Page 16 of Junie
Chapter Sixteen
It’s lucky that Junie makes it back into the cabin unnoticed. It’s a miracle that she falls back asleep.
Her nightmares have become so common her body almost finds comfort in the rhythm of relaxation, terror, and insomnia. It’s the good dreams that set her on edge the next day.
She’s on a small island, dotted with beautiful, tall oaks, each one wrapped in gray moss. She sits for a moment on the island’s beach, running her fingers over the pebbles and watching as they turn into silver lockets between her fingertips. She ambles through this magical island, moving through the trees until she sees a figure standing just past the edge of the forest on the island’s pebbled beach. Caleb turns to face her, his brown eyes glistening in the sun. She opens her mouth to speak, but the words dry on her tongue. He takes her into his arms, lifting her body from the ground as though she were a twig. His deep kiss sends both their bodies through the island itself and into the water beneath it, intertwined together in the dark blue.
“Get up, Sleepy Bug! It’s time for church!”
She jolts awake to see Muh smacking the wooden end of her broom next to Junie’s face. Junie strains her eyes. Muh’s wearing her church dress in preparation for the day. “I’ve been up since before dawn and done your nice dress.”
Junie rolls her eyes. She knows for a fact Muh was sound asleep until long after the sun had risen.
“Stop making faces and get yourself ready! We gon’ be going on soon. Granddaddy’s gone over to the cookhouse to see about the others.”
Church. The last place Junie wants to go, not only because it’s boring, but because it’ll ruin her plan of avoiding Caleb for the rest of her life. Junie turns back over into her pillow and moans. She presses her hand to her forehead. It was cold in the woods this morning—could she have a fever? She coughs to see if her throat is sore. With no signs of ailment, she turns to other body parts, checking her pulse, belly, and feet for signs of illness.
“Why you such a busybody in your bed this morning?” she calls.
“I think I’m sick, Muh,” Junie says. She forces a cough.
“You always think you’re sick. I’ll come and see,” she says. Junie shoves her hands between her legs, hoping to develop a bit of palm sweats.
“You ain’t got no fever,” Muh says. “And your eyes and nose look just fine to me.”
“My head’s hurting,” Junie says, covering her eyes from the light. “And my belly’s sore. Plus my hands are all sweaty.” Junie removes her palms from underneath the blanket. Muh touches them, then laughs heartily.
“Sweet Pea, you must think I’m brand new. If you wanna get out of church, you gonna have to come up with something a little better than that.”
“But I don’t feel good, Muh!”
“Save your crocodile tears for your Granddaddy, Baby. Besides, if it’s a bellyache you got, we got more than enough dried mint leaves for you to take in the cookhouse. Or I can mix you one of my potions.”
Junie winces at the thought of one of Muh’s medicines, usually a concoction of fishy oils and pungent leaves forced down your throat until you get well or get worse.
“Mhmm, that face alone is enough to tell me you ain’t really sick. Unless you’re planning to take your little show to the stage, I’d get up and get moving. Your dress is about ready.”
Junie groans, pulling the quilt back over her head, begging her body to come down with typhoid.
“Junie, I’m an old woman, but I will drag you off that bed by your ankles and toss a bucket of water on your face if you don’t quit acting like a bump on a log.”
Junie steels herself for the cold and rips the blanket off her body before jumping up. The fire has long burnt out, and the cabin is gray and cold. Her breath billows in front of her. She screams, snatching her blanket again and wrapping it around her body as she walks to get her dress from the ironing board.
“You really are the sorriest little thing I’ve ever seen this morning,” Muh says with a chuckle. “You’re gonna need to wash up and fix your hair, can’t have you going into church looking like you just caught the devil. There’s some water in the bucket round back and some soap, go on and rinse off. I’m going round to the cookhouse to get some food while it’s hot.”
Junie stumbles around the back of the cabin to strip and wash herself with Muh’s bucket. It should be a crime that church happens on her only day off each week. She could be spending her time in the woods exploring, or even working on her poems. After she finishes washing, she runs some oil over her skin and hair before getting into her church dress.
Auntie Marilla is finishing the morning pot of grits as Bess readies the bowls to serve everyone when Junie walks in. Caleb is dressed and ready, squeezed on the bench next to Granddaddy with a cup of coffee in his hand. Junie turns away from him as soon as she walks in, feeling as though his eyes could burn straight through her skin if she looks directly at him. Her dream flashes in her mind; her body wrapped in Caleb’s embrace as they float through the water. She distracts herself by helping to serve breakfast.
When Junie sits down with her own bowl, she lets the morning chatter of her family overshadow her silence. She stirs the white porridge until the golden butter mixes in and the grains begin to form cold clumps along the edges. Each sharp clatter of a fork or loud laugh makes her look up, and she curses the reflex as it forces her to look at Caleb. After he says something that makes the others burst into laughter, she catches the glint of his smile, gapped, wide, and bright. He’s never looking at her when she peeks at him, yet a tingling sensation, like the sun hitting her neck while her back is turned to its heat, persists when she looks away. Is he watching her, too?
Granddaddy starts ushering everyone out toward the road as Junie finishes her food. He maintains a jovial attitude most days, but come Sunday, he transforms into a steely, religious man. While Muh never truly cares for church, favoring her knowledge of spirits and nature, Granddaddy insists the family maintain the ritual of attendance to make communion with the Lord. The group begins their silent walk toward the church house, their feet scraping against the hardened red dusty path as they move. Junie hangs toward the back, unhappy as always to be forced to attend.
The weather is good at least. Individual golden leaves peek out from within the canopy, as though they are afraid to showcase their glow and distinctiveness among the crowd of green. The first of the geese arriving from the north squawk overhead, flying in formation over the scenery. The way in which the earth chooses to change itself entirely every few months has always marveled Junie, and she relishes another season of transformation. She wants to write about what she sees, the shy autumn leaves, the flight of the geese, the crispness of the first cool breeze. When she reaches toward where her apron pocket would be, she’s disappointed to remember she’s stuck in her church dress, with her notebook left back in the cabin far away. She pouts and keeps walking.
—
The church is a pine building with chipped white paint and unsealed windows at the corner of the narrow road to Bellereine and the main road toward Montgomery. It opens on the third Sunday of each month for services and communion; the other Sundays, Junie and her family make do with the bits of the Bible they know, sitting around to recite verses from memory. Between the monthly schedule, Granddaddy’s travels with Mr. McQueen, and Muh’s ambivalence, Junie hasn’t had to go to church in over five months, something she’s welcomed happily.
As she gets closer, memory transforms the scenery. The trees, no longer covered in leaves, are bare and twisted in the winter frost. The ground is hard and icy, and the air stings as she breathes it in. Men carry her sister’s coffin inside, a pine box hammered shut and poised on their shoulders.
“Stop dillydallying and get in here!” Auntie Marilla calls from the church doorway.
Junie’s muscles tense as though they’re begging her not to walk in, not to go back to this place again. She wills her legs to take her forward and inside.
The pews of the church are full by the time Junie enters, and she keeps her head down, hoping not to be stopped by any of the other brothers and sisters from nearby plantations. She takes her usual seat in the second row, squeezed between her grandparents on the bench. They both cut her glances, but don’t say anything so as not to cause a stir in front of the others.
“Thank you for joining me today,” Pastor Daniels says as he takes the pulpit, shuffling his notes in his hands. After reading A Christmas Carol with Violet, Junie is certain Dickens must have based the character of Scrooge on Pastor Daniels, a miserly, bitter old man in desperate need of a cruel awakening. While a Baptist preacher on paper, he was never favored by the white churches, and was instead forced to preach the word of God to the various slave churches, alternating between the four in the area each Sunday.
“Today I will be preaching from the Book of John. Here, the Lord’s book commands ‘Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them.’ Obedience, true obedience, to the Lord and his disciples, is the only way to avoid the burning flames of eternal damnation. And let us not forget the words of Romans 13.1, ‘Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.’ It is your masters who are the authorities here on Earth, as instituted by God, and it is God’s will that you obey them, for they are the superiors in God’s eyes and closer to God’s word and light.”
The congregation nods solemnly in response. A cold wind slithers between the cracks in the windows and the pine planks. Junie’s mind wanders to counting the cracks in the ceiling and listening to the sound of water dripping onto the dirt floor. She remembers how freezing it was the day they buried Minnie, the way her grandparents cried as Pastor Daniels stood over Minnie’s body, listing Bible verses and proclaiming his hope that she had done enough good works in life to save her immortal soul. It took all her strength not to wring his thin neck for daring to say her sister was anything less than the picture of goodness.
That her soul might not be worthy of heaven.
The pastor bangs his fist on the wooden stand, jolting Junie to attention.
“?‘Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you; bind them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart.’?”
At that moment, Pastor Daniels looks at her, his eyes wild with passion. Rage boils in her veins. Who is he to tell her about steadfast love and faithfulness? Junie tried saving her sister’s soul, devoting herself to her even as her body lay decaying in the ground a few yards away. Would he go as far as she had, communing with a spirit and doing her bidding just to save her? She imagines Pastor Daniels seeing a spirit in the woods at night, picturing the way he’d scream at the sight, running off while soiling his pants. She chuckles, causing Muh to pinch her on the wrist.
Fat drops of water roll off the pastor’s forehead as he begins to scream the last verse, saliva flying from his mouth like water from a dropped glass.
“In the book of Daniel 12.2 the Lord proclaims, ‘And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.’ We will all awake again! Sinner and believers, whites and Negroes, masters and slaves! All as one!”
As he comes to a crescendo, he pounds his fist on the pulpit so hard Junie worries he might actually break it.
“But it is Revelation 21.8 that tells us ‘but as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death!’ You who do not obey, you who do not believe, you who do not kneel, you will burn in the flame of Satan, you will choke in the sulfur, you will fry in the heat of that second death! Obedience is your only salvation, to your masters and to the Lord, or find your eternal damnation in the lake of fire!”
The pastor rests his body on the stand as though he will faint if he doesn’t hold on. He gulps for air before looking out to the congregation.
“Will anybody be saved today? Or will you, the children of Ham, descendants of a sinner, die sinners, too?”
The room is silent, as the congregation stays in their seats.
“God save your immortal, soiled souls. In Christ’s name, amen.” He steps out of the pulpit and takes a seat on a wooden chair to the side, the cue for the choir to take the stage.
The choir, composed of men and women from the congregation, including Bess, stand and go toward the front, where they lead the church through several songs. Junie mouths the words, but her mind is consumed in thought. What could be keeping Minnie’s spirit on earth, anyway? Minnie had always been good, doing what she was told, singing in the choir, looking after everyone. Why would she deserve to awake to everlasting contempt?
Junie’s stomach turns as the events of last night replay in her mind. Her blood pounds in her temples, her mind devoured by the repetition of a single phrase.
This is all my fault. This is all my fault.
She was the reason her sister got sick, the reason why she died. She was the one who couldn’t speak up at the funeral when everybody in the family said a kind word about her sister; the one who’d left early, running into the frigid morning. She was the one who’d ripped the necklace out of Minnie’s grave, who’d stolen it to stop Violet’s marriage.
She was the one who’d discarded her sister’s task for a boy, leaving Minnie’s soul to rot in the woods.
This is all my fault. This is all my fault.
Minnie is gone, and it is my fault.
She is damned, and it is my fault.
Her lungs feel like they are filling with water rather than air. Her heartbeat threatens to break her ribs. Sweat pools underneath her stiff dress.
She has to leave this church.
“I have to get out,” she says to Muh.
“Baby, they’re in the middle of singing, you can’t go anywhere now.”
“I need to go! Please, I need to go now.”
“You’re gonna have to wait.”
“I can’t wait!”
Stars take over Junie’s eyesight. She’s almost certain she sees a flash of a golden woman out of the corner of her eye as her vision goes black.
—
Grass between her fingers. Moisture on her cheeks.
“Grandbaby?” Granddaddy says.
“Shh! Tom, you gonna startle the baby awake!”
“I wanna make sure she hear us! Junie?”
Junie grunts as she opens her eyes. She’s sitting underneath the maple tree, just outside the side exit of the church. Granddaddy and Muh are hovering over her, Muh holding a wet cloth pressed to her face.
They both sigh with relief and take her into their arms.
“Baby, what happened?” Granddaddy asks.
“You went pale as a ghost, and before we knew it you was on the floor,” Muh adds.
“I don’t…” Junie starts, remembering the terror that had seized her before she fainted. She’d never be able to explain to them what she’d felt. “I don’t think I ate enough this morning.”
“Bless you, Sweet Junie!” a woman yells as she passes by. The man next to her tips his hat before bowing toward her in prayer.
“The Lord is good to you, ain’t He, sister?” he yells.
“Who are they?” Junie asks her grandparents, beginning to tentatively rise to her feet. Muh chuckles.
“They think that the Lord overcame your body and cleansed your spirit. They’d be certainly disappointed to hear you’re just hungry for some more grits.”
Junie leans her weight against the tree trunk and slowly stands.
Her sister is suffering, her eternal soul unrested, and Junie has been delaying in saving her. She’s chosen to spend nights with someone she barely knows rather than do what is necessary to help Minnie.
“Where did everyone else go?” she asks.
“We sent ’em on the road. Thought we was the only ones who needed to stay by your side,” Granddaddy says, wrapping his arm around her.
“C’mon now, we better get back and get you somethin’ to eat,” Muh says, beginning to hustle them along. “We only got until dinnertime.”
“Should we stay a little longer?” Granddaddy asks. He nods toward the graveyard behind them. Junie’s eyes follow his, knowing where he’s going. Her sister’s grave sits only a few yards away. Her throat begins to tighten at the thought of moving any closer.
Muh looks in the direction of the graveyard before biting her lip. She starts ahead toward the road.
“We better get the grandbaby something to eat. We can come back some other Sunday,” Muh answers, walking.
“I’m happy you all right, Grandbaby,” Granddaddy says, kissing her on the forehead. “Even if you ain’t been anointed by the Lord Almighty.”
Junie laughs, beginning to feel a bit better.
“How’d you manage to carry me out of that church all the way over here, Granddaddy?” she asks as she walks next to her grandfather.
“Me? Naw, Junie, I hate to say I can’t do that no more. It was Caleb who brought you out here. Came running over and snatched you into his arms before we even called for him.”