Holy Ghost Girl (24 page)

“Last night the Lord showed me there’s another tropical storm out there.” He drew an ominous
x
somewhere in the vast blank space that represented the Caribbean. “It’s gonna gather power until it turns into a storm as destructive as Hurricane Carla.” He drew a scary swirled image with a black oval in the middle. “It will hit the Carolina coast and come right through Columbia.” He drew a star to represent Columbia and little dashes to represent the path of the storm. South Carolina would be obliterated by hurricanes that year, thus saith the Lord.

Sister Coleman and her white-haired aunt Eunice sat in the wooden theater seats, nodding yes, yes. After service, women gathered around Weatherman and assured him he had a real gift, but no one stored up provisions, and no one made plans to leave the state. As it turned out, the hurricane season was one for the record books that year. In Florida.

As part of our bedtime routine, Sister Coleman read aloud to Gary and me from a book entitled
The Rapture
. The book weaves apocalyptic events into a story where characters wake to find that their Christian loved ones have been taken to heaven during the night, or raptured. Those left behind endure clouds of swarming insects. Rivers run in blood. Multiheaded beasts run through the streets. The sun burns the skin from their bones. And of course, the moon turns to blood too. The book turns the apocalypse into a story, and that story lived in my imagination in a way that sermons had not. Fear caused me to consider my sins in a more serious way; I did not want to be left behind when my mother and brother were raptured to heaven. Besides, Sister Coleman was so kind to me; she made me want to be good, really good, with no stains on my soul. One night as she closed the book, I looked into her eyes and told her about how Randall sometimes bribed me to touch him and how Pam and I took turns pretending to be the husband with each other.

“A girl with a girl? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“Yes, ma’am. Does that mean I have a reprobate mind?”

She said she didn’t know, but that I needed to kneel beside the bed and ask God for forgiveness. We prayed, and I cried so much I thought surely my sins had been washed away. Wrong. The next morning Sister Coleman announced Gary and I could no longer play together without adult supervision.

I was confused. “What do you mean? What do we do?”

She gave me a long, meaningful look. “Nothing. That’s the point. You do nothing. You stay away from each other unless there is a grown-up in the room.”

I thought she might relent, but she didn’t. When Gary started kindergarten a few months later, she would not let us walk to school together. She made him leave first and let me go a few minutes later. She didn’t know that Gary waited for me behind a bush just around the corner and that we finished the walk together.

 

 

The more Sister Coleman knew about me, the less she liked me. One day after meeting with my first-grade teacher after school, she strolled into the empty classroom where I waited, grabbed my arm, and squeezed it hard. Her voice was steady and even.

“Get to the car now.”

I stumbled through the hallway and into the parking lot, with her hand heavy on my shoulder. Once we were in the car, she turned the key in the ignition and pumped the gas pedal. The engine sputtered to life and she turned and glared at me.

“Why are you disappearing into the woods with boys during recess?”

“I’m not.”

“They’ve seen you.”

“It’s boys and girls.”

She gripped the wheel and gunned the engine. “You are a perverse child.”

I didn’t know the word “perverse,” but I could tell it didn’t mean anything good. I tried to explain.

“We go into the woods so they can repent and give their hearts to the Lord. I’m doing God’s work.”

It was true. I witnessed to my classmates during recess, then took them into the woods, where I had them kneel down and ask Jesus to be their personal savior. Tammy, the prettiest girl in my class, had almost gotten the Holy Ghost after only a few minutes of coaching.

“One boy said you kissed him.”

“He said he wouldn’t repent if I didn’t.”

She put the car in gear and we pulled out of the parking lot and away from the school.

“If you’re so concerned about the Lord’s work, why did you steal cookies from another little girl? And why did you lie when the teacher asked you about it? She
knows
you did it.”

There it was, another sin. Two with the lie. Three if you counted the kiss, and I had to, considering how much I liked that boy.

I was not surprised when Sister Coleman began to favor Gary over me. As the chosen one, Gary dwelt in a land of perpetual smiles and kindnesses.

“Here, honey, let me help you with those buttons.”

“Do you want another sucker?”

Or turning to her old aunt Eunice, “He’s just the sweetest child I’ve ever seen.”

She answered most of my questions with a terse yes or no and little eye contact. Questions that required further explanation were ignored. Her emotional coldness made me miserable, but I understood and accepted it as the penalty for my sins. I was always looking for ways to ingratiate myself with her. Once when we were on a long trip, I devised a game in which Gary counted gas stations and I counted churches. When Sister Coleman heard the rules, she sighed and responded exactly as I had anticipated.

“Honey, I’m afraid you’ll always lose counting churches.”

“That’s okay. I don’t mind.”

The next time we stopped for gas, I got the sucker and the pat on the head, and Gary got nothing. I remained the favorite for a day or two, until I felt so guilty and so bad for my brother, I engineered my own fall from grace.

I pulled out a bag of books I kept under the daybed. In the bag was the oversize Bible storybook my mother had bought and for some reason Queenie and Rita had inscribed. The inscription read: “To David and Betty. May God bless and keep you always. Queenie and Rita.” Everyone called my mother by her middle name, Carolyn, but Betty was her first name, and it was the name she had used in Houston when living incognito with Brother Terrell. I handed the book to Sister Coleman and asked if she would read us a story. She opened it and studied the inscription.

“Do you know what this says?”

I shrugged.

“Why do you think this is addressed to David and Betty? Isn’t Betty your mother’s first name?”

I nodded. “Yes, but everyone calls her Carolyn. They probably meant Betty Ann. David and Betty Ann. That book probably belonged to Pam and Randall.”

She knew I had engineered her seeing the inscription and that I was lying about the ownership of the book, but she didn’t know why. I didn’t know either. What I knew but could not articulate was that sometimes I felt so awful, so sinful, that I wanted to pull everything down around me, wanted in fact for everything to fall on me like the dead weight of a felled tree and crush me into the ground. Maybe that “everything” was Sister Coleman. Tim-ber.

 

 

Sister Coleman opened the door to her lab and flicked on the light. My eyes lingered on the vending machine as we walked past and entered the main room. It was a Saturday and the employees were gone. Gary and Bug had stayed at the house with the sinner husband. I moved the teeth aside and placed my books on the table. The plan was for me to read and do homework while she caught up on work. She fished her white lab coat off the rack and pulled it on while I lost myself in a library book. A package of crackers fell onto my opened book. I looked up. She smiled and turned to study the dentures on the shelf. I opened the package, stuffed the crackers in my mouth, and went to the water fountain for a long drink.

I sat down at the table and picked up my book. Then I said what I always said. “I could eat a dozen of those.”

Sister Coleman left the room without saying anything and went to the entryway. I followed. She put a nickel into the slot and pulled the knob. Then instead of handing me the package, she put in nickel after nickel and pulled the knob again and again. She handed the packages to me.

“Go sit down.” Her voice had a flat, mechanical sound and there was an odd feeling in the room, a feeling of excitement and dread and something I could not name. I walked to the main room and placed twelve packages of crackers on the table.

“I told you to sit down.”

I pulled the chair out from the table a bit, cringing as its legs scraped against the floor, and wedged myself into it.

“Now, eat.”

“But I can’t eat all these.”

“You said you could eat a dozen of them.”

“I didn’t mean it.”

She wrapped her hand around the back of my neck. Her palm was cool and firm.

“You said you could eat a dozen, and you will.”

Each package contained four cracker-cheese sandwiches made up of two crackers each. Eight crackers per package, ninety-six crackers in all. I made my way through package after package. Sister Coleman sat beside me, spine erect, knees and ankles together, hands relaxed and folded in her lap. A small, secretive smile settled on her lips. After a while, she stood up and began to check the teeth on the counter that ran along the longest wall of the room. She hummed under her breath. My mouth grew drier with each cracker until I began to gag. She glanced over her shoulder and pointed at the water fountain. I ran for a drink, careful not to let any of the mush in my mouth escape.

That night as Sister Coleman tucked me in, she planted a warm, dry kiss on my forehead, the first in a long time. “You know I love you chillens. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

After dinner one evening, Sister Coleman called me and Gary to sit with her on the couch. She folded us into her arms just as she had when she first welcomed us to her home.

“There’s something I need to tell you. It may be hard to understand at first, but it’s better for everyone. Your mother has officially given you all to me. You’re going to live here from now on.”

Gary looked stunned. “You mean forever?”

She patted his arm and smiled. “Yes, honey. Forever.”

I jumped off the couch and faced her, hands on my hips. “I don’t believe you!”

She looked startled. “What do you mean?”

“Our mother wouldn’t do that.”

“Really? I have something to show you.”

She stood and walked from the living room into her bedroom. I sat back down on the couch with Gary and whispered in his ear, “Don’t worry. It’s not true.”

Sister Coleman walked back into the living room, holding a stack of papers. With her reading glasses on the tip of her nose and her sensible shoes, she looked like someone’s favorite aunt. She flipped through the pages, licking her fingers in between to ensure she was turning only one page at a time.

“This is a legal document your mother signed, giving you both to me.”

She pulled out a page and handed it to me. Our mother’s signature was at the bottom.

Sister Coleman kept talking. She would adopt us. We would be a family. She wanted us to call her Mama. Wouldn’t we like that? We nodded yes.

“Yes what?”

Gary spoke up. “Yes, Mama.”

He gave her a quick hug. “Can I go now?”

“Go ahead, sugar. I’ll call you for dinner.”

The worst had happened. We had lost our mother. There was nothing left to say. Nothing left to do. I curled up on the daybed and fell asleep.

Gary and I found it almost impossible to eat after Sister Coleman’s announcement. Food stuck in our throats, and breakfast especially proved difficult. Every morning Sister Coleman placed giant bowls of oatmeal in front of us and told us to eat. The cereal refused to stay down. We started each day hanging over the toilet and throwing up. I was late for school almost every day.

One morning when I began to gag, Sister Coleman would not let me run to the restroom. I was going to eat my breakfast, she said, no matter what. Again that cool, firm palm on the back of my neck. I swallowed, took a bite, and the oatmeal came back up. My cheeks bulged. I flailed and scrambled to get up, but she held me in the chair. I threw up in the bowl and all over the table. When I finished she held my face and wiped it gently with a napkin. Something sour streamed from my nose. I was sorry, really sorry. She smiled and handed me the spoon.

“That’s okay, hon. Just clean your bowl.”

“But . . .”

“Go ahead. Eat it.” She held my head over the bowl.

I cried and pleaded and ate what was in my bowl.

After a while, she replaced the oatmeal with mackerel. It was salty and fishy and the vomiting lasted all morning.

We never told Sister Coleman’s husband what was happening in his suburban home, and we never told her aunt Eunice. White-haired Aunt Eunice sometimes sat with us while the Colemans worked. Her body was soft and comforting as a favorite pillow and she had enough patience to teach a seven-year-old to embroider. She shuffled her thick legs behind a walker and talked about the day the Lord would heal her.

“I just want to walk without pain one more time before I die.”

The three of us, Sister Coleman, Aunt Eunice, and I, were desperate for God’s attention: Sister Coleman for Bug, and Aunt Eunice for her legs. As for me, I prayed all the time for forgiveness. I was sure I had done something to make God hate me. How else to explain my mother’s abandonment. How else to explain Sister Coleman, a woman who couldn’t decide whether she loved or hated us. How else to explain why no matter how hard I prayed or what I promised, no deliverance came.

 

 

Sister Coleman strapped Bug into his special seat in the back of the car and Gary and I climbed in beside him. Aunt Eunice lowered herself into the front seat, her walker stowed in the trunk. Sister Coleman slid behind the wheel. Her aunt grabbed her hand. “I believe Bug is going to walk out of the tent tonight, Lib. And I may leave my walker at the altar and walk out with him.”