If my dead grampa Jackie had just held on a few more months all those years ago, he too could have found Vern. He could have stood in the middle of his fields, mouth opened to the falling water, and been converted. I didn’t like to think of Grampa Jackie in hell, so I tried not to. I tried to work out a way perhaps he had slipped into heaven instead, but it was true he had a filthy mouth and a hankering for single malt, and Grandma Cherry said sometimes he’d pretend she was a ghost and withhold words and love from her for weeks on end until she started to wonder if she had really died and truly was a ghost. But still he had the best eyebrows, a severe arch to them that made him seem playful, and he treated me the same as my boy cousin Lyle and let me get my hands dirty. Grampa Jackie made it so I understood the love of the land, the love of grapes lying perfect on trays plumping in the Godkissed sun.
This, he would say, looking out over his vineyard. Press my hand to soil. This is the perfect climate for raisins.
SO EVEN NOW, drought upon us again like disease, I believed Peaches was the most blessed town there ever was, capable of providing the world’s food, Godkissed and set apart. Everyone I passed, nearly everyone I knew, was sovereign to Vern and if they weren’t they could be spotted with ease, trudging through town, heads dipped lower than a snake’s belly in a wagon rut. Like Quince at the Pac N’ Save, who never came to church on Sundays and we all tried to save her but she stuck her middle finger in our faces. She had taken to wearing a pentagram necklace and black lipstick for theatrics but I didn’t sense any true evil coming from her, just stupidity, which could be worked with. A few teachers at the junior high and high schools who drove in from Fresno would not disclose their religious whereabouts to us no matter how we pressed, which is of course how we knew they were bound for damnation. We left small Bibles on their desks and never followed prompts, but wrote papers about God and created collages of the Second Coming when Vern would meld with God’s golden beam. We painted beautiful portrayals of our pastor kneeling in rain-drenched vineyards that only a heartless person could look away from without provocation. We would get to them eventually and when we did they would shriek with gratitude.
But the most unholy sin of sins in Peaches was the Diviners: A Lady on the Line. It was a phone sex business housed in a leaning red Victorian mansion filled with pale witches no one ever saw come or go. They were the unreachables, rumored to have snakes for hair, eyes of fire, and poisoned nethers that could strike a fool man dead. Most days I forgot about them. Nothing in my mind could compute how someone could have sex over the phone, practically speaking, and I held my breath if I ever passed near the house, which wasn’t often, because it stood exactly on the opposite end of town as the church, where the canal went on and became Fresno, another county entirely.
BY THE TIME I arrived at Gifts of the Spirit, my mother’s dress was wet against my back. The pad in my briefs felt heavy and I wanted it off. A thicker heat swept over me. There had never been air-conditioning, never even a swamp cooler. If God brought the heat we were meant to be hot.
In the emptiness, the space seemed smaller. By some impossible magic the whole Body fit here every Sunday. In the center of the groaning floor the tired wood drooped and made the church a shallow bowl. There was a fine layer of God glitter permanently on it like a varnish for there was no need to sweep away a physical wonder of the spirit. The pews were built by the hands of men when Vern’s father was a young pastor. The ceiling was high with rafters surrounding it, and a single stained-glass window loomed behind the pulpit, featuring a pack of fearful flying cherubs. The light filtered orange through the stained glass and below it, on the wall, hung a portrait of Jesus with a bloody and beaten face, a reminder of the horrors He’d gone through. Next to it was a portrait of Vern in imitation of Jesus, his own face woeful, smeared with what I assumed was fake blood and makeup, but it looked so real I didn’t know for sure. Vern wanted us to be reminded that our sin hurt our pastor in the same way it had hurt Jesus and God—likely more.
Vern was always here throughout the week, preparing sermons in his small office in the loft like a full-time job, sometimes rehearsing them on the stage, I’d been told, but had never seen myself. We weren’t to disrupt him unless it was an emergency, and now here, the confidence I had felt on my walk over faltered. I could still leave, I considered. I could go back home, maybe talk it over with my mother again when she returned from her assignment, when she would be a little tired, heat-beaten to a sweetness and willing to agree to anything to stop my badgering. I stepped back toward the doorway.
But then a voice from above. “You have something for me,” Vern said from the top of the stairwell, a blue shiny cape fastened around his neck. His hair shone and his cheeks were covered in gold sparkling God glitter. It was a sign he had been with the Father transcribing a message. I’d interrupted.
He held his arms out and his face broke into a smile. I felt myself exhale. I ran up the narrow stairs and he folded me into a hug. I thought for the slightest moment I smelled cigarette smoke on his cape, but he would never smoke. He was above humanly desires, he told us, and smoking was just a way to fill a God-sized hole. “I knew I’d have a visitor today,” he said, ushering me into the small office. My worry fell away then. Nothing was better than aligning with one of Vern’s messages from God.
The wall behind his wooden desk was covered in crosses but no crucifix. Christ didn’t stay on the cross, he always told us, just as Vern himself also would not have tolerated hanging there, bleeding out. Vern likened himself to Jesus often, saw himself as an equal or even a superior to Him, so we didn’t really worship Jesus because Vern was also God’s chosen son, just in current times. Every so often when the need was great, God would decide on a son, and Vern was it now, and Jesus was like Vern’s retired spirit brother, and was mostly left out of things. “Let Him rest,” Vern had told us from the first sermon I had ever heard him preach. “He is tired, but I am powerful.”
We sat across from each other and he looked at his hands, eyes closed. I could see the shaved Spirit Hole on top of his head, the little spiky regrowth. I closed my eyes, too, and imagined my assignment. I secretly hoped it would be something people could see me doing. I wanted to be stationed somewhere, in the Pac N’ Save maybe, bringing people to faith in the soap aisle. I would summon the God glitter and even Quince would not be able to resist my good news.
I looked up and Vern was staring at me, face a calm pool. I realized I mostly saw him in motion, whirring across the stage of the church. But here, in the silence, so up close to him, he could have passed for one of my mother’s men, sort of ruddy-faced, a bit dark under the eyes. He had blackheads on his nose and I felt my breath catch a little. I wondered why he didn’t get rid of them, or ask God to. Then I felt ridiculous for my vain fixations. Vern was dealing with more important things than blackheads. “What brings you?” he said.
I had wanted him to pull the truth from me on his own so I could remain innocent—not having betrayed my mother, and not having betrayed him. But I knew in a true faith there was no such thing as both, so I chose.
I pulled out a piece of bloodied toilet paper I’d carried with me in my purse. I set it on the desk between us. Here was the proof, and it would talk for me. I could even get creative and tell my mother that Vern saw me walking through town, blood on the back of her white dress.