Holy Ghost Girl (28 page)

Gary and I stood in the middle of our caliche drive Friday morning, dreading that smear of yellow on the horizon, hoping as we would for the next two years that we had somehow managed to miss the bus. He picked up a smooth, round stone and with a flick of his wrist, sent it skipping one, two, three over the blacktop. We grinned at each other. He stepped back from the highway and stood beside me. We turned our heads and eyed the bus lumbering toward us. Gary ran his sneaker over the loose rocks, clearing a small path through them. “You don’t have to do it. I don’t think it makes him feel better about being disgusting and all.” The bus huffed to a stop and the door opened. My brother looked over his shoulder before he stepped inside. “I won’t tell.”

I took my seat at the front of the bus that morning without saying a word. Dead silence. Followed by a hailstorm of spitballs and laughter.

My mother introduced herself to neighbors as Mrs. Ter-
rell
, with the emphasis on the last instead of the first syllable, a mispronunciation intended to throw off anyone who might connect Mr. Ter-
rell
, with Brother Terrell. They decided a certain amount of disguise was necessary, and Brother Terrell began to go incognito in lime-green leisure suits and straw fedoras. This in a community where Wranglers and cowboy hats were standard male dress. Then there were the big black Jackie O sunglasses he and my mother insisted on wearing indoors. A waitress who worked the dark cavern of Marlin’s “nicest” restaurant once suggested they take off their sunglasses if they wanted to actually see the menu.

“Or you could stand under the Schlitz sign over there by the counter.”

They raised their sunglasses slightly to peruse the menu and lowered them again when she returned to take our orders.

Brother Terrell fueled rumors with his habit of paying in cash for everything from the most expensive saddles in Barnett’s Feed and Seed to land. A neighbor told us the townspeople speculated he was a professional gambler, mobster, drug dealer. He squinted at my mother in her dark glasses and waited for her to fill him in. She tried to dance around the question.

“Oh, he does a little of this and that.” The neighbor pressed her and finally she said her husband was a traveling salesman. What did he sell? “Oh, cars, heavy equipment, land, things like that.”

The neighbor said, “Uh-huh, I see.”

Whatever people suspected, the great silver heist probably confirmed. The Lord revealed to Brother Terrell that as the Mark of the Beast approached, U.S. paper currency would lose its value and silver and gold coins would be the only money worth anything. Around the same time, he heard the government was withdrawing silver dimes, quarters, half-dollars, and silver dollars from circulation and replacing them with coins that had either less silver or no silver at all. He began to bring home sacks of change from the offerings.

Mama held a large cloth bag over my bed and the coins rushed from it like water through a broken dam. She emptied another and another. A metallic smell filled my closet-size bedroom. The smell was so strong I could taste it on my tongue. Mama shook another bag and hundreds of dimes fell onto the inverted cone-shaped mountain of coins. I thrust my hands into the pile, buried up to my wrists in money.

“Careful, now. You don’t want to scatter everything.” Mama stood over me, folding the bags in half one by one, running her fingers over the crease in each one, like she did the sheets when we folded laundry. She stacked the bags on my dresser and sat on the edge of my bed. She picked up a dime and held it between her thumb and pointer finger, turning it so the edge was toward me.

“You want to look for edges that are silver like this. We’ll keep those.” She threw the dime into a bucket on the floor, sifted through the pile of money again, and pulled out a second dime. “The ones that have this coppery edge? We’ll give those back to Brother Terrell.”

The mindlessness of sorting the coins appealed to me. Mama brought peanut-butter sandwiches and milk and set them beside my bed, and we ate and sorted together. Over time we filled six to eight large trash cans with silver. We stored the trash cans in the old house that stood beside our trailer, next to the room where we stored hay and feed for the livestock. We padlocked the front and back doors of the house. The arrangement worked fine until my mother hired someone to feed the cows and horses. Maybe the guy was looking for feed and stumbled upon the coins or maybe he just took a peek one day. Either way, the next time Mama checked the trash cans, they were only three-quarters full. She balked at calling the sheriff. She said she felt bad for the man who worked for us, that he was poor and black and had a bunch of kids. She did not say that she was reluctant to explain to the sheriff why she kept so much money squirreled away in trash cans. Eventually she did press charges and the man went to jail for three months. We drove to his house each week while he was in jail and gave his wife a check for the same amount of money he had made working for us. It was the least we could do after putting temptation right in front of the man, Mama said. She bought a new lock for the doors, but she didn’t move the money.

Not long after our move, my mother called Gary and me into the living room and made a somewhat breathless announcement. “I’ve got something to tell you both. Y’all sit there on the couch.” She smoothed the full skirt of her shirtwaisted dress, sat between us, and took our hands. It was Mama’s version of a June Cleaver moment. All I could think was,
Uh-oh, here we go
. She looked at Gary, then at me, and ran her tongue over her lips. “I know this move has been hard on you, leaving your friends and all. But something good has come from it. From now on, you can call Brother Terrell ‘Daddy.’ ”

Gary broke into cheers. “We’ll have a real daddy.”

My brother called every man he spent more than ten minutes with “Daddy,” so Brother Terrell’s latest incarnation suited him. I had spent every year of my life since I was one living apart from my dad, but I had never thought he was gone for good until that moment.

Mama put her hand on my shoulder. “Donna, you’ve got that lip so far out, you could ride it to town.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I thought you loved Brother Terrell. What is it?”

I didn’t know where to begin. There were so many “it’s” piled one on top of the other in a big sticky mess. My real daddy. Pam’s and Randall’s real daddy. My mother’s coming and going. Sister Coleman. Moving from one crappy place to the next. Always talking about the Truth, but living a lie. I did not know how to choose my words or pull apart the grievances. In the end it didn’t matter. The words chose me.

“He is not our daddy! You are not his wife! This is all a big, fat lie!”

My mother’s eyes met mine and in one awful instant I knew. This was the big “it.” Her hand popped across my face. The slap registered, but the euphoria of saying what only seconds before had been unsayable and the righteousness of knowing I was
right
, numbed the sting. I could not stop myself. “The Bible says thou shalt not commit adultery, but you do it all the time.”

“Do you just want to hurt me?”

I did want to hurt her and in the next second I didn’t. “I’m sorry, Mama. I’m so sorry.”

She wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “Well, for your information, men in the Bible usually had more than one wife. They took a woman into their tent and they were married. They didn’t go through all the rigmarole we do today. In the eyes of God, we are married.”

In the eyes of most people, Brother Terrell was still married to Betty Ann, but I decided to let that one go.

My mother waved her left hand through the air and said in the breathy voice of a new bride, “Aren’t they beautiful?” Brother Terrell had given Mama a set of diamond-encrusted wedding rings he had pulled from the offering. When believers had no money to give or when they wanted to “prove God” for a miracle, they made an offering of their most treasured possessions. The thought was that the goods would be sold and the money transferred to the ministry, and that God would honor the sacrifice and answer the prayer of the giver. Jewelry, they dropped directly into the offering buckets. In the early years, Brother Terrell announced from the platform that we didn’t have the time to sell the items, but people continued to give them anyway. He stopped making that announcement after awhile. After the evening services, someone separated the trinkets from the money and put them into a different bucket. It wasn’t unusual to see members of the evangelistic team at the back of the platform going through the jewelry and taking what they wanted. Sometimes they paid for it and sometimes they didn’t. Mama contended that Brother Terrell always paid for what he took. He brought home several sets of china that we never used, silver, stereos, antique furniture, handwoven Indian bedding. I was the only girl in fifth grade with a diamond watch. Mules kicked the china to bits. Someone tore holes in the Indian blankets. I lost the diamond watch. We didn’t possess the capacity to value such things. They meant almost nothing to us.

The one exception was the rings. My mother loved those rings. Every time we went to a revival and Brother Terrell asked people to prove God by digging deep and giving something they could not afford to give (he meant money), Mama slipped the rings from her purse and dropped them into the offering buckets surreptitiously. She took seriously the concept of proving God. She believed if she gave God everything she had, he would work things out so that she and Brother Terrell could be married properly and she could wear the wedding rings he gave her under the tent as well as out in the world. Brother Terrell fished the rings out of the offerings many times and gave them back to her. One night, someone got to the rings before Brother Terrell. He had to find another set and the cycle began again.

My mother believed she and Brother Terrell were soul mates ordained by God to be together to build a great ministry. He received the visitations, and she translated them into their own brand of theology and wrote articles under his name explaining the revelations. She encouraged his ambitions to take his ministry worldwide and helped him develop a strategy to do so. She believed he would “do right” by her. All she had to do was pray and keep the faith. I know all of this because when we were not arguing about her relationship with Brother Terrell, she confided in me. She had no one else. She kept her affair with Brother Terrell a secret from her family and the longtime friends she had made while traveling with the tent. Neither her family nor her friends knew where we lived. The neighbors she befriended thought she and her “husband” were flashy dressers and secretive, but they chalked it up to their citified ways. They had no idea how secret their lives really were. To talk with anyone other than me about what was going on would have been to betray what was most important to her: Brother Terrell and the ministry.

I was desperate for my mother to save herself, to save us. Especially after she told me she was pregnant. She said we would manage by keeping the baby a secret from everyone in the ministry, and from her family. When we traveled to the tent revivals, we would leave the baby with a sitter. Simple. I cast and recast the reasons she should leave Brother Terrell, out loud and to myself. He couldn’t leave Betty Ann. The baby would grow up and someone someday would have to know the identity of the father. I told my mother that if Brother Terrell loved her, truly loved her, he wouldn’t want her to be so sad. I thought clear, compelling arguments would make the difference. Instead they made me my mother’s adversary. She couldn’t stand to hear me say what she was thinking and our “talks” inevitably ended in argument.

People have called Brother Terrell a sociopath, but I don’t think that’s true. He had a conscience. I woke to him crying in the middle of the night more than once, calling out again and again, “My kids, oh, my kids. What am I going to do about my kids? Oh God. My children.”

The first time I heard him, I slipped out of my bed and felt along its edge until I found the door and pulled it back an inch or two. He was on his knees in the living room, holding his head in his hands. Mama held him and the two of them rocked to and fro in silhouette. A crescent moon grinned in the window behind them.
What the hell are you grinning at?
I eased the door shut, climbed back into the bed, and fell asleep with my fingers in my ears.

The road between sin and hell was turning out to be long and circuitous instead of short and direct. I could deal with that. On days my mother dropped Gary and me off in town to spend the afternoon wandering in and out of stores, I rolled up my knee-length skirts to hit midthigh and flirted with older boys. We set up meetings in alleyways and in nearby houses where I let them kiss me, keeping their tongues out of my mouth and their hands away from restricted zones. On occasion I smoked and said “damn.” My brother charged me a percentage of my allowance not to tell. It’s strange to think that our moral code was such that this delinquent behavior did not make me feel half as guilty as saving up to buy my first pair of jeans. When I pulled on those pants, I was bucking one of the strongest and most visible tenets of holiness. Mama told me to take them off, but I wouldn’t. She stalked me through the fake-wood-paneled trailer, paraphrasing scripture in Deuteronomy: “It is an abomination for a woman to wear that which pertaineth to a man.” Not just a sin, but an abomination, she stressed. That meant it was something God hated. I reminded her that a few verses down it warns against plowing with an ox and an ass together and allowing men with crushed testicles to enter the assembly of the Lord.