They weren’t warm enough this early in the morning, the flannel pajamas mommy made. They were blue with green pickles embroidered on them, 5 pickles on his shirt over his tummy, one for each birthday. That was Paul’s favorite part.
But he was so cold and his eyes were sticky and the frowning church adults should stop opening the door to the patio in the back yard because they were letting in cold wind and snow. The adults frowned most of the time, probably because almost everyone in the whole world was going to burn in hell forever and ever because they wouldn’t do what dad said.
“Come on, big boy,” mom said, “Daddy says it’s almost time, and you get to watch. Jesus will be happy you’re out there with us.”
She held out the new coat they’d found together last week when they went to Value Village after Paul finished washing the lunch dishes and climbed off the milk crate he stood on to wash everything except sharp knives. The coat was green and had lots of warm padding and a small red circle stain under the right arm that gave it character. That’s what mom said. She said it matched him because he had character.
Cynthia said having character must mean being used, then. Cynthia was 10 and knew lots of stuff because she could read good. Mom told her to be quiet when she said that, but mom also pretended not to smile a little bit, so it was probably a joke about something Paul would get after his next birthday when he was 6. He’d be 6 in 6 months when it was warm again and it would be nice to get out of bed. Mom left extra fabric in the arms and legs of his pajamas so she could make them longer when he turned 6 because he told her pickles would still be his favorite vegetable when he was older, for sure.
“Stephanie is going to get sick. Unless Jesus protects her,” Paul said as he got up and put first his right arm, then his left into the coat mom was holding for him. “It’s better if people gets baptized in summertime in their swimsuit. Especially because it don’t count unless they go all the way under the water, including their nose and eyes, so all of their sins drowns.”
Mom giggled, then she sighed as she zipped his coat all the way up the collar until it covered his nose.
“You say ‘doesn’t count’ not ‘don’t count’, love. And sins aren’t things that can be drowned. Baptism is just a very important way to tell Jesus and everyone else that from now on we’ll leave sinful ways behind us and will be pure for Jesus.”
Paul nodded behind his collar. The top of the zipper poked his nose, so he reached up to unzip it a bit. “Ya, that’s why they have to go all the way under water, but they can hold their nose.”
He took the wool hat mom was holding out and put it on his head. Later it would feel good to scratch his head after he took the hat off.
“Ok, and you’ve already got your tennis shoes on, so you’re all ready to go!” Mom said with a smile as she bent forward to kiss his hat. “Stay here while I get Cynthia and check to see if it’s time to go out.”
Paul watched her walk toward the door to the kitchen, across the living room and over the cracked white linoleum with gold flakes by the back door to the patio. She wore the long navy blue pleated skirt she always seemed to wear, along with a thick but very soft gray sweater that was nice to hug, and she wore one of her colorful flower scarves around her neck, wrapped a few times to keep out the cold. When Paul was little he used to hold on to that skirt whenever other people were around, but now he didn’t because he was big. When the kitchen door shut behind her, he was alone.
He sat back down on his sleeping bag and untied his right tennis shoe so he could practice tying it fast with the rabbit ear loop. He was allowed to sleep with his shoes on last night because it was cold in Stewart’s living room. Stewart played piano for dad’s church and was fat but never ate food and told Paul he turned the heat down to 50 in his house at night so he could give more money to missionaries in China. Cynthia said Paul was gross to put his tennis shoes inside his sleeping bag, but he wiped them off first with two paper towels he got wet in the bathroom, and anyway, mom said it was ok, so there.
“It’s not gross cuz I cleaned them,” Paul said to Cynthia. “Anyway, you might get frosts bites on your toes and they’ll turn black and fall off inside your sleeping bag and then you’ll have gross feet.”
Mom had been reading “Call of the Wild” for his bedtime story. Cynthia already read it.
“Nuh uh,” Cynthia said with a roll of her eyes and shake of her curly brown hair, “it’s not cold enough to freeze off my toes.”
“Maybe it will be in the middle of the night cuz then it’s super cold and nobody is awake, not even you, and you’ll sleep while your toes fall off,” Paul said.
“Whatever, gross boy,” Cynthia had said. But when she got out of her sleeping bag on the living room floor before Paul got up that morning, he opened one eye part way and looked at her feet and she was wearing her tennis shoes.
Dad came through the kitchen door and stopped for a moment to look across the large living room at Paul sitting on his sleeping bag in dim lamp light, the laces of one shoe untied. Mom bumped into him from behind, but he didn’t move because he was the strongest man in the world and mom was a woman and women are weak and don’t weigh a lot.
“Tie your shoe, Paul. It’s time to go,” dad said. “I told you to get him ready, Tiffany.” He turned his head to mom. He stared down at her. She met his eyes for a moment, then looked down, then stared at Paul’s shoes.
“He was ready. He must be practicing his shoe tying. It’s ok. Go ahead. We’ll meet you out there.”
Paul watched them.
Dad turned back to Paul. “Do it now, Paul. Tie your shoes. Don’t make me say it again.”
Paul leaned over to tie the shoe as dad started walking slowly to the back door. Mom stepped past dad quickly, looking left, away from him, and hurried toward Paul. She walked noiselessly on the balls of her feet, like she usually did in the house, but usually she wore soft slippers. This morning she wore her puffy gray snow socks over the nylons she always wore outside her house, even when she pulled weeds in the garden. Nylons made her shoes stinky, but not as stinky as dad’s. When Paul was an adult he’d decided he’d be so rich that he’d buy brand new shoes whenever his old ones started to stink, shoes no one ever wore before.
Now that mom was out of the doorway, Paul saw the rest of the church start to file into the room behind dad. About 10 men and women bundled in coats, hats, and gloves moving slowly in a line behind dad toward the door to the back patio. Most of their clothes had character.
When dad opened the back door, a blast of cold air howled into the room, blowing back dad’s blond hair and ruffling his gray pants and white button up shirt. He wasn’t wearing a coat or hat or gloves.
Ezra, the man just behind dad, stumbled back away from the icy air, knocking into his wife behind him, who reached out both hands to hold him up.
Dad stood in the open door, face in the wind, not moving, like a rock, and he shouted against the wind in tongues, the language Jesus gave him a long time ago in his bed when dad got filled with the Holy Spirit and God told him to be in charge. All the church adults were filled with the Holy Spirit too, so they all prayed in the special language God gave them, but nobody could understand what anyone else was saying. Paul hoped dad’s tongues was China language. Maybe if Stewart turned the heat down more dad could go to China and all the light brown people under big flat hats would get saved when dad talked in tongues. And he could order a Big Mac, maybe, and a vanilla ice cream cone. In China all the men were bald with three braided pigtails, one above each ear and one on top, and they all wore baggy blue pants with shoes that curved up at the toes. The shoes wouldn’t fit very well in a sleeping bag, but Cynthia says China is hot, so that’s ok.
“Hey mom,” Paul said as she swished down to her knees next to him on his sleeping bag. The air she pushed in front of her smelled lightly sweet, like holding a milk chocolate candy bar to your nose. “I tied it in less than 5 one-thousand. At about 4 one-thousand and one half. Usually I do it in 6 one-thousand, so now I’m faster cuz practice makes perfect.”
“Oh, wow! Good job, honey.” She patted his hat and didn’t smile, glancing back at dad.
Dad was still speaking in his tongues in the open door, but he had raised up both arms and his open eyes toward God, maybe so God could hear better over the wind. All the people behind him had started talking to God in their other tongues too and most of them had also raised up an arm or two and were also looking at the ceiling. A lot of it sounded kind of the same. Some of them just seemed to say the same few words over and over, and Paul sometimes thought they were faking, but God knew what they were saying because mom said God was omnivorous, so he knew everything. Sometimes God would tell Stephanie, the woman who rented a room in their house, the one getting baptized today, what someone was saying and she’d stand up and shake, with both her hands up and her eyes closed so she wouldn’t get distracted, and she would say someone’s tongues in English so everyone could understand. Usually God said pretty much the same thing dad said, but fancier, like a poem with no rhymes.
“Hurry son,” mom said as she pulled him to his feet, “I think daddy is waiting for us.”
She stepped over to the armchair next to the coffee table Paul slept by and snatched up her long coat and hat, slipping into the coat as she walked to dad, Paul at her heels. Her church shoes were at the door, simple black shoes with a slight heel. As she quickly pulled off her socks and slipped her nylons into her shoes, Paul ran back to the coffee table to get his new bible, the one with the picture on the front of a big lion with a huge yellow mane lying next to a small white lamb in a garden. He was learning to read it, and someday when Jesus came back from heaven, lions would be nice to lambs and Paul would pet the mane of the biggest lion in the world. He knew lions were cats and cats made him sneeze, so he would ask Jesus to heal his sneezing before he petted the lion and the lion wouldn’t eat Paul or the lamb even if it was hungry.
Cynthia said lambs tasted like chicken, because most meat except cows tastes like chicken, even people, but they never had eaten lamb and of course not people. But sometimes missionaries in the jungles got eaten by black people and sometimes Paul saw black people at the meat section at the store. Paul unzipped his coat as he walked back to mom, carefully put his bible inside, tucked under his left armpit, and then zipped his coat back up, all the way to his nose because now his face was cold by the open door.
Mom and Paul stepped between dad and Ezra, who made room for them by pushing back into his wife. Dad blocked some of the wind, which was nice, until he stepped down into the crusty couple inches of snow on the patio. His white tennis shoes made a crunching noise in the snow that Paul could hear over the wind and through his hat. Dad turned to the right, crunching slowly across the patio toward Stewart’s above ground swimming pool, arms still raised, still praying to Jesus in tongues. Everyone followed, also praying, and they all lined up next to the pool.
The pool sat on the patio next to a wall of the house, brightly lit in the early morning darkness by a pair of outside lights mounted under the eaves. Its sides were taller than Paul and it was about as long as dad’s Ford station wagon that went fast around corners. Stewart had built a plastic house for the pool for the winter. The sheets of plastic around the pool were as tall as the eaves of the roof and hung off a frame of white plastic pipes. Stewart said the plastic cover was to keep tree gunk out and to stop the water from freezing because the pool was for summer and wasn’t heated.
Dad walked to the ladder at the end of the pool farthest from the back door, and then turned back toward the house. He lowered his hands and stood silently in his thin clothes, looking relaxed in the frigid wind. One time Paul saw him drop a big rock from the front garden wall on his left pinkie and the finger got smashed flat and its guts came out, piled up at the end of the finger, and dad looked at Paul and held out his finger in front of Paul’s face and laughed when Paul screamed.
“Stephanie, come forth unto thy baptism, in the holy name of Jesus Christ our Savior!” dad called loudly to the open back door.
Stephanie stepped into the doorway and paused. She was barefoot and double wrapped from neck to ankles in a white sheet, like the Romans who killed Jesus. Her thin brown hair was pulled back into a bun, pulled so tight it raised her eyebrows like she was surprised. She was pretty and younger than mom and went on dates with church men but didn’t kiss them because that’s bad. The room she rented in Paul’s house was next to dad’s office where he spent most all his time surrounded by books on shelves packed from floor to ceiling, studying the bible, well, except for when he was at his job. Nobody but dad and Stephanie were allowed to go to that end of the house unless they asked dad first, not even mom.
The plastic around the pool snapped like a sail in an ocean storm as Stephanie took her first barefoot step into the snow. She winced, then recovered, setting her mouth in a pinched line, like when she inspected the dishes sometimes after Paul washed them. As she walked slowly toward dad, staring into his eyes and not blinking, she raised both her hands and began to speak in tongues like she was praying at dad.
He smiled his big other people smile that showed all his teeth and was a little scary and he reached his right hand out to her. Everyone had stopped praying when dad stopped, but now they all started again, all murmuring as they watched Stephanie reach dad and take his right hand with her left hand.
Mom watched and didn’t pray and took Paul’s right hand and squeezed it.
Dad turned to grasp the rail of the pool ladder with his left hand, pulling Stephanie close behind him as he began to climb the six icy metal steps. Someone, probably Stewart, had opened the plastic tent at the end of the pool with the ladder. There were no steps down into the water, so when dad got to the top step, he let go of Stephanie’s hand and, without hesitating, held the ladder rail with his left hand as he jumped into the pool. The water came up to dad’s chest, but Paul could only see his head through the plastic sheet from where he was standing on the patio next to the pool. Dad was still smiling and looking back at Stephanie climbing the ladder, but now his eyes were open super wide and his lips were shaking around his teeth.
There was no way Paul would get in that freezing water right now unless Jesus said to, not even for five dollars, but then he’d ask Jesus if it was ok to wait until summer. Jesus lives forever, so waiting a few months would probably be ok.
Stephanie now stood on the top step, looking down into dad’s eyes.
Dad reached both his hands up to her.
As she bent down to take his hands, the top of her makeshift gown by the left side of her neck came loose and swung down, revealing the lightly freckled skin at the top of her breasts. When she grabbed for the wayward cloth, her upper body jerked back to the left. The sudden movement caused her bare right foot to slip off the top step and down she went, falling with an unholy yowl on top of dad. They both disappeared under the water and all the spectators gasped as they jumped back to avoid the water splashing over the pool’s edge out onto the patio under the plastic wall.
As dad and Stephanie resurfaced, she clinging to dad and crying as they spit water and made for the ladder, Ezra’s wife wrung her gloved hands and raised them to the dark sky with a plaintive wail, “Oh Jesus Jesus, help them now!” The others in line began to say “Yes, help them. Amen Lord!” And then a screeching burst of laughter pierced their pleading prayers from the patio door behind them.
All except the freezing sputterers struggling to get out of the pool turned to the door where Cynthia stood in tennis shoes and her long thin pajama dress, doubled over now with the ecstatic pain of pure 10 year old delight. The wind whipped her gown around her bony body and shrill laughter rolled out of her in increasingly raucous waves that broke over the bitter gusts of winter storm.
Paul felt mom’s hand tremble. He looked up and she looked down into his eyes. Her face was very serious, but he felt her body shaking as she glanced over at the other church people and then she winked down at him with a quick, tiny smile just for him.
Paul looked back at his sister and, for the first time that morning, felt warm all over, from his nose to his toes. He gave mom’s hand a squeeze and he smiled big.
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