Читать книгу Godshot - Chelsea Bieker - Страница 11

Chapter 3

The next Sunday my mother was drunksick. She lay in bed and writhed around like the possessed. I pressed a cross to her forehead for healing. I said, God, please God.

She swatted the cross away. “That doesn’t work.”

I pulled back, stunned, for we’d seen it work countless times. Seen Vern pull sickness from the mouths of children, seen old Wendall Meeker, a Vietnam vet with no cartilage in his knee and a bad heart, hobble in and lie before Vern, and Vern had restored the knee, and Wendall walked out of there with the strength of a boy, his memory wiped clean of the war that ailed him each night like the cruelest hammering. His sure steps were proof alone to me, but my mother acted like she’d never seen such enchantment.

I guided her to the bathtub where she vomited yellow into the water. I took a cup and poured some of the filth over her head. “Be baptized!” My voice echoed in the tiny room. She covered her ears. I pulled her up by the underarms and I dried her and dressed her. “We never miss church,” I said.

“I made you into a fool,” she slurred.

I grabbed the keys and guided her out the door.

She vomited into a dead stick bush outside that used to bloom poisonous white flowers in the spring and each spring my mother would tell me as if for the first time of the boy who cooked a hot dog on a branch from a plant just like that one and how he had dropped dead after eating it.

In the parking lot, she considered the Rabbit, her body tilting to find balance. Finally she walked around to the passenger side and got in. “You drive,” she said, challenging me, thinking probably that I’d back down.

But no. In the name of Vern I jerked us down Old Canal Road, braking and jolting, my mother giggling, sunglasses over her makeupless eyes, unknown bruises up her bare legs, offering me no direction on how to operate a vehicle. Part of me wanted to laugh, too, just pull over and die of laughter, let this whole sadness kill me.

I led her into the pew and we sat next to Grandma Cherry. She looked at my mother and then at me and shook her head.

“Summer flu?” she asked. She poked my mother’s leg. “Smells like a tavern after a fight.”

My heart pounded. I knew in this moment that it was a mistake to have come at all, but if we didn’t show up Vern or an elder would surely have come looking. I had imagined them finding her sick in bed, casing our apartment, deciding we were unfit believers. They might throw us out of the church and then what would be the point of living at all?

The Body pressed into pews, avoiding the nails that poked up from the old wooden seats. I looked at the pulpit and hoped my cousin Lyle, two years my senior and recently well blessed with spirit speak, would come in soon to distract Cherry from my mother, who was sinking down in her seat, spineless, head to one side.

I was never to have ill feelings toward the church and I never had. But a small voice within me kept nudging. My mother had only begun this downhill slide since she’d taken her assignment. I had almost thought to follow her some days to see what she was doing, but the Rabbit seemed to speed away from me so fast. I didn’t want to imagine her assignment was somehow pulling her away from the church, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Vern had given her something she clearly couldn’t handle.

“Happy Easter, ladies,” an older man named Gentry Roo said as he found his seat.

Happy Easter. I looked around and realized every girl except me wore white frills and that every woman except my mother wore a white floor-length canvas dress, and the men wore their sequined capes of many colors. Vern had said the capes were delivered by angels, so everyone who laid eyes upon the men of the church would be pulled into belief, the capes so hypnotic. Like many traditions of the church, I couldn’t remember when exactly the capes arrived for the men, only that they did. Cherry wore black for she was widowed, and my mother and I were in jean dresses smudged with dirt. On my mother’s feet was an unmatched pair of flip-flops.

Lyle walked in and came straight for Cherry and kissed her on the cheek, but his eyes were on my mother and me. I tried to nudge her so she’d sit up, look alive, but her legs splayed apart instead. He sat between Aunt Pearl, my mother’s older sister, and Uncle Perd, her husband. Pearl shook her head at my mother and faced forward. “Lordy be,” she said.

Vern stood at the front wearing a special gold robe of sequins over loose-slung jean overalls with holes worn in the knees from frequent prayer. He raised his arms, his curls gleaming under the new bright spotlight they’d just installed. His feet were bare, the tops of them sun-browned. I knew if I were to kneel and kiss them I would see he had penned a little black cross on each toenail. Music filtered in from the line of ten stereos all set to play the same CD at the same time, a ghostly refrain of screaming bagpipes.

“He is Risen,” Vern said now, jumping a little bit off the ground. The Body bellowed back, “He is Risen indeed!”

I hoisted my mother up for the singing but she shook me off and leaned against the back of the pew in front of her, her butt on full display to the Stam family, who sat behind us. Wiley, the father, stared openly, his tongue hanging out like a dog’s in the desert, while his wife shoved the hymnal before him. Their daughter, Sharon, was my age, a fellow Bible study girl, and she looked at my mother side-eyed and amused. She had never expressly seemed to want to be my friend—her eyes struck me as judgmental and joking, the way whenever I said anything, Bible verse or prayer request, she sort of covered her mouth in a private laugh, but what she was laughing at exactly, I never knew. Her pig-faced brother, Laramie, stood still, mouth unmoving, his fat fists clenched at all times ready for a fight. I met Sharon’s eyes and she crossed them and her mother nudged her. I was so embarrassed by my mother I could have happily never looked at her again.

At the center of the stage, Vern knelt on one knee and held up a hand to catch the spirit. “Yes!” he shouted. “I’ve heard what’s been said about Peaches. Oh, I’ve heard. That Peaches’s soil is no good. That Peaches might as well be shut down, but I’ll tell you, this is not God’s plan. God will restore Peaches’s soil and Peaches’s sky. He will bring the bounty up from the ground, He will bring forth water from thin air. This is the holiest uprising that Peaches . . .” He paused, his face screwed up, reeling in the message. “No. That the world will ever know!”

My mother and Cherry liked to say Vern could have been a televangelist star with his bravado, the way he could really make you feel something when nothing else was happening to make you feel that thing. That was spirituality, my mother explained once when I asked her why sometimes I wanted to cry just because Vern was, even if I hadn’t been paying that much attention to what he was saying. Why when the Body stood up and swayed in song, did my body do the same almost on its own? These were the mysteries of faith. And one of the tenets of faith was accepting that mystery, living in it day after day, and liking it.

I loved when Vern spoke his goodness like he did now, but I was distracted by my mother, who was drawing lazy pictures of the moon cycle on the back of her hand with a silver pen she’d taken to keeping in her pocket. She had been on about the moon lately, about planets in retrograde and our sign compatibility. It seemed like a new religion to her. Two Aries in one house, she’d said to me the week before, holding her hand to her heart like she was delivering some real bad news. War of fires.

I glanced at Lyle. If I was jealous of my mother’s assignment, however wary I might have been, I was doubly jealous of Lyle’s. He was Vern’s newest favorite, staying late after sermons, walking and nodding behind him up the stairs to Vern’s tiny office, so smugly a part of the boy’s club, so secretive and full of giftings.

I reached over Pearl’s lap and poked Lyle. I hissed, “Vern gave me an assignment.”

He shushed me. “The dead Jesus is about to come on out of the cave tomb.”

Lyle was right, Vern was gearing up toward telling the most exciting part, when Jesus ascended into a white cloud and the apostles stared on in utter reverence.

The Body began to mutter, prayers laced in the tongues of the gifted. Most in the church were gifted in the way of spirit speak, and though she was silent that day, usually my mother’s tongues were like a high and soft whisper, while Cherry’s were raspier and hurried, a mean staccato. I bowed my head and waited to be overtaken with a language beyond my understanding. I hummed aloud with my eyes open and nothing came. I wanted it to be over, for the time to come when someone would take the stage and read the Bible aloud while Vern rested, curled up to the side of the pulpit on what I knew to be a sleeping pad for a large dog, but in this church it was his spiritual resting dock.

The prayers died down and I opened my Bible and waited for the reading, for Vern’s final blessing, for the praise pop to come on the boom boxes so he could run up and down the aisles, cape trailing him, high-fiving us all with firm, almost painful slaps. But then came the voice of a man with a slow drawl I didn’t recognize.

“Where’s she?” the voice said. “Where’s my beauty queen?” The church snapped silent and craned necks to see who would interrupt the commencement of Vern’s sermon.

“Louise, you here?” the man shouted. My mother’s name. I looked at her but she had folded in half, her head between her knees. “Oh God,” she groaned.

For a moment in my fearful heart I wondered if this was my father back for us at last. I stretched to see him again but the man’s turquoise cowboy hat shaded him, made him faceless, and he wore a dark suede button-up shirt tucked into white flared dungarees. I thought of the man on the motorcycle, was this him? But it wasn’t. This man before me appeared almost unhuman somehow, his limbs too long and bending strangely like they’d been loosely screwed onto his broad body by someone with all thumbs.

Vern didn’t flinch. He swept back to where the man stood and asked if he’d like to be baptized.

The Turquoise Cowboy stepped within spitting range of our pastor. “Here I am a nice man, an entrepreneur to be sure, and my Lou says, I can’t love you in real life, honey, until my pastor approves.”

“If you’re here to be saved,” Vern said flatly, “we don’t have water in our tub, but God knows our intention.”

The Turquoise Cowboy cocked his head to one side. “What are you, jealous or something?” he said, and took a lazy, openhanded swing at Vern’s face that sent him flat on his back. The Body rushed to our good pastor, helping him back to his feet. My mother bolted up and ran toward the men. Stopped before them, frozen. I knew she didn’t know what to do.

The Turquoise Cowboy kept his thumbs hitched in his belt loops and a collection of long rabbit teeth emerged from behind his lips. He was happy to see my mother like a man viewing his prize sow before slaughter.

She looked from him to Vern. She seemed to have sobered quite a bit and now was plain scared. She could see the storm she’d brought on, the familiar calamity from the beforelife, when my mother said all number of things to men and meant or remembered only half of them.

“Baby,” the Turquoise Cowboy said. “I’m here to make you a star.”

Everyone looked around at one another, at Vern. Some whispered. A woman behind me said, “Well, some folks just out looking for the devil.”

Vern smoothed his curls. He walked my mother by the arm to the front stage. My mind raced to configure how my mother had even come in contact with the Turquoise Cowboy at all. He certainly wasn’t of Peaches.

“You know that man?” Cherry hissed into my ear.

It occurred to me then that over the past few months I had done something very bad. I had looked away from all my mother had been showing me when I’d needed to look.

The men of the Body assembled around the cowboy like a mob. Vern gripped the back of my mother’s neck and raised his hand to heaven. He was inviting the Father down and a puff of gold God glitter drifted from above and settled on our sweatslick skin.

“Church,” Vern said. “It seems that one of our own has strayed.”

My mother looked at her feet. I thought rapid silent prayers, a series of helps.

“First she tried to keep her own daughter’s first blood from me, holding up our plan for rain,” he said. “Now this, coming to church mowed down by the devil’s elixir, a man of sin clamoring behind.”

“I’ve only been doing my assignment duty,” my mother started. “Employed by the Diviners: A Lady on the Line.”

The Body gasped. My praying mind stopped dead. This was much worse than I could have imagined. I thought of that leaning red house, the force field of evil surrounding it. And my mother had actually gone in. This fact struck me down, how I’d slept next to her in the same bed and never once imagined that’s where she’d spent her day. But it all made sense. Those sinful women must have cast something wrong deep inside her, led her away from God and back to the drink, to this cowboy. Fury burned in me toward women I’d never met in my life.

“I spoke sensual wordings, but my heart was with our Papa God,” my mother said. “I was bringing men to holiness one phone call at a time and bearing witness to the working ladies.” She looked at the cowboy, her eyes open and watery, like he could be of some help.

“I should have known you were never really purified enough to stand against evil without becoming it,” Vern said.

“Whore!” screamed Shirl, an old woman who often rolled around in the front, honking and croaking in her spirit speak during worship. She spat into the aisle.

“I did everything you asked,” my mother said to Vern. She squared to him and I saw another sort of communication occur, something wrapped and hidden from the rest of us, the end of it just beginning to unfurl.

Vern smiled. “But you didn’t,” he said.

It seemed my mother had something else to say but it was stuck inside her. Vern led her off the stage but she turned, shook him off. “Wait,” she said. Her eyes locked with mine. “Try to understand. I was testifying. I let God lead me to the right scripture. They trusted me and told me their sorrows. It soothed them. I’ve converted at least nine souls, most of them local infidels. You may not want me in this church no more, but I’m not bad. I tried, and on the way I fell in love.”

Vern was stung and it was a spectacle to see him this way, thrown off, befuddled by anyone, least of all a woman. “Love,” he repeated, the word gagging him.

My mother pulled her arm from his grasp. “Lacey,” she said. “Ask Lacey. She’ll tell you I’ve been sober. I haven’t touched a drop since conversion. Tell them, my girl.” Her eyes begged.

I didn’t understand how it had come down to this. What could my voice matter in her sea of obvious transgression? Anyone in a five-foot radius could smell the booze on her breath. If I lied now I could be banished too. If I lied now I might not be useful anymore. That thought was terrifying to me then.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Lacey,” Vern said. “Tell your church family just how your mother has sinned.”

“Let’s go,” my mother said to me. “Let’s get out of here. Come on. This is over. This is all over.”

I stepped toward her but then my body stopped. I saw a flash of what I knew our life would be. I saw the Turquoise Cowboy just like all the others. I saw her skinny body passed out at odd angles across the bed, the shrunken world of her hangovers that could last all day when nothing else could go on around her, each sound too assaulting, even my quiet voice too mean. The way she would refuse me simple things, drives to school, bread from the store, until I was red-eyed from staying up all night either wondering where she was or wishing she would leave again. The frightful way she would look at me like she was reaching out from a black hole, trying to drag me down into it. Nothing was over. It was only just beginning.

“She’s been drinking,” I said.

“Well,” Vern said, turning to my mother. “Your drinking alone is grounds for banishment, not to mention the love you’re in.”

A small sob escaped from my mouth. “Wait,” I said. But it was too late.

The Body became a flurry of movement. The men screamed for exorcism, arms to the sky. Someone grabbed me and held me up over his head, repeating that he was saving the daughter, and the women formed a circle around Cherry, sputtered in their protective ways. I saw only a glimmer of my mother’s long hair before she disappeared through the side door without me. I looked for the Turquoise Cowboy but he was gone, too. I primed my heart to my mother and sent her messages: I’m coming. I’m sorry. What a big misunderstanding, I thought. That’s all it was. A misunderstanding.