, surrounded by bulrushes and shoots of tall field grasses. If I took good aim, I probably could have landed a rock on the other side—that’s how small it was. It was hard to tell where the water began and the earth stopped. A mounded nest of twigs and leaves rose on the uppermost branches of a fallen tree limb in the middle—creating a tiny makeshift island—big enough for Lilliputians, not sturdy enough for my Gulliver-size feet.

  Breathless from running, my heart thumping hard, I put my hand on my chest, still half-fearful Reverend Love might have seen me run off. I stood, motionless, waiting for my breath to return to normal.

  Like magic, two white swans glided past on the far side of the pond. They grazed along the bank, pulling reeds out of the shallows. They seemed to be waiting for me, like creatures out of a fairy tale, skimming the water, with their snow-white feathers and impossibly long necks curved into S’s. Their eyes gleamed, outlined in glistening black. Dipping here and there, their orange beaks glinted in the setting sun.

  Five little ones followed the bigger swans in perfect order, scrambling not to be left behind
. Their bodies sprouted light-gray downy feathers tinged with yellow-brown edges. I moved closer, careful not to disturb them. A twisted limb slanted off a gnarled tree, a perfect seat for me to watch them at their family business. I climbed up onto it and sat with my back against the trunk, legs outstretched, captivated.

  The swans seemed to have a natural language all their own. The babies responded to each movement of the bigger swans with little pecks and shoves. Their tiny wings unfurled like boat sails when they got riled. They pulled and tugged at one another, each movement full of meaning. The only sounds were little rustles of the water they disturbed.

  Immediately I felt as if I understood them and as if they understood me, too.

  As I watched them gliding on the surface of the water, I finally understood that poem Mrs. Whitehouse made us recite last year about how the beauty of the world is in the smallest things. Most of all, I remembered how it felt to let the words float effortlessly, like dust motes in the classroom.

  To see a World in a Grain of Sand

  And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

  Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

  And Eternity in an hour

  I wished I could have recited it again, letting my voice flow as freely as you please. But I only made breathy whispers when I tried, my lips forming the words, my body refusing to help my voice make sound. I was drowning in a pool of unspoken words, their weight keeping me silent altogether.

  Imagining you were right beside me helped. All I had to do was pretend we were sitting on the front stoop of the trailer at Lilac Court, or dangling our feet out at the lake.

  You always said if we looked hard enough, there are bits of heaven right here on this earth. This place felt like that for me—a place where I wasn’t expected to talk—where nobody wanted to cure me, where nobody stared at me like I was damaged goods. I wasn’t stuck in a hot basement with a crop of homegrown farm boys with cowlicks in their hair and manure on their shoes, or mean holier-than-thou girls who wore pretty dresses and ugly stares, who meowed under their breath, “Cat got your tongue?” or whispered just loud enough for me to hear, “Are you crazy? Crazy like your mama?”