by Lucas Mangum
“So, what now?” I ask.
She smiles, and again, it’s as if she’s aged in reverse. I think she was probably beautiful once, a different kind of beautiful, I mean. She’s still good-looking now, but like an old building photographed in black and white, as opposed to a new mansion in full color.
“Now, you get the grand tour.”
She leads me out of the room. It doesn’t hurt so bad to walk. I follow her down the long hallway and turn a corner, past the room where Lady Iscariot chose to hang.
Falling headlong, burst asunder—
Bowels gushed out.
Danvers practically sashays up ahead.
A lake broken by lumps like fecal islands.
We walk on, and I keep pace.
Aches like distant echoes—
No longer whore nor harlot—
Healed, demons cast out in no one’s name,
Unless my healer invoked silently some holy epithet.
The hall stretches and turns, a labyrinthine, disorienting place, like the hotel from that movie Daddy beat me for watching—
A deluge of blood—
Wonderworking power in the—
Wet, black puddle.
Late one sleepless night.
A face through splintered wood—
Splinters in scourged flesh—
Up Calvary Hill, onward to Golgotha—
Finished.
Not yet the risen Harlot.
He kept the movie playing while he whipped and—
Baptized by—
Daddy came on my face and wept.
“May I please have some water?” I ask.
“Of course. We’re nearly to the cafeteria.”
Slips, shatters on slate.
The dining room is spacious. Several tables are set for twelve.
“How many people live here?”
From somewhere nearby, I hear cooking sounds: clanging pots and pans, sizzling grease, and banter between cooks, both male and female. The words are difficult to make out, but I don’t detect any flirty menace usually present in dialogue between the sexes in a kitchen setting.
“Our last census counted fifty-seven of us. More have come since then. We’re growing rather quickly, I’m afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Oh, nothing for you to be concerned with, dear.”
She stops and turns to me.
“Especially if you plan to leave.”
I say nothing. She draws closer.
“You do plan to leave, don’t you?”
“Don’t know yet. How about that water?”
“Of course. Wait here, will you?”
“I reckon I don’t have a choice. Easy to get lost in this place.”
“Indeed.”
She turns, walks toward the cooking sounds, and slips through a door. In her absence, I examine my surroundings. The walls are blank. The floors, pristine. The entire hall is almost obnoxiously bright. I’ve never been in such a clean place, despite always toiling to keep the house spotless for Daddy. Maybe I will leave. The image of Ambrose’s face takes form in my mind’s eye.
I know a lot about you, Courtney.
I blink him away and turn my focus to the kitchen door. Finally, Danvers comes out with a full glass wrapped in a damp napkin and hands it to me.
The water is cool on my lips, pleasant as it pours down my throat. I chug half the glass before taking it from my mouth.
“Ready?” she asks.
“Guess so. What’s for dinner?”
“For you? More greens.”
“Seriously? Come on.”
“No, not seriously. You’ll be well-fed tonight, after sermon.”
“Y’all have church here?”
“Not exactly.” She turns away, beckoning with a callused hand. I notice for the first time how short she keeps her fingernails. “Come,” she says. “I’ll show you the outside.”
Paradise
1
ACCORDING TO DADDY, PURGATORY OR Limbo, is a myth for Catholics, and not at all Biblical.
But that room, muted, silent and gray, convinced me otherwise.
Biblical or not, it’s real, and there, I waited and healed.
Aches (sins) became echoes, like mostly forgotten bad dreams.
Whether my world before the accident was Hell or Chaos or something else, I know not, but this place, its lush acres stretching before me, green and vast, is surely Paradise. It can be nothing else, and it needs no God. Here, my thoughts, always so loud, scream no more.
Stepping onto the front porch, I think maybe I can stay here, at least for a while. I can always reevaluate after the baby comes.
“Well, look who’s up and about!”
I don’t need to turn to know who speaks. If you’ve heard it once, Ambrose’s voice is instantly recognizable. He steps in front of me, smiles and turns to Danvers.
“I’ll take it from here,” he says.
“Yes, Brother.” She gives him a short bow and reenters the compound.
He returns his attention to me. “And how are we feeling today?”
“Physically? Fine, I guess.”
“And otherwise?”
“Otherwise, I don’t reckon I know.”
“What’s on your mind?”
“The hanged woman. What’s her story?”
His features darken. His gaze lowers.
“Sister Abigail was very sick, but do not mourn for her, for she has been returned to the Earth.”
“What kind of hippie shit is that?”
“Truth.”
I stare at him.
“Do you find my explanation insufficient?”
“Yeah, you could say that. You could also say I think it’s utter bullshit.”
I expect my dig to strike a nerve, but he only smiles.
“That toughness of yours. We’ll get through it.”
“Don’t count on it. Besides . . .”
“Right. You don’t plan on staying.”
I don’t know what to say. There’s something weird as hell about this place, but at the same time, it’s a roof over my head, and they seem able to provide some medical care. Still, I find it all very strange.
“At least stay for tonight’s service.”
“It you giving the sermon?”
“Indeed it is.”
“All right. I’ll stay. At the very least, I’d like to know what all this is about.”
“You see these fields and the people working in them?”
“Sure do. Awful green for west Texas.”
“That’s because we give everything to these fields, everything to the Earth. We suffer for it, and through our labors, our trials, we see God’s face.”
“God, as in Jehovah?”
He shakes his head. “No religion gets it right. God and the Earth are not separate. This truth has been revealed to me.”
“Whole lot of heretics had truth revealed to them, too. What makes you and your truth so special?”
“Come to the service. After you’ve been given the full message, decide for yourself what is true and what is heresy. For now, you are free to walk these fields and observe. If you find yourself hungry, you are free to eat. Save your appetite though. Dinner’s after the service.”
“So, I can just roam free?”
“Yes.”
“And what’s to stop me from just leaving?”
“You won’t.”
I feign stoicism, but he has my number.
“How you know?” I ask.
“Because if you wanted to leave, you already would have, injuries or not. As I’ve said, you’re a tough one.”
“But also curious, right?”
“What you say is true. Now, go be free. Just return by sunset. Service is in the chapel over yonder.”
He points to a half-cylindrical, tin-roof structure. A light burns inside one of the square windows. The exterior reflects the sun’s glare.
“See you in church,” I say.
“Try not to think of it as such. It’s so much more.”
“We’ll see.”
I walk away before he has a chance to retort.
2
I MAKE MY ROUNDS, OBSERVING workers in the field, harvesting all manner of crops, picking fruit from trees. I make no conversation, but some people wave when they notice me. I feel at ease in my body, though the image of the hanged woman never leaves my mind. It inspires a sort of morbid curiosity I hope to satisfy before I leave, and I do intend to leave; it’s just a matter of when. I don’t think I’ll leave before the day is out. Ambrose has my interest. I suppose it comes from an upbringing in which religion was hardwired into me. Though I found traditional Christianity profoundly lacking, I still long for . . . well, something.
When I see the woman with the boyish face and asymmetrical haircut working on the old van, I think for a moment I’ve found what that something is. The sight of her, in her dirty coveralls and work boots, her hands smeared with grease, makes me stop in my tracks. Not noticing me, she continues to work. Her slim body moves, and it’s like the erotic Song of Solomon made flesh. She bites her lip as she turns a wrench. A smile twitches at the corners of her mouth when she achieves what she set out to do. She bends to replace the tool, and when she comes up again, she sees me and stops. I wonder if she, too, feels what I feel: total captivation. While the delicate features of Brother Ambrose and the soothing touch of Nurse Danvers inspire varying degrees of arousal, neither of them could ever hope to attract me the way this woman does. As for my father and the tricks, it was never about sex. It was about control and necessity and survival. This is something else. This is something good. I can’t believe how powerful the feeling is. How instantaneously it takes over.
She approaches me and every nerve ending in me goes taut. Her mouth curves into an adorable smile, different than the satisfied expression that followed the turn of the wrench. It’s welcoming and seductive. When she’s standing less than three feet in front of me, I don’t know what to say. I’ve never been rendered speechless like this, and my mind races, trying to find the right thing to say. She gestures back at the van, and thankfully, she speaks first.
“Pretty, huh? It’s a 1981 Dodge Ram 350.”
“I know it. I used to have one back home. I’d hide in it whenever my parents were fighting or fucking or both.” She cocks her head to the side, no doubt amused by how forward I am, but I keep talking. “When I got a bit older, I’d climb the ladder up the back and sit on the roof drinking beers and looking up at the stars. I used to fantasize about driving off in it, but Daddy got rid of it before I could get my license. Not like I ever learned how to drive anyway.”
She holds out her hand, that cute smile still plastered across her face. “Name’s Marley, and I’d teach you to drive if I could, but no one’s allowed to use this old heap except for Ambrose, or me if there’s an emergency.”
“Oh.”
“We try not to use it at all. Bad for the environment, you know.” At this she rolls her eyes. “Ask me, planet’s already screwed. Nothing we can do about it now.”
“So why are you here?”
“I have nowhere else to go. Burned a lot of bridges.” At this her smile falters. “How about you? What brings you to our humble homestead?”
The way she says it makes me think she’s being sarcastic. It’s refreshing, less cultish than the way the others speak.
“I didn’t have much choice. I was brought here.”
“Oh, you’re the one who had the accident. The one with the baby.”
I lower my gaze and my hand instinctively goes to my belly. “Yeah.”
“Where’s the father?”
I shake my head and fold my hands behind my back. “Don’t much care to talk about it.”
“Fair enough. If that changes, you know where to find me.” She gestures again at the van. “That there’s my baby. If I’m not working on her, I’m apt to be eating or sleeping. Or dead, I guess.”
“Returned to the Earth, you mean?”
“Ah, so you’ve already heard that part of the spiel?” She raises eyebrows thicker than what I’m used to seeing on women. “You gonna stay?”
“Haven’t decided yet.”
“You’re lucky they’re giving you a choice.”
I start at that. Did Ambrose give me a choice?
“Never mind,” she says. “I shouldn’t have said that. Either way, if you have somewhere to go, you should get there as fast as possible. Ambrose has a way of . . . getting in your head.”
“After nineteen years of Bible Belt fundamentalism, I think I can keep him out.”
“I hope for your sake you’re right. Listen, if during the service tonight, anything strikes you as wrong, you trust that instinct, you hear? You trust that instinct and you run far away, got me?”
“I don’t see you running.”
“Like I said, I don’t have many options.”
“What are you? A car thief or something?”
Her smile returns, but now it seems sad.
“Or something.”
We hold each other’s gaze for several seconds and don’t say a word. Then she reaches out and gives my shoulder a squeeze.
“Listen, I need to wash up. See you in church.”
She walks past me, back toward the compound.
“Yeah, see you,” I say, feeling a new ache in her absence, and it’s deeper than anything caused by the accident.
3
AS I CONTINUE TO WANDER the grounds, I stay mindful of the sun’s position. Though I may be crazy, though I may be a manipulative whore, I do like to keep my word, and I did tell Ambrose I’d stay for the service. Besides, he may not know as much about me as he claims, but he’s right about one thing: I am curious.
When the sun goes down, I make my way to the tin-roof chapel, joining many others who do the same. They move mostly in single file, save for some odd clusters, and don’t speak to one another. Inside, there are no chairs. People either kneel or sit cross-legged on the floor. Opposite from the entrance is a stage with a podium and a projection screen. As I search for somewhere to sit, I pass a slide projector, one of the old kinds where the slides are inserted manually. I scan the crowd for Marley, but don’t see her, so I sit somewhere off to the side in hopes she’ll see me when she comes in and maybe want to sit together. I imagine us holding hands while Ambrose preaches his Earth gospel.
Though I kept my cunt reserved for Daddy during my teenage years, I had several crushes on boys that, in the interest of maintaining my power, I didn’t pursue. One of them was a boy from church named Tyler Waite. I felt no sexual attraction to him, but I felt something I can only describe as nice. My fantasies of him involved merely holding hands in the pews and picnics by one of the nearby rivers. He ended up getting another girl from church pregnant and got sent away to live with an uncle in Plano. I wonder now what might have happened had I pursued him. Would we have run off together? Would I be carrying his child and not my father’s?
It’s no use thinking of such things, I know, but sometimes I can’t help myself. While I eagerly anticipate my son’s birth and relish every sensation that indicates life growing inside me, I fear for him, too. As a product of incest, what sorts of challenges will he—and I as his mother—face? Will he be healthy? Of normal intelligence? Will he be an outsider like me?
All this and more, I wonder, as two men carrying acoustic guitars take the stage and start strumming. The song they play has no lyrics. It’s soothing and gentle. By the time the flute starts in, played by one of the women from Lady Iscariot’s room, I feel as if I’m sitting on a cloud. Ambrose walks between the seated and kneeling congregants, his pace keeping with the music. Each stride is elegant and deliberate, as if he’s performing ballet. He’s clad in a white cloak with bright green vines drawn across it. When he steps behind the podium and faces the crowd, the music stops. The performers drift off the stage and take their seats among the sedate audience. Ambrose’s hands close around th
e sides of the podium and he surveys the people gathered before him. When he spots me, he stops and smiles, but it’s subtle and brief.
A slide appears on screen: a gray sculpture of the dead Christ, broken and crowned with thorns, lying in his mother’s arms. It looks very old, late medieval.
“Had Christ been hung from a living tree and not dead wood, his true Mother God would have placed him at her right hand, making him Lord of the Earth. Instead he died for an imagined world beyond. Focus, brethren, on his agony, and mourn for the futility of it.
“There is much suffering in the world. Most of it is meaningless. School shootings. Little boys raped by priests. Wars that never seem to end. Natural disasters. Starvation and disease. All of it is terrible, because it all means nothing.
“People offer it up to false gods, if they offer it up at all. They die and the Earth does use their remains, but they don’t see the face of the Mother God. It’s like being fucked from behind by someone you never see, by someone who cares not for your pleasure because you treated them like they didn’t exist.”
I start at that. I’ve never heard the F-word during a sermon, let alone such graphic sexual descriptions. I know now this truly is a church unlike any I’ve known.
“Many of you know that I was once a climate scientist. I thought I really cared for the Earth then, but I still had my blinders on. I advocated for cleaner energy, recycling, solar power, and every other global warming alarmist’s pet project you can possibly imagine. Truth is, I was still wrong. My heart was still set on technology, however preferable to fossil fuels these technologies may be, and I never stopped to think that technology itself is the problem. Science is the problem. It was us, brethren, who first put the machine in the garden.”
A few people cry out their approval.
“We did this to ourselves. Now, I know we have to have shelter. Mother God doesn’t expect us to die of exposure. Now, I know we have that van out there, but how often do I use it? As little as possible is the answer, in case you were wondering, and it runs on biofuel. It was already here when I bought this land. Mother God provided it. Along with our compound, it’s something she allows us. Everything else must be attained by labor. True labor, tending to the Earth.
