Sweet Land Stories Read online

  A week later they were married in the chapel of the First Methodist church there in Tulsa that looked like Winchester Cathedral. Brad G. Benton brought her to live in his apartment in a new building that had a swimming pool in the basement and a gym on the roof. They were high enough to see out over the whole city, though there wasn’t that much to see in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  So once more her fortunes had changed and little Jolene was a young matron of the upper class. She wanted to write to someone about this incredible turn in her life, but who could she write to? Who? There was no one. In that sense nothing had changed, because she was as alone as she had always been, a stranger in a strange land.

  Things in the marriage were okay at first, though some of Brad G. Benton’s ideas were not to her taste. He was very athletic and no sooner satisfied in one orifice than she was turned over for the other. Also, he seemed not to notice her artwork. She had bought an easel and set up a little studio in what was designed to be the maid’s room, because the Indian woman who cooked and cleaned had her own home to go to each evening. Jolene painted there and stretched her canvas, and she took a figure-painting class once a week where there were live models. She did well, her teacher was very encouraging, but Brad took none of this in. He just didn’t notice—he was too busy with his work and his workouts and his nights out and his nights in her.

  It turned out that Brad G. Benton’s family was prominent in Tulsa. Not one of them had come to the wedding, their purpose being to define to her what white trash meant. At first she didn’t care that much. But she’d see their pictures in the newspapers being honored at charity events. They had wings of buildings named after them. One day, coming from shopping, she looked out of the cab window as it passed a glass office tower that said BENTON INTERNATIONAL on a giant brass cube balanced on one of its corners in the plaza out front.

  She said to Brad, I would think they had more respect for you if not for me. But he only laughed. It was not so much that he was a democrat in his ideals, as she was to realize, it was part of his life’s work to do outrageous things and raise hell. It was how he kept everyone’s attention. He loved to twist noses out of joint. He was contrary. He hadn’t joined the Benton family enterprise as he was supposed to—it was a holding company with many different kinds of business in their hands—but had gone off on his own to show what he was made of.

  Jolene knew that if she wanted to prove anything to his family, if she wanted any kind of social acceptance in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she would have to work for it. She would have to start reading books and take a course or two in something intellectual and embrace the style of life, the manners, the ways of doing and talking by being patient and keeping her eyes and ears open. She would attend their church, too. As wild as he was, Brad was like his father, what he called a strong Christian. That was the one place they would have to meet and, she was willing to bet, speak to one another. And how then could the family not speak to her?

  Oddly enough, she was looking as good as she ever had, and Brad took her once a week to dinner at the country club to show her off. By then everyone in town knew this so-called Cinderella story. Grist for the mill. He was heedless. He just didn’t worry about it, whereas she could hardly raise her head. One evening, his father and mother were sitting at a far table with their guests, who looked as if they were there to serve them no less than the waiters. Brad waved—it was more like a salute—and the father nodded and resumed his conversation.

  Through no fault of her own Jolene had stepped into a situation that was making her life miserable. Whatever was going on with these people, what did it have to do with her? Nothing. She was as nothing.

  To tell the truth, she had made Brad for a creep that first time he came on to her at that cocktail party. He’d padded into the kitchen, stalking her like some animal, taken the empty champagne tray out of her hands, and told her redheads smelled different. And he stood there sniffing her and going, Hmmm, yes, like warm milk.

  AFTER HER BABY was born, when Brad G. Benton started to bat her around, Jolene could not help but remember that first impression. Every little thing drove him crazy. It got so she couldn’t do anything, say anything, without he would go off half-cocked. He took to hitting her, slapping her face, punching her. What are you doing? she screamed. Stop it, stop it! It was his new way of getting off. He would say, You like this? You like it? He’d knock her around, then push her down on the bed. She grew accustomed to living in fear of getting beaten up and forced against her will. She was still to learn what they would teach at the shelter—it happens once, that’s it, you leave. But now she just tried to see it through. Brad G. Benton had been to college, he came of money and he wore good clothes, and she was flattered that he would fall for her when she hadn’t even a high school diploma. And then of course there were the apologies and the beggings for forgiveness and the praying in church together, and by such means she slowly became a routinely abused wife.

  Only when it was all over would she realize it wasn’t just having the baby; it was their plans for him, the Bentons’ plans for her Mr. Nipplebee. He was an heir, after all. The minute they’d found out she was pregnant, they went to work. And after he was born, they slowly gave it to Brad in bits and pieces, what their investigators had learned about her life before. Never mind that she had tried to tell Brad about her marriages, her life on the road. He never wanted to hear it; he had no curiosity about her—none. She had appeared in Tulsa as a vision, God’s chosen sex partner for him, a fresh and wet and shining virgin with red hair. All those beatings were what he was told, and all those apologies were the way his love for her was hanging on. She would feel sorry for him if she could because he was so wired, such a maniac. It was as if his wildness, his independent choice of life, was being driven from him, as if it was the Devil. It was those parents slowly absorbing him back into their righteousness.

  One day Brad G. Benton appeared at the door to her little studio room when he ordinarily would be at work. She was ruling off a grid on one of her canvases as she had been taught. Brad! she said, smiling, but there was no recognition in his eyes. He kicked the stool out from under her. He broke the easel over his knee, he bashed her canvases against the wall, tore down the drawings she had pinned up there, and then he squeezed tubes of paint into her face as he held her down on the floor. And he began hitting her as she lay there. He punched her face, he punched her in the throat. When he got off her, she could hear his breathing—it was like crying. He stood over her, kicked her in the side, and as suddenly as he had come he was gone.

  She lay there moaning in pain, too frightened and shocked even to get up until she thought of the baby. She dragged herself to the nursery. The Cherokee woman who had heard everything sat beside the crib with her hand over her eyes. But the baby was sleeping peacefully. Jolene washed her face and, wrapping up her Mr. Nipplebee, she took him with her as she dragged herself to a doctor. She was told that she had had her cheek fractured, two broken ribs, contusions of the throat, and a bruised kidney. How did this happen? the doctor asked her. She was afraid to tell him, and, besides, it hurt too much to talk. But the nurse in the office didn’t have to be told. She wrote out the name and address of a women’s shelter and said, Go there right now. I’ll order you a cab. And in that way, with her precious in her arms and only what she wore, Jolene left her marriage.

  She could hardly bear staying at the shelter, where there were these wimpy women looking for her friendship, her companionship. Jolene wouldn’t even go to the group sessions. She stayed by herself and nursed Mr. Nipplebee.

  The shelter gave her the name of a woman lawyer and she put down a retainer. Get me a divorce as fast as you can, she told the lawyer. The money—I don’t care, I’ll take anything they give. I just want out of here and out of Tulsa, Oklahoma. And then she waited, and waited, and nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. This went on for some time. And the next thing Jolene knew, when she was about strapped of her savings account, the lawyer quit on her. She was an ol
der woman who wore pinstripe suits and big loopy bronze earrings. I may be broke, Jolene said to her, but Brad G. Benton has money to burn and I can pay you afterwards out of the alimony or child care.

  You didn’t tell me you had a past including a stretch in juvenile detention, the lawyer said. To say nothing of a previous as yet un-annulled marriage to a convicted drug dealer.

  Jolene was so stunned she didn’t think to ask how the lawyer knew that if she hadn’t told her.

  She was up against a scumbag husband on his own turf, so what could she expect but that there was worse to come, as there was, if he knew all along where she was hiding, and if he knew by first names everyone in town, as he probably did the very police officers who came one morning to arrest her for unlawful kidnapping of her own child, who they took from her arms and drove off in one squad car with Jolene in another as she looked back screaming.

  I don’t want to hear about what is the law in this country and what is not, Jolene told the Legal Aid person who was assigned to her. Do you know what it means to have your child torn from you? Do you have to have that happen to you to know that it is worse than death? Because though you want to kill yourself, you cannot have that relief for thinking of the child’s welfare in the hands of a sick father who never smiled at him and was jealous of him from the day he was born.

  My baby, she said aloud when she was alone. My baby.

  He had her coloring and button nose and carrot-red fuzz for hair. He drank from her with a born knowledge of what was expected of him. He was a whole new life in her arms, and for the very first time she could remember she had something she wanted. She was Jolene, his mother, and could believe in God now, who had never before seemed to her to be much of a fact of life.

  And so now there was a hearing for the divorce Brad had filed for. And his whole miserable family was there—they loved him after all now that he was getting rid of her and her past was thrown in her face. They had it all down, including the medical records of her STD from Coco, her living in sin, and even her suspension one term at South Sumter High for smoking pot. It was a no-brainer, her Legal Aid kid was out of his league, and without giving it much thought, the judge ruled she was an unfit mother and granted Brad G. Benton sole custody of her Mr. Nipplebee.

  On top of everything, in the fullness of her milk that she had to pump out, she must have done something wrong, because she ended up in the hospital with a staph infection that had to be drained, like the milk had gone bad and turned green. But she had a chance to think. She thought of her choices. She could kill Brad G. Benton—it’d be simple enough to buy some kind of gun and wait on him—but then the baby would be raised by the Benton family. So what was the point? She could find a job and see the baby every second Sunday for one hour, as allowed by the judge, and rely on the passing of time for the moment when nobody would be looking and she could steal him back and run for it. But then on her first visitation what happened was that Brad was up in the gym and a new large Indian woman was with Mr. Nipplebee, and Brad’s crone of a mother stood with her back to the door and they wouldn’t let Jolene hold him but just sit by the crib and watch him sleep. And she thought, If I stay on in Tulsa for my visitations, he will grow up learning to think of me as an embarrassment, a poor relation, and I can’t have that.

  THESE DAYS, JOLENE has this job in West Hollywood inking for a small comic-book company, except they don’t call them comic books—they call them graphic novels. Because most of them aren’t funny at all. They are very serious. She likes the people at work, they are all good pals and go out for pizza together. But where she lives is down near the farmers’ market, in a studio apartment that is sacred to her. Nobody can come in no matter how good a friend. She has a little stereo for her Keith Jarrett CDs and she lights a candle and drinks a little wine and dreams of plans for herself. She thinks someday, when she has more experience, of writing a graphic novel of her own, The Life of Jolene.

  She has a pastel sketch she once did of her precious baby. It is so sweet! It’s the only likeness she has. Sometimes she looks at this sketch and then at her own face in the mirror, and because he takes after her in his coloring and features, she tries to draw him at what he might look like at his present age, which is four and a half.

  Friends tell Jolene she could act in movies because she may be twenty-five but she looks a lot younger. And they like her voice that she has courtesy of her ex-husband, the way it cracks like Janis Joplin’s. And her crooked smile, which she doesn’t tell them is the result of a busted cheekbone. So she’s had some photos taken and is sending them out to professional agents.

  I mean, why not? Jolene says to herself. Her son could see her up on the screen one day? And when she took herself back to Tulsa in her Rolls-Royce automobile he would answer the door and there would be his movie-star mother.

  WALTER JOHN HARMON

  When Betty told me she would go that night to Walter John Harmon, I didn’t think I reacted. But she looked into my eyes and must have seen something—some slight loss of vitality, a moment’s dullness of expression. And she understood that for all my study and hard work, the Seventh Attainment was still not mine.

  Dearest, she said, don’t be discouraged. The men have more difficulty. Walter John Harmon knows that and commends your struggle. You can go see him if you wish, it is the prerogative of husbands.

  No, I said, I’m all right.

  AFTER SHE HAD gone I went walking in the evening light across the pastures. It is beautiful country here, a broad undulant valley with brooks and natural ponds and no ground light to dim the stars or the moving lights of the jets up among them. This is where the Holy City will descend. The community has in just two short years assembled the parcels of this valley. I did some real estate law back in Charlotte and I am proud to say I have had no small hand in our accomplishment. It is in the nature of a miracle that Walter John Harmon has in his effortless way drawn so many of us to his prophecy. And that we have given everything we possess—not to him, to the Demand that comes through him. We are not idiots. We are not cult victims. In many quarters we are laughed at for following as God’s prophet a garage mechanic who in his teens was imprisoned for car theft. But this blessed man has revolutionized our lives. From the first moment I was in his presence I felt resolved in my soul. Everything was suddenly right. I was who I was. It is hard to explain. I saw the outside world darkened, as in a film negative. But I was in the light. And that I was blessed seemed to be established in his eyes. Walter’s pale blue eyes are set so deep under the ridge of his brow that the irises are occluded at the top, like half moons. It is almost a chilling gaze you feel on you, as gentle as it may be, something not of this world but ineffable, expressive of God, like the gaze of an animal.

  So I knew the failing within me when Betty was this night summoned for Purification. Walter is at a level beyond lust. This is apparent, since all the wives, even the plainest, partake of his communion. His ministry annuls the fornications of a secular society. Betty and I, for example, made love many times before we were married. And the Community’s children, the children in white, who have never known carnal sin, are not permitted to look at Walter John Harmon lest he inspire them to their confusion. They are the precious virgins, girls and boys, whose singing brings him such joy. He says nothing to them, of course, but smiles and closes those remarkable eyes, and the tears stream from them like rain down a windowpane.

  BETTY AND I learned about Walter John Harmon from the Internet. I found myself reading someone’s Web log—how that happened I can’t remember. I think of it now as the beginning of His summons, for there is nothing without significance in this world made by God. I called Betty and she came into my study and together we read of this most remarkable event of the tornado that had occurred the year before in the town of Fremont in west Kansas. There were links, too, all from this locality and all telling the same story. I logged in to the archives of the regional newspapers and confirmed that there had been a series of tornados all
through the state at that time, and a particularly destructive twister that had hit Fremont head-on. But beyond that not one news report had the key thing. Not even in the Fremont Sun-Ledger was there an account of this one inexplicable occurrence of the cyclone that came through the middle of town, flinging cars into the air, shattering storefronts, lifting houses off their foundations and, among other disasters, setting off a gas-and-oil fire that pooled on the floor of the repair shop of the Getty station on the corner of Railroad and Division Streets, where Walter John Harmon worked as a mechanic.

  I hold in my mind a composite account of what happened, from the Web logs and from what we have since heard recounted by the townspeople who witnessed this or that particular moment and who followed Walter in his ministry and are now the Community Elders. Walter John Harmon himself has not been persuaded to write down a testament, nor has he permitted anything to be written in the way of documentation. “It is not the time for that,” he says. And then, “May it never be the time, for the day we falter and lose our way, that will be the time.” In fact nothing in the Community is written. The Ideals, the Imperatives, the Assignments and Obligations are all pronounced, and once spoken by the prophet are carried and remembered by means of daily prayer. The miracles of the tornado are held in the imaginations of our minds and we speak of them to one another in our workday or social gatherings, so that as the years pass there will be a Consensus of the inner truth and its authority will be unquestionable.

  As he stood by the pool of fire, the garage doors first, and then the roof and then the collapsed walls, were lifted and spun into the black funnel. Only Walter John Harmon stood where he stood, and then was slowly raised in his standing and turned slowly in his turning, calmly and silently, his arms stretched wide in the black shrieking, with the things of our lives whirling in the whirlwind above him—car fenders and machines from the laundromat, hats and empty coats and trousers, tables, mattresses, plates and knives and forks, TV sets and computers, all malignantly alive in the black howling. And then a child flew into Walter John Harmon’s left arm and another fell into his right arm, and he held them steadfast and was lowered to the ground where he had stood. And then the dreaded wind that takes all breath away was gone, having blown itself to bits. And the fields beyond the town were strewn with the several dead and dying among their possessions. But the pool of fire in the Getty garage was nothing but a ring of blackened concrete, and the sun was out as if the tornado had never been, and the mothers of those two children came running and found them bruised and bleeding and crying but alive. Only then did Walter John Harmon begin again to breathe, though he stood where he stood, unable to move as if in a trance, until he collapsed and lost consciousness.