Holy Ghost Girl (26 page)

I woke the next day as I always did, with the image of my mother’s face fixed in my mind, only this time it didn’t recede. She looked at me through the car window, then the door opened and we tumbled into her. I buried my face in her neck and wept into her hair.

“You’re here. You’re really here.”

Gary climbed all over her. “Mama, Mama, Mama,” he called again and again.

“Yes, yes, I’m really here. It’s okay. It’s okay now.”

That morning in Baton Rouge Mama promised she would never leave again. By the time the revival ended, she had changed her mind.

“It’s just for two or three months, kids. There’s no one to play for the revivals right now, and until we find someone, I have to do it.”

She said it broke her heart to leave us, and I believe it did. She cried and cried as she climbed into the backseat of someone’s old black Chevy. My brother, a quiet, easygoing kid, fell apart as the car drove away. He climbed the chain-link fence and when someone pulled him down, he kicked and flailed and cut his legs on the pointed metal pieces at the top. Blood ran in small streams down his legs as he raced the length of the fence howling, “No,” his mouth stretched into a wide, red
o
, like the entrance to a fun house. My mom’s face, framed in the car’s rear window, wore a look of surprise. Her arm waved from side to side, good-bye, good-bye. I watched the car grow smaller and smaller until it disappeared into that thin space where heaven and earth meet.

 

 

 

SUPPOSE YOU BREAK THIS WORLD TO BITS, ANOTHER MAY ARISE.

 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,

GOD WORKS IN SEVENS. THE RAINS CAME SEVEN DAYS AFTER NOAH SHUT the door of the ark. Egypt had seven fat years and seven lean years. The book of Revelation refers to seven churches, seven spirits, seven golden candlesticks, seven stars, seven lamps, seven seals, seven horns, seven eyes, seven angels, seven trumpets, seven thunders, seven thousand slain, seven heads, seven crowns, seven last plagues, seven golden vials, seven mountains, and seven kings. The only thing missing is seven swans a-swimming and the tune to “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

Gary and I wandered through seven households in three years, and then Mama reappeared. Her return was as unfathomable as her departures. One day we looked up and there she stood. The kind and seemingly mute old couple we had lived with in Baton Rouge was gone. Baton Rouge was gone. We blinked and found ourselves back in Houston, living with Mama in a series of run-down apartments, each with its own built-in tragedy.

The yellow cinder-block ghetto that housed our first apartment backed up to what I remember as a highway. Mama told us not to go near the road, but the store on the other side exerted a powerful pull, and one day we could no longer resist. We stood by the side of the road with a group of kids, waiting for a break in the traffic, one leg in front of the other, rocking forward and back. An older boy was supposed to shout, “Go!” But before he could say anything, Gary wrenched his hand from mine. A horn blared. Tires screeched. Cars slipped all over the road and came to rest at odd angles. A woman opened her car door and began to wail. I ran toward her. My brother lay on his back, surrounded by chrome bumpers and grills. Blood covered his forehead. He tried to sit up, but the woman pushed him down. He told her he was okay, that Jesus had protected him, and pulled a Sunday-school picture of Jesus from his back pocket to show her. Someone called an ambulance. Someone else ran to our apartment where Mama was visiting with Brother Terrell. She arrived, hair, tears, and snot flying, and crawled into the ambulance with Gary. They returned from the hospital a few hours later. Gary had a Band-Aid on his forehead and the picture of Jesus crumpled in his hand. For months he told every person he knew, every person he met, the story of how Jesus had saved his life. I felt more wretched each time he recounted the story. If I had watched over my brother the way I was supposed to, if I had resisted the neighbor kids when they said, “Aw, come on,” my brother would not have been in harm’s way and Jesus could have gone about his business elsewhere.

After Gary’s accident, we moved to an apartment located far from the highway but in the heart of sin city. Strippers and sad-eyed drunks in need of encouragement populated the new complex. When my mother wasn’t writing articles for Brother Terrell’s magazine, she was “trying to help” the neighbors. She listened to long, troubled sagas over coffee in our kitchen or theirs and told them about how God could straighten out their lives. Late one night, the husband of one of those neighbors muscled his way through our front door and grabbed Mama by the throat. He pushed her through the living room, where Gary and I slept, to her bedroom. Just as he began to tear off her clothes, Brother Terrell called. Mama grabbed the phone and the man, thinking that Brother Terrell was in town and on his way over, ran out of the apartment. According to Mama, God and Brother Terrell saved her from being raped. While she fended off the would-be rapist, Brother Terrell was busy discussing a business proposition with another preacher after a late-night tent service. My mother says the Lord caused Brother Terrell to become so distracted and so uncomfortable that he was compelled to break off conversation with the man midsentence and call her. Gary and I slept through the incident and woke to policemen swarming our apartment and our mother’s shaky voice recounting what had happened. The police advised her not to press charges, telling her the man’s lawyer would try to make her look like a whore. What seems likely, though hardly fair, is that Brother Terrell’s visits to our apartment may have figured into their assessment. A single woman with two kids who allowed a married man to come and go from her apartment would not have been in much of a position to file attempted-rape charges in 1964.

 

 

I was in third grade when we landed in the
Leave It to Beaver
house, a white two-bedroom frame job with green shutters, shaded by big trees and surrounded by grass instead of dirt. I began to do well in school, and my teacher moved me to the top reading group. She gave me permission to check out books designated for fourth- and fifth-graders and I did so at every opportunity, even though I had to skip words, paragraphs, and sometimes most of what was on the page. I dreamed of becoming an artist and drew pictures of three-legged horses: one leg at either end and a third, foreshortened, coming out of the rear of the belly. Inexplicably, the girls who lived on our street began to like me. I had been friends with boys, but other than Pam Terrell, I had never had a girl for a friend. They taught me to play Barbies and we gathered in their living rooms to watch
The Monkees
or sat on the grass and sang Supremes songs as loud as we could.

I began to feel a part of instead apart from the world. My mother let it happen, and in some ways she encouraged it. She gave me a hot-pink transistor radio through which poured the satanic sound of rock and roll. The Lovin’ Spoonful. The Monkees. The Beatles. Sam Cooke. I plugged in my earpiece when Mama was around, to keep from aggravating her. It seems odd that my mother would allow me to listen to rock and roll. She wanted Gary and me to fit in, to belong in the communities in which we lived. Or more accurately, she wanted us to avoid the pain of not fitting in. Her childhood stories had always revolved around the theme of being chosen, called by God. As I matured, the flip side of her theme surfaced: She was the kid who never fit in, the girl whose dedication to God was not always by choice. The missed field trips (too worldly and no money). The unrequited longing to play high-school basketball (Holy Rollers didn’t wear shorts). The fantasy of strutting down the field as a majorette (something Mama’s preacher father wouldn’t have let happen even if God hit him over the head with a baton). Mama was caught in a tug-of-war between what she wanted for us and what she thought the Lord required.

Brother Terrell dropped in about every three weeks, on his way to and from revivals. He arrived in the middle of the night, and when Gary and I woke up the next morning, we found the briefcase he now carried sitting by the living-room door and his pile of change on the kitchen counter. A carefulness settled over the house during his visits, but we didn’t talk about it. I don’t remember what we talked about. Family life was deep space. No road maps. No signs. Just light-years of uncharted territory. Brother Terrell and Mama once again held themselves out as brother and sister in the neighborhood. At the tent revivals and the independent Holy Roller church we attended, Uncle David morphed back into Brother Terrell. And in the privacy of our home, he was someone else entirely: the man who slept in my mother’s bed. I never knew what to call that person. The laws of behavior were determined by which role Brother Terrell played: Uncle, Man of God, or Mama’s Whatever. The basic rules were: (1) Run to meet the uncle’s car and introduce him to neighbors as Mama’s favorite brother without looking shifty; (2) Act shy around the Man of God under the tent and wait for him to invite a hug; (3) Try not to gasp when the Whatever smooches Mama long and hard on the lips. The situation made me tense, but I did not find it especially confusing. I understood our life with Brother Terrell occupied a parallel universe, and that my job was to tap-dance between worlds without stepping in anything.

My mother stumbled about for days after Brother Terrell left, muttering about how she was going to write a book about “this whole sorry mess,” but she never did. Her favorite antidote for loneliness was to drive us down the road to the doughnut shop across from the drive-in theater. She ordered six glazed and three tiny cartons of milk at the drive-thru window, pulled around the building with the winking fluorescent lights, and parked the old Ford with its nose toward the drive-in. The three of us sat in the front seat and gorged on doughnuts and every image that flickered across the giant screen. We strained to catch any bit of dialogue from
Cat Ballou
,
Born Free
,
The Dirty Dozen
, and my favorite,
Bonnie and Clyde
. I argued with Mama on occasion that it couldn’t be more of a sin to actually drive in to the theater and listen to the movie than it was to watch in silence across the street.

“Fine. We’ll stay home, then.”

Gary rolled his eyes and asked me why I couldn’t for once just let well enough alone. We joined forces and pleaded and when the sun went down, we headed back to the doughnut shop to watch Bonnie bounce like an unstrung puppet to the
tat tat tat
of the machine guns, the only sound that drifted across the street with absolute clarity.

 

 

Brother Terrell was putting up the tent in Dallas, and though Houston was four to five hours from Dallas, Mama said we were going. Our tent-revival attendance had become spotty. There was school and there was also the matter of keeping our secret life with Brother Terrell a secret. When we did go, I didn’t always get to see Pam. Like my mother, Betty Ann had retired from the tent circuit and settled down so that Pam and her other daughters could go to school. Randall traveled with his daddy and was omnipresent at the tent, though I am unclear about where he went when Brother Terrell came to see us.

I was excited. Gary and I had not traveled with the tent in five years, but somehow I still considered it our real life, our real home. Plus, Mama told me that since it was summer, Pam would be there. In the days leading up to our trip, she knelt in front of me several times, rested her hands on my shoulders, and reminded me not to tell everyone everything I knew. Especially about Brother Terrell.

“You’ll have to keep your mouth shut. Pam may try to pry information out of you, but you can’t tell her anything, not even where we live. It’s important.”

“But why is it a secret?”

“It just is. And it’s important for you to keep it. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The gravity of these talks made me feel important. At ten, all I knew was my mother trusted me with her secrets, and that I had to be very careful not to say or do anything to betray her trust.

 

 

The world’s largest tent took me by surprise, as it always did. When I remembered the tent, I thought of the smaller one with a crowd capacity of about three thousand, not this monster that could accommodate more than five thousand people. My mother ushered us down one of the central aisles. People stopped her to ask her where she had been and to tell her how good it was to see her. She said she had taken time off to raise her kids, that we needed her. The words sounded less convincing each time she said them.

“How long’s it been since you traveled with Brother Terrell?”

“A year and half? Maybe two?”

“My word. Don’t you miss it?”

“Every day.”

Everyone said the music wasn’t the same without Mama. It was good, but it didn’t have the same anointing. Mama waved her hand as if to brush away the compliment, but I could tell she was glad to hear it.

We finally made it to our seats, middle section, second row. Brother Terrell liked to be able to see my mother. Before he started to preach, he would have her stand and introduce her as an old friend of the ministry. Everyone applauded. As my mother and Gary settled into their seats, I told Mama I wanted to go find Pam. I was anxious to show her my go-go boots and fishnet stockings. She said okay, and gave me a meaningful look. I walked until my boots pinched my toes and still I had not made it around the tent or seen anyone I recognized. The faces had changed since the time we traveled with the tent, or maybe the people I knew were just lost in the crowd. I was about to head back to my mother when a young woman walked by and touched my arm.

“Aren’t chu gonna say hello?”

“Pam?” I recognized the voice and that was about all. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a mass of curls. She wore a simple white blouse, a dark knee-length straight skirt, and heels. She had breasts and hips. At twelve, she didn’t look a day under seventeen. I felt the full weightlessness of my ten years, and the silliness of my paisley skirt and go-go boots. She gave me a quick hug, the kind where shoulders almost touch but not really.