Read Online JEWEL by BRET LOTT - Free Book Online Page B

Cook’s granddaughter be baptized. They were there more to give respect to the rich old lady in town than to witness the Holy Spirit descending upon me. l No, what I’d expected I’d see when I came up from the water was a new world in which the quiet and practical God I knew had become the strange and moonstruck one Cathe ral’d found, on the Wednesday after she’d been baptized, the two of us were out back of Missy Cook’s, her hanging up wash, me reading out loud to her from one of my old Mcguffey Readers. Then I heard the wet swish of material dropped to the ground. I looked first at Cathe ral’s feet, where one of Missy Cook’s finest white sheets lay in the dirt. Then I looked at Cathe ral. She stood with her shoulders up, fingers stiff at her sides. Her face had gone slack, her eyes back in her head.
    She spoke, and the words from her mouth all rolled out in a ball, syllables and throat sounds and hard breaths I recognized from nowhere.
    She was speaking in tongues, I knew, and my knowing that seemed a miracle of my own.
    I dropped the book, stood with my hands clasped together in prayer.
    Still she went on, the song moving up and down some scale only angels knew for certain. I felt myself begin to cry, the sound so beautiful, so filled with a god who’d love you enough to bestow on you a freedom from the same old words that chained us all.
    Then Molly was there with us, moving toward Cathe ral still speaking.
    She took Cathe ral by the shoulders and gently shook her, said, “No, no, no, child, you can’t be doing no speaking now.”
    Cathe ral’s words began to thin down, the sounds broken and tired, until finally she closed her eyes, let her shoulders fall.
    My hands were still clasped. Neither Molly nor Cathe ral had even looked at me yet. I took a breath, said, “Why does she have to stop?
    ” I swallowed, my tongue dry and thick.
    Molly put an arm around her daughter’s shoulder, Cathe ral’s face wet with sweat, her arms limp at her sides. “Because, ” Molly said, her eyes on Cathe ral, “that what the Apostle Paul say. He say, Wherefore let him that speaketh in a unknown tongue pray that he may interpret.
    They ain’t no one to interpret here.” Cathe ral, eyes still closed, leaned into her momma’s shoulder. Molly whispered, “We got to wait for Sunday, that’s what we got to do, ” her words not meant for me, but for her daughter, words suddenly earthbound and the same as always.
    That freedom Cathe ral’d found was what I wanted, a freedom, too, that let her look me straight in the eye for the first time since I’d known her. Since that day in the back yard she’d searched out my eyes, hung onto them with her own. That was the freedom I was after, what I figured God must have given her, freedom from this earth and its words and what you knew your only role here would ever be. That would be my triumph over Missy Cook, the abounding w.. grace of God. All I need do was to confess Christ and be baptized, the only two things required to enter the new Jerusalem.
    Ushered to the shore, though, after Pastor had held me under, I felt no different. There was a God, I knew, and he dwelt in me, took care of me.
    He was a God who so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, so that I might not perish, but have everlasting life. This much I knew was true.
    When Missy Cook took my hand and pulled me to her, and I heard the slow murmur of Hallelujahs around me, a sound like the vague roll of summer thunder it might have been, I realized it was all information I’d had before. I’d believed all along, my standing before the congregation and immersion in dirty river water only thin symbols of what had first to be in the heart. Cathe ral and I were of the same God, I knew, but the face of Him she’d seen would never be the face I would come to know. The piece of God I’d gotten wasn’t the flamboyant and exotic one she’d found. The God I’d found was the same one who’d answered my