Read Online Matters of Faith by Kristy Kiernan - Free Book Online Page B

nobody tells you about. Like the pain of childbirth fades, allowing us to do it again and again, eventually the time spent on petty resentments shortens, and we move from angry to settled in hours rather than days. Cal and I did anyway. My parents were gone too young for me to ask them about the intricacies of marriage, the secrets, if they had them, and the pitfalls.
    And Calvin’s parents were no example to turn to. According to him anyway. I’d never met his father, dead of a massive heart attack on their sofa when Cal was only sixteen, but his stories about him were both frightening and exhilarating, tales of impassioned sermons on the lure of the devil and the pain of the fiery pits of hell. Cal’s brother, Randy, had been the quintessential preacher’s kid, and was, the last time anyone had heard from him, evading warrants in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama.
    Cal had removed himself entirely from the family the day he graduated from high school. We received occasional letters from his mother, her looping hand childlike, filled with misspellings, guilt-laden entreaties to visit her, and unselfconscious Bible references along with portents of doom and random news of obscure relatives.
    Cal read these letters quickly, silently, occasionally allowed me to read them, and then threw them away. We did not discuss it, but I knew that he feared Marshall would read one and get intrigued, would possibly want to visit his grandmother, and would disappear into the bug-infested wilds of undeveloped Florida and spend his life convincing others that Satan was just a step behind them, waiting for the chance to claim their souls.
    We’d taken him to visit once, when he was a toddler, at my insistence. Our first days there had been good, strained but polite. But once the initial busyness of food preparation and catching up on third cousins thrice removed was over, Cal and his mother seemed to deflate, as though all of their social niceties had simply leaked out, like so much air, and all that was left was the sour, stale remnant of a relationship long over. Their conversations, already terse, decreased in word count but increased exponentially in hidden meaning.
    I watched, as one might watch snakes behind glass, certain of my safety but fascinated by the proximity to danger anyway. I did not miss a word, or a glance. I held Marshall while they jabbed at each other and vowed that I would never speak in riddles to my son.
    She quoted Bible passages that seemed to be written specifically for her perceived lot in life, that of wronged mother, grievously harmed by the insensitivity and ungratefulness of her family. Cal countered with bits of Bible I’d never known he knew, all of it streaming from his mouth in a rounded, thickened accent I’d never heard.
    My son and I were visiting with strangers.
    Two days before we were to leave, we sat on the porch after dinner, eating homemade peach ice cream and listening to crickets, and it all ended. Marshall finished his ice cream and began to cry for more. He was up too late, and his cries rose fast and high in the air. Cal’s mother stared hard at Marshall, his lips soft and red and still smeared with ice cream, and I saw her eyes narrow as she turned to Cal.
    Ignoring me completely, she pointed her spoon at Marshall and said: “ ‘ Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell .’ ”
    Before I could even begin to make sense of this, Cal stood, his bowl clattering at his feet, and said, “That’s it, we’re done.” He strode past her and grasped me by the arm, pulling me from my chair as he scooped Marshall up in his other arm. Marshall’s crying escalated to screaming, and though I pulled my arm from Cal’s hand, I moved.
    I never protested, I simply followed him quickly to the room he and his brother had