Godshot

by Chelsea Bieker

  “What do you know about Vern before he came back to Peaches?” I asked.

  “I don’t like your tone,” he said. “I know just what the good pastor’s told me and I don’t need any more.”

  “What if he’s not who he says he is?” I said. “What will you do?” I reached out and touched his badge, hot under the sun. “What will you do if you find out that all these babies aren’t God-given after all?”

  “Say it straight,” he said, standing.

  “Maybe all these babies are coming from regular old sex.”

  He stepped off the porch. “Women sure have a hard time being obedient, don’t they?” He stared up at the blinding sky as if looking for an answer. He got in his old patrol car and rolled away.

  Chapter 18

  I sat in the passenger seat as Florin parked us in front of an abandoned lone blue barn I’d passed a million times. It used to belong to the Sander family—dairy people—before they left town after the first bad drought, saying they didn’t like Vern and his ways. I’d never thought of them again, other than to pray for their deliverance, and certainly never realized the barn was now inhabited for a very different cause. FARM OF SPIRITUAL BIRTHING AND UTERUS CELEBRATION was written on a little wooden sign over the door.

  “Well, now this is happening,” Florin said.

  “Appears to be,” I said.

  She opened the door for me. I tried to imagine she was my partner, the father of the baby perhaps. This was just a normal appointment. Ask your doctor about cord clamping. Ask your doctor about vernix practices. What happens to the placenta? Bring a cooler for transportation if you wish to eat it. My magazines had whole checklists you could cut out and bring with you, but I had forgotten them all.

  Inside were Hazel’s doulas and several other women I had never seen, lit up from somewhere unearthly, their cheeks sun-flushed. They wore T-shirts that said things like The Clitoral Truth and Feminist Killjoy tucked into wide-leg canvas pants, and they smiled with their heads cocked to the side, lips pressed in feminine knowledge.

  Hazel hugged me and led us to a back room. She patted my belly. “That baby in there wants to be a person in the world, I can tell.”

  In the room there was a poster advertising a womb continuum class and little twiggy flowers in mason jars on every windowsill, a double bed with a pure white duvet. Everything smelled of peppermint and baked bread. She poured cucumber water from a pitcher into a glass and I downed it in a loud, shameless gulp. The water was crisp and cold. The more I drank, the more I wanted. I thought of how my mother used to drink alcohol as if it were water, no hesitation, no savoring. Just pure need.

  “More,” I said, and she gave me more. She took a cloth and wiped dirt from my face.

  “Pregnant women need a ton of water,” she said. “I hope you’ve been watering that little baby in there.”

  I pictured myself pouring soda on a seed in the ground and expecting a garden. Useless. Perhaps the strange popping I’d been feeling was just the baby signaling for more water, begging for it, and there was not enough.

  “You can wash here before you leave, too, if you want. Only if you want. No judgment.”

  “There’s this weird feeling in my stomach,” I said quietly. “I mean, it could just be gas. It probably is. But what if it’s not, what if I’m doing this all wrong?”

  “Pop pop pop,” she said. She tapped on the drum of me, enthusiasm unthwarted. “Like that?” I nodded. “That’s your babe kicking. It’s saying, ‘Here I am, Mom! Pay attention to me!’”

  “It’s moving in there?” I said. This possibility felt obvious to me suddenly. Of course it was moving. Hadn’t the mama magazines mentioned this would happen? Yet I had felt certain these very normal things wouldn’t happen for me. I had dreaded deep down that this baby would never move, that I would not be a good-enough host. But here it was moving despite everything. Goose bumps sprang up on my arms and legs. I wasn’t in control of anything about the person inside me, a relief and a terror.

  “Babies are known to masturbate in the womb, if you can believe it. They lick the wall of the womb, they suck their thumbs. It’s incredible. Oh, you poor thing. Did you think something was wrong? Just kicks!”

  Poor thing. I smiled at her, but I hated those words. I wanted her to see me as a glowing mama in a new bodycon dress showing off my bump, smiling dear husband on my arm. Nursery almost complete. I wanted to put my feet up in my new rocking chair that I would nurse in, and think of baby names, think of nothing but the swell of my feet. But instead, Poor thing.

  “Is she gonna be too small to push this thing out?” Florin asked, looking at my crotch.

  “A woman from Fresno had her babe in here a few days ago,” a doula cut in. Her hair was pinned to the sides of her head in little bushes over her ears. “Eleven pounds, vaginally.” She looked dreamily at the ceiling, toward some unknown doula heaven of elastic vaginas, still in awe. “We made her placenta pills. It was a gorgeous placenta.”

  “That’s a big-ass baby,” Florin said.

  “They’re all coming in from the city now that unmedicated birth is in style again,” Hazel said. “She did amazing. Her mantra was ‘I’m going to get enooooorrrmmous.’ She kept saying that while pushing, ‘I’m getting enorrrrrrmous, I’m getting enorrrrrrrrmous.’ Never seen dilation like that. He came right out.”

  “What if I can’t do it?”

  “Nope,” Hazel said. “Don’t entertain that thought. Don’t give it an ounce of power. Your thoughts create reality.”

  If my thoughts created reality I wouldn’t be in this situation now, I thought.

  I lay down on the bed and she took my blood pressure. “Good,” she said. Then she pulled out a wand-looking thing.

  “Time to hear the heartbeat,” she said.

  The heartbeat. This was another way I could fail. The baby could have a heartbeat but not the right kind. Perhaps it could have no heartbeat. I had just felt the popping minutes ago but now I didn’t, so maybe in the last thirty seconds it had decided to stop. No no no. “I don’t want to,” I said.

  “Come on,” Florin said. “This is the fun part.”

  I sat up, my own heart skipping too fast. I wanted out of there.

  “That’s okay, Lacey May,” Hazel said, putting her hand on my shoulder. “We should probably put together a birth plan for you. I want you to think about your ideal birth. Just meditate on it.”

  “I’ll do what you want me to do.” I got off the bed. Anything to leave.

  “Take a walk, listen to your body, to your baby.”

  “Listen to the baby?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Your baby has all sorts of things she wants you to know.”

  “I mean,” I said. “I just didn’t know I was supposed to.” It annoyed me a little bit, to be told to listen to something that was not going to speak outright, just like I was always told to listen to God, to decode divine messaging from dust-filled air.

  We walked back to the car. Florin started the engine and scanned the radio. We sat for a minute.

  “My mom loves that shit,” she said. “All the oils and body positivity. I don’t know. I’d want a real doctor, but that’s me.”

  I thought of Hazel at the yoni magic meeting. How she had looked at all of us. She believed in us fully. I had never met someone like her and it seemed I could find the ends of my pain if she was there to hold my hand.

  “I like it,” I said. “You can tell she knows things.”

  “I hope so,” Florin said.

  “Wait,” I said. I opened the door again. Got out of the car. My body took me back into the farmhouse, back into the room where Hazel was making notes on a chart. She looked up. “Forget something?”

  I lay across the bed and pulled up my dress. I closed my eyes and said it. “You should know the father is not my husband but my cousin, mother’s sister’s son. Related.”

  She smiled. “Does it feel good to say it to another person?”

  It did
feel good, to say it so clearly. “Yes.”

  “Hon,” she said. “You’d be surprised how many people make it with their cousins, and those babies turn out a-okay. It’s not unheard of is all I’m saying. Some parts of the world it’s pretty normal.” She wanted me to believe nothing could faze her but I saw a red blush flower around her hairline.

  She turned the Doppler on. It sounded like radio static. “Now, whether you wanted that to happen to you is another story. I’m here to talk about that too if you want.”

  She moved the wand around my small dome smeared with cold jelly. I craned my neck to watch and felt I was out of my body looking at someone else. The faintest brown line spread down from my navel. My skin looked tight and pulled. My thighs were larger, meatier, than ever before. It seemed to me I was turning into a series of lumps. I didn’t understand how I was only going to get much, much larger from here. It seemed impossible. I liked it, though. I looked nothing like the girl that had lain on the shed floor.

  “It takes time to find the heart sometimes,” she said. She looked up at the ceiling and let her hands guide her. Her eyebrows twitched and the softness of her tunic rubbed my skin.

  She worked a minute longer. The walls were closing in. Here it was, my punishment. I braced. I saw my pink unformed baby floating in the boiling toxic waters of me, too hot to hold.

  But then a quick two-step, a sharp gallop.

  Hazel smiled like she’d expected this sound. To her, this very routine sound. “Strong.”

  It did sound strong. It sounded like rain.

  ON THE WAY back Florin and I laughed like friends, and our sweat shone in the sun and the wind mussed our hair and I felt almost normal for a moment, so normal that it seemed right and sure that I should have a mother of my own and not imagine that Daisy was my mother, and so I asked Florin if she and Daisy could drive me to Reno to get my mother so we could all be women together in a car just like this on our way on our way, and she said not to get my hopes up but they were already up up up.

  AT HOME THAT evening Cherry was at the stove humming, thwacking her cane around to the beat of an old country crooner crackling through her small radio. Steam rose from a pot. She was heating dark soda to make a syrupy glaze to drizzle over her apricot scones. She liked to make about two dozen scones at one time and eat them all through the night. In the morning there would be no scones left and neither of us would say a word when she made comments about how I’d gone and fattened myself with them.

  The kitchen was the biggest area of the house, with a huge pink tiled island. On it, a dirty glass vase full to the brim with raisins from years ago, gray and mummified now. Another one full of misshapen moldy oranges that had turned green then white then become a kind of dust. I remembered just years before, the white wicker fruit basket full of peaches, figs, pears, plums, oranges, tangerines. Not anymore. I snatched a hot soda scone with candied apricots, hard as pebbles, and ate it in two bites. I put another in my back pocket.

  I stared at the wall above the sink, where a framed picture of a man wearing a purple shirt falling to his knees hung. Behind him stood Jesus, weary and dirt-smudged with oval holes in his hands. He looked at the fallen man with loving sadness. He was trying to help him stand but his face was forlorn. It struck me that I could not imagine Vern standing behind any of us, holding us up.

  “Did I ever tell you about when your mother won Miss Peaches Supreme?” Cherry said.

  “One thousand times.”

  “She came out dressed as a raisin for the talent portion.”

  “Twirling a baton,” I said.

  “People figured you couldn’t make sexy out of a raisin but she proved them wrong. I always thought you would grow up right like her with those long bones. When you were little you wouldn’t stop drinking sweet milk drink from your bottle at bedtime. I told your momma, her teeth’s gonna rot out her head, and they did! You ended up silver babies ’cross the front. Shame. Made everyone think you were some kind of white trash. Boy, you are getting thick around the middle. That baby is showing itself.”

  An image of Lyle on top of me flashed through my mind, and left. I got hot, then cold.

  “Come ’ere,” she said. I could smell her as I got close. Body odor, jelly, and baby powder. “Help me get at this hair,” she said, pulling me into the bathroom. “It’s a trickster. You’ve got to get to the root.” She handed me the tweezers and shone a flashlight on her face. “See it?”

  It was there poking out of her makeup. She wore a new matte orange bronzer I had noticed on her bathroom counter. Haitian Vacation. I clamped the hair and then pulled and pulled and finally it came out, wound corkscrew tight, a white stump root. “Here’s the offender,” I said. She opened a tiny velour jewelry box where she stored them and I dropped it in.

  “It’s always the same spot,” she said. “Just wait until you get old. God a-mighty, hairs out the chin.”

  “By the time I’m old there will be some miracle cream that won’t allow that to happen.”

  “You real sure this baby should be that rat boy’s?” Cherry said. “Seen all these girlies around church touched by the light, highly prized. Thought, why can’t my Lacey May be one of them? If you’re running away from God’s plan I feel that’s a right shame. It’s on my heart to tell you so.”

  “It’s Stringy’s,” I said.

  “Vern didn’t even seem to care I’d brought a regular infidel into the Body. Thought he was going to have some reward for me. Something to say, at least. But he ain’t been saying much of nothing lately. It don’t give me a good feeling. My own daddy used to simmer simmer simmer. Us kids would think everything was fine, going on about our business. One time I dropped my mama’s mixing bowl and it shattered all over the place, but my daddy just smiled. Helped me clean it. Then weeks later I got the beating of a lifetime. Guess what for?”

  The mixing bowl, I knew.

  “The mixing bowl!” She threw her hands up. “Not right if you ask me. If I’m going to be punished I like it served hot.”

  “You think Vern’s like your daddy?” I asked.

  “I didn’t before, but lately. I don’t know. I can’t say who anyone is.”

  “You don’t like his plan for the babies, do you? Not really. You know it’s wrong.”

  She twitched, looked up at God, who was always watching. “Go call for Goldie, will you? I forgot today.”

  “I don’t know why you still call for that cat. You know she’s dead, don’t you?”

  “Mouth of trash! Go call for that pussycat.” Cherry waved the bull penis cane over her head, threatening me, then withdrawing it as if I wasn’t worth the cane treatment. She looked at it with love. “Made from real bull organs. If Grampa had been alive to see it he would have been impressed.”

  “If Grampa was alive you wouldn’t need a cane,” I said. “Wouldn’t need to call for Goldie either. Grampa was alive you would have never joined up with the church in the first place.”

  “Devil speaking through you, girl.”

  I leaned out the door and called, “Goldie, Goldie, Goldie.” I waited a few seconds. “Here she comes, Cherry!”

  Cherry bolted up from her seat, dropping the cane. She ran just fine across the room, crowded the door frame, and stared into the blankness of the front yard. Wiley Stam’s lifted truck passed by slowly like a patrol. “I don’t see nothing,” she said. She shielded her eyes from the sun. “Goldie? Goldie?”

  She turned to me. “You’re right and sure?” she said, but I was smiling in my anger.

  “Oh, tricking an old woman like this. For shame, Lacey May. Get an old Cherry her cane.”

  “You only joined the church because you were scared,” I said. “Now look what you’ve done to my mother. To me. If it wasn’t for you we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  I threw the bull penis cane at her feet.

  “Next time you’re feeling low,” she said, “I’ll make sure to tell you I see your mama coming up the drive. I’ll remind you how yo
u laid there and let that Lyle do just what he did to you, how you never said no. I ain’t stupid. I have eyes. You believed then, Lacey May. What happened?”

  How could I explain to her that I thought I was following Vern’s vision. I didn’t know about the babies. Now everything was different.

  Cherry twisted her lips in a sly half smile. Smug. Knowing. It was the face she got when she was freshly baptized. When someone in the congregation cited the wrong verse, and she could pipe up with the right answer, waving her hand, a proud schoolgirl. “He’ll pull you back or cast you out, Lacey May. If you think you can ride the line between believing and not, you’ve got it wrong. One side’s gonna getcha whether you like it or not.”

  I wanted to slap her for many reasons, but mainly because I knew she was right.

  Chapter 19

  “It’s a hot-steam Friday night, babe,” Stringy said to me, drenching himself in an awful cologne in the bathroom. “You coming out with me or what? And no drinking this time, you little lush.”

  “I drank one time,” I said. My stomach rolled, remembering the rum from Tent City. Shame coiled in me. I’m sorry, baby.

  “And look how you ended up.” He pointed to my belly. He thought that was the night I got pregnant. Poor boy, math wasn’t his strong suit.

  I got dressed up to go, mother’s linen, almost too tight on me now. We got in his truck, some punk band playing way turned up. “They’re doing a news segment on me soon,” he said. “They want to see how the magic of my lawns happens. I’m about to get famous. You’ll have to stay out of the spotlight, of course.” He grabbed my chin. He was full of something. “You listening to me?”

  I pushed his hand off. “No one cares about your lawns.”

  As we neared the turnoff, he pulled over. He pointed to the front of his pants. “What’s a wife for anyhow?”

  “I don’t see the point in doing that,” I said to him.

  “You haven’t ever done it, have you?”

  “Only ever been with you.”

  “Here, I’ll do you first,” he said. He unbuckled my seat belt and pulled my legs toward him with a rough strength, an energy drink can full of spit and chew jabbing my lower back in the center console. He peered at me from between my knees. “You’ll like it.” My stomach was all wrong in this position, heavy on me. He didn’t know that pregnant women shouldn’t lie on their backs. I imagined my veins collapsing under the weight of the baby. I tried to turn over, but he held my hips.