Crooked Hallelujah

by Kelli Jo Ford

  By the time they got back to the house, Justine’s back was on fire. Since she’d hurt it slinging a broken pallet into the dumpster at work, she couldn’t sit long, and the drive up had just about done her in. She did best when she kept moving, so she decided to work in the garage, which was stacked with boxes they’d hauled over from the attic of the last rent house. Dee and Josie got busy in the flower beds, and when Lula wasn’t dozing, she stood over them giving directions.

  It was a fight to get Lula to let anything go. Ketchup packets and McDonald’s napkins bulged from kitchen drawers; stacks of Styrofoam coffee cups lined the counters. The garage wasn’t much better. Half the crap was junk, useless stuff that lacked even sentimental value. The other half: photo albums and Lula’s old artwork that had been left in the heat. If Lula didn’t care any more about it than this, Justine figured she could clean it up and take what she wanted for Reney. She told herself she was saving the trouble of having to do it later, with the added benefit of getting to it before her sisters. She told herself she wasn’t worried about getting caught.

  When she leaned her ear to the thin door that separated Lula’s bedroom from the garage, she heard nothing from inside but the pull chain clinking against the light in the ceiling fan. She adjusted the box fan whirling in the heat of the open garage door. Then she wiped sweat from her forehead and dug into a dusty cardboard box with DREFT stamped on the outside. Pulling out a warped photo album, she listened for Lula one more time. Then she dusted off the cover and started flipping.

  She stopped at a photo of Reney, who couldn’t have been more than two, sitting on Granny’s lap. Reney was doing this thing she’d always done to whoever was holding her: pinching and rubbing elbow skin. But Granny, of course, was wearing long sleeves, so it was really polyester that Reney was rubbing.

  In Portland, Reney was taking on debt to study books she could have read for free, as far as Justine could tell. Her Reney, who after high school had become such a hard woman, so cautious with money and closed off. Sometimes it seemed this kid she’d more or less grown up with, the girl she’d loved and fought with and rocked in the night—her daughter, her very soul—was a whole different person.

  Reney called whatever it was she was going through her rebirth. She lived in a communal house of some sort and dated two different men that she called feminists. She’d taken to asking questions about her “Cherokee heritage” when she called home, wanting to hear old stories. Justine had stories aplenty; few that she cared to tell. Nonetheless, she found herself telling them all.

  It was often late at night when Reney called. She asked for Justine’s advice, something she’d never done back home. They could talk for hours now that she was gone. Justine wondered what Reney was doing right then. She thought about calling her.

  Justine jumped when she heard footsteps. She shoved the album into the box she’d set aside for Reney and felt relieved to see Dee standing beneath the garage door.

  “We’re about to go to Walmart. Need anything?”

  “Again?” Justine said. She stood and stretched her back. “Josie better take that damn TV back.”

  “I told her, but you know—”

  “You know what?” Josie said, peering over Dee’s shoulder. She was the middle sister but had always behaved more like the baby.

  “Mama finds your devil box, all hell’s going to break loose,” Justine said, going back to her sorting.

  “She finds my TV, I’m directing her to the ice chest full of Coors Light in your truck.”

  “You can’t even get any channels out here,” Justine said.

  “I’ve got a whole season of ER. Clooney’s an Oklahoma boy, you know. We’re the same age. If I’d played my cards right and not run off with old whatshisname, maybe we would have got married.”

  “Bullshit,” Justine said. “Bring back bleach. Did you see the bathroom? I swear Mama’s eyes are slipping. Her nose too.”

  “Well her ears aren’t, so you two better pipe down,” Dee said.

  Justine was in a groove when Lula opened the door leading from her bedroom into the garage. She wore house shoes, but her hair was neatly braided. She held bobby pins in her mouth as she wrapped her braid around itself on the top of her head. Justine noticed a piece of paper stuck to her cheek. It looked like a tiny curled tail growing out of her face. Justine was compelled to go wipe it away—she knew it would embarrass Lula—but she was feeling annoyed at her own fear over nearly being caught.

  “You need your rest, Mama,” Justine said.

  “I get lonesome for my girls. Thought you all might like to drive to McDonald’s.”

  “Dee and Josie went to the store,” Justine said. “I’m sorting through all this junk.”

  “Those folks behind the counter love me,” Lula said. “They treat me like a queen.” The paper stuck fast to Lula’s cheek as she spoke. It looked like it had come from inside the ring of a spiral notebook.

  “I know, Mama,” Justine said. “Maybe later.”

  She thought Lula was about to go back inside and leave her be, but then she stepped down into the garage. Lula scanned the boxes and garbage bags and then peered into the box Justine had been working in before moving to an untied kitchen trash bag.

  Using her index finger, she shifted the trash bag open and pulled out a little Indian doll. The braided hair had come undone and matted. The faux buckskin dress came apart at the touch, and the nose had been chewed away to white plastic. The most intact thing about it was the bold lettering spelling CHINA on the doll’s underparts.

  “Mama, that thing’s been in a box for twenty years. Mice got to it.”

  “Well, I’d appreciate you not throwing away my belongings,” Lula said. She carried the doll back into her bedroom.

  Justine was so relieved at not being accused of stealing what she wanted before Lula died that she ignored the urge to barge through the now closed door and argue. Instead, she dug the album out again and flipped back to the picture of Reney and Granny.

  It struck her that unless Granny was caught in a moment with one of her half sisters, she rarely smiled in photos. Even in this picture with Reney, who Justine knew was one of Granny’s secret favorites, her lips turned downward in a soft C.

  The Granny of the photograph—old Granny—was a gentle woman who tucked her laughter into all of the places in their house that lacked. But “old Granny” had been far from a pushover. When it had gone bad with Lula, Granny acted as Justine’s and her sisters’ buffer.

  Justine turned the page to a faded picture of Uncle Thorpe and his gang of kids—her cousins. The boys wore long pants and long sleeves and crew cuts. The girls were in long cotton dresses and pigtails. Most of them were barefoot—they’d probably been playing outside before whoever had the camera rounded them up and told them to freeze. She wiped a smudge over John Joseph, the cousin who’d been closest to her in age and her best friend. She smiled at the thought of the two of them fighting over who got to memorize “Jesus wept” for Sunday school.

  In the picture, John Joseph stood off to the side a little, caught midstruggle, leaning back trying to hold a full-grown German shepherd. His hands hardly met around the dog’s barrel chest, and the dog’s outstretched legs were planted firmly on the ground. The movement must have caused John Joseph to be out of focus. There weren’t a lot of pictures of him, and this one was out here, ruining in the garage.

  Justine shook her head and stood up to rub her back as she scanned the garage. She set the album back into Reney’s box before moving to another corner. There was no telling what had been lost.

  She knelt before a new box and pulled out another picture of her granny. She was young in this one, her hair still black, her skin dark brown. She stood in a wooden wagon full of watermelons with Justine’s grandfather, a severe-looking white man in a cowboy hat and rolled-up blue jeans.

  Justine squinted into the photograph, trying to imagine her grandmother so young. She had been a maid in a big ranch house when she’
d met Justine’s grandfather, a barn hand who Justine knew had been a terrible drinker. It wasn’t hard to imagine Granny’s strength. She was kind, but she was not soft. That’s where Lula got it, where Justine got it, and Reney, too, Justine figured, though she’d done her damnedest to keep Reney from ever having to access that kind of strength. Granny had been brought up in Indian orphanages and, later, Indian boarding schools. She’d never taught her grandchildren the language beyond basic greetings. She simply said that life was harder for those who spoke it.

  Justine thought of all the times she’d bought herself or Reney language tapes and materials at the Cherokee Nation gift shop. You could probably start a library if you gathered up the books, flash cards, and tape sets that she’d purchased over the years, only to stash them on a bookshelf until they made their way to boxes in the heat of her own garage.

  This time, she didn’t even peek over her shoulder as she slid the photo inside the album in the box of thieved treasures. She took out a manila envelope with folded pieces of paper inside. From it, she pulled one of Lula’s charcoal teepee drawings. She marveled over her mother’s talent. No matter how many sets of pastels or pencils Justine sent her, Lula would not—said she could not—draw any longer. Justine put the teepee in Reney’s box, too, and set the manila envelope to the side. In the bottom of the Dreft box was a leather journal, stiff with age. She thought it was one of Lula’s diaries, which Justine always felt bad about reading, though she could never help herself. Filled with Lula’s perfect cursive, the diaries spoke of deep loneliness and sorrows. It was a side of Lula that she didn’t reveal to anyone, as far as Justine could tell. Justine checked the door and opened the book. She nearly gasped when she saw the writing inside. She hadn’t seen her grandmother’s sweet scribbly handwriting in years. It looked like Granny had used the book as a record of their days, no matter how mundane.

  May 25—In Hominy with Celia all week. Caught perch and catfish—big mess. Celia’s baby son graduated high school today.

  May 30—Sweet Service tonight. Bro. Buzzard came and preached good.

  June 2—Sister Irene picked us up for church but had to leave early for a sick little one.

  Thorpe gave us a ride home.

  June 3—Lula made a cowgirl cake for Reney’s birthday, so pretty. Reney is always sweet and precious. She stayed all night here again.

  At that entry, Justine set the book down and cried so hard she had to pinch the top of her nose to keep quiet. After Reney divorced, she’d started calling Granny her soul mate. She said Granny came to her in dreams and had ever since they’d moved to Texas when she was a little girl. In taking Reney to Texas, Justine knew she’d taken her away from Granny, who, it turned out, had been Reney’s buffer too.

  Reney had tried her best to follow in Justine’s footsteps in her sorry choice of men, and the more Justine pushed her to do better, the more Reney dug in. Until she let go and drove off without a word.

  “Are you ready to go to McDonald’s?” Lula stuck her head out the door, surprising Justine again.

  Justine jerked her shirt over her eyes and pinched them dry.

  “Teeny?”

  “McDonald’s is disgusting,” Justine said. “You need to take better care of yourself.”

  Lula leaned heavily on the doorway to ease down into the garage. “Is everything okay?” she asked.

  “Mother,” Justine nearly shouted. She took a breath then continued: “I’m fine.”

  Her mother cupped Justine’s cheeks, as if Justine were a little girl and Lula were checking her face for cake icing. Justine wouldn’t meet her eyes. Instead, she studied the piece of paper, still stuck to Lula’s face. Lula must have fallen asleep studying her Bible and drooled.

  “Mama loves you, Justine,” Lula said. “But only Jesus can make it all better.” She turned to go but came back and said, “Please don’t throw away my belongings.” Then she passed through the open garage door and climbed into the dented-up Pontiac.

  “Where’d you get those keys?” Justine asked.

  “I can rummage through my belongings too,” Lula said. Then she settled into the driver’s seat and started down the hill.

  Justine picked up the box she’d been filling with treasures and sat with it in front of the fan. She pulled the rest of Lula’s artwork from the manila envelope. There was a smaller envelope inside, too, labeled “Teeny” in Lula’s looping letters. It was her High School Equivalency Certificate, lost nearly as soon as she’d gotten it all those years ago after Reney was born. She’d always been embarrassed to say she had only a GED, but right now, she felt proud of the yellowed piece of paper, saved all these years by Lula. She remembered what it meant when she got it. She was sixteen, but she could get a good factory job, a job with benefits. She could take care of Reney. She could help Granny and Lula.

  She wiped the sweat from her face and pushed her hair behind her ears. Then she spread her GED on the floor before her, smoothing its creases. She placed a rock on top to keep it from blowing away. She added her grandmother’s journal and Lula’s drawings, all of them she could find. She placed the old pictures around everything, too, finding stones and knickknacks to place on each one. A pressed cardinal feather fell from an album. Justine sat there for some time, smoothing the feather between her fingers, letting the wind blow heat over her and her makeshift altar.

  She looked back toward the road, where dust from Lula’s car was still settling. Justine knew she should have taken her mother to McDonald’s, where Lula was certain the pimplefaced kids saw her as royalty and not as the strange woman in a long dress who overenunciated her order and huddled over her flapjacks. Now it was too late. But maybe tomorrow.

  You Will Miss Me When I Burn

  I spent my morning at the Dairy Queen with the idlers and the cattlemen who get their feeding done before first light, a typical Ferrell morning my Indian daughter-in-law would say. It was a sparse crowd nonetheless; we didn’t know yet what the wind was going to do. People left their tables and crowded around the television set hung in the corner. Smoldering houses and charred land all over the Red River spoke to the notion that man can’t do much to change the course of nature.

  Hank Marshall had an expert in fire behavior on his show discussing “The Great Fires of ’06.” The man stood on the tips of his loafers drawing a triangle and explaining concepts a fool would be born with: a fire needs fuel, heat, and oxygen—things we had in spades. “Our goal,” the man said, “is to manage one of the three elements, but fire exclusion has led to an excess of fuel, and drought conditions have exacerbated the problem.” They went to a commercial, and the old boys and blue hairs set to talking smart, trying their best to act regular.

  “If the air ain’t so humid you swim in it, it’s so crackling dry it burns you up,” Elsie the big-boned waitress said, passing a cup across the counter. I winked at her, and she rolled her eyes.

  “At least the wind let up last night,” Liza Blue said. I eased into the bench next to her, setting my hat crown-down on the table. She leaned over and said she forgot how to sleep without the wind banging that iron gate against her fence post. Liza Blue was always bringing talk around to her bedroom.

  “Maybe they’ll get it put out,” she allowed, and the way people nodded at the floor, you’d think they was in church. People with something to burn get real nervous when they start thinking about the off chance that hellfire and brimstone will come to pass in their day.

  Crazy old TomTom Tompkins sat in the corner with a Big Chief tablet taking notes on everything with a pencil nub. TomTom fancied himself a big author because he printed up two of his books and had them in the trophy case for fifteen dollars apiece. When somebody walked in or out, he smashed his fat palms onto his tablet and hunkered over his coffee to keep the wind from blowing it all away. After the door sucked shut from the latest exit, TomTom looked up from underneath his green visor and said, “That dry bluestem is sitting on the Caddo Field just waiting for a spark like a lover listens
for the sound of a truck door in the night.”

  I bent over laughing and slapped my boot against the tile just as hard as I could. Liza Blue jumped clean out of her curls. She spilled her coffee in her lap and cut her eyes until I put my arm around her and whispered.

  We grew up together at the country school outside town. When my wife, Nina, died, Liza Blue showed up asking me if I wanted to get married “like we should have by-God done in the first place.” She had the trouble with her voice that Katharine Hepburn had, so every conversation took too long, and that one was no exception.

  “We’ll make your homeplace over,” she’d said. “Patch the barn, put a roof on the house, new pipes and wiring, fix the whole foundation. Dig a new well if need be. Even better,” she said, “load your mare and come saddle up with me.” She had a hundred acres and plenty of oil money coming in from her dead husband. Just like that, problems solved. I told her I was mourning and needed some time to think on it. That’s what that daughter-in-law of mine kept whispering in my ear: “Don’t make any decisions for at least a year, Ferrell.” For once, her yammering was useful.

  The clock was ticking on my year, but truth be told, I didn’t need time. This is going to sound bad to some of you, but Liza Blue was too old for me. It wasn’t the years on her driver’s license that got me, per se. It was how she showed them on her face and in her shoulders—damn, how they wore her down. And besides all that, I already had somebody in mind.

  “Elsie, you better send me that rag, honey,” I said. “We got Hurricane Katrina here in Liza Blue’s lap.” Her case of the shakes was contagious. Before you knew it, somebody else had spilled coffee and another one knocked an ashtray onto the floor. “Terrible Tuesday, aisle eleven,” I yelled and went behind the counter to help myself to a new rag. I kept it because it didn’t look like we’d seen the last catastrophe. Before I wrung my rag out and hung it over the sink, I got through the Big Chinese Flood and worked my way to Exxon Valdez. Finally, I yelled out “Hindenburg!” just for meanness. Despite what the Indian might think, I can always tell when I’m wearing thin on people, so I put on my hat. I had a couple of things to take care of.