Holy Ghost Girl

by Donna M. Johnson

  About fifty people, mostly women, approached the front and arranged themselves in a semicircle around Brother Terrell, heads bowed. He took the money from each of their hands and prayed with them individually. They stood straight and still, absorbing whatever it was Brother Terrell and God promised. As they walked away, Brother Terrell once again issued his call.

  “There are fifty more of you out there. God is dealing with you right now. Come on up here and help us take the message of Jesus to hundreds of thousands in India who have never heard his name. We need your support.”

  Another twenty made their way down the ramp. “I’m not asking for me. I’m asking for God. You better think twice about denying God.”

  Thirty minutes of coaxing and mild threats yielded a total of about eighty believers willing to part with a hundred dollars. In the end Brother Terrell handed out twenty pledge envelopes addressed to his office in Dallas. The Lord would have to rely on a lick and a promise to get the rest of his ten thousand dollars.

  As the service wound down, Pam leaned over and asked if I wanted to come back to the motel and spend the night with her. She put her arm around me. “Don’t look so shocked. Don’t you know I love you, Donna?”

  My mother gave me permission to go with Pam. Mary Sue drove us to Mama’s room, where we picked up my pajamas and toothbrush, and then we went back to their motel. We turned past the blinking NO VACANCY sign (believers had filled the place) into the parking lot of a moldering cinder-block motor court, the same kind of place we had stayed in on the road from time to time as kids. Brother Terrell had since graduated to the Holiday Inn, as had my mother. I couldn’t believe how grown-up we were when Pam put her key in the door. We were practically on our own. Mary Sue said good night and closed the door between the adjoining rooms. I brushed my teeth while Pam smeared something like Pond’s Cold Cream over her face. She said she was traveling with her daddy all summer, on her own—well, except for Mary Sue. Her daddy paid the older girl to keep an eye on her.

  “Mostly ’cause she needs the money. She’s more of a friend than a babysitter.” She tissued the white goop off her neck. “What do you wash your face with?”

  “Soap. Sometimes.”

  I padded toward the bed. An off-white trench coat, hanging in the recessed area of the room that passed for a closet, caught my eye. I stopped and fondled the sleeve.

  Pam eyed me in the mirror. “What is it?”

  “Nothing. Whose coat?”

  “Mary Sue’s. Why?”

  “Mama has one just like it.”

  “Well, Mary Sue’s isn’t some cheap raincoat. It’s a London Fog.” She met my eyes and said in a very deliberate tone, “Daddy bought it for her.”

  There was something about the way she said “cheap” that sounded like a slur against my mother, and something about her daddy buying the coat for Mary Sue that felt like a threat to Mama. I let the sleeve fall from my hand and said in my most casual voice, “He bought one for Mama too.” I turned my back and in an instant Pam had backed away from the sink and hurled herself on me and knocked me to the mildewed carpet.

  She straddled my back and grabbed my hair, drawing my head back. With her other hand she twisted my arm behind my back. I yelled for her to get off me and she yelled for me to keep my mouth shut about her daddy. Mary Sue burst through the door and demanded to know what was going on.

  “She tried to insinuate something about Daddy and her mama.”

  Mary Sue knelt beside us. “Let her up, Pam, come on.” Her voice was low and soothing.

  “I’ll let her up when she takes it back.”

  “Get off me, you, you . . . you mean thing.” I tried to flip over but couldn’t.

  “What do you want her to take back?”

  “She said Daddy bought her mama a raincoat just like he bought you.” She was crying. “Why would he buy her a coat, Mary Sue? Why would he?”

  She let go of my hair. Mary Sue pulled her off me, and then turned to help me up. Pam buried her face in the older girl’s chest. Mary Sue put her arms around her and rubbed her hands up and down her back, like an older sister, like a mother. Pam cried long, heaving sobs. I felt miserable and useless. I had used a seemingly casual remark as a weapon against a girl I loved like a sister, and worse, I had aimed it at what I knew was a tender spot. Mary Sue walked her to the bed and sat down beside her.

  “Look, Pam, that coat don’t mean nothing. Your daddy bought one a few months back for all the women who work for him. He bought one for Martha Joyce and Sister Sonnie and Brother Starrs’s wife.”

  Pam snuffled. “Really?”

  “Yes, really. Now you and Donna make up so we can all go to bed.”

  “Sorry” seemed a flimsy word, but it was all I had to offer. Pam and I hugged each other’s necks and fell into bed, exhausted by everything we had said and all the tension created by what we had left unsaid. The next morning, when Mary Sue went to the tent service, Pam and I walked to the store. She pulled out twenty dollars—from her daddy, she said—and bought bags of notebooks, paper, files, pens, stamps, envelopes, and other office supplies. We went back to the room and played secretary. I filled out forms and Pam signed them. We wrote about twenty-five letters to people who didn’t exist, sealed them in envelopes with fake addresses and real stamps, and dropped them in the out-box of the motel office. We ran back to the room and fell on the bed laughing. With our pretend work finished, we fixed each other’s hair, put on Pam’s best dresses, and pretended to be secretaries, then singers, then actresses. Ann-Margret and Sandra Dee, out on the town. We held out our pinkies and drank Coke from the stubby motel glasses. We giggled and vamped as the light outside deepened and shadow spread across the room. Pam was right; we were not kids anymore. At least we never would be again, not together. Mama picked me up early that evening before church started, and without a word of protest, I climbed in the car. It was time. I waved briefly through the dusty car window and turned to face the front, sad and relieved to be on my way.

  Chapter Eighteen

  LIFE CHANGED THE DAY I SLAMMED BILL DODGE’S ARM DOWN FOR THE third time on our front porch in Houston.

  “Ta-da! I’m the arm-wrestling champ.”

  His face flushed and the red rushed all the way up and through his blond crew cut. He pulled himself up and stood by my front door, the same door he had walked out of so many times carrying a stack of Mama’s homemade oatmeal cookies. His cheeks puffed a couple of times, and then he blew.

  “That man is not your uncle, and everybody knows it!” He yelled loud enough for everyone on the block to hear, and hopped on his bike.

  I ran after him. “You better pedal fast, weeny arms.”

  The veil of normalcy under which my family and I thought we were hidden had been ripped away. None of my friends had questioned the identity of the man I called Uncle David, not to my face. I put my dog, Prissy, in the basket of my bicycle and rode up and down the streets for hours, soothed by the motion.

  That night at dinner Mama asked me what Bill had yelled. I told her it was nothing, that he hated losing to a girl, but I could tell by the way she looked at me that she knew better. A month or so later, she announced we were moving to the country. I blamed Bill Dodge, but larger forces orchestrated the move. I wept when I told my teacher. She tried to ease my misery by pulling down the state map in our classroom and tapping her long pointer at the exact center of the map.

  “What do you see?”

  I sniffled. “A red heart.”

  “That’s where you’re moving, to the heart of Texas.”

  I looked closer. Printed next to the heart was the word “Waco,” the future scene of the Branch Davidian siege.

  Waco was the cover story. It was the place I was told to say we were headed. This was part of Mama’s and Brother Terrell’s strategy to throw off the Communists or the Antichrist or perhaps Betty Ann (though no one said that), should they come looking for us. We actually landed six miles outside of Marlin, a tiny community thirty
miles east of Waco. Still, it made me feel better to think of us living close to a city that looked like a valentine on the map. Any romantic imaginings vanished when I laid eyes on our new home, a secondhand trailer squatting a few feet off Highway 6 on a hard patch of ground that would have been completely barren except for two spindly trees that produced bushels of inedible pears and no shade. An old white house with peeling paint and rotting wood leaned to the left of the trailer. Long stretches of mud-clotted land with outcrops of mesquite trees, ramshackle barns, and outbuildings separated us from the patchwork houses of our neighbors. Barbed wire delineated property lines. Everyone lived far away from everyone else.

  Mama tried to soften the blow. “You’ll have your own bedroom! This is ours. We own it.” When Gary and I remained unconvinced she added, “Look on the bright side, you can have more dogs.”

  My mother made good on her promise of more dogs, but they began dying soon after we moved in. First to go was Prissy, kicked to death by cows. Then we found Suzy, Prissy’s replacement, dead on the highway. A giant, sweet-tempered German shepherd named Kelly met his fate there, as did Brutus, a black adolescent Great Dane whose first and last attempt to mount the long-legged and more experienced Guinevere had ended in a broken and bandaged penis. I spotted him one morning as I stepped out of the trailer. He lay stretched out on the far side of the two-lane road, his taped and splinted member glowing white against his dark fur. The neighbors shrugged and said too bad’bout those dogs.

  Gary and I had been raised by country people, but we were not country kids. Until we moved to Marlin, we had never cleaned a horse stall, rounded up cows (just wave your arms when they stampede toward you), ridden a horse, or raised an animal destined for the slaughterhouse. The kids who lived around us had plenty of experience at these things and had developed a mental and physical toughness we lacked. They sniffed out weakness and pretension like bloodhounds.

  The first Monday Gary and I stepped up onto the school bus, it went silent. Twenty pairs of eyes took our measure. Why, oh why had I worn the go-go boots? Blood thrummed in my ears. I focused on the unshaven face of the bus driver. His cheeks hung down to his chin. His eyes drooped. His lips drooped. Someone had let the air out of this man a long time ago. Mama had taught me it was my Christian duty to lift up the downtrodden. I read the nameplate on the dash and said in my most grown-up, citified voice, “Good morning, Mr. Nix.”

  A dark, juicy wad issued from his mouth and landed with a splat in the big coffee can he kept beside his seat. He threw the bus in gear and we lurched forward.

  That night at dinner, I told my mother about saying hello to poor old Mr. Nix. She looked at me with admiration.

  “I hope you always have the gumption to do what’s right.”

  “But how do you know what’s right?”

  “You feel it. Like you did on the bus this morning.”

  The next morning I stepped into the bus, took a deep breath, and said, “Good morning, Mr. Nix.” Before I could sit down, a chorus of kids echoed in my own prissy falsetto, “Good morning, Mr. Nix.” On Wednesday, a barrage of spitballs followed the chorus of mimics. On Thursday night, I prayed Mr. Nix would die in his sleep.

  Gary and I stood in the middle of our caliche drive Friday morning, dreading that smear of yellow on the horizon, hoping as we would for the next two years that we had somehow managed to miss the bus. He picked up a smooth, round stone and with a flick of his wrist, sent it skipping one, two, three over the blacktop. We grinned at each other. He stepped back from the highway and stood beside me. We turned our heads and eyed the bus lumbering toward us. Gary ran his sneaker over the loose rocks, clearing a small path through them. “You don’t have to do it. I don’t think it makes him feel better about being disgusting and all.” The bus huffed to a stop and the door opened. My brother looked over his shoulder before he stepped inside. “I won’t tell.”

  I took my seat at the front of the bus that morning without saying a word. Dead silence. Followed by a hailstorm of spitballs and laughter.

  My mother introduced herself to neighbors as Mrs. Ter-rell, with the emphasis on the last instead of the first syllable, a mispronunciation intended to throw off anyone who might connect Mr. Ter-rell, with Brother Terrell. They decided a certain amount of disguise was necessary, and Brother Terrell began to go incognito in lime-green leisure suits and straw fedoras. This in a community where Wranglers and cowboy hats were standard male dress. Then there were the big black Jackie O sunglasses he and my mother insisted on wearing indoors. A waitress who worked the dark cavern of Marlin’s “nicest” restaurant once suggested they take off their sunglasses if they wanted to actually see the menu.

  “Or you could stand under the Schlitz sign over there by the counter.”

  They raised their sunglasses slightly to peruse the menu and lowered them again when she returned to take our orders.

  Brother Terrell fueled rumors with his habit of paying in cash for everything from the most expensive saddles in Barnett’s Feed and Seed to land. A neighbor told us the townspeople speculated he was a professional gambler, mobster, drug dealer. He squinted at my mother in her dark glasses and waited for her to fill him in. She tried to dance around the question.

  “Oh, he does a little of this and that.” The neighbor pressed her and finally she said her husband was a traveling salesman. What did he sell? “Oh, cars, heavy equipment, land, things like that.”

  The neighbor said, “Uh-huh, I see.”

  Whatever people suspected, the great silver heist probably confirmed. The Lord revealed to Brother Terrell that as the Mark of the Beast approached, U.S. paper currency would lose its value and silver and gold coins would be the only money worth anything. Around the same time, he heard the government was withdrawing silver dimes, quarters, half-dollars, and silver dollars from circulation and replacing them with coins that had either less silver or no silver at all. He began to bring home sacks of change from the offerings.

  Mama held a large cloth bag over my bed and the coins rushed from it like water through a broken dam. She emptied another and another. A metallic smell filled my closet-size bedroom. The smell was so strong I could taste it on my tongue. Mama shook another bag and hundreds of dimes fell onto the inverted cone-shaped mountain of coins. I thrust my hands into the pile, buried up to my wrists in money.

  “Careful, now. You don’t want to scatter everything.” Mama stood over me, folding the bags in half one by one, running her fingers over the crease in each one, like she did the sheets when we folded laundry. She stacked the bags on my dresser and sat on the edge of my bed. She picked up a dime and held it between her thumb and pointer finger, turning it so the edge was toward me.

  “You want to look for edges that are silver like this. We’ll keep those.” She threw the dime into a bucket on the floor, sifted through the pile of money again, and pulled out a second dime. “The ones that have this coppery edge? We’ll give those back to Brother Terrell.”

  The mindlessness of sorting the coins appealed to me. Mama brought peanut-butter sandwiches and milk and set them beside my bed, and we ate and sorted together. Over time we filled six to eight large trash cans with silver. We stored the trash cans in the old house that stood beside our trailer, next to the room where we stored hay and feed for the livestock. We padlocked the front and back doors of the house. The arrangement worked fine until my mother hired someone to feed the cows and horses. Maybe the guy was looking for feed and stumbled upon the coins or maybe he just took a peek one day. Either way, the next time Mama checked the trash cans, they were only three-quarters full. She balked at calling the sheriff. She said she felt bad for the man who worked for us, that he was poor and black and had a bunch of kids. She did not say that she was reluctant to explain to the sheriff why she kept so much money squirreled away in trash cans. Eventually she did press charges and the man went to jail for three months. We drove to his house each week while he was in jail and gave his wife a check for the same amount of m
oney he had made working for us. It was the least we could do after putting temptation right in front of the man, Mama said. She bought a new lock for the doors, but she didn’t move the money.

  Not long after our move, my mother called Gary and me into the living room and made a somewhat breathless announcement. “I’ve got something to tell you both. Y’all sit there on the couch.” She smoothed the full skirt of her shirtwaisted dress, sat between us, and took our hands. It was Mama’s version of a June Cleaver moment. All I could think was, Uh-oh, here we go. She looked at Gary, then at me, and ran her tongue over her lips. “I know this move has been hard on you, leaving your friends and all. But something good has come from it. From now on, you can call Brother Terrell ‘Daddy.’ ”

  Gary broke into cheers. “We’ll have a real daddy.”

  My brother called every man he spent more than ten minutes with “Daddy,” so Brother Terrell’s latest incarnation suited him. I had spent every year of my life since I was one living apart from my dad, but I had never thought he was gone for good until that moment.

  Mama put her hand on my shoulder. “Donna, you’ve got that lip so far out, you could ride it to town.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I thought you loved Brother Terrell. What is it?”

  I didn’t know where to begin. There were so many “it’s” piled one on top of the other in a big sticky mess. My real daddy. Pam’s and Randall’s real daddy. My mother’s coming and going. Sister Coleman. Moving from one crappy place to the next. Always talking about the Truth, but living a lie. I did not know how to choose my words or pull apart the grievances. In the end it didn’t matter. The words chose me.

  “He is not our daddy! You are not his wife! This is all a big, fat lie!”

  My mother’s eyes met mine and in one awful instant I knew. This was the big “it.” Her hand popped across my face. The slap registered, but the euphoria of saying what only seconds before had been unsayable and the righteousness of knowing I was right, numbed the sting. I could not stop myself. “The Bible says thou shalt not commit adultery, but you do it all the time.”