Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [47]
Eli took the beatings. He never let himself cry out again. In the bathroom, after brushing his teeth, he sometimes dug a razor blade into the flesh of his shoulder, making neat bloody lines in careful rows, learning to feel the pain without fearing it. Roker at least did him the service of keeping the bruises in easily hidden places. Eli sometimes wore long sleeves, but he never had to hide his face. He told no one: He didn’t want Them to take Aden away.
Eli liked school inasmuch as it gave him an eight-hour reprieve from anxiety. During school hours he could relax, knowing Aden was safe. His teacher, Mrs. Davis, was nice and very pretty. She let him draw in class, a rare privilege. “… from a broken home …” he’d heard her admit, somewhat smugly, to a fellow teacher in the hallway.
Mrs. Davis liked art. She did her bulletin boards in Monet lilies and Van Gogh shapes. She took the students on a field trip to a local art museum. Eli stared at the paintings. Like the magazines, the men had clothes, the women didn’t, but these pictures were different. He couldn’t explain why. He wondered why there would be naked women in the same paintings as Jesus, and he stared five whole minutes at the wounds in Jesus’ side, the sliver slits of blood, like the engravings on his own arm. He didn’t believe Mrs. Davis that someone had made them with so much pencil and paint. He wrote the names of the artists on his hand intent on investigating the matter for himself. The next day he got a hall pass to use the bathroom. He walked out of the school and hiked the five miles to the library. He could only find pictures from one of the painters, but the librarians wouldn’t let him take the book home: It was expensive and it was inappropriate. He kicked the librarian’s desk. “Young man,” she warned. He ran home, surprised to find himself weeping.
He didn’t get home until seven. The house was empty. The television was still on, the table dusted with scattered white powder. He found Aden crying in the bathroom, a welt across his back and another across his legs. Eli examined the wounds. He turned to the toilet and threw up. It was his fault: He’d left his brother alone. He thought of the Jesus in the painting, the rivers of blood. He imagined his brother beaten and bruised, wrists sliced through with razor blades. No one touched his brother.
The next week when they learned Roker was coming to stay, Eli instructed Aden to invite himself over to a friend’s and personally escorted him to the neighboring house after school. When he returned home he gathered beer bottles from the kitchen sink. He put three in a Ziploc bag, carried the bag to a rock in the backyard, and used a hammer to smash the glass to pieces. He waited until Roker and his mother were asleep before sprinkling the shards of glass on the mattress beside the grown man’s naked hulk of a body, and on the floor where his feet were likely to land in the morning.
Roker received thirty-two stitches. Eli received a year in Sunday school.
“Your Jesus works miracles?” his mother asked Aunt Jenny, hauling him up to her sister’s doorstep that Sunday morning. “Ask His holiness to civilize this one.”
Eli’s mother didn’t believe in church, but she did believe in capital punishment.
Aunt Jenny was thrilled: She’d been begging to take the children to church for years and was happy to provide the service no matter her sister’s motivations for allowing it. Every week for a summer Eli was to attend Sunday school. He was also to stay after to wash Uncle Rod and Aunt Jenny’s cars and to mow their lawn. This was on top of his usual chores cleaning up at home, a duty that now fell entirely to him as further punishment. He continued to finish the night’s old beers