Godshot Read online

  “I ought to take you straight to Vern and have him give you a nice long kiss and taste all that sinner’s wine,” I said.

  She turned and looked me up and down.

  “How you gonna shut me up?”

  She tugged at the hem of my mother’s sundress. “I can see your holy grail right through this fabric. Guess you wouldn’t mind some new clothes,” she said, steering the car toward the Dolly Do clothing boutique. It was situated in the one strip of shops in Peaches, between the Peaches and Cream Malt Shop and the Ag One.

  Inside, old Ms. Crenshaw sat like a bony hawk at the counter patting cold cream into her cheeks with her eyes closed. “Sinner’s delight,” she cawed. She peered over the counter. “Here for some self-respect?” She clicked her tongue at Pearl. “The things girls wear today. Just like they don’t care about the fine bodies God done give ’em. Like they want every man to turn into a dog and start sniffin’ up their cooters. In my day we wore gingham up to our eyelids and the boys wished they could have a look.” She pecked her face in closer to me. “But they couldn’t. And that’s why they wanted to marry us.”

  I looked around at the broad-shouldered clothing. My mother never shopped here. She called it the Sad Lady store. I put on a beaded necklace and a pair of sunglasses and looked in the mirror. Behind me Pearl held up a rail-stripe coverall, large and straight in its dimensions with buttons from the crotch up to its collared neck. It looked like a jail suit. “This is perfect for every day and’ll keep you of singular mind.”

  “Keep the wrong boys away,” Ms. Crenshaw said, nodding.

  “Tell me,” I said to Ms. Crenshaw, holding the suit up against my form. “Why you never married if you wore so much gingham?”

  Ms. Crenshaw pursed her lips. “Some’s called into singleness. Your mama was clearly meant to be one of them, but I guess she couldn’t hold down such a commitment.”

  I gripped the rail-stripe canvas. I decided I would cut the sleeves off and the legs off and tie a jump rope around the middle like a sunsuit. “I love this,” I said to Pearl. “I want it.”

  “That was fast,” Pearl said. “Your mother would have taken hours and tried everything on before deciding. She would have twirled around the store waiting for compliments. Maybe there is some hope in you.”

  “My mother,” I said, looking at Ms. Crenshaw, “wouldn’t have touched this place with a ten-foot pole.”

  I imagined turning and telling them both what Lyle had done. But I stopped. I wouldn’t be a fool. To tell them about Lyle would only be telling them about myself.

  VERN LIVED WITH his wife, Derndra, and their daughter, Trinity Prism, in a white stone house on the edge of church property. On each stone of the house was a Bible verse written in thin-point marker giving the effect of marbled stone from far away. They were not home as far as I could tell; no activity outside in the dead field surrounding the house, no rustle of a window curtain. But their car was in the driveway, a tan sedan stamped with personalized bumper stickers: Remember who brought the rains and If you were on trial for following Vern, would there be enough evidence to convict you? The hood was covered in silver glitter with a black cross painted on it, flashy.

  Trinity Prism and Derndra could rarely be seen about town, the two of them claiming allergies to the sun. If they came out you could find them with white parasols spinning over their shoulders, covered in floor-length dresses, tattered and thin like they’d been cut angrily from sheets. Their eyes seemed to have a pinkish hue to them, hay fever perhaps, and once my mother had commented that they reminded her of twitching white rabbits. You don’t ever want to be compared to a rabbit, trust me.

  Trinity Prism didn’t speak to the Body much, but moved in a whispering orbit around her mother, and they both wore pinched faces like someone was slapping them but they had decided to endure it. Trinity was not one of the Bible study girls. Instead she was set apart as what Vern called his angel helper, a role that would live and die with her alone. It seemed to me the pastor’s daughter should be involved in all number of church activities, but it wasn’t so.

  I knocked on the door but nothing. I edged around to the backyard and unhooked the side gate. Nothing there either but then my eyes adjusted. What I saw, I didn’t know. My eye had forgotten how to take in a verdant green, the healthy leaf of a plant thriving under morning sun. But before me stood a lush vine in the middle of an otherwise barren backyard, clearly alive, and on it, heaving pale green muscats. I was panting, I realized, looking at them. The perfection of their roundness. How they might feel in my palm, the burst of juice down my chin at first bite. I could pick a bunch and run. I could fill a basket and take them home to Cherry and she might let me off fly duty for at least a week. I remembered Grampa Jackie bent over in his rows, the way he delicately laid the thick bunches on paper trays, like each one was a newborn child. If he could see this now.

  Halfway to the vine I heard the sliding glass door open but I kept my pace.

  “Each day I come out and say a prayer for it,” Vern said, walking toward me. “I ask God to keep it alive and He does.” I knelt at the vine and he stood over me. Being near it was intoxicating. “Now imagine if every believer in Peaches had my level of faith. Imagine how much more green we might see.”

  I felt my hands tremble. The sight of the vine was almost too glorious to bear, it almost looked fake. “I doubted you,” I said.

  The confession poured out, my shame laid bare—shame for feeling afraid of what Lyle and I had done. I’d perverted it, I saw now. Vern, our dear pastor, God’s chosen son and confidant. I wanted to eat of the grapes so badly. I reached out to grab one but he grasped my wrist. Then he softened, knelt next to me. The knees of his white jeans became brown. He reached forward and plucked a grape from its stem and popped it in his mouth. He put one to my lips, and I bit through it with my front teeth, the wetness on my tongue, the long lost dance of fruit sugar.

  “You know, for a time I would see you and your mother together and think how alike you were. But now I see you different. I see you as a woman of your own. A smart woman.”

  “She was smart,” I said.

  “Was she? She didn’t stay obedient. She didn’t stay around here for you. But you know who has? Me. Your church family. We’re here for you.”

  He pulled another grape from a stem and put it in my mouth, held his finger to my bottom lip. “Eat and be well.”

  I closed my eyes. These were nothing like the soggy purple imports that used to litter the Pac N’ Save. This was the taste of life.

  “I’m worried what I’ve done is bad,” I heard myself say.

  He sighed. He put his chin in his hand like a boy waiting for ice cream. I wondered what he was like before God began using him. “It’s hard leading the people, you know,” he said. He looked at me and it seemed he wanted to tell me something then. I leaned closer. His eyes were soft, tired. But then he straightened.

  “Our humanness, our meager shames and fears. They are nothing in the face of His glory.”

  “I miss her so much,” I said. He wiped tears from my cheeks. He pulled me to his chest. I tried to listen for his heart but there was only stillness.

  “You’ve already done the right thing. Keep on now.” He pushed me away from him, gentle but firm, and the kind repose was gone. I saw Derndra’s rabbit face watching from behind the glass door.

  I trembled all the way home. I understood Cherry then, how you could witness a miracle and how it could change the way you saw everything forevermore. Perhaps this was what it would have been like to see those first rains fall over the land, as shocking as that brilliant vine against all the dead. My mind brought me back to the red house every other thought, but I could fight against that. It was just a temptation common as any.

  WHEN I GOT back to Cherry’s, I wanted to tell her of my realization, I wanted to celebrate and dance, the grape juice still on my tongue. But Cherry wasn’t out on the porch looking at her grass. It was Stringy, the lawn painter from Popc
orn, Indiana, sweating on her rocker, a box of stone chinchillas under one arm. “No one answered, so I figured I’d wait,” he said. “See how you liked my little present.” He looked out over the lawn, which was still a neon shout.

  I went inside and brought him out a cup of warm soda. His lopsided smile was simple. There was nothing behind it, I decided.

  “I love it,” I said.

  I could still feel Vern’s finger on my lip, the salt of his skin mixed with the sweet of the grapes, but I liked hearing Stringy talk. On and on he went about nothing, his cares so small. I liked how he looked at me, like I amused him, like he’d never known a girl in all his life.

  “Let me get your number,” he said. “I’ll take you out sometime.”

  I told him I didn’t have a phone but he said that everyone had a phone. I held my hands out, empty. I told him how Cherry didn’t like the house line tied up in case she wanted to play Telephone Testimony, calling up randoms from the phone book and trying to convert them through an even lecture of terror and love. He nodded like he understood and then made a remark about how I wasn’t wearing the bikini today.

  “You’re not in the green elf suit,” I said back. Instead he was freshly shaven, a few spots of dried blood on his cheek where a razor had sheared the heads off pimples. His eyes were wrinkled around the corners, but his body was all boy, skinny in his black T-shirt and black sagged shorts, white socks pulled up midcalf. He didn’t dress like a country boy, like the boys of Peaches with their faded jean cutoffs, soiled white shirts that came from a ten-pack. His shirt said Blink 182 and had a picture of a harshly pretty nurse who I strongly suspected wasn’t really a nurse pulling a blue glove over her tattooed arm. I wondered if this was the type of woman Stringy wanted to be with, someone with angles of makeup drawn on, breasts pushed up until they kissed. I couldn’t help but feel that she had taken whatever sexiness I might have had and canceled it out with her own.

  “You found God?” It came from my mouth like the deepest routine.

  He looked me up and down, side-smiling. “I found you.” Then he told me he’d be back in an hour. I went inside and imagined I’d never see him again, but then after hardly any time at all there he was on the other side of the screen holding up a bright blue bag. “I activated it for you and everything.”

  I pulled out a box and inside was a small silver phone with rubber number buttons and a little square screen. I thought of the sapphire earrings from my mother’s old boyfriend, how after he had pushed the posts through my skin they had rusted and made my swollen ears bleed red and yellow pus. I would take them out at night so he wouldn’t know and I’d put them back in in the morning, eyes watering. How he looked at me and pushed my hair back each time he saw me to make sure I was wearing them. The gift had come with a high price.

  I handed the phone back to Stringy. “It’s too nice.”

  But he set it on the ground before my feet and walked back to his truck, arms up. Said that maybe it was okay for me to take something nice.

  LYLE DID IT to me five times. Always in the shed, me on my back. Each time he came to it like a chore, or sports practice of some kind that he was only half interested in, his eyes resigned, his face flushed and exhausted with effort.

  I marked them in my notebook where I had once listed my mother’s beers. I tried to make little notes alongside each one—did not hurt as much, was faster this time—but then I stopped bothering. They all became sewn together in my memory as the first time it had happened. The other details fell away, aside from the fact that by that fifth time I was completely rid of myself and made new into a girl with a stone for a stomach, a jittery wire running through my veins. I felt nothing from Lyle, not a tingle or hint of pleasure as it happened. I left my body like I had trained myself to do, and I became better and better at it. I prayed during the time, I didn’t despair. I thought of telephones ringing, my mother on the other end. I pictured Vern’s kind eyes and I tasted the grapes, juice on my lips.

  I was fine and things would be well but my eyes grew black with insomnia and I peeled the skin from around my nails and had taken to eating it.

  “Are we going to get married?” I asked Lyle after that fifth time. For I still didn’t know what it was all for. A unification of the Body, perhaps, some pact or bonding secret, but what it would provide the land, or the church, was hazy and out of focus. This muddled goal was what bothered me most.

  In all my not knowing, I decided it must be something that would eventually occur within me, like Lyle had hinted at. Some heart change, some transfer of power that would give me a higher order of gifting. I knew through my romances that real sex caused a quickening of the love pulse, made you moan in pleasure. Made your body swell and burst.

  He pulled his shirt over his head. The shed walls seemed to pour heat on us. Grampa Jackie’s old rodeo posters had peeled and died, their pictures gone, just browned paper now. It was midday and the sun sat meanly overhead, finding its way in through the slits in the ceiling. Sweat had dripped from Lyle’s forehead onto my chest and mixed with my own. I needed cool water to cleanse me. I dabbed at the sweat but stopped. What if we were to be married? I had better get used to his sweat. I tried to picture myself in a white dress, saying Are you sure? to God, hoping that maybe everyone could forget we were cousins after all. That fact embarrassed me. I supposed I could learn to love Lyle. It would happen with time, with God’s help, all things were possible. Weren’t they? But Lyle shook me from my daydream.

  “Our work is done. You aren’t the only one I’m making holy with my seed. I have a quiver full of arrows.”

  A tightening ran through my ribs. I braced both hands on the floor.

  “Vern said you’re a full-moon bleeder,” he went on. “Now we’ve done all there is to do and we’ve done it at the right time. There’s gonna be rewards beyond our wildest dreams. Rain like you wouldn’t believe. Get your umbrella ready, Lacey May.”

  I reached up and my hand gripped the neck of his shirt. “Who else?”

  “Are you jealous? Of your own cousin? That’s just sad.”

  “You’ve been with more than just me? Is this a big joke?” Blood throbbed in my ears. I felt ordinary then, utterly unspecial. I had thought myself supremely chosen, but now I wasn’t the only one. “I’ll tell Cherry what you’ve done.”

  “You mean what we’ve done.”

  Full-moon bleeder. I remembered how Vern had lifted my bloody tissue to his nose. How my mother had told me to wait. Not to go. And I’d disobeyed her immediately.

  “By the time everything is revealed,” he said. “You, too, will believe in the white light that came upon you in the dark, in your bed while you were alone in prayer.”

  Chapter 11

  Days and days and days of heat. I tried to remember what a chill felt like to the skin, but I could not. No sun like this anywhere else in the world . . .

  August left us and by mid-September my mother had still not called. This was no vacation she was on. My meager fantasies about what this was were no longer holding up. This was abandonment.

  Stew-brown water sludged from the faucet and we gave up on trying at all. Our toilets were useless bowls, and Cherry instructed as I dug a basin in the backyard and we propped a rusted lawn chair over it and cut a hole out of the seat. There was talk that someone would deliver barrels of rationed water each week but when I asked Cherry where they were, she said it wasn’t the will of God that we would allow some infidel from the next unholy town to bring in our blessing on four wheels. We’d rather be a believing town, waterless, but believing.

  But it was hard to keep believing when the stench of the filthy Body during church services was enough to send us girls outside to vomit in the dead grass. As it splashed on my feet I wondered how it was that no men seemed to need to throw up from the smell. Denay leaned against the wall hunched over and groaning while Taffy petted her and dry heaved, a worse punishment, pain with no release. Sharon retched and moaned and her vomit came out in
thick globs like oatmeal.

  “I can’t take it anymore,” she said. “I’m gonna crawl out of this town and hope a truck runs me down or picks me up. I don’t even care which.”

  “My mom said it ain’t that bad,” said Maisie Lynn, a beanpole of a girl with a frizz of black hair. “I told her to take a hike and she slapped me.”

  I wondered who exactly had been with Lyle. I couldn’t help but picture Taffy with him. I was sick again in the dirt.

  “Maybe we’re coming down with a possession,” I said. I sat against the building. I felt emptied out.

  Denay scoffed. “As if demons would dare approach us. Do you know how important we are to this church?”

  Maybe he’d been with her, I considered. I wondered if he got to choose. I wondered how any of this had happened.

  “Shut up, Denay,” Sharon said.

  “You’re all weak in faith,” Denay said. “The time is now. This is the trial, when it really counts to God.” She wiped her mouth on her bare arm. Her brown waves fell over her face and she looked pretty, the sun filtering through her hair from behind, but there was something energetically off about her, something that could not be explained, but felt. “Anyone can be a believer when times are easy, and God knows that.” I wanted to know where her confidence came from. She walked back into the church, leaving us all there like cows at trough.

  AT CHERRY’S AFTER church, the nausea kept on as I lay on the kitchen floor and cleaned the fly larvae.

  “This doesn’t make any difference,” I snapped, scraping the black patches of eggs that had reappeared overnight. I flicked a squirming flesh-colored maggot off my hand.

  Cherry stomped around with the bull penis cane, swatting the flies out of the air. I could hear their bodies hit the floor, fat and slow. That morning I’d woken up to a layer of them on my face, my neck, rubbing their little stick arms together like they were trying to start a fire.