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  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.

  “I should have known you were never really purified enough to stand against evil without becoming it,” Vern said.

  “Whore!” screamed Shirl, an old woman who often rolled around in the front, honking and croaking in her spirit speak during worship. She spat into the aisle.

  “I did everything you asked,” my mother said to Vern. She squared to him and I saw another sort of communication occur, something wrapped and hidden from the rest of us, the end of it just beginning to unfurl.

  Vern smiled. “But you didn’t,” he said.

  It seemed my mother had something else to say but it was stuck inside
her. Vern led her off the stage but she turned, shook him off. “Wait,” she said. Her eyes locked with mine. “Try to understand. I was testifying. I let God lead me to the right scripture. They trusted me and told me their sorrows. It soothed them. I’ve converted at least nine souls, most of them local infidels. You may not want me in this church no more, but I’m not bad. I tried, and on the way I fell in love.”

  Vern was stung and it was a spectacle to see him this way, thrown off, befuddled by anyone, least of all a woman. “Love,” he repeated, the word gagging him.

  My mother pulled her arm from his grasp. “Lacey,” she said. “Ask Lacey. She’ll tell you I’ve been sober. I haven’t touched a drop since conversion. Tell them, my girl.” Her eyes begged.

  I didn’t understand how it had come down to this. What could my voice matter in her sea of obvious transgression? Anyone in a five-foot radius could smell the booze on her breath. If I lied now I could be banished too. If I lied now I might not be useful anymore. That thought was terrifying to me then.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Lacey,” Vern said. “Tell your church family just how your mother has sinned.”

  “Let’s go,” my mother said to me. “Let’s get out of here. Come on. This is over. This is all over.”

  I stepped toward her but then my body stopped. I saw a flash of what I knew our life would be. I saw the Turquoise Cowboy just like all the others. I saw her skinny body passed out at odd angles across the bed, the shrunken world of her hangovers that could last all day when nothing else could go on around her, each sound too assaulting, even my quiet voice too mean. The way she would refuse me simple things, drives to school, bread from the store, until I was red-eyed from staying up all night either wondering where she was or wishing she would leave again. The frightful way she would look at me like she was reaching out from a black hole, trying to drag me down into it. Nothing was over. It was only just beginning.

  “She’s been drinking,” I said.

  “Well,” Vern said, turning to my mother. “Your drinking alone is grounds for banishment, not to mention the love you’re in.”

  A small sob escaped from my mouth. “Wait,” I said. But it was too late.

  The Body became a flurry of movement. The men screamed for exorcism, arms to the sky. Someone grabbed me and held me up over his head, repeating that he was saving the daughter, and the women formed a circle around Cherry, sputtered in their protective ways. I saw only a glimmer of my mother’s long hair before she disappeared through the side door without me. I looked for the Turquoise Cowboy but he was gone, too. I primed my heart to my mother and sent her messages: I’m coming. I’m sorry. What a big misunderstanding, I thought. That’s all it was. A misunderstanding.

  Chapter 4

  My mother gone and gone, I spent the night at Cherry’s. She dragged a dusty mattress made for a baby in from the shed to the craft room. She handed me a thin sheet and kicked back her crates of sewing supplies and cookbooks then puttered down the hallway to remote control her way to heaven with her beloved televangelists. I curled into a ball on the mattress and decided there was no reason to ever leave that room. I counted flowers on the peeling wallpaper. I listened for cawing crows out the window. I dreamed in feverscapes, my betraying words a haunt running through me. She’s been drinking, she’s been drinking.

  BY MY SECOND motherless day, Cherry took to bringing food and leaving it on the dresser and then standing over me with a heavy iron cross, poking me with it like I was some mystery, a possibly dangerous animal. God in Vern, she’d pray. Rid us of your devil. At night she’d toss chocolate sandwich cookies into the dark and they’d land on my face and across my body. I’d eat them slowly and feel sorry for myself. I understood clearly then how shut-ins were born.

  AFTER A WEEK, Cherry finally softened toward me, lowered her round body and squatted on the edge of the tiny mattress. She patted my back. “Maybe it’s time you get out of this room and face the music.”

  “I’ll come out when she comes back.”

  “My own momma passed on when I was eighteen years old,” she said. Her eyes sort of drifted above me and settled on a crack in the wall. Her mother had been a busybody of a woman, Cherry explained, and one day she took to her bed, covered herself in blankets. Cherry knew something was the matter, for truly her mother never did rest like the lazy. They checked on her every hour, and she was sweating and shaking in fever. Finally she called them in and pulled back her blankets, and her skin was covered in sores a-fester and she said, “The mortification has set in.”

  My mother had never mentioned any of this.

  “We didn’t know what she was on about, the mortification, but she died the next week.”

  Cherry clapped her hands once, like that was that. Her eyes bore into me. “You know what I did after she was no more?”

  “What?”

  “I put her out of my mind. I knew no amount of slothing around was gonna bring her back. A girl can be fine without a mother.”

  But my body told me this wasn’t true for me and it wasn’t true for Cherry either. She had missed her mother desperately and still did or else she wouldn’t have told me the story.

  Young Cherry, a woman I’d seen in photos, trim and wind-kissed, that long hair always in tufts around her face and down her back, her sharp nose and pointed chin. Cherry was unpossessed by beauty, yet arresting, hard to look away from. I imagined her a girl looking at her mother’s sores, the fear she must have felt, and I pulled myself out of the craft room by afternoon, and Cherry saw that it was good.

  “Praise be to the Lord of honey and milk! She’s back and I see the life of the church still in her!” she proclaimed into the phone. “Yessum. Okay. Well, I suppose.” She hung up. “Vern said he’ll see us when God tells him the time is right. Until then, pray.”

  “He’s not coming over?” I asked.

  “Lucky you weren’t thrown out with the bathwater of your mother, keeping her dirty shames all to yourself,” she said, hard suddenly. Like it was difficult to imagine how my mother and I were of her family tree at all. My mother’s face was not capable of getting this hard, I didn’t think. “Sin’s a disease like anything else. Sit in a barbershop long enough, you’re gonna get a haircut.”

  Like everything in Peaches there seemed to be Before Vern and After, and this went for Cherry too. The Cherry of my early life was not prone to such hardening, was soft toward my mother, was understanding of her foibles because at that time there was no Vern to steer her straight, there was no light. She would listen to my mother go on and on about all her cruddy men and she’d lean over the kitchen counter and nod and pat my mother’s hands. Hand me sweet after sweet so they could go on talking.

  You think it’s possible to fall in love without meeting the person? my mother had asked me. Maybe, I’d told her. Maybe you can.

  IT FELT BAD to have Cherry’s boxes strewn around my head as I slept, the haphazard shadows of the clutter looming against the wall at night, so I tried to move her things into the closet to make more room. For what I didn’t know. All my belongings were at the Lakes just where I’d left them. I’d been wearing the same jean dress I’d worn the day my mother left, the denim thick and stiff from my sweat.

  The closet was its own spectacle, and in it I unearthed clear plastic tub after plastic tub of what looked like still and stiff stuffed animals that smelled of urine. I brushed a finger against a squirrel’s tail and it felt so real I pulled my hand back. It even had sharp little teeth. Under the squirrel were dozens of mice with long wormy tails and fear-struck eyes. Where had these come from, I wondered. I’d never seen anything like them sold in Peaches. I shivered and closed the lid and moved on to a duct-taped brown box. ROMANCE was written on the outside in black marker. I ripped it open and inside must have been forty compact paperbacks, looping cursive titles down each spine. I opened one to the middle and the first sentence I saw was he palmed her breast. I recoiled as if from a hot flame, tossed the book
to the ground, kept my eyes on it like it was a striking snake. I called for Cherry. I pointed to the tawdry cover with skin spilling from corset and demanded who was reading such sin. She pressed her lips and said, “Wouldn’t crack a math book, but those your mother loved.”

  I looked at them wary but I felt a strong pulling current coming from them.

  “You was just a little thing, but you remember how it was before Vern, just living life to live, no meaning whatsoever.”

  I figured she was going to take the books away, burn them in the yard. Call the church and report them. But she shuffled back down the hall. “Anyhow,” she called. “Don’t touch them animals in there. Them’s my specials.”

  I looked back to the crates of stuffed animals, imagined them writhing inside, chewing one another’s little tails clear off. I heard Cherry turn the TV up in the living room. The books called to me. “God,” I said aloud. “Why are you testing me this way?”

  I put my hand on one of the books and felt a warmth. Felt, maybe, my mother. I was powerless. I took to reading the entire collection straight away.

  EARLY THE NEXT morning Cherry woke me by thwacking something against the floor by my head. I looked up to see a deep brown oiled cane in her hand, curved at the top and veined.