Crooked Hallelujah

by Kelli Jo Ford

  Dee takes my hand after she says amen and a bunch of thank you, Jesuses. She squeezes it and leads me away from my destiny and back to Mama. Mama is sleeping so peacefully now that you can’t tell her brain is full of fireworks. There’s this joke that’s been going through my head since the doctor told us the news. All the sudden, it strikes me as the saddest shit I’ve ever heard, so as we settle into our nests, I start to tell it.

  “Okay, so an atheist lives next to an old-time believer, an old widow lady on a fixed income, I guess.”

  “You can’t be real,” Dee says, and I wave her off.

  “Every morning the old Christian lady walks out onto her porch and smiles into the new day and shouts, ‘Thank the Lord for this day!’ Now from the outside, she don’t have much to be thankful for. Half her windows are covered in plastic and the porch isn’t nothing but a rickety roof over a dirt floor. She probably has cancer and suffers untreated seizures, if we are being realistic here.”

  “Teeny,” Dee says.

  “No, now every morning the crotchety old atheist—you probably forgot about him. Don’t. He wears rainbow suspenders and smells like piss and yells out his window over his coffee, ‘There ain’t no Lord!’”

  Dee shifts on her love seat. She picks up her phone and starts swiping, clicking her red nails on her screen.

  “Well, this goes on for a while, as things do in jokes. And one day the atheist decides he’s going to get the crazy old Christian good. So he limps to the grocery and buys a few things. Before sunup, he puts them on her porch and waits behind the old oak tree that separates them.

  “When the lady steps out to take in the day, she sees the groceries. Well, she kneels down and begins to pull out bread, cookies, a whole bird. She gets to crying and getting happy with the Lord and cries out, ‘Thank Jesus for this bounty in my time of need!’

  “The atheist waits for her to get good and worked up and then jumps out yelling, ‘I told you, there ain’t no Lord. I bought that!’”

  “What a butt,” Dee says. Her phone is back in her lap.

  “Asshole,” I correct her. Then I add, “An’it?” practicing, I reckon, for when I go home with the man from the waiting room.

  “Anyway, the old lady isn’t fazed. She goes right on dancing for joy. ‘Thank the Lord for providing me these good, good groceries,’ she says. ‘And for making the devil pay for it.’”

  “That’s it?” Dee says.

  “I don’t know. Maybe they get married and get their own TV show.”

  “God does have a way of providing,” she says and picks her phone back up.

  “Except when he don’t or won’t,” I say, digging into my purse. I try to ease back the recliner, but it springs open and rattles my neck, sending hot pain all the way down to my numb-ass toes. “There ain’t never been a time when Mama wasn’t in need,” I say. “She’s dedicated her life to God for forty-some-odd years, refused medications for seizures on faith, and claimed her healing despite years of chewed-up tongues, wet beds, and car wrecks as evidence to the contrary. What does she get out of it? One hell of a testimony and a bed in a hospital that specializes in stroke recovery.”

  Dee gives me one of her “I’m the older sister” looks that burns me up inside. I guess I’ve raised my voice because I look over and Mama is glaring at me.

  “Mama?” I say, not sure what she’s heard. Just like that, I’m a girl waiting to get into trouble all over again. I feel myself getting madder and madder at how Mama, even laying on a hospital bed, can make me feel. My phone buzzes in my pocket, so I take it out and find a message from my sister, not the one in Tennessee, but the one sitting right here that’s damn near sixty-five. I open it, and there’s a dancing cartoon version of my sister saying: YOU MAD BRO???

  Something weird happened when Mama beat the hell out of me that day. Things went underwater for a minute after she closed her fists. Then I guess everything I’d been trying to understand clicked. Finally, all of existence and life came together and everything really was the totality of the now. An’it! Me and Charlie Manson understood what it meant to submit. I think I smiled a little. I know I held my palms up to her and said, “Jesus on the cross, Mama.” And I meant it. I was going to let her kill me, and not even out of spite.

  This is when things get a little fuzzy. She shouted, “Get thee behind me, Satan” and threw me into the old beater piano someone had given us. The next thing I know, I am coming to in my big sister’s arms. Mama is laying on the couch quivering, Josie pressing a rag to her face.

  The other girls were smart enough to put the Mississippi River and a thousand more miles between her and them. I settled for the rusty Red River, among my other shortcomings. If I was a dweller, I’d be as incapacitated as Pitch waiting on a cloud to take him up out of the pasture. So I take my medicine to grease my spine and soften the nerves that carry the pain and go to work and do a man’s job better than half of the assholes I work with. I can drink and dance them under the table at the casino when I get tired of going home to a ghost. You’ve got to keep moving, whatever you do, but when I get around Mama, my movement’s all in reverse.

  No matter. When tragedy in the form of seizures or strokes or car wrecks strikes, I load my shit in my truck and make the drive north. By the looks of things, the stroke is probably going to end these trips. When it does, I’ll be left with no place to aim these stories, and I reckon they’ll go wherever all the hurt with no home goes. And what will be left then?

  Mama’s having a good day. Dee has gone to Mama’s house to shower and tidy up the place. With no one else around, Mama is letting me work her right hand. I’m putting a rolled-up washrag in her hand and opening her fingers and letting them close themselves around the washrag to remind the muscles how to work.

  I learned all kinds of tricks taking care of my father-in-law when we had to watch him wither for one year and twelve days. That wasn’t so very long ago, and here I am putting my terrible knowledge to work. Beautiful by-God circle of life this is.

  I work the right leg, starting at the hip and moving the whole leg up. She’s not a small lady and gives me a run for my money, always. I rest her calf on my shoulder, the one with all the knots in it, hoping to get a little massage out of the deal, and raise the whole leg as high as I can. After I do that a bunch, I move down to work the knee and eventually work all the way down to her toes.

  My neck is killing me by the time I’m done, but I’ve promised her a bowl bath. I get a new rag and fill her plastic bowl with hot water and wipe it over her head until her hair is wet enough to put in the special no-rinse shampoo. Then I get the vitals: face, pits, under her breasts, and everything else.

  Mama’s always been so modest with her body that I almost can’t do it. I figure I’ve seen and done way worse, but when I stop and think about it, I’m pretty sure that’s a lie. But like damn near everything else in my life, I grit my teeth and separate myself from what I have to do. Keep going. It strikes me that me and whoever else has cleaned her up at the hospital are probably the only ones to see this sight in forty years. I’m so embarrassed that I almost get to laughing, but then I start to cry at the thought of her saving herself for Daddy and now this. That is the saddest shit I’ve ever heard of.

  After I’ve got her cleaned up, I comb and rebraid her hair. I dip the comb in a little Styrofoam cup of water and can’t help but think about how we found her out of her mind that morning after Daddy left, leaves in her hair, humming “In the Garden.” Mama was always listening to the Mahalia Jackson orchestra album then.

  Before she settled on cakes, she tried to sell the landscapes she painted of Sequoyah County. Turned out, not many people were as enamored with those hills as her, so she sold her brushes and unused canvases. She sold everything we could part with and traipsed around town looking for someone to hire a near forty-year-old woman with three daughters and no husband. She was breaking all the while, I reckon, until she ended up in the yard at 3:00 a.m. in her nightgown, hair wild all
over like the Choctaw woman who lived down by the creek and cut feed sacks into kid-sized dolls.

  Her two braids are snow-white now, thinner than they used to be, but with some water they are smooth and neat. They fall down her chest almost to her belly button. Even with her mouth drooped, she is a striking woman. It seems like just the other day she was the powerful, fearsome presence she had to become, and now here she is.

  I’m standing over her, sort of taking her in when she reaches across her body and takes my hand with her good one. She squeezes me and rubs her thumb across the inside of my palm.

  “Sweet Justine,” she says. “My Teeny.”

  I look to the door, hoping to see Dee or one of the nurses walking in, but the doorway is empty.

  She smiles, and the left side of her lips curls upward. The right side stays down, and I think of the two movie masks again, the happy one laid overtop the sad one.

  “The smart one,” she says. “Strongest too.” She pulls me toward her, and I’m surprised—even though I know I shouldn’t be—at her strength. “Me and you,” she says and bonks our foreheads together hard enough to hurt. “Always love you, though. My baby.”

  Her voice is full of air, strange.

  She kisses my hand, and I wipe the drool that’s always creeping out the right side of her mouth with the washrag. She blows stinky air from her mouth, in exasperation I guess, and slobber strings across my hand.

  “Want you to listen,” she says and pushes the washrag away.

  “You’re getting better, Mama. We’re going to be taking you home before you know it. Dee went to get your house ready.”

  “Listen,” she hisses and squeezes my hand so hard I think I might cry.

  She doesn’t gently whisper “I’m ready to go home” like I’ve heard that some sweet old Saints do on their deathbeds. There’s no peace in my mother, faithfullest of servants, as she whispers, “Help me.”

  I pull away, but she won’t let me go.

  “Justine,” she says. “I can’t.” She’s starting to cry, but her right eye won’t work so the tears are only falling from the left side.

  “Doctors say if you do the therapy there’s a good chance you’ll be able to walk with a walker. Dee’s talking to some guys today about putting a ramp on your porch.”

  “No ramp. No walker,” she says. “I’m tired.”

  “You are strong as an ox and stubborn as a mule. You can beat this.”

  As I say the words, I know I’m full of shit. She might be able to leave the stroke unit, but she’s eighty-two years old. She can’t beat that. And even if she could, to what end? The way she looks at me, burning through my eyes with her good one, I know she knows that, too, and I get the feeling she knows I know I’m full of shit.

  “Wanted you to go to Heaven. Couldn’t lose you girls,” she says. “Always loved my babies.”

  The truth is, I never doubted Mama loved me. She loved us fiercely, even as she beat the hell out of us. When I was in a jam, there was not a thing I’d do before I’d make my way to a phone and call my mama. By the same token, there was not a thing I could do or any word I could fling at her that would cause her to refuse prayers on my behalf. A gentle hug after I bombed a test or some understanding that certain kids are going to have to run wild, so meet them somewhere in the middle and let them feel like they are getting away with something by wearing short sleeves, well, we can’t have everything.

  “Please,” she says. She can’t bring herself to say sorry, but I understand how a mother can go too far and regret it as soon as it happens. I understand how desperate it feels to lose the thing you’ve created that has become your only life. I feel myself think about forgiveness because I don’t know if I’ll have another chance. I’m real afraid of what that forgiveness looks like here in this hospital room on the fourth floor in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  I look around and see a pillow on the recliner. I lean down and bonk her back on the forehead, and then I kiss the red spot.

  “Hurts, don’t it?” I say, and she just looks up at me from beneath those eyebrows. I swear I see a kindness in her eyes that I thought got killed a long, long time ago. It hurts to not know if Reney ever saw this kindness in the eyes of her grandmother. Like a big old baby, I hurt for the little girl I was and wonder who she could have been without the Bible, without sickness, without so much by-God loss. But without the things that make us who we are, we’re nothing, I reckon. Pitch standing in the pasture without his daddy, waiting to get carried away with the dust.

  I crawl onto the bed beside her and lay on my side along her. I get up under her bad arm and position it across me like she’s holding me herself. I put one of my legs over her leg. I close my eyes and can smell her again from all those years ago. Rose-scented powder and butter.

  “You made me strong, Mama,” I tell her. “You did what you could.”

  “I’m ready to go home.”

  “I know, Mama,” I say, but what I know is I’m full of shit. I’m not strong, not as strong as she thinks, never strong like her. I’m afraid that every day that Mama suffers from now on is my responsibility.

  “You can’t give up now, Mama,” I whisper in her ear.

  She doesn’t answer.

  “God will take you when he’s ready. Granny will be there. Uncle Thorpe will be there. There’ll be a rejoicing, Mama.”

  I feel her breathing with my body. Our breaths even into one another until hers catches and she lets loose a ragged, empty cough.

  I start to hum so soft I don’t even know if Mama can hear it. I rock her until I don’t even recognize songs in the sounds I make. I think maybe she joins me, but when I finally stop, it’s just hospital noises I hear.

  “Mama, are you okay?” I ask. She still doesn’t answer, but her hand finds mine around her waist. She squeezes once and lets go.

  When Sheila and Samuel walk in the door, I’ve already got my backpack zipped up, and I’m strapping my pillow to the side. Mama’s eyes shift from me to sweet little Sheila, who’s rubbing on her arm, asking if she’d like a song. Dee comes in just as I’m saying goodbye.

  “You’re leaving?” Dee says.

  “I’ve got to get back to work,” I tell her. She stands there looking confused, still holding on to her purse, but she hugs me back when I squeeze her neck.

  I go to Mama and bend down and wrap her up. She feels so small, like a tiny bird. I press every bit of her into me for as long as I can.

  “Teeny,” Mama whispers. “Thank you.”

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” I say. Then I go. As I make my way past the nurses’ station to the elevator, I hear the Saints’ voices starting up. Dee joins them. The harmony they make is beautiful. I feel it moving along my arms and into my spine and down my legs.

  For a long time, I thought harmony was just people using air and vibrations at the same time. I thought that once the singing stopped it might as well have never even started. But when the heavy hospital doors close behind me, there is a ringing in my chest like a song. When I close the door to my truck and later when I cross the state line, I can still feel the voices. They carry me home.

  PART III

  Near Future

  What Good Is an Ark to a Fish?

  1.

  I pad around my house in the morning, turning on faucets and lights to assure myself that the apocalypse is still self-contained over a thousand miles away at my mother’s doorstep. Texas border states have already begun rationing plans. Through their television noise, scientists and preachers scramble to understand such centralized tragedy, use incantations and formulas to predict where this may go if it ever leaves Bonita. Some claim aliens.

  2.

  To be clear, I’m not speaking in metaphor when I tell you the end of the world began on my second wedding day, more than a year ago. Leaves littered my mother’s lawn. Dried bits the grasshoppers left behind turned Bonita parking lots and roads a pale green ocean. A case of wine left too long in a truck exploded. Trees stood naked, bare arms raise
d to the sky as if seeking answers.

  My mother’s temperature gauge read 112 that day, but I was in love, if sweaty, in my sundress. Outside, grasshoppers crunched underfoot. We kept a broom handy to push them outside, letting three in for every one swept out. Mother, embarrassed, ran her well dry trying to turn brown grass green, as if the weather and bugs were a reflection on her and her housekeeping, not a sign of what was to come.

  3.

  I fill the bathtub each night. When the faucet squeaks to life come morning, I water the plants, fill the dog’s bowl, and empty the tub, watching the clear water swirl away to nothing. Plant stalks swell and leaves droop. I wander out to check the sky for dangerous cloud formations, kneel and place both palms on the ground. Neighbors wave, keep walking. Leaves shift in the breeze, lazy and unconcerned. My Idaho sky is blue for days. Rainbows come and go in the sprinkler’s twirl.

  I don’t know if a thunderstorm would make me feel better or worse at this point, so I turn on the television. Bonita’s apocalypse is growing old for the rest of the country. No news for almost a week.

  4.