Sibling castaways

“SINNERS go to: HELL. Rightchuss go to: HEAVEN. The end is neer: REPENT. This here is: JESUS LAND.” These words, posted on roadside signs near the Indiana farm town where Julia Scheeres moved with her family in the mid-1980s, are emblematic of the world in which she was raised.

“Jesus Land” is a memoir about this upbringing, one that opens with Scheeres, age 16 1/2 , and her adopted brother David out on their bikes, exploring a cemetery near their family’s new farm. Cemeteries hold a deep fascination for them. Beyond the typical, morbid kid interest in rotting bodies, they have serious questions: “Where is the soul of the person I’m standing on right now -- Heaven or Hell? Were they satisfied with their lives, or did they want more? If they could go back and do it all over again, what would they change? Is Heaven all it’s cracked up to be?”

These are not idle issues, for the two of them are being raised by strict, Calvinist parents who are preparing them for heaven by creating a home life that is hell on earth.

Scheeres, the youngest of four children, is 3 when her mother and father adopt David, a black infant with whom she immediately bonds. “I appointed myself his warden and his keeper,” she remembers. “I’d kiss away his pain and hush his cries.... He was my baby.” Later, feeling that David needs a friend, the Scheereses adopt Jerome, an older child, also black.

The author’s parents are a study in cruelty and narcissism. Her surgeon father, “a stranger who comes around to mete out punishment,” beats David and Jerome in their basement bedroom, leaving Scheeres upstairs to suffer the guilt of her white-skin privilege. She is convinced that because she is blood kin, she is exempt from physical abuse. (Later, after her brothers leave home, this turns out to be incorrect.) Nor is she exempt from the psychological abuse of her mother, a woman who spends her days listening to Christian radio and obsessing about church missionaries, raising her children with manic frugality and platitudes. “Turn the other cheek,” one of her favorites, could have served as an alternate title for this book. Though she herself never beats the children, she deprives them of touch or a single affectionate word. She keeps a stern yet distracted eye on the kids, either ignoring them completely or barking orders over the household intercom, which she also uses to eavesdrop on them in their rooms.

“Jesus Land” is a harrowing memoir, a survivor’s testimonial, as well as a harsh look at the seamy underbelly of fundamentalist Christianity. But above all, it is a love story. Scheeres’ relationship with David, her emotional twin, is the soft center of this very hard story. Together, they explore their surroundings, make below-the-parental-radar forays into pop culture (favoring “The Brady Bunch”) and imagine a future in Florida, which becomes shorthand for the freedom that lies on the other side of their nightmarish childhood.

Laced through the book are knots of racial confusion. A pale, Nordic blond, Scheeres has dreams of showing up at school with her brothers, all three of them sporting afros. David, meanwhile, seeks acceptance from friends and family by wearing blue contact lenses and shaving a part into his hair. When a bigoted schoolmate calls him a monkey, he does a monkey act to make the other children laugh. The dual tracks of Scheeres’ and David’s confusion and need for acceptance simultaneously divide and unite them. “After mother punished him,” she writes, “he’d stick his fingers in his mouth to stifle the sobs and gaze at me with those soulful brown eyes. At me, his twin sister. Wanting an explanation for life’s cruel vagaries.”

With Jerome, the delicate balance of this unbalanced family gets thrown even more horribly out of whack. Scheeres describes the painful shifting of alliances after her father has beaten her brothers: “When their wounds are fresh, their allegiances change, and it’s no longer children against parents. It’s blacks against whites, and I’m one of the enemy.” Compounding the pain and loneliness is the teenage Scheeres’ secret that Jerome is raping her while the family sleeps. The abuse deepens not just her misery but her confusion and helps set her up for a promiscuous, love/hate relationship with the boy next door.

Halfway through “Jesus Land,” Scheeres’ parents give up on her and David altogether and ship them off to Escuela Caribe, a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. There they are left in the hands of sadistic “teachers,” who through degradation and isolation brainwash their teen charges into humility and servitude. “[D]on’t trust anyone down here,” advises David, who has been at the school a few weeks longer than his sister. It proves to be good advice, though it’s a lesson Scheeres has already learned at home. Not allowed to talk to each other, the siblings communicate soundlessly through a code of looks and gestures, letting each other know that they’re OK.

The facts of Scheeres’ story are horrific and heartbreaking, but what makes “Jesus Land” remarkable is her plain, straightforward, unsentimental point of view. She never wallows in self-pity; rather, she lets the facts stand on their own. Her self-portrait here is nuanced and complex, leaving out no ugly detail of her failings or the bitter revenge she sometimes tries to exact on those around her. The result is a teenager we can relate to -- zits, fears, crankiness, rebellion, longing and all. (If the memoir has a failing, it is the author’s inconsistent use of italics, which generally signal memories from early childhood. This, however, is a minor issue and only slightly interrupts the story’s flow.)

Though other books about abused children, such as Dorothy Allison’s brilliant and scalding “Bastard Out of Carolina,” have covered similar territory, what makes “Jesus Land” unique and easy to relate to is its unadorned, dark humor. At the end of the book, Thanksgiving is celebrated at Escuela, everyone is dressed up and a live turkey is brought in for slaughtering. David is handed a machete and what ensues is both as brutal and hilarious as a “Three Stooges” bit. “By the time the Annual Escuela Caribe Thanksgiving Holiday and Worship Celebration has ended,” Scheeres reports, “the other girls are clutched into a bawling knot and a boy is horking into the dirt. Yep, best darn fun ever.” Many of us could have had the misfortune of stumbling into “Jesus Land,” but few would have the spirit to survive. *