Crooked Hallelujah

by Kelli Jo Ford

  When I open the car door, my husband stays put. She’s not going to leave, he says.

  I nod at the boy with the gun, but he just shifts his feet and stares at me. I can’t believe we didn’t bring bacon, I say.

  Fine, my husband says and follows me through the parking lot.

  The checkout lady recognizes me, though to me she is only a face. She tells us that a few other places have reopened, but they’ll rob you blind if you don’t watch. Tell your mother we miss her at the V, she says. No sense moping around waiting on the big one. She smiles, and her teeth are stained from coffee or cigarettes, probably both. Her eyes are lined in dark blue, and you can see where the powder has settled into the wrinkles crisscrossing her face. She doesn’t smooth her rouge, just leaves the circles be, like setting suns.

  23.

  When we pull up to Mother’s, the place looks empty without her usual array of petunias and marigolds. A blue tarp still covers the roof on the east end. It’s buttoned down tight with bungees in all directions, looks professional. Pitch’s horses run up to the fence and nicker, toss their heads at us. They’re skinny. Mother told me grain’s hard to get and she’s down to her last few round bales, but it’s still sad to see them looking like the horses kept by people who aren’t horse people—people who stake a horse to a lead in the backyard and cram three kids on the bony animal to ride through the streets unshod during parades. I wonder what those horses look like now. I wonder what those kids look like.

  24.

  Mother walks out and stops, as if we are a vision she can’t trust. Standing there on her cracked concrete porch with sagging steps, arms crossed, she seems small. The bonnet covers her eyes. Then she bounds down the steps and shouts, My professors! When she grabs me up, she feels, again, whole and as big as the world. My husband stands back watching us. When we don’t let go or stop our crying, he begins to unload camping gear. Bless you babies, Mother says, stroking my hair. Bless my sweet babies.

  Those are my Lula’s words, not Mother’s. I pretend not to notice and hold on tight.

  25.

  I have my mother’s hands. Our left central incisors each stick out just a hair, the loans she took out for braces on my stubborn teeth a waste of money. When I’ve drunk too much, my husband reminds me that I have more than Mother’s hands and mouth.

  26.

  The wind knocks out the electricity at night. The tarps covering the unrepaired portion of the roof rumble across the ceiling with each gust. Mother’s heeler burrows beneath a pile of quilts stacked in the corner. Mother doesn’t seem fazed even though it’s her night on the grid. She goes around muttering prayers and lighting candles. When she’s not squeezing my hands and stroking my hair, it’s almost like she’s not even here. My husband fills the lantern I brought. I ask him if he’d like to play Frisbee with his laptop.

  27.

  It turns out the end of the world has been subsidized. We must, however, convince Mother to accept the food FEMA ships in. God will provide, she says. It’s for us sinners, we say, and she gets a worried look, grows quiet.

  When we pull in at the Tuesday pickup, my husband says in a big, booming voice, BEHOLD GOD FEMA.

  Great, I say. On the seventh day God created formaldehyde trailers.

  He says the end of the world is making us dumb and walks away to grab a box. I’m happy he’s making jokes, and when he comes back I’m grinning. Hey look, two-by-two, I say, dropping cans of tuna and chicken into the box.

  Why would a fish need an ark? he says. What good is an ark to a fish?

  28.

  Time moves slowly at the end of the world. Each day Mother cooks a breakfast to end all but won’t eat. She’s in there cracking store-bought eggs before we wake up. When we shuffle into the kitchen, she shakes her head at the pale yolks in apology. The hens have stopped laying her prized multicolored eggs with the hard shells and yolks like setting suns. With a clenched jaw, she flips the sizzling sausage that we splurged on when there was no bacon, plates the biscuits and the FEMA milk gravy, and sets it all out on the counter. When we finally sit down to eat, my husband and I exchange looks as Mother blesses the food and the day and gives thanks for everything from the table and chairs to the hairs on our heads. She only smiles when she’s standing over us while we eat. We do our best to keep eating.

  Mother spends the rest of the day in her room. When I’m not recovering from breakfast, I drive my husband crazy with my encyclopedic store of Don Henley songs. I don’t know how I know so many or how to stop singing. He retreats to the garage to read. Or stares at the blue roof, his face smashed in concentration, muttering numbers and supply lists. I can see he feels bad that he’s not a son-in-law who can swoop in with a hammer and make things right again. Sometimes I see him standing next to the barbed wire fence trying to work up the courage to climb over and pet the horses.

  I go to the bedroom to lie down beside Mother while she reads the Bible. Sometimes I stand on the bed and sing: All she wants to do is dance. I remind her of her disco days and toss my hair like a stripper. I find her box of shiny outfits and play dress up. She doesn’t get angry. She smiles and reaches out to pull my hand to her mouth where she breathes it warm and kisses it. We have to be ready, she says.

  29.

  On day four, my husband comes into the kitchen and plops down a grocery sack of toilet paper, pulls out a packet of powdered eggs. Fresh out of the real ones, he says. He starts to say something else, then trails off, smoothing the edge of the fake eggs as if what he wants to say can be found there and coaxed out.

  People were talking about cattle dying, he says finally. The guy hauled them to a sale because he didn’t have any grass or water left on his property. When he let them out, they trampled each other trying to get to the water. Within minutes, they all collapsed. Water intoxication. And if that isn’t bad enough, he says, the bag boy says there’s a sex room at the VFW.

  I squeeze the toilet paper to my chest like an idiot and sing: We’ve been poisoned by these fairy tales.

  It works because he hops onto the counter and sighs. Alright, which song? I shrug my shoulders and dance a little more. Then he surprises me and says that maybe we should just go to the V and have a drink.

  Eyes Wide Shut II: Apocalyptic Cowboys and Hell-Bent Barmaids? No thanks, I say. Do you remember the lady at the grocery store? Do you really want to see her naked? He rubs his eyes, says things may be getting to him, says I need to think about what I want to do. Then he picks up a leftover biscuit and walks into the garage. The weather has been calm for two days, the sky blue. It’s making us all a little crazy.

  30.

  Before all of this, my husband loved that Mother wasn’t like his first mother-in-law, following him around tallying up his shortcomings, holding secret court with her daughter over the telephone. While he feared what harsh truth might come out of Mother’s mouth, especially when she was on to her second red-eye, he loved that she was a let-it-loose kind of lady who did her lipstick every hour on the hour, even if she had to pull it from a dented-up lunch pail. Sometimes he walks back to her bedroom and stands in the doorway for a while before he turns and walks back out. I think he’s starting to worry about that with which he cannot reason.

  31.

  I approach Mother with half a plan. She is lying on her bed with her hands clasped, Bible open beside her. The wind has picked up. You can hear it whistling through the small spaces and moaning through everything else. Out the window I see a dust devil moving across the pasture. The horses are running. A large limb cracks in the tree that stands bare in the front yard. I watch, waiting for it to fall. When it doesn’t, I sit on the bed. Let’s take a drive, I begin. I tell her we need to fill up the car. The corrugated gate is banging against a fence post, ringing out again and again. God wouldn’t want you in here hiding behind prayer, I say, pushing.

  The birds are all gone, she says. I tried feeding them, but the little things blew off. Tumbled away one after another when they gathered f
or the seed. I guess I shouldn’t have. The ones that didn’t catch on the fence rolled right across the pasture. Haven’t seen a bird in two months or more.

  I look out the window for a sign of something okay, something not terrifying. A yellow grasshopper thunks onto the screen. Mother begins to massage the top of one thumb with the other. Arthritis has turned the joints in her hands into balls of cartilage, just like Granny’s before her. What if you’re right, I tell her. What if God’s decided, Well, so much for Earth and all those little people down there. And you know, I think I’ll stretch it out, make them suffer good. If this is all we’ve got, then what? I want to hear you laugh. I want to hear you say, throw dirt on it, and fuck ’em, feed ’em fish heads to anybody who doesn’t like it. I need you to fight. I need you.

  She doesn’t say anything, but her eyes fill with tears. I pull her hands apart, wrap them in mine. I raise her hand to my mouth, take her index finger, and run it over my sticking-out tooth. Then I run my finger along hers, feeling the bump of imperfection. Remember when you used to come into my room when I was dead asleep and do this, I ask, leaning my forehead against hers. Looking into her eyes is looking into my own. You’d open the door, say: Are you asleep, before barging in to lie down and tell me about your night.

  You needed your rest, Mother says. I start to say something but she cuts me off, says, He’ll come like a thief in the night. She picks up her Bible.

  Well, I say. If he’s a thief, he’s not a very good one making all this noise.

  32.

  When I poke my head into Mother’s room to tell her we are going to leave for a bit, she is sitting on the edge of her bed. Her purse is at her feet, and her head is covered in a silk scarf tied beneath her chin. She looks tiny there and older than I’ve ever imagined she could be. I wonder if she’s been hiding these old lady purses and scarves beneath her bed for years, just waiting for the right moment to become this person I see before me. She smiles thinly and hugs her purse tight against her chest. The uncertainty I see in her eyes tells me it’s not faith keeping her in her bedroom. This new religion is one of fear. Her only certainty, I’m afraid, is that she somehow deserves all of this sorrow, and I don’t know that I’ll be able to convince her otherwise here.

  The wind has let up some, I say. Come with us. It’ll just be a short drive.

  Honey, she says. It’s not the wind I’m scared of.

  33.

  The sun’s close to setting, and as we pull out of the drive, the wind blows us onto the gravel shoulder before my husband yanks the car steady. I’ve left him up front alone so I can sit in the back with Mother, like the new moms I see on the road, unable to let the baby rest buckled behind their backs for a second. When she didn’t fight the seat belt like she always does, my husband gave me a look that said, we’ve got to get out of here as plainly as if he’d written a note. I make soft cooing sounds and hear myself saying, There, there. We’ll be just fine.

  Remember our sunsets, I say. Remember how we’d pack an ice chest and go up to the hill and watch the sun go down? How it’d stretch for miles, lighting up the sky blood orange and blue and everything in between? Mother looks out the window, and I imagine that she smiles.

  My husband fiddles with the radio up front. He pauses at a fuzzy news station long enough to hear that a tornado has ripped through downtown Oklahoma City. A big one. They’re interviewing the police chief, who sounds confused. His voice catches. It’s just gone, he says. I lean forward and punch it off. There’s no sound for a while except the sound of the tires on the road and the wind. Always the wind.

  Finally my husband speaks up. I know Oklahoma’s close, and I feel for them, he says. But isn’t this good news for Bonita, in a sense? I mean, climate change is terrible. Terrifying. But it’s science.

  Mother is praying to herself. Her whispers grow louder. I find his eyes in the rearview and give him the please-shut-up look. He jerks his head over his shoulder toward Mother, says, We need to talk.

  I lean my head over onto Mother’s shoulder and think about a new apocalypse unconstrained by precedent or the absurdity of town borders. Words run through my head: Mother and plenty of water. Safe haven and plenty to eat. Understanding and safety for the man driving us, love. I can’t tell if I’m begging for these things or thanking something or someone or both. As if awoken from a dream, Mother looks down on me and says, It’s been forever since I’ve watched the sun go down from the hill.

  34.

  When we pull up, the well fire still hasn’t burned out. My husband just shakes his head, giving up on understanding anything, I’m afraid. One of the Riders is leading her horse toward a trailer at the base of the hill. Her head hangs, stiff from sitting on top of a horse for God knows how many hours. The wait can’t be easy on the faithful either.

  Two new rangers man the exit out of town and past the roadside park. My husband stops, and one of them sticks his head in and asks if we have everything we need. I lean forward and tell him we just want to catch the sunset. My husband doesn’t protest when I say we’ll be right back, but I know we’re going to have to make a move quick. I can let you go, the ranger says. But they’re shutting down unofficial entries. The man does not put up with any kind of reasoning or logic, so my husband puts the car in reverse and pulls perpendicular to the road. He puts it in drive, leaves his hand on the gearshift. Ahead, a horse trailer pulls onto the road. The Rider raises a weary hand. Finally, my husband speaks, but I have to lean in to hear him: We could just go.

  35.

  I turn to Mother. What do you think, I say. Let’s just go. Somewhere things are better, somewhere things can still be okay? We’ll visit the library, go to a restaurant. We can swing wide and see the Grand Canyon.

  The animals need a new round bale, Mother says. And they’ll need another one after that. My husband slams the car into park, and when he sighs, I have to roll down the window to get some air.

  36.

  Mother picks up her purse, opens the door, and steps out. I’ve never seen my calm, constant husband have a panic attack, but by the looks of things, I might.

  We can’t stay here forever, he says. I love you, and I’ll help you tie her up and make her go, or I’ll hold you when we leave her, but I’ve had enough of whatever you want to call what’s happening here.

  He grabs his hair with both hands and looks like a Munch painting.

  Do you even know what you’re asking me to do, I say. I hit the seat back with both hands and begin to cry. I need him steady. I can’t be the steady one. It’s not in me anymore.

  Mother is holding a crumpled tissue to her mouth, teetering across the cattle guard, heading toward the well. I fling the door open and say, Do what you have to do. He’s still sitting there when I look back.

  When I catch up to her, she’s standing at the base of the flame, close enough that when I take her hand it’s already warm. You can’t imagine heat, she says. You have to feel it for yourself.

  37.

  Flames dance, casting shadows across Mother’s face. Heat vapors make the world look unsteady, dreamlike. Please, I say, but this close to the flame, its roar swallows the word. The pressure comes and goes, whips in and out, a giant blowtorch below the Earth’s surface beginning to run itself dry. An orange ball billows twenty feet or more into the sky before the flames shrink down and snake wispy in the wind. The fire makes its own wind, and I feel it moving through my clothes, pushing back stray hairs. My husband crosses the cattle guard but stands back a ways watching us. He shrugs his shoulders and gives what smile he can muster. Mother offers him her hand, and he comes over and puts his arm around my waist, working to be the person I need him to be for a while longer.

  38.

  Above us, the new Riders keep watch on the hill, silhouetted by the setting sun. They step high in their stirrups and lean forward, bracing for something we can’t see. We stand there, staring into the flame, until it begins to grow dark outside our circle. The wind picks up, whips the flame around
, lighting our faces. Mother pulls my hands close, turns them over, studies them like she used to when I was a girl. I’m not crazy, she says. I don’t think so anyway.

  I know— I try to say, but she cuts me off.

  To tell you the truth, she says, I don’t know if it’s suicide or salvation, but this is home. I don’t even know anything else anymore. But you, she says, you were always my perfect angel. The wind shifts directions again and begins to roar. There is a loud bang, and people are yelling off in the distance.

  I’m so proud of you, Reney, she yells. Then she wipes my hair from my face, leans her forehead against mine, and shouts, I’m glad you’re not like me in the ways that count. I take her by the shoulders and hold her gaze, try my best to see past my own reflection, to see her as she is right now, as she must have been all those years ago, defiant but afraid. Space opens up, the sky goes soft. I see what’s before us, I see what’s been, and I see out past the sun where stars explode and life starts anew. I know she won’t be in the car when we drive away. I don’t know if it matters where we are when all is said and done. We are together, two parts of some unimaginable whole. When I’ve seen more than I can take, I give in, close my eyes, and feel the warmth of her skin. I imagine her as big and whole as the world, pretend her words were lost to the flame.

  Acknowledgments

  So many thank yous—

  Adam Eaglin, for reading and rereading, for seeing the book even when I didn’t, for making each story better, for your undying patience and generosity, for your belief.