Crooked Hallelujah

by Kelli Jo Ford

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2020 by Kelli Jo Ford

  Cover design and artwork by Kelly Winton

  Cover photograph: silhouette of figures © Shutterstock

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  FIRST EDITION

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: July 2020

  This book was set in 11-pt. Scala by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-4912-1

  eISBN 978-0-8021-4914-5

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  20 21 22 23 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART I

  Book of the Generations

  PART II

  The Care and Feeding of Goldfish

  Annie Mae

  The Year 2003 Minus 20

  Terra Firma

  Greater the Mass, Stronger the Pull

  Hybrid Vigor

  Then Sings My Soul

  You’ll Be Honest, You’ll Be Brave

  You Will Miss Me When I Burn

  Bonita

  Consider the Lilies

  PART III

  What Good Is an Ark to a Fish?

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  For my grandmothers, my mom, my aunties and cousins, and, now, Cypress Ann

  Epigraph

  It was really the world that was one’s brutal mother, the one that nursed and neglected you, and your own mother was only your sibling in that world.

  —Lorrie Moore, “Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People”

  PART I

  Beulah Springs, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma 1974

  Book of the Generations

  1.

  When Lula stepped into the yard, the stray cat Justine held took off so fast it scratched her and sent the porch swing sideways. Justine had been feeding the stray, hoping to find its litter of kittens in spite of her mother’s disdain for extra mouths or creatures prone to parasites. She tried to smooth cat hair from her lap. She’d wanted everything to be perfect when she told her mom that she’d tracked down her father in Texas and used the neighbor’s phone to call him.

  “That thing’s going to give you worms.” Lula dropped her purse onto the porch. She hadn’t been able to catch a ride from work. With a deep sigh, she untucked her blouse and undid the long green polyester skirt she’d started sewing as soon as she’d seen the HELP WANTED sign at the insurance office. She was a secretary now, and as she liked to tell Justine, people called her Mrs. and complimented her handwriting.

  “I’ll wash up,” Justine said. She’d already decided today wasn’t the day. Like yesterday. And the day before that.

  “At least let me say hi.” Lula kicked off dusty pumps and let her weight drop into the swing beside Justine. The swing skittered haywire as Lula pulled bobby pins from her bun, scratching her scalp. Her long salt-and-pepper braid fell past her shoulder and curled under her breast. “Bless us, Lord,” she said, the words nearly a song. She closed her eyes, and as she whispered an impromptu prayer, she touched the end of her braid to the mole on her lip that she still called her beauty mark.

  As a girl, Justine had pored over the pictures from Lula’s time at Chilocco Indian School, trying to see her mother in the stone-cold fox who stared out from the old photographs. Lula’s clothes hung loosely, even more faded than the other girls’ in the pictures, but something about her gaze—framed by short black curls, of all things—made it seem as if she were the only one in the photo. If Marilyn Monroe had come of age in an Indian boarding school and had fierce brown eyes instead of scared blue ones, that would have been young Lula. Justine kept the old pictures in a box hidden in the top of the closet where she kept her Rolling Stones and a mood ring, other forbidden things. She hadn’t thought of the pictures in ages, but she did so now as she watched her mom in prayer.

  Lula whispered amen, caught Justine staring at her.

  “Granny’s out gathering wild onions with Aunt Celia,” Justine said quickly.

  “Late in the year for it,” Lula said. She unrolled her nylon stockings and wiggled her toes in the air. In the way of Cherokee women, Lula could still make you feel that she held down the Earth around her one moment and then seem almost like a girl the next. “Did you do your homework?”

  “I swept and did the rugs too.”

  “My Teeny,” Lula said, calling her the nickname that had stuck when Justine’s middle sister, Josie, hadn’t been able to say her name. Together they pushed the swing back and let it fall forward.

  Justine closed her eyes. In the cool air that had come with the night’s rain, her mother’s warmth felt nice, which made the words she’d been practicing feel all the worse.

  “Evenings like this make me wonder how a body would want to set their bones anywhere other than these hills,” Lula said.

  Justine opened her eyes. The two-bedroom house they rented with her granny sat on the edge of Beulah Springs, the outer walls almost as much tar paper as asphalt shingle. She had her own room now that her sisters, Dee and Josie, had married themselves out of state, but her mother and Granny still split a room barely big enough for one. Hand-sewn curtains strung on a clothesline separated their beds. The low green hills beyond the train tracks seemed like folds in a crumpled blanket after Dee sent her pictures of Tennessee mountains. Justine had a good idea why a body might light out for other hills, other lands.

  “I talked to Daddy.” Her nerves blurted it out for her.

  Lula put her feet down to stop the swing. Justine couldn’t read her mother’s face, but she wished she could put the words back in her mouth, swallow them for good.

  Justine’s father had dropped the family off for a Saturday night service at Beulah Springs Holiness Church almost seven years back. As far as anyone could tell, he’d then been swallowed up by the Oklahoma sky. He’d never sent an ounce of child support or a forwarding address, never even called.

  Lula held herself together with a religion so stifling and frightening that Justine, the youngest and always the most bullheaded, never knew if she was fighting against her mother or God himself, or if there was even a difference. Still, her father was a betrayal of the knife-in-the-heart variety—something far beyond all their fighting—and here he was on a cool spring evening, right between them.

  “He’s in Texas. Near Fort Worth,” Justine said. She bit her lip. “He asked me to go to Six Flags with him. Just for the weekend. He has a little boy now, I guess.”

  She almost hoped Lula would hit her, but Lu
la stared into the hills. It wasn’t clear she had heard, so Justine’s mouth kept moving.

  “Six Flags is an amusement park. With roller coasters. I know you might think it’s too worldly, but I can wear a long skirt on the rides and all. It’s sort of like a big old playground!” Justine forced a smile. She pushed a strand of hair back into her bun and waited. “I’m sorry, Mama.”

  Lula remained quiet, focused on the horizon.

  “I guess I pestered Mr. Bean at the plant so much he helped put me in touch.” She didn’t say that she’d gotten the information from her dad’s old foreman almost two years ago and then been so ashamed that she tore the paper into bits she spread over Little Locust Creek. A few weeks back, her treacherous mind had begun to play the numbers across her thoughts, a musical sequence that interrupted her over dinner or during tests.

  “I’m real excited about Six Flags,” she said, and despite everything, she realized it was true.

  “I’ll talk to Pastor about it,” Lula said, finally. She pushed herself out of the swing and walked inside.

  At first Justine was surprised at how well it had gone. Then she saw Lula’s purse kicked over on the porch, her comb and Bible in a puff of cat hair. Justine scrambled to retrieve them and ran her hand over the textured leather cover of the heavy book.

  She pushed past the screen door and went to her mother’s room, where she could hear Lula already in prayer. One of Lula’s drawings of a Plains Indian’s teepee was tacked to the closed door. Justine knew that on the other side of the teepee, her mother knelt, as she did in church. Instead of a wooden pew or an altar, Lula’s face was buried in her twin bed, if she had made it that far. Justine ran her finger over the smooth indentations of her mother’s ink. She wanted to take Lula the purse and Bible, decided that if Lula stopped praying, she would make herself push through the door. She would go into the small, dark room, where maybe she would lay her head on her mother’s shoulder. If she did, Justine knew that her mouth would open back up. Instead of telling Lula about Six Flags and a new half brother, Justine would tell her about what Russell Gibson did to her.

  She wouldn’t be able to omit the details of the night she’d snuck out and met him down their dirt road, how he looked back over his shoulder then let her steer the car while he pushed from the open driver-side door, only cranking the engine once they were well out of Lula’s earshot. How her stomach flip-flopped over the way he had looked at her as he drove, shaking his head, saying, “Fif-teen,” and how her insides had frozen when she noticed a blanket folded neatly in the back seat. She would say how very sorry she was that she had pretended to be asleep that night when Lula stuck her head into the dark room and said, “Good night, my Teeny. Love you.” She would tell her how she’d thought his abrupt movements must have been what first dates were made of. She would tell Lula that she said no quietly at first.

  But Lula’s prayer rose and dipped into a moan. Then great, body-shaking sobs vibrated through the door into Justine’s hand, along her arm, and into her chest. She dropped the purse and Bible on the kitchen table and locked herself in the bathroom.

  “Shit. Shit. Shit,” she muttered. Feeling as if her bones were shaking, she took a can of Aqua Net, covered her eyes, and sprayed it all around her head. She waved hairspray from the air and then scrubbed her face red with scalding water. Her father’s blue eyes reflected back at her, not Lula’s brown eyes or eyes that seemed her own. Mostly she didn’t think about him anymore. She didn’t think she wanted to see him, but what was done was done. She decided then that she would go to Six Flags with her father and never think of Russell Gibson again. It was as if her young heart could only hold the two emotions: one, a guilt so deep for betraying her mother that it left her feeling like a human rattle, empty save for a few disconnected bones; and two, a joy so sudden and surprising at the thought of riding Big Bend, the fastest roller coaster in the world, that she felt she might pass out.

  2.

  “We’d love to have you, babe,” her father had said. “We’ll go to Six Flags. It’ll be a blast.” Through the crackly long-distance line, his baritone sounded familiar but busy, his words fireflies that flitted between them without illuminating a thing. She cradled the telephone on her shoulder and counted France, Spain, Mexico, Confederacy, United States on her fingers, trying to think of the sixth flag. “Roller coasters big as mountains,” he’d said. “Hold on.” She heard muffled talking, then he came back. “Justine, is everything okay?”

  “Just dandy,” she said, and he was off again, filling the distance between them with empty words. It was a presumptuous question after all these years: Is everything okay? Where to begin? She knew he’d meant: Why now? Just like she knew that if he’d really wanted her to visit, she wouldn’t have had to go to such lengths to find him. She should have called her oldest sister, who was spending the summer on the Holiness Camp Meeting circuit with her new preacher husband.

  Six Flags, like the basketball team she’d wanted to join last year, was “of the world.” Justine could hear Lula already: “The world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.” Justine was only fifteen, but she held no illusions—nor intentions—of abiding forever. Maybe Six Flags would be less hurtful than the truth that she needed to get away from here. And that her father was the there.

  She had imagined the night for weeks after Russell Gibson had first spoken to her on her class trip to Sequoyah’s Cabin. When she’d seen him working on a water leak outside the stone house covering the cabin that day, she recognized him. Her cousin John Joseph played music with him. She knew he was twentysomething, Choctaw, already back from the war. He had his shirt off and a rolled red bandana holding walnut-colored hair out of his eyes. When he saw her looking, he grinned and dropped his shovel for a pick mattock that he buried in the red earth.

  She slipped away and let him write a phone number on her wrist, not telling him they didn’t have a phone. She liked that he wasn’t much taller than her but had wisps of a mustache. She thought the homemade outline of the Hulk tattooed on his forearm was cool and pictured them going to a drive-in movie in Fort Smith. Or maybe he would lean on the hood of his car and sing her a song: sinful, surely, but nothing she couldn’t pray her way out of. Every bit of that had been the work of a girl’s imagination, nothing else. They hadn’t gone to a movie, and he didn’t even bring a guitar.

  She had her first moment of regret when she looked back at their little house, porch light glowing on the hill, but then he let her start the car. She revved the engine and laughed. Freedom had been waiting just on the other side of her bedroom window! He used his thigh to push her to the middle of the seat and took the wheel. He passed her his cigarette and rubbed her leg when he wasn’t shifting gears. Time and place swirled together as he turned onto a two-track road that disappeared into Little Locust Creek. He pushed the emergency brake, and before he cut the lights, she could see where the two-track, broken by the black water, picked back up on the other side of the creek.

  She thought she should have fought him, thought maybe she’d unknowingly agreed to what happened. Her mind kept mixing up the jumble of memories from that night, but it returned again and again to Proverbs 5, a favorite of church deacons. She suspected she caused the whole thing.

  She told herself that if she could forget the terrible night ever happened, it would be so. She didn’t sleep for days. Numbers replaced her thoughts. She found her father. When her body grew too tired to keep up her mind’s tormented vigil, she dreamed of roller coasters.

  3.

  Lula came red-eyed out of the bedroom. Her voice nearly a whisper, she said that if Justine wanted to see her father, it was her choice. “It seems you’re old enough, Justine, that your salvation is your own burden.” Then, her voice sharper: “And if you want to ride a roller coaster in your first act as a spiritual adult, so be it.” All Justine had to do was make it out of Wednesday night service.

  People in town called them
Holy Rollers, but the congregation of Beulah Springs Holiness Church referred to themselves as the Saints, the hardy few called to travel Isaiah’s Holiness Highway. They set themselves apart from the world with their Spirit-filled meetings, faith healing, prophetic visions, and modest dress. Though even wedding rings were forbidden as outward adornment, they believed once married, always married: Lula’s solitude was a sentence of belief and circumstance. They believed Stomp Dances were of the devil, that God healed what was meant to be healed, and children obeyed. Justine learned early that life was made up of occasional threads of joy woven through a tapestry of unceasing trials and tribulations. Life was spiritual warfare, and Six Flags would be no exception.

  Justine sat where she always sat, in the back pew with her cousin John Joseph. His father was Lula’s brother, Justine’s Uncle Thorpe, but first and foremost he was their pastor. John Joseph’s black hair was stuck behind one ear in a greasy clump. He had his father’s square jaw and his mom’s gray eyes, which made him a hit with girls in town, girls who didn’t go to a Holiness church or wear slicked-back buns and skirts down to their ankles. Like Justine, he was old enough to be an adult in the eyes of God and their church, and like Justine he hadn’t prayed through, no matter what terrors his soul faced in this world and after. “Jesus wept” had been their favorite Bible verse for as long as she could remember. She always thought it was because it was the shortest and easiest to recite on demand, but lately she’d found herself wondering why the words were so sudden and set apart.

  Justine’s eyes welled up, so she kept them on her lap while Uncle Thorpe finished his sermon with a story about a teenager who had died in a car wreck on his way home from a concert. The teenager had been raised Holiness and knew better. Uncle Thorpe walked around the simple wooden pulpit, rested an elbow on it, and looked at Justine. He wiped his eyes with his handkerchief. One brylcreemed strand of hair had fallen onto his forehead, like some kind of Native Superman. Justine imagined herself melting to nothing on the floor and sliding away.