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
