Holy Ghost Girl (29 page)

She put her face so close to mine I could count the pores on her nose. “And we don’t do those things, do we?”

I backed out of slapping range. “How would we know? I don’t see anyone asking the preachers to drop their pants before they step on the platform.”

All those long talks about Brother Terrell and their future had begun to shift the balance of power between my mother and me. She relented finally, saying I could wear my filthy old pants to ride horses, but that was it. I walked outside wearing my abomination and climbed on Red Rose, the bag of bones I had spent the last year trying to ride. I thought she might throw and trample me for my sins, but she settled for her usual routine of scrubbing me against the barbed-wire fence until she was bored, then plodding back to her stall and standing there while I unsaddled her. It was business as usual, but this time my legs weren’t bleeding. Thank you, Levi Strauss. Once I had those jeans on, I didn’t want to take them off. It was so much easier to run, jump, and play baseball. Plus, my skinny legs looked better covered up. Mama threatened to burn them, so I hid whichever pair I wasn’t wearing under my mattress.

 

 

I sat in the backseat of Brother Terrell’s Thunderbird and smoothed the flounces on my fanciest dress. I always wore a dress when he was around, out of respect, and maybe a bit of fear, too, though he had not come after me with a belt in years. Gary sat beside me and flexed his bicep muscleman-style. “Feel it, just feel it.”

I ignored him and looked out the window. The car rocked toward the local diner, with Brother Terrell driving in his signature style: one foot on the gas, the other on the brake, accelerating and slowing down, accelerating and slowing down. Mama sat beside him, almost glamorous in her big sunglasses. Life looked so much better from the white leather interior of the T-Bird. I contemplated ordering something sophisticated for dinner, maybe a club sandwich and a TaB. We were almost to the city-limits sign when Mama turned to Brother Terrell, adjusted her sunglasses, and made one of her announcements.

“David, Donna has been taken over by a lesbian spirit.”

Gary lowered his arm and we stared at each other. Brother Terrell turned toward Mama, and then back toward the road so fast he jostled his fedora. A lesbian spirit was as bad as it got in our circle. I didn’t know whether to speak up or wait until she said something more, something I could defend myself against.

Brother Terrell straightened his hat and shook his head. “What are you talkin’ about?”

Mama sniffed and lifted her chin in the air. “She never wants to wear anything anymore but pants.”

I envisioned myself rolling in the sawdust with Brother Terrell trying to pin me down and cast the devil out of me. I was relieved to hear him tell my mother, “Look, we need to, uh, you know, I think, well, let’s pray about this, okay?”

Before she could answer, he punched in his new eight-track tape and turned up the volume. I was not a Johnny Cash fan, but “Folsom Prison Blues” sure sounded good that night. Brother Terrell had decided that while rock and roll was blasphemous and rebellious, and he didn’t mean that in a good way, God actually liked country music.

 

 

I was eleven, going on twelve, nearing the Age of Accountability, that time when a kid becomes an adult and God begins to record every sinful thought, word, and deed on a permanent spiritual record. Mama confirmed that holiness people considered twelve the cutoff point between childhood and adulthood. It depended on the individual. She raised her eyebrows and quoted from the New Testament: “For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required.”

I knew what she meant. All those years of hearing Brother Terrell preach the Word meant God had higher expectations of me. That did not seem fair. But neither did having the world end before I grew up. The end had been in sight for as long as I could remember. I took for granted that God, the devil, and the Communists had signed some sort of foreordained annihilation pact that was already unfolding. What I found more disturbing was that the more I learned of the outside world, the more it seemed to corroborate the apocalyptic visions on which I had been raised. At school they had us crouch under our desks, put our hands over our heads, and wait for the end. I read about the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in the issues of
Time
and
Newsweek
my mother brought home, and even between the ads in
Seventeen
magazine. I saw photos of boys who looked like high-school students fighting in Vietnam, pictures of other kids fighting in the streets with the police, pictures of blissedout teenagers, half-naked, listening to rock and roll. Proof we lived in the last days. And yet, I wanted to be in those pictures.

It was a Saturday afternoon. I was walking along Highway 6, beating at the long grasses with a stick I had picked up. My destination: the cemetery located about a mile from our trailer, the only place close enough to reach by foot. I couldn’t ride my bike because there was no shoulder on the road and the burrs would flatten my tires. Horses were too moody a mode of transportation. The day had gone cold and gray. A pickup passed. An old car. An eighteen-wheeler. All going somewhere. Everyone talked about heaven as a place where time stood still, but other than saying it had streets of gold, no one said much else about it. I imagined an embalmed sort of place. No color. No feeling. No gravity. People and angels flying off at random. I passed a neighbor’s house, tiny and cramped with a warren of rooms, each added on as time and money permitted. On the other side of the highway, a field of turned earth rolled on forever, or at least as far as I could see. Somewhere on the other side of all this, the world waited. The world with its music and books and cities and violence and terrible beauty. I paused and poked through the ice that skimmed the surface of the ditchwater. My next thought came to me with a certainty so clear and strong it frightened me: I did not want to go to heaven.
I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
But I wasn’t sorry. Surely God knew that. I turned into the drive of the roadside cemetery. The tombstones on either side looked as though they had been stuck in the ground on a whim: one here, another there, two more on the diagonal. Why not in straight orderly rows? I walked to the end of the drive and turned around, then wandered among the graves. So many young children, babies really, with lambs and roses and cherubs etched into the stones. I sat down and leaned against the back of one of the stones. I had a soul, and God and the devil had everything else. I closed my eyes. No pictures crossed the screen of my mind and no thoughts either. I could feel my heart beat all over my body. I took a deep breath.

“Look, Devil, I’ll trade you my soul for the world. I’m not talking about a little bit of the world, I mean the whole wide world.”

I looked up from the weedy graves of the people who had lived and died right next to the heart of Texas. The sky was still there, the ground too. I dusted off the back of my jeans and walked home. I rarely thought about my deal with the devil after that day. Nothing changed much. I invoked the blood of Jesus to protect me from demons when I went to the bathroom at night. I prayed when I remembered, but there was less guilt, less remorse. I had made my choice. I would live in the world. In truth, it wasn’t that easy, but it was a beginning.

SAYONARA, HELLHOLE, WE WERE MOVING. BROTHER TERRELL HAD bought property about thirty miles away, outside a town with the improbable name of Groesbeck. An enigmatic smile perched on my mother’s lips each time I asked her about our new house. “Just wait till you see it,” she said. “Just wait.”

Mama switched on the blinker in her dark green Thunderbird and turned off the highway onto a long circular drive. We glided past crepe myrtle trees in hot-pink bloom and an acre of the greenest front lawn I had ever seen. She stopped the car in front of a yellow two-story house shaded by giant oaks and turned off the engine. This was the kind of house that girls with long shiny hair and braces disappeared into every afternoon, girls with “Homecoming Queen” stamped on their future. I hung over the back of the front seat and shook a rattle in the general direction of my new sister. Mama insisted on putting baby Carol’s carrier in the front passenger seat, “in case of emergency.” That way, if she had to put on the brakes, she could throw her right arm out and save her.

I craned my neck to see around the house to the garage apartment or trailer in back. “Where is it?”

My mother glanced over her shoulder. “Where’s what?”

“Our house.”

She opened the door and paused before getting out of the car. “This is our house.” She walked around to the passenger’s side and lifted Carol out of the carrier saying, “Hi there, hi there,” in that sticky voice people use with babies. Gary and I were right behind her. He looked up at the trees, then turned to face the house, spreading his arms out as if to encompass the view. “We’re going to live
here
?”

“This is it, and your room is at the very top. It’s a converted attic.”

He ran up the steps to the long porch and threw himself into one of the three white rockers that seemed to be waiting for us. Mama shifted the baby to one shoulder and asked me to grab the diaper bag.

“And Donna, close your mouth. You’ll catch flies.”

We unlocked the front door and stepped into something called a foyer with a hanging light and a wall-mounted gold mirror with a table underneath. We huddled in the doorway looking into a white-carpeted living room with nine-foot ceilings and furniture that was decidedly not early American. A dark blue low-slung couch stretched along a wall punctuated by three tall windows. Cream-colored floor-length drapes framed the windows and were pulled back by wide black ribbons at either end. The black fabric shades were a revelation; who knew they came in anything other than white plastic? Outside each window, just below the midway point where the shades stopped, hung a yellow-andblack garden spider. A little jewel of color located at the central point of each of the three large webs.
Even the spiders are color-coordinated.
Islands of glass-topped tables floated through the room. Gary and I took off our shoes and slid our feet through the white shag carpeting. We ran our fingers over everything, including the empty built-in bookshelves. We passed without speaking through the wide arched opening into the dining room. My mother flipped a wall switch and a chandelier spilled light over a long dark table with eight tall chairs.

“Oh.” The word came out as a soft sigh from all three of us. Off to the side, an empty china cabinet awaited its new charges. It would have to make do with the Harvest Gold dinnerware Mama had bought with green stamps. We pushed through a door into the kitchen with its floor-to-ceiling cabinets, a second table, and a pantry almost as large as Gary’s old bedroom. So much space. Half our trailer would have fit in the kitchen.

We rounded the corner and traipsed up the stairs, through the bedrooms fully furnished with beds, dressers, tables, lamps, and a picture or two. Where had all this stuff come from? I peeked in the closets, relieved to find them empty. The dressing room attached to my mother’s bedroom was the only unfurnished room in the house. Mama nodded toward the longest wall. Her voice broke the spell. “The crib will go there.”

“Mama, all this furniture, whose is it?”

She laughed and handed me the baby. “Ours now. We bought it all from the people who lived here. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers.

“All those years of sacrifice, and now the Lord is blessing the ministry. Brother Terrell is going to get that divorce from Betty Ann. Things are going to be different.” Her voice sounded like a kid who couldn’t believe her luck.

 

 

Things were different, and seemingly overnight. Right after we moved in, Brother Terrell had Longbotham Furniture deliver a huge TV to our door. Mama made a weak protest, but she couldn’t say no to Brother Terrell, and the hellevision became a permanent fixture in our living room. Brother Terrell spent every evening after dinner stretched out on the big couch, watching that screen. It wasn’t so much that he liked TV, Mama said. He just needed a break from the pressures of the ministry.

In the early to midseventies, the Lord’s work officially took in about a million dollars annually, though since all transactions were made in cash, the accounting was vague at best. Edited versions of Brother Terrell sermons were broadcast on about thirty-five stations across the United States, and his magazine,
The Endtime Messenger
, went out monthly to over one hundred thousand subscribers. Radio and publishing costs came with an annual price tag of close to a half million dollars. Brother Terrell had purchased a second version of the world’s largest tent, this one in red, white, and blue. His annual missionary trips to India drew hundreds of thousands. He was on the verge of being discovered by a broader audience. The rise of the Charismatic movement brought middle-class tongue-talking Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Catholics to the tent. Someone approached Brother Terrell about a television show. Someone else wanted to write a book about him. A religious film producer wanted to make a movie about his overseas revivals. Brother Terrell bragged that country-music star George Jones had approached him after service one night and requested prayer. Another night, bluegrass legend Lester Flatt, a personal hero of his, came to the tent and asked for prayer. Brother Terrell prayed for Flatt several times over the years, usually by phone, but the musician kept getting sick. After hearing Flatt was back in the hospital, sicker than ever, he called my mother in tears. God healed people all the time in his services, he said, so why wouldn’t God heal Lester Flatt? And more important, why hadn’t God healed Randall?

I stood by the table in the breakfast nook and listened as my mother consoled him over the phone. Of course God heard his prayers. Of course he hadn’t done anything wrong. The devil was using Lester’s and especially Randall’s sickness to make him doubt himself. Randall continued to vacillate between health and illness. One minute he was shouting the victory and the next he was getting yet another blood transfusion. The scripture about God visiting the sins of the fathers on the children came to mind. I wondered if Mama or Brother Terrell ever thought of it.