Transcendent Kingdom(15)

There’s a picture of my family at his funeral. We are standing near the casket. Nana looks like he is both bored and angry, the first signs of a look that my family will come to know well in his teenage years. The Chin Chin Man is holding me, taking care not to ruffle my black dress. My mother stands next to him. She doesn’t look sad, exactly, but there’s something there.

This is one of the only pictures of the four of us together. I think that I remember that day, but I don’t know if I’ve just turned my mother’s stories about it into memories or if I’ve stared at that picture long enough that my own stories started to emerge.

    What I think I remember: The Chin Chin Man and my mother fought that morning. He didn’t want to go to the funeral, but she insisted. However horrible Mr. Thomas had been, he was still an elder and therefore deserving of respect. We’d all piled into our red minivan. My mother drove, which was rare when both of my parents were in the car together, and her hands gripped the steering wheel so hard I could see her veins pulsing.

Mr. Thomas’s shithead kids were there, all three of them. The two sons, who were around the same age as my father, were crying, but his daughter is the one who stood out the most. She was stone-faced, staring at her father in his casket with an unmistakable look of contempt. She came up to my family as we took our turn viewing the body, and said to my mother, “He was a god-awful man, and I’m not sorry he’s dead, but I am sorry you had to put up with him all these years, I guess.”

She was the one who took our picture, though why anyone would want to commemorate that moment, I don’t know. On the way home, my parents couldn’t stop talking about what she’d said. It was a sin to speak ill of the dead like that; worse than a sin, it was a curse. As my parents discussed it, my mother got more and more agitated.

“Pull over,” she said, for my father was driving this time. “Pull over.”

The Chin Chin Man got onto the shoulder of the highway; he turned toward my mother, waiting.

“We have to pray.”

“Can’t this wait?” he said.

“Wait for what? For that man to jump out of his grave and come and find us? No, we must pray now.”

Nana and I already knew the drill. We bowed our heads, and after a moment or so, the Chin Chin Man did too.

“Father God, we pray for that woman who spoke ill of her father. We pray that you do not punish her for saying those things and that you do not punish us for hearing them. Lord, we ask that you allow Mr. Thomas to be at peace. In Jesus’s name, amen.”



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    “In Jesus’s name, amen,” the most common ending to a prayer. So common, in fact, that when I was a child, I felt that no prayer was complete without those words. I would go to dinner at friends’ houses, waiting for their fathers to say grace. If those four words were not spoken, I wouldn’t lift my fork. I’d whisper them myself before eating.

We used those four words to end prayers at Nana’s soccer games. In Jesus’s name, we would ask that God allow our boys to defeat their opponents. Nana was five when he started playing the sport, and by the time I was born, he’d already made a name for himself on the field. He was fast, tall, agile, and he led his team, the Rockets, to state finals three years in a row.

The Chin Chin Man loved soccer. “Football,” he said, “is the most graceful sport there is. It is performed with elegance and precision, like a dance.” He’d pick me up, as he said this, and dance me around the bleachers behind the old high school where most of Nana’s games were held. We went to every single one, me and the Chin Chin Man. My mother, usually working, would come when she could, the requisite cooler of grapes and Capri Suns in hand.

One of Nana’s games stood out to me. He was about ten years old then, and he had already come into his growth like a weed in spring. Most of the boys I knew growing up were shorter than us girls until about fifteen or sixteen, when they rounded some invisible corner in the summertime and returned to school the next year twice our size, with voices that crackled like car radios being tuned, searching for the right, the clearest, sound. But not Nana. Nana was always taller than everyone else. To get him onto the soccer team that first year, my mother had had to produce his birth certificate to prove he wasn’t older than the rest of the kids.

    The day of this particular game had been hot and muggy, one of those quintessential Alabama summer days when the heat feels like a physical presence, a weight. Five minutes into the game and you could already see droplets of sweat flinging from the boys’ hair every time they shook their heads. Southerners are, of course, accustomed to this kind of heat, but still it works on you, to carry that weight around. Sometimes, if you’re not careful, it sinks you.

One of the boys on the other team slid in a careless effort to score a goal. It didn’t work. He lay there on the ground for a second or so, as if stunned.

“Get up off the damn ground,” a man shouted. There were only a few bleachers at the soccer field, because no one in Alabama really cared about soccer. It was a child’s sport, something to put your kids in until they were ready to play football. The man was on the other side of the bleachers, but that was still quite close.

The game continued on. Nana was a forward, and a good one. By halftime he had already scored two goals. The other team had one.