A jolt of pain tore in my center and I remember shrieking, and I remember they had to shred my dress to get it out of the hub of the wheel. A man I didn’t know carried me along the sidewalk. I remember Mama turning away white as a ghost and trying not to sob down in the doctor’s office, my dress in tatters and blood indeed streaking my underthings.
But in almost no time it didn’t hurt very badly anymore, certainly nothing like the excruciating throb of my headaches, and before long I found myself trying to comfort Mama from flat on my back on the doctor’s table, telling her I was sorry I tore my dress, that it wasn’t Otto’s fault or Victoria’s either, that I understood now it was dangerous but it was more of a shock than anything and really, it just didn’t hurt very much anymore . . .
Victoria was right there with us, eyes still like globes.
The doctor took the briefest glimpse at my injury before testing uninvolved things like my ankles and wrists, then moving on to soothing Mama. He spoke in a low tone, although I could hear parts of it.
Not as uncommon as you think . . . a notion from the Dark Ages, really. It’s just an adaptation—nature’s way of keeping everything safe before the childbearing years . . . No moral weight to it at all . . .
A little later Mama collected herself and left me with Victoria. The doctor had some books for children that he took down for us, but in short order Mama returned with a new dress and underthings. I had a smudge here and there, dirt from the street and black from the tire, which she wiped clean with a washcloth.
She did not seem angry at me, even at the loss of my ruined dress. She was very gentle, but I knew anyway that something was not right. She could hardly look at me and Victoria may as well not have been there, although my sister did fix and adjust my hair.
Finally Mama summoned whatever she needed to summon to meet my eyes.
We’ve done what we can. It’s in the Lord’s hands now. Whatever you do, do not tell anyone where you were injured. But especially, do not tell your father. Her gaze shifted to my sister. Victoria?
Yes, Mama. I understand.
When Victoria was seventeen, she was still going to church with Mama and me, still badgering the minister and the Sunday-school teacher with questions and conundrums. She volunteered still at the orphanage and the old folks’ home. But her evenings were her own.
We had heard the term Pentecostal and had a faint sense from rumor that the adherents believed in principle what we ourselves did, so far as sin and salvation went. But by the same rumor, they actually felt the approach of the Final Days, and felt as well the moving presence of the Spirit among and within them. Many people looked askance, called them Holy Rollers or Jumpers, and still others considered that their babbling exuberance had more to do with the devil than with blessed Jesus. But I’ll admit, curiosity ran high.
So when an Apostolic revival came to the community hall, Victoria heeded the call. She returned with her answers, utterly baptized in the Spirit.
She shook me awake, and even in the dim glow of the lamp, I could see the transformation. Eyes like shining embers; hair, which had been bound in plaits, come loose and practically standing around her head, as though the power of the Spirit had run through her like voltage and blown her glowing curls into a halo. She’d sweated right through her dress.
You have to come tomorrow, Gloria. You have to feel it. It’s the most real thing I’ve ever known. I mean, it’s real, Gloria, it is REAL . . .
She told me she’d spoken in the language of the Holy Ghost, been anointed with that gift. She’d seen crutches cast aside, seen others healed, and she knew that I could be made whole too.
I knew by then she was not talking about the headaches or the twist to my spine, or at least not those alone. Not so long before, whole sermons were preached about the moral threat of bicycles upon the young, especially young ladies, the ones in the East who had shucked their proper skirts for split bloomers and mounted up and pedaled away, off to uncharted places.
I, of course, did not even have to do that. A single ill-informed passage, my very first naive attempt at a lark with a boy, and I broke my mama’s heart.
Do you really believe so, Victoria? That I will be made whole again?
She was on her knees beside my little bed, eyes roving the shadows at the ceiling. That wild hair. I felt things I’ve never even imagined. I believe that you will, too.
We rode the three miles to the hall with some good, God-fearing neighbors, in their surrey. They hadn’t attended the night before, but already they had heard, as half the county evidently had, of the transforming power of the thing. Mr. Perkins, the gentleman of the house, was a dairyman somewhat older than Papa, and suffering a rheumatism that made milking troublesome. He had walked for some time with a cane. Victoria told him she had already experienced a power greater than the afflictions of either the earth or the devil. She told him to make himself ready.
We were early to the service, but already the crowd was such that the meeting had been moved outside, with the hall’s front porch serving as a stage. The piano had been rolled out, too, and I could hear it as we approached through waves of a general din and a chorus of both song and hallelujah-style shouting, heard it being played with a gusto I could associate only with the automatic player piano I once saw demonstrated at the county fair. This was no perforated roll of paper above the keys, though, but astonishingly enough a colored man, fingers flying and pounding as though he intended to reduce the device to splinters and sprung wire.
The hymn, if it may be called that, was nothing like “Rock of Ages” or “Amazing Grace,” but a song with some other form altogether. A frantic man with a tambourine on the edge of the porch hollered, “My God is alive,” to which the whole roaring crowd replied, “He has made me glad,” over and over, emphasizing their enthusiasm with a loud, proud handclap at the end of each call-and-response. Then again not the whole crowd, because many of them were in a state outside the bounds of normal comportment, some in a kind of rapture or trance with their arms outstretched above their heads, others on their knees with their hair in their hands, and still others jerking and quaking as though stricken with the same palsied fit. The ones who could respond, though, were not only singing—many were also dancing.
I had heard of quadrilles, or the waltz. Those dances were most certainly not this. I recognized people I had known my entire life, stalwart farmers with their stalwart wives, staid townspeople who seemed born composed, bouncing and swaying and kicking up their heels in ways that reminded me of young colts, bucking and jumping in a spring pasture. What Papa called “feeling their oats.”
Hands clapped and clapped and hands reached toward the sky, and suddenly I jolted back to myself with all of it gone, although I, too, had been shouting and clapping and swooning for some unknown time. When did the light fade? Just when I felt time had stopped, it had actually catapulted forward, full dark nearly upon us now, and a woman—a woman—preaching from the stage.
Could not be. But yes, she was right there, a Bible in one hand and the other splayed urgently against the air, speaking about the power of Jesus, the hunger and the thirst for righteousness that’s come so alive in this present age, the way the Word declared that it would.
You will hear of wars and rumors of wars . . . and nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. Look at Old Europe even now, brothers and sisters. Nation against nation, in those awful trenches and no-man’s-land . . .
I had only a vague idea of the great conflict unfolding in Germany and France, from Papa’s weekly newspaper and also from the cluster of boys around Victoria who seemed itching to get into the fight themselves.
Victoria beside me had tears streaming and her arms thrust in the air. I was crying, too, dizzy with the terror of it all.
I remembered the times the two of us peeked into the Book of Revelation, only to clamp our eyes shut again. Words to chill th
e very bone, passages about the whore of Babylon and the seven seals and the seven trumpets, and the number of the beast, which shall be six hundred and threescore and six—puzzling and horrible mysteries that nobody seemed to address, although they must be true. Surely they must be true, for they appeared right there, in the very last book of the eternal Word of God.
Do not despair, brothers and sisters. Do not worry long over this strife, but rejoice! Rejoice, for the end is nigh, and ye shall be with your Lord in Paradise—
Victoria took to crying out herself beside me, and a torrent of strange syllables gushed out, as though the cooing of doves and the gibberish of a baby and the yodeling of Papa at the cows and the war whoops of boys playing Indian had all run separately out of the wells of her limbs to converge in a righteous river from her babbling tongue, and she went to her knees with her hands clasped before her, going on and on and on—
Be diligent, brothers and sisters! Go forth and preach the Word, and be constant in your calling, for though no man knows the day or the hour, it is prophesied that YE SHALL KNOW THE SEASON, and that season is UPON US. Amen.
Sweat and tears ran out of me the way the crying and yelling ran through the dense mass all around, Victoria on her knees with her mouth still issuing its inscrutable torrent while other strange tongues came through the air in fits and waves, and my eyes darted and raced, and some of those lamplit faces were just plain people I’d known my whole life who were suddenly transformed, seized by an energy unlike anything I’d ever witnessed in Sunday school. And I wanted that energy to course through me the way it coursed through them, wanted to give myself over and know that the power of the Lord lived inside me, too.
Victoria was struck with a jolt and went to the ground on her back, as though she’d been swept by a palm and dropped flat. I felt that energy concentrate and pull me down like a reeled fish alongside, not to my back but to my knees, right there beside her.
She jerked and shuddered and writhed, her mouth still uttering with esoteric mania, and her eyes wide upon me now and with such absolute joy on her face that I began to sob and wail out myself. I seized her hand with both my own, and in that moment of contact the fire of the Spirit flashed through me, too. And I felt it, I did, the first overwhelming dawning of absolute righteousness.
The cries of the crowd subsided. The lady preacher appeared, hair blown around her head, the way Victoria’s had been the night before and was again now. The preacher knelt down across from me and took my quaking sister’s free hand in one of hers, laid her other palm across Victoria’s forehead.
Slain in the Spirit, praise Jesus . . . Feel the power of Almighty God, feel the power within you over the enemy of the Lord’s people. Slain in the Spirit, praise God . . .
Victoria’s wide eyes rolled frantically toward me and caught my own, and I quivered, still feeling that mighty surge flow out of her and into me, but then she looked to the lady preacher and another babble came forth. Victoria squeezed my hand tightly, and I gripped back just as hard, and her eyes came to me again while she warbled and cried, then back to the lady preacher, whose own mouth moved in an utterance as well, a whispered one with an entirely different tenor than either Victoria’s secret dialect or her own thunderous preaching from the stage.
You have travails, child. You have come tonight seeking deliverance.
She was talking to me. Victoria’s stream had fallen to a ragged burble, and she merely lay there, whispering around great gasping breaths, her quaking otherwise stilled. I looked across her, at the lady preacher.
You have come to be made whole, in body and in spirit. This is manifest through your sister’s gift, and in your own hunger and thirst for righteousness.
I nodded and cried, and she lifted her hand from Victoria’s forehead to reach across for one of mine.
We all have come short, child, but I sense the power of the Holy Spirit within you, imploring you to cry out for Jesus, to receive Him fully, and to let the same Spirit that raised Him from the grave quicken your own mortal body, child. Let thee be healed . . .
Hands from all around settled now on my shoulders and my back and my head, and a mighty shaking came over me, not just in my body but within me as well, and a din of praying and tongues of the Spirit climbed into the night. I felt the energy of those sanctified believers, as though a fountain of pure water rose through my body and out to the tips of my fingers and toes and right into my dizzy head, rising and rising in a stirring pressure, until a gush of ecstatic speech shot from my mouth like a geyser.
I came back to myself flat on the ground, with no memory of how I’d gotten there. But Mr. Perkins cast his cane aside and walked unassisted that night, and I returned home in the surrey in the wee hours in an afterglow of pure bliss. The stars in the heavens seemed placed just for me. Victoria held my hand.
Mother awaited when we returned to the farm, there in the little parlor room in her nightgown. She looked back and forth between us, at our flowing hair and our mussed dresses.
I must confess. You do look like the Lord’s own angels.
We have been filled with the Holy Ghost. Baptized, from the inside out. Both of us have spoken the evidence of it.
Now Mama took my shoulders in her hands, glanced in a flicker to Victoria, then back to me. You look . . . taller, or something.
I felt the power of Jesus, Mama. Really and truly, for the very first time. It is like I have been restored. Healed. If I am taller, maybe it is because my spine is straighter. The healer was a lady. She told me I will see signs and wonders, if only I am willing to look.
Mama still had her hands on my shoulders, and she glanced at Victoria again and pulled me to her, rubbed my back the way she had during so many of those agonized bouts.
I certainly hope you do, my dear.
I knew full well my back was no different than before, but on the way home in the surrey in the wake of all that terror and exuberance and unleashed power, while I watched the dreamy spray overhead and listened to the clop of the hooves on the road and felt dumbstruck or thunderstruck or just completely wrung inside out, even then I was aware of something happening, some stirring or transformation, down there low in my belly, and yes, in the place where the bicycle took a part of me.
I’d been holding my water for hours now, and maybe it was only that, but a little later, out in the privy in the light of the lantern, I saw again the streaks of blood in my bloomers.
Mama and Victoria were still in the parlor when I came in, Mama in her rocker and Victoria kneeling on the floor with her wild head in Mama’s lap. She raised up and they looked at me as though I really was a-glow.
I believe I have received my moon.
Meteors
1
“I can’t believe she’s still out there,” said Huck. “What’s it, four days already? It’s like they’ve started some girls’ club or something. You ought to see it.”
They were back to work on the waste-oil still, installing fittings to connect the boiler to the condenser. Pop had run down to the mercantile to fill a grocery list for Mother and Annelise.
“Can’t say I’m surprised,” McKee told him. “Your ma’s pretty starved for company in general, any fool could see that. And Annelise might have her legs back under her, but she’s still worn to the nub. Probably just needs to sort things out.”
“Couldn’t have predicted she’d hole up at the ranch, though. With all the unfinished business, I mean.”
“Yeah, well. Part of that may be worry over your mother. Leaving her out there alone. Not to mention in the dark.” McKee shook his head. “My fault, comes down to it. I should’ve left that watch right there in the road. Mea culpa, and all that.”
Huck had been trying to think his way through that one himself, had lain there at night considering from every angle how to get out of the maze. “They still wouldn’t have the ledger, though. Or the keys that were with
it.”
“Nope.”
“They’ll be back, won’t they?”
McKee looked at him. “I’m surprised they haven’t showed already. Pains me to say.”
He’d been somewhat less than his usual whimsical self the last few days, which Huck mainly put on the absence of his cousin. Of course there was more to it. “What do you think they’re liable to do?”
“No idea. But for all they know, we’ve already called in the law, which is why they haven’t shown.”
“Shoot. Maybe we should, you know? Just go on and spill it already. We already sent the forms to register the plane, so I don’t think there’s much Cy can do on that score.”
“Okay, but there’s another side to it. I ain’t a kid, far as the law goes. We tell the whole naked truth, they might clap my own sorry hide in jail. Which I’d just as soon avoid.”
Huck started. “You? What on earth for?”
“That cockamamie ambush, for one thing. Your cousin’s right, it ain’t the Wild West anymore. Assault with a deadly weapon, endangering minors, failure to report a crime. That’s off the top of my head.”
Jail, when all he’d been worried about was having his toys taken away. He looked at Yak, and for the first time understood what his cousin meant that day, about how brilliance and basic sense were two different things. “I wish Annelise were here. She’s good at this stuff.”
“She can think ten steps ahead, no doubt. Impulsive as even she can be.”
What would Annelise do? It was a natural question, in the absence of the actual brain to pick. Funny, when you considered that the oracle in consideration had lately taken refuge with exactly the person they’d all sworn to keep in the dark. “You know what I think she’d say?”
Cloudmaker Page 34