A Land More Kind Than Home Read Free Page A

this church long enough for you to know that we protect our children, and I can tell you that I wouldn’t never let a youngster take up no snake or drink no poison or nothing like that. But you’ve been here long enough to know that what we do here is the Truth and our children need to see it. Our children need to be raised up in it.”
    â€œAnd you should know that children can’t keep no secrets about what they see either,” I said.
    He folded his arms across his chest and kind of rocked back on the heels of his boots. He turned his head and looked out over the river toward downtown Marshall like he was thinking about what I’d said. Then he turned his head and looked back at me.
    â€œCan you, Sister Adelaide? Can you keep a secret?”
    â€œI can,” I said. “But I’d rather not know any secrets that need keeping, and I won’t know them if I stay out of your church. A church ain’t no place to hide the truth, and a church that does ain’t no place for me. Ain’t no place for children neither.”
    C HAMBLISS NEVER FORGAVE ME FOR TAKING THE CHILDREN OUT OF that church. He warned me then that in leaving the church I was leaving my life as I’d known it, and that those folks wouldn’t ever accept me the way they once had and that I’d always be an outsider. I told him I wasn’t leaving the church, I was just leaving him, but I knew he was right. I lost friendships I’d had just about my whole life, and it hurt me. It still does. But for ten years I kept those children out, kept them safe. Once the service started, I’d take them across the road and down to the river when it was nice and warm, or folks would just drop them off at my house in the wintertime or if it was raining. We’d have us a little Sunday school lesson, then they’d play outside. Sometimes we’d make things, color pictures, and sing songs. But I didn’t step another foot inside that church for ten years, and I hardly said more than a “hello” to Carson Chambliss in all that time. And for a while there it was real nice, that little truce. I had my little congregation and he had his, and we didn’t have hardly anything to do with each other. I felt like I was doing what the Lord wanted me to do with those children.
    But I should’ve known it couldn’t have gone on like that, and I should’ve known that something terrible was going to happen again. But there was just no way I could have guessed it would happen to one of mine. I tried to keep them children out of that church, and for ten years I did, but that ten years didn’t do nothing for Carson Chambliss but make him ten years older and braver and ten years more reckless too. And here I was on a Thursday afternoon, sitting outside a church I thought I’d never see the insides of again, waiting to talk to a man I was afraid of being alone with. It was the only time in my life I’d ever gone to church out of fear.
    I sat out there in my car with the windows rolled down and my keys still swinging from the ignition, and I stared at the church through all that bright heat and thought about him sitting in there in all that dark and waiting. The sound of that gravel dust getting blown through the parking lot could’ve been bare feet shuffling across the hallway the night before, when Julie was standing in the doorway watching me hunched over the bed in my funeral clothes. I finished folding the covers down, then I turned around and settled myself by the quilt that was slung over the footboard, and I smoothed out my dress and looked up at her. She didn’t have a black dress to wear because she’d had to leave so many things behind right after it happened, and I ended up giving her one of mine. It hadn’t been worn for years, and I reckon it had fell out of fashion well before I’d come to own it, but she seemed glad to have it and it looked just fine on her. She