Blind Faith

Eighth in a series on my West Virginia childhood and Appalachian exile.

Once my mother was without a husband, my brother and I spent more time with Eva DeLancey, usually at her home. Born in 1917, she was older than our other babysitters, older even than all my grandmothers. Her husband Denward, with his white hair and thick glasses, seemed older than time itself. They lived in a house on a busy corner in the north end of town.

When I ran errands with Eva on foot in her neighborhood, she always wore a dress with practical shoes, her gunmetal hair short and curled above glasses with dark frames. We would march along cruel sidewalks without benches or grass until I complained bitterly, when she would point out that we had covered at most three or four blocks. Errand days were good, however, because she might be persuaded to stop at JR’s Donut Castle, which had real turrets bolted on above its chrome and fluorescent lights.

On other visits, my brother and I stayed for dinner and got ready for bed at Eva’s before our mother came to pick us up. The furnace for the house sat in her basement, with a rectangular grate on the main floor above it.

Wrapped in towels and shivering after a bath in winter, I laid my head on the grill of the vent to dry my hair. I listened for the sound of the furnace rumbling to life below just before the flame of the pilot light caught, followed by warm air surging up. I nursed a faint hope that just once it might carry me aloft.

Eva was a member of the Church of the Nazarene. When summer came, she drove my brother and me to vacation Bible camp for two weeks. The teacher gave out small prizes for reciting Scripture from memory (a little wooden cross, a miniature New Testament), which I racked up quickly with unchristian greed in a tight battle with another girl.

When it came time to say the Lord’s Prayer, I was ready, the nuns already having taught it to me at Montessori, where my mother could no longer afford to send me. My hand went up to volunteer before the instructor could even recite it aloud. After I finished, the teacher prodded me to keep going. But I’d said all I knew.

“That’s how it ends,” I told her.

“No,” she said, “it isn’t.”

The version I knew by heart didn’t include the closing that was canon in Eva’s church, lines about the kingdom and the power. The teacher seemed unnerved by the heresy of my omission more profoundly than if I hadn’t known the prayer at all. I was likewise scandalized that religious authorities could disagree about such matters, and more so when I found out they wouldn’t give me my prize for a prayer that had been perfectly acceptable to the nuns. It was my first experience of religious schism.

***

Later that year, Eva took me to a full Sunday service at her church. I liked the hymns and the feeling of energy in the room expanding and rising like a balloon. Down in front during worship, the preacher made a call for people to raise their hands to accept Jesus into their hearts—the only way, he said, that anyone could get to heaven. I hadn’t heard the part about raising a hand before, but I intended to go to heaven. My hand went up.

The preacher coaxed more and more people to surrender to Jesus, while the congregation sang and my arm grew tired. Eventually the pastor invited those of us with hands held high to approach the altar and be born again.

This was a different than a Catholic Mass, where I had been too young for First Communion and usually stayed seated in the pew. Being born again seemed like an opportunity, like getting to be in a school play. I walked with the others, nearly all adults, to the front of the church. I imagined how someone full of grace ought to feel in that moment, overwhelmed with thoughts of Jesus. The preacher said a blessing over us, the congregation sang. After a time, we dispersed back into the world to give glory to God.

I hadn’t realized I needed to be saved like that, but now that it was done, I was glad. I didn't talk about it with Eva afterward in the car, though I knew she was pleased.

That night, when we sat down at the dinner table at home, I announced I’d been born again. I was weeks away from turning six.

My mother looked at me. I could see her working hard not to say anything.

I talked about the church service and raising my hand then accepting Jesus into my heart at the altar. She listened, still silent. I wasn’t sure of her opinion about being born again, but I could guess that she thought it wasn’t something anyone should do in public. She slowly chewed a bite of food then simply moved onto another topic as if we had both agreed to never discuss the matter again.

My mother sometimes dropped us off at Eva’s in time for breakfast. We ate pancakes with homemade syrup, a transparent boiled sugar-water that I loved. One morning sitting at the little table in her kitchen, Eva watched me eat for a moment before reaching toward me. I thought she was going to wipe something from my cheek, but she flipped her hand sideways, slapping me across the face.

“Use your right hand,” she said.

I sat there confused. When I finally picked up the fork in my right hand, it was harder to eat than I thought it would be. No one had ever suggested to me that my left-handedness was a failing.

My default position—one my mother indulged completely—was to ask questions all the time about everything. But I thought better of interrogating Eva about what had just happened. Instead, I learned to eat right-handed at her house. And if I forgot, she would smack my left hand to remind me.

In the months that followed, Eva sometimes punished me for other reasons. My hair was thin, and my ponytail holders often fell out, leading her to spank me if she saw my hair tangled and unfurled. When I argued that I hadn’t taken the elastic bands out, I would get in trouble again for talking back.

At home, if we did something we’d been told was dangerous—running into the street or playing with electrical sockets—my mother would hold us by the wrist and swat our rear ends once or twice with the flat side of a hairbrush. But it was perfunctory; even as a child, I could see she didn’t want to do it. By comparison, the flashes of anger behind Eva’s discipline sparked a sense of injustice in me, especially if I stood accused of something I hadn’t done.

It never occurred to me to tell my mother. I believed she knew everything that took place in my life as clearly as if she had herself been with me to witness it unfolding. On some level, I still felt she was always with me even when she wasn’t in the room. If she didn’t want Eva to slap me, she would have told Eva to stop. Therefore, she had no problem with it. This was my cross to bear.

The burden didn’t weigh heavily, in part because Eva and Denward had a farm. Some days, my brother and I went there with them. Left to explore, I ran through fields, planted or fallow. Occasionally, my brother and I sat on the front porch and did small chores, trimming green beans or sweeping up. We played with Cookie and Bernie, their dogs.

How far outside town was the farm? In what direction? I had no idea.

Going to the farm might as well have been a hop between dimensions. All that mattered was the ride away from the familiar and the destination itself. I picked up daddy longlegs and let the charming monsters stagger along my forearm before brushing them into a jar. Stabbing airholes into the lid with a butcher knife, I carried the spiders with me for hours before releasing them.

I wasted whole days wandering. Denward, who was not long for the world, remained a quiet mystery to me. But I loved both the farm and Eva. And though I was scared to cross her, I never doubted that, like my mother, she loved me too.

I would later learn that the farm lay east of town, near Ellenboro, where Eva had been born. But at the time, my only geography of the wider world was that the stars lay visible above, and that below them, I belonged to every inch of green earth, cement, blacktop, mud, and river. I had no sense of what course we were on as we made our way, any more than I could have described the palpable sense of being cherished that flooded my days—a naive faith with no awareness it could be lost.

 [You can read another story in this series about my childhood here, or find out more about me and this newsletter on my About page.]