Lydia Netzer: Shine Shine Shine

Loose in India, she wandered in a slipstream. She only hummed through the hymns. The mountains interfered with the radio signal, and Bob Butcher went back to the States, but Emma wouldn’t go. He left his beautiful red-lipped wife in India with the other missionaries and went home, determined to find a way to come back under legal cover, as a businessman, or a scientist, or a diplomat. She slept in a hammock on their screened porch. She spent her time in India teaching the local children how to read, but she never imagined having a child of her own. She couldn’t imagine something good coming out of the thing they did together that was necessary to make a child. She didn’t want the sex between her and Bob to have any lasting effects. When she rose from the bed every morning, she saw herself walking away from it and from what was left between the sheets. They never talked about it. It only happened at night, when she had already been asleep. It was as if she had to be sleeping for him to approach her. He couldn’t approach her if she was able to see it coming.

This was the way he had first come to her, in the middle of the night, when she was asleep in her father’s house in Indiana.

She had gone away to college and come back, back to her austere parents and their brutally efficient family farm. He had come for a week of prayer meetings, a fire and brimstone speaker who moved the whole church to their knees. She had known him since her childhood, because he came every year and they always hosted him at their house. First he came with his wife, who died in childbirth, taking the baby with her to heaven, and then alone, dramatic and intense, knocking glasses over at dinner and giving her blessings, his hand on her head. That night, when she was back from college and he was visiting, she was asleep under her lemon yellow patchwork quilt, and then she was awake, looking at him in her room. The clock ticked beside her. A shadow moved across the ceiling.

“I choose you, Emma,” he told her, his voice hoarse. She had never heard him try to speak quietly before. She had heard him shouting, ranting, pleading, even crying. “I choose you to go with me to Burma.”

She felt cold wonder. Was it a dream? She had seen him only in a suit, behind the pulpit, everyone listening in rapt attention. Then in his shirtsleeves, tie pulled open, at the dinner table, telling stories. When she was twelve, he had baptized her in the river, and the testimony she gave was that she wanted to be more genuine in her faith, not just say the words, but live the life. She had ridden in the back of his truck, with the other kids who had waited all year to be baptized during the revival week. She saw his big shoulders bumping along, one hand on the wheel, one hand clutching the top of the doorframe, as if lodging himself firmly in this world.

He was with her, in the dark, in her room. It was now a private time between the two of them only. She felt paralyzed, and special. How could she not? Within the confined world of the church, the community, the Christian college she had attended with its fumbling, guilty boys, he was a shining celebrity. Her parents would be proud. And what else was she going to do? Next to him, no one else seemed completely alive. She felt twelve again, nervous, unready, and yet proud that she was a woman to him now. Proud that she knew what to do. She had never spoken a full sentence to him. But she could be the one to go to Burma with him, be his helpmeet, and replace his dead and sainted wife.

He was breathing heavily. He was standing next to her bed with no shirt on, her sleepy eyes could see only the top part of his body, broad chest shining in the dim light from the moon. She felt her body lying flat in the bed like a paper doll. What would it be like, this thing? A shiver went up from her stomach. His breath filled the room.

“Can I come to you, Emma?” he asked. She saw his brow furrow. She nodded.

Then he had pulled aside the covers and she felt the chill of the air. He looked down at her, her belly, her legs. Then he was with her in the bed, his knees on either side of hers. His one big hand pushed down the flannel waistband from over his hips, his other pressed on her collarbone, rubbing and rubbing. His penis came out of the top of the pants and she felt it, warm on her leg in the sudden cold of the dark room, smooth and hot, nudging at her, pushing all around over her panties. His square chin was all she could see above her, the rest of his face pointed up and toward the sky. She shifted her hips up to meet him, put her arm around him and her little hand down in the bottom part of his warm back. He moved his hot hand down from her collarbone, down over her breast, fingers dragging urgently down to where he felt her, dug into her, opened her up. His body felt heavy on top of her, everything he did so forceful, so demanding. Now his forehead was on her shoulder, his hips twisting, and the sounds he made were groans. “Oh, oh,” he said. “Oh, god, it feels so good.” But then he could be charming. He could say, “Oh, honey, I know it hurts.”

AFTER A YEAR IN exile, Bob brought his wife back into Burma. He brought a field laboratory with him to study the medicinal qualities of orchids, under the auspices of the University of Chicago. The Red Guard was burning churches in China. It was a time for persecution and torment. The Christians had to come in under the cover of secular jobs, when they could get them. Or they had to surrender the gospel to the natives, and hope they would continue to dispense it among themselves. Bob Butcher was now overtly a scientist, but he was still secretly a missionary, holding meetings in the bedroom of their new two-room house in Hakha. Communicants huddled around the spindly bed.

The husband and wife lived this lowly way for a dozen years. Emma planted tea in their little garden. Bob whispered sermons and clinked test tubes together, distilling oils. Always the couple would go to sleep peacefully, separately, in their own space. Then in the night, there would often be the urgent waking, the desperate clutching, big hands around her upper arms or grasping her hips, his hot mouth on her, separating her, driving into her. And then all the grateful exclamations. “Thank you. Oh, god, thank you.” Sometimes she could feel she was still in a dream. Sometimes she woke up full when his rigid thrust was already inside her, his body already drenched in sweat.

Bob had had a vasectomy after his first wife died on the delivery table. He knew, at the time, that it was God’s will. Emma had known there would never be babies, had felt it her calling to be his wife, this man whose tragedy had taken away his will to reproduce. When she thought about children, she wished the idea away, thinking of their sex together as so separate from the kids she saw all around. Then she became miraculously pregnant at the age of thirty-seven. No one expected it. The couple celebrated mildly, each privately horrified. The husband announced his accomplishment to his secret congregation. “My wife, Emma, is going to have a baby,” he said to them. They nodded quickly, smiled, and showed their approval by patting each other on the arm.

Would she die in delivery? Would the baby be a sweaty, demonstrative little man? No. Sunny was born, she grew, and she learned to walk in the village. She sat with her beautiful kimonos among the ratty dogs. Nu washed the diapers, burned fruit to the gods on the back porch. The daylight hours under the mountain increased. In the village, their secret mission was safe, because most of the Chin State of Burma was stubbornly Christian. No matter how many Bibles were burned, more Bibles could be got from India, or smuggled in from the USA. Everything was safe and the family would stay on indefinitely, until Sunny was an old woman, and her head wraps got dirty and her mother died.