by Jeff Newberry
i.
The white-and-gold family bible my mother displayed on the living room coffee table listed my birth, my brother’s birth, and my sister’s birth and death. The pages were so delicate it was as though the words had pressed them thin. Renaissance portraits broke the pages in the Old and New Testaments, dour, shadowy pictures of atrocities. Jael hammering a tent spike into a sleeping Sisera’s head. Christ on the cross, bloody and forgotten. My sister’s name conjured pictures that couldn’t be: she and I outside, in the backyard, her long red hair shining in the sunlight. I thought of her the way I thought of those pictures, so removed, but also familiar. I’d heard the stories even if I didn’t know how to understand them.
ii.
Make no graven images Yahweh tells the Hebrews. As a child, I thought graven meant from the grave, as in, Don’t make any images of the dead. Were all portraits eventually sin, then? I drew all the time, then, filling up notebooks of tiny figures, squiggly-line mouths and dotted eyes. If these weren’t real, was it a sin to draw them? When I learned that graven meant engraved or carved, I was told the Hebrews had built pagan idols to worship alongside Yahweh. God is a jealous god our pastor told us, quoting the scripture. I studied the cross hanging behind him, two planks of wood nailed at the center. On my church bulletin, I drew pictures of knights battling dragons. I drew crosses on the knight’s shields.
iii.
On night when I was in college, a young man came to the front door and offered me a tract, a script balancing damnation with redemption and fiery cross emblazoned on the front. He wanted to know if I followed Christ. I showed him a cross I wore around my neck and said Sometimes, when I can. He said living that way was dangerous. I thanked him. Closed the door. That night, I wrote in my journal about the encounter and imagined a life for my would-be evangelist. I shared his faith, I wrote, but not his zeal, not his need to convert everyone else. Gospel means good news. I tried to turn that journal entry into a short story about a door-knocking preacher who loses his faith, but I never finished it. I didn’t know how it ends.
Jeff Newberry’s most recent book is Cross Country (WordTech Editions), a collaboration with the poet Justin Evans. Recently, his writing has appeared in Brevity, Connotations, and The Journal of American Poetry.