Gods in Alabama
Authors: Joshilyn Jackson
CONTENTS
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by Joshilyn Jackson All rights reserved.
Warner Books
Time Warner Book Group
1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Visit our Web site at www.twbookmark.com.
First eBook Edition: April 2005
ISBN: 0-7595-1352-X
For Betty before me and Maisy after
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A novel is a process, and the only portion of it I understand is the part where you sit down and write it. After that, it turns out there are all these other things that must be done, and quite frankly, they scare the pants off me. In order to do these other parts, you have to be many things that I am not, like savvy and discerning and brave.
I was as gormless and dewy as a bunch of ducklings, and I was lucky enough to imprint Jacques de Spoelberch, my magical agent. He did the parts that I didn’t know how to do, and he did them beautifully, and then he walked me over to Caryn Karmatz Rudy at Warner. If you close your eyes and wish for the perfect editor, and if you’ve been very, very good your whole life, Caryn might appear. If, like me, you haven’t been very, very good your whole life, you’ll have to get Jacques to go find her.
Many thanks also to hand-holding editorial assistant Emily Griffin. Production editor Penina Sacks pulled a thousand details into a coherent whole, and copy editor Beth Thomas valiantly took on My Tendency to Randomly Capitalize.
I have a crew of readers who alternately jollied and kicked this book along. Lily James is, I promise you, a contender for the best writer that will come out of my generation, and she’s also graced with a fine critical eye. Lydia Netzer, Jill James, Jill “~” Patrick, Julie Oestreich, Nancy Meshkoff, and everyone in the In Town Atlanta Writers’ Group (especially Crime Fiction writer Fred Willard, Diane Thomas, Bill Osher, Linda Clopton, Anne Web-ster, Anne Lovett, Skip Connett, Jim Taylor, Jim Harmon, and Barbara Knott) were invaluable in getting this book polished. I learned about character from Dr. Yolanda Reed (and the rest of the crew at Pensacola’s Loblolly Theatre) and Ruth Replogle and Dr. Natalie Crohn Schmitt. I could not work without the support I get from my community at PSFUMC.
It’s almost a given that a Southern writer needs a savage and spectacularly dysfunctional family, but I am afraid mine has failed me. Every one of them is disappointingly mentally stable and supportive. Scott Winn is my sweetheart and my spine. Betty Jackson always takes my side. Bob Jackson is my hero—to this day my conscience speaks in his voice. For the record, Bobby Jackson is wrong and Julie, Daniel, Erin, and I are right.
Samuel Jackson and Maisy Jane did absolutely nothing to help me write this book. In fact they dragged me away from work at every possible opportunity and made me go look at bugs. I thank God for them.
CHAPTER 1
THERE ARE GODS in Alabama: Jack Daniel’s, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus. I left one back there myself, back in Possett. I kicked it under the kudzu and left it to the roaches.
I made a deal with God two years before I left there. At the time, I thought He made out pretty well. I offered Him a three-for-one-deal: All He had to do was perform a miracle. He fulfilled His end of the bargain, so I kept my three promises faithfully, no matter what the cost. I held our deal as sacred for twelve solid years. But that was before God let Rose Mae Lolley show up on my doorstep, dragging my ghosts and her own considerable bag-gage with her.
It was the week before summer vacation began, and my uncle Bruster was getting ready to retire. He’d been schlepping the mail up and down Route 19 for thirty years and now, finally, he was going to get a gold watch, a shitty pension, and the federal gov-ernment’s official permission to die. His retirement party was looming, and my aunt Florence was using it as the catalyst for her latest campaign to get me home. She launched these crusades three or four times a year, usually prompted by major holidays or family events.
I had already explained multiple times to Mama that I wasn’t coming. I shouldn’t have had to explain it at all. I had not gone back to Possett since I graduated from high school in ’87. I had stayed in Chicago for nine Christmas vacations, had not come home for nine spring breaks, had faithfully signed up to take or teach classes every summer quarter for ten years. I had avoided weekend fly-downs for the births, graduation ceremonies, and weddings of various cousins and second cousins. I had even claimed exemption from attending the funerals of my asshole grampa and his wife, Saint Granny.
At this point, I figured I had firmly established that I would not be coming home, even if all of Chicago was scheduled to be consumed by the holy flames of a vengeful Old Testament–style Lord. “Thanks for the invite, Mama,” I would say, “but I have plans to be burned up in a fire that weekend.” Mama, however, could wipe a conversation out of her mind an infinite number of times and come back to the topic fresh as a daisy the next time we spoke.
Burr had his feet propped up on my battered coffee table and was reading a legal thriller he had picked up at the grocery store.
In between an early movie and a late supper, we had dropped by my place to intercept Florence’s eight o’clock call. Missing it was not an option. I called Aunt Florence every Sunday after church, and every Wednesday night, Flo parked my mother by the phone and dialed my number. I wouldn’t put it past Florence to hire a team of redneck ninjas to fly up to Chicago and take me down if she ever got my answering machine.
Florence had not yet mentioned my uncle’s retirement to me directly, although she had prepped Mama to ask me if I was coming home for it through six weeks’ worth of calls now. With only ten days left before the party, it was time for Aunt Florence to personally enter the fray. Mama was so malleable she was practically an invertebrate, but Florence had giant man hands on the ends of her bony wrists, and she could squeeze me with them till I couldn’t get any breath to say no. Even over the phone she could do it.
Burr watched me over the top of his book as I paced the room.
I was too nervous about my upcoming martyrdom on the stainless-steel cross of Florence to sit down with him. He was sunk hip deep into my sofa. My apartment was decorated in garage-sale chic, the default decorating choice for every graduate student. The sofa had curlicues of moss-colored velvet running all over its sage-green hide, and it was so deflated and aslant that Burr swore he only ever kissed me the first time because of it. We sat down on it at the same time, and it sucked us down and pressed us up against each other in its sagging middle. He had to kiss me, he claimed, to be polite.
“About how long do you think this is going to take?” Burr asked now. “I’m starving.”
I shrugged. “Just the usual Wednesday-night conversation with Mama.”
“Okay,” said Burr.
“And then I have to have a fight with Aunt Florence about whether or not I’m going down for Uncle Bruster’s party.”
“In that case,” said Burr, and he levered himself out of the depths of the sofa and walked the five steps to my kitchenette. He opened the cabinet and started rummaging around for something to tide himself over.
“It’s not going to take that long,” I said.
“Sure, baby,” he said, and took a pack of peanut-butter crackers back over to the sofa. He sat down with his book but didn’t open it for a moment. “Try to keep it under four hours,” he said.
“I need to talk to you about something at dinner.”
I stopped pacing around. “Is it bad?” I asked, nervous because he’d said it in such a serious tone of voice. He could mean he wanted to break up again or he could mean he was going to propose to me. We’d broken up last year over Christmas and both hated it so much that we’d found ourselves drifting back together casually, without even really talking about it. We’d been coasting along easy for a few months now, but Burr would not coast forever. We had to be going somewhere, and if he thought we weren’t, then that would be it for him.
I said, “You know I hate that. You have to give me a hint.”
Burr grinned at me, and his brown eyes were warm. “Don’t panic.”
“Okay,” I said. I felt something flutter down low in my stomach, excitement or fear, I wasn’t sure which, and then the phone rang.
“Dammit,” I said. The phone was on a crate full of books at the other end of the ugly sofa. I sat down next to Burr and picked it up. “Hello?”
“Arlene, honey! You remember Clarice?”
Clarice was my first cousin, and we were raised in the same house, practically as sisters. Mama was possibly the only person on earth who could have asked this question sans sarcasm to a daughter who had not been home in almost a decade. Aunt Florence would have gotten a lot of miles out of it, and in fact I couldn’t help but wonder if Aunt Florence hadn’t somehow planted the question in the fertile minefields of my mother’s mind.
It was not unlike the Christmas card Mama had sent me for the last five years. It had a red phone on it, and it said, in bright red curling text, “Daughter! Do you remember that man I introduced you to the day you were born? Why don’t you give him a call? I know he never hears from you, and today’s his birthday.”
Open it up and there, in giant candy-striped letters, was a one-word explanation for the terminally stupid: “Jesus,” it said. Three exclamation points.
Mama got those abominations from the Baptist Women’s League for Plaguing Your Own Children to Death in the Name of the Lord or whatever her service club was called. My aunt Florence was, of course, the president. And my aunt Florence, of course, bought Mama’s cards for her, held them out for her to sign, licked the envelopes, got stamps from Uncle Bruster, and mailed them for her. In Florence’s eyes, I was on the high road to apostasy because my church was American Baptist, not Southern Baptist.
But all I said was “Obviously I know Clarice, Mama.”
“Well, Clarice wants to know if you can drive over to the home and pick up your great-great-aunt Mag on Friday next. Mag needs someone to carry her over to the Quincy’s for your uncle Bruster’s party.”
I said, “Are you seriously telling me that Clarice wants to know if I’ll drive fourteen hours down from Chicago, and then go another hour to Vinegar Park, where by the way Clarice lives, and pick up Aunt Mag, who will no doubt piss in my rental car, and then backtrack forty-five minutes to Quincy’s?”
“Yes, but please don’t say ‘piss,’ it isn’t nice,” my mother said, deadly earnest. “Also, Clarice and Bud moved on in to Fruiton.
So it’s a good forty minutes for her to go get Mag now.”
“Oh, well then. Why don’t you tell Aunt Florence—I mean Clarice—that I will be sure to go pick up Mag. Right after Aunt Flo drops by hell and picks up the devil.”
Burr was jammed deep into the sofa with his book open, but his eyes had stopped moving over the text. He was too busy trying to laugh silently without choking to death on his peanut-butter cracker.
“Arlene, I am not repeating blasphemy,” said my mother mildly. “Florence can ask Fat Agnes to get Mag, and you can drive me.”
Oh, Aunt Florence was crafty. Asking my mother to have this conversation with me was tantamount to taping a hair-trigger pistol to a kitten’s paw. The kitten, quite naturally, shakes its fluffy leg, and bullets go flying everywhere; a few are bound to hit something. I was, after all, talking with my mama about whether or not I would pick up Mag, not whether or not I was coming.
A cheap trap worthy of Burr’s legal thriller, and I had bounced right into it.
“I can’t drive you, Mama,” I said gently. Why shoot the mes-senger? “I won’t be there.”
“Oh, Arleney,” my mother said, sounding vaguely sad. “Aren’t you ever coming home for a visit?”
“Not this time, Mama,” I said.
Mama made a pensive little noise and then said, in a cheerier voice, “Oh well, I will just look double forward to Christmas, then!” That I hadn’t been home for the last nine Christmases was not a factor in Mama’s fogbound equations. Before I could even try a quick “Love you, bye” and escape, I heard Aunt Florence’s voice barking in the background, and then Mama said, “Here’s Aunt Flo’s turn!”