Wonderfully Made

The sky over Hargrove Street was the color of a fresh bruise. Three weeks outside taught a person things, and Eli Turner had maybe twenty minutes before the darkening sky opened up on top of him. Above the rooftops, the clouds were now drawing themselves up like his father's shoulders used to before a beating… tight, swollen, and full of danger.

The wind came up hard off the river and flipped the leaves silver-side-out. Eli pulled the strap on his duffel tighter and made for the only lit doorway on the block. EASTSIDE COMMUNITY CENTER was painted on the glass in peeling gold letters. Half of them were missing so it read E ST IDE COMM NITY CENTE, like even the place couldn't hold itself together for the impending storm.

Inside, the air smelled like burnt coffee and floor wax. Folding tables adorned the large room together with metal folding chairs. The bulletin board was layered with old and curling flyers. An old man was stowing away chairs at the far end of the hall, unhurried, one at a time, like he had all the time God had ever created.

Eli calculated the situation as he always did now. Old man, alone, cardigan with actual buttons. Cardigan guys carry cash, Eli thought to himself. He crossed the room, rehearsing the voice in his mind. Be polite, a little pitiful, not so pitiful it might spook him.

"Excuse me. Sir. I hate to bother you, but… I'm trying to get bus fare to my aunt's place, and I haven't eaten since…"

"You picked a good night to come in," the man said, without turning around. He set a chair on the stack. "Storm's going to be biblical."

Eli hated that word. Biblical.

"Yes sir. So… if you could spare anything. Couple dollars? Food, even? Whatever."

The man turned. He was older than Eli had guessed, seventy maybe, with white hair cropped close and eyes that scanned Eli's wrecked sneakers and duffel bag before meeting his hollow eyes. It wasn’t the up-and-down look of judgment that strangers gave him lately, deciding whether he was dangerous or just filthy. This was something else. Like the man was checking items off a list.

"Where are your parents?" the man asked.

Eli's face went hot. "Man, forget it."

"Sit down, son. There's chili in the kitchen from the seniors' lunch. I was going to throw it out, which would be a sin, and I like to keep those to a minimum." He picked a chair back up off the rack and set it down, then another, facing it. "I'm Ray." He held his hand out and waited for Eli to take it in his.

Eli hesitated before accepting the introduction. “Eli,” he said, as he extended his right arm out to grip Ray’s hand in his.

“Bon appétit,” said Ray. “It’s not my best, but it will fill your belly.”

The chili was lukewarm and Eli ate it like it was the last bit of food in the county. Ray watched out the windows as the sky opened up and the rain fell. It was, in a way, its own kind of mercy. Only when Eli was done scraping the bowl did Ray speak again.

"So what's a kid your age doing out on the street?"

Eli had a lie for this too. He'd told it at the Greyhound station, and at the McDonald's on Route 9. The wind was picking up and blowing the rain hard against the glass now. He was warm for the first time in two days, and the lie just didn't form in his mouth.

"My parents put me out," he said. "Three weeks ago."

"Put you out? for what!?!" The expression on Ray’s face turning to one of skepticism and disappointment.

Eli looked down at the empty bowl and adjusted the spoon. His shoulders slumped forward to conceal his shame. "For being what I am." It came out reluctantly, as Eli glanced up at Ray and then back down to his bowl.

*****

Eli was eight years old, sitting cross-legged on the living room carpet, too close to the television which his mother always fussed about. It was the Sunday afternoon movie. A way to unwind after church. His father was asleep in the recliner behind him and the house had that holy weekend stillness, and the smell of his mother's cornbread billowed warmly from the kitchen.

The movie was about mutants. People born different, hunted for it, and forced to hide what they were. Wolverine appeared on the screen. A tall, long-legged man with the ruggedness of a cowboy and the superhero powers of a beast. Something in Eli's chest turned over like an engine catching in the cold as his eyes drifted to examine the man’s physique.

He didn't have a word for it. He was eight. But he knew the feeling was aimed at the man and not at the woman with the white streak in her hair. He knew, with the knowledge arriving whole, the way scripture was supposed to and never did, that he must not mention his feelings. Not ever. He glanced back at his sleeping father like the feeling might be visible on his face, read easily like a Dick & Jane book. No one must ever know, he thought to himself.

The mutants in the movie had a school. A place they could go where being what they were wasn't a curse, but where they could be themselves. Eli watched the credits roll and thought, that's not real, there's no school like that. At dinner that evening, he said his grace like a boy with nothing folded up hiding inside him. Something that would be suppressed for the next several years.

He got good at hiding his feelings. Nobody ever told him how much practice he would get. By age eleven, he would keep his eyes flat when the other boys talked about girls. At thirteen, he learned to laugh for the exact right amount at tasteless jokes. He learned his own face, being always aware of how his expressions matched or masked what he was really thinking, like an actor learns a role, concealing truths and hiding the lies for an audience that could never see the real person underneath.

*****

"Church family?" Ray asked. Outside, the rain was coming down in ropes.

"I am…” Eli started to form a smile, “I was… a deacon's son." The smile evaporated. "We sat in the third pew from the front for every Sunday of my life. On Wednesdays we had Bible study. And I sang in the youth choir till my voice broke."

“What’s your favorite verse?”

“Psalm 139:14.”

*****

He was fifteen, in the third pew, in the blue suit his mother had bought him for Easter, when Pastor Loomis found his text in Romans and settled into it like a man settling into a hot bath.

"The Word is not confused,” Loomis said. He was a big man and he used his size like an instrument, leaning over the pulpit so the whole sanctuary leaned back. "The world is confused. Our culture is confused. But the Word says God gave them up unto vile affections. Says that men leaving the natural use of the woman, burning in their lust towards one another… It is an abomination!" and here he slammed a fist onto the pulpit, and the amens came up out of the congregation like startled birds. “And I don't care what they legalize, I don't care what they celebrate on television, you cannot get to heaven through a door that God himself has demanded stay closed!"

“Amen!” His father's voice rose in praise right beside him, deep and certain.

His mother with her fan going, and her chin dipping, “yes, Lord Jesus, Amen!”

Eli sat very still with the hymnal on his knees and did the thing he had trained himself to do whenever an uncomfortable church moment was occurring. He would meditate, leaving his body but still sitting in the pew, obedient and pressed, while the rest of him went somewhere else. He fixed his eyes on the banner above the choir loft, the one that had hung there since before he was born.

I WILL PRAISE THEE, FOR I AM FEARFULLY AND WONDERFULLY MADE. — PSALM 139:14.

He'd loved that verse. Wonderfully made. He used to think it meant everything about himself from his large feet to his crooked tooth. It even meant the engine-turn in his chest he'd never asked for and couldn't shut off. Made meant intention. On purpose. By Somebody who did not, the Book said elsewhere, make mistakes.

But apparently there was an asterisk. Apparently God had made all of him on purpose except the one part, and that part he was supposed to unmake himself, nightly, on his knees, and Eli had tried. Lord! He had actually tried. He had prayed it out, fasted it out, wept it out into his pillow. But it stayed. It was the only prayer he'd ever prayed with his whole soul, and the answer, as far as he could tell, was this is how I made you.

Which meant either God was cruel, or Pastor Loomis was wrong. And Eli, fifteen, in his Easter suit, sat in the third pew and committed the quietest heresy of his life. He stopped believing.

"So how'd they find out?" Ray asked. He'd gotten up and come back with two coffees. He put one in Eli's hands without asking.

"My phone."

Ray winced like a man who'd heard it a hundred times.

“There'd been a boy. Caleb. He plays football.” Eli sipped his coffee as he clutched the mug with both hands. “Caleb wasn’t from a religious family, but he had a laugh that was deep and honest, like the water in the river.”

“You texted each other?” Ray asked.

“Yes. The message my mom found said, I think about you all the time. I wish I could just be normal or stop wanting this but I can't. It's how I'm made.”Eli took another sip of coffee.

“When my mother found it, she didn’t scream, as I had always imagined she would if… when she found out.”

That was the part Eli couldn't get over, even now.

*****

Eli’s mother sat at the kitchen table, staring at the screen on the phone in her hands like it was some kind of dead animal.

"What did we do wrong?" she asked him, looking up with a pale expression. The question was directed not to him, but past him. To God. To the ladies of the missionary board who would surely hear.

His father was worse, because his father stayed quiet. Vernon Turner, head deacon for twenty-two years. A man whose whole standing in the world was the Church. He stood by the refrigerator with his arms folded and let Eli's mother cry, and when he finally spoke he didn't talk about hell. He talked about the church.

"Do you understand what you've done to this family? To me?” his father asked. “I sit on that deacon board with men whose sons I baptized. The pastor asks after you by name, Eli."

His voice never rose. That was the horror of it.

"We will be an embarrassment to the church. Everything I have built in that congregation, twenty-two years… and you did this in my house."

There was no how do we help you. Not even a word of support. That night, his father took him to an emergency meeting with Pastor Loomis. He handed them each a pamphlet for a program upstate that promised to pray the affliction out of him for eleven hundred dollars. Eli, sixteen now and done kneeling for cures, said the one unsayable thing.

“No. I am how God made me.”

His father looked at him for a long moment. Then he said, "Not in this house He didn't." He grabbed Eli by the wrist and yanked him out of the seat before escorting him back to the car. When they got home, Eli’s dad went and got a duffel bag from the hall closet and threw it at him.

“Pack your shit and get out.”

“But dad! It’s after 10:00! And I have school!”

“I don’t care. Find somewhere else to sleep. You’re not my son anymore.”

His mother stood in the kitchen doorway while Eli packed. She didn't stop it. That was her whole testimony. In the end, she chose to turn her back on him. Coldly. Without tears.

As the door closed he heard her say, "Call us after you've prayed on it." As if he were the one who owed the apology. As if he had somewhere to plug in a phone.

*****

"You were kicked out three weeks ago?" Ray asked. "Where have you been sleeping?"

"I was at Caleb's, till his mom got nervous. Then there were a couple of guys from school. You find out real fast how long your welcome on a couch will last." Eli wrapped both hands around the coffee mug. "After that, the bus station till I got run you off. I tried staying under the Route 9 overpass, but lots of grown men under there, and some of them…" He stopped. "…You learn what to stay away from."

"You shouldn't have to be learning that at sixteen."

"Lot of kids are learning it, though."

"More than anybody wants to count," Ray said. "I’m sure you know some of them. Some nights it's near half of them here in your same situation. Same story, different pew. Church kids, a lot of them. Good families, everybody says." He shook his head slowly. "Whole country's arguing about LGBTQ youth like you're the issue. But you're just children! You’re just seeking shelter from the rain and a hot meal." Ray placed a gentle, reassuring hand on Eli’s shoulder as thunder rolled through the walls.

Eli looked at his hands. "Why do you care?"

Ray paused before answering. He looked out at the water sheeting down the glass, and something in his face went back. A long way back.

"1974," he said. "I was seventeen. My daddy was paster at Church of Christ, and he found a letter I wrote but never mailed." He turned the coffee cup a slow half-circle on the table. “The letter was to a boy I met in high school, two years ahead of me. He got drafted into the War.”

Eli froze upon hearing the confession.

"It was January when I got kicked out. At least you got summer rain." A dry sound, not quite a laugh. "There was no community center. There was no anybody. What was done to me I won't bother you with tonight; you're carrying enough. But I promised God – the real one, not the one my daddy kept preaching about – that if I lived, I'd be the someone who is there for somebody else when there had been no one there for me.”

The rain filled up the silence, as Eli and Ray held their gazes, realizing God’s providence had guided them to one another.

"There's a youth place on Delmore," Ray said. "Beds, showers, and a case worker who will actually fight for you. They know me. I can't make you go. But the van comes by here at eight, and it's seven forty. And son, look at it out there."

Eli turned his head to the window. The street had gone to running water, gutters full, the streetlight smeared gold across all of it. Somewhere across town his bedroom still had his trophies in it, his Bible with his name in gilt on the cover, and a bed that nobody slept in. He wondered if his mother had prayed on it yet. He wondered if she ever would.

"At this place you described, are they going to tell me I need to get right with God?" he asked.

"No," Ray said. "But if you ever want to worship again, there are churches now that'd read that banner of yours and mean it entirely. Fearfully and wonderfully. No asterisk."

Ray stood, his joints cracking, and started on the chairs again. "God made you in the womb, and again on a Sunday afternoon in front of the TV. He hasn't lost track of you, Eli. Neither will I.”

The van pulled up outside, and Eli gathered his duffle. He stopped at the door and turned to Ray. “Thank you. For the chili. Will you be here tomorrow?”

Ray smiled with a nod, holding back tears. “Sleep well tonight, Eli. Tomorrow is a new day.”

Eli pushed the door open and rushed through the rain before getting into the van. As it drove away, Eli turned and looked back through windows of the Community Center where Ray was still racking chairs. Wonderfully made, Eli thought to himself.