Crooked Hallelujah

by Kelli Jo Ford

  She sleeps in spurts, which is more than I can say about myself. Since the nurse’s last check, I’ve had this footrest up and down and back up again. Years ago a doctor told me the connective tissue in my spine was shot. He said I’d see a wheelchair by fifty if I didn’t stop working, as if there was ever a choice.

  I left the doctor’s office that day with a handful of prescriptions. Then I drove straight to a pay phone and got Mama praying first thing. I don’t pray anymore, but I could never shake myself of asking her to. I was standing there in a parking lot with my eyes squeezed shut when she started feeling the spirit and speaking it over me. Warm tingles came out of that phone straight through my hand, into my arm, and down my spine. I went on back to work the next day and have damn near every day since. Of course, I can’t bend to tie my own shoes. But I guess it’s one of Mama’s miracles. That’s what I call them, the kind of miracle that might answer one prayer but leave you in need of a thousand more.

  She’s survived a lifetime of these miracles, which trace back to Daddy emptying the bank account and leaving her with three girls and half an art education degree to pay the bills. There were the nervous breakdowns. Forty years of loneliness and untreated seizures. The miracle of antiepileptic drugs she won’t take because Moses didn’t think to bring them up in Deuteronomy. And now this stroke. If she could talk, I know she’d say, “Count it all joy.”

  “Try to get some rest,” I whisper.

  She blinks. I brace myself and try to ease the chair back down. Dee stirs on the couch.

  “Want me to call a nurse?” I say. My leg is numb, so I lean on furniture to make my way to her.

  Mama turns her head to the wall when I take her hand. The right side of her face is drooped pretty bad. I cup it, push it up a little. Her skin is cool and dry. A whisker on her chin pokes me. She pulls away when I touch her, so I check her numbers on the screen like the nurses showed me and put the pillows back under her calves. I offer her the little oral sponge thing to moisten her mouth, but she won’t open.

  “Wish I knew how to help,” I whisper. I stand there for a minute rubbing her good hand until she pulls it away too. “Remember how to call the nurses, Mama?” I show her the right button and lay the remote beside her, then go back to my chair and pop it out. By the time I get resettled, she’s back to watching me.

  “What?” I say, louder than I intend, but she doesn’t answer.

  I shut my eyes and get to rubbing the scar on my left hand between my thumb and pointer finger. All these years later, the X is still ropy and thick from the infection I got when I marked myself with a razor blade, thinking it was going to make me real cool or real different or real anywhere but here, but probably only marked me for the damn fool I was.

  By the time I got ahold of the Rolling Stone that happened to have Charlie Manson on the cover, I was so sick of spare the rod, spoil the child, sick of having to go up to the front of the church in matching homemade outfits and sing with my sisters. I was already rolling up the waistband to shorten my Holy Roller skirt once I got to school. I kept my suede fringe vest with the BE COOL patch in my locker. Of course the bell-bottoms my neighbor’s mom gave me were an abomination to the Lord, even though I was pretty sure Moses hadn’t considered them either. I figure I was just the kind of disciple that lunatic Manson had in mind.

  After I’d used the razor blade to pledge allegiance to the only family more jacked up than mine, Mama asked me what the bandage was for. I told her I’d burned myself making a cake. Maybe I was remembering the crisscrosses on the back of her hands, in those days after Daddy left and she tried to bake her way to rent and Bible-beat her way out of whatever it was inside that broke. She realized pretty quick how far-fetched my excuse was. Not that I cared. I was damn near daring her to catch me.

  I ease the recliner upright and force my eyes open to try to stop thinking about things that nobody can change, things that don’t matter anyway, especially when Mama is in such a state. I dig deep into my pocket and pull out one of my pills. When all that’s left is a bitter taste, my mind pulls at me like it does. I look in my purse to make sure the little orange bottles are still there. I can’t slow down for fear the wheelchair will catch me. I’m half afraid it has already but for the miracle pills that keep me living in a different time, one where I’m still a half step ahead, one where I can keep working.

  Mama’s looking at me again. She’s moving her mouth, but no words are coming out. When I make my way back to her, she looks away. She makes me so mad I could spit, but I can’t begin to imagine the strength it takes to refuse a pill that would give you a whole new life, one without seizures, without the embarrassment of waking up to strangers’ faces and unfamiliar ceilings. Faith that moves mountains. Faith that keeps you from stepping into a hospital until, for one reason or another, you’re rendered unconscious and some well-meaning person admits you against your will.

  I adjust her bed to bring her head up and switch her pillows around again. I wonder about the pain she feels right now, where it comes from, where it ends up, how she would rate it on a scale of one to the rest of her heartbreaking life. I don’t figure she would respond to my inquiries even if she could, so I don’t ask. I lie instead, say, “Go on back to sleep, Mama. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  “I’m going to run out and get her some short-sleeve shirts for therapy,” Dee says. She sniffs her pits. “Probably ought to find a shower too.”

  When the doctor explained how important the first two weeks are to recovery, Mama set her face and looked through him to the wall. She wouldn’t budge when the therapists came into the room. It’s hard to know if this is the stroke or her usual meanness, but I do know a thing or two about Mama despising short sleeves.

  “She won’t even realize it,” Dee says. Mama is asleep, and she’s talking about the shirts again. “You know it’s not wrong, and so do I.” She bats her eyes and runs a hand up her arm, acting stupid. They think Mama is going to pull through, though in what shape, they will not say.

  “I’m not buying her clothes she wouldn’t be caught dead in right-headed,” I say. I almost take it back because of the “caught dead” part. It bothers Dee too. She shakes her head, picks up her phone.

  “You do what you want,” I say and go on organizing the flowers on the far side of the room, throwing out what’s going stale, putting the brightest in the front. I haven’t had the time or gumption to do any sort of throwing out or arranging in my life back home in months.

  North Texas is light-years from here now. The godforsaken storms and flashes of lightning are so constant down there they almost make up for the dark brought on by power outages. Of course, Pitch stayed home, muttering he better keep the animals fed and the place buckled down. I didn’t say I sat with your daddy and wiped his ass every day until he passed. He knows.

  I don’t think there’s anything holding him to this Earth anymore with his daddy gone. I saw him standing in the pasture watching the horses work a round bale before I left. A gust of wind came that whipped up a cloud of dust and hay and grasshoppers so thick I lost Pitch. After it settled some, the horses were running wild around the fence line, but Pitch was standing there with his arms out, like he was waiting to be carried away. When it passed and the horses wandered back up, I could see Pitch’s shoulders droop from the kitchen window. He hung his head and shuffled his way to the barn.

  I tell him to get over it. Buck up. This is the way of things. Kids grow up. We either end up just like our parents or do our best to turn out nothing like them. If we are lucky, we by-God make a little better of all the things we can. Short of some terrible interruption, parents go first. That’s the way of things. Of course, we work ourselves stiff in the meantime and cry ourselves dry, but maybe we get to have some little something that fills us up in our time. Our mamas and daddies? We don’t have long to get over the loss—or celebrate the release, as the case may be—or our time here will be gone, too, and our own kids will be burying us. I told him so
me version of this for about the four-hundredth time before I left, and he stared through me like I was a piece of hay blowing in the wind. Reney says it hasn’t been very long, and I need to let him work through it, that he’s depressed. To that I say, who the fuck ain’t?

  Dee comes back from her shower with three-quarter-length sleeves and yoga pants for Mama so you won’t see nothing sinful if Mama’s skirt rides up.

  “Look, Mama,” Dee says. She’s wearing a big jewel-crusted cross around her neck. It dangles over Mama as Dee leans down. “The fabric is quick dry,” she yells. “So if you really go to getting it, you won’t be sweaty against your skin.” She shows her the lady on the tag who’s running and smiling with little dumbbells in her hands. “Might be you before long, Mama. We just got to get started.”

  “I’ve never seen one soul so happy to be running,” I say.

  Dee looks hurt. I shrug and make a face at Mama. I swear she grins or tries to. The right side of her mouth stays down, but the left side comes up just a little. I think she nods her head at me. She was never much into bullshit either.

  “Mama,” I say. “These people ain’t going to leave you alone until you do their therapy.” Mama sort of grunts, so I go on. “Your choice, but if you want to get back home to your Sequoyah County hills, you better get your butt up and do what the doctors and nurses say.”

  She doesn’t like it one bit, but we use the gait belt the nurses gave us to shift her forward. The therapist told us it’s best for her to start getting herself dressed every day, as much as she can, so we untie the gown and try to help her pull the shirt over her head. We maneuver her onto the edge of the bed and slide the pants up. We put her long denim skirt over the pants so she feels holy. I put the skirt’s waistband in her good hand.

  “Pull it up, Mama,” I say. She holds on to the skirt but doesn’t do anything with her arm. I start to cry, because for all I know she don’t even know how to get her arm to do what we’re telling her to do. “Like this,” I say and work the arm up for her. Her hand relaxes, and the skirt falls to the floor.

  Dee has ahold of the belt from the side to keep Mama from sliding into the floor. I can hear from her sniffles that she’s crying too. This keeps happening. We’re trying to get some simple thing done, and the weight of what Mama can’t do and who she is or isn’t any longer and might not ever be again strikes us hard, and the next thing you know, the air is thick with our bawling. We try to hide it from Mama, but if she knows anything, she knows.

  We finally get her half-decent and put brand-new white Target tennis shoes on her feet. We’ve just got her settled in the wheelchair, ready for therapy or whatever the nurses throw at her, when Sheila knocks at the open doorway. She presses her face to mine, and her cheek is already wet. She sniffs and smooths her blouse real fast and starts to pray over Mama before she sings. All of us are crying by the time she finishes, but then she offers to sew fabric beneath the V-necks of Mama’s therapy shirts “so Aunt Lula is as modest as she’d want.” I love little Sheila with all my heart, but there’s always a step beyond what you think is good enough with these people. You’d think we would learn.

  Mama’s first word comes later that afternoon, as I’m combing through a tangle in her hair: “Don’t.”

  Before long, she’s ordering us around like servants. Never says please. Yells at us if we are too slow or fast or move her wrong. Asks me to close the blinds, but I close them too much. Tells me to open them back up just so, and I go too far. When I say, “Mama, I ain’t sure where you want them,” she says, “Oh, you ain’t?” and gives me a real satisfied glare.

  I know what she’s doing, just like she knows quitting school embarrasses the hell out of me. She knew it before the stroke, and she knows it now. There’s no reason she’d say that but meanness and an aim to hurt.

  Of course I don’t linger on it. I run down to the nurses’ station and tell them she said a three-word sentence. When the doctor comes in, she goes back to staring at the wall. Not a word. After talking to her a bit and running her through some quick checks, the doctor sighs deeply and pats her on the leg. Then he takes us outside the room.

  He listens kindly but looks at us with pity, like we are wishful thinking, wanting our mother to heal despite the terrible evidence before us. They don’t know the extent of her meanness, and I tell him as much. He says, “A stroke of this magnitude often makes a person combative who never was before.”

  “It must be a miracle,” I say. “Because Mama has come through this as mean as ever.”

  When Mama pulled the bandage off my hand that day, I stood there waiting on her palm, ready to tell her once and for all she wasn’t going to hit me ever again. Unlike Mama, I knew where Daddy had got off to. I was ready to pack a bag and head for Texas whether he wanted anything to do with any of us again or not. And if he didn’t, I had just about decided I could find love in the leftovers of the Manson family somewhere in the desert.

  When she kissed the top of my hand and started to cry, I didn’t pull away. I don’t know what it was that let me stand still while she got close and pulled my hand to her breast that morning.

  “Oh Justiney,” she said. “My sweet, sweet Teeny.”

  Her voice was familiar but I didn’t know it anymore. I don’t know how to explain it except to say that things I’d shut out a long time before kind of washed over me. A little girl with two black braids flashed through the screen door with a puppy named Chief. This was from before Mama started chasing strays off with a broom and drowned that bunch of kittens because they’d do nothing but get us attached. There was a mother at the table, up late of the evening working on her paintings. She could be distant, but when you had her eye, you felt like you must be the luckiest girl in the world. She wasn’t sick. She was the most beautiful woman in Beulah Springs. On the edges of it all was her husband. You could see it on his face: he’d been waiting all day to get home. There were short sleeves. Bare arms jutting all over the place! And makeup!

  Her voice was familiar that day. But I didn’t know it anymore.

  She kissed the top of my head—she still stood almost a foot over me then—and pulled me into her, smelling like butter and the rose-scented Avon powder puff us girls went in on for her birthday. We stood there like that, me breathing her in, feeling like a lost world was re-creating itself in my chest, her breast heaving.

  Then it stopped. She bent low to my eyes and said, “I can’t make you pray, Justine. I can make you go to church and make you dress for the Lord.” She wiped my hair from my face. “But I can’t love you to Heaven, honey.”

  She turned to the piano where she kept the bottle of Pompeian olive oil, said a quick prayer over that, too, and poured some into her palm. She wiped her hands over my hair and over my heart and eyelids and over the X I’d carved into my hand the night before. She pulled me over to the couch, and she got down on her knees and sank her face into the cushions and began to speak her prayers low at first. Presently she began to moan and then to shout.

  I’d been prayed over more times than I could count by then, so this wasn’t something to take note of. I’d seen exorcisms and sign readers and all sorts of wonders in our little wooden church. What had me was the tenderness I caught in my mother’s voice, the soft way she’d held me. That wasn’t anything I was used to, not since before Daddy left. I was knocked so sideways that I forgot my fear.

  “I’ll tell you something else you can’t make me do anymore, Mama,” I told her. “Sing in church. I hate it.” I took a deep breath. “And I don’t need your prayers.” I was out on a limb. I’d worried the thought deep in the night, sure the devil was winning my soul. But you couldn’t tell it that day. “We’re all going to die, Mama. But I want to live. Some ain’t in for illusion.”

  Mama raised her head from the couch cushion and wiped snot from her nose. She rubbed her eyes and blinked, probably trying to find her way to this all being a simple misunderstanding.

  “Don’t need your prayers,” I said
again.

  Mama’s eyes went vacant, and she began to beat me with her oily hands. Here I was, a hillbilly half-breed of the Oklahoma hills trying to deal with some kind of drug-addled maniac’s theory of unified existence or some bullshit, while my mama lost her ever-loving mind upon my head and shoulders. It’s not any wonder I gave up on schooling so early.

  I kept trying to hold on to Manson’s words from the crinkled Rolling Stone that was presently shoved deep under our mattress. No good, no bad, beauty in the totality of existence. Submission is a gift, and all sorts of horseshit that at the time spoke to something in my tortured insides. I tried hard to accept the force and weight of her palms, and for a good little while, I struggled.

  “The light-colored spots are damage to the brain from the stroke,” the doctor says. Then he moves his finger all across the image of my mother’s brain. “See here,” he says. “She’s been having them for months. It looks like fireworks all across here.” By here he means her entire brain, as far as I can tell.

  He leaves, and me and Dee go into the waiting room to call Josie, our middle sister in Tennessee, to relay this sorry news. Together we cry and cry and cry. The two of them have started going to church again. They’ve recently settled on a church they’re calling charismatic but not crazy! They won’t have a drink with me anymore. They claim it’s not wrong, necessarily they add, but that they just feel called to not.

  Here in the bright-lit waiting room, I close my eyes while they pray with each other over the distance. Even I have to admit those old sounds of desperation and certainty stir something in me, so I say, “Some God she serves.”

  The only other person in the waiting room is a full-blood who is dabbing his eyes with a red bandana, and all I can think about is the sad Indian in that old commercial who cries over trash and traffic. Maybe I’ve been away from Indian Country too long, but I swear this man looks just like the guy from the commercial except his belly is big and his hair is bleached orange and standing up every which way with gel and he’s wearing a sleeveless jean jacket with a middle finger patch on the breast instead of a buckskin shirt and braids. I think about me and my sister holding each other crying a minute ago and think we probably look just like the sad Indian, too, and that Mother, in her two white braids, probably looks just like him too. Everywhere in this whole hospital are sad Indians crying but nobody thought to make a commercial to save our lives, so we keep playing different takes on the same scene nobody watches but us. I want to hug the man in the cutoff jean jacket. I want to wrap my arms around his big middle and maybe never go back to North Texas and its godforsaken storms and sad cowboys and never come back here to this waiting room or Mama’s waiting-for-deliverance room. Never go anywhere but home with this man who might be crying but is by-God here.