Rapture of Canaan by Sheri Reynolds Page A

eyes and saw all the pleasures of the whole world looking back.
    Sometimes when we were praying, I’d open my eyes and watch James’ face, his square jaw left loose so that his bottom lip fell down just a bit, just enough for me to look into the darkness that was his mouth and imagine my whole body hiding there, warm beneath his tongue.
     
     
     
    T hat next spring as it got closer to time to plant the garden, Grandpa Herman decided that the children would be the ones to get the soil ready. So after school, we’d go out and work in the dirt. James and Mustard and Barley would take turns with the hand tiller, and I’d pick up sticks and roots, along with Pammy and John, and carry them over to the edge of the field where we’d burn them later.
    It was a big field, and while we worked hard, we played too, kicking clumps of dirt at each other and drawing figures in the soil.
    It was out in the field where I talked to James.
    Barley was taking his turn with the tiller, and James and I both had armloads of old tobacco stalks to carry to the far end of the field. Pammy and John were working opposite us, on their way back to pick up more, and Mustard was helping Barley.
    “Listen,” I said, “if you don’t like being my prayer partner, you can just tell Grandpa Herman to find you another one.”
    “Why would I want to do that?” he asked.
    “Well—in case you don’t like me,” I told him.
    “I like you fine,” he said.
    “You do?”
    “Yeah,” he said, and stopped and wiped his face off with his sleeve and spit. “Why would you think I don’t like you?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You’re the one who didn’t want to be my prayer partner.”
    “Me?”
    “Yeah. Pammy told me that when you found out you had to hold my hands, you cried like a girl.”
    “I wasn’t crying,” I insisted. “I was cutting up onions.”
    “oh.”
    “The whole reason they put us together in the first place was because I told Nanna”—and I paused—“I told Nanna that I liked you and to help me figure out a way,” and I paused again. “Well, just a way to see you more.”
    “Oh,” he said again, and tried not to smile but did it anyway. “Really? Nanna did it?”
    “And ever since—well, you ain’t acted like you wanted to be with me.”
    “I wanted to be with you,” he said. “I just thought you were—I don’t know—like them.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You know, like a Believer, in everything.”
    “You mean you’re not?”
    “I didn’t say that,” he said stubbornly, and started walking again.
    “You’re not a Believer?” I yelled out, and then I started laughing out loud.
    He looked back at me and said, “I am too a Believer. But I don’t think for a minute that Rajesh Patel is going to Hell. Or his sister either. And if you think that, you’re just ... full of shit. ”
    “I don’t think that,” I said, running to catch up with him, laughing so hard my lungs felt like they might explode from the happiness. “I can’t believe you said that word. ”
    Then James crumpled beneath his face. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean it. We have to pray,” he said desperately. He looked like someone just realizing that he’d taken his last breath.
    “I don’t care, ” I assured him.
    “Well, I care,” he said. “And of course Rajesh is going to Hell. He sure can’t go to Heaven. Where else could he go? We have to pray.”
    James fell on his knees right there, pleading with God for forgiveness. I knelt on the ground beside him, listening to him swear that he was a Believer. But I didn’t pray with him. The wind was blowing his curls everywhere. He had the most beautiful curls I’d ever seen. It was all I could do to keep from rolling with laughter on that hard earth.
     
     
     
    T hat night when James and I met together in prayer, we prayed like never before. We prayed out loud.
    James said, “Heavenly Father, help David and Laura to conceive a child in your image,” because