cigarettes into empty chili cans.
And me?
I was only her bastard daughter, unsaved and seven years old, daddyless and dirt-kneed, whole mind a sin plain, my fingers pocketing gumdrops from the candy store, eyes watching cartoons of coyotes dropping anvils on heads. Someone I can hardly remember. But thank the good God, I learned that day, the past was of no matter. The rain soaked my sundress and Vern blessed us out of that life and into another.
I STEPPED OUT of the shower and let the heat of the apartment dry me. My mother was still at the bathroom mirror, head flipped upside down, filling the bathroom with hair spray. Some might think a good religious woman must be plain and clean-faced, but at Gifts of the Spirit it was fine for a woman to prepare her body and adorn herself in God’s light. The brighter the shine, the easier His angels could spot us. Vern wanted the women pretty because everything Godsaved was beautiful. He wanted the women pretty maybe, I wondered sometimes but did not say, to attract infidels to the church, to dangle a prize to be awarded on the other side of conversion. Nevertheless, it was something of evil to make a man stumble.
Whenever the sermons turned to the matter of stumbling, I pictured men with black holes for eyes, walking but falling, arms reaching out, hands landing upon women’s bodies unawares. Under a trance they were, and whose fault was it?
Women, God created beauty.
Women, lead men not into temptation.
But what was my mother to do with her beauty? She couldn’t pray it away. It came up from inside her. It was not just the arrangement of eyes and nose and mouth. It was something unnameable that could not be achieved with makeup or manipulation of hairstyle. She had a gap between her front teeth that she considered an imperfection, but it was what threw her beauty over the edge. It was what drove her men crazy. I knew Vern was captivated by the way she looked, considered it to be God’s gift. I had to agree. It was a gift. I imagined no one had what she had for miles and miles, though we hadn’t left Peaches since becoming saved, so there was no way of making sure.
Under my towel I reached between my legs and pressed a finger just inside. I wondered where the blood was coming from exactly. I wanted my mother to sense my question and tell me all I would need to know, really fawn over me. But she handed me a pad wrapped in thin pink plastic, no ceremony at all. “Maybe keep this between us for a little while.”
A chill came over me in the still heat of the bathroom, and though I’d never come down with a prophecy before, the prickle that spread from the top of my head to my fingertips felt close to a kind of warning.
“But Mom.”
“Just wait until the next one. It’s not that long to wait.”
I brushed past her and into our bedroom. I left the door open so I could see her finish getting ready. What was it I loved about watching her so? It wasn’t as if I saw myself in her, some future promise. Though I had her honeyed hair down my back, her freckles and water-blue eyes, I carried the blunt nose and jutting chin of my father, a truck driver out of Needles, my mother had told me, someone who left before I could remember, she liked to say.
I knew it wasn’t true. I had memories like floaters in an eye, there one moment, gone the next: his arms throwing my mother’s thin body into a deep dumpster one day, and plates crashing against walls overhead on others. His boots as he kicked her. The sound of a person spitting on another person is a particular shame.
She never mentioned any of that but was quick to recall his one short leg, the way he had mixed up letters when he tried to read and how he took one look at me and said I wasn’t his.
I put the pad into my underwear and angels did not sing. Out the window all was the same, dead grass and paint-peeling apartments. I got back into our bed, the double we’d shared since we were saved and no men came for visits anymore. It was a bent metal frame propping up a mattress that sagged in the middle, a feature I loved because it caused my mother and me to roll into each other in the night, waking each morning with our backs warmed and stuck together. I tried to pray but nothing came. I didn’t want to disobey my mother but I sensed that obeying her by not telling Pastor Vern about the blood might mean something much worse.
She stood in the doorway now. “I am your mother,” she said. A reminder not to me, but to herself.
I waited for the click of the door, the jangle of keys, the sound of our broke-down Rabbit sputtering and fading down the road. I put on one of my mother’s dresses, floaty and white, one that made her look like a dream of man. Cocked a sun hat low on my brow.
Gifts of the Spirit church was a one-mile walk from our apartment complex. The Lakes, it was called, though there was not a single lake around, or any body of water for that matter. After Vern’s first miracle things were better for a time. The rain returned and the winters cooled and deepened and fog settled over us when it was supposed to and the grasses shone each morning with dew. The spring skies released heavy downpours and it seemed each time we got itchy again, worried again, just a little prayer could shift the clouds, Vern’s goodness enough to earn the land’s potential. But slowly as the years passed, Peaches crept back to the dry. Vern couldn’t do it alone forever. He was only one man atoning for all our sin, he said. He needed our sacrifice now.
For now the reservoirs and canals were empty basins, home to deflated soccer balls and broken glass bottles and the skeletons of birds that I imagined had died in flight, too hot and thirsty to go on. I passed where the row crops and orchards used to be, now a flat brown stretch, vegetation nowhere. Then came Old Canal Road, our main street, where every year there was a raisin parade to celebrate our bounty. Men in huge raisin costumes pumped their white-gloved hands, their chunky gold cross necklaces moving in the sun as they danced to praise pop, gleefully handing out foil-wrapped tri-tip sandwiches on seeded buns from Mike’s Meat Market. I had heard talk that this year there wouldn’t be a parade because who wanted to rejoice over a failed harvest? But we of Gifts knew better. As long as Vern was around there was always something to celebrate. Always reason to hold out. Don’t quit before the miracle, we liked to say to one another, easy as a greeting.
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
