Relentless Angels — Chapter 12. I Land in the Bible Belt
By: Nate Briggs
Tags: Novel, Religion, Small Towns, Humor, Fiction

I Land in the Bible Belt

As hard as it is to believe, it was Aunt Billie who brought me to Utopia: answering another plea for help from my Father after another lost school year of suspensions, experimental vice, and defiance at yet another private academy.

But I can guess that Billie thought that what I needed was the example of a righteous home (my father was a committed sinner in her eyes, certainly).

She guessed that I had just been short of examples of good behavior, and Christian living.

Which was far from the truth. I had known good and careful people. I just didn’t feel like being one of them.

• • •

The afternoon of the first day included a brief tour of the farm.

Then Danny was off to the feed store, and Billie introduced me to the ground floor room where I was supposed to live like a holy hermit for what was going to be at least three months — maybe longer.

Although no one else was in the house, aside from ourselves, she pulled the door shut behind her and (in a low tone of voice) informed me that, as long as I lived under their roof, she would want to see underwear beneath my clothing.

She didn’t go to her “Bible voice” to demand this of me — as she would have done with her own child.

I was Barry’s daughter. She was cautious in the early going, and — even later — I don’t believe she was ever as strict with me as she would have been with one of her own.

• • •

The room in which I was to be incarcerated had formerly been her sewing room, and they had simply dropped a narrow bed into it without making any other adjustments.

It had her sewing table, some needlepoint things, a couple of black-and-white photographs on the wall, and the smell that a pine-scented cleaner leaves behind.

They had opened half a closet for me and I stuffed some of what I had brought into there. I didn’t know what to do with the rest, so I left it in the suitcases. Then dinner was mostly silent, and the time after dinner seemed to be mostly dedicated to waiting for bed.

In a way it was like living in the previous century. Television, of course, was a tool of Satan and was not allowed in the house. Movies were also out of the question, for the same reason. There was a museum-quality stereo system in the living room, but it accepted only recorded hymns at 33 RPM.

With dinner complete, Uncle Danny took up the thin little newspaper from Elsinore — the Harvester — and studied it as though he was going to be quizzed on the material the next day.

Billie’s Christian radio was muted during dinner — but came on again as she cleaned up in the kitchen. Then it could be heard, in the distance, as she settled into the living room and carefully read through her Bible: her finger following the verses down.

Certain pungent passages got read aloud: reminding Danny about what he should believe, and why he should believe it.

No provision was made for my entertainment, because I wasn’t there to be entertained. All that was left for me to do was shuffle to my new quarters: where I was scheduled to confront my sins … and repent.

• • •

As far as I was concerned, I felt I had plenty of reasons to repent. All of my private school indiscretions had led to this. A needlepoint closet. A convent of one. In this case, the punishment more than suiting the crime.

But there were more surprises to come.

That very first night, I settled myself on the bed and began to read the wallpaper. But, without thinking (and because the radio was on and I didn’t want to hear it), I closed the door to the room behind me as I came in.

Hearing the click of the latch, Aunt Billie came flying.

Without even an attempt to knock, the door opened on her threatening face: determined to find something loathsome and atheistic going on. (She may have thought that I’d packed a vibrator in my overnight bag).

“We have no closed doors in this house.”

“Why not?”

“We just don’t.”

“Well, it’s easy when there’s just the two of you.”

“That has nothing at all to do with it.”

“Doesn’t the Bible say anything about privacy?”

“The Lord looketh upon the heart. He sees everything we do and think. Nothing we do is private.”

“Then what does it matter whether the door is closed or not?”

“Because it’s a temptation. It encourages things.”

“Like what?”

She couldn’t bring herself to describe it.

“What did you think I was doing?”

“Nothing!”

“Did you think I was fingering myself in here?”

She stiffened, as though I had poured ice water down her back.

I know that I saw her right hand move, slightly.

If she tried to slap me, I was going to try to block it. I had made lots of enemies during my school career. I wasn’t exactly a virgin when it came to fighting.

But I was Barry’s daughter. And protected by that. They were just warehousing me for the summer. In return for the checks that would keep the farm afloat. So she couldn’t hit me. All she could do was stammer.

“I … I … wasn’t thinking anything of the kind.”

“You’re a terrible liar.”

“I’m glad of that. The Lord loves the truth. And loves those who speak the truth.”

“The truth is: I wish you’d go away.”

Another slap-worthy comment, had our relationship been closer. Instead, I only got a decree.

“This door stays open….”

She went back to the kitchen. Thinking that the episode was complete.

But it had only begun. After waiting a decent interval I softly crossed the room, and closed the door again. Which, again, brought her from wherever she was in the house.

And so began the Door War. And I can only explain its true significance by saying: you had to be there.

It wasn’t just a vehement discussion of where a piece of wood, mounted on hinges, would come to rest. It was a struggle that defined all of our other struggles. Who would dominant. Who would decide “right” and “wrong”. How my time would be governed. The limits of what I could do.

In time, I came to understand that — in Aunt Billie’s view of evangelical Christianity — there was no room for compromise. There were only “winners”. And only “losers”.

She knew (for a fact) that the day would come when Jesus would return, and — when he did — she, and the other Non-Instrumentals would be welcomed into his arms.

Them — and only them. Just the members of that one church. Just the people who spent Sunday mornings in that building.

No one else.

The teeming billions of the world would be dumped into the unquenchable fires of hell: as the tiny band of 50, or 60, true believers walked into paradise: to live forever with the Lord.

My Aunt Billie obsessed about winning and losing: with the ultimate victory — the eternal torture of everyone else on the planet — as her final goal. Not to “win” was to “lose”. There was no middle ground at all in her life.

So it was obvious that she couldn’t allow me to close my door. Or have any kind of time not under her supervision.

• • •

Which meant that I was under house arrest as well. All the same, I made an announcement at the breakfast table the next day.

“Think I’ll take a walk around this morning.”

Before I even had time to take another breath, permission was denied.

“No — I think we’ll just have you around the house for a few days. Until we can have some people over from the church.”

To straighten you out, she almost said.

After Uncle Danny gave her a brotherly kiss, and bounced away on his tractor, Aunt Billie clicked the radio on, and adjusted the volume to the very loud hymn that was playing.

And the term of my imprisonment was supposed to begin.

• • •

Yet I felt I had an obligation to go walkabout, and display my big city sophistication. I had lucked out, back East, and had found a pair of jeans that fit me so tightly I couldn’t get a cigarette paper between the fabric, and my skin.

They were a natural choice for my debut.

The tube top I pulled out of the closet was a size, or so, too small — boldly etching my nipples — curving up under my breasts: showing their roundness, and weight.

High-heeled sandals pushed me up about 4 inches, and forced me into a syncopated kind of gait that had my hips swinging and my ass in full motion.

The small mirror in my room confirmed that my outfit left almost nothing to the imagination.

I seemed to recall that the Bible had said something about “fishers of men”.

Well — there I was. About to go fishing.

Aunt Billie was still in the kitchen — radio voices filling that room — and I had only to wait to hear the water running to know that her back was turned to the hallway before I slipped out. Unheard. Unseen. Unlicensed.

The village tax base didn’t provide for sidewalks: so I swayed right down the middle of the street.

Even in the late spring, the “rainy” season there, the town was beige with dust. My feet made a satisfying crunch as they hit the gravel — and I felt a very unwarranted sense of optimism as I saw curtains flicker, here and there, in kitchen windows and next to television sets that were already moving through the morning soaps.

I was to discover that any sound of footsteps in the street always had that effect.

People looking to see what was going on, since — so much of the time — there was so little going on.

But, except for the curtain flipping, there was little evidence of human settlement.

At that time of the morning, it was mainly a dog town. Six or seven trotted over to greet me. Unleashed and roaming free. The majority were utterly unsuspicious and not territorial, since they were able to move without restraint through the open yards and streets.

In fact, you might say the village was a utopia for dogs (at least the intelligent ones) who found freedom and food and entertainment in its streets, and garbage cans, and open fields. They could go wherever they wanted to. No one even seemed to know what a leash was. Although the less intelligent among them eventually ended up as corpses at the edge of State Highway 98.

The Parminter boys, in their flatbed truck, were headed toward 98 as I entered the Central Business District.

I got an appreciative, openmouthed leer from Paul (Saul?) out of his open window as they drove by. He turned to say something to the rest of the cab, but I didn’t hear what it was.

• • •

The Café, which had no other name, was a large linoleum room with acoustic ceiling tile stained brown from past leaks in the roof. A variety of tables and chairs filled it: without much attention to what matched and what didn’t. And the wall decor consisted mostly of calendars, one of them for the wrong year, and advertising posters that Lucy had received free in the mail. (Lucy had received them. Someone else, with more energy, had hung them on the wall.)

Like every small town café I have visited since, this one had a geezers’ table: where retired men could escape from their wives, and act like fools. But the customary giggling and chatter at that table stopped the instant that I came through the door, and all of the men turned to the inspection of their coffee cups for traces of sediment.

At least until I had passed.

Then I felt the clinical pressure of seven pairs of eyes on my backside as I walked to the counter. (I understood that, later, they would be discussing how I got those pants on. Turned out that there was more than one theory.)

Lucy was the owner of the establishment, and — like my Uncle Danny — read newspapers as though she would be tested on them later.

She made it clear to everyone that she was not a waitress. Or a cook. She unlocked the front door in the morning. Started the coffee. And was available to answer questions.

But she was not a waitress, or a cook.

Visitors would approach the counter and — if they didn’t already know it by heart — examine the menu: a display board with moveable letters where some of the 5’s were S’s, and some of the S’s were 5’s, to decide if there was anything they would like to have thawed out.

When the order had been zapped in the microwave, the idea was to come back to the counter to retrieve it.

And, before leaving, whoever had eaten came back to the counter to pay.

Each of these visits to the front involved a delay while Lucy found a convenient stopping point in the article she was reading just then. So the Café was not the first choice of people who liked being served, or who were in a hurry to get somewhere.

Regular visitors knew how to open the cash register and make change for themselves. If you just wanted coffee there was an Honor Jar next to the coffee pot where you could drop in a quarter.

And it was not unheard of for someone who needed some small thing, like toast, to just go into the kitchen and make it themselves while she sat there.

You would think, in that case, there would be some sort of discount for do it yourself.

But there never was.

Lucy was not a waitress. Or a cook. And nothing was ever discounted.

• • •

I gave the retirees a lingering shot of my rear end — a few seconds of fantasy — as Lucy self-consciously turned the tabloid page to even more unexpected revelations and indiscretions. (It turned out that baking soda, used in different ways, could solve just about every problem anyone might have).

I made a sudden resolution that she would be the first to speak. Since I was new in town.

She turned a page before curiosity got the better of her.

“Help ya’?”

“Some herbal tea, please.”

I was hoping to get her to double check the menu. But she knew perfectly well what she had, and what she didn’t have.

“We ain’t got any a’that.”

“Well … just some coffee then.”

She didn’t move from her chair. She hadn’t moved from her chair the day before, but knew already who I was and who I was staying with in town.

“Seems like Billie’d have coffee at home of a morning.”

“Once I saw what a nice place this was, I couldn’t keep myself out.”

“Coffee’s a quarter.”

I flipped a hundred dollar bill out on the counter. Ben Franklin, face up.

She glanced at it, then tilted her head a little.

“I can’t change anything that big.”

“This is legal tender.”

“I ain’t sayin’ it isn’t. We just don’t deal in that kinda money….”

I put down a five instead.

“What kind of money do you deal in?”

“Cup a’ coffee’s just a quarter, little girl. Jar’s over there.”

And, with that helpful information, she considered our conversation over.

“Would you have anything like a cinnamon roll?”

“I’d think that Billie’d have breakfast of a morning.”

“The board says Jumbo Cinnamon Rolls. Should someone change it? Would you be the one to change it, if it needed to be changed?”

The five was still on the counter and I held a roll of currency visible in my hand while she decided what she wanted to do. She could see the geezers smiling at her from their table. This conversation was better than The Today Show as far as they were concerned.

She started to shift her enormous ass on the stool.

“Think I gotta coupla frozen rolls. Take a few minutes t’heat up.”

I shrugged.

“I’m here for the whole summer.” (I judged that news would be all over town in about 10 minutes).

Lucy put down the tabloid near the special “Alien Invasion” insert.

I stepped over to the coffeepot. Putting a dollar into the jar probably entitled me to four cups of whatever brown stuff she was keeping hot. But I probably would have died before I finished that much.

I demurely placed myself at a kitchen table near one of the front windows, the indestructible brown mug in front of me, and watched as nothing at all happened on Main Street outside.

After a minute or two, I used a napkin to wipe the windowpanes clear. But the milky film I was trying to remove was part of the glass, and there was nothing to be done about it.

When Lucy judged that my pastry was sufficiently thawed, she placed it on the counter, without a word, and resumed reading. This was not out of malice. As I said, this was the system in her democratic establishment. She treated everyone like dirt.

After a few minutes, one of the geezers appeared at my elbow with the plate. Looking a little apologetic.

“You don’t go up to the counter to get it, she just leaves it there.”

It was a grander gesture than I had expected from one of them. I turned on a full Miss Congeniality smile, and he returned to his table a hero. Beginning a low rumble of retired conversation again. Although not about me. That would begin when I left.

Judging from the snatches that I heard, they were refighting the Second World War in Italy.

My Jumbo Cinnamon Roll was actually quite small. About the size of a very thick cookie. And I discovered that it was a good thing that Aunt Billie did fix breakfast of a morning. The pastry, although warm to the touch around the rim, was held together in the center by undissolved ice.

That was inedible. The coffee was undrinkable. And the decor was enough to make you put a gun to your head.

Thankfully, my work there was almost done.

I had finished my moment at centerstage. Lucy wasn’t looking at me. Even out of the corner of her eye. And the geezers had reached full conversational volume on the topic of Hitler’s postwar lifestyle in Argentina.

The General Store across the street invited inspection. But the place I really wanted to visit, the Six Shooter, was closed until lunchtime.

I left my frozen nugget at the table to thaw out for some other lucky person and returned my cup to the counter. Lucy didn’t look up.

“Make sure to read that section on how to get a smaller tighter ass….”

I was able to bring up the volume so that my one-liner filled the place.

Her eyes narrowed as she gave me a look that was supposed to blister my skin.

But the geezers thought I was attractive, and lively. I gave them a wave. And a couple of them waved back.

Now they knew I would be there all summer.

Going across to the General Store, I found the source for Lucy’s tabloids. There were almost as many different little weeklies as there were brands of beer. And more kinds of candy bars than anything.

Larry, with the drooping paunch and the optically-amazing bifocals, was the owner, manager, inventory clerk, and head cashier. He was Lucy’s husband. But didn’t seem to have the same aversion to work.

He poked his head out of the back when the merchant bell on the door rang but, seeing that it wasn’t one of his friends, he went back to his clipboard.

I surveyed his shelves. Packed tight. And surveyed the arrangement of the place. Tight again. Almost claustrophobic. But without cameras, or even security mirrors, to help Larry spot people who were taking things from him without benefit of legal tender.

There were packages of cigarettes in a special display near the cash register. Out of Larry’s line of sight. I took two of them. Just to see how easy it would be to operate there should I ever run out of cash.

Then the merchant bell rang again as I went back out.

I assume that Larry looked out of the back again, clipboard in hand. But he was busy. There was no commotion. And no pursuit. Stealing from that place was so easy that it didn’t even deserve the term “shoplifting”. It was more like a village potlatch.

As for the cigarettes, I don’t smoke myself, so I dropped them into a garbage can that was standing next to the street.

• • •

After strolling the three blocks it took to cross town in a westerly direction, Agnes Parminter at the Post Office told me that I would be unable to collect any mail without the post office box key.

So I walked over to the elementary school: three blocks to the south — past Widow’s Row, with the Church of the Last Word, Non-Instrumental, to the right, and the Lutheran church to the left.

The school was the largest building in town. But stood empty, since they had run out of children to put in it, and no one could think of any other purpose it could be used for.

A large, empty building can be a wonderful opportunity, and it was an opportunity that I saw right away.

The school had what, in England, they would call a “pleasant seat”. Like Aunt Billie’s house, it stood at the end of a street, and one long side of it faced out into yet another field planted in corn. The shaded area next to the field was where the playground had been: although the slides and monkey bars and the merry-go-round were gone, and there was only grass to replace them.

Giving myself plenty of time to confirm that I wasn’t observed, I checked a couple of doors and windows. Which were locked hard. But I made a note to check them again when I had the darkness on my side, and more time.

There was a wooden bench on the back side of the building, where the sun hit the brick, and I soaked up the light like a cat. After a while, I slipped my top off. To avoid the tan lines that are always so bothersome.

Had the bench been facing the highway, or had I thought that I had any company, except cottonwood trees and hybrid corn as far as the eye could see, I might have thought twice about this.

But there was no one in sight. And no hint of activity — except the long tearing sound of the occasional car or truck moving along the distant State Highway 98.

Gilded by the sun, I started to be reconciled to Utopia a little bit.

In that town, where surveillance was so much a part of everyday life, that little area on the far side of the school seemed to be a sanctuary — and I stayed there until I thought it was time for lunch.

• • •

I came back to Bible Farm with the thought that I could possibly endure the summer there.

But I had failed to realize how efficient the village was in its self-policing.

I had no sooner stepped through the front door, than I was immediately placed under house arrest (again) for dressing like a “slut”. My sentence was intensified, if that could be possible, by a report from one of Billie’s fellow Non-Instrumentals that I had discarded cigarettes in his garbage can before coming home.

“It wasn’t like that….”

“Where on earth did you get cigarettes?”

“I found them.”

“No one finds packages of cigarettes in this town. They weren’t even opened.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”

“Why would that be good?”

“It means I didn’t smoke any….”

“If you’re a smoker, then you’d just better get used to not smoking. It’s not the kind of thing that’s going to go on with anyone living in this house.”

“The Bible doesn’t say anything about smoking.”

“It says that your body is the Temple of the Lord. It’s disobedience to do otherwise.”

“I think it also says that what you put into your mouth isn’t as important as what comes out of it.”

Aunt Billie felt the scriptural ground shift a little under her feet. Not a big tremor. But enough to feel.

“Christ wasn’t talking about this when he said that.”

“I think Jesus might have smoked. He obviously drank.”

“He didn’t drink at all.”

“He turned water into wine.”

“It wasn’t wine. It was just plain grape juice.”

“Wouldn’t grape juice go bad in a couple of days? It would be wine then.”

“He would keep it fresh.”

“How?”

“He was the Lord. He could do whatever he wanted.”

“Why does it say wine then? Why doesn’t it say ‘fresh grape juice’?”

“That was added later. By people who misunderstood.”

“So it’s wrong … the Bible, I mean….”

Aunt Billie saw where this was going, and refused to continue.

“I know where those cigarettes came from, and that Larry Aardson is going to get a talking to.”

Billie already had consigned him to eternal hellfire for selling beer. It was hard to imagine what she would have to say to him that could be worse than roasting naked over infinite charcoal.

“And I’d better never see you with a cigarette in this house.”

“You won’t. They didn’t belong to me.”

There was more of the same for about ten minutes. Then I was dispatched to my room.

She more or less dared me to close the door. But I didn’t take the bait.

I just got some lotion for my sunburn, and tried to take a nap while some minister was being interviewed on The Jesus Hour.