“Do you just want to hurt me?”
I did want to hurt her and in the next second I didn’t. “I’m sorry, Mama. I’m so sorry.”
She wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “Well, for your information, men in the Bible usually had more than one wife. They took a woman into their tent and they were married. They didn’t go through all the rigmarole we do today. In the eyes of God, we are married.”
In the eyes of most people, Brother Terrell was still married to Betty Ann, but I decided to let that one go.
My mother waved her left hand through the air and said in the breathy voice of a new bride, “Aren’t they beautiful?” Brother Terrell had given Mama a set of diamond-encrusted wedding rings he had pulled from the offering. When believers had no money to give or when they wanted to “prove God” for a miracle, they made an offering of their most treasured possessions. The thought was that the goods would be sold and the money transferred to the ministry, and that God would honor the sacrifice and answer the prayer of the giver. Jewelry, they dropped directly into the offering buckets. In the early years, Brother Terrell announced from the platform that we didn’t have the time to sell the items, but people continued to give them anyway. He stopped making that announcement after awhile. After the evening services, someone separated the trinkets from the money and put them into a different bucket. It wasn’t unusual to see members of the evangelistic team at the back of the platform going through the jewelry and taking what they wanted. Sometimes they paid for it and sometimes they didn’t. Mama contended that Brother Terrell always paid for what he took. He brought home several sets of china that we never used, silver, stereos, antique furniture, handwoven Indian bedding. I was the only girl in fifth grade with a diamond watch. Mules kicked the china to bits. Someone tore holes in the Indian blankets. I lost the diamond watch. We didn’t possess the capacity to value such things. They meant almost nothing to us.
The one exception was the rings. My mother loved those rings. Every time we went to a revival and Brother Terrell asked people to prove God by digging deep and giving something they could not afford to give (he meant money), Mama slipped the rings from her purse and dropped them into the offering buckets surreptitiously. She took seriously the concept of proving God. She believed if she gave God everything she had, he would work things out so that she and Brother Terrell could be married properly and she could wear the wedding rings he gave her under the tent as well as out in the world. Brother Terrell fished the rings out of the offerings many times and gave them back to her. One night, someone got to the rings before Brother Terrell. He had to find another set and the cycle began again.
My mother believed she and Brother Terrell were soul mates ordained by God to be together to build a great ministry. He received the visitations, and she translated them into their own brand of theology and wrote articles under his name explaining the revelations. She encouraged his ambitions to take his ministry worldwide and helped him develop a strategy to do so. She believed he would “do right” by her. All she had to do was pray and keep the faith. I know all of this because when we were not arguing about her relationship with Brother Terrell, she confided in me. She had no one else. She kept her affair with Brother Terrell a secret from her family and the longtime friends she had made while traveling with the tent. Neither her family nor her friends knew where we lived. The neighbors she befriended thought she and her “husband” were flashy dressers and secretive, but they chalked it up to their citified ways. They had no idea how secret their lives really were. To talk with anyone other than me about what was going on would have been to betray what was most important to her: Brother Terrell and the ministry.
I was desperate for my mother to save herself, to save us. Especially after she told me she was pregnant. She said we would manage by keeping the baby a secret from everyone in the ministry, and from her family. When we traveled to the tent revivals, we would leave the baby with a sitter. Simple. I cast and recast the reasons she should leave Brother Terrell, out loud and to myself. He couldn’t leave Betty Ann. The baby would grow up and someone someday would have to know the identity of the father. I told my mother that if Brother Terrell loved her, truly loved her, he wouldn’t want her to be so sad. I thought clear, compelling arguments would make the difference. Instead they made me my mother’s adversary. She couldn’t stand to hear me say what she was thinking and our “talks” inevitably ended in argument.
People have called Brother Terrell a sociopath, but I don’t think that’s true. He had a conscience. I woke to him crying in the middle of the night more than once, calling out again and again, “My kids, oh, my kids. What am I going to do about my kids? Oh God. My children.”
The first time I heard him, I slipped out of my bed and felt along its edge until I found the door and pulled it back an inch or two. He was on his knees in the living room, holding his head in his hands. Mama held him and the two of them rocked to and fro in silhouette. A crescent moon grinned in the window behind them. What the hell are you grinning at? I eased the door shut, climbed back into the bed, and fell asleep with my fingers in my ears.
The road between sin and hell was turning out to be long and circuitous instead of short and direct. I could deal with that. On days my mother dropped Gary and me off in town to spend the afternoon wandering in and out of stores, I rolled up my knee-length skirts to hit midthigh and flirted with older boys. We set up meetings in alleyways and in nearby houses where I let them kiss me, keeping their tongues out of my mouth and their hands away from restricted zones. On occasion I smoked and said “damn.” My brother charged me a percentage of my allowance not to tell. It’s strange to think that our moral code was such that this delinquent behavior did not make me feel half as guilty as saving up to buy my first pair of jeans. When I pulled on those pants, I was bucking one of the strongest and most visible tenets of holiness. Mama told me to take them off, but I wouldn’t. She stalked me through the fake-wood-paneled trailer, paraphrasing scripture in Deuteronomy: “It is an abomination for a woman to wear that which pertaineth to a man.” Not just a sin, but an abomination, she stressed. That meant it was something God hated. I reminded her that a few verses down it warns against plowing with an ox and an ass together and allowing men with crushed testicles to enter the assembly of the Lord.
She put her face so close to mine I could count the pores on her nose. “And we don’t do those things, do we?”
I backed out of slapping range. “How would we know? I don’t see anyone asking the preachers to drop their pants before they step on the platform.”
All those long talks about Brother Terrell and their future had begun to shift the balance of power between my mother and me. She relented finally, saying I could wear my filthy old pants to ride horses, but that was it. I walked outside wearing my abomination and climbed on Red Rose, the bag of bones I had spent the last year trying to ride. I thought she might throw and trample me for my sins, but she settled for her usual routine of scrubbing me against the barbed-wire fence until she was bored, then plodding back to her stall and standing there while I unsaddled her. It was business as usual, but this time my legs weren’t bleeding. Thank you, Levi Strauss. Once I had those jeans on, I didn’t want to take them off. It was so much easier to run, jump, and play baseball. Plus, my skinny legs looked better covered up. Mama threatened to burn them, so I hid whichever pair I wasn’t wearing under my mattress.
I sat in the backseat of Brother Terrell’s Thunderbird and smoothed the flounces on my fanciest dress. I always wore a dress when he was around, out of respect, and maybe a bit of fear, too, though he had not come after me with a belt in years. Gary sat beside me and flexed his bicep muscleman-style. “Feel it, just feel it.”
I ignored him and looked out the window. The car rocked toward the local diner, with Brother Terrell driving in his signature style: one foot on the gas, the other on the brake, accelerating and slowing down, accelerating and slowing down. Mama sat beside him, almost gl
amorous in her big sunglasses. Life looked so much better from the white leather interior of the T-Bird. I contemplated ordering something sophisticated for dinner, maybe a club sandwich and a TaB. We were almost to the city-limits sign when Mama turned to Brother Terrell, adjusted her sunglasses, and made one of her announcements.
“David, Donna has been taken over by a lesbian spirit.”
Gary lowered his arm and we stared at each other. Brother Terrell turned toward Mama, and then back toward the road so fast he jostled his fedora. A lesbian spirit was as bad as it got in our circle. I didn’t know whether to speak up or wait until she said something more, something I could defend myself against.
Brother Terrell straightened his hat and shook his head. “What are you talkin’ about?”
Mama sniffed and lifted her chin in the air. “She never wants to wear anything anymore but pants.”
I envisioned myself rolling in the sawdust with Brother Terrell trying to pin me down and cast the devil out of me. I was relieved to hear him tell my mother, “Look, we need to, uh, you know, I think, well, let’s pray about this, okay?”
Before she could answer, he punched in his new eight-track tape and turned up the volume. I was not a Johnny Cash fan, but “Folsom Prison Blues” sure sounded good that night. Brother Terrell had decided that while rock and roll was blasphemous and rebellious, and he didn’t mean that in a good way, God actually liked country music.
I was eleven, going on twelve, nearing the Age of Accountability, that time when a kid becomes an adult and God begins to record every sinful thought, word, and deed on a permanent spiritual record. Mama confirmed that holiness people considered twelve the cutoff point between childhood and adulthood. It depended on the individual. She raised her eyebrows and quoted from the New Testament: “For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required.”
I knew what she meant. All those years of hearing Brother Terrell preach the Word meant God had higher expectations of me. That did not seem fair. But neither did having the world end before I grew up. The end had been in sight for as long as I could remember. I took for granted that God, the devil, and the Communists had signed some sort of foreordained annihilation pact that was already unfolding. What I found more disturbing was that the more I learned of the outside world, the more it seemed to corroborate the apocalyptic visions on which I had been raised. At school they had us crouch under our desks, put our hands over our heads, and wait for the end. I read about the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in the issues of Time and Newsweek my mother brought home, and even between the ads in Seventeen magazine. I saw photos of boys who looked like high-school students fighting in Vietnam, pictures of other kids fighting in the streets with the police, pictures of blissedout teenagers, half-naked, listening to rock and roll. Proof we lived in the last days. And yet, I wanted to be in those pictures.
It was a Saturday afternoon. I was walking along Highway 6, beating at the long grasses with a stick I had picked up. My destination: the cemetery located about a mile from our trailer, the only place close enough to reach by foot. I couldn’t ride my bike because there was no shoulder on the road and the burrs would flatten my tires. Horses were too moody a mode of transportation. The day had gone cold and gray. A pickup passed. An old car. An eighteen-wheeler. All going somewhere. Everyone talked about heaven as a place where time stood still, but other than saying it had streets of gold, no one said much else about it. I imagined an embalmed sort of place. No color. No feeling. No gravity. People and angels flying off at random. I passed a neighbor’s house, tiny and cramped with a warren of rooms, each added on as time and money permitted. On the other side of the highway, a field of turned earth rolled on forever, or at least as far as I could see. Somewhere on the other side of all this, the world waited. The world with its music and books and cities and violence and terrible beauty. I paused and poked through the ice that skimmed the surface of the ditchwater. My next thought came to me with a certainty so clear and strong it frightened me: I did not want to go to heaven. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But I wasn’t sorry. Surely God knew that. I turned into the drive of the roadside cemetery. The tombstones on either side looked as though they had been stuck in the ground on a whim: one here, another there, two more on the diagonal. Why not in straight orderly rows? I walked to the end of the drive and turned around, then wandered among the graves. So many young children, babies really, with lambs and roses and cherubs etched into the stones. I sat down and leaned against the back of one of the stones. I had a soul, and God and the devil had everything else. I closed my eyes. No pictures crossed the screen of my mind and no thoughts either. I could feel my heart beat all over my body. I took a deep breath.
“Look, Devil, I’ll trade you my soul for the world. I’m not talking about a little bit of the world, I mean the whole wide world.”
I looked up from the weedy graves of the people who had lived and died right next to the heart of Texas. The sky was still there, the ground too. I dusted off the back of my jeans and walked home. I rarely thought about my deal with the devil after that day. Nothing changed much. I invoked the blood of Jesus to protect me from demons when I went to the bathroom at night. I prayed when I remembered, but there was less guilt, less remorse. I had made my choice. I would live in the world. In truth, it wasn’t that easy, but it was a beginning.
Chapter Nineteen
SAYONARA, HELLHOLE, WE WERE MOVING. BROTHER TERRELL HAD bought property about thirty miles away, outside a town with the improbable name of Groesbeck. An enigmatic smile perched on my mother’s lips each time I asked her about our new house. “Just wait till you see it,” she said. “Just wait.”
Mama switched on the blinker in her dark green Thunderbird and turned off the highway onto a long circular drive. We glided past crepe myrtle trees in hot-pink bloom and an acre of the greenest front lawn I had ever seen. She stopped the car in front of a yellow two-story house shaded by giant oaks and turned off the engine. This was the kind of house that girls with long shiny hair and braces disappeared into every afternoon, girls with “Homecoming Queen” stamped on their future. I hung over the back of the front seat and shook a rattle in the general direction of my new sister. Mama insisted on putting baby Carol’s carrier in the front passenger seat, “in case of emergency.” That way, if she had to put on the brakes, she could throw her right arm out and save her.
I craned my neck to see around the house to the garage apartment or trailer in back. “Where is it?”
My mother glanced over her shoulder. “Where’s what?”
“Our house.”
She opened the door and paused before getting out of the car. “This is our house.” She walked around to the passenger’s side and lifted Carol out of the carrier saying, “Hi there, hi there,” in that sticky voice people use with babies. Gary and I were right behind her. He looked up at the trees, then turned to face the house, spreading his arms out as if to encompass the view. “We’re going to live here?”
“This is it, and your room is at the very top. It’s a converted attic.”
He ran up the steps to the long porch and threw himself into one of the three white rockers that seemed to be waiting for us. Mama shifted the baby to one shoulder and asked me to grab the diaper bag.
“And Donna, close your mouth. You’ll catch flies.”
We unlocked the front door and stepped into something called a foyer with a hanging light and a wall-mounted gold mirror with a table underneath. We huddled in the doorway looking into a white-carpeted living room with nine-foot ceilings and furniture that was decidedly not early American. A dark blue low-slung couch stretched along a wall punctuated by three tall windows. Cream-colored floor-length drapes framed the windows and were pulled back by wide black ribbons at either end. The black fabric shades were a revelation; who knew they came in anything other than white plastic? Outside each window, just below the midway point where the shades stopped, hung a yellow-andblack g
arden spider. A little jewel of color located at the central point of each of the three large webs. Even the spiders are color-coordinated. Islands of glass-topped tables floated through the room. Gary and I took off our shoes and slid our feet through the white shag carpeting. We ran our fingers over everything, including the empty built-in bookshelves. We passed without speaking through the wide arched opening into the dining room. My mother flipped a wall switch and a chandelier spilled light over a long dark table with eight tall chairs.
“Oh.” The word came out as a soft sigh from all three of us. Off to the side, an empty china cabinet awaited its new charges. It would have to make do with the Harvest Gold dinnerware Mama had bought with green stamps. We pushed through a door into the kitchen with its floor-to-ceiling cabinets, a second table, and a pantry almost as large as Gary’s old bedroom. So much space. Half our trailer would have fit in the kitchen.
We rounded the corner and traipsed up the stairs, through the bedrooms fully furnished with beds, dressers, tables, lamps, and a picture or two. Where had all this stuff come from? I peeked in the closets, relieved to find them empty. The dressing room attached to my mother’s bedroom was the only unfurnished room in the house. Mama nodded toward the longest wall. Her voice broke the spell. “The crib will go there.”
“Mama, all this furniture, whose is it?”
She laughed and handed me the baby. “Ours now. We bought it all from the people who lived here. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers.
“All those years of sacrifice, and now the Lord is blessing the ministry. Brother Terrell is going to get that divorce from Betty Ann. Things are going to be different.” Her voice sounded like a kid who couldn’t believe her luck.
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