Taylor McKay Hathorn

The Land of Nod

Clara is in the third grade Sunday School class the first time she hears the story of Adam. Mrs. Canfield reads from the book of Genesis while they cut out butterflies. Clara wonders why, if Adam had been given dominion over all the animals, they only had butterflies in class, and Mrs. Canfield’s warm voice belies the harshness of the words: if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.

Clara’s head swims with the image of sin outside her bedroom door, a rabid dog like the one her father had shot when it staggered into their front yard. Clara had only been in kindergarten, but she had watched from the front window as her father went out onto the porch. He had the same gun that he used to go hunting in the deep winter, and Clara’s mother clapped her hands over Clara’s brother’s ears when he pulled the trigger. The dog dropped in its tracks, and later, as her brother splashed in a plastic kiddie pool, Clara found dark smears of the dog’s blood in the grass. Her mother had yelled at her to get away from it, and she had.  

Clara imagines God with a gun in the hallway of her house, shooting the mad dog of sin before it devours her. She does not imagine God coming inside her room, even though her Sunday School teacher says he lives inside her heart. If God could master even the wild dog, she does not want him in her bedroom. 

She associates God with the doctor’s office, too, because Mrs. Canfield also reads them a story about Adam’s wife, Eve. Adam had been formed out of the dust of the earth (this feels right to Clara, who has made mud pies. It is not something from nothing a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. It is something from something). Eve, however, was born from Adam’s rib the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. Mrs. Canfield talks about how nice it must have been for Adam to awake from his slumber and find Eve lying there it is not good for man to be alone.  

All Clara can think about is what happened when Adam was asleep. She imagines God’s finger opening Adam’s ribcage the way her father splits a watermelon. She imagines the blood spilling onto the earth your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground, imagines the white rib in God’s hand as it whirls into a woman flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone.  

Adam wakes up when the violence is over, when there is only a woman left behind.

**

When Clara is twenty-five, she decides that she would very much like to not believe in God anymore, thank you very much. Her brother is dying and her father can’t stop drinking about it, and she’s in her second year of seminary, learning Greek and Hebrew and wondering how she, the child did not want God in her bedroom, will ever stand behind a pulpit and tell other people that they should invite him into their lives. 

There are stories that she loves, stories like take up your mat and walk I once was blind but now I see forgive them for they know not what they do and those stories laid down to sleep with her at night and woke up next to her in the morning, helped the raging dog outside her room turn around three times, helped her forget the deathly horror of surgery and remember only the warm body in the recovery room.  

But now, there is only the story of the dying Lazarus and the tarrying God, the God who, after hearing that Lazarus was ill, stayed two days longer in the place where he was. As her brother wastes away, she thinks endlessly about those two godless days, those days when Martha and Mary watched the life leech from their brother’s body (these words are not in the book, but she hears them rattle around in her skull and knows that they must have been said in hushed whispers around the sickbed of Lazarus: God loves him, and shouldn’t that count for something?), those days when Mary and Martha wrapped their brother in cloths and anointed his dead body and put him in a tomb near their house so that they could visit his grave and rail that God would allow such a thing in the first place. 

The rest of the story, of course, is Lazarus come out and the resurrection and the life, but she rips it out of the book of John in a fit of rage, and she helps her brother plan his funeral. There will be a black dress, and she will give the eulogy and will try to say words that are not Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died, even though they are the truest ones she knows.

** 

She marries Jack when she is thirty-five, and she thinks about the story of the surgery in the garden again, the story that had so tormented her as a child, and now it feels so true that she can feel it in her teeth, behind her eyelids: under his heart was where she had been born and where she would go to die. She does not say this out loud because it feels too close to the bone, too true.  

She gets in the pulpit and says plenty of things that she believes half-heartedly and half-of-the-time, like surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, but this one certain truth, she cannot say. She says it in other ways, by listening to jazz while they make dinner together and by running with him in the mornings when she would rather be in bed. She tells him she loves him before they go to bed at night, and when he says it back, she thinks it might be sufficient.

** 

She is forty-seven when the sky falls. Jack dies on a Thursday morning, struck by an elderly woman going the wrong way up a one-way.  

When she drives to the hospital, she thinks about how cold the knife blade must have felt on Isaac’s neck, thinks of the way the scent of steel must have haunted his relationship with his father his whole life long, thinks of how long and lonely the walk down the mountain must have seemed when he discovered that there was nothing that God would not ask of his father take your son your only son whom you love and nothing that his father would not give him he reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son.  

** 

She is an old woman who has learned to sleep in the middle of the bed, an old woman whose cardiologist tells her that the pain in her chest leads to nothing (this is not diagnosable, but she thinks to herself that what she feels is the aching emptiness of the missing rib, the divine surgical scar with its phantom pain).  

She hears her bedroom door creak open, and when she opens her eyes, Jack stands at the side of her bed. In her mind, he has been frozen in time, but now, in the deep darkness of her empty bedroom, he is the same age she is, with white hair and deep creases around his eyes. She has never seen him as an old man, and she is blinded for a moment at the sight of it, at what might have been but never was. 

Be not afraid, he says, and he climbs into bed beside her. Just as when they were young, they cross their arms over each other’s, an x marking the spot in the middle of a bed that has not been theirs in forty years. 

You know when I lay down and when I rise up, she tells him, and she feels the tears she thought she had long stopped crying leak from her eyes. 

You discern my thoughts from far away.

You search out my path and my lying down

And are acquainted with all my ways.

END

Taylor McKay Hathorn is a Mississippian by birth and a Jacksonian by choice. You can read more of her work online at www.taylormckayhathorn.com. Twitter: @_youaremore_ IG: @taymckay._