My sister and I wake up with black stripes on our faces and Dad’s Sunday suit all creased. I sit up in bed at once. If Dad catches us, he’ll get the Authorized Version out of the drawer in the dining room table and read to us from Romans: ‘If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.’ With that same mouth we kissed each other last night. Hanna pushed her tongue inside me as she was looking for words she didn’t possess herself. You can refuse the guilt of sin entry to your heart but never to your home. That’s why when he comes to drum us out of bed, Dad will quickly find out that we’ve invited this sin in, the way we once let in a stray cat. We put it in the walnut basket behind the wood stove and fed it milk and crusts until it grew stronger. Neither Hanna nor I is going to be saved now.
Hanna smooths the creases out of Dad’s suit and takes half a roll of peppermints from the breast pocket. She puts one in her mouth. I ask myself why she’s doing this because the peppermints are meant for getting through the sermon, to keep us quiet so we don’t start swinging our legs, which makes the pew creak so everyone in the row knows that Mulder’s kids aren’t listening to the words of Reverend Renkema. We have no reason to sit still now – we have to get moving. After the service when we complain about how long it was, he says, ‘Anyone displaying impatience can listen for twice as long for punishment,’ before saying, ‘Lien next door, now she rambles on. She could talk the hind legs off a donkey, or the ears off your head.’ For a moment I picture my father and Lien standing facing each other on the farm track, with his ears falling off like autumn leaves. We’d have to stick them back on with Pritt stick. I’d rather put them in a little velvet box and whisper the sweetest and the most terrible words into them every night, before putting the lid back on and shaking the box so I’m sure the words have slid into the ear canal. I’ve got so many words but it’s as if fewer and fewer come out of me, while the biblical vocabulary in my head is pretty much bursting at the seams. I can’t stop smiling at the idea of Dad’s glued-on ears. And as long as Dad is making jokes about Lien next door and keeps repeating them, just like this week’s weather forecast, we’ve got nothing to fear.
Yet Dad eats the most peppermints during the silent contemplation and, just recently, as soon as we get home he’s been asking what the sermon was about to check whether we were paying attention. Secretly I think he asks for himself because he’s been distracted and is using us to get a summary. Last Sunday I said the sermon had been about the prodigal son, which wasn’t true but Dad didn’t correct me. The return of the prodigal son is my favourite story. Sometimes I picture Matthies arriving on foot with snow-white skin, and Dad taking the best calf from the cowshed and slaughtering it. Despite the fact that Mum doesn’t like parties because of all the ‘jigging about and bam-bam-bam’ as she calls dancing and music, we’d organize a big party on the farm with lanterns, streamers, Coke and deep-ridged crisps ‘because he was lost and is found again’.
‘Do you think we did something wrong?’ I ask Hanna. She tries to suppress a yawn behind her hand. We’ve only had three hours’ sleep.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you know. Maybe we’re the reason why things are like they are with Mum and Dad. Maybe it’s our fault that Matthies and Tiesey are dead.’
Hanna thinks for a moment. When she thinks she moves her nose up and down. There is marker pen on her cheeks too now. She says, ‘Everything there’s a reason for comes good in the end.’
My sister often says wise things, but I don’t think she understands much of what she says herself.
‘Will it be all right, do you think?’
I feel my eyes moisten. I quickly turn them onto Dad’s suit, the padded shoulders that give him more authority on Sundays. We could easily puncture them with a knife. I pick the yellow trails of sleep out of my eyes with my little finger and wipe them on my duvet.
‘Of course. And Obbe didn’t mean it that way, it was an accident.’
I nod. Yes, it was an accident. Here in the village it’s always that way: people fall in love by accident, buy the wrong meat by accident, forget their prayer book by accident, don’t speak by accident. Hanna has got up and is hanging Dad’s jacket back on the hanger. The perfume bag of lavender has burst open, and there are little purple flowers all over my duvet. I lie on my back in the lavender. Please let the day wait so that I don’t have to go to school, long enough for the grass in the fields to be dry enough to make hay, long enough for the dampness in me to slowly subside.