The Whole Beautiful World Read online

  I stormed to mine and Danny’s room and slammed the door for good measure. I sat on the edge of my bed and picked up the only thing I liked in my room, the snow globe with the dancers I had gotten from Dad two years ago, when we used to see him more. I shook it as hard as I could. All the little dancers moved around in different ways as the chunky sparkles fell around them, bouncing slowly off their yellow hair, which was tightly pulled back and wrapped in perfect spirals at the back of their pin-sized heads. My anger was starting to subside, but I didn’t want to lose the feeling just yet, so I clenched the globe again with both hands and shook it as hard as I could for a solid minute. I hoped the ballerinas would dislodge from their perches, but they stuck fast, shaking around on their posts. I shook it again and again, each time watching a different dancer. One would bounce up and down on a tiny spring. Another moved back and forth on the tips of her toes, her long extended leg moving in a quick arc, touching the shiny ceramic floor and then rearing backwards. Another spun in a small circle, round and round, and I felt nauseous watching her.

  It wasn’t because I hated him that I thought he was demon-possessed—on the contrary, I loved him enough to be the only one willing to do what it took to cast them out.

  There were so many signs—the way he’d get so angry he’d hold his breath till he passed out, the way he broke anything of mine he so much as looked at. I kept a tally of the number of times my brother was sent to the principal’s office by pinning safety pins to the bottom of my curtain. The house was full of traces of his terror: broken cupboards, soundless jack-in-the-boxes, the scars on my wrist from the time he had pushed me into the window and it broke. The only reason for someone to be so destructive was that he wasn’t in control. He had some evil spirit inside of him, tearing apart everything in his path from the inside out.

  It was one o’clock and the day was too full of end-of-summer heat and I was too hungry to play outside in the afternoon, so I sat and watched TV from the floor while Mom smoked on the couch, filling the room with a white, spirit-like haze that matched the glazy brightness of the image of the Reverend Pastor John Orville.

  “Go turn it up,” Mom said, rubbing one hand through her short hair, which was the colour of a golden retriever’s.

  “Are we having grilled cheese again for lunch?”

  “Just turn it up.”

  “And I don’t mind telling you,” the Reverend Pastor John said, hovering formidably against the dusty rose walls of his church foyer, “that I have seen the miracles of this little bottle of oil in my own life. It’s a small thing, but I think we all know the Holy Spirit moves through the smallest of us, doesn’t he, Mary-Beth?” He turned to his wife, perched beside him with her big yellow hair that sat still as a cage around her head, no matter how fervently the Spirit moved her to nod along with what the good Reverend Pastor John said.

  “Yes, indeed, John.” The corners of her lips moved up and made her baggy eyelids pinch around her beady eyes.

  “Why, we have a nephew, Phil. Deep into steroids, he was. He’s a good kid: smart, and kind, and full of life! But boy, that stuff messes with you. And for our young viewers out there, I don’t mind telling you, don’t even start with smoking, ’cause addiction is a harsh, harsh demon, ready to steal your life away.” Mom breathed in her cigarette quietly as Mary-Beth looked at me and wiped a long pink fingernail along the black-coated lashes of her bottom lid.

  “So our nephew got involved with these steroids, and I’m telling you, they changed that boy. Don’t ever stop believing that the battle we wage is merely against flesh and blood—this was a spiritual battle for his soul going on here.” Mary-Beth’s mouth pulled tightly into a knot and moved to the side of her face as if pushed by an invisible hand. Reverend Pastor John took her thin fingers in his, softly folded like a bird wing.

  I thought of the battle Danny must feel in his soul, this tugging back and forth of the demons and angels all rummaging around in his chest.

  “He would be his normal sweet self and suddenly it was just like a shadow’d pass over his face. He’d lash out. You could feel that he was not in control of himself. Someone else was ruling his heart.”

  Mary-Beth let out a low, dark sigh, and looked down at the Reverend Pastor John’s hand clamped around hers.

  “So, I took this little bottle of holy oil to his house,” and he drew it from his blazer’s front pocket, “and I just felt the spiritual tension walking into that home.”

  I knew exactly the kind of tension he was talking about. I knew the feeling that things might just explode at any minute.

  “And Phil came into the living room, and I asked if I could just pray for him, and he was a little resistant at first, but deep down, he wanted to be . . . free.”

  “That’s right. Freedom,” said Mary-Beth, looking up, pinching the ends of her hair between the thumb and forefinger of her unbound hand.

  “So I just wiped this oil across his forehead and claimed him for the Lord, not for Satan, and he broke down. Just wept! Well, I don’t mind telling you he was a different boy after that. Altogether different.”

  “Freedom!” said Mary-Beth, and she pulled her hand from the pastor’s, holding it up in the air like a timid bird, her fingers fluttering reverently.

  “Miracles come in all sizes, and this is small but powerful. We pray over each of these, that they will bless our supporters, and with any donation to our ministry, we will send you one, right away! Because we know how dearly we all need a touch of the Spirit.”

  “Amen,” said Mary-Beth. “Freedom! Free-dom.”

  I watched the ministry’s address flash in a rigid font in front of their hazy faces and ran the words over and over again through my head, then ran to my room and wrote them down in my notebook. “Still want that grilled cheese?” Mom hollered from the couch.

  MY HOLY OIL came in the mail four long weeks later. School had started back again, so I saw Danny less often and our fighting went from four times a day to once on average. Every day until its arrival I thought of it: each time Danny told Mom he hated her or called me stupid, when his teacher called and wanted to talk to Mom, every scream I heard reverberating through the drywall. When my heart began to pound with anger, I thought of the holy oil, small and potent, on its way slowly but faithfully through the mail.

  I had spent many walks to school thinking about the best way to anoint his head with oil. I concluded that the stuff probably needed to sit on his skin for a while to let the Holy Spirit sink in, and I couldn’t trust him not to wipe it off while conscious, so probably the best bet was to apply it while he was sleeping.

  I had included a five-dollar donation in my letter to the Reverend Pastor John Orville. I came home from school each day, checked the mailbox on the way in and turned on the TV to catch the tail end of his program to see if he included my prayer request on the show that day. I wondered if my donation was too small to be worthy of the oil of healing, and started thinking about searching through Mom’s stuff to find some more cash to send. She’d forgive me for stealing once she saw the results.

  Finally I checked the mailbox and found a small bubble-wrapped manila envelope. In the top left corner was a return address sticker with an image of the Pastor Reverend John’s smiling face beside Mary-Beth’s stiff grin haloed by her stiff yellow hair.

  I sat on my bed and tore open the lip of the envelope with a butter knife. Inside I found the little clear bottle, plastic, not glass, no longer than my forefinger and maybe twice as wide. Wrapped around it was a brochure for the ministry centre. I dug my hand around in the envelope, hoping for a letter, but found none, so I carefully lifted the little sticker from the top left corner and stuck it to my wooden headboard.

  Danny was napping in our room. I crawled over to his bed, sat up on my knees and looked at his face, so still, so peaceful. Maybe the holy oil would freeze him in this serene state and he would never be angry again. The little bottle felt weightless in my hand as I shook it gently for a minute and then took
off the lid carefully and dabbed a little on my finger. I tipped my hand above his face as slowly as I could and as lightly as possible drew my finger across his forehead. It was the nicest way I had ever touched him. He grimaced for a minute, but then his face relaxed again and he smacked his lips as I pulled my hand away. I had felt something. There had to be some change taking place throughout his soul. I had so much love for him in that moment that it felt like my lungs were pressing against the insides of my rib cage.

  He opened his eyes. My heart beat twice, hard, then I thought it stopped for a few seconds. He turned his head quickly towards me and his eyes went big.

  “What are you doing?” he yelled. He ran the back of his hand across his forehead. “What did you do to me?”

  He jumped up and tried to rub his head clean on the stomach of my shirt.

  “Hey! You’ll stain it!” I pushed him away at the shoulders. His arms flew out, knocking over my snow globe. It rolled across the dresser, tumbled off and cracked against my headboard.

  I ran to grab it from the floor. It was split down the centre and the liquid oozed through my fingers, thick and slippery. Danny ran from the room as I watched the dancers waver and teeter in their draining home. I sat on the edge of my bed, and turned my head to stare at the tiny Reverend Pastor John and his wife on my headboard.

  I WAS STILL holding the dancers when Mom came in.

  “What happened.” It was a statement not a question. “Grandma said you guys were screaming at each other. She didn’t want to come near—thought she’d get torn apart by you monsters.”

  I didn’t look up from the globe. “He’s demon-possessed, you know.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I anointed him with oil, and he . . . it was from the reverend.”

  “The demon?”

  I groaned. “The oil. The reverend on TV.”

  “Well, that man says some good things, but he’s got some problems, turns out. His wife took all the money from the ministry and ran away.”

  I turned to her. “But she’s with him on TV still!”

  “You’ve been watching that? They’ve just been playing re-runs.”

  I turned and looked at their smiling stamp on the headboard. I leaned over and put my palm across it, not wanting to look at Mom yet hoping she would somehow notice the wetness in my eyes.

  The next day when I came home, I found the globe-less dancers on my dresser. The glass was gone and so were the sparkles, but the dancers were there, poised in the air. I gently touched one’s yellow head, and watched it bounce back and forth daintily for a minute before settling, still and upright.

  BARN CATS

  HEATHER HAD REFERRED HIM. SHE knew his older sister, who was “the sweetest girl ever,” and if my oldest sister suggested it, it was nearly gospel. So when John Truman called, I said yes and he came to pick me up the following evening. It was my first date.

  Heather lent me a brown polyester skirt. I kept reapplying my deodorant every hour throughout the day.

  When we heard tires squeal in front of our house, Heather patted my bum and told me to behave. I responded with a scowl, and made my way out to the rusty growling pickup.

  He rolled down the window as I approached. “Hey, you look nice!” he called over the rumbling engine. He reached out his hand. His fingernails were dirty. I thought of my fifth-grade teacher, the one from Trinidad who would walk up and down the aisles every morning and check our fingernails to make sure they were clean. If they weren’t, he rapped them with a ruler.

  I lifted my hand and he shook it hard, bumping his forearm on the bottom of the window. He winced. “Well, are we gonna have our date here on the side of the road or should we go somewhere?” he said. When I walked in front of the car, he revved the engine. I jumped a little, and my sweaty hands were shaking by the time I tried to lift the door handle.

  He was laughing when I climbed in. “I’m so sorry I scared you! I was just joking around—trying to break the ice. Oh, but your face! You should have seen it.”

  Dinner was at the Capitol, the only restaurant in town with a flashing neon sign. Our father told us never to visit because the food was disgusting and the mugs were all chipped.

  John told me about hay season, about castrating pigs, and about how they butchered in their shed even though they weren’t supposed to because of “all the crazy health and safety crap.” He asked me what my dad used to do when he was still alive, what my favourite class was, and did I like working in tobacco in the summers. I didn’t love it but the money was better than picking strawberries. He said, “I think I’d rather cut the balls off pigs than work with all the Mexican immigrants, but you do what you have to do.” I gave him short answers, and he seemed to appreciate that.

  The food was better than I thought it would be, if you could get over the slight taste of cigarette ash. He finished his meal long before I did, and kept watching my fork move from my plate to my mouth while he talked.

  He told me about their barn cats, how they loved to lick up the pigs’ blood in the shed. Sometimes Scooter and Mittens would climb up the wood siding of the house and cry at John’s window at night. He demonstrated, his hands balled into little paws hanging off the edge of the invisible windowsill between us. His little meowing kitten face had me snorting chocolate milk up my nose. He couldn’t resist the little critters, and he’d let them in his room overnight. Then he shooed them back out in the morning before his mom found out the grubby creatures had slept all over his pillow.

  After dinner, he suggested a movie. I would have said no, had it not been for the way he talked about the cats. We wouldn’t have to talk anymore in the theatre, and besides, Heather had suggested him. We drove to Stanford where the theatre played two movies. I forced a giggle here and there through the comedy, to match his wet snickering. I kept my eyes pasted on the speckled screen when I saw in my peripheral vision his pimpled face turn to look at mine.

  On the ride home, he rambled till he informed me he had to “go, if you know what I mean,” with a wink. He pulled over on the shoulder of the gravel road, slammed the door, trotted past the front of the truck, and then to my surprise, wrapped around the side of the vehicle, passing me and stopping near the rear bumper. I whipped my head forward and glanced into the rearview mirror and caught him urinating on the back tire.

  The next time he called, Heather told him I was unavailable.

  BACON BITS

  CALLIE AND THE GROCERY CART swivelled as one. She shook her shoulders in a spastic dance to make Aunt Lou laugh. The woman ahead of them was too busy texting to start loading her groceries onto the belt. Callie gave her a soft nudge from behind with the cart.

  “I’m sorry,” Callie said sweetly as the woman glared at her.

  “Sure you are,” said Texty, dropping her phone in her pocket. Callie would have shot something back if she had been at home. But in Port Franklin things like this didn’t seem to bother her. When they had been at the beach earlier that day, a man had plopped down on his towel right beside them and started picking at the bottom of his feet, pulling flakes of skin off and flicking them in her direction. Callie-at-Home would have asked him if he had a problem—did he not realize that they were in public and not in his filthy-ass bathroom? But Port-Franklin-Callie just turned away and thought about the hours Aunt Lou had spent peeling the flakes off Callie’s sunburned shoulders and lathering them with aloe vera.

  “You mind if Dee joins us for supper?” Lou asked Callie as they settled in the car.

  Callie pushed off her dirty flip-flops and plunked her feet on the dashboard. “Call her up. We’ve got bacon bits to spare.”

  Lou’s best friend Dee had been scary at first, when Callie had met her three summers ago. Scary because Dee made intense eye contact, as if she could see your thoughts behind your eyes. Scary because she was quiet while you talked to her and she didn’t make sounds like “yep” and “uh-huh” the way everyone else does, to prove they are listening, instead of
actually doing it.

  Callie finally warmed to her when they visited the workshop attached to Dee’s hand-crafted furniture store, Wood You Be Mine. As Dee opened the door and fresh dust poured out, Callie finally identified the strange smell Dee exuded, the smell of wood chips and varnish. Callie wandered around the sunlit shop and examined the machines and Dee didn’t once say, “Be careful” or “That’s dangerous.”

  Dee took the wooden skeleton of a chair and showed Callie how to weave dried cattail rushes to make a seat. Her stubby fingers twisted the strands and wrapped them around each other, pulling them up and down through the chair’s empty centre until it was filled. She made it look simple, but Callie’s seat ended up lumpy with sharp strands bulging and splaying at every angle. Instead of scolding or lying that it looked great, Dee said, “That looks like a medieval torture device,” and Callie and Lou laughed.

  This summer Dee taught Callie to prep the rushes. They found a nearby ditch and cut down long green stalks while the cattails’ soft brown bodies dodged their reach. Callie picked one and made purring noises while running it along Dee’s arm.

  “I think I prefer this thing to the actual animal,” Dee said, petting the plant. “But I guess they shed.”

  “Should be called corn dogs instead,” said Callie.

  They stretched the reeds carefully in Dee’s pickup and Callie sat in back, guarding them against the gusts of wind that threatened to pull them away.

  Lou suggested leaving them in the shed to dry, but Callie was afraid the birds would shit on them. So they took over Lou’s living room and set up a drying screen where Callie could turn them every day as Dee had instructed her, letting the air toughen their thin bodies, watching them turn from fragile green to hearty beige. The active waiting made Callie feel grown up, entrusted with something delicate that could become valuable in time.

  After a few weeks, they sprayed them with water to “mellow” them, softening the brittle leaves. The next day Dee’s thick hands demonstrated how to weave a basket. Callie took her time, slowly and rhythmically coiling the rushes she had cared for over the past weeks. They didn’t feel dead to her but soft and refreshed.