Crooked Hallelujah

by Kelli Jo Ford

  “Move,” Pitch says. He steps around me and starts hauling down more boxes. “They ain’t in these?”

  I shake my head, and he kicks them away, pushing them to the middle of the room.

  “Hurry up,” he says.

  I open up a box, still sniffling. Outside, big trucks are tearing around the block. A police siren blasts over the noise, and Sammy Boyd, the rich prick turned cop who went to school with Reney, announces in his official voice that “the mayor has issued a mandatory evacuation. All residents must leave immediately. Drive east on Eighty-Two or south on Fifty-Nine. Immediately.” His voice trails off, making a bigger deal out of “mandatory” and “immediately” on the next block.

  “Shut up, stupid-ass Sammy Boyd,” I yell.

  “No joke,” Pitch says.

  My fingers are shaking and snot’s dripping out of my nose, but I keep digging to the bottom of the boxes he pulls out of the closet, finding nothing but old clothes packed away for a garage sale and more Christmas stuff, a whole Wrangler nativity scene done out of cowboys, the Virgin a barrel racer in tight jeans.

  Pitch’s got all the boxes out, and he kneels down beside me to go through the last ones. “Is this it?” he asks, holding up a book covered in blue quilting.

  I snatch it from him and open it, dropping the Christmas goat I was holding. Pitch looks over my shoulder and sees where the father’s side of Reney’s birth certificate is blank. He doesn’t mention it and never has. He just knows that whoever Reney’s real father is, he isn’t around. Pitch puts his hand next to the footprints.

  “Tiny little thing, wasn’t she?”

  “Little?” I tell him. “You try squeezing eight pounds and nine ounces out when you’re no more than a baby yourself.”

  “That’s big?”

  “Pretty big,” I say, flipping through the book.

  Pitch smiles. Then he stands up, his knees popping. He strokes my hair once, like he hasn’t done in a long time. “Reckon we got to load the horses and dogs. See if we can’t find that damn cat.”

  “I might’ve seen your old coveralls in the shed,” I say.

  “Come on.” He pulls me up by the hand. We stand there for a minute and look at each other, and I try not to think about what comes after the trucks are loaded. Pitch leans in and kisses me, first on the forehead, then on the lips. “Sorry about all that,” he says.

  About that time, Sammy Boyd comes back around the block, hitting that damned police siren, saying “immediately” like he’s the governor of Texas.

  I follow Pitch with the baby box in my hands. He stands there, studying my boxes and labels, biting his bottom lip. “You pack pretty quick,” he says. His lip’s chapped and bleeding, and without thinking, I wipe away the blood with my thumb. I think he’s going to say more, but he lets it go. “Wind’s whipping out there,” he says. “Reckon we ought to leave immediately.”

  I don’t laugh and neither does he. He picks up a box of knickknacks and piles a garbage bag on top of it, and I put a bag on top of the baby stuff and take off after him. He balances my knickknacks on his knee and has to fight the wind to open the door. He almost drops it all but grabs ahold just in time.

  “Saw Daddy downtown with his mare,” he yells. “From what I heard, probably going to get Mama and Daddy’s place.” We stack the boxes in the back of my truck, and he says, “Hundred-foot flames.”

  The wind carries away whatever I try to say.

  “Daddy says he ain’t leaving. Says he’ll save the mare.”

  “With a water hose?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. He’s sitting in the DQ parking lot with her loaded, wearing his spurs. He’s got a bandana tied around his neck, poking around looking for a damn cup of coffee. Shit,” he says. “I should’ve put the sprinkler on the house.” He takes off running around the side of the house, and I go after him.

  “Well,” he says, screwing on the sprinkler. “Can you take our horses?”

  “Maybe I should run check on Ms. Johnny.” I look toward our neighbor’s house.

  “She’s already gone. The horses?” he asks, aiming the sprinkler at the roof, wiping the grit out of his eyes with his shoulder.

  “What about your daddy?”

  Pitch just looks at me and sighs and then looks back to the roof.

  “Help me get the trailer on,” I say. “Then you go on and I’ll get them.”

  He sets the sprinkler then backs my truck up to the rusty stock trailer, while I run out to the back lot with a gallon can of oats, a halter and lead rope looped over my shoulder, calling up the Paint mare and her little colt. When Pitch brushes her, he’ll duck under her belly and come up on the other side to show off what gentle horses he raises. “That there’s a Barnes horse,” he’ll say, rubbing her above her tail.

  She won’t even come to me. The colt’s only a month or so old, and I guess the smoke and the banging tin have her spooked. She stays far back, on the other side of the lot, nickering real low, jerking her head up and down, stamping her feet in the dust, keeping herself between me and that colt. “Come on, Gertie, we got to take a drive,” I tell her, shaking the oats in the can, losing half of them to the wind. She’s not interested. When I take a step toward her, she throws up her head, wild-eyed, and runs to the other side of the lot with the colt following after her. I take another step, and she runs to the opposite side again.

  “You just got to go up and grab her,” Pitch says, out of breath. He takes the halter off my shoulder, walks up and loops the rope over her neck, patting her, saying, “Whoa, Mom. Easy, girl.” Then he slides the halter over her head and buckles it easy as can be. She jerks her head once and settles in to be led wherever he wants her to go.

  “The tin had her spooked,” I yell. But he’s already unlatching the gate to lead her to the trailer, with the colt trotting along behind.

  The air is getting thicker, and you can see the big orange flames at Comanche Hill now. I load the two dogs in the cab of my truck real quick while Pitch wrestles with the cat. The sun’s going down, and the wind isn’t letting up. It’s coming.

  Pitch cusses at his truck until it starts, then asks me to fly by the DQ before I leave. He wants to talk his daddy into following me or at least into putting his mare in with the ones Pitch has all the sudden taken to calling “ours.” I tell him why the hell not, that I don’t have nothing but time.

  At the DQ, I see Pitch has left his fire gloves on my dashboard, so I run them over to his truck while he argues with his daddy. Laying there on the seat beneath a tangle of bits and spurs is one of his mama’s quilts bunched up, halfway folded. Reney’s belt buckle from the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show is sticking out of the edges of the fold. Pitch and his daddy are still talking, shaking their heads, and throwing their arms up in the air, and I sit down in the driver’s seat. I push the bits to the floor and flip the quilt back. He’s got a couple of pictures of me and Reney fishing the summer he took us to New Mexico, and there’s one of the winner’s circle at the World Wide Futurity when he won on Miss Easy Pocahontas, his daddy’s pride and joy. Pitch looks like another person sitting on top of that mare. His face is splattered with mud and he’s small, but he looks like he could do anything. His daddy’s standing there grinning ear to ear, holding the horse’s reins, and I’m beside him holding on to his arm with one hand and Reney’s head with the other.

  I drop the quilt and run back to my truck, leaving Pitch’s gloves on his dash. He looks over at me and shakes his head, then comes jogging over.

  “Go on. Daddy won’t come.”

  “I’m afraid I’m leaving something,” I say.

  “You got what you need,” he says, jumping a leg into the coveralls. There’s a rip in the thigh.

  “Will those be okay?” I ask him.

  “Love you, Teeny. Now get going.”

  “Be careful,” I say.

  A water tanker from the fire department comes by, and Pitch takes off running to catch up, forgetting his gloves.

  I st
art my truck and head east with the rest of the Beverly Hillbillies, relieved Pitch hadn’t put his daddy’s horse in with the other two. I don’t need that on my conscience too. Marni and Stevie, two ladies who moved here from Austin, and the boy they adopted stay right behind me the whole way. When the traffic stops, we get out and drink Cokes and ask if anybody knows anything new. Nobody ever does. We sit on that highway most of the night, hardly moving, ducking when the giant tanker planes fly over, watching the wind, listening to the radio and the mare stomping in the trailer. The wind changes while we sit idling, starts coming from the south, shaking the truck and trailer from side to side instead of pushing us from behind. We all hope the wind shifted in time.

  When we get to Gainesville, Marni and Stevie go on to a gas station, and I stop in a church parking lot to check on the horses and let the dogs out. Gertie’s happy to see me this time and nickers for me to hurry up while I put on some lipstick and try to stretch my back out. I find a waterspout, put the lead rope on her, and open the gate. Out both of them come, Gertie shaking her head and the little colt nervous at first, peeking all around before he bucks a couple of willies, running circles around us both, sniffing noses with the dogs. I give Gertie some alfalfa and lean back on the truck to watch the colt nurse. Even there in the half-light of the church parking lot I can see it: he’s a good-looking horse.

  When Marni and Stevie pull up, I haven’t even noticed that the wind has died down, and I’m feeling halfway comfortable. Marni’s sitting in the middle of the seat, her face all washed out and pale, leaning her head over on Stevie’s shoulder. Their boy’s asleep in a car seat in the back, fine hair pressed to his face. “They opened up Eighty-Two West,” Stevie says. “Want to follow us back in?”

  Mom’s is another four hours north.

  “They know anything yet?”

  “It doesn’t sound great, but I guess we’ll see.”

  “Ya’ll go on,” I tell her. “I’ll load these horses in a minute.”

  They take off to see if they still have a house, and I sit there listening to Gertie stomp gravel and the streetlight buzz until the sun starts warming the side of my face. I start thinking about the firefighters back in Bonita and about all those folks on cots. The cedar cross Pitch peeled and nailed for his mama. Reney’s hair when it was fine and resting against a car seat on this very same road, me driving like crazy, headed to Bonita or away from it. I think about what those horses are worth, afraid of what I’m about to do. Scared of my new old life in Oklahoma, scared of the one passing me by. Then I get to thinking about those hundred-foot flames and Pitch’s five foot, three inches. And I can’t hardly stand it. It’s all so much bigger than him and bigger than me, bigger than us together. I stand up and shake the blood back to my numb legs.

  Gertie’s chomping alfalfa and shaking flies from her ears. That colt stops nudging Gertie for milk and takes a step toward me. Gertie speaks up a little, watches from the corner of her eye, and goes back to her hay. I squat down and ease my hand toward the colt, and he nibbles at my finger, leaving a string of milky slobber trailing from my hand to his mouth. Then he walks back over to his mama, turns his face to the sun, lets his ears droop, and sighs. I know what probably I knew all along. The horses aren’t mine, and I can’t no more take them across the Red River than I could leave not knowing if Pitch is okay.

  On the drive back, sunlight shows me what we missed the night before. Farmers had to rush to cut down their own fences, and there’s cows all over the road. Some are orange from the chemicals the planes dumped. Some are half burned and paralyzed from the fear and pain. Calves bawl for their mamas, and black bunches of stiff-legged and hairless cows smolder, cornered into triangles of barbed wire that don’t burn. You wouldn’t believe the smell. The fields are giant squares of black, as far as a body can see.

  But the fire is gone. A couple of farmers are already hooking up dead cows to ropes and hauling them off over the burned-out stubble, taking them to wherever you take the things that don’t make it. I pick up Hank Marshall “live from 7,” and he says the news is not all bad. Some homes made it on account of the flames being so big they jumped the houses that had been watered down enough and just went on, like the fire wasn’t satisfied with the house before it and went looking for one that wasn’t so much work. Getting closer I see a burned-out car sitting on the ground, all the rubber melted from the wheels. The fire was so hot it busted out all the car’s windows and painted the thing in ashes, but right next to it, a little wooden swing set stands fine as can be. Hank Marshall calls the area a war zone.

  The DQ sign, lit up same as always, is the first thing I see when I pull into Bonita. I let off the gas and roll down the window, spreading my fingers against the wind. The old Boot Shop building across the street is ashes. A man’s standing there, talking in front of a camera, telling the world about our ruin. A couple of snot-nosed kids try to make him laugh, not a care in this world. A group of men stand around drinking coffee.

  Pitch and his daddy sit on a tailgate in the sunshine, their feet dangling below them. Their heads hang low, but I can see them smile through their black faces, talking. Pitch looks over, and I put the truck in park. He wipes his face with his sleeve and spits on the ground between his legs, keeping his eyes on me. Then he shakes his daddy’s hand, squeezes his shoulder, and walks over.

  “It’s gone,” he says. “Skipped over Ms. Johnny’s and burned ours clean to the ground. Nothing left but floorboards in the bathroom and the iron fence in the horse lot.” He hangs his hands on the trailer panels and leans his head there.

  “We tried to save it.”

  I slide down onto the wheel well beside him.

  “Wasn’t nothing we could do, Just.”

  Gertie stomps on the boards, ready to get out. Pitch doesn’t move. He’s still looking at the horses, biting his lip, holding on to the trailer. I lean my forehead next to his hands. They’re rough and black, cut up from fighting fire. He smells like fire. I can still smell the mare and her colt, all their alfalfa, all their shit, their sweat and dust. I can even smell the milk from that baby colt.

  “You really think he’s a runner?” I say.

  “All a man can do is put one in the gates, open them up, and hold on,” Pitch says. He stretches his back and waves once to his daddy.

  Pitch squeezes my hand, and then he gets in his truck, starts it up, and drives down 82 with his arm hanging low out the window. I stand there watching, feeling my insides swelling bigger, getting ready, trying to take it all in, and when he turns off on our road, I follow him to see for myself what’s left.

  Consider the Lilies

  The Saints are huddled over Mama singing again, but Sheila can’t get through “Consider the Lilies.” Her voice catches midchorus, and she goes quiet, trying not to cry. Her husband, Samuel, holds on to Mama’s hospital-bed rail with one spotted hand and rubs Sheila’s back with the other. He lifts up his voice to cover for her. Little Sheila’s hair is done up in one of the fancy Holy Roller buns, poufed and sprayed with way more worldly charm than Mama ever allowed.

  Mama’s sunk down into her pillow. It’s not the seizures that she calls God’s will that have brought us here. It’s a stroke, and it was a big one. I imagine she’s wondering why her pearly gates look like bed rails and whatever in the world a sinner like me could be doing beside her in heaven. Her eyes dart around the room like a coyote caught in a trap, which this hospital room must feel like for old-time Holiness like her.

  Dee hums along and strokes Mama’s hand. She always had the prettiest, strongest voice when Mama made us get up in front of the congregation and sing. Dee doesn’t look the Holy Roller part anymore, but when she opens her mouth, I feel like that girl in church again.

  Sheila keeps going in and out through her tears, but Samuel sings his part, carrying them over the awful beeping and whirring machines until she comes back in with her beautiful voice and hair. It seems they’ve been married forever—and I guess they have—but I still
think of her as a girl. She’s not much older than my Reney.

  I turn my back to them, try to prop up Mama’s painting they brought with them. The thing is almost as old as I am, but the sunset still drips blood orange into a just-right purple sky. All Mama ever painted was teepees or landscapes of Sequoyah County, the scrubby patch of hills she saw nothing but beauty in.

  When I turn back around, Dee stands at the foot of the bed, wiping tears and squinting into a cell phone pointed at Mama. Dee keeps her hair dyed reddish blonde, but now she’s added purple streaks like a damn teenager.

  “You think Mama wants people seeing her like this?” I snap.

  Sheila jumps a little but keeps singing.

  “God’s moving in here, Justine,” Dee says. “Calm down.” She puffs her bangs out of her eyes and shakes her head. Then she slides her phone in her pocket and starts singing again.

  I wipe my tears quick. As much as I’ve worked to turn myself stone, I can’t get my eyes to set. I’m not sure Mama deserves any more of my tears, though her fair allotment would’ve probably drowned her wing of this hospital and half the other. I’ve never seen my mother’s mouth and eyes so sorrowful, like a movie mask come to life. I go to her, smooth her hair, and kiss her forehead. I can’t help myself. She looks up at me from under her bushy white eyebrows and lets out a sorrowful moan, looking like the most pitiful, dear beast you can imagine. I rub her limp arm and straighten the gown, adjust her cords so they don’t pull. We don’t know what her brain knows anymore. She is crying, too, now, and I wish this room and everything in it would wash away for good.

  Mama’s finally fast asleep. I try to be quiet, but the vinyl recliner groans, and the footrest pops into place like a steel trap. The whole chair rocks, jerking my back. I stifle my whimper, but when I look up, Mama startles me. She’s all blankets and IVs except for her big brown eyes reflecting the green monitor. She blinks a few times, and then the green goes out.