Holy Ghost Girl (5 page)

Randall flitted past Pam and me and taunted in a singsong voice, “I get to ride in the big truck and you don’t. Nanny, nanny, nanny.”

We pulled at our moms. “Why does Randall get to ride with Dockery and we have to pack into the car like sardines? It’s not fair.”

Mama shook her head in agreement. “Some things aren’t fair. Brother Terrell’s about ready. Get in the car, now.”

“You, too, Pamela Eloise,” Betty Ann echoed. Pam shot her mama a hard look. She hated her middle name.

The next revival was scheduled to start a week later just outside of Atlanta. We had plenty of time, but we would drive all night anyway. Brother Terrell couldn’t sleep for hours after a service and saw no reason to wait until the next morning to get on the road.

For reasons mysterious to me, Mama, Gary, and I had been elevated to first-family status during our first year on the road. We loaned our old Ford to one of the tent families and traveled with the Terrells in their old car. And then the Falcon appeared. One minute we were riding in a beat-up rattletrap with bad tires, faded paint, and a wheezing engine, and the next thing you know, we were cruising in the Falcon, intoxicated with the new-car smell and the knowledge that God placed our needs at the top of his to-do list. One of the faithful had slipped the keys to Brother Terrell at the end of a revival. That made it a miracle car.

Gary and I crawled into the backseat with my mother. He curled up into a fetal position and rested his head in Mama’s lap. She pressed her forehead against the window, a gesture of exhaustion or need, maybe both. I gathered my legs onto the seat, fit them around Gary’s body, stroked and patted my mother’s leg with my feet. She cupped her fingers around my toes. I leaned my head into the corner where the car door and the seat meet. Up front in the passenger’s seat, Betty Ann folded her coat into a pillow and placed it on the console for Pam.

“Put your head there, honey.”

Pam snuggled into what looked like a comfortable nest, so comfortable it made my own position feel hard and cramped in comparison. I registered my dissatisfaction in my standard way.

“Why can’t we go now?”

Mama replied in her flat, end-of-the-night voice, “We’ll leave when we’re ready. Close your eyes and go to sleep. Now.”

“I can’t sleep till we’re going.”

“Then close your mouth and stop talking.”

Finally, Brother Terrell opened the driver’s-side door and slid behind the wheel and we bumped over the field and onto the road. His long white sleeves glowed in the light of the tube radio. Hank Williams whined “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” Kitty Wells answered with “It Wasn’t God who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” We beamed through the night, our headlights reflecting off the molasses-colored two-lane road. On and on we rolled, anywhere and everywhere, across the dotted lines of the map Betty Ann unfolded and folded, across the imaginary boundaries that separated and divided the land into puzzle pieces of here and there.

Betty Ann’s head rose like a dark moon above the back of the seat. Dreams merged with reality. A woman moved across the swamps that lined the road, her head rag white, so very white against the night. A long cotton sack hung from her shoulder, but there were no cotton fields here, just water thick as stew and trees that stub and splinter against the night. A hand made its way from the front seat to the back and rested, light and tentative as a mayfly, on my mother’s knee. Someone flicked on the overhead light.

Betty Ann’s voice rumbled, “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to.”

Brother Terrell glanced toward her. “What? I didn’t do nothing.”

No answer. Just the lick of the tires on the road. I looked out the window for the white head rag. Nothing. We traveled deeper and deeper into the darkness until finally the light overtook us and another day began.

The sun hit us like salt on slugs. Every muscle, every dream hardened and cracked under the glare. It hurt to move, breathe, blink. I burrowed into the corner, my hand over my face. The car slowed. I peeked between my fingers as we came to a stop in front of a white wooden restaurant with two big windows. We eased our stiff bodies out of the car and stumbled toward the building.

Brother Terrell called out: “We don’t have all day now.”

Betty Ann pointed out the restroom to Pam as we walked through the door.

Pam pulled on her mother’s arm. “Aren’t you coming?”

“I’m staying here with Daddy . . . and Carolyn.”

A look I could not decipher passed between the adults. Pam and I took Gary by the hand and headed for the bathroom. When we returned, Mama and Betty Ann were ordering breakfast: two eggs with bacon, grits, and toast for each of them, and the same thing for Pam and me to share. Gary would eat off our mother’s plate. The women handed the plastic-coated menus back to the waitress, and it was Brother Terrell’s turn. He cleared his throat as if to say something, then didn’t. I dreaded what came next. Without looking up from the pad she held in her hand, the waitress asked Brother Terrell if he thought he might order before lunch. She laughed a bit as she said it, but he didn’t respond. From the platform, Brother Terrell glided over the most difficult words of scripture with ease. Take him off the platform, replace the Bible with a letter, a contract, or a menu from a roadside restaurant, and he stumbled and stammered and sounded out the words like a kid learning to read. Everyday life rendered him functionally illiterate. My mother said it was God’s anointing that enabled him to read during services. She didn’t say why God didn’t cure him of his illiteracy and spare him the humiliation.

He cleared his throat again and pointed to the menu.

“I’ll have this here.”

The waitress’s pencil hovered over her pad. “And what’s that?”

“It’s the, the . . .” His face turned red. Pam and I stared at our laps, trying to avoid her dad’s terrifying vulnerability. Brother Terrell turned to Betty Ann and dropped his voice. “What’s that say?”

“Three eggs, country biscuits, redeye gravy, and ham.”

He handed the menu to the waitress and swallowed hard. “That’s what I’ll have.”

She looked up finally from her pad and her eyes went soft. “The writing is so small on these things, it’s a wonder any of us can read ’em.”

By the time the waitress delivered breakfast, Brother Terrell had recovered. She settled the platter of food in front of him, and the light clicked on in his eyes.

“That looks like my mama’s cookin’. I thank you.”

She smiled at him like she had never been thanked before and lingered for a moment, hip cocked, before unloading onto the table the other plates that lined her arm.

Betty Ann took it all in with her big, sad eyes. “Aren’t chu sumthin’?”

Brother Terrell sawed at his ham without looking up. Pam and I stirred our runny eggs into the grits. Gary crunched into a slice of toast coated with jelly—his mouth a sticky grape outline. Mama picked at her scrambled eggs, then gave up. She mumbled for me to scoot over, all the way over, and slid out of the booth to play a song on the jukebox.

The car felt more crowded than usual that morning when we folded ourselves back into it. The grown-ups spoke only when they had to, and when they did, their words said one thing and their voices another. Pam looked over her shoulder at me from her perch on the console between the bucket seats her parents occupied. Her face was smug. She didn’t say anything, but I knew she was thinking,
I get to sit up here and you don’t.
I whined that it wasn’t fair that only Pam got to sit on the console. Mama told me to be quiet about it. I said it was only right that Gary and I should have a turn too.

Mama cut her eyes at me. “Donna Marie, I’m warning you.”

I couldn’t stop myself. I reminded Mama and Betty Ann and Brother Terrell that Pam and Randall had sat on the console during our last trip, that it was in fact my turn, and that I had never gotten to sit on the console even once. Brother Terrell slammed on the brakes and the car skidded to a stop. “Pamela, get off now and let Donna sit up here.”

Pam slid into the backseat with Mama and Gary, and I climbed onto the narrow console. I had to sit straight up and my back hurt after about five minutes. I looked over my shoulder at Pam. She nestled against the door and smirked. I shifted from side to side and tried to get comfortable. I couldn’t lean forward and I couldn’t lean back. I couldn’t do anything except sit straight up. After a few miles I offered to trade places with Pam but she said no, she was comfortable, and that I could just ride up there for the rest of the trip.

We uttered a collective sigh of relief as we drove through Atlanta to the community that would be our home for the duration of the revival. The house was located in an area of town that had elements of both city and country life. There were cracked sidewalks, a corner store, and yards that turned into small pastures with an occasional barn or lean-to. Brother Terrell eased the car along the curb, ducking his head slightly and squinting to see the house numbers. Betty Ann looked down at the address she had scratched on an envelope.

“David, this has to be it.”

I peered through the car window at the house, white with red shutters. Nice, much nicer than the last place we stayed. Two squares of brown grass lay on each side of the concrete walk that led to the front door. A metal roof extended from the house and covered a porch just wide enough for the glider that occupied one end. A swing. Okay, sort of a swing. A tree hugged the edge of the porch, small, too small for a tree house. We rolled past the house and turned into the dirt driveway that widened into a large rectangle of dirt side yard and extended beyond the house to the ramshackle barn. Brother Terrell jerked the car into park and fished in his pocket for the key his advance man had mailed a week earlier.

We stepped stiff-legged from the car and headed for the side door of the house. Each adult carried two suitcases, all the clothes we owned. The door opened into a large kitchen with a little table pushed against the wall. The five boxes we had packed with pots, pans, plates, towels, sheets, and quilts sat on the table and the floor, delivered earlier that morning by one of the tent families. Betty Ann went to the sink and turned a handle. Rusty orange water poured out of the faucet. After a minute she turned to us and said, “No hauling water from the windmill this time. And if you wait a minute, it turns clear and gets warm.”

Mama flicked a light switch on the wall. She and Betty Ann stared at the ceiling, as if to marvel at the result. It wasn’t that we had never experienced modern conveniences; we just never knew when to expect them. We followed Brother Terrell through the kitchen, dining room, little square living room with a couch that folded into a bed, and into the hallway. Three bedrooms opened onto the hall: one for Brother Terrell and Betty Ann; one for Brother Cotton and his wife, Laverne; and one for me, Pam, Randall, and Gary to share. Mama would sleep on the sofa. I pushed through a fourth door. An indoor toilet. I started toward it, but Pam cut in front of me and settled on the seat. She kicked her sturdy tanned legs and beamed a guileless smile, her daddy’s smile, dimples denying any wrongdoing.

We unpacked the boxes, placed our plates on the shelves and our flatware into the drawer. We took our clothes from the suitcases, shook out the wrinkles, placed them in the chest of drawers and chifforobes, and smoothed our sheets on the stained yellow mattresses of the beds. Once we settled in, the hours and days turned tedious. It was Saturday and the revival didn’t start until the following Friday night. We were people built for the mountaintop experience, not the humdrum routine of everyday life. The mundane grated on us, and we in turn grated on one another.

Everything turned hard. One night as Brother Terrell worked to help lower the tent before a windstorm hit, the winch he turned flew loose and pummeled his arm. Within minutes the arm had puffed up like an inner tube. He prayed for it, and without a call to the doctor, put it in a homemade sling. The tent men dropped one of the big speakers while setting it up under the tent and argued over who was to blame. The house key disappeared and Brother Terrell had to drive across town to pick up another one. And that was just the beginning. The newspaper ads had the wrong dates, and since it was the advance man’s fault, we had to pay to run them again. The constable showed up and informed the tent workers that we had filed the wrong permits. My mother went with Brother Terrell to the courthouse to help him read and figure out the permits. They were gone a long time. When they returned, Betty Ann wouldn’t speak to either of them.

The four of us kids took refuge in the falling-down barn behind the house and tried to figure out what to do next. We sprawled on the hay and went through our list: Play church? We had exhausted ourselves on that one. Red rover? Not enough of us for two teams. Randall suggested husbands and wives, a variation on doctor that was always his favorite game.

Pam groaned. “We played that yesterday.”

He sighed and walked around the barn, hands deep in his pockets. “I got it. We’ll play sinners!”

As sinners, Pam and I bunched our dresses into our long white panties to make shorts and stood on street corners holding little sticks between our fingers and blowing imaginary smoke through pursed lips. We thrust our chins out and dared passersby to look at us. When they did, we stared them straight in the eye. Only true Jezebels wore shorts and smoked. We had played sinners all that week, so there wasn’t anything new in that idea.

Pam looked hard at Randall, trying to figure out his angle. “We’re not playing sinner husbands and wives, Randall.”

“I’m not talking ’bout
that
, Pam. I mean we’ll be
real
sinners.” Randall paused and looked up at the barn eaves. When he spoke again, it was in a hushed voice.

“We won’t play sinners. We’ll
be
sinners, real sinners. And we’ll smoke real cigarettes.”