The Boy with the Arm was a good gentle boy with a biblical name like Davey or Johnny. Everyone liked him. He had thick, straight blond hair and wire-framed glasses. When he found out he was sick and had to stay in bed because he probably wouldn’t live, his only worry was whether God would be able to find the soul of a boy so small and take him to Heaven. This troubled The Boy so much that it was all he talked about, and his sweet-hearted mother too became fretful. Finally, when he was close to dying and unable to breathe well or speak loudly, he came upon a solution: if he raised his arm every night before he went to sleep, God would be able to see him and know that this little boy’s soul needed to be taken to Heaven. With the help of his mother, he propped up his arm and fell asleep with a smile on his face. That night, The Boy with the Arm died and went peacefully to Heaven. Beside the story was a picture of The Boy sleeping with his arm bolstered by striped pillows while his soul floated toward the ceiling.
I was hooked. In the waiting room, I devoured the story, anxious to feel the thrill of The Boy with the Arm’s death before the nurse called my name.
Each night after a doctor’s appointment and the inevitable encounter with the story of The Boy with the Arm, I lay in bed debating whether the story was true. Did God know the little boy was dead and that his soul was ready for Heaven, or was it the arm in the air that signalled Him? If it was the arm, what would have happened if the little boy hadn’t propped up his? Would the Devil take him? I didn’t think so.
My concept of the Devil was more vague than my concepts of Jesus and God. The Sunday school taught by Lucy Stevens in the United Church basement never mentioned the Devil, and it didn’t provide me with stories like The Boy with the Arm. The bad characters in Sunday school were people: evil kings and disciples like Judas-Who-Betrayed-Jesus. The closest I’d come to the Devil was the red costume with tail, horns and pitchfork Duncan Matheson had worn last Hallowe’en over his mother’s protests. If The Boy hadn’t signalled with his arm, maybe he would have ended up in space, his body stretching then breaking apart as he got sucked into a black hole, his chance at Heaven missed.
Part of me believed it was impossible for God not to know the boy was dead — after all, He’d created everything. Surely He was aware of each person who died and needed to come to Heaven. On the other hand, what if like Santa Claus, He was fallible, sometimes so busy He needed human help to do His job?
There was one way to test God: go to sleep with my arm raised. If God did know everything, as Lucy Stevens said and I preferred to believe, He’d realize I was just a little kid with a plantar’s wart who wasn’t dying or ready to go to Heaven. Yet, there was the thrilling possibility that maybe God did respond to signals from down below, that there was a code between God and good children wherein they helped Him with the little tasks He might not notice in his grandness. But I’d found the story of The Boy with the Arm by accident. If such a code did exist, no one had told me. The thought of God using children as helpers firmed my belief that I was not a good child which led to the third and perhaps most exciting prospect: if I slept with my arm raised and I wasn’t a good enough child to go to Heaven, the Devil in his red suit might come and take my soul; in fact, God might even be the one to point me out.
Most nights when I tried this experiment, I raised and lowered my arm several times before I gave in and hid it under the sheets, fearful of success. Only then was I able to fall asleep.
Thus it was that God had the same status that Santa Claus used to have in my mind: an energy beyond my understanding, bigger than I was and potentially out of control.
I needed a way to signal this God-energy; to let God know I wasn’t crazy, no matter what He might think about my mother; to tell God to leave me alone. I lay in the centre of the double bed in Vi’s spare bedroom and spread my body so my fingers touched the edge. With my eyes closed, I tried to sink into the mattress. In this position, I thought long and hard about normal and crazy. If I concentrated on what I was not, maybe God would get the message, a prayer that told Him what I did not want to be. One thing was sure. Crazy was not what I wanted to be.
In the evenings, I sat at Vi’s counter at Effie’s Diner, two houses down at the BP station. I filled in crossword puzzles and read Alice and ate grilled cheese with salted fries and ketchup while Vi talked about her varicose veins and flirted with the men who’d stopped by for a burger before going home to their wives. People said hi to me and I smiled with the corners of my mouth but mostly I kept my head down and my eyes on the page.
Some nights Sam dropped in on his way home from work and handed me a pocket notebook or a rubber oval change purse or a black comb in a sleeve that he’d purchased out front where people paid for gas. He stayed long enough for a coffee and to tell Vi and me about his day. Nicky, he said, was helping on a farm. Farm work was good for a boy.
When Vi was out of earshot, I asked why I couldn’t help on the farm, too. Wasn’t farm work good for a girl?
Sam explained that Nicky was going to the Sousas’ and Jack and Betty had two daughters and didn’t need another girl.
“Your grandma likes having you around too. You’re good for her,” he said, pecking me on the temple and standing to go.
Though I kept my head down, I could tell through my bangs that Vi had her eye on me. Every twenty minutes or so, she made a point of lifting my plate, bleach-soaked J-Cloth in hand, and swiping the counter beneath it. I’d twirl on my stool, knees together and up, folded crossword book in hand, my pencil steadily filling in words while she swooped past. Her jokes, definitions, soap opera gossip and stories about her sons were part of the restaurant din.
Then she told the story of how Sylvia had come to Apple Ford.
“It was in the middle of an electrical storm, the rain lunging down so sudden men were wringing out their pant legs afterward. For five minutes, the clouds spat crystal green hailstones. Then they were gone. Nothing was damaged. Later they found out Apple Ford was the only town hit.”
For the first time in the weeks since I’d come to Vi’s, I looked up. Her eyes, already magnified by the horn-rims, widened.
“The storm left only one memento: Sylvia.
“No one ever found out where she came from, and it was your daddy she decided to marry.”
I sat unblinking.
“Sylvia chose Sam,” Vi said, squeezing the J-Cloth in her fist, then shaking it out over the floor. “Not the other way around. He couldn’t have said no if he’d tried.”
The Sam in Vi’s stories was always helpless. He was her oldest by five years and hadn’t done a thing right since those nights at the logging camp when Earl stayed out. Those nights, Vi would hold Sam tight between her legs in the dark, her Oxford dictionary open on his lap. He’d fix his sharp blue eyes on the door and listen for bears while she fingered the tissuelike pages. Her shoulders shook, but even at six years his were rigid as a man’s, the hard blades jutting into her breasts.
After the story, Vi stuck a lit menthol into her sideways grin and tossed the J-Cloth into the sink.
When she went into the back to get a fresh canister of butterscotch ice cream, I left my crossword puzzle book and Alice in Wonderland on the counter and went outside. From the corner of Number 8 highway, I walked along the sideroad on the dirt shoulders of the irregularly-edged asphalt. There were some houses, high up on hills, and a stretch of pine and marsh. I turned north onto County Line 3 and walked another stretch by the river cottages where Sylvia took pottery, then across the bridge and past the park and the Stevens’, willing myself not to glance toward the graveyard I’d dreamed. Uphill into town I remembered Front Street from when I’d started school when there were no sidewalks, only dirt paths