Kathryn M. Barber

Taking the Long Way Around (Selected Scriptures)

Gospel of Gate City, Virginia

1:1

I grew up worshipping God in a vocational school auditorium, a portrait of a cape-collared Blue Devil hanging on the back wall, eyes cast down on worshippers casting their eyes down to the floor, knees pressed to cheap carpet. On a stage in front, my daddy waved his arms, told everybody about the love of the Lord Jesus, how He could redeem us from our sins if we’d ask Him to come in our hearts, live, breath, save us, change us. Faith required change. I knew that, always did—before I knew my multiplication tables, I could recite books of the Bible, Old and New, in order, tell you which stories were featured in which, quote scripture, could’ve told you how you could get saved, too.

People who followed God’s Word were good people, people who didn’t follow God’s Word were bad people, folks we ought avoid. Don’t eat with sinners, don’t break bread with them, take their wine (course, you ought not be drinking wine in the first place). No dancing, no cussing, no talking unholy. I couldn’t understand how come I wasn’t allowed to wear my new swimsuit one-piece to church (it covered my belly, after all), but I could understand who the Devil was, how he tempted me, understood I’d go to hell and burn forever in a lake of fire if I didn’t resist the Devil and believe in God.

I got saved when I was ten, after I thought, could’ve sworn, I saw the Devil hiding in my curtains one night, standing back to the window, watching me trying to sleep, and he told me he’d take me to hell forever, torture me. So I got saved the next morning at church, confessed my sins so that shadow of the Devil hiding in my curtains wouldn’t be there when the sun sunk down again. Daddy dipped me in a creek running through the woods; we had tents and buffet tables and a spread of casseroles and breads and pies, and I held my nose, came up washed new in the blood of Jesus.

I was a sinner, and then I was saved by grace. I was unclean, and He healed me. I was blind, and now I see—I see.

1:4

Senior year of high school, I made friends with a girl named Rachel, and she was the first friend I ever had who didn’t believe in God. She told me so, too. Didn’t tell me I was stupid, didn’t say believing in God was for the weak or the dumb or the insecure, just said she didn’t buy it. Asked me to come out with her and some friends that weekend, come drink at her cousin’s house.

“I can’t,” I told her. “I don’t drink.”

“Have you ever?” she asked.

“No. And I can’t. My daddy’s a preacher. Somebody will tell somebody and everybody will know.”

“Girl, please,” she said, and she rolled her eyes, sitting on top of the table in Biology 2. “My friends, they’re from Twin Springs.” The next town over. “Promise you won’t know anyone there.”

Friday night, I told my mama I was at Rachel’s house, but I wasn’t, I was in the next town over, same town my daddy preached in, at some girl’s house on a hill, never been that far back in the woods before. I kissed the top of a Jack Daniels bottle. Felt like every man I’d ever loved, ever lost, all the bad things I thought had happened to my seventeen-year-old heart got washed away on a shore, Jack Daniels drowning me, saving me.

On a front porch, I sat with girls I didn’t know, and someone passed me a cigarette from a pink Camel pack.

Rachel smiled at me, and I tugged it with my lips, choked on the smoke, and she still smiled.

“You’ll get used to it,” she promised me.

“What if I don’t want to?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Then don’t.”

“Everybody here smokes,” I whispered to her.

“So?” she said. “Just because everybody else does something don’t mean you have to. You do whatever you want, don’t do whatever you want. Nobody cares.”

Those girls whose names I can’t remember—I don’t remember who they were, but I remember how they made me feel. Like I could be whoever I wanted to be. I didn’t have to be the preacher’s daughter, face to the pew, getting re-saved every time I fell from grace. I could be the girl licking Jack Daniels from the corners of her lips, letting cigarette smoke hang in the air like clouds on the Smokies a few miles west. Didn’t matter. I could be anybody. Could be both.

Could be nobody. Could be somebody who wasn’t a preacher’s daughter.

1:5

I can still summon to memory the sounds of his fists banging against my locked door. His words disobedient child disappointment who made you like this disrespectful vile sinful blasphemous offensive—I give up—what did I do to deserve a daughter like you?

In my bathroom cabinet, a pack of Camels was tucked behind compacts of powder. In the chest painted with a scene from Noah’s Ark at the foot of my bed, wine coolers purchased by a coworker at the grocery store were nestled beneath blankets. Dust gathered on my King James Bible in the windowsill. I watched my mama recoil inside herself, watched her sit in that pew every week, head held high, playing a role that was killing her a little at a time.

“Why’d you stay for so long?” I asked her on the back porch of her new house, few weeks after the divorce had gone through and we split, two sisters with her, one with my dad.

“I stayed for you,” she said. “Until I realized he was breaking you, too.”

Gospel of Jefferson City, Tennessee

2:1

My first semester in college, a private Baptist school in the Smoky Mountains, I sat slumped over in Henderson Hall, listening to my New Testament professor lecture about the Macabees.

“Katie! Pay attention, Katie!” he said too often, in his South African accent. I didn’t go by Katie, but it weirdly reminded me of my dead uncle, whose death had, by this point, effectively destroyed the majority of my belief in the church, and so I never corrected him.

“Katie, why is stealing wrong?” he asked me.

“I—what? Because, I don’t know, the Bible says so,” I stuttered. A girl beside me, who lived on my hall, with whom I would eventually sit under spring trees outside our dormitory passing a cigarette between us, snickered under her breath.

“No,” he said. “I asked why you think it’s wrong.”

“It’s against the law,” I tried again.

“No,” he said. “Why do you think it’s wrong?”

“I was taught growing up it was wrong?” I didn’t understand what he wanted me to say. Jesus is the answer to every question? Did that work in college like it did in Sunday School?

“Katie,” he said, firm, but not frustrated, “you aren’t hearing me. Why do you think it’s wrong? I’m asking you what you, Katie Barber, think. What do you think?”

Since I was two, I was told there is a God. Since I was three, every staple Bible story there was, golden calf to the road to Emmaus. I’d been baptized twice, saved by God, gone to church camps, worked at church camps. No one had ever asked me what I thought before.

Gospel of Starkville, Mississippi

3.2

Ryland and I stood on the swinging bridge one weekend, back in Virginia, and it swayed like it used to, like the nights we spent out there before—before we understood nothing, before we asked each other questions like: what if there isn’t a God? Then what?

“Sometimes I find more answers at the bottom of a glass than the bottom of the Bible,” he admitted to me one night, sitting in the living room of his Knoxville apartment. Behind him, a long frame I gave him once, Dawson and Joey on a dock in the center, a photo of me and him on either side. We used to watch Dawson’s Creek in high school, smushed into the chair in his den, curled up together before we knew we weren’t Dawson and Joey, we were Jack and Jen. Before our parents were all divorced, before we knew to call how he felt gay, before we learned to call how we felt different.

And this river, the one we were standing over, it was just miles from the house he grew up in, the one his parents left each other inside of, and it’s just miles from where I made Jackson Davis pull his truck over so I could throw up by the Quick Mart. We found ourselves on that bridge. It put us back together when we couldn’t find the words. And even on the nights he was home and I was somewhere else, or I was home and he was somewhere else, it was like we always existed inside that bridge together.

“You think it’s sinning?” I asked him. “Wondering if God’s real? If He’s really up there listening? If we were really good Believers, we wouldn’t question anything.”

He snorted, shifted his boots on that wood over that water. “To really believe something, you must first consider the possibility it isn’t true. Study it, ask questions, wonder, wade through it all. Anybody who ain’t ever questioned God, thought about it a little too hard—well, that’s just blind belief. What’s that worth?”

We stood there a while, listened to the river in the darkness, watched headlights in the distance through the trees turning down those old back roads.

Gospel of Wilmington, North Carolina

4:1

There was a boardwalk by a river in Wilmington, North Carolina, and it was the only place that ever made me feel like that bridge back in Gate City, Virginia. And when I couldn’t go there, when I was stuck inside the borders of Mississippi, when they were closing in on me, same way they closed in on my mama, ran her clean out, I’d turn on my television, hide inside Dawson’s Creek the same way I used to in high school with Ryland. Only now, it meant something different, or something else, something more. By then, I’d put my feet on those same brick roads, breathed in that same river water, been pushed down by those same Atlantic waves.

And so when Mississippi was over, I packed my car up again, moved to Nashville, fell in love with the sounds of a hundred guitars on Broadway, with the roads that criss-crossed through midtown. I had Bible studies with girls from a local mega church while we drank red wine, and I’d never met people who were comfortable with wine and Jesus in the same place, didn’t matter they were in the same places several times in the Bible.

And that spring, I got this letter inviting me to go move to Wilmington, stand on that boardwalk riverside long as I wanted, write fiction, finish another graduate program, and I packed my car again, and I left, again.

And when one night, a friend I’d met years before in Wilmington showed up on my apartment doorstep, face red, tear-streaked, her year-old daughter on her hip, she asked me:

“Can I stay here tonight?”

And one night turned into a week, and a week turned into the summer, and then we were talking about putting a deposit on a house downtown, and I prayed, prayed hard. Lord Jesus, I said to the sky, please don’t let me make a mistake. Please don’t let me walk in the middle of a bunch of drama’s gonna get me in trouble. But I saw bruises on her shoulders, saw them with my own eyes, and what woman sends another woman back to a man who’s hitting her?

I knew what my grandmother would say, watched her put herself in danger over and over again, looking after my cousin, pursing her lips, staying quiet when he woke up on streets or didn’t come home, and she loved him all the same. “The Lord’ll keep you safe if you’re doing His work,” she would’ve said. Lord’ll keep you safe. Two weeks before we were supposed to move into the house, her ex knocked on my door. I had her daughter alone; she was meeting at friend at the beach for lunch.

I opened the door, her asleep on my shoulder, thought it was UPS, and he came in, she woke up, held her arms wide open for her daddy, and while he held her, he yelled at me about heroin, insisted she was at the beach meeting her dealer, that she left him because she was sleeping with her ex the heroin dealer. I told him to get out, said I’d known her longer, and what did he know. He took the baby, and as I was screaming in the doorway, he pushed me aside, said, “She’s not your fucking kid, Kate.”

4:2

We stained the back porch deck with red wine. We put that baby to bed, kissed her one after the other, and I changed diapers and made bagels, vacuumed shredded cheese from the couch and scrubbed pickle juice from the coffee table. We sat in rocking chairs on the front porch, sipped champagne, and sometimes we laughed and sometimes we cried and sometimes we were quiet while our street was alive, loud. And I loved that girl sitting next to me in the rocking chair, loved how she’d rub my back when my anxiety choked me, how she’d hold me when I struggled to reconcile the father I fought with all my life with the daddy I was finally able to love. She pulled me out of my darkness, and I pulled her right back. Pulled her back until she came home high on pills, until her ex was busting into my bedroom in the early morning, yelling, asking where she was, until my landlady called to tell me she’d fixed the toilet in my bathroom, and did I know what was in the pipes?—it was needles.

4:3

I rocked that baby in that rocking chair, her nose nestled into my shoulder, and I thought of all those girls back home who had their own nurseries and their own babies, didn’t have to pretend like I did. I didn’t know where her mama was, what bar she might be passed out on, whether the spoon she was heating up was silver or cheap metal. I rubbed the top of that baby’s feet, smooth and soft, thought of her mama’s feet, red and rashed, and I finally understood it wasn’t from dry skin, it was from where she’d been shoving those needles between her toes. I rocked that baby and thought how my mama must’ve rocked me, how she must’ve held me the same way, how she must’ve looked forward in time, prayed for me, hoped I wouldn’t end up the sinner I had. When I looked forward in that baby’s life, I saw pain, just pain. I saw empty bottles and empty cigarette packs on a rain-soaked porch. I saw her mama passed out in a bed, me trying to wake her, not understanding how a person could sleep that hard, that fast, that deep. I saw this baby leaning over a sink, all grown up, feet up to the mirror, shoving needles between her toes, too, and I thought—how can I save her from all this?

And it felt like my prayers were hitting the ceiling.

I wanted to lie to her, tell her there was no bad and no evil and everyone was good deep down and everything would be okay, and I wanted to lock her inside a church where nothing and nobody bad could get her. Where she couldn’t find needles or men in bars, the way her mama had. I wanted to put her in my car, strap her into the car seat I’d been riding around with for the last eight months, drive across the mountains back into Tennessee, keep her safe.

I wanted to tell her God was real and she should obey Him and follow His word so she would stay safe from the darkness hiding under bridges downtown, in dirty bathrooms where her mama threw needles and watched them flush down, down, down. I would’ve told her anything, anything, to keep her safe from that life.