Grace McCleen - The Land of Decoration

Father said: “I’m glad it meets with his approval.”

After a few minutes I said: “Is it going to stay there?”

“For the foreseeable future.”

“Good,” I said. “I like it. It’s the best fence in the world.”

The Bible study that night was about Jerusalem. It turned out Jerusalem also became a Den of Iniquity after Jesus died, and yet it was the capital of the Land of Decoration. God let it be destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. Most of the people inside forgot to escape to the mountains, like Jesus told them to do, when the first troops came and went again. When the Romans came back, it was too late; they built a fence of pointed stakes around the city and the people starved and began eating their own children. “Only a few escaped,” Father said. “Those who remembered what Jesus had told them. They went to the mountains and stayed there until the Romans went away. The Great Tribulation will be the same. We mustn’t become complacent, because it will come like a thief in the night.”

THAT WEEK, PEOPLE shouted if they wanted to speak to Father, and he stood on a milk crate and peered down at them. The postman had to throw our mail over the top of the fence because Father said a letter box was asking for trouble. I had told Father I liked the fence, but when I came home from school and someone was walking behind me, I didn’t go in through the front but slipped down the lane and went in through the back gate.

I couldn’t sit in my room anymore, because I didn’t want to be near the Land of Decoration. I was trying to remember exactly where everything was and couldn’t be sure if something had moved or not. I had a bad headache before bed and had to ask Father for some acetaminophen.

At night I slept with my back to the Land of Decoration, but then I felt frightened and turned back to face it again. Once I dreamed the little people were scaling the sides of the bed with ropes, and I woke as the little man I had made to look like Neil was nailing my hair to the mattress with toothpicks.

After school, I spent a lot of time walking around the garden, looking through the cracks in the fence. It was like being invisible, but we weren’t invisible—we were the most visible house on the street. If our town had been Jericho, we wouldn’t have had to tie a red cord to the window; God would have known which house to leave standing.

I had lied to Father about Mr. Neasdon liking the fence, but someone really did like it. On Tuesday Mrs. Pew was coming home with her shopping and said: “I wish I could have something like that. It would be ideal for hanging baskets.” She asked me to ask Father if he could build her a fence, but I didn’t. He was acting strangely.

He sat in the middle room every evening after the Bible study and went over bills—at least that’s what he said he was going to do, but when I looked through the keyhole he was staring into space. He told me off for leaving the hall light on and for throwing a crust away because there was mold on it. He said: “It’s only penicillin; you’re lucky to have food at all!”

He went to bed earlier than usual and began sleeping on a mattress on the kitchen floor. Before bedtime he walked around the garden and checked that the back gate was locked. Then he came inside, turned the electricity off, and balanced an ax above the back door. I lay in bed looking out over the town and thought about those people in Jerusalem. I wondered who the Romans were this time, and if they came, would the mountains hide us?

ON FRIDAY, NEIL Lewis came back to school. I felt him come into the room before I saw him though he didn’t come in as he usually did. He sat down quietly. Then he did something strange. He glanced over his shoulder at me, as if to check I was there and in that moment I knew everything. I knew he had started the fire, he and his brother and his friends, and I began to feel sick. I wasn’t sure if it was because I was angry or because I was afraid, but I knew I mustn’t think about Neil Lewis anymore, not even for a second, because if I did I would do something bad.

On Monday I woke to a strange sound: a slap and a roar. The roar came a split second after the slap. I looked down to see Father standing on the pavement. He had a can of brown paint in one hand and a brush in the other. He was dunking the paintbrush into the can and splattering it against the fence. His face was screwed up as if he was crying.

I had never seen Father look like that, and it made me feel worse than I had ever felt in my life. I sat down on the bed for a minute. Then I went down. When I came through the gate, he shouted: “ Get back! Your clothes’ll be ruined!” But I had seen what was on the fence, the words sprayed in big looping letters, and this time I understood them all.

I went back to my room and curled up and shut my eyes. I put my fingers in my ears and pressed hard and kept pressing. I ground my teeth. But I could still hear the roaring and I could still see Father’s face.

I began to think I would like to hurt Neil Lewis badly.

MY HEAD WAS hot and full in class that morning, like it had been the afternoon I made the first miracle. We were making snowflakes at school, folding and cutting and opening circles of paper. I would normally have enjoyed making things, seeing how the patterns suddenly sprang into life when you opened out the snowflakes, but my eyes kept wandering to Neil.

He was sitting with Kevin and Luke, his cheek on his hand. He looked bored, half asleep: The sunshine was catching his hair and making his eyelashes whiter than ever. I thought that you would not know to look at him what he was like. You would never know what he wrote on people’s fences and did to their gardens. I began cutting my snowflake again, but my eyes were getting fuzzy and I couldn’t make the scissors go where I wanted. I looked up again. Neil was putting his thumb inside the corner of his nose. He saw me looking at him. And when he did he smiled so that his eyes became slits and his lip curled.

I looked down and bit into my lips and kept pressing down until I tasted iron. I thought of Father and what he had said about forgiveness. I thought of everything good and everything right and everything hopeful, but it was all I could do to keep cutting. Something was rising inside me, millions of small things, scurrying down my arms to my fingertips, crawling up my spine into my hair.

Specks appeared in front of my eyes. There was roaring. The room was getting darker.

I don’t know what made me look up, but when I did I saw that someone was standing behind Neil Lewis. I couldn’t see the person’s face because it was hazy. The rest of the classroom was empty. The person’s hands took Neil’s head, brought it back, then down onto the desk. I jumped. The head made a dull sound and the desk rocked.

The roaring was getting louder. The hands brought Neil’s head back again. His skin was stretched and his eyes were staring. His mouth was an “O.” The hands brought the head down on the desk and Neil yelled. When his head came up this time, there was blood coming from his nose.

He tried to get up but lost his balance. The hands brought his head down again. This time it hit the edge of the desk and I heard a softer sound, like a cabbage broken open.

I opened my mouth but nothing came out. I was being pressed into the seat. My eyes were closing, I was falling. The hands brought the head down again. The face didn’t look like Neil anymore. The hands brought the head down again. Neil had stopped yelling now. His mouth was a hole and his eyes were two bags of flesh and his nose had spread sideways.

Then someone was saying: “Judith! Can you hear me?” But the roaring went on and the hands went on bringing the head down on the desk.