Crooked Hallelujah

by Kelli Jo Ford

  I wish I’d told him to give the motherfucking crayon back or gone over there and taken it myself and told him what a piece of shit he was for keeping a kid’s crayon and for running from the Fill’Er Up and for being a sorry piece of shit probably every day of his life. I should have said all of that. I should have stood on one of those tables and shouted: She was only fifteen.

  Instead I stood there like a dumb statue while he brushed past me without a word. I was pretty sure I smelled his B.O. even after he was in his truck throwing gravel. The little kid ran down the aisle and grabbed his crayon. Then he looked at me and spun his finger around his ear, saying “cuckoo, cuckoo” and giggling. I grabbed the hat and hooked Sheila’s elbow and together we took off out the door to her car.

  “What now?” she said, but I didn’t answer. She started to drive, I guess, so we didn’t sit there like donut-thieving maniacs. I didn’t have any idea where we were going, no real sense that we were moving at all, when we turned onto Lula’s street. I didn’t even realize we’d stopped in the middle of the road until Sheila squealed her tires and pulled over.

  When I looked up, Mom was huddled on Lula’s front steps, her back to us. Sheila had jumped out of the car and was running through the yard before I could grab my backpack and get the door open.

  Lula was lying on the porch having a seizure. Mom knelt over her, rocking back and forth and talking in a strange, sweet voice.

  “Sure is a pretty day,” she said. “Hear them birdies peeping, Mama?”

  Mom was trying to hold Lula’s hands, but they were clamped into tight little balls. Sheila took Mom’s hands into her own and made her let go of Lula. One of Mom’s hands was bleeding.

  “We used to keep wooden spoons all over the house,” Mom whispered. “What if she’s biting her tongue?” Wild-eyed, Mom pushed the flat of her hand into her belly, her face breaking in two. “I didn’t have a spoon.”

  Sheila took her by the wrist and held her hand in the air. Blood tendrilled down Mom’s arm. I’d made it up on the porch by then, so Sheila put Mom’s wrist in my hand and pressed a handkerchief she picked up off the porch to a gash in Lula’s head.

  “Put pressure on it,” she said. I leaned over Lula, still holding Mom’s wrist up with one hand.

  Lula was calming, starting to blow spit bubbles and make the sounds she makes when she’s coming back to us. One of her pink house shoes had fallen off. I could see the stocking seam crooked over her big toe. I wanted to fix it for her, but I was stuck between her and Mom.

  Sheila palmed the top of Lula’s head. She closed her eyes and started whispering “dear Jesuses” and “thank you, Lords.” Before long, Sheila’s voice grew loud and forceful. Then she got quiet again and began to speak in tongues.

  I didn’t want to hear it. I focused on Lula’s stockinged foot, still slowly twitching, and pressed the handkerchief as steady as I could. Mom hung her head and cried so hard she hardly made a sound. After what felt like an eternity but was probably only a minute or so, Lula opened her bewildered eyes and looked at each of us, searching, searching, searching.

  “It’s okay, Mama,” Mom whispered. She smoothed Lula’s hair with her good hand. I handed Mom the handkerchief and scooted down to straighten Lula’s stocking along her toes. Then I leaned against the house, wishing I could zap myself away from all of it. I thought about the rapture house again and wondered where the people went. I wondered if things were better for them. I hoped they’d won the lottery one morning and said to hell with all of you people and all of this shit, but I knew those chances.

  Lula finally settled her eyes on Sheila and seemed to focus some. Sheila’s voice slowed down, grew quieter until all I could hear were whispers and sniffles. Mom took Lula’s arms and pulled her upright. Lula sat there awhile, the heavy gray braid from her bun falling across her breast like a rope. Mom got ice to press to Lula’s forehead and mouth.

  When she could stand, we helped Lula to her bed to lie down. After a phone call, Sheila’s mom and a few lady Saints arrived and joined Sheila in prayer around the bed. While they prayed, Mom paced the kitchen with the phone pressed to her ear, arguing with her sisters about what to do. They thought she should force Lula to the hospital.

  “They ought to fly here and do it themselves, if they’re so damn sure about it,” Mom said. We were sitting on the front steps staring at the loaded-down Mustang. She’d gotten us ready to go that morning, before any of this happened.

  Before I had time to answer, she got back up and went inside to hover in Lula’s doorway again. She couldn’t stand to be too close to the rising and falling of their voices—that kind of praying gave her a little bit of a wild animal look.

  When she sat back down, she picked at her bandage a little while, then chewed on the side of her thumb. “She’s going to be sleeping for a while,” she said, finally. “I guess she’s as fine as she was before it happened, but I still hate to leave. Sheila said they’re going to take turns sitting with her and praying through the night.”

  “Maybe we should just stay here,” I said. I wasn’t sure how I meant it, or if I meant it at all.

  “I guess we could force her to go back to the clinic,” Mom said, talking to herself it seemed. “Again! Damn sure can’t make her take their drugs any more than we could last time.” She put her face into her palms and kept talking. “What are we supposed to do? Be here when she falls. A lot of good I by-God did.” She let loose a long, agonized scream, muffled by her hands. Then she wiped her face and took a big breath and put an arm around me. “We’re a hell of a team. I can shove my hand down her throat, and you can fix her pantyhose.”

  “Look,” I said. The shadow of the house stretched into the road. The light had turned, making everything a richer, deeper color, giving things a sort of purple glow or turning everything more the color it already was, maybe. In front of us, an orange moon was rising, huge and full.

  “To hell with it,” she said. “Let’s fly out to the lake before the sun goes down.” She went inside to check on Lula one more time. I stayed on the porch waiting for her. I heard the screen door slam shut when she came back out, but when she didn’t come down the steps and pull me along to the car, I looked back to see what was going on. She stood one foot on the first step, blinking back tears. I was about to ask her if Lula was okay when I caught sight of the cowboy hat lying in the corner where the steps met the porch. I’d had it in my hand when I ran up. I jumped over and fumbled it into my backpack, but of course it was too late.

  “It’s okay, you know,” she said. “If you want to get to know him, whatever. I guess I understand. I mean, my daddy’s an asshole who wasn’t ever around, but I’ve heard his voice.”

  “I ran into him today is all,” I said.

  “And?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It turns out he’s an asshole.”

  “Yeah,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Or still an asshole.”

  Mom handed me the keys and walked to the Mustang that wasn’t ever going to be a Corvette. She didn’t say one word about leaving myself an out or staying four car lengths behind. I stayed right at fifty-five until the speed limit slowed at Snake Creek.

  By the time we got out of the car, the sun was just a sliver above the hills over the lake. We’d missed it. I took my backpack onto the dock anyway, and Mom followed. When I pulled the hat out and dropped it into the lake, she rolled her eyes.

  “Don’t do that for me,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  She leaned over, fished the hat from the water, and tossed it into my lap. I flung it like a Frisbee as far as I could.

  “He ran again,” I said. “That’s why I have the hat. He took off so fast, he’d have left his ass if it wasn’t stuck to him.”

  “And?”

  “Fuck him,” I said.

  “Feed him fish heads,” she finished.

  “I got the better end of the deal, you know.”

  “Yeah, no shit,” she said.

  “N
o. I mean I’m glad I don’t know him at all. You had a person to miss when your dad left. I’m glad you never let him into our lives.”

  “All I’ve ever done is screw up and react, Reney.”

  “All you’ve ever done is take care of me.”

  The hat was washing in and out, inching closer to us with each wave. Mom picked at her bandage. “What do you want to do, Reney? What do you really want to do? Go or stay?”

  “I guess I’d like to get someplace and stay there,” I said.

  “But where?”

  “I want to go home,” I said. “I miss Pitch.” It struck me that despite how I’d mourned leaving Oklahoma as a kid, Texas was my home now. I didn’t want any more Tulsa rapture houses or speaking in tongues or—bad as it sounds—front porch seizures. I damn sure didn’t want to run into Russell Gibson again. I already had a dad.

  “Pitch has been tore up since we left. He thinks of you as his own.”

  “Don’t tell him about the Russell Gibson thing, okay?”

  “Don’t worry.”

  We sat there on the dock watching the waves pull in and push out, our legs dangling over Lake Tenkiller. The hat worked its way ashore but sank just before it got back to us.

  “It’s okay, Reney,” Mom said as she stood to go. “I can take most anything.”

  We left the next evening as the moon was rising. I didn’t try to play my music. I popped in “1999,” a song about a future that people must have felt would never come but was now upon us. Mom didn’t sing along or dance this time, but before the song ended she reached across the console and took my hand. By the time we got off I-40 at Lake Eufaula, the moon still hung in the sky like a big, glowing orange. I knew its light was only a reflection, but I watched it grow smaller and brighter all the way to Texas.

  Hybrid Vigor

  By the glow of the headlights, Reney counted again. A calf was gone. A bawling cow trotting ruts into the fence line confirmed Reney’s count. She shoved her work gloves into the back pocket of a pair of Wes’s greasy coveralls. She’d slipped them on over her underwear and a Dairy Queen polo, and now static electricity popped as she climbed into the idling diesel to get the shotgun.

  With new babies dropping by the day, neither the feral hogs nor the coyotes would be far off. The hogs had pretty much planted a flag and declared the rooted-up land around the river their own, and the coyotes had grown brazen in the drought, killing two neighbor dogs and countless goats down the road. Still, she didn’t think it was hogs or coyotes. Her mule, Rosalee, was gone too.

  Shotgun cradled in the crook of her arm, Reney whistled, squinting toward the pale sliver of sunrise, hoping to see her mule’s big ears come bobbing over the hill. Wes’s sweet but useless stock dog, Rowdy Rotty, munched on a dried piece of cow shit.

  Even Wes held a small appreciation for the mule, now that he’d heard stories of mules protecting cattle from predators and seen for himself how Rosalee kicked the shit out of a neighbor dog that had gotten too close to his calves. The calves, he’d said time and again, were the only thing keeping them off the dole. Reney had been working toward a degree for years, but it didn’t take a degree to see that Wes was full of shit. She did the paperwork in the evenings and wrote the checks to the feed store and the vet. The cattle did little more than break even. But the money left in a steady trickle and came in chunks, and Wes, for all his tenderness, had become a man fond of a big chunk of money, or at least the appearance of such.

  When Rosalee didn’t come after a few sharp whistles, Reney killed the truck’s chugging idle and left the shotgun barrel to the floorboard. She took out the cattle prod and lead shank and started walking the fence. “Where are they, girl?” Reney said to the dog, who gave her a quick lick. Reney hung wide around the mama cow in her manic vigil, all swinging udder and mournful cries, and nearly lost her boots in the mud suck crossing what was supposed to be the creek.

  Most every spring the river devoured huge chunks of sandy loam. Scrub oaks crashed into the water like imploded high-rises. One good thing to come of the drought—they wouldn’t lose any more worthless land to the river. But less rain meant more feed bills—their leased thirty acres were grazed to the root—and that meant more beery moping out of Wes.

  Reney balanced on the second row of barbed wire and whistled again. Nothing. Their part-time neighbors from the metroplex had forty acres of bramble and bluestem that sat empty except for a couple of deer feeders and the dirt-bike trails Wes had bladed into the land for free. A whole day’s work, wear and tear on their sputtering Farmall, not to mention the cost of fuel, for two cases of beer and some good old-fashioned Dallas backslapping. She scanned the empty field and climbed over.

  The first time Rosalee took a calf, Reney had been scrubbing green scum from a water trough when the mule’s slow, purposeful movement caught her eye. Reney stopped what she was doing and smiled at the silly creature, who made her way over to a baby calf napping in the sun. Suddenly, Rosalee snorted two times in the direction of the grazing mama cow. Before the cow could get over there, head lowered and bellowing, Rosalee took the calf into her mouth by the nape of the neck. Then Rosalee turned and ran across the pasture, baby calf a clenched ball. Reney never would have believed it if she hadn’t seen it.

  Rosalee jumped the creek, calf swinging like an off-kilter metronome and beginning to low. By the time Reney got across, Rosalee had reached the northeast corner of the pasture, calf tucked against the barbed wire fence. Rosalee’s ears sagged. She made strange whimpering sounds and licked curlicues into the calf, starting at the head and slowly working her way down its small body. She kicked her hind legs at anything dumb enough to close in, even Reney.

  It took Reney all morning to coax Rosalee away from the calf. She had to call in to work and sweet-talk Jack to keep him from cutting her shift. Luckily, Wes had been on his two-week hitch, and she’d mentioned the story only in passing when he got home, laughing about the calf accepting its fate as half donkey and trying to nurse. Wes didn’t see the humor. Though he’d not even been able to bring himself to dock his rottweiler’s tail, he promised that if the mule ever tried the stunt again he’d shoot her himself and sell her for dog food. Reney had hoped it was, like so many other things with Wes, bluster.

  It struck her this morning that she’d rather lose a calf to the petty violence of coyotes than deal with Wes. She wiped her face with a rough sleeve.

  “Fuck,” she muttered. She checked her watch again and saw that if she was going to make it to work at all, she had to go. “A mule,” she said, cutting into the morning chorus of whip-poor-wills. “My glorious goddamn kingdom for a mule.”

  Behind her, the mama cow cried billows of steam into the air. The poor beast had quit running the fence and was instead staring after Reney with dumb, worried eyes. “I know,” Reney said. “I’m sorry.” She hurried toward the back of the property, where a few scrub oaks crowded a rocky outcropping. With each step, the bluestem crackled beneath her. Wes’s sagging coveralls, dampened from what little dew the March morning left, tripped her up. In her front pocket, she still had an apple she’d taken from the bowl on the counter for Rosalee’s morning treat. She took another look at her watch. After one last whistle, she threw the apple as far as she could and headed back home.

  “I’m late, Wes.” Reney opened the mini blinds and hit the alarm clock, silencing two idiot disc jockeys midguffaw. She remembered their catchphrase—“Big bucks, no whammies!”—from a game show she had watched with Nina after her mom had first married Pitch and moved them to Texas. As a girl, she’d kept one eye on Oklahoma—the wooded hills and late-night church services she’d left behind, her great-grandmother. As she got older, with the help of MTV and books, she kept her mind on anywhere but Bonita, never for a minute imagining she’d stay and, like her mom, be responsible for holding together a household that most days she’d just as soon burn.

  She looked one more time out the trailer window before dropping the coveralls and sliding into her
work pants. She sat in the crook of Wes’s body and pushed his hair back. He was still as handsome as he had been when they met at a party, her in Dr. Martens and flannel, trying too hard to not fit in, and him in standard-issue Wranglers. How quick he’d been to fling the snuff from his lip when she made a crack about it. Now, a can of Copenhagen and a spit cup sat on the bedside table, and she was late for work at the Dairy Queen, worried about a mule. She jostled him.

  Wes rolled onto his back and stretched his arms and legs as long and stiff as they’d go. Turning back into her, he wrapped her up and pulled her toward him. He untucked her shirt, buried his face in her back, and rubbed his chin against her. His goatee was long and he’d not shaved around it in a week, making him look like a billy goat with his big brown eyes. He made gnawing sounds up her ribs, across to her breasts, said, “Big bust, no whammies.”

  “Get up. Unless you want to be without the truck,” she said, pulling away. “I’ve got to go to work.”

  “Morning to you too.”

  Wes didn’t notice the mama cow’s bawls when he stomped down the metal stairs. He bent to scratch Rowdy’s ears and kiss her head. Then he licked his thumb and wiped at a spot on the truck’s door before climbing in. Reney was already sitting in the passenger seat.

  “Why didn’t you leave it running?” he asked. “Told you it’s hard on the engine.”

  Reney waited until they’d turned onto the highway. “Are you going to fix the back fence today? Something’s going to get cut up out there.”

  “Got to go over some stuff with Sammy at the Iron.”

  The Branding Iron cost twice as much as the DQ, though its food came in twice weekly on the same Sysco truck. Reney had graduated with Sammy Boyd, and she wasn’t a fan. Wes never had been either.

  But since he’d lost his job, Wes had taken to putting on his good boots and sitting at Sammy’s table as weekday mornings stretched into afternoons. Sammy’s grandpa’s grandpa, or whoever, had made a fortune in oil way back, and, like his father, Sammy had been set up with cattle and hundreds of acres of his own as a teenager. He carried himself accordingly.