Sunday's Silence: A Novel by Gina Nahai

Author:Gina Nahai [Nahai, Gina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-01-21T06:00:00+00:00

BEFORE MY DAUGHTER DIED I USED TO WONDER WHAT I would tell her when she was old enough to ask where I came from, or why it is I cannot go back there or even point to the place on a map.

Blue was standing by the French doors that separated Adam’s room from the balcony overlooking the courtyard, facing Adam without looking him directly in the eyes. He lay in bed with his back against the headboard, the dress he had peeled off her still next to him. He studied the way the curls in her golden-red hair fell against her white skin, the lines of her body as if drawn with a sure hand on paper—lean, spare, certain. Across from the window a wall mirror with a black wood frame reflected her image.

You did not know this—that I had a child and that she died. The newspapers have written much about my snake handling, but they never mentioned my daughter or her passing. It doesn ’t make good copy: a little girl catching fire in the middle of the afternoon, running across the yard without a sound or a whimper as the flames rise around her body and over her face and head, running toward her mother with her arms open as if to embrace her, and me standing there, too stunned to utter a sound or make a move.

Would she have been saved if I had acted a moment sooner?

The newspapers didn’t write about this, and the townspeople hardly seemed to notice at all. They have always thought of me as an outsider—because I came from abroad, and later, because of the church and its practices. They looked at me and talked about me, but they never saw me as anything but an oddity and so it was easy for them to ignore both my daughter’s birth and later, her passing.

She fell to the ground half afoot away from me, flames ris-ing from the tips of her tiny white fingers, and by the time I threw myself on her to choke the fire, I knew I had lost her.

So the townspeople do not mention my daughter, and the church members, who know what happened, rarely spoke of her afterward: they could not explain it, you see—how such a thing could happen to a five-year-old. They could not explain it and could not accord it any greater importance than all the sorrow and misfortune that has tainted their own lives, and so they responded the only way they knew how: accepted it as the will of God and moved on.

This is the essence of faith, the Professor always says: not asking questions, not daring to disagree. He says that is why the church members brought faith in me even though I am not from among them, even though I have never spoken or acted or lived like them. They see how I can fight a snake, and they close their eyes on the rest of my story and that is why, to this day, most of them do not know that I wasn't born with Jesus.

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