Russell Banks - Trailerpark

“I see. Your mother’s dead husband.”

“Oh my God! How could you know about that?”

“Check your Bible,” He said.

“Oh, listen, I… I’ve really had problems, my mother says I’m fragile, and she’s right. You shouldn’t call up and fool around like this. I’ve been very depressed lately,” she reminded Him.

“I know that. That’s why I been thinking of giving a little visit. Might turn things around for you, Noni.”

“Okay, fine. Really,” she said, her voice trembling. “You do that. I… I’ve got to go now, I hope it’s okay to go now.”

“Fine. Good-bye.”

“Bye.”

And that was all. She hung up, her mother came home around eleven, and Noni kissed her good night and went into her room at the back of the trailer and fell immediately to sleep, dreaming, as might be expected, of her dead father. It was one of those dreams that are so easy to interpret you feel sure your interpretation is wrong, that is, assuming you respect the intelligence of dreams. Noni and her father were standing in the lobby of a large hotel, the Hyatt Regency in Nashville, Tennessee, and Noni’s father kissed her good-bye, and when the elevator door opened, he led her forward into it, stepping back himself just as the door closed. The elevator was suspended in a round glass tube, and it shot up for forty or fifty floors, then came to an abrupt stop. The door opened, and standing in front of her, with His hand extended toward her in the same position as her father’s when he had led her into the elevator way below, was Jesus. He was wearing a white robe, as He’s usually portrayed, and was smiling. He wasn’t very tall, about her height, five foot six, and He was smiling with infinite understanding and sweetness. She stepped out of the elevator and placed her hand in His. Then she woke up, and it was morning, a late February morning, gray and cold and lightly snowing.

She did tell the police what day it was that she first saw Jesus, February 22, 1979, but she did not reveal to them when exactly on that day or where exactly at the trailerpark. They probably were a little embarrassed by the line of questioning they were caught in and, as a consequence, accepted approximate answers when exact answers would have been more revealing and possibly more convincing. It was the second afternoon following her phone conversation with Him that she actually saw Jesus. The light snow of the previous day had built to a snowstorm that had abated the next morning, leaving six inches of new powdery snow on top of two feet or more of the old, crusted stuff, and Noni in boots and parka had shoveled a path out to the driveway, which had been cleared early that morning by the kid from town who plowed out most everybody in the park that winter, and afterward she had walked down the freshly cleared lane under a darkly overcast sky, one of those weighted, low skies that make you think winter will never end, that it will surely press on and down, bearing you beneath it, until finally you lie down in the snow and go to sleep. At the end of the lane she came to the lake, and with the trailers behind her and the wind off the lake in her face, she stood and gazed across the silver-gray ice to the island and, beyond the island, to the humped, pale blue hills. The wind had scraped most of the snow off the lake, drifting it against the shore and the trees and here at the trailerpark against the sides of the trailers. Her pale, pinched face grew paler and drew in upon itself as the steady wind drove against the shore, and as she later said, it seemed to her at that moment more than any other that her life was not worth anything, for she was a stupid, unimaginative young woman who had no gifts for the world and who did not believe in herself enough to believe that her love was worth giving. She had discovered in college that she was stupid and flunked out after two semesters, and she had learned on the commune that she was unimaginative and after taking a lot of acid tried to stab one of the people who truly was imaginative, and in the hospital she had found out that she had no gifts for the world because her dependencies were so great, so she stopped eating and almost died of starvation, and then last summer with Terry she had learned that her love was worth nothing so she refused to have his baby and sent him away. She opened her eyes, wishing the lake were not covered with ice so that she could walk straight into the water and drown, when she saw a man approaching her at a distance, walking slowly over the ice directly toward her. Even from this distance she knew the man was Jesus, and trembling, suddenly warm, all her dark thoughts gone, she raised her hand and waved. But when He waved back, she grew frightened. He was more or less the same as He had been in the dream, except that He wore a heavy maroon poncho over His shoulders, and His feet were wrapped in some kind of bulky mucklucks. He was hatless, and His long, dark brown hair swirled around His bearded face. Turning away from Him, she ran in terror back up the lane to her mother’s trailer, dashed breathlessly inside, locking the door behind her, and when she had pulled off her boots and parka, she switched on the television set and sat down in front of it and tried to watch. Her mother was in the kitchen, preparing dinner. “Have a nice walk, dear?” she called. Noni said no, she had seen Jesus walking across the lake toward her, so she had run home. “Oh, dear,” her mother said.

Time passed, and winter did indeed turn eventually into spring, soggy and swollen and ravaged, which is almost always the case with New Hampshire springs. Renewal seems almost impossible, except as survival alone indicates a potential for it. Noni saw no more of Jesus during these months, but she thought of Him frequently, and she read her Bible, and along about the end of March she started attending services at a small white building located on one of the side streets in town. It was a single-story building that once had been a paint store, just a half-block off Main Street, and the two large windows facing the street had been painted over dark green and a sign in white, wobbly letters had been made in each of them. The one on the right said: CHURCH OF THE NEW HAMPSHIRE MINISTRY OF JESUS CHRIST; on the other side were the words, FOR WHERE TWO OR THREE ARE GATHERED TOGETHER IN MY NAME, THERE AM I IN THE MIDST OF THEM. The people who attended prayer meetings and listened to sermons here were all local people, about twenty in all, and except for Noni, working people. Noni didn’t work because she was supported by her mother who, in turn, was supported by her dead husband who, in his turn, had been supported by the selling of life insurance. Nevertheless, she felt comfortable with these people, mostly because they had been unhappy once, too, and now they were not, and when they talked about their time of unhappiness she knew they had felt then just as she felt now, stupid and unimaginative, with no gifts for the world and no belief that her love was worth giving. It was Jesus, they said, who had changed their lives, for He had found their love to be of infinite worth and their gifts, no matter how slight, to be of great value, and their intelligence and imaginative powers to be apocalyptically superior to the intelligence and imagination of the rest of the people in town. They said to her, when she wept, “Did you never read in the Scriptures, ‘The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner. This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes’?” And then in mid-April, shortly after Easter, Noni saw Jesus a second time, this time in the form of a body of light. He appeared to her one night late while she lay in her bed and tried to sleep. Since joining the Church of the New Hampshire Ministry of Jesus Christ she had given up smoking marijuana, along with alcoholic beverages, sex, cigarette smoking, cursing and cosmetics. All her anxieties and grief fell immediately away, and she came to be filled with the light of Jesus, and when He had passed through her and had gone from her room, she remained filled — but filled now with love, her love of Jesus Himself, and the inescapable logic of that love. From then until now Noni Hubner was a different person. That much was obvious to anyone who knew her, and that much, of course, she told the police when they interrogated her.