After the baptisms, he lined us up. He paced like a mad daddy. The valley floor had sunk thirteen inches over the last year alone, and where, Pastor Vern asked, did we think we were going?
Of course we already knew. Hell was always waiting.
He said in order to save the land we so loved we would need to step over the lines of our comfort. To open our arms, span them wide, and risk being shot down by God. He fell straight as a post onto his back to demonstrate. I spread my arms, my mother next to me, other mothers beyond her and their girls. The boys and the men were there too but it’s the girls I noticed most, girls like me, ready. I thought we looked tough lined up like that, like soldiers, the hay-dead field our battleground, that vast open plain of beige nothingness surrounding. I remembered what had once been here, a land so fertile you could throw the pit of a peach after eating the sweet flesh from it and underfoot would sprout up an orchard, how we had walked lightly over the dirt, electric with the possibility of small seeds creating bounty, lettuces and kales shimmering opulent, where before there had been only earth.
But now all was dry, and the steady stream of infidels we might recruit was dwindling. No one wanted to have the rodeo here anymore. No one wanted to hold an agriculture convention where there was no agriculture. And without new believers how would we ever offer Pastor Vern’s message to the world? How could anyone trust the faith of God’s own chosen people if they could not restore their land?
Pastor Vern stood up and looked straight at me. There might have been crows in the sky circling. There might have been a child’s cough or an old man’s sniffle or sneeze from all that dust, or the scraping shift of bare feet in the hot dirt. I thought maybe Vern would look at everyone this way, and maybe he did but I couldn’t see anything beyond the way he was looking at me, like he knew me through and through, eyes saddened by my natural-born sin yet still hopeful. There was no sound but for my own blood rushing in my ears. I felt a wave of desire rise up in me—I could have jumped into his arms. He looked looked looked and finally he made a gun of his hand and pointed it at my face. Pulled the trigger.
REBAPTIZED OR NOT, the next day brown water still ran from our taps, but praise, it turned clear by the time we counted to ten. It was dawn and I perched on the bathroom counter in one of my mother’s camisoles, a silky black thing that felt glamorous but she liked to remind me it was one hundred percent polyester, not silk. I wore too-small underwear she picked up from Goodwill that were clearly meant for a little boy, a penis hole and yellow tractors. I didn’t complain. She wore nothing, mowed over by the heat, and leaned toward the mirror, smoothed cream foundation over her sweaty skin even though it would slide off before she walked out the door.
“Holy holy, praise almighty,” she sang. “Our King is here, He is here. Hell is hot. Don’t drink the water. Stand and feel the fear.”
I was past the point of desiring sleep at this hour. What I desired most was time with her. I handed her the mascara and she craned her head back and opened her mouth as she raked black ink through her lashes, smudged raspberry glow into the hollows of her cheeks. I eyed her body, the thicket of light brown hair between her legs. She told me she never nursed me a day in her life and that’s why her breasts were still buoyed up on their own instead of sinking down in flaps of sadness. She was very concerned that one day they would give up so she gave them little pep talks—come on, girls, don’t fail me now. Ready steady.
I loved watching her. My mother was the sun in a dark room.
“Can I try?” I asked, hungry to look like her, to do my makeup like her, or better yet, to have her lean close and do it for me.
But her eyes settled on my crotch.
“Lacey May,” she whispered.
She swiped a finger across my thigh and then held it to the light. We both saw it—the red smear.
I looked down at myself. It was as if something deep inside me had cracked open and now wanted out. I jumped off the counter and pulled her to me, but her arms stayed by her sides.
“Looks like you’re ready for a real spiritual assignment now,” she said into my hair.
“Like yours?” I asked.
She pulled away sharply, but then softened. “He’ll have something special just for you.”
I felt a surge of new self tingle within me. I didn’t like the way my mother’s face flickered when she saw my first blood, I could read her so well, I could tell something troubled her, but it seemed selfish of her when now I was finally a woman. Surely the rebaptism had sparked this flow, and I smiled with that warm believer’s glow of confidence that came from answered prayers. I primed my eyes toward destiny. I would have an assignment and Pastor Vern would bring the rain at the right time and the town trusted him and loved him and all God’s people would be tended and the crops would persevere, amen.
I pulled the camisole over my head, kicked off the bloody boy unders, and stepped into the shower. “Can I?” I asked her, hand hovering over the faucet.
She shrugged in a way I knew to mean yes.
The water rained brown on my skin, almost like blood, I thought, as it streamed down my thighs, wasted its way down the drain. Then clear and clean, the smell of metal. Hard water, everyone called it. My mother liked to complain it made our hair dull but what could dull me now? I was electric. I was thinking in glitter and gold. Thinking, with my hands raised in praise right there in the shower, of Vern’s original miracle, the way he’d cured the town of drought years before when I was just seven years old. His dying daddy had ushered him in as a replacement, the new pastor of Gifts of the Spirit church. Vern had confused everyone at first with his proclamations of the supernatural and foresight, his golden robes and long blond hair curled in ringlets, sprayed to a starch. No one in town had seen him in over ten years—he’d been on mission trips around the world, it was said, casting God into the hearts of infidels. The top of his head was shaved clean in what he called a Spirit Hole, so that God could reach him without hair in the way.
“I’ll bring the rain,” he’d told everyone on his first day. And even though Peaches was in desperation times—several farmers, including my own grampa Jackie, had killed themselves over the shame of their barren crops, drank bottles of pesticide and lay down for the long sleep—and even though there were threats to turn off the water for good and condemn the whole place to death, the doubters in the congregation had gawked at Vern with little faith. For they did not yet know the most important thing about working the land, and that was that the land was not theirs to work, but God’s.
Of the Herd women, only my grandma Cherry attended church at that time, grasping at faith after the death of Grampa Jackie. She had stood in the fields to see Vern command God’s attention. He had knelt in the dry burrs and thrown up his hands. Cherry had seen the clean sky turn back like a page, gray eating blue, rolling into a great thunderclap. She felt the first drops on her hot skin, and then it was crashing rain for days. When it flooded the streets, when the old Peaches canal overflowed, when the news reported the rain had only fallen in the bounds of our little county—population 1,008, barely 3.2 square miles in size—there was no avoiding the truth. Vern had shown our town what God could do. He’d summoned something from nothing and no one was the same after that.
The next Sunday, rain still falling, my mother and I had lined up with everyone else to touch the new pastor’s robes. To listen to that magical voice that had brought the rains. And who was my mother then?
She was a day late and a dollar short, a water bottle of gin in her purse, in the glove box, a waitressing job at the Grape Tray, and one lousy boyfriend after another who sat
