Godshot

by Chelsea Bieker

  “Look at your daughter,” Daisy said. She pointed the gun at Rick again.

  “Call nine-one-one,” my mother said.

  “Look at her,” Daisy screamed. The gun fired and I thought Daisy had finished Rick off, or shot my mother. But then plaster rained down on us and we all quieted for a moment and shielded our eyes. The dust landed on our sweaty skin just like God glitter.

  “Come with us right now,” I said, “or this is it.”

  “Get out,” my mother said to Daisy.

  “Mom,” I cried.

  Daisy grabbed my hand. “This girl’s too good for you,” she said to my mother.

  We walked outside. Daisy herded me to the car. The moment was so many things at once. It remains hard to recall. It frustrates me endlessly. Some days, it feels like the moment my mother made her final choice, and other days it feels like the moment I made mine.

  Daisy steadied her breath, looked at her own two hands on the steering wheel. “We really should go,” she said. “I mean, I just shot a man.”

  WE DROVE AND drove and peed in the same Citrus Heights gas station as before and I wanted to tell Daisy all she didn’t know then. That the baby was Lyle’s. That I’d followed along hoping it was the godly thing to do. But what difference would it make? She would never know who I really was. She would never understand the church and all it had meant for us, the places it had forced us into.

  “What kind of mother does something like that?” she said heavily, almost to herself. I bowed my head as she drove. What kind of mother? I knew just what kind of mother. Before everything, when Sapphire Earrings gave me those beers and I would sleep sleep sleep, I wasn’t always so asleep. He got lonely, he said, when my mother wasn’t any good, and he needed a nice girl to rub his shoulders. He needed a nice girl and wasn’t I it?

  I felt my breath get fast. How I’d pressed it down for so long. How I imagined it would never surface again, would never need to in God’s kingdom. When he bent me over his knee to spank me, or to wrench those earrings in, it was the things he’d say that were hardest to forget. Your mother is one of them throwaway women. Worthless. Just like you. He’d make me feel we were the lowest creatures on earth and then the next day there my mother would be, curled on his lap, smiling at me in a kind of bliss from across the room.

  She left me all alone, caged, with her boyfriends. I’d forgiven her when I became a believer because that’s what a believer did. I’d forgiven. But not now.

  We pulled up in front of Cherry’s and Daisy looked at me, dark under the eyes. Said, “I’m sorry all that happened, but it did and now here you are. Better make the best of it.”

  Chapter 22

  I didn’t make the best of it. I took my heart out of my chest and I watched old crows eat it on the fading yellow-green painted grass in front of Cherry’s. When I went inside, Stringy was a madman at the kitchen table, papers strewn around him, falling onto the floor.

  “Thought I wouldn’t figure it out,” he said. “Thought I wouldn’t see all your other little church girls knocked up and put it together? That baby ain’t mine.”

  “I saw my mother,” I said.

  He shoved the papers at me. “You and that crazy granny try to pin anything on me, think again. I’ll call up the popo and tell them right now we’ve got America’s most wanted pastor right here in Peaches, at it again. You didn’t believe when I told you before. Now here’s proof.”

  My eyes blurred over the writing and stuck to the photo instead, of a young man. The curls were gone, the robes gone. But his pointed chin was the same. His arched eyebrows and the cock of his head, the same.

  “Don’t leave me now,” I said.

  “This baby belong to that pastor? He line all you girlies up and have him a time?” Stringy shook his head in disgust. That’s when I saw Cherry creeping up behind him. She raised up a glass jug full of pennies. She smashed it hard over his head. It broke, and the pennies flew everywhere. He lay on the floor, knocked out cold.

  “What?” she said, looking at me. “I didn’t like the way this rat boy was talking about my pastor,” she said, standing over him. “Now help me.”

  We dragged him by the armpits into the craft room. I could feel his sweat on my hands.

  “He’s dead,” I whispered.

  “I’ve seen a dead man and that ain’t it.” She wedged a chair under the outside of the door.

  “When he wakes up he’s gonna be angry,” I said.

  “Rather have him angry under my nose than flying around spreading the worst of rumors.” She lit a match and burned the printed news articles, the ones accusing Vern of all manner of wrongs, in the kitchen sink. “Nothing was proved in this anyway, even if it is our pastor. He showed it to me all proud. But all I read was that nothing was ever proved. Just like the infidels to frame a holy man.”

  “My mother wouldn’t come back.”

  “Oh Lordy,” Cherry said. “That’s what you were up to.” She pulled me into her and I let myself give in. I cried and cried and my tears dampened the front of her dress, and she let me. I felt the warmth of her hand on my back and I felt how foolish I’d been, thinking there were a million other ways to live.

  “Just like God to clear the path for you even when you’re hanging on to every weed. But he did. That Stringy ain’t no use to you now. The good God got rid of that boy to show you the way.”

  I felt all pulled out. I’d tried everything. Maybe she was right. God had gone and cleared it all away.

  “You’ve seen the other side, you’ve seen the darkest low of hell. Have you quenched your thirst for the world?”

  I nodded.

  “I’d say it’s time to buckle down while you can still be forgiven.” Her hand slid around and patted my belly. Artichoke turned violently inside me. “’Bout time to come back where God loves you the most.”

  So I did.

  I ATTENDED THE Bible study girls’ prayer meeting after the service. We were deep into preparation for the Birthing Day. We sat in a circle sewing birthing gowns for the blessed day in April, when the children within us would be ready to meet their earthly destiny and the rain would come at last. I could not sew and I tried to watch the others, who seemed to have absorbed some instruction from Derndra in the time I hadn’t been there. She looked at my clumsy attempt and said nothing. She wanted to watch me struggle.

  Derndra trimmed my hair again so that it matched everyone else’s. She brushed my cheeks with creamed blushes, glittery gels. Lined my eyes in red. White rabbit, I heard my mother tease as Derndra fed me Hershey’s chocolate and patted my head.

  “Sharon’s gone looney,” Denay whispered to me after Derndra had gone downstairs to fetch more chocolate.

  “How do they figure we’re all gonna give birth the same day?” I whispered back.

  She shrugged. “Divine miracle don’t care about specifics.”

  “They’re gonna herd us all up like cows and watch the blood spill,” Sharon said.

  “Shut it,” Taffy said, covering her ears. “I can’t take your negativity.”

  Sharon shot up and grabbed at Taffy’s stomach, jerked it from side to side. She pushed up her dress and pulled off what looked like a wadded up pillow covered in silver tape.

  “We all know you weren’t blessed,” Sharon said.

  I looked to Denay, expecting a rush of anger, but she stayed calm and sewing. “If Taffy’s not pregnant, her parents will be most displeased.”

  “Well, what are you going to do when the Birthing Day comes?” Sharon asked her. Knelt down close to Taffy’s face. “Just kill yourself?”

  Taffy hugged her knees in. “I wanted to give the church a baby,” Taffy said. “Now what will become of me?”

  “And you,” Sharon said, turning to me. “You know the truth but here you are like the rest of us anyhow. Just admit it already,” Sharon said, looking around the room. “There was no white light. We were all raped! Raped!”

  We were silent. What was there to say?


  We didn’t want to be girls raped.

  CABBAGE, COCONUT, PINEAPPLE, leek, Swiss chard, sadness. Artichoke became other-sized fruits and vegetables and I turned fifteen without realizing it.

  Chapter 23

  No one could hear Stringy’s screams out in the country, where sound died on contact with the still air. It seemed to me he could break the door down if he wanted, but he hadn’t. He knew Cherry would call the police if he did, and besides, she had supplied him with big dusty bottles of bourbon from Grampa Jackie’s old stash to soothe him. But the longer Cherry kept him there, the harder it seemed to figure out what we should do with him. I stood behind Cherry as she peeked in to offer him a can of pork and beans. She shrieked and I saw Stringy passed out in the corner. It took me a moment to realize he had opened the crate of her animal babies and spread them all out on the floor. The room smelled of urine. He’d peed on them.

  “Get me my cane,” she said. Her voice was a growl like I’d never heard.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m gonna beat this halfwit senseless.”

  “What would God do, Cherry?”

  Stringy stirred in the corner. An eye flickered open. I pulled Cherry away from the door and shut it. Locked it.

  “Punish,” she said.

  “He would love him,” I replied.

  She snorted. “Fine. When the church babies come and God restores us, Vern’ll have some idea for that snake. Some use for him, surely. Until then, he can just think of all his sins in there alone. That’s one way to break people into believing. Give them a real reason to need a savior, am I right?”

  “You can wash the animals,” I said. “It will be okay.”

  She stared at me. “Look at you. Got broked down yourself and now your faith’s tighter than ever.”

  HAZEL CALLED AND called and when I didn’t answer and didn’t text back she came for a surprise home visit. She tried to get through to me, to remind me of Daisy and Florin and how much they cared. Stringy yelled and she flinched each time she heard him. “Do you hear me?” he kept saying. “Do you hear me? Send in the bourbon!” I lay back on the couch and directed her hand to my stomach. Asked her to make sure the baby was okay. She pressed deep into my pelvis. “Head down, hallelujah.” But her smile wavered. “It’s time to get some outside help,” she said, quiet.

  “This is God’s child,” I said. And then she went away from me, spooked.

  I HAD TAKEN to sleeping on the couch while Stringy was in the craft room. I let the hours fall away. I didn’t want to read anymore. Everything in the romances was a lie. I didn’t want to watch TV and even Cherry had cooled off from her soaps and her televangelists, shutting herself in a corner chair tapping her hand on her green Bible. Periodically she would get up to shove hard raisins under the door to our prisoner and he would grunt something incomprehensible.

  The baby in me shifted and moved and I pressed my hand to it but I didn’t talk much. Words came to mind but did not have the strength to come out. I tried to detach, to stay in the moment, to not imagine it being taken from me. The phone rang several times and we didn’t answer it. I watched the light turn dusky. I dreamed of water.

  Cherry poked me with the bull penis cane. “Sharon Stam’s asking for you. It’s her mother. She says you’re the only one she’ll see.”

  I WALKED BESIDE the canal, but not down in it, all the way to the Stams’, a tiny farmhouse on what was once a nice stretch of vineyard down about a mile from Cherry’s. The house was like a box divided in four, and Sharon and Laramie shared a room. It smelled like yeast inside, like Wiley’s whiskey and spoiled cheese.

  Sharon’s mother had lost weight, and she appeared distorted, her wide face bobbing above a too-narrow body. “In there.” She pointed to the room as if there were a rabid animal inside. I passed Laramie eating canned pigs’ feet on saltines lying in front of the television.

  “Wiley’s had to lock up all his guns, that’s how she’s acting.”

  In the room Sharon lay on the floor looking up at her ceiling. Her stomach was a huge hill pinning her body down.

  “Don’t lie on your back,” I said. “I read it can cut off blood supply.”

  “A fine way to go.”

  “I’m supposed to tell you everything’s okay.”

  “I called nine-one-one again,” she said. “They said, are you a child? They said, let me talk to your father. But then I realized that even if they came, I’d still be pregnant. This will always be my life.”

  “One day you’ll be old enough to leave and you will,” I said.

  “What about you? You’re just gonna hand over that baby to Vern? You’re just gonna push it out of your body and hand it to him?”

  “It’s easier this way,” I said.

  “I don’t want to think about hell anymore,” she said, sleepy-sounding. “I’d rather just be there than think one more day about it.”

  “Let’s stand next to each other on the Birthing Day, okay?” I said.

  I lay down beside her. I thought of Stringy holding the articles. The tales of a polygamist pastor trying to evoke blessings for who-knew-what reason by having many wives. How that hadn’t done anything remarkable for the world. How we were all still begging for rain just the same.

  She took a deep breath. “Swear?”

  “On my life.”

  I WALKED THE canal home, surrounded by blackness. I didn’t want the moonlight on me. I didn’t want any light. I never felt safer or more untouchable than when I was in the canal. I dragged my hand along the wall of it. I imagined it full of water. Maybe one day it would have water again.

  Then there was something ahead, a footstep maybe, a stick cracking. A whisper. I stopped and pressed my back against the wall. I reached for the go-phone but stopped. If I used it to light my way, I’d only reveal myself. The feeling of a thousand eyes crept over my skin. I just had to climb out of here and into the dim light of the moon. I felt the wall for somewhere to place my foot, for an edge to grab, but it was smooth. If I carved something it would make noise. Calm down, I told myself. You’re imagining things.

  But then a voice from above. “Where you off to?”

  “Who’s there?” I said.

  “Going somewhere important?” another voice said.

  I was so slow, so pregnant. Two bodies jumped in and landed before me, forming a wall. The tang of sweat and baby powder, dirt and salt: boy. How Lyle smelled when he was over me. How the boys’ club smelled with their newly grown-out long hair, the stripes of glitter they wore on their cheeks like war paint. Vern’s soldiers. “We have on good word that you’ve been going to the red house outside of assignment.”

  “Let me pass,” I said. I folded my arms around my belly. I didn’t want to scare the baby so I tried to keep my breath normal, but my knees shook.

  “This is a punishable offense,” a voice said behind me. There were at least three of them, all breath and spit.

  “I don’t go there anymore,” I said.

  “We’re gonna take you there and let you prove just how steadfast you are.” It was Lyle speaking now. “You have some of Vern’s work yet to do.”

  Hands urged me forward and I dug my heels into the ground. My flip-flops slid in the dust and then one snapped. They lifted me into the air. It seemed like they had multiplied in the dark. They carried me over their heads, my arms folded across my chest like a dead person. I kept still so they wouldn’t drop me, hurt the baby.

  They set me down finally. The lights were on in the red house, and I knew Daisy was settling in for evening calls amid the incense, the tobacco candles, the crushed velvet robes, the curtains of silk. Longing consumed me.

  “They didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.

  “They make men stumble with glee.” Lyle stepped closer to the house, holding a red gas jug. If I screamed maybe they would hear me inside. He pressed a book of matches into my hand. “Burn it.”

  “You think God would burn a house down with people in
side?” I asked.

  The boys’ club considered this a moment. Then some of them nodded. “Yeah,” Lyle said. “I think He would if it was for the right cause.”

  The door swung open and there was Daisy in a pale nightgown holding that little gun out. The boys’ club piled over one another like puppies, scrambled for coverage, every boy for himself. Lyle stood still and stared at her. He didn’t know what she could do with that thing.

  Daisy’s face was bare, hair back. She looked taller than I’d ever seen. “You little fuckers,” she said. “It’s not enough you come to harass me and my daughter, now you’ve dragged Lacey along. Well, shit.”

  “Shoot me,” Lyle said. “I’ll catch the bullet in my teeth.”

  “Little boys,” she said. One of the boys broke away from the rest and made a run for it. “Just lost little hick boys. What will become of you? You need a nice lady to teach you a lesson about the world, I think.”

  “Ma’am,” Laramie started. “It’s not too late for you to be redeemed.”

  She came closer. Pointed the gun at Lyle. “For some reason, I like you least of all.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said to her.

  “Lacey, you get inside.”

  “She ain’t going in there with you witches,” Lyle said.

  “Oh yes she is,” Daisy said. I scrambled behind her and hovered in the doorway watching. “Why are you all so concerned with Lacey May anyhow? Don’t you have better things to do? You all want rain so much maybe you should be getting an education so you can figure out how to treat the earth right. Do things different.”

  Lyle laughed. “That’s the problem with you infidels. You all think you have control. You all think you’re God.”

  Daisy considered this. “So you think me out here minding my own business has something to do with you and your land? You think if I was like you, converted and holy, that the rain would just start falling?”

  Lyle tensed his shoulders and his hands opened and closed. When she said it like that, it sounded pretty stupid and I could tell he knew it.