WILLOW
Joseph was a professor of religion at the community college. He taught about the Bible, but mostly the Old Testament. He taught about a God who wiped out the world with a flood, who rained down fire and brimstone on entire villages, killing everyone there. Women and children, good and bad. Everyone. I didn’t know what brimstone was, but he showed me drawings in those college textbooks of his, pictures of fire pouring down and devouring the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah, turning Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt.
“This,” he told me in that somber voice of his, with the solemn, spongy face that never smiled, the reddish-orange beard, thick and disgusting, “is God’s wrath. You know what wrath is, don’t you, Claire?” and when I said I didn’t, we looked it up in some big, heavy dictionary, together. Extreme anger, it said.
“This,” Joseph said, showing me again, the pictures of fire and brimstone, “is what God does when he’s mad.”
Joseph convinced me that thunder was my doing, something or other I had done to upset God. I lived in fear of thunder, lightning and rain. When the sky turned black—as it often did in Omaha in the middle of summer—on one of those hot, humid July days when the threatening black clouds raced in to swallow the calm blue sky, I knew that God was coming for me. When the wind started whirling, the trees stretched down to touch their toes and sometimes snapped clear in two, garbage from the Dumpster on the corner jetting through the air, I would drop to my knees, as Joseph had showed me to do, and pray, over and over and over again, for God’s forgiveness.
What I did wrong, I never quite knew. The explosive lightning and ear piercing thunder immobilized me, and once or twice, and probably even more, I peed my pants as I knelt there, in that bedroom of mine, praying to God. I’d keep watch out the window for the fire and brimstone, falling from the sky. I’d stare for as long as it took, for the storm to settle, to move on to Iowa, and then, Illinois, to punish some other sinner like me.
Joseph told me about hell. The place that sinners go. A place of never-ending punishment and torture, with demons and dragons and the devil himself. Eternal punishment. Lakes of fire. Fiery furnace. Unquenchable fire. Fire, fire, fire. I lived in fear of fire.
I tried to be a good girl. I did. I cleaned up the house when Joseph was teaching and Isaac and Matthew were at school; I made dinner for Joseph and the boys, carried Miriam a tray, though it was rare that she would eat on her own, without some arm-twisting from Joseph.
Miriam spent most of her days in either one of two ways, in a sleep-like daze, wide-awake but totally still, like a statue, or she’d be up and in a panic, throwing herself at Joseph’s feet and begging for his forgiveness. There were days when she was agitated, snapping at Joseph and the boys about reading her mind. She’d tell them to stop it, stop reading my mind. And then get out, get out, get out, and she’d smack at her head with the palm of her hand as if she was pushing them, pushing Joseph, Isaac and Matthew right on out of her brain. On those days Joseph would lock her in her room with a lock and key. He kept that key with him at all times, even when he wasn’t home, so that when it was just Miriam and me, I could hear her screaming from her bedroom all day long about how Joseph was reading her mind, how he was putting thoughts inside her head.
I thought that Miriam was crazy. She scared me. Not like Joseph did, but in her own way.
I did my chores, the laundry and cleaning and such, made dinner for when Joseph and the boys came home. And I hummed loud enough to drown out the sound of Miriam’s screams. But I only hummed when Joseph wasn’t around, because Joseph would swear that whatever I was humming, usually Patsy Cline like the records Momma used to play, wasn’t right by God. Blasphemy, he’d say. Sacrilege.
But Joseph never did lock me in my room. Not back then, at least. Joseph knew I wouldn’t run away ’cause over and over again he told me about Lily. How he’d do things to her if ever I misbehaved. So I didn’t ever misbehave.
But when Miriam was being statue-like, I’d go into her room, and it was as if she didn’t know I was there. Her eyes, they wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t follow me as I helped her move from the bed. They wouldn’t blink. From time to time, I pulled the dirty sheets from that bed and washed them. And then I’d go back inside to help Miriam into the tub, to scrub her body with my bare hands because Joseph told me that it was mine to do.