Holy Ghost Girl (33 page)

Brother Terrell placed his hands on my head next, and it was as if a curtain fell over my senses. Sight, sound, smell, and touch were gone. The I that was me, separate and distinct, released its hold, and I experienced myself as a vast and bliss-filled darkness. I did not shout or speak in tongues. I did not fall to the ground as my boyfriend had. I was there, but I was not there. I don’t know how long I drifted like this before slowly becoming aware of sound and of being back in my body. When I opened my eyes, I knew Brother Terrell had prayed for me, but I didn’t know the content of the prayer. It didn’t matter because the sores, fevers, and lethargy that had plagued me for months disappeared that night. The healing increased the dissonance between what I believed and what I thought. I believed Brother Terrell was a prophet and a healer. I knew he was a liar and an adulterer. I did not know how to reconcile the two. I also believed the Terrellites were right about what God required—complete withdrawal from the world and sacrifice in every aspect of life—and I knew I was not capable of that. I was seventeen when I left Brother Terrell’s ministry for what would be the last time. There were no epiphanies, only a sense of regret and failure. I pushed these feelings away when they surfaced, and over time they turned to anger and then, to my relief, something that felt like indifference, only heavier.

 

 

It was well after midnight. The bars had closed and my friends and I had taken the party to someone’s house in the country. Bodies packed every room. We were smoking and drinking and hovering over the pile of cocaine on the coffee table. Musicians ran up and down guitar scales, and somewhere in the back of the house, someone pounded out the drum solo from “Wipe Out.” We talked and talked about terribly important things. Out of that din, a clear, mellifluous voice sang:

Everything fell away but the song. It was “Job’s God Is True,” a song Brother Terrell often sang under the tent.

I followed the sound to the front porch. A young blond woman who fronted a local band and who minutes earlier had bent over the cocaine with me sat on the porch swing, strumming her guitar and singing. I asked where she had learned the song and she told me she had attended Pentecostal churches, even tent revivals, as a kid.

“There’s power there. Can’t deny that.” She looked up and smiled.

I nodded and walked back inside.

 

 

Over the next five years Brother Terrell and my mother drifted further apart, but she didn’t seem to realize it. After a while, only the preacher woman and her family accompanied him to the ranch, but Mama maintained he was working everything out. Eventually a grand jury convened to examine the IRS evidence against him. It came out in the hearing that my mother had made a down payment on a property with thirty thousand dollars in cash. The attorney who handled the transaction remembered it ten years later as one of the strangest moments of his career.

“This woman hands me all this money in a bag. A brown paper bag! I kept waiting for the wise guys with machine guns.”

My mother told the grand jury she had borrowed the money from an individual, but she wasn’t at liberty to tell them who had loaned it to her. She had promised the person she wouldn’t. The jury sent her home to reconsider, but her answer remained the same. She spent several weeks in the Wichita County jail for contempt. Eventually the person she had “borrowed” the money from (she told me it was not Brother Terrell) released her from her promise and she answered the jury’s question. Mama told me later that while she was in jail, the preacher woman and Brother Terrell had been in Hawaii ready to leave the country “if things went wrong.” It was the closest my mother ever came to saying a bad word against Brother Terrell. She wouldn’t elaborate on which things could have gone wrong. I assumed she meant answering the grand-jury question in a way that would have incriminated Brother Terrell. I remembered that during the weeks my mother was in jail, he had called me almost every day.

“I’m really concerned about your mama,” he said in that hoarse, overworked preacher voice.

I asked my mother what she thought about a man who would have left the country when she was facing legal repercussions for protecting him. Instead of answering my question, she voiced a fear around which she had detoured for almost twenty years.

“I guess he didn’t really care what happened to me.” She looked tired and defeated.

If anyone had asked me at the time of this conversation if I still believed in David Terrell, I would have said no, and I would have been wrong. Belief, like love, can go underground. It can become a part of our operating system, without our knowledge or approval. As my mother spoke of Brother Terrell’s betrayal, another layer of faith fell away even as I recognized its existence. What a surprise to feel its absence. Within hours, the illness from which I had been healed returned. I had been symptom-free for nine years. One doctor said the symptoms I experienced can occur and then disappear and remain dormant for years. I nodded, thinking all the time,
You have no idea
. I sometimes think that the timing of my healing and my relapse were weird coincidences. What I believe, or what I think I believe, is far less rational. I had faith once in a man’s connection to what I thought of as God. Strange as it seems, that faith, misplaced and undeserved, made me well, and when the last remnant of it deserted me, I fell ill again. The symptoms remained for two years until we found a drug to control them. These days I am mostly well.

After an investigation that lasted almost a decade, Brother Terrell’s case went to trial. I’m not sure how much of a role, if any, my mother’s answer to the grand jury played. We learned during the trial that Brother Terrell had fathered a child with Sarah, the woman he had taken home after a tent service more than twenty years earlier. Pam murmured during the trial something about hoping there were no more children hidden under a bush somewhere. Her dad was found guilty of criminal income-tax evasion and sentenced to three ten-year sentences, to run concurrently. It wasn’t until my mother tried to see Brother Terrell in prison that she realized he had finally worked everything out. He had put my sisters on the visitors list as his daughters. The preacher woman was listed as his wife. My mother’s name was not on the list.

 

 

There is a small tree—I picture it as a skinny, overgrown bush—in the yard of the prison where Brother Terrell served his time. He told my sisters that when he finished his work as a prison janitor, he went to the tree to read his Bible and pray. Since praying and pacing were synonymous for Brother Terrell, he walked around the tree and called out to his God, sometimes in silence and at other times aloud. Did he beg forgiveness and ask for a second chance? Did he call down the wrath of Jehovah upon his enemies? Knowing Brother Terrell, I would bet he did both.

My sister Carol met a man who served as chaplain of the prison after her daddy left.

He told her that her father had become something of a legend. Five years after his release, the longtime prisoners still talked about the tent preacher, and when they were troubled, many of them visited what had become known as the Prayin’ Tree.

AFTER SEVERAL FALSE STARTS AND STOPS, I FOUND A PATH THAT LED away from the tent and the Terrellites. I went to college and studied philosophy, literature, and journalism. For a long time I felt like a cardboard cutout of a person, flat and one-dimensional, propped up with a plastic stand, nothing behind me. I watched the students, teachers, employers, friends, and colleagues around me and picked up cues on how to be in the world: Look them in the eye, firm up the handshake, file down the emotion, read good books, wear good shoes, dark colors, the best haircut you can afford. Fake it till you make it. Gradually, the years between me and the tent stacked up until they formed a wall of experience that separated me from my former self. Upon meeting my relatives who remained in the ministry, my husband and friends commented, “I don’t know what to think. They’re so different from you.” The elevenand-a-half-year-old girl who sold her soul to the devil in exchange for the world—the very thing everyone under the tent warned against—had gotten exactly that: the world, in all its messy glory.

When casual acquaintances asked where I grew up, or where I came from, as we say in Texas, there was a long and uncomfortable pause. After a moment I might say, “Oh, we moved around,” or “We lived all over,” which led to questions about whether my “stepfather” was in the military. If I felt brave, I laughed and said, “Oh, something like that,” and made a fast getaway. Most times I stammered and shifted my eyes until the conversation limped off in another direction. The question of where I came from struck me as a paradox. I had not lived anywhere long enough for a place to stamp itself upon my psyche in the cozy shape of a Monopoly house. Brother Terrell’s ministry was the only home I had known, and that did not constitute an answer anyone could understand. I experienced myself as an exile, an orphan, a ghost girl, all of the above. There was the time I had passed through and the time I now inhabited. I had no way to connect the two. Until my sister’s telephone call and Randall’s funeral.

Randall knocked on death’s door off and on for forty years. Maybe that’s why when the door finally opened and he slipped through, it came as a shock. With the help of his daddy’s prayers, he had spent most of his life proving doctors wrong, and I guess some of us thought he always would. One of his sisters sobbed, “I thought he was going to get a miracle.” All the hemorrhages and death sentences he had survived didn’t count.

On the night prior to the funeral, family members gathered in the funeral home in Brownwood, the largest town close to Bangs, and greeted one another with exclamations of surprise at how long it had been since we last saw one another. The old animosities no longer held. Betty Ann gave me a long hug and said, “How’s your mama? Tell her I love her.” Only my mother and brother were missing; they had begged off, saying neither of them felt up to it. Betty Ann drew my sisters to her and they clung to her like a long-lost aunt. The preacher woman’s daughter was there, laughing and talking with my sisters. I marveled at the banality of the scene. After all the lies and secrets, we were, finally, like any other family. Voices, soft and layered one upon the other—how you been, have you seen so and so, that’s her over there, her husband died ten years back, oh no, it’s been so long—all spoken in half whispers, as though we feared to wake the dead.

At the edges of the crowd, the conversation was of an entirely different nature:
Should
Brother Terrell raise Randall from the dead? Maybe he should leave him in peace. He was so sick when he died. Well, God had promised Randall a miracle. But he had already been
embalmed
. Wasn’t that a problem? If only Randall hadn’t been sick so long. If only Brother Terrell had gotten to him before the mortician. No one said, “Look, this isn’t going to happen.” Several of us had left the ministry decades earlier to pursue nursing, software development, accounting, and other careers built on reason and rationality, but that evening we had once again taken our places in a universe where the impossible could happen, whether you really wanted it to or not.

 

 

The next morning, my husband steered the car down Highway 84 toward the funeral in Bangs. I gazed out the window, puzzled at the unreality of finding myself en route to a place I had left so far behind, a place I turned away from at every juncture. When friends said things like, “Nothing happens in God’s world without a reason,” and “There are no coincidences,” I rolled my eyes and shuddered. They had no idea where that kind of thinking could lead. Everything within me had shifted, from belief to atheism to agnosticism to a sort of “cultural Christianity,” yet the stretch between Brownwood and Bangs remained unchanged. I thought I recognized every dusty outcropping of rock, every stand of cedar and pad of prickly pear. The person who looked out the window, the woman who had changed the way she thought, spoke, dressed, prayed, or didn’t pray, the woman who had sold her birthright, she was the one I didn’t know.

I pointed out a gravel road. “Slow down. Turn right.”

My husband swerved, and all at once we were there. Dusty cars of every make and model were scattered across the scrubby field. Small groups of people streamed toward a large utilitarian building, the Terrellite church, positioned in what appeared to be the same spot the tent had occupied during the run-up to the end-time. My husband parked the car and we stepped out into the sunlight of a mild November day. A light breeze played at the edges of my suit jacket. No west Texas gusts pulled or pushed at me. No need to pull my coat tighter about me. No need for a coat at all. We picked our way across the dry, rocky terrain, moving ever closer to the church. I remembered the times I had backed away, literally and figuratively, from anything that had evoked this place, these people. The pop singer who crooned “Job’s God Is True” at the after-hours party, the sad little gospel tent in Boston Common, the voice of a street preacher wafting through a hotel window ten stories above San Francisco, the French Holy Rollers who tried to convert me in Nice. Trickster spirits that winked at me from unexpected corners of my life, reminders that all was not as it seemed, that I was not as I seemed.