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.