The Angels Around Us

My parents decided to fix their marriage the old-fashioned way: by having a baby. I didn’t tell anyone when my parents told me that they were expecting. I was old enough to know where babies came from, and I didn’t want anyone to think that my parents were doing stuff like that. But only a day or so after telling me, the secret got out through the loose lips of my fresh-out-of-college middle school teacher.

When I was twelve years old, my homeroom teacher at Lebanon Baptist School announced, with as much pomp and circumstance due the birth of Christ himself, that my mama was pregnant. Before the morning announcements squealed through the speakers, my teacher stood there in front of all fifteen of us, with her hands clasped together at her chest like a cheerleader, telling everybody of the “good news and great joy” that was swelling within my mother’s womb. I could not take my eyes off my desk for fear of making eye contact with one of my fellow classmates. I sat there silently in a classroom with a bunch of pubescent preteens while my teacher discussed the glory that is being knit by the hand of God in the secret places within my mother. She, and God, I guess, could not have chosen a grosser way to describe this process of growing baby cells in mothers. Hail Mary, I could almost hear my teacher saying. Hail Mary Fisher, Ruth’s mother who got pregnant in her 40s. Hail her for her unexpected fertility. 

            “Ruth, this is just wonderful,” Ms. Simpson said. “You know, the Lord says that children are a gift from above.”

            She started tearing up, probably because she was jealous that the Lord had not chosen to bless her with an unexpected pregnancy, or maybe because she was already an old maid as a twenty-four-year-old unmarried Christian girl. Trying to hide her shame, Ms. Simpson left the room clapping softly, saying, “Praise God, praise Him,” over and over until she was far enough down the hall that we could no longer hear her. As soon as he was sure that Ms. Simpson was out of earshot, a fat-fingered boy named after St. John, Jesus’ most beloved disciple, stood in his chair and pointed at me. “Ruth’s parents had sex!” he said, and then he belly-laughed, his entire body shaking so that he almost fell from his makeshift platform.

            All of my classmates joined him in laughter. A couple girls near me said, “Ew, that’s so gross,” and a boy stuck out his tongue and let slobber trickle down his chin while saying “I bet she heard them do it.” I tried not to look at them, really. I tried to be like Jesus on the cross, surrounded by scoffers and all the time asking God to forgive them because they didn’t know how stupid they were acting. I thought about my mama driving me past two public elementary schools every morning while slapping on makeup whenever we stopped at a red light. I remembered her making eye contact with me last Wednesday morning in the rearview mirror and smiling, crow’s feet stamped at the corner of each eye like decorative spider webs. She broke our stare first, licking her thumb and wiping it hard across her eyelid, smudging her eyeliner.

            Ms. Simpson returned much quieter than she left, so I did not hear her cross the threshold of our Sunday-school-room-turned-classroom as I stretched out my arms in wildly shaking fists and yelled over the cries of my mockers, “Y’all’s parents had sex too, you bunch of dumbasses!”

            Seven months later, my baby brother Jeremy was born. My grandmother was the one who ran to the waiting room to give me the news. “He is an angel, Ruth! Perfect, Ruth, just perfect,” she said, wiping tears with the back of her hand so that her glasses were pushed up the bridge of her nose. I was allowed to see him once they had cleaned him and my mother. He whimpered when I held him for the first time, and I asked Gran if I was hurting him. She said no, but still I handed him back to her because I didn’t want to break him.

            For two and a half years, my mom, dad, Jeremy, and I lived in intermediate peace. Jeremy’s nursery was across the hall from my room upstairs, and my parents’ room was off of the kitchen downstairs. This meant that I was the first to reach Jeremy’s crib when he would wake up in the middle of the night for food or attention. For the first two weeks that Jeremy was home, my dad would reach my brother’s doorway and put a hand out to steady himself against the frame. Rubbing his eyes with the heel of his free hand, he would look at me with empty, sleep-deprived eyes as I rocked Jeremy back and forth over my lap while giving him a bottle that I had learned to put on my nightstand. My dad stopped coming up to check on Jeremy during the nights when he would cry, and, eventually, I moved him to my bed with me.

            My mother liked this new sleeping arrangement, and one morning she mentioned it while rinsing out hers and my dad’s coffee mugs. “You know, Eric, I think it’s just precious that Ruth is letting Jeremy sleep with her,” she said, and then winked at me while I held Jeremy tight to my chest like Gran had shown me.

            I smiled at her, happy to have her approval. Then my dad opened the door to the backyard and muttered over his shoulder, “Yeah, well, I’m glad that you’re getting a good night’s rest. That’s hard to come by for new mothers, so I’ve heard.”

            My mama didn’t look in his direction until after my dad pulled the door closed behind himself. For a long while she stood very still, resting her forearms on the edge of the sink while staring at the back door, as if willing my dad to come back in on hands and knees, begging for her forgiveness. I swayed back and forth while Jeremy slept on my chest. I imagined that he was my baby and that we were the only ones there. My mother eventually gave up, probably because her arms got tired holding her, and she finished putting away the dishes. After drying her hands, she turned around to face me and grabbed for Jeremy. Without thinking, I said, “Be careful.”

            She looked at me hard, the bags under her eyes dark and swollen. I loosened my grip, and she took him from me. “I know how to hold a baby, Ruth.”

            Jeremy continued to sleep with me, despite my dad’s persistent, passive-aggressive insights. I think he knew that it was better for Jeremy anyway. For two and a half years, I did what my mother had done for me when I was little, like I knew mothers were supposed to do. I read him Dick and Jane books and sang the ABCs while brushing each tooth that cut through his pink gums in hopes that he would become an avid reader, and I held him and kissed him often so that he would know that he was loved. I even recited parts of the catechism to him, asking the questions and giving the answers, like Gran used to do with me so that I would grow up with good doctrine rather than the Sunday school folktales allotted to me in my parents’ Baptist church. Gran reminded me often that I was Catholic by blood, something she said my parents seemed to forget.

Grandmother had crooked fingers and white, cotton ball hair, and I spent most weekends at her house, just two hundred yards away from our own. The morning we named our new puppy Raphael, we were making biscuits as she told me about the angels.

“Ruthie, angels are like God’s little brothers and sisters who protect God’s people,” she’d said.

We cut round holes with our metal cutter and dropped the dough circles on a pan.

“Miss Ruthie, I think that we should write out the archangels' names. You need to know them so that you can talk to them.” With that, my grandmother sat me down at her antique wooden kitchen table and began writing out their names, telling me their jobs. As a devout Catholic, Grandmother knew all of the archangels, saints, and holy days; things that they did not teach me at the Baptist church. I chose the name Raphael, the archangel of healing. Grandmother liked that I picked the angel of God’s healing, but really I picked the name Raphael because that was the name of my favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. 

Many nights, my mother would go to follow me upstairs to tuck Jeremy in and do her motherly duties, but I always told her that I could do it because I knew that she was tired and that it was just easier since he was sleeping in my bed. She always seemed grateful and told me that she was tired, sometimes throwing in a fake yawn followed by a smile and wink. Once she was back downstairs, I could normally catch pieces of hushed conversation between my parents after Jeremy fell asleep.

Before Jeremy, I did not wake up until my mama came upstairs to wake me for school. She would come in at 7:15 a.m. and wake me in her sing-song voice and a kiss on the head, which I loved even though her breath stank to high heaven. And occasionally, but thankfully only occasionally, my dad would wake me up for school if mama was cooking breakfast and couldn’t leave her post. He would throw open my door, turn on my overhead light, and whistle with two fingers between his lips. “Get up, soldier!” he would yell. My dad was a drill sergeant before he retired from the Army, and he thought it was funny to play army with me and my mom. I guess the honorable discharge and PTSD left a void in his life that could only be solved though whistling and ordering. Mama and I did not like the whistling and ordering as much as his army guys used to, but we didn’t tell him so because he has a gift with “last words” of conversations; he could always walk away from a conversation making us feel guilty for ever accusing him, our godly perfect head of the house, of wrongdoing.

When I was fifteen and a three quarters and Jeremy was three and one month, my dad came home after spending another night on the preacher’s couch, probably trying to talk Preacher Earl into understanding why he and my mama should just give up and get a divorce. I knew that my dad wouldn’t do it until Earl confirmed that he wouldn’t rot in Hell for committing what Grandmother had informed me was a mortal sin. He came in the house about 6:30 a.m., well before I had to leave for school, but before Jeremy stirred awake from his new-found spot in my parents’ bed whenever my father found himself absent from it.

My dad looked around the room from just inside the door frame before choosing to take the step in and close the door. Without looking back at me, I watched my dad pull out his chair at the head of the kitchen table, where he insisted “the head of the family” should sit, and hesitated before letting himself fall into it. He stared blankly at the table, probably tired after not sleeping all night on Preacher Earl’s very uncomfortable couch. Instinctively, he raised up his right hand and began massaging his temple, letting his fingers feel along his brow bones, his cheeks, and drift down to his chin as if he was making sure that his features had not changed overnight.

“Daddy,” I said, “do you want some coffee?”

He looked up at me, and I saw, as if for the first time, how tired his eyes were. I wondered if they had always looked like that. “Yes, please,” he said to me.

I flipped on the back left stove eye and grabbed the percolator from the cabinet beside the sink. I tossed in a few scoops of coffee grounds and added water like Dad had shown me one Mother’s Day a couple of years ago. That was the year that he helped me pick out a mug for my mama. It had said “TEACHER” in bold, and, underneath that, “She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.” My dad showed me the verse in Proverbs where the saying came from. I didn’t think it fit who my mama was other than the fact that she was a teacher, but Dad assured me that Mama would be like that one day.

Once the coffee had brewed, I poured my dad a cup and watched him take a sip.

“Can I go to the creek?” I asked. “I can take Jeremy with me.” The creek, Shanklin Creek, was the soul of our community—at least, that’s what my grandmother said. She said that people from all over the county used to gather out by Shanklin Creek and sing hymns or folk music and dance in overalls and aprons, and that “the only reason people stopped was because no one took pride in their roots anymore.” I didn’t know if I believed her or not. Still, every morning since my brother could walk, we went down to the creek first thing in the morning and let our feet soak up all of the “soul,” as Grandmother called it, from the mud of the creekbed. I saw it as our daily baptism in the water that prepared us to battle alongside the angels.

Still looking into his cup, my dad said, “There are grounds in this.”

I didn’t say anything. Instead, I stared at him, waiting for him to look up and see the daggers in my eyes. Is it a sin to flip someone off in your mind? Can God see that? I knew that the angels could, and they seemed like tattletales, so I took a couple deep breaths to calm down. I wanted to tell my dad that he could have made the coffee himself if he wanted it done right.

“Did you grind these beans yourself?” he asked, looking up at me.

I held up the can of grounds that I had clearly used to make the coffee. “No, sir.”

“Well, you’ll have to throw the rest out,” he said, taking another sip.

“Yes, sir.”

I took the percolator off of the stove and began dumping the contents down the drain. Just like he said, there were grounds sprinkled throughout the dark liquid as it swirled and finally disappeared in the drains. I inspected the filter in the percolator as I rinsed it and found that the grounds were small enough to sneak right through it and destroy the coffee.

“Daddy,” I said over my shoulder, “Why don’t we use a coffee pot if we have canned coffee grounds?”

“That percolator was my dad’s,” he said, as if I was supposed to understand that its sentimental value made it a utilitarian kitchen tool.

Deciding not to push him, I asked, “Do you want me to make more for you?”

“No.”

“Do you want me to make some for Mama?” I knew Jeremy would wake her up soon. He should be up already, but Mama told me that she wanted to let him sleep in today since she had him up so late. If she had let me take him to bed when it was time, the two of us could be at the creek by now listening for the angels singing in the trees. I didn’t tell Jeremy that the singing was just birds; he was only three, and I wanted him to know that angels were watching us, and this was the only way I knew to explain it to him.

“No. She wastes it. If she wants some, she can make a cup of instant herself,” my dad said.

“Yes, sir,” I said, placing the cleaned percolator upside down on the drying cloth like Grandmother had shown me. Grandmother, and my dad who learned from her, believed that all dishes should be hand-washed, which is why dad refused to buy a dishwasher even when Mama kept bringing it up in passive aggressive comments. I liked handwashing, though. It was soothing, and I knew that everything was being washed completely clean. After drying my hands, I traded the can of coffee grounds out for instant coffee for my mama, knowing that she would want it when she got up.

Just then, I heard my brother in the next room with my mama. “Can I go outside?” he asked her in his tiny voice.

I heard my mama answer, “You can go ask your sister.”

            Jeremy threw open the door of my parents’ room and sprinted to me, crashing into my legs. I laughed and put my arms around him, picking him up and placing him on my hip.

            “Good morning, baby,” I said.

            “Good morning, sissy,” he said, and I smiled bigger because I loved that he called me “sissy.” He started calling me that originally because it was too hard for him to say my name because his ths sounded like fs, and “Sissy” was much cuter than “Roof.” Plus, if he called me “sissy” in public, people felt ashamed for seeing the fourteen-year age gap and assuming that I was one of those babies having babies that old ladies shook their heads about.

            I looked at my dad who was still trying to drink my messed-up coffee attempt. “Can we go to the creek, Daddy?”

            “Be careful,” he said, looking at his bedroom door, probably deciding to talk to Mama once we were outside so that we wouldn’t hear. Even now, my parents still tried to have most of their fights in private like good Christian couples. Once, when I was eleven, they had slipped up by having it out in front of me. I asked them if they were going to get a divorce, and my dad told me that we did not believe in divorce. My mama didn’t say anything, she just looked at the ground, defeated. I knew then that she would leave us one day, not like Dad did when he would leave for the night; that was just him cooling down, Grandmother told me. Still, I wondered sometimes if they were doing what was right for each other or for me and Jeremy.

            With Jeremy on my hip, I walked down the hall and to the back door. I looked back and caught a glimpse of my dad with his hand on the bedroom door frame. I wanted to listen, but Jeremy bounced on my hip and said, “Go, go!”

            I pushed open the door and looked at the steps leading to the ground. I put one foot on the first step and then lunged over the missing one under it, placing my foot carefully on the side of this next step so that I didn’t snag my barefoot on the nail that stuck out of the board. I jumped from this step onto the ground, skipping the last step even though there was nothing wrong with it. Jeremy laughed at my jumping around, and I smiled back at him, but in my head I cursed my dad for not fixing these steps even though I had told him before that Jeremy was going to get hurt on them one day. Dad said he kept forgetting because he never used the back steps. I made a mental note to remind him again.

Once safely outside, we did what all the kids in our county did some variation of: we went to the chicken coop, let the chickens out by the wooden door at the bottom, and stole the eggs from their nests. Everyone in our part of South Carolina had either chickens, goats, or cows, and the richest people in the county–the McCaws and the Riddles and all those–had all three.

After stealing the eggs, we gently placed them in my hoodie pocket to wash off in the creek. Jeremy then ran over to Raphael, gave him two aggressive pats on the head, and reminded him not to eat our chickens. I knew that Raphael wouldn’t hurt a fly, but I loved this part of our routine because Jeremy showed that he wanted to care for our animals. I prayed often that he would grow up to be gentle.

“Sissy,” Jeremy said.

I looked down at his face. He still had a bit of sleep in his eyes. I knelt down and lightly brushed it away with my index finger. “Yes, baby?”

“Can I wash the eggs? I will be careful,” he said.

I wiped the sleep out of his other eye and touched my finger to the tip of his nose. He smiled. “Yes, you can, mister man,” I said, and he giggled at my rhyme.

I pulled the eggs out of my pocket and handed them to him. He cupped his hands and held them close to his face, and then he looked at me to see if I saw how careful he was being.

“Very good, brother,” I said, standing back up.

I watched as my baby brother knelt down at the creek’s edge and let the water pool in his hands around the eggs. The birds were singing multitudes of songs this morning, so many that they seemed to jumble together into a concerto of grand proportions. I closed my eyes and tipped up my head, letting myself be surrounded by their song. Still with my eyes closed, I asked Jeremy, “Do you hear them?”

He didn’t answer me, and I opened my eyes to make sure that he was okay. He was sitting cross-legged at the water’s edge and had laid one egg on his legs while he gently rubbed the other one. I felt tears in my eyes—I knew that Jeremy was going to be a good man. And I loved that he was my baby. Yes, he was my mama and daddy’s child, but he was my baby. I was the one who tucked him in at night and sang until he fell asleep. I was the one who taught him the important things like being careful on the back steps and how to hold the chickens’ eggs and making sure to apologize for taking them even though they would never hatch chicks. I told him about the angels, and he told me that he could hear them, and even though I knew that they were just birds that he heard, I told him that I could hear them too.

Jeremy looked back at me, and I could see immediately that he was about to cry. Wiping my eyes with my sleeve, I crouched down beside him. “Hey, hey. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

I wrapped an arm around him and looked at his hands. He had cracked one of the eggs. Looking down at what he had done, he began to weep, shaking his hands violently in an effort to get the yoke off.

I grabbed the other egg from his lap and placed it to the side and slid behind him, placing my arms completely around him and humming softly like my Gran used to do when I would get too upset, rocking him back and forth. “Breathe, baby. I will wash it.”

I leaned forward over him and placed my hands over his in the icy water. Still humming, I washed the egg off of his hands and dried them on my pants.

“I’m sorry, sissy,” Jeremy said through tears.

I shushed him, still rocking, and said, “It’s not your fault. You were being so careful.”

We sat here for a few minutes longer until Jeremy had calmed down, and then I stood up and grabbed the unwashed egg from the creek bank. Bending down, I washed it with little circular movements of my thumbs. When I stood, I heard a car start in the distance, and I prayed that it was not my mama.

I handed the egg to Jeremy and wiped the tears and snot from his face. Picking him up, I placed him back on my hip and made my way quickly through the woods so that I could see our house. I made it to the wood line just in time to see my daddy pulling out of our driveway in the family van, leaving a cloud of dust behind him. I breathed out deeply, relieved that it was my dad who was leaving us today.

Jeremy tapped my shoulder and sniffled. “Where is Daddy going?” he asked.

“He’s just going to cool off. He’ll be back soon,” I said.

I set Jeremy down again and took his hand in mine. “Let’s go back to the water, Jeremy. I want you to hear the angels sing.”