Free Rapture of Canaan by Sheri Reynolds Page B

them off her feet one at a time. And then he reached up and took her socks and pulled them down too, slowly, down her legs.”
    “Really?” Mustard said.
    “Yeah. But he didn’t touch her skin.”
    About that time I felt a poke and realized it was James’ hand, resting on my leg. I pulled in my breath quick and kept talking.
    “He folded her socks up neatly and stuck them back inside her shoes, and then Grandpa helped Nanna up. They felt the prickles underneath their toes of baby blades of grass just breaking through the soil.”
    “So what’d they do with their shoes?” Barley asked.
    “Wait a minute. I’m getting to that,” I told him.
    I looked around, and Laura and Wanda were still talking to Lorrie. David and Everett and Ben were still giggling in the corner. Nobody was looking our way at all. James’ fingers fumbled lightly at my leg, at the skin behind my knee that’s softer than newborn biddies. I slid down a little, and my dress slid up, and then he was massaging the place where my knee changed to thigh.
    “They took their shoes and stuck them in a drainage pipe that ran underneath a dirt road. The pipe had a lot of dirt packed over it, but it was like a bridge, separating two sides of a creek. Except the creek had dried up. Anyway, that’s where they left their shoes for the day, and they danced all the way to school, feeling dusty sand powder up around their toes and leaving footprints side by side for anyone to see.”
    James’ eyes were only half open. His mouth was half open too. Pammy, laying right beside me, didn’t notice a thing. I was very still.
    “But that day at school, it started raining. It rained from the time they got there until just before they left. And when Grandpa Herman met Nanna on the school steps after the last bell, they knew they were in trouble deep.”
    He reached up quickly, to the middle of my thigh, shifting his body as he did it so that anybody who was looking would just see the blanket change positions from his movement.
    The heat rushed up my body and into my face. I licked my lips and kept talking, trying not to breathe out loud.
    “They got their feet and legs all muddy walking back to the pipe,” I told them. “Nanna had splats of mud above her knees that she had to flick off with her fingernails. But then when they got to the place they’d left their shoes, they were gone. Washed away by the creek that had come back to life in the storm.”
    “What’d they do?”
    “They had to go home and tell their parents about their sins,” I said.
    And then James reached up again, almost too high, just barely escaping the edge of my underpants, and his hand there felt like a thousand ladybugs crawling. For a second, I thought I might lift right off the bed, zip up into the air, and float across the room. I felt like a pine tree in spring. I knew if I opened my mouth again, there was a chance I’d speak in tongues.
    “And then?” Barley posed.
    I cleared my throat, and James slid his hand back down to my knee, and I quivered all over without meaning to.
    “And then they couldn’t walk to school together for the rest of that year. Except they did it anyway. Grandpa Herman would wait for Nanna half a mile down the road, and then Imogene would walk ahead of them and holler back to Nanna if she saw anybody else coming so that Grandpa Herman could duck into the woods.
    “And they didn’t even care that they had to wear old shoes that were too tight and left marks across their feet because they were in love and it didn’t matter.”
    “That’s a good story,” James said.
    “Y’all should go to bed, maybe,” I sighed, and rolled over to face Pammy.
    T hat night I dreamed of Jesus on the cross, on a cross in the field behind The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God’s Almighty Baptizing Wind. I dreamed I was standing at my bedroom window, and Jesus was on the cross, holding a handful of azaleas for me.
    I dreamed I went outside in just my gown, and walked up