by Lynn Pruett
Now I was not right in my heart about Reverend Peterson anymore—he pushed things too far at the truck stop. There was evil in his flock and I intended to root it out. So that’s when I went searching for my Polaroid. I haven’t taken many pictures in my life. You have to be able to see more than what you do. I might see a pretty blue jay pecking at the yellow grasses so I shoot it but what comes back is a picture of weeds with a speck of blue. I do not know why I have this calamity with wildlife but it happens all the time. So I gave up bothering.
I cotched that hussy in her lair. She camped out in the woods near the truck stop, under an upheaveal of rock that made a cave, and inside there was soft moss and dirt and leaves and a chair and an air mattress, and some pillows and blankets. It was the sheets hung out to dry on a pine that caught my eye in the first place. She was asleep. I shook her awake roughly.
She had no place to go. The rock wall was behind her.
“I know you,” she said. “You’re the maid at Dollarskin.”
“I am not,” I said, “but I recognize your face. Your chest has been subjected to Miracle-Gro since our paths last crossed.”
She shifted. A blue bracelet sparkled on her right hand as she moved to a sitting-up position.
“You are going down the wrong path.”
“Oh, fuck off,” she said tiredly.
“I’ll offer you a better life.”
“Don’t talk church to me or I’ll blow your head off,” Ash Lee said, and showed me her little revolver.
I could tell she had not the energy to use it. “Look here,” I said. “I want you to tell me if you’ve had commerce with any of these men.” I opened the church yearbook. Every year we each get a turn to set for the photographer from Atlanta to document our membership in its best light. He makes a yearbook of the Church of the Holy Resurrection. We are fine-scrubbed and beautiful, if I say so myself. It hurt me to foul this book with these doings, but I could not stop now. I flipped past the picture of the church cross at night. I showed Ash Lee first the intact families in alphabetical order, the men in suits, the women all in flowerdy dresses with bows and poufed-up hair, the children grinning like jack-o’-lanterns, powdered and dusted like they belonged on a wedding cake. I am in there, lumped with the older unattached folk, Gee and Haw on either side of me like bookends. I wore my lilac dress and gloves. It was a good likeness but for the knobs beside me. I suddenly thought I didn’t want to know if Gee and Haw were active in Ash Lee’s way. We passed over the Toller Odoms, the Baker Thomases, the Reynoldses. I was watching to see if any pictures caused her to light up or get gloomy, but nothing showed on that foxy face. She touched the women’s dresses as if she could feel the raised roses or the starched bows.
She held the picture of the Childerses close to her eyes. “That’s the guy with the bruises. Football player. He’s got a new convertible, but he is so strange,” said Ash Lee.
“Upon my soul, I do not need to hear these confessions,” I announced. “Do you know him, yes or no?”
“He treats me like I’m his date,” said Ash Lee. “He never does anything. We go to the drive-in and watch the movie and drink Coke and I eat caramel corn and Jujubes and then he brings me back here and I kiss him on the hairy cheek. He gave me this bracelet.” She shook her hand and the blue beads shone. “He is really strange. I wonder if he just takes me around to hide something else. Like he’s a fag, maybe.”
I had no advice for her on this account.
She snapped the book closed. “What are you, the God Squad?”
I laid it out straight to her then. Yes, I was the God Squad and here is what she must do. If one of these churchmen came to her in a compromising position, she was to whip out the Polaroid and take his picture.
“Like, do you want to watch? I can get you moving pictures if you’re into it.”
Dear Lord, I am in the wilderness here. Please keep me from busting out in anger and murder at her words. I am a Christian woman, not to be subjected to this kind of whoremongering. My face was warming up like an electric burner.
“I’ll feed you,” I said.
“Food?” Her eyes grew luminous.
“Three square and dessert too.” The child was hungry. She’d been putting the wrong thing in her mouth; there was no sustenance in it. She just wanted to be fed. “Where do you live in the wintertime?”
Ash Lee shrugged. “Wintertime I travel. I like this place, though. I’ll be back. I’m saving money for a Jim Walter home. It’ll have a kitchen and two bedrooms and a living room that’s separate and a hall. I’ve been collecting ducks.” She pocketed her revolver and rooted around in the cave and brought out some white fabric with blue gingham checks and waddling ducks on it. “Could you put these in your house? I’m afraid the rain’ll ruin them. It’s my curtains.”
I did not want anything of hers in my house, but in that moment she looked very young and true and dim, like Jessamine often does, and my heart softened, and I took the curtains. I wondered if this made me an aider and abettor, or if it made me more like Jesus who talked to the harlot, or if I was like Martha the housekeeper, and then, if I was, shouldn’t I be the better one, the harlot? This was getting too complicated, and here I was in the woods with a hussy with a gun.
I handed her the camera. “Just push the button.”
Ash Lee peered through the lens at me.
“Don’t!” I said, too late and then was blinded.
She looked at the developing film. “These men, it’s not what you think. They talk and all I want to do is get them off. I’d like to tape their mouths shut. It ain’t sex they want but to feel loved and I ain’t got that. But they pay and that’s all I care about. My mother told me the most important thing was getting a man. Hell I get five– ten men a night if I want.”
She handed me the photograph and it was a big blur of light, that’s all, that’s me. I was on the right path.
REVEREND MARTIN PETERSON
“Why do I deserve this?” he said, as a big old Oldsmobile nosed like a shark into the church parking lot. He had no idea who it was, perhaps some very old lady who just remembered she’d been a Christian once and wanted a checkup. He rolled his eyes. These women always wanted to reveal their deep, mostly imagined sins. They’d read something in the Bible, usually from the letters of Paul, that made them think they’d boil in hell forever. Sometimes they wanted an immediate baptism, citing a collapsible lung, a herniated heart, or a liver psychosis as their expected death du jour.
The big ones were the most difficult. He’d wade into the baptismal font with them and wait in the waist-deep water and they’d go under and lash about, all that pink flesh visible under the white filmy baptismal robes, while he held on to what he hoped was an arm. They came up, water pouring off their faces, like great falls over serrated rock; then the two eyes would flash open and he’d startle and look away, expecting that his revulsion was clear. These women were not mountains, Stelle had told him, when he complained, but humans with souls. She was disappointed in him for this, but she was not the one in the font with these big bags of flesh.
Martin decided he’d pretend to be busy. He took out a handkerchief and began polishing one of the lightbulbs on the cross. The car door slammed and he heard a woman’s voice.
“Look, here, little man,” she said. “One of your church boys tried to rape my daughter because of your lies, issued from the pulpit as if from God Himself. And it’s just you, you little man, thinking big—”
Martin turned and was shocked to see Hattie Bohannon in her blue work uniform, her face distorted and deeply colored. Usually she was pleasant when serving biscuits or taking his cash. But that was a long time ago, it seemed to him. Little man! he heard her say again.
“Prostitution will not be tolerated in Maridoches!” he shouted at her. Suddenly he felt small, standing on flat ground. He could not lean against the wall of the church because of the lightbulbs.
“There is no prostitution at my truck stop,” she sai
d, coming closer. She carried a leather purse, and she was sweating. Curls clung to her face while the rest of her hair rose about her head in wild waves. Her eyes were incredibly blue and he noticed her breasts and the pink lipstick on her mouth. “Harlot!” he shouted.
She picked up a rock and threw it at him. He watched as it hit above his head and he felt a strange urge to unzip his fly, much like soldiers were wont to do in face of fire. He stooped and found a smooth stone and hurled it in her direction. It flew toward the silver expanse of the car’s windshield and he waited in horror and happiness for the crash.
Mrs. Bohannon swung her purse by its long strap and knocked his rock out of orbit, sparing the face of the Jetstar. Martin stood agape at this feat of coordination. The Devil invested his workers with strange powers.
Hattie Bohannon became a hurling machine, scooping up rocks and throwing them with accuracy, shattering the lightbulbs on the cross. “I’ll call the police!” he shouted as he ducked, and was horrified at his physical reaction. He was so taken with her body in motion, he thought, I’d like to ride her to Galilee. The bulb directly above him broke and splinters of glass rained down.
He dared not move. Above him glass explosions, poofs of surprise, then bits falling like confetti around him.
He watched as her color changed, lightened, and her face smoothed out from the exercise. She seemed to grow taller. The purse hung like a tiny sack. Whatever she’d come to do was done.
She climbed into the car. The headlights came on when she started the ignition. The Jetstar reversed as if sucked away from the church by a great force. Martin smelled something burnt in the air. The car disappeared in clouds of red dust that lingered like tumbleweeds along the road. He still heard lightbulbs plinking—but it wasn’t glass falling, it was rain. Holy rain. Prayed-for rain. He opened his arms. He was so parched, he opened his mouth and felt fat water dot his tongue. The stiff grasses opened up and drank, and the landscape reveled in the winds, long grasses twisting, twirling, swirling in the cool caress of rain. Release begun with a shower of glass turned to rain.
I have been praying for the wrong miracle, he thought, on the verge of an understanding—something in the torrent of water, light and then heavy, brisk and cold, soft and wet, the spectrum of sensation, grace. And then a horrible thought: she had caused the rain. The devil woman with her attack on his lights, she had brought down the rain.
HATTIE BOHANNON
Rain beat on the windshield in sheets so white she could not see, and Horseshoe Bend was coming up soon. The mountain hugged the road on her right, leaving no room to pull the big wide butt of the car out of the lane. Ahead lay the threat of wet curves and a slippery slope leading toward the river, which surely churned with this welcome rain. Hattie used the granite cut as her guide.
The rain slowed her, made her drive safely while her wild blood demanded speed. It had taken all her self-control to aim above Reverend Peterson’s head. How dare he spew lies that put her daughters in danger! Now she regretted missing him. Now she regretted not taking knives.
The wipers clacked back and forth like a train on the track. Moisture filmed the windshield. She pressed the button to open the side windows. The rain, heavenly rain, came in and slicked her arms and bounced in her lap. She wiped the windshield. She could see. She fell in love with the low gray sky and the wet scent of the pine boughs, the rising odor of blacktop, the temporary coolness, and now, in the tapering rain, a fine mist, ghosts rising off the road. The air grew heavy as the sun broke full and glittering as if it had not rained. It was hot again, so very humid that her dress hung on her like a damp extra skin.
But it is only the heaviness of home, she thought, as the truck stop and house came into view. As soon as I get close, I feel the weight. I come up the drive and the yoke settles on my neck, two buckets of milk balanced precariously with each step. Why do I live this way, when what I want is to throw rocks and shout and run and drive fast? Pummel the lying man as a man can do? Dance in the rain? Sing? Love lightly and fully?
And then there is this: against the dripping-wet roses, on a path of pale petals strewn along the grass, a small blond girl in a bright blue dress, yellow plastic sandals, holding a basket of red tomatoes, waving, calling, “Mama, Mama.”
JESSAMINE BOHANNON
Each morning during the drought I watched Heather unroll the hose and water Mama’s tomato plants in the garden. She would wear only dresses, this child of mine. The thick air was yellow and the beans and shriveled cornstalks curled and yellow too. But the tomatoes stood sturdy, flush and green, the spiky leaves dotted with small yellow flowers like butterflies alighting. Firm green fruit hung among red globes while Heather carefully placed the hose at the roots. She conserved water in her own way. She let each plant drink until a saucer-sized collar of mud surrounded its green stem. While the water trickled, she plucked off slugs, bare-handed, and dropped them in a can of salt.
That toughness must come from her father. I felt a pang of sadness, not for him, whoever he was, that boy in the river, but for my lonely existence. Mama and I had lied about Heather’s parentage and I lost my daughter. I told the truth about my love for Richard and I was labeled a prostitute. Nothing was fair or right. In both instances, Mama blamed me and carried with her a deadly weapon, painful words that could cut me down quicker than any handgun. They did not kill me, the words, but they kept the wound of me raw and alive.
I dreamed of a new life.
I’d have a new boyfriend and Heather and my own house, maybe, and Mama would treat me good. I could go out on a date in public. I watched couples when they came to the truck stop. Some were old and tired and even fat, but there was something in the way one would order for the other or reach across the table and wipe a chin. To be half of a couple like that was my dream.
But it didn’t seem that a man would date a suspected prostitute. I was ruined as far as Maridoches was concerned. When I thought of my prospects, that’s when I got very angry at Richard. I had called him once and said, “I am not a prostitute,” and he’d said, very softly, “I know, baby, but you’re not married. You don’t understand,” which had stung so hard my whole body felt numb as the venom from the sting worked its way head to toe. I never called him after that.
So June was drought again, hard on the rainless weeks of May. It was unpleasant and parched outside, and I didn’t care if it ever rained again. Let the calves die and the cattlemen go bankrupt. Let the vegetables dry up and the whole world starve. Let the church be hit by a tornado. Let the truck stop fail. Let the lumberyard combust. Let an earthquake spew Alabama into the sea.
These were my litanies. This is what I thought at work while Gert was talking miracles and revival and assuring me I was a good strong young woman, a follower on the right path. Little did she know I had cooked up many murders in my mind, starring hers truly as she talked. She liked me now because I let her do what she wanted to in the kitchen. She wanted to dump Worcestershire sauce in the hamburger meat, let her. She wanted to lard up the vegetables with butter after they’d been cooked with a hock or rind, let her. I am not the one to prevent heart attack or burn. I am not even I.
One day in the midst of her garbled singing, “We must be born again,” she mentioned that Stelle Peterson was a regular songbird at her church. I imagined the magnificent woman in a small gilded cage, a bird with sleek exotic feathers, singing music so beautiful it broke your heart. Of course, Gert’s song, “We must be born again,” got caught on the record player in my head and I was humming it all afternoon. Every time I sang it, I pictured Stelle at the protest, cool and elegant, and everybody listening to her. She had them all in the palm of her hand.
In the morning, I passed Heather crouched in the garden singing to the slugs and told her to tell Gert she was in charge until I got to work. Settling into the VW, I felt as furtive as if I were going off to see Richard in our hotel in Georgia. My stomach rose in the same way, and I turned Z-95 up so loud the steering wheel was vibrati
ng. Just like old times. I drove up Raider’s Hill, going slower and slower toward the Church of the Holy Resurrection, until it seemed I was not aiming for it but being dragged there by a dying engine.
The sunlight was glancing off the white church walls and glinting off the cross. My eyesight was pretty patchy as I walked to the door marked CHURCH OFFICE and pushed it open. Blinking in the dimmer light, I must have looked addled to the person behind the desk. She was not the first thing I registered. Behind her, a long cloth hung from a pole near the ceiling. The cloth began pale at the top, then flowed down through blue tones to a dark hem, nearly black. The fabric was like a waterfall, undulating, silk.
When my eyes found the woman, Stelle, dressed in purple, her glossy hair caught at the base of her neck with a white clip, I said, “I’m Jessamine Bohannon.”
To my relief and dread, she said, “Come in.”
She smiled in a way that meant she’d hear me out, and yet I sensed she was glad to see me. “I need to change my life,” I blurted out.
“In what way?” she asked.
“I did something bad and I don’t want to be always marked by it,” I said. I thought of Heather in the garden keeping the tomatoes alive and wanted to rush home and hug her. But I knew I was not ready to tell Stelle the truth about Heather.
“What is your purpose?” Stelle asked gently.
My purpose. My need. What I sought. I’d never been talked to like this before. It was embarrassing and hard. I became aware of an undercurrent of sound, a very low modulation of chords, what a slow-moving river would sound like if it were notes. “I need a new life,” I said. “So far I’ve messed things up following my own way. Gert says that God can help.”