Risen

Elizabeth Hall Magill

 I call Brick the Wednesday before Easter to ask him what to bring to brunch. He knows I’m missing our mother something fierce because this is the first Easter without her. Not that she and I went to church with Brick, or even celebrated the way he did. But we always went to brunch after church with him, and Sue, and the twins, and she and I always walked in the meadow and picked wildflowers for the table. So, he knows — he knows — I am feeling low, and he says it anyway. His words go right to my core. Jezebels don’t prosper, he says. Repent, and be washed clean in the Blood of Christ. Come to church on Sunday. He thinks it is for my own good. Poison is poison, no matter how you serve it up.  

Funny how you can know somebody’s wrong and still half-believe every word they say.  Maybe I half-believe Brick because he’s my half-brother, or because he’s sixteen years older than me. More likely it’s because I love him. It’s not his fire and brimstone that I love, but his hands, which held mine when I was small and worked alongside mine as I grew older. He helped me weed and stack wood, fixed the engine in my first car, moved me out of Mama’s rural Kentucky house and into my own Lexington apartment. I love his wild promise of a laugh and his worn-out boots, which he always took off by the backdoor like our mother asked.  

When Brick calls me a Jezebel, I hear:  tramp, slut, whore. I am sitting in the small kitchen of my Hollow Creek Road apartment, staring at the chipped green Formica table that honest-to-God belonged to my grandmother, like it was an heirloom instead of a relic from the seventies that didn’t get the memo. I answer right quick, “What are you talking about?” 

“You know what I’m talking about,” he says, and then he waits. 

It’s Richard, of course. I had a fling with him — or maybe not a fling. It lasted one night, but I hate the term one-night stand, as if you are standing when you are definitely not standing. At least, not the whole time. But how the hell does Brick know about Richard? I play dumb. “No, I don’t,” I say. “And you still haven’t told me what to bring to brunch.” 

“That is Sue’s territory,” Brick says, like I knew he would. And then right back to it: “I heard from a friend that you spent the night with that man you met last October. The one from the hayride who followed you—” 

“That’s my business,” I say. 

“Not in the Lord’s eyes, Gracie. Not in the Lord’s eyes.” 

“Didn’t the Lord say to get the plank out of your own eye before looking—” 

“Don’t quote Scripture to me,” he says. 

I laugh, feeling the burn of Brick’s words in my gut, just below the iceberg that has been in my chest since the day Mama died. I keened like an animal that day, then drove to her house and rummaged through all her drawers looking for every picture I could find of her — young and middle-aged and older. I cried until I had no breath left, until there was no day left. I kept vigil for her on the floor of her house and that iceberg formed in my chest, heavy and absolute as iron. Now, I feel her absence like a presence, wanting her to tell me what to say to Brick, how to answer Jezebel. I know for a fact that our mother wasn’t a virgin when she met his father, and we both know she never married my father. But I don’t say that. All I say is, “I might have been with Richard five days ago, but the hayride was six months ago—the same month we lost Mama.” As if that explains anything. 

I went on the hayride with Brick, Sue, and the twins, Mavis and Lewis, who are freshmen at Eastern Kentucky University. At nineteen, they’re rangy and thin like their mother, red-haired like their father. Lewis had a girlfriend along, his arm draped around her shoulders. He and the girlfriend were dressed normally—like me and Brick and Sue—Lewis in jeans and flannel, his girlfriend in jeans and a black sweater. Mavis was dressed up for Halloween as some kind of queen, in a dark red velvet dress with a square neckline that dipped low. She had a friend with her, a girl her age who was wearing a black wig and a fairy costume. 

We sat on haybales in the back of a long red wagon until we arrived at a haunted forest. There were white tents set up, at least ten of them, and we walked through while zombies and witches reached out and touched us. There was cackling laughter from the trees, dry ice for fog, smashed pumpkins as the remains of headless horsemen. I was surprised Brick went along with it — I expected he’d call it Black Magic or the Devil’s Work, but he thought it was all in good fun. 

So did Richard, apparently. He sat next to my haybale in the back of a long red wagon on the way back from the tents. I smelled his breath, which was sweet, like mint and alcohol. I glanced at his sharp chin, dark glinting eyes, and buzz haircut, his thighs in tight denim, his hand resting on one of them like an invitation. I had a flash of winding my tongue into his mouth, tasting that sweet mint and guessing at the alcohol.  

You know how men can smell it on you, your desire for them, pretending like your need didn’t exist until they sauntered in. Like you’re a lady-in-waiting to be a slut, when in fact you never had any interest in being either one. You were born with a craving, same as them. Born with it waxing and waning until you find a man who pulls it like a blade across a whetstone, and you want him to know it was him that did the sharpening, not him that made the craving. But just try and tell a man that. They can’t hear it in words because of all the lies they tell each other, but some know it just the same. Those are the ones who make a game of it—what kind of game, good or bad, depends on the man.  

I know a game when I see one, and Richard started playing right away, leaning forward and dangling his hands between his knees as he talked to Mavis’ friend, the Goth Fairy, who was sitting across from him. I figured he was about forty. Great, I thought. I’m thirty-five and I’m too old for him. But the whole time I felt it from him too, desire radiating in my direction like a warm wind. He enjoyed sharpening that blade against my whetstone, and truth be told I enjoyed it too. If I had been younger, I might have vied for his attention, but instead I sat back and closed my eyes, wishing for a glass of wine.  

That’s when I felt his thumb tracing the line of my thigh, running along my black leggings from knee to hip. He had leaned back too, laughing at something the Goth Fairy said, offering the long pale swoop of his throat to the moonlight. He firmly ran that thumb along my thigh, so smooth and gentle I swear I could have come right then and there. The dark jostling of the wagon, the stranger tracing my lines, lines that hadn’t been traced but once or twice before, and not for a long time. I could have shivered and moaned and made like I was thrilled at the ghost sounds coming from the tents behind us. No one, not even Richard, would have known if I was fake-scared or real-satisfied. But I felt more than the yes-ness shimmying from my thigh to my lower spine. I also felt the burn of betrayal hitting my throat like a shot of whiskey. My craving, my body, were mine to offer, not his to claim. I opened my eyes, moved my thigh away quickly, and looked across the wagon at the Goth Fairy. Mavis, who was sitting next to her friend, glanced away from me when I looked up. The wagon rolled to a stop. I moved through the crowd and hopped off, staring straight ahead. 

Mavis followed me and touched my elbow. I stopped and turned around.  

“Hey,” Mavis said. “My friend. The one dressed like a fairy? She wouldn’t—” 

I glanced over Mavis’ shoulder. Her friend was walking toward us, talking to Lewis’ girlfriend. Brick, Sue, and Lewis were a step or two ahead of them. Before I could say anything, Brick caught up to us. He glanced at Mavis’ dress, then looked her in the eye. “Are you supposed to be a queen of some kind?” 

Mavis looked at me as she answered, “Yes. Anne Boleyn. She was falsely accused of adultery and incest, then beheaded.” 

Her father touched her arm. “You shouldn’t be showing your chest like that.” 

Mavis looked from me to him. “This was the style she wore. It’s not my fault my chest is bigger than hers. And anyway—” 

“Anyway, Mavis is nineteen,” I said. 

I heard a step behind me and turned around to see Richard standing there. He leaned in close to me and introduced himself. I turned toward him as he pressed a small piece of notebook paper into my hand. Call me, he said, and walked away. Brick shot me a look, but kept his mouth shut. By then we were all moving toward the parking lot. 

I held onto that paper for a couple of weeks, not calling him and not calling him. Finally, I threw it away. But then last Saturday night Richard walked into Joseph-Beth Booksellers, where I work. He was wearing tight jeans again, and his broad shoulders were packaged neatly in a black tee-shirt sporting a brewery’s logo.  The tide of my craving surged forward before I could rein it in. When he asked if I wanted to get a beer after work, I said I preferred wine. He said he’d pick me up when my shift ended at seven, and we’d find a place that served both.  

I took him home against my better judgment. He left in the morning -- didn’t stay for breakfast and wasn’t invited. It was the first thing of that kind I had done, and the release of being in a stranger’s arms was deeply satisfying. 

Brick tells me to go to church, and I go. But not because of Brick. Because I want something. Something that will spread through my gut with the warmth of wine, trace the lines of me all the way to my origin and bless it beyond all reason, beyond all poison. I want holy lips to part and whisper that Brick has it wrong:  Christ’s blood wasn’t poured out to purify me, but to unify me. I have no idea if that is even possible, much less true. But I want to find out.  

I decide at the last minute on the evening of Maundy Thursday to go to the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd. I choose the church based on the ad in the Lexington Herald Leader, which says the service is to begin at seven. I finish my tuna sandwich and bowl of vegetable soup eaten at my grandmother’s table. I brush my teeth and take a long look in the mirror, which is not something I do often. I don’t like the crow’s feet at the corners of my eyes, and I especially hate the long wrinkle between them, which proves I frown too much. Every time I think about it, I frown. I avoid the wrinkles, look myself in the eye, and see a need so raw and recent that it might as well be a wound.  

When I was a little girl, my mother told me God heals all wounds. Sometimes she said it when she brushed my hair at night—long and auburn like hers—as if it were a lullaby. But mostly she said it when I missed my daddy. She’d be reading to me or helping me sweep the porch, and I’d get distracted, looking out over the top of the book or holding the broom still in my hands, and she knew I was thinking about him.  

My father left when I was six. Mama said my father was a kind man, but he just couldn’t stay in one place. It was his curse. I thought she meant curse like a swear word. His curse wasn’t damn or hell (the only swear words I knew, because Mama used them when she scorched the bottom of a pot or found dry rot at the base of a tree) his curse was gone. When I got distracted or cried about missing him, Mama crooned to me God heals all wounds, and I believed her. Once, when we were scrubbing the dinner dishes clean, I replied well then why don’t we go to church. She answered that the outdoors was all the church she or God needed. 

I wanted to believe her and only her, but I had Brick’s notions to contend with. How is God supposed to heal the loss of my mother when Brick’s God locks me out of divine presence, and I’m afraid he might be right? Still, I’m determined to go. I put on a navy-blue skirt and a white blouse. My only pair of pantyhose has a long run snaking up from the left heel. I twist it as far to the back as I can. I get in the car and drive a fast ten minutes to Good Shepherd. At five after seven the parking lot is packed, so I park down the street from the church.   

My heart is hammering like God knows I’m up to something, but I keep going. Two huge wooden doors creak open, and I stand in a stone space of heavy silence. Two more wooden doors face me. I open one slowly and step into church. The congregation is quiet, like a child waiting for punishment. A few people in the back turn to look at me. There is nowhere — I mean nowhere — to sit. I have to walk down a side aisle, feeling too small and too large at once. I find a seat on the left edge of a pew near the front and sit down. A few more heads turn, and the Reverend looks straight at me before focusing his attention on the center of the church.  

What am I doing here? I think. Am I really here for me or for Brick? 

Brick lorded his age over me from the time I was three, and by the time I was ten he was lording the Lord over me. I don’t know where he got his conviction because he says it wasn’t from his daddy, who was a low-down-snake-in-the-grass who didn’t-deserve-the-time-of-day, much less a woman like my mother. Brick knew she stayed for his sake, leaving only when he was fifteen and old enough to fend for himself. He didn’t seem to have much respect for his daddy, so maybe he put all that respect into church. All I know is that for most of my life I’ve been hearing about the Will of God and the Hand of God and the Fear of God and the Wrath of God. Never, I noticed, the Grace of God. 

Brick and I shared the love of a good long walk in the peace of the woods. We used to take walks in the woods that bordered the meadow around our house. There was no one around for miles, which was how Brick and I liked it. We’d head to a stream that was shored up by large, smooth rocks. We’d sit, dip our toes, and not say a thing. I wasn’t tempted to share a single secret with Brick, but there were times when I placed my hand on his to feel the warmth of life. He’d sit still when I did that, like I was a wild animal he didn’t want to disturb. 

Brick kept coming for our walks even as I got older, but I ended them at fifteen, the age of fending for yourself. I had read the beginning of the Bible enough times to have a sense of what it was getting at, and some of it bothered me. The stuff about Eve causing us to lose paradise struck me as a fable, like the scorpion and the frog, where the scorpion promises to give the frog a ride across the river unharmed and then eats the frog when they get to the other side. In this fable, Eve was the scorpion. And she didn’t come straight from God, the way Adam did. On what became the last of our walks, I decided to ask Brick about it. 

We were sitting by the stream because I had led us that way, veering to the left when Brick wanted to go straight. I was heading for water, looking to feel cool and calm. When I had slipped out of my sandals and put them on a rock that was showing the first signs of spring moss, I dipped my toes in the water and moved my legs back and forth, watching the ripples. 

“Brick,” I said. 

He looked at me from underneath his khaki fishing cap, the kind that usually has lures pinned all over it. The top half of his face was in shadow. I studied him, my brother who was over thirty and more like an uncle, who was planning to marry a woman he’d met at church. 

“Brick,” I said again. “What do you think about the story of Eve?” 

“I think it is the story of Original Sin,” he said. He sat up straighter, pressing his back against a tree. 

“Doesn’t anything about it seem—old-fashioned to you?” 

“I like old-fashioned, Gracie. That’s why I’m marrying Sue. She knows the story of Eve, and all the other stories in the Bible. How many do you know?” 

 “I mean, it’s a fable, like something that didn’t really happen but has a lesson, right?” 

Brick stroked his beard, which was thick and red. This was before he shaved off all his hair and became a father and a bank manager. He gave me a sharp, calculating look. The kind of look my mother had when she talked about Brick’s father. “Watch it, Gracie. You’re on a slippery slope.” 

I slid right down that slope until my mother died, and then I got caught on a snag, like a piece of driftwood in a river. I haven’t been to church for anything but a funeral or a wedding my entire adult life, yet here I am looking for God on the night that Jesus’s apostles were preparing for his death. My mind’s been wandering, thinking about Brick and Eve and myself, and now I hear the pastor say, “Mary Magdalene, who anointed Jesus’ feet with oil, was doing so out of love. Some say Mary was Jesus’ beloved.” 

I hear those words, Jesus’ beloved, and the iceberg in my chest shifts. The sermon continues but I don’t hear any more of it. I stand when the people around me stand and I sit when they sit. When they sing, I move my mouth, but no words come. My tongue doesn’t know the songs of God. 

“He is Risen!” Sue says as she swings the door to the Jefferson Street house wide open. I step past her into the foyer, holding my glass-topped Pyrex dish tight against my chest. I’ve been here a few times before — most recently after Mama’s funeral — but I am in unfamiliar territory. There is a wide stairway in front of me, with a living room to the right and a formal dining room to the left. I walk into the dining room and set my mac and cheese on the table next to an empty crystal bowl. “Thanks for having me!” I say over my shoulder. 

Sue follows me. She moves around the table rearranging plates and forks, adjusting a serving spoon here, tucking a napkin in there. The table is set for five, which means the twins are joining us.  

“Is there anything I can do?” I ask, knowing Sue will decline. As far as I can tell, only she and Mavis ever do anything productive in this house. 

“Just make yourself at home. You can hang your sweater on the rack in the hall if you want. Brick should be down shortly.” 

“Where are the twins?” 

Sue looks up from the table. “They went out to get some ginger ale and ice cream. Funny, the things you forget.” She laughs and walks through the white wooden door into the kitchen. 

I pass through the foyer and into the living room, which is cluttered with dark furniture. An oval coffee table squats in front of a couch that looks like it’s covered in a Victorian tapestry. There are two armchairs to match, and heavy end tables at either side of the couch. Crystal lamps on each table. A mantelpiece loaded with angel figurines.   

There is plenty to look at, but what draws my attention is the Jesus clock. It hangs above the couch, taking up most of the back wall. It’s fashioned from a thin slice of tree trunk, stained and lacquered so each ring in the wood visibly gleams. The numbers around the edges are painted gold. It is unclear where the golden hands that mark the time are anchored. They float across the surface of the wood. And then there is Jesus. Smack in the center, all golden locks and glossy blue eyes.  

I used to think Jesus was like my father, a kind man who just couldn’t stick around. Fast on the heels of that thought was another: it was my fault. My sin was his curse. This belief wormed its way into me during those walks with Brick, when I was older and understood that my father’s curse wasn’t a swear word but a burden he carried, like how Jesus carried the burden of our sins. If I’d been better, maybe he would’ve stayed. And if that was true of my father, was it true of Jesus too? That’s why the Eve story got to me: it said I was the reason for the curse, the dry rot at the base of creation. No amount of thinking otherwise could shake that feeling from my heart. I had an inkling that Jesus would tell me I wasn’t dry rot, but only if he were more of a mystery to Brick and less of one to me. 

Staring at that Jesus clock, registering the time as five after eleven but feeling like it is no time at all, I wonder who Jesus really was. Was he the kind of man to take a woman as a full partner, a beloved, and minister with her? That’s what I’m thinking when Brick comes up behind me and puts his hand on my shoulder. I startle at his touch. 

“You’re awfully jumpy,” Brick says.  

I turn around and give him a quick hug. “I’m not jumpy. Just surprised is all.” 

“You always were skittish.” 

“Well, I’m not a horse.” 

Just then, Lewis and Mavis come through the front door, laughing and talking. Lewis is holding a white plastic bag from Kroger, and Mavis is slipping her keys into her thin pocketbook.  

Lewis nods at me and continues on to the kitchen, but Mavis crosses the room and hugs me. “Aunt Grace, it’s good to see you.” 

I look at her for a moment, her white linen shirt with no wrinkles in it, her red hair loose over her shoulders. “You too, Mavis. Tell me about college.” 

She shrugged. “You know how it is. Classes, dorm rooms, projects and exams.” 

I smiled. “Have you chosen a major?” 

“I’m trying to decide between History and Women’s and Gender Studies. I’m taking this class on women’s history—it’s through the history department, but it’s also part of the gender studies curriculum. I’m learning so much about women’s roles in society—in work, at home, in relationships—" 

“This is just a passing fancy,” Brick says. “She’s only a freshman. Her brother has a mind for business. Next thing you know, she’ll be taking statistics with him.” 

“That’s not true, Dad. I’m a feminist, and I love history.” 

There’s a silence as the word “feminist” hangs in the air. I am about to ask Mavis about what she thinks of that word, what it means for her—something I am real curious about—but Brick speaks before I can. “Mavis, you want to think about women, think about the ones in the Bible.” 

“Fine by me, Dad. There’s plenty of material there. Like Jesus with the woman at the well. He talked to her even though she was supposedly unclean.” 

This story rings a vague bell, but since I don’t exactly read my Bible on the regular, I can’t remember it. “Unclean how?” I ask. 

“The usual. Sex.” Mavis shoots a look at her father. “She’d had five husbands and a boyfriend.” 

That gets my attention. But again, before I can speak, Brick’s mouth is open. “You are two peas in a pod. Gracie, do you remember asking me about Eve when you were a little younger than Mavis here?” 

“I do. And I remember you told me I was on a slippery slope.” 

“You were questioning the story of Eve and sin. If you start there—if you question women and sin and sex, like what Mavis is doing with that well story—you are sinning. Sin always starts small. It ends up ruining your life. I don’t want that for Mavis, and I don’t want it for you. That’s why I told you to repent.” 

“Jezebels don’t prosper, you said. What friend told you about me and Richard, anyway?” 

Brick looks at Mavis, then at me, angrily. “I have friends who shop at Joseph-Beth. One of them saw you talking to that man from the hayride — they described him, and I knew who it was. They said you left with him.” 

Mavis touches my elbow. “Maybe we should see if Mom needs help.” 

I keep my eyes steady on Brick. “To question women and sin and sex is to sin? So, we  

—women — are sin?” 

Mavis lets her hand drop from my elbow. “Jezebel was a queen,” she says, looking at the Jesus clock. 

“She killed prophets,” answers Brick. 

“Yes,” Mavis says, shifting her eyes to her father. “But she wasn’t a prostitute.” 

I glance at Mavis, and the iceberg in my chest shifts again. “Let’s go see if your mom needs help,” I say. 

Sue is setting down a pitcher of ginger ale. The table is loaded—a plate of ham and one of fried chicken, some slices of quiche, a green bean casserole, my mac and cheese, homemade potato salad, rolls with butter and jam, and the crystal bowl I’d seen earlier, filled with clementines.  

Once we get settled at the table — Brick and Lewis at the ends, Sue and Mavis across from me — we have to say grace. I am a beat behind everyone else when they bow their heads, but I catch on right quick. I stare at the ring of pink flowers around the edge of my plate while Brick says a prayer about missing Mama, then something about Almighty God and forgiveness.  

We raise our heads and everyone, even me, says, “Amen.” Things are quiet as we pass the dishes around. I don’t put much on my plate because I don’t eat much. Lewis notices. 

“Hey Aunt Gracie, help yourself to more potato salad. There’s plenty to go around.” 

I smile at Lewis. “Thanks, Lewis. It all looks delicious.” 

The talk around the table is small at first. No one asks me anything because they already know all there is to know. They talk amongst themselves, mostly about what kind of classes Lewis is taking. Then talk turns to the service they attended that morning. Brick asks the twins what their favorite part was, like they were little kids.  

“I liked Reverend Afton’s emphasis on the resurrection conquering sin. Sin as death. I thought he really made sense when he said we talk about Easter like it’s just a happy ending, when really it’s this culmination, the erasure of the basic sin of our nature,” says Lewis. 

Brick nods and forks a bite of quiche into his mouth. Sue beams at Lewis like he’s just delivered the sermon himself. Mavis looks at her plate, moving food around. I watch her and take a bite of mac and cheese.  

Mavis looks up and turns her head to catch Sue’s eye. “I have the same favorite part every year,” she says. “I like the re-enactment of the empty tomb they do for the kids. The way Mary Magdalene was the first one there and proclaimed the news to everyone.” 

Sue, who has reluctantly looked away from Lewis, turns her attention back to him. “The re-enactment is nice for the kids,” she says. “But I think Lewis really got the sermon.” 

A quiet tension stretches above us, like a tablecloth ballooning in mid-air. Mavis puts a piece of ham in her mouth and chews slowly, looking at the crystal bowl of clementines. I take one out of the bowl. 

“I’d like to hear more, Mavis,” I say. “About Mary at the tomb.” Mavis shoots me a grateful look and opens her mouth to speak. 

Lewis interrupts flatly, “Mary Magdalene was a whore.” He looks straight at me, his eyes a glossy blue, and bites into his fried chicken. 

I glance at Mavis, expecting her to say something. But she is silent, her green eyes flashing forsakenness at Lewis. I hold the clementine in my right hand. I dig my thumbnail deep into its flesh, releasing the tang of citrus. I rise from the table. Mavis shifts her gaze to me. 

I don’t say a word, not to Lewis, not to Sue, certainly not to Brick. I look at Mavis, only her, so she won’t miss the wound of need in my eyes. “I went to church on Thursday,” I say. “And the Reverend said that some people believe Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ beloved.” 

I walk around the table and hand Mavis the clementine. She looks down at it and begins to peel it. The smell fills the air as I touch her shoulder lightly, then walk out of the dining room, into the foyer, and out the front door. 

I stand on the porch for a moment, but I’m not waiting for anyone.