Aunt Alma thought the whole thing was funny. “Well, at least she an’t copying Bible passages out and hiding them in your drawers like my Temple did. You just got to let her ride it out. When Temple got it, I teased her a little and the girl nearly took my head off. Almost had the preacher out to talk to me—as if I wasn’t a good Baptist—just because I don’t see no reason to go to church every Sunday of my life.”
“But you should go to church,” I told Aunt Alma imperviously. She made me mad talking like I wasn’t serious about my faith. “You should witness your faith and get Uncle Earle to go with you. He thinks the world of you, and he’d listen to you if you talked to him right.”
“If I started talking to Earle about Sunday-morning church services and witnessing for our faith, he’d think I’d lost my mind.” Alma laughed and pinched my chin. “You go for us, girl. You witness. If the world really is gonna end tomorrow, I’d rather save you than any of those drunken uncles of yours. And don’t you even try to talk Jesus to Earle. The man is impossible to talk to about God and religion.”
I took Aunt Alma’s warning as a challenge and started talking to Uncle Earle about faith and good works. I played him Mama’s most tearful gospel country music and repeated all the most dramatic soul-saving stories I’d found in the pamphlets the Christian Ladies’ Aid Society passed out. Earle loved the whole thing, my sincerity, the Bible verses, and the thinly veiled threats of perdition. But most of all he loved the argument. While I tried to prove to him that God was love and Jesus saved, he set out to prove to me that the world was irredeemably corrupt.
“Never mind the ninety and nine, let’s talk about the poor lost sheep in this county,” Uncle Earle would start off. One shot glass of whiskey and a tall glass of beer and he was ready to address the issue of Jesus, only occasionally reminding me of his wife, Teresa. He blamed the loss of Teresa on Jesus, naturally—Jesus who made Catholics, Catholics who were so particular on the subject of fornication and made it so hard for a decent Baptist man to get a divorce. He was funny about Catholics, damning them for making his life so difficult and admiring them at the same time.
“At least,” he told me, “Catholics are interesting, got all that up-and-down stuff, chanting, velvet carpet on the pews and real watered wine for communion. What the hell Baptists got? Grape-juice communions, silly rules against dancing and movies, self-righteousness by the barrelful, damn-fool preachers in shiny suits, and simpleminded parishioners! Baptists could learn something from the Catholics.”
Sometimes in his arguments, Uncle Earle would get Teresa, the Catholic Church, and the county marshals a little confused. Given enough whiskey, he’d start talking about the way they had all united to blight his life. If there was a God, Earle had decided, He was on the side of Teresa, the Catholics, and the marshals. But there was no God, Earle told me, no God and no hope in churches. People were better off learning to rely on themselves and each other, instead of running around praying for what they weren’t going to get.
“I gave up churches—all churches—because I saw what they were,” he told me. “Take a look at those oil color paintings on the wall of every Sunday school in South Carolina. Jesus in the mountains. Jesus in the desert. Jesus against the night sky. Jesus got the lost one in his arms. Jesus wants you, each and every one of you. He’ll climb mountains, walk the hot sands, brave the night winds, search among the many for the one not found. And you are never so valuable as when you stand outside the fold, the one God wants. Oh, don’t I know! Don’t I know?
“They want you, oh yes, they want you. Till they get you. An’t nothing in this world more useless than a hardworking religious fool. It an’t that you get religion. Religion gets you and then milks you dry. Won’t let you drink a little whiskey. Won’t let you make no fat-assed girls grin and giggle. Won’t let you do a damn thing except work for what you’ll get in the hereafter. I live in the here and now, and I need my sleep on a Sunday morning. But I’ll tell you, Bone, I like it that they want me, Catholics and Baptists and Church of Gods and Methodists and Seventh-Day Adventists, all of them hungry for my dirty white hide, my pitiful human soul. Hell! None of them would give two drops of piss for me if I was already part of their saggy-assed congregations.”
Uncle Earle would drink and swing back his glossy black hair. The more he drank, the more he would talk. Perversely, the more he talked, the more I wanted to hear, though every word out of his mouth was blasphemy. What I really liked was how he talked about Jesus. He talked about Jesus in a way I understood even when I couldn’t put it together with all he said. He talked about Jesus like a man dying for need of him, but too stubborn to sit down to the meal spread within reach. Earle talked the language of gospel music, with its rhythms and intensity. I heard in his drawled pronouncements the same thing I heard when I listened to the music, the desperation swelling rough raw voices, the red-faced men and pale sweating women moaning in the back pews. “Lord, Lord!” Moaning and waiting, waiting and praying, “to be washed, Lord Jesus! washed in the blood of the Lamb!” The hunger, the lust, and the yearning were palpable. I understood that hunger as I understood nothing else, though I could not tell if what I truly hungered for was God or love or absolution. Salvation was complicated.
I put my hand on Earle’s forearm and felt with a dizzy sensation how tight and hot the skin was, as if every muscle in his body was fighting off God. If I had not been so certain of his prospects of hellfire and damnation, it would have tickled my pride to see what a challenge to God’s patience Earle managed to be. As it was, all I could think was how marvelous it would be when he finally heard God speaking through me and felt Jesus come into his life.
I tried to do all I could to save my poor uncles from their heathen ways, but when I tried to get them to go to Sunday services, Earle just laughed at me, Nevil grunted, and Uncle Beau worked himself into a coughing fit. “Goddam women and their goddam churchgoing ways,” Uncle Beau yelled at Granny, as if she had put me up to it. “A man don’t have to have God on his ass to know what he should do. A man don’t need a woman preaching at him all the time.”
“Stop cursing like that,” Granny told him mildly enough. “You the biggest fool in Greenville County, and it an’t the women made you who you are. You been after somebody to blame your life on since you was born.” She spit snuff and told me to get out of the house and into the sunshine.
I didn’t argue with her. If I got balky, she was sure to make me squeeze up a piece of her leg when she had to take her insulin shot. She always made me do it when she was angry at me, which was plenty of reason to keep her from getting mad.
“If God lived in a whiskey bottle,” I heard Granny tell Uncle Beau as I headed out the door, “He’d of filled up your heart a long time ago. But He don’t, and you an’t never gonna be saved, so keep your nastiness to yourself.”
Uncle Earle got work building a carport and took some of the money to get Mama a little electric record player and four records. “That’s all I’m giving for free,” he told her, scooping up gravy with one of her biscuits. “I even bought you some of those old June Carter songs you like. What’s that funny one? ‘Nickelodeon,’ right?”
He scooped and sopped, and drank sweet tea down like it was whiskey. Mama said he’d eaten so many of her biscuits by now he was like a child of her own.
“A man belongs to the woman that feeds him.”
“Bullshit,” Aunt Alma insisted. “It’s the other way around and you know it. It’s the woman belongs to the ones she feeds.”
“Maybe. Maybe.”
Out of those four records, there was only one Mama liked, and she damn near wore it out. “The Sign on the Highway,” it was called, and after a while I could sing it from memory. “The sign on the highway, the scene of the crash ... the people pulled over to let the hearse pass ... their bodies were found ’neath the signboard that read—Beer, Wine and Whiskey for sale just ahead.”
What surprised me was that Mama, who wouldn’t go to church and neve
r even said Jesus’ name, had the same response to that music I did. She cried every time she heard it, and she wanted to hear it all the time. It was a gospel song, of course, a kind of a gospel song. Mama would play it over and over, and I’d come in to sit with her while she listened, her with a glass of tea in one hand and the other over her eyes, and me as close to her as she’d let me, both of us crying quietly and then smiling at each other and playing it again. Uncle Earle would come in and laugh at us.
“Look at you two. You just as crazy as you can be. Look at you. Crying over some people didn’t never really die. That’s only a slide guitar and some stupid folks can’t make a living no other way ’cept acting the fool in front of people like you.” He stomped off out the screen door while Mama wiped her face and I sat still. He kicked each step as he went down.
“I swear this family’s got shit for brains.”
Since I was getting nowhere saving my uncles, I fell back on the only capital I had—my own soul. I became fascinated with the idea of being saved, not just welcoming Jesus into my heart but the seriousness of the struggle between salvation and damnation, between good and evil, life and death. God and the devil were the ultimate arbiters, and everyone knew what was being fought over. It was just like Uncle Earle had told me: if you were not saved, not part of the congregation, you were all anyone could see at the invocation. There was something heady and enthralling about being the object of all that attention. It was like singing gospel on the television with the audience following your every breath. I could not resist it.
I came close to being saved about fourteen times—fourteen Sundays in fourteen different Baptist churches. I didn’t fake my indecision, the teary-eyed intensity and open-mouthed confusion that overtook me when the preacher turned his glance on me. There was something about the way his face looked when he cried out for all those who felt the “call” to some forward, something in the way the old women in the front pew turned around to look up and down the aisles. The music would come up and the choir would start half-humming, half-singing “Softly and Tenderly, Jesus Is Calling,” and a pulse would start to throb in my temples. Tears would pearl up in the corners of my eyes, and my tongue would seem to swell in my mouth. I wanted, I wanted, I wanted something—Jesus or God or orange-blossom scent or dark chocolate terror in my throat. Something hurt me, ached in me. I couldn’t tell if it was the music or the eyes or the waxed smell of the hardwood floors, but everything ran together and drew me down the aisle to the front pew, where the preacher put his hand on my head and some stiff-necked old woman came forward to hold my hand.
Once there, I would cry silently and hold on while a few other people came down too. Then we would all pray together. I could not have explained, but it was not actually baptism I wanted, or welcome to the congregation, or even the breathless concentration of the preacher. It was that moment of sitting on the line between salvation and damnation with the preacher and the old women pulling bodily at my poor darkened soul. I wanted that moment to go on forever, wanted the choir to go on with that low, slow music. I wanted the church to fill up with everyone I knew. I wanted the way I felt to mean something and for everything in my life to change because of it.
When the music stopped and the sweaty preacher sat down with his little notebook to talk to me, my face would go rigid and my voice sink to a whisper of shame and nervous terror. Every time that moment was the same. The smell of watery ammonia would blot out the orange blossoms and whatever old woman was hugging me would flake pancake makeup on my bare arms. I would start to gag and have to run off to the girls’ room in the basement to wash my face. Then I would stare into my eyes in the mirror and know I wasn’t ready. It wasn’t right. The magic I knew was supposed to wash over me with Jesus’ blood was absent, the moment cold and empty. I would stumble out into the sunshine guiltily, still unsaved, and go on to a new church the next Sunday.
I’d begun to think about trying out the Church of God or the Holy Church of Jesus’ Disciples when Mama caught on to me. She took me to Aunt Ruth’s church at Bushy Creek and had me baptized beneath the painting of Jesus at the Jordan. When my head went under, my throat closed up and my ears went deaf. With cloudy water soaking my dress and my eyes tight shut, I couldn’t hear the choir or feel the preacher’s bruising grip. Whatever magic Jesus’ grace promised, I didn’t feel it. I pushed up out of that dirty water, shivering, broke out in a sweat, and felt my fever rise.
I sneezed and coughed for a solid week, lying limp in my bed and crying to every gospel song that came over the radio. It was as if I were mourning the loss of something I had never really had. I sang along with the music and prayed for all I was worth. Jesus’ blood and country music, there had to be something else, something more to hope for. I bit my lip and went back to reading the Book of Revelation, taking comfort in the hope of the apocalypse, God’s retribution on the wicked. I liked Revelations, loved the Whore of Babylon and the promised rivers of blood and fire. It struck me like gospel music, it promised vindication.
11
I recognized Shannon Pearl immediately on the first Monday of the school year. I’d seen her with her family at the revival tent. Her daddy booked singers for the circuit, and her mama managed the Christian bookstore, a religious supply store downtown south of Main Street, a place where you could get embossed Bibles, bookmarks with the 23rd Psalm in blue relief, hot plates featuring the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus and that damned lamb on everything imaginable—slipcovers, tablecloths, even plastic pants to go over baby diapers.
Shannon got on the bus two stops after Reese and me, walking stolidly past a dozen hooting boys and another dozen flushed and whispering girls. As she made her way up the aisle, I watched each boy slide to the end of his seat to block her sitting with him and every girl flinch away as if whatever Shannon had might be catching. In the seat ahead of us Danny Yarboro leaned far over into the aisle and began to make retching noises.
“Cootie train! Cootie train!” somebody yelled as the bus lurched into motion and Shannon still hadn’t found a seat.
I watched her face—impassive, self-sufficient, and stubborn; she reminded me of myself, or at least the way I had come to think of myself. Sweat was showing through her dress, but nothing showed in her face except for the eyes. There was fire in those pink eyes, a deep fire I recognized, banked and raging. Before I knew what I’d done, I was on my feet and leaning forward to catch her arm. I pulled her into our row without a word. Reese stared at me like I was crazy, but Shannon settled herself and started cleaning her bottleglass lenses as if nothing at all was happening.
I glared at Danny Yarboro’s open mouth until he turned away from us. Reese pulled a strand of her lank blond hair into her mouth and pretended she was sitting alone. Slowly, the boys sitting near us turned their heads and began to mutter to each other. There was one soft “cootie bitch” hissed in my direction, but no yelling. Nobody knew exactly why I had taken a shine to Shannon, but Reese and I were back at Greenville Elementary and everyone there knew me and my family—particularly my cousins Grey and Garvey, who would toss you against a wall if they heard you’d insulted any of us.
Shannon Pearl spent a good five minutes cleaning her glasses and then sat silent for the rest of the ride to school. I understood intuitively that she would not say anything, would in fact generously pretend to have fallen into our seat. I sat there beside her watching the pinched faces of my classmates as they kept looking back toward us. Just the way they stared made me forget all my newly made vows to behave like a good Christian; their contemptuous, angry faces made me want to start a conversation with Shannon and shock them all. I almost grinned, imagining Shannon and me discussing all the enemies we had in common while half the bus craned their necks to hear. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that, couldn’t even think what I would say to her. Not till the bus crossed the railroad tracks at the south corner of Greenville Elementary did I manage to force my mouth open enough to say my name and then Reese’s.
&
nbsp; She nodded impartially and whispered “Shannon Pearl” before taking off her glasses to begin cleaning them all over again. With her glasses off she half-shut her eyes and hunched her shoulders. Much later, I would realize that she cleaned her glasses whenever she needed a quiet moment to regain her composure, or more often, just to put everything around her at a distance. Without glasses, the world became a soft blur, but she also behaved as if the glasses were all that made it possible for her to hear. Commotion or insults never seemed to register at all when she was cleaning her glasses. It was a valuable trick when you were the object of as much ridicule as she was.
Six inches shorter than me, Shannon had the white skin, white hair, and pale pink eyes of an albino, though her mama insisted Shannon was no such thing. “My own precious angel is just a miracle child,” Mrs. Pearl declared. “Born too soon, you know. Why, she was so frail at birth we never thought the Lord would let her stay with us. But now look at her. In my Shannon, you can just see how God touches us all.”
Shannon’s fine blue blood vessels shone against the ivory of her scalp. Blue threads under the linen, her mama was always saying. Sometimes, Shannon seemed strangely beautiful to me, as she surely was to her mother. Sometimes, but not often. Not often at all. Every chance she could get, Mrs. Pearl would sit her daughter between her knees and purr over that gossamer hair and puffy pale skin. “My little angel,” she would croon, and my stomach would push up against my heart.
It was a lesson in the power of love. Looking back at me from between her mother’s legs, Shannon was wholly monstrous, a lurching hunched creature shining with sweat and smug satisfaction. There had to be something wrong with me, I was sure, the way I went from awe to disgust where Shannon was concerned. When Shannon sat between her mama’s legs or chewed licorice strings her daddy held out for her, I purely hated her. But when other people would look at her scornfully or the boys up at Lee Highway would call her Lard Eyes, I felt a fierce and protective love, as if she were more my sister than Reese. I felt as if I belonged to her in a funny kind of way, as if her “affliction” put me deeply in her debt. It was a mystery, I guessed, a sign of grace like Aunt Maybelle was always talking about. Magic.