“Was your mother religious?”
“No,” he said right away. “She wasn’t religious—she was confused. I remember every Sunday morning we were late getting to church. We—my sisters and me—hated going to church because it was so stuffy in there. ‘Those big fancy churches that cost millions to build,’ my mother had said, ‘you can tell what’s important to them just by looking at the building. It’s the little churches on the hillsides, or tucked away in the woods that are blessed by the Lord. Because the people who worship there don’t care about fancy pews and extravagant carpet and high vaulted ceilings. The preacher doesn’t drive a forty-thousand-dollar car. His wife doesn’t have a new face every five years,’ and blah, blah, blah”—he pressed his fingers and thumb together, simulating a moving mouth—“So we never went to churches with air conditioning. And we hated it!” He laughed.
I chuckled.
Atticus lost his train of thought suddenly as if something bothered him. Was it the memory?
Noticing the dark shift in his face, I reacted quickly to combat it.
“You said she was confused?”
He nodded. “She was a complicated woman, my mother,” he said. “One day she was all about Jesus, the next day she was telling my father how religion was dangerous, that it was the true wolf in sheep’s clothing. Then she’d be back to church the next week, telling me and my sisters to read our bibles before bed”—he shook a pointed finger and cocked his head to one side, pretending to be his mother, mimicking her voice—“‘Say your prayers and learn the Word of God so you can make it into Heaven,’ she’d say. One year she declared herself a Buddhist!” He laughed again, shaking his head at the ridiculousness of it all.
“The truth was,” he went on, letting the laughter die, “my mother just needed to believe in something, like so many people do, I guess.” Then he smirked, and said critically, “It just needed to be something that didn’t take too much away from the things she liked. When someone in church pointed out to her that God didn’t approve of half the things she enjoyed, she decided she didn’t like Christianity much.”
We laughed together.
“Is she why you don’t believe in God?” I asked. I didn’t know why I’d said it; it just came out.
The question caught him off-guard; it stripped the smile from his face, and the humor from the moment. He looked me right in the eyes with a sort of determination I could not place.
He did not answer.
“Why do you believe in God, Thais?” He paused; wrinkles of curiosity deepened in his forehead. “Why do you believe in someone who took your family from you?”
I had never told Atticus whether or not I believed in God, but it was never something I neither openly displayed, nor tried to hide.
“God didn’t take my family from me,” I said with no emotion. “We all die, Atticus. Today, tomorrow, years from now; life and death go hand in hand like darkness and light—one cannot exist without the other. But God had nothing to do with their deaths.”
“He had nothing to do with saving them, either.” There was a contemptuous bite in his voice.
“I’m sorry, Thais,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that. I guess I’m just still at war with…God, for what He allowed to happen to my family—and yours. I’ll always be at war with Him.”
“But how can you be at war with Him,” I said gently, “if you don’t believe in Him?”
ATTICUS
I thought about it, and in the end had no worthy rebuttal so I said nothing.
“Look who’s back,” Thais said, her frown turning up again.
I expected to see Jeffrey coming through the woods, but it was George, crawling through the grass.
Thais went down the steps and picked the turtle up, her fingers latched to the sides of its shell. She smiled and peered in close to its face as its neck stretched out toward her; its little scaly feet moved back and forth in the air as if it were swimming.
“Thais, please don’t kiss the turtle; they carry diseases.”
She made a pffft sound with her lips at me and then turned back to George. “If he was good enough to eat,” she argued, “then he’s safe enough to kiss,” and then she planted a little kiss right on the top of its cartoonish head.
I laughed under my breath, even though I really, really wished she wouldn’t kiss the turtle with the same lips she kissed me with.
Thais put out a few blackberries in the grass for George and left it alone to wander in the yard. Eventually, it disappeared again.
And like clockwork, Jeffrey reappeared.
“Hi! Thais!” Jeffrey shouted as he shot through the trees and into the backyard, his arm raised high in the air. “I got you flowers, Thais!”
She glided gracefully down the steps to meet Jeffrey halfway.
“Oh, how beautiful, Jeffrey,” she said as he eagerly put the bouquet into her hands. “Thank you so much.” She buried her nose in the tiny petals and inhaled deeply.
“I got them for you,” said Jeffrey, beaming, his crooked teeth on display.
“Good morning, Jeffrey,” I said from the porch.
“Morning, Atticus! I got Thais flowers today!”
“I see that,” I said with a nod and a smile. “They’re very nice.”
“Come inside so I can put them in some water.” Thais grabbed Jeffrey’s big hand and pulled him along.
Jeffrey followed happily, ran up the porch steps and gave me a high-five on his way past.
While Thais rummaged the kitchen for something to put the flowers in, Jeffrey went on and on about how he had been helping his Grandpa Esra clean and smoke the fish Jeffrey had caught in the pond yesterday. And when I asked Jeffrey how Esra and June were doing, Jeffrey told us that his grandma and grandpa were doing “good, good” but that June was too tired to leave the treehouse “past day and yesterday and probably tomorrow, too”.
“Is she sick?” Thais asked, concerned.
Jeffrey shook his head. “Just tired,” he answered. “And maybe tomorrow too. She’s so old, Grandma June.”
Then, as if Jeffrey couldn’t hold onto a thought for more than a moment, he went across the living room toward the window overlooking the front porch.
“Mr. Graham said he would make me a rowboat come February,” Jeffrey said. He pressed his childlike face, full of wonder and innocence, against the glass as he tried to get a better look at the skeleton in the rocking chair. “But he’s dead now, so he can’t make me a rowboat.”
Thais and I glanced at one another.
Then I noticed Jeffrey wasn’t in his usual yellow-and-red-striped swimming shorts. “Are you going to swim today?” I asked.
Thais set her flowers in a cup with water on the windowsill next to Jeffrey.
Jeffrey looked down at his baggy blue jeans, then over at me with a look of frustration.
“I…forgot my shorts. Oh no, now we can’t go swimming.” Dramatically, he brought up a hand and ran it over the top of his partially shaved head—hair was growing back in an odd formation, longer in some spots than others.