Crooked Hallelujah

by Kelli Jo Ford

  It’s probably true that we all have our own self-centered versions of when this started, when we decided to believe or stop believing in coincidence. The tornado that ripped off a section of my mother’s roof, causing her to box her sequined tops and fall upon her knees, was weather and nothing more in my mind. Her fundamentalist upbringing wouldn’t allow her the luxury. She heard the roar of the wind twisting metal and dislodging bricks. The sky took her bobtailed cat and left her half a home. That same sky later took Pitch, and that is not a metaphor either. At least I don’t think so anyway.

  Mother was chastened by the rain that pelted her carpet, only to watch the clouds dry up with not a drop of relief for months on end. When it seemed she could not take one more loss, she lost Lula. She looked to God for answers. He wasn’t speaking, so she looked behind her, made a list of transgressions, hoping to balance some divine equation. She underlined “mother” in red.

  I thought I had run far enough away to be sure I saw things back in Bonita clearly. I couldn’t have known that, in my flight, I would forever keep one eye over my shoulder, and in doing so would circle back again and again. When the second earthquake hit, shortly after the first round of fires I’d called plain old bad luck, I knelt in my closet and tried piecing together my own prayer, unable to remember anything beyond “thy kingdom come.” Disaster close to home had not given the words new meaning, so I left the quinoa to burn on the stove and called Mother.

  5.

  I work her every way I can from my Idaho kitchen to hers, our voices ones and zeroes pinged through space satellites. I tell her we’ll load the horses, haul them across the canyons and mountains, and put them in the backyard. Bring your chickens. Just brick and wood, I say of the three-bedroom home she’s scraped for, the patched-up house whose mortgage will probably outlive her. I hear her switch the phone to the other ear, bang a door shut. I brag on the depth of our town’s reservoir and the snow-tipped mountains you can see in August. A preacher buzzes radio noise in the background. I’ve never even heard of a tornado in Idaho, I say. You can carry your gun on your hip in the grocery store! She sits there, jaw set in silence I can see. Then: You know the story of Job, she says. What if God picked the wrong person for the job?

  6.

  NPR finally runs a story, a color piece on Bonita’s Riders for Christ—a group that takes its message almost as seriously as its method of delivery. Before all of this, they opened rodeos performing cowgirl tricks against a backdrop of fireworks and “God Bless the U.S.A.” Now sword-packing Riders sit sentry at each of the cardinal directions outside town, certain the Four Horsemen will gallop down from the heavens any day in need of spangled escort. Steve Inskeep says a few have liberal enough interpretations to pack rifles, which has created something of a rift. Those Riders man only the Southern outpost, where the group’s leadership think the Horsemen are least likely to appear. Steve outlines stories for tomorrow’s program in the event the rapture doesn’t occur overnight. Then he cues Blondie. I pick up the phone to make sure my mother hasn’t found herself a sword.

  7.

  Every day before she died, Lula bowed her head and prayed for Mother’s cussing and carousing to stop. She prayed for Mother to humble herself before the Lord and care about what good Christian people thought. She prayed my mother would get out of that mess she was in, as she referred to Mother’s marriage to Pitch. Adultery in Lula’s eyes, though my only real memories of my mother’s first (and God-recognized) husband are the blue welts he made of her eye; the way the bruises bloomed purple, then yellow on her chest and back; how we both missed him when he finally left. Lula prayed for God’s love to rain like fire from the heavens. I wonder if this strange apocalypse is what she had in mind.

  8.

  There will always be those ready to don a cowboy hat and ride the bomb down with a yippee-ki-yay, those who sell hats and work the levers. While the Bible church holds twenty-four-hour prayer meetings, sinners filter into the casino and the VFW, filling up the dark places, no need to conserve, no need to conceal pent-up desires. Faithful to no end the time is nigh.

  My mother refuses to step into a church, but she’s taken to covering her head, wearing long dresses. I find myself in the unexpected position of suggesting she go to the casino to keep some semblance of normalcy. She won’t hear of it. Mysterious are the ways.

  9.

  I get an all-networks-busy recording and punch End and Send until I get a crackly ring, and she picks up. I don’t tell her I’m half believer. I insist that while surely some kind of geoseismic shift has occurred beneath her very feet, this does not necessarily mean that the Christian God of Fire and Fury has returned. I tell her it probably has to do with all the oil Texans sucked up. Arrogant Texans messed up the tilt of the Earth, perhaps. Somehow altered weather patterns, I say. I was never good at science, and she reminds me of this. Then she tells me my ex-husband, Wes, leads AA meetings now, that his twin boys both accepted offers to play football at Texas Tech. I duck, jab. Ask if she’s taken up embroidery or churning butter, ask if Laura Ingalls is the First Saint of the New Apocalypse. She sets her jaw. Okay, the end of the world maybe, I say, but show me this God.

  10.

  Can I love anything the way that I used to love the mystery of my mother, her strength in suffering?

  11.

  Today I ask if she wishes she’d left before it got so hard, come to live with me and my husband in the high desert where we could listen to the end of the world over the airwaves and cook frittatas still. This is what we do when there is nothing new to report and the line goes quiet. This is how we push back at the distance and the catastrophe. She says, Do you wish you’d stayed?

  12.

  CNN runs a segment on a newly discovered Mayan calendar. A reporter goes around interviewing people in front of the Mall of America, asking for views on the Texas Apocalypse and the End of Time. I wonder what the Mayans had in mind as they toiled, fashioning stone chink by chink: a twenty-four-hour news cycle, complete with a running Twitter ticker of the apocalypse?

  An African American woman claiming Mayan and celestial ancestry speaks. She wears a purple tunic with strange lettering. Says this whole Mayan hysteria is a big misunderstanding. The Mayans didn’t create calendars, and there isn’t an End of Time. They were measuring divine light, outside time. I make doodles on the back of a Chinese take-out menu. In the end, it all looks like lightning bolts and cyclones.

  The anchor seems relieved until the Mayan woman places a hand on her polyester sleeve and explains that just because the ancients weren’t concerned about our modern world, it doesn’t mean the events in North Texas aren’t indicative of what’s to come. We must practice seeing with our eye-eyes, she sighs, before we can see with our mind-eyes. And then: North Texas is now. When she smiles into the camera, she seems sad for us. I hear my husband’s key in the door. He’s home from giving a final, so I turn off the television, fold the menu into a tiny square, and cram it into my back pocket.

  13.

  My husband is a skeptic. He thought the grasshoppers last August were a nuisance, nothing more. Of the heat, he said, It’s Texas in August. What did you expect?

  When I speak to Mother, he opens the computer, goes quiet. As soon as I hang up, he closes the laptop, and his sigh misplaces the rest of the air in the room. I don’t think he does this for my benefit. I think he does not appreciate what he cannot tie down with reason. I think this is why he loved me in the first place: I am a good challenge.

  14.

  At first nobody danced at the wedding, or Mother’s Event, as I began calling the night. The Legion hall filled, scattershot, with my aunts from Tennessee and a few Bonitans, mostly Pitch’s relatives. Few friends made the trip to Texas, and when I bemoaned the fact, Mother knocked back her white zin and said, Yes, it’s too bad you have a family that loves you.

  I ran off and cried in a storeroom stacked with cases of beer. Not because I had traveled around so much that I didn’t really have fr
iends or because of what Mother said but because without Pitch there, the wedding felt like a funeral. He faded so slowly that I hardly noticed when I lost the only real father I ever knew. Idaho is so far.

  Mother said that by the time he disappeared into a dust storm, she could almost see through him. I’d been told stranger things that turned out true, and I couldn’t find a record of him anywhere. Still, I looked, hoping someday I’d find a number and he would turn up fat and happy, living out his days in the mountains of New Mexico, catching trout or raising runners. But mostly, I knew. He wasn’t coming back.

  I dried my face and rejoined the ladies in tight jeans and men in broad-brimmed straw hats. People brushed one another’s backs as they came in, checking for grasshoppers, and made quick for cold Dos Equis and napkins to dab sweat. The swan-carved melon soon sat empty, save the black seeds. My aunts fanned themselves and cried tears of joy when we recited the vows we’d written. Aunt Josie said she thought I was going to end up dying in the Bonita DQ for sure, but look at me, born again and brand-new.

  Mother cocked her brow toward the empty dance floor, so I gave up on Rebirth Brass Band and put on the AC/DC that she had insisted I load on the playlist. As soon as the bells began to ring out and the guitars snarled to life, cowboys began setting down drinks, clasping hands with their women, marching bowlegged toward the rented speakers. I took a hard pull of my beer. She knows her crowd, my husband said.

  I told you, Mother said and led us onto the sawdusted floor, “Hells Bells” echoing off the walls. My husband shrugged his shoulders, pushed up his glasses, and proceeded to get down, banging his head and bouncing his ass off Mother’s as I clapped them on. In those sweaty three minutes, Mother was right; everything was, somehow, perfect. But soon I’d had two beers too many, and barefooted and half-cocked, I was out-Bonitaing the Bonitans. I woke up the next day as ready as ever to leave and never come back.

  15.

  I get the all-networks-busy signal for two days before I decide to go. My husband calls the plan hopeless and vague. He says we need to save our resources. He quietly reminds me of my job search. He asks me if I really think adjuncting for another semester will finally lead to a full-time position. I shrug, and he walks away. He comes back to say that my mother is a grown woman who can take care of herself and never has been inclined to listen to reason. That’s easy to say, I blab, when it’s not your mother living on the brunt end of the beginning of the end of the world, which is mean because his mom died years ago.

  Being the man he is, he agrees to go to Texas if I wait for him to enter final grades and agrees to use his credit card to pay for the gas that has skyrocketed. Despite rationing, you can still travel freely if you have the money and don’t live at the end of the world. He tells me I am about to put an end to that freedom on both accounts. Then he squeezes my hand hard and begins to pack.

  I pack with one hand, work the phone in the other. Sending, ending. Sending. I fill my backpack with Ziplocs and wool socks. I check the tent for stakes. My husband packs a few shirts and some underwear and fills his bags with books on Greek philosophers whose names I can’t remember how to pronounce. When I come in with the orange cat-hole trowel, he takes it gently from my hand and puts it back in the garage. I don’t know how to pack for the end of the world, so I imagine a backpacking trip.

  16.

  Mother picks up as we’re driving through the red rocks of Moab listening to a classic rock station. It’s Don Henley’s birthday, and every station seems to be in on the awful celebration. When I hear her voice, I punch off the radio and sit up. Everything is fine, she says. A trembler, not too big. She tells us to turn around and go home. Or head west—everyone should see the Grand Canyon, she says. She sounds tired.

  Why don’t we all go see it together, I say.

  You know, she says, it’s just a few miles from one rim across to the other. Imagine all that sky, she says and fades off before adding: People die all the time trying to get across.

  We’re coming, Mama, I say and snap the phone shut. I lean my head back and close my eyes. All I see are burned-out buildings and twisted metal. My husband touches the side of my face and pushes the car faster.

  17.

  A fierce wind greets us when we pull to the top of the hill outside town. A line of delivery trucks waiting to move into Bonita has us backed up alongside the roadside park. From the looks of it, the park was recently a happening place, but news teams have mostly abandoned their makeshift camps. My husband points out that Texans favor a liberal definition of the term “park.” It’s just a couple of cement slabs with picnic tables and a trash can off the highway, usually devoid of much else besides prickly pear or bluebonnets in springtime.

  I point to the farthest table, tell him this is where Mother and I came to watch the sun set when I was a girl. I absorbed as much of that time as I could, that time after work and school before she reapplied her lipstick and walked through a cloud of perfume and out our front door, where she’d spend the night dancing the sun back up as I slept.

  Now tarps pop and snap in the wind, strain at the lines holding them to Earth. One guy in a dingy brown suit huddles on a bench squinting into his phone. We roll down the windows despite the wind. A brown beer bottle rolls across the cement slab. Plastic bags flutter against the table legs, trapped just east of the freedom stretching ahead on the endless Texas prairie.

  Toward town, things appear just about normal, aside from a gas well that billows orange flames and hazy, electric smoke. My husband is taken aback by the sight, but I tell him this happens from time to time in oil country, even when there isn’t an apocalypse going on.

  18.

  Mother, speaking on good authority I assumed, had always told me nothing good happened after midnight. I have a feeling that’s when I was conceived. I know it was sometime the summer before her ninth-grade year, not long after she started to sneak bell-bottoms to school, where she changed out of her Holy Roller dress and put on eyeliner she stole from the drugstore. I can imagine her scrubbing her eyes red to get the makeup off, rolling the jeans into a neat ball and putting them in the bottom of her locker, walking back home at the end of the day defiant but looking like the Holiness girl she was supposed to be.

  Mother told me plenty, wanting to make certain I didn’t follow in her footsteps. I mostly listened, until late one night my sophomore year when I let a stout little running back named Jett sweet-talk me into going to see a well fire that had erupted when drillers hit a gas pocket. We left a party around eleven, me peering out the back window every few minutes, sure that every set of headlights belonged to Mother. After parking his truck in a ditch, we followed the orange glow through pastures, carrying a bottle and blanket over tree-lined fences until we got to the flame.

  I snuck into the house close to sunrise and tiptoed past Pitch’s snores, and only after I was tucked deep into my bed did I smile to myself, excited at the new life that awaited me outside Mother’s hypocritical rules. The next morning, I discovered a hickey the running back had left, like a badge. He told everyone except his girlfriend that he got further than he did.

  He turned into a meth head, still in and out of jail. Mother always swore it was him who broke into the house and stole the change bucket. I was long gone by then, of course. Cause and effect, my husband says and inches the car forward.

  19.

  Two rangers lean against their Mustangs at the front of the line. Just beyond them, atop Paint horses, sit two women holding purple flags emblazoned with a golden cross and sword. The horses shift and stomp. The flags pop in the wind. Would you look at that, my husband says. They wear cowboy boots and white tunics gathered at the waist. Wide leather belts and giant gem-encrusted cross buckles hold their swords in leather scabbards. I hope they’ve got Gold Bond in Bonita, my husband says, but he doesn’t laugh. I raise my hand toward them, but they don’t seem to see. Over the wind you can hear the thrust of the gas-driven flames from the well fire. The women stare beyond us
out toward the western horizon in certainty. One dismounts and kneels in prayer, her voice lost to the wind and flames.

  20.

  The rangers let us pass after we explain our purpose, sign a dossier, and complete a few forms. They assure my husband that the fire will burn itself out and that there’s no reason to call 911. Don Henley’s been running through my head since Moab, and as the ranger waves us past, I sing, You can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave.

  Not funny, my husband says and accelerates past the snaking flames that dance high into the sky welcoming me home.

  21.

  On the last stretch into Bonita a hand-painted sign warns:

  WELCOME TO PRETTY. SLOW DOWN—ROUGH GOING. Mother warned us that a small group of white locals have taken it upon themselves to expunge foreign words from the English language, hoping, I guess, that the coming God is a white supremacist too and that he appreciates their attention to detail.

  Thanks for the heads up, assholes, my husband says as we bottom out. He thinks the road could be buckled from the heat, but I think earthquake. You can see where the earth bucked and bowed, picking up the two-lane road and setting it several feet off to the side, leaving the double yellow stripe misaligned. Infinity broken.

  22.

  While we were busy packing tent stakes and books, it never occurred to us to bring more than road food. The stupidity strikes us at the same time when we see the beat-up grocery store in the middle of town, which is really just the middle of a highway. There never was much to Bonita, especially before the casino. A few gas stations. The VFW and Legion hall. Two drugstores. One or two grocery stores, depending on the year. Plenty of churches and a rodeo arena. After the heathens voted the town wet, there was never a shortage of liquor stores, and the sign for one is half-lit just down the road. That will be the next stop.

  The gas station across the street is nothing but charred rubble and bits of metal that skitter in the wind. Gas lines ruptured in the last earthquake, and dust coats the cars in the grocery store lot. A boy who can’t be more than ten stands in the back of a pickup holding a shotgun. His little brother is yanking on a kid goat’s ear. Not that unusual, I say to my husband, who’s gone quiet.