Jeri Smith-Ready: This Side of Salvation

Me: I didn’t study for this test. By the way, I’m flunking.

Dad: John’s death was part of God’s plan, which we’re too small to comprehend.

Me: I’m big enough to comprehend that this plan sucks.

By that point we were “finished” with the military’s grief-counseling services. I guess mourning for more than a year was unseemly for respectable families like ours, or it would have insulted God and His fantabulous grand plan for the universe.

The door to John’s room was shut forever. Mom and Dad told us not to go in there anymore, to sleep or reminisce or wish things could be different. It was time to buck up and move on and be grateful for the good in our lives.

But late at night, I heard Mara through the wall, crying. I heard John in my head, screaming.

So I did what any self-respecting thirteen-year-old brimming with rage and brand-new testosterone would do: I hit people. Mostly bullies who deserved it, like eighth graders who tripped sixth graders in the hallway, or that guy at the bus stop who grabbed Mara’s ass when she bent over to pick up her book bag.

The principal said I was “acting out,” but I preferred the term “taking action.” Whatever the label, I never felt happier than when I was standing over the prone, writhing—preferably bleeding—figure of some jerk who had it coming but didn’t see it coming. I could pretend for one brief, beautiful moment that he was the man who killed my brother.

Then I broke my pitching hand on someone’s face. For the sake of baseball, my one connection to John, I stopped fighting. When my hand healed, I funneled my frustration into a more elegant, eloquent channel: graffiti. I wrote what was in my heart, big and loud, on any surface I could find, in whatever tone felt right that week.

Snark at the skate park: When God closes a door, He opens a can of tear gas.

Bitterness on a train bridge: life’s a bitch and then i kill you. love, god.

These were the ones clean enough to print in the local papers.

I was more of a spray-paint scribbler than a real graffiti artist. But for my masterpiece, a three-word indictment that would say it all, I aimed higher. I spent weeks learning how to letter in the proper graffiti style, practicing in a sketchbook (which I burned, to avoid implicating myself), and scoping out the perfect location.

Stony Hill Community Worship Center was one of those megachurches large enough to have their own zip codes. Dad complained about the traffic jams they caused on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. Mom sniffed at their pun-ridden, inflammatory messages on their marquee sign in the parking lot.

The side wall was whitewashed brick, upon which Stony Hill would flash messages in colored lights during holidays, like christ . . . is . . . christmas. It was the perfect blank canvas, like God had delivered it to me Himself.

I gathered the troops. They called themselves the “Blasphemy Boy Gang,” three fellow eighth graders who eased their suburban tedium by finding me transportation, acting as lookout, and procuring my supplies.

For the Stony Hill job, Patrick Heil blackmailed his older brother Cullen into being our getaway driver, threatening to rat him out for dealing weed to middle schoolers. Stephen Rice snuck a ladder out of his dad’s tool shed. And Rajiv Ramsey bought the spray paint and dust masks—to keep telltale paint from getting on my nose hairs— with cash from a Home Depot way up in Valley Forge, so it wouldn’t be traced back to this crime.

At 2 a.m. on what turned out to be the hottest night of the summer, we struck. Cullen parked the car around the corner while the rest of us went to work.

A major crossroad was a thousand feet away, in plain sight of the church, so we had to be fast, alert, and lucky. With Rajiv handing me paint cans like a nurse assisting a surgeon, Stephen steadying and moving the ladder, and Patrick acting as lookout, I was finished in five minutes.

I descended the ladder and helped Stephen collapse it, sliding it down slow and steady to keep it quiet. Then Rajiv gave me the bag of cans while he helped Patrick and Stephen carry the ladder back to the car. They trotted in perfect synch, like horses drawing a carriage.

I paused for a second alone beside the church. why god why? loomed over me, stark, simple, and savage. Sweat chilled on my skin at the thought of strangers seeing my rage and pain poured out with such purity. The mural was a mug shot of my insides.

But a mug shot never tells a criminal’s whole story, only the unhappy ending. It doesn’t reveal that the girl arrested for prostitution needed money to support her dying sister, or that the guy busted for smoking weed had brain-crushing pain from bone cancer.

I reached into the bag and pulled out the can of black paint.

If I’m never caught , I realized, those three words will mean nothing. The world will never know who asked why? Or why why? needed to be asked in the first place.

I clutched the paint, filled with the desire to sign my name. My hand shook so hard, the ball inside the can began to rattle.

Then Rajiv barked my name from across the field, followed by a string of impatient profanities.

Self-preservation won. I ran for the car and made my escape.

“Get up,” Dad said. “We’re worshipping somewhere new this week.” He rapped his knuckles on my open door until I grunted in acknowledgment. Then his footsteps retreated down the hall.

I rolled out of bed without opening my eyes. The inside of my skull felt coated with peanut butter. It had been only a few days since the why god why? graffiti night, when the adrenaline rush had kept me awake until it was time to go to school. I’d hoped to catch up on missed sleep that Sunday morning, but a peek at the clock revealed that Dad had woken me an hour earlier than usual.

I wondered why we were going to a new church all of a sudden. I wondered if St. Mark’s Episcopal had tired of Dad’s Bible-study rants, or if he’d tired of them explaining every verse’s historical context and “intellectualizing the truth out of Scripture,” as he put it. Most important, I wondered if I could wear jeans.

I barely had time to grab a bagel on the way out the door. In the car, Mom kept glancing back at me from the passenger seat. I thought maybe it was because I was scattering sesame seeds all over the place, but she wasn’t usually a neat freak. Something was up.

We turned off Lancaster Avenue and immediately slowed, a traffic jam forming a block south of the busy boulevard. For once, my father didn’t complain about the weekly mass pilgrimage to Stony Hill church. He just sat there, humming.

We reached a side street, where I assumed he’d turn off to get around the traffic.

He didn’t turn off. We were part of the traffic.

I stopped chewing, my throat tight and stomach churning. Do Mom and Dad know what I painted on this church? Did they bring me here to see if I’d confess? Will I get in more trouble if I don’t?

The child locks on the rear doors were engaged. No escape.

On Stony Hill’s outside wall, my why god why? was already painted over in stark white, like it had never existed. This hasty erasure pissed me off. How could they obliterate humanity’s most basic question and anguished howl?

I finished my bagel with hostile bites. No way I’d confess. No way I’d stop. Next time it won’t be paint. Next time I’ll make it permanent.

Stony Hill was no less intimidating on the inside. Its sanctuary was three times the size of my middle school auditorium. The pulpit had a giant screen to its right and a five-piece band warming up to its left. And that squat black contraption upstage—was that a fog machine ?

We sat in the center-left section, in cushy movie-theater-style seats instead of pews. Everyone in the row in front of us turned and smiled, clasping our hands like we were old friends. I wondered how, in a congregation this size, they could tell we were newcomers.