Every Bone a Prayer

by Ashley Blooms

  “What’s happening?” the garden asked.

  “I don’t know,” Misty said. “Something bad.”

  So the garden stayed with Misty in her mind, like someone standing just beside her in the dark of an empty room. Penny grabbed Misty’s hand as their father walked up to the green glass man, cocked back his arm, and swung.

  Their mother’s hands flew to her mouth, and she stopped in the middle of the yard. The only light in the bottom came from the sodium lamp over the barn, and it outlined everyone in orange—their mother narrowed to a thin line of fire at her shoulder, their father’s face full of sunlight as he swung, and the green glass man glowing and shivering and not moving an inch.

  The sound of the bat hitting the glass was almost like a church bell. High and bright, a single piercing note over and over and over again. After a few swings, Misty could almost feel the reverberation in the soles of her feet.

  “He can’t hurt them,” the garden whispered. “Why do men think the only way to fix something is to hit it?”

  Misty shook her head. Even if she could talk to her father now, if she could build a bridge between them, she wouldn’t. His face was set in hard lines, his arms moving like pistons, pulling back the bat and swinging and swinging and swinging. Even if he heard Misty’s voice in his head, it didn’t feel like he would listen. She’d wanted so badly to speak to him for so long, but that feeling was changing. She had hurts of her own now, and the longer she looked at him, the less he seemed like the kind of person she could share them with.

  Earl walked onto his front porch and stood with a beer in his hand. William came out behind him and the two looked like different versions of the same thing, like a timeline of growth and all William had to do was shoot up and out a few inches and he would be the one standing there instead of Earl. And even though William wasn’t looking in her direction, Misty still took a step back, tried to hide. Her stomach ached and the garden swirled like a summer breeze along her throat and into her chest, warming her from the inside.

  William tugged on Earl’s shirt and said something. Earl rested his beer on the rail of the porch and walked back inside his trailer. The beer wobbled, tipped, fell onto the grass below. The porch rail was uneven. The more Misty looked, the more she noticed how Earl’s trailer seemed to dip forward, like it was leaning toward the garden. There were dozens of crawdad chimneys strewn across his yard now, and the ground was beginning to sink as the crawdads dug the earth’s insides out.

  When her father’s bat produced not so much as a dent on the green man’s chest, he turned his attention to the golden hand. He swung for the wrist and then for each of the fingers one by one, but the hand never closed, never flinched, never wrenched itself from the earth to flee. It sang its own, deeper tone as the metal bat struck its palm over and over.

  Earl came back with a gun in his hand. He checked the chamber, held it up, and fired a single shot into the air.

  Penny closed the front door.

  She led Misty back to their room and sat with her on the edge of her bed until the sound of their father’s truck peeling out of the driveway and onto the road faded to a distant hum, then lost itself beneath the screech of the crickets. Until the front door of their trailer opened and closed again. Until their mother’s sobs wrung themselves dry.

  Twenty-Seven

  If Misty could speak Penny’s name, she thought it would sound like the pop of bubble gum blown too wide and thin and pink. The sticky, soft way it peeled from her cheeks after the bubble burst, how it tried to hold on to everything it touched. Penny would be a wind chime in a high wind, the desperate clinking of the metal, the bells jarred and humming, giving out not a song, but a cry, a warning that something was about to change. Cinnamon candy held in the well of a jaw, dissolving, cracking, gone. She’d be the squish of fingers through damp hair, the froth of shampoo, the scratch of fingernails against the soft tangle at the very nape of the neck, a knot of dark hair like reeds twisting at the bottom of a deep, green lake.

  Penny sat beside her in the back seat of their mother’s car. She had a notebook in her lap, and they passed the ink pen back and forth playing tic-tac-toe. When Penny won too many games in a row, she would suddenly start playing worse, her O’s becoming too wide for their boxes, and Misty would win knowing that Penny had let her win, but was happy all the same.

  When they pulled into Dolly’s driveway, Penny pushed the notebook into her overnight bag. “I still don’t see why I can’t come.”

  “Because,” their mother said. “I need some time with your sister.”

  Misty shrugged when Penny looked at her. She couldn’t say anything with their mother there, but Misty had noticed a difference in their mother since the day the green light landed on her chest. A kind of desperate searching in her eyes every time she looked at Misty. She had come to their bedroom door three times a night since then and stood, silent as a shadow, just watching. Just making sure.

  Penny sighed. “Well, I’m coming back when Dolly gets up tomorrow morning. First thing. I ain’t sticking around to watch Charlene slather mayonnaise all over her fried bologna.”

  Penny skulked into Dolly’s house without bothering to wave goodbye, but Dolly waved from the window, her hands dusted white with flour. Misty rarely went on trips with her mother alone because Penny was always there, Penny asking questions, Penny angling for ice cream or a toy at the store, and without her noise, the space between Misty and her mother felt wider, emptier.

  Her mother gripped the wheel as Dolly shut the front door behind them. She said, “I think we need help.”

  “Okay,” Misty said.

  “I know this has been a hard summer for both you girls, but I wanted us to have a chance to talk. Just me and you. And then we’re going to the prayer meeting. It’s the best place I can think of for heavy hearts.”

  They were both silent during the rest of the drive down the long, twisting roads. They passed the old gas station with its windows boarded shut, and they passed Elder Mason standing at the mouth of his holler, staring up into the sky. Every day he woke and dressed and walked the three miles down to that same spot. He never accepted a ride, even when it was raining or snowing. He waited there until dusk, then turned and walked home again. No one knew exactly what he waited for, but Misty always felt sad when she saw him standing there with his wispy, graying hair and thin plaid shirt. She wanted to hand him something warm to drink and stand beside him so at least he wouldn’t have to wait alone for one day.

  Her mother’s car rumbled as they drove, and sometimes the engine went quiet in the steepest curves and her mother whispered, “Come on, Betty,” under her breath as the wheels evened out and they kept chugging along. The car was box-shaped and gray, and both rims were missing from the wheels on the right side. The fabric on the inside of the roof was starting to come loose. It billowed like a circus tent, caught the breeze from the open windows, and ruffled until their mother couldn’t stand the sound. She’d brought thumbtacks from the kitchen and tacked the fabric in place, but the billows didn’t go away—they just became smaller, stretching between the tacks. The car had a topography of its own, a special, hilly landscape that mirrored the one outside as though the two had spent so much time together that they were beginning to look alike.

  The car had belonged to Misty’s father once, and it still smelled like coal dust, and there was a bright-yellow sticker on the dashboard that read CAUTION: HOT WORK AREA. The engine had a particular whine to it after it had been driven for a while, a kind of high-pitched grind that was so fine and thin a sound that Misty could barely hear it some days, but she heard it on the drive and was comforted by it until Misty’s mother pulled into the church parking lot and shut off the engine.

  There were only a couple cars in the parking lot and almost twenty minutes before the prayer meeting started so they waited. The windshield fogged at the corners and then everywhere, completel
y, so the world outside disappeared. The engine ticked as it cooled, and for a while it was the only sound between them.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever brought you to a prayer meeting before, but it’s a lot like church, except there’s no preaching or singing. They’ll have a prayer line. Brother Baker is here and Brother Daniels. He’s from up Stinnett. Brother Cleveland is usually here. He’s from Harlan.”

  Misty toyed with the handle of her umbrella.

  “Do you—” Her mother faltered. “Is there anything you want to tell me before we go in? Anything you need me to know?”

  Her mother’s hands moved from her lap to the steering wheel and back again. She stared straight ahead through the foggy window, and before Misty could think of an answer, she was talking again.

  “I know that you ain’t been sleeping good lately. I check on you girls at night. I think one of the best things about being a mother is when you put your kids in bed. Not because they’re not awake or because you want them gone, but because I can stand there in the doorway and say they are right there, and I know exactly where they will be, and I know the sound of them sleeping, and they will be okay until morning. Everything will be okay until morning.”

  Her mother’s hand fluttered along the wheel. “I know that you ain’t been eating much, either. I haven’t said anything because girls change. It’s hot and sometimes you lose your appetite. Your granny said that Aunt Jem made it by a whole summer just sucking the juice from honeysuckle blooms. Now, I don’t know if I believe it or not—I sure don’t remember Jem ever refusing a meal—but I guess what I’m saying is that I know sometimes you just don’t want to eat. It’s funny to be growing up, and it’s fine, sometimes, to act different. Until it ain’t fine anymore.”

  Her hands squeezed the wheel once, white-knuckled until they released and fell to her lap. “You know, I don’t think my mama knew a thing about me when I was your age. She loved me. And she tried to raise us right, keep us fed and clothed, but it was hard and Daddy, well, your grandpa was a good grandpa but he wasn’t much of a husband or a father to any of us. He drank a lot and he was gone a lot and Mom had enough on her hands. So as long as we weren’t bleeding or screaming, she didn’t ask many questions. And I didn’t know anything about her until I was fully grown. I was pregnant with Penny before she told me that she had a tattoo.”

  “Granny had a tattoo?”

  “Yep. A friend of hers did it. Right here.” She touched Misty’s shoulder with her finger. “They used an ink pen and a screwdriver or something else like that. I can’t remember all the details. It was awful, though. Got infected and everything, said she thought she’d die from the pain, but she didn’t. It was her initials before she got married. Peggy Ann Combs. Said she didn’t ever want to forget. I wish I had known her better before she passed, and I wish she’d known me better, too. Did I ever tell you that me and your daddy are going to counseling down at the church?”

  Misty shook her head, even though Penny had told her the truth days ago. She’d never heard her mother talk so much at once, and she was afraid that if she spoke up, the gates would shutter closed and her mother wouldn’t speak again for a day at least, maybe never again.

  “We’ve been going for months now. We decided that he would stay with your uncle Danny for the summer. Try to give us some space to think things through. Not forever. Just for a little while. It was my job to tell you girls about counseling and about how your dad wouldn’t be staying with us. I wanted to right from the start but every time I looked at you and Penny…” She shook her head.

  “And I don’t know why they left it to me, neither. The preacher tells me that I’m your daddy’s helpmate. He had me write it down one week and write out all the things I thought a good helpmate should be. He never asked your daddy to do that. He never asked your daddy what he could do to help me. And I called him last night so he could help me. I told him I was scared and I didn’t know what to do about the statues and you girls, and I wanted him to come and help me figure it out. But he came and tore things down and that wasn’t help. Not the kind I wanted.”

  Misty almost reached out to her mother, almost put her hand on her knee, but there was a kind of frantic energy around her, like all the green strings she’d hung on the walls of their trailer had connected something inside her and she had to let it out before she burst.

  “And the thing is that most days I think everything will be okay. That everything is okay because one day all this suffering, all this pain will be over and I’ll be given the first true rest of my life in Heaven. I’ll be at peace. We all will. And my mom will be there, and she won’t be angry anymore because all her burdens will be lifted. And my granny and Dolly and Jem and all of them will be as happy as they deserve. So it’s easier to go along and to pray and believe that it’s all worth something and that what I’m doing is right, even if it hurts, and the hurt proves it somehow. The hurt shows what I’m willing to do for God. But if you don’t believe for sure in Heaven—if you’re not completely sure all the time that it’s worth it, then it’s so much harder to keep going. It’s so much harder.”

  Misty’s mother stared out the window. Her breath fogged in front of her mouth, and a tear slipped down her cheek. She wiped it away absently.

  “You know them clothes I brought to Jem’s house? In the big bag? We gather things up for families that need them. Whatever we can do to help. This time it was a woman who left her husband. He wasn’t a good husband and she needed to go, but she had to leave the state to be safe. We got her set up and sent her off in the dark of night. She’s called already and we know she’s okay. But she’ll be wearing some of my old shirts wherever she goes. They’ll be living this life I’ll never see and sometimes…sometimes I just wonder…”

  When her mother looked at Misty again, she jumped a little, like she’d forgotten that Misty was there or forgotten how small she was, how round her face, how dark her eyes.

  Her mother said, “I shouldn’t have told you all of that. See, there’s a way to say too much when you’re a mama, but I can’t figure out exactly what’s enough or what’s too much, so I say too much and then feel bad and go back to saying nothing at all. Lord, Misty. I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry for all of this, for me and your daddy both, but we’re trying, and whatever it is that’s been weighing on your heart this summer, I think tonight will help. This is what your granny would have done for me. ‘Go to God,’ she said, so we’re going.”

  She took Misty’s hand and gave it a tight squeeze.

  “Come on,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Let’s get inside.”

  * * *

  Most of the people attending the prayer meeting were older and sick. There was a whole row of people near the windows who were in wheelchairs or walkers. There were women with oxygen tubes wrapped behind their ears and one man with a blue hospital mask over his mouth whose cough sounded wet and rattling, like his lungs were filled with water and stone. One older man came over to Misty’s pew and offered her a stick of gum. He offered her gum at every Wednesday night service, and Misty smiled as she took the silver foil from his hand. He smiled back and nodded, his face lined with wrinkles, his glasses smudged in the corners. His cane trembled as he walked a few rows down, stopping now and then to offer gum to the other children. Misty was unfolding the foil when her mother cleared her throat and held out her hand.

  “I don’t trust that man,” her mother said. “He never got married. Always acted right quare. He lives alone at the top of that big, old hill, and he only ever gives gum to little girls.”

  Misty opened her mouth to tell her mother that she’d just seen him give a piece to a boy in another pew, but her mother narrowed her eyes and Misty sighed. She put the gum in her mother’s hand, and her mother crumpled it up and dropped it in her purse. Men were supposed to be nice, but they couldn’t be too nice or people would stop trusting them. They became quare, and quare didn’t seem like
a good thing to be. Misty wasn’t sure at what place in the middle men were supposed to be, but it seemed a very narrow spot. She kept her eyes on the little old man as the preacher walked onto the pulpit and spread out his arms.

  He said, “Thank you all for being here tonight. I know many of you have come from far away to get a touch from the Lord, and we’re so glad that you could come. The Lord tells us in James that if any among us is sick to call on the elders of the church and ask them to anoint you in His name. We’ve got oil here that we’ve sent to churches all over the states, down as fur as Georgia and it’s been prayed over by some of the best men I know, and they all believe that there is a healing in store for you. I say there is a healing in store for all of you who are weak and weary, burdened and ill, and whatever it is that you carry. We’re going to help you carry it tonight.”

  He stomped his foot hard enough to make his glasses almost slip from his nose. He tipped back his chin just an inch, and when he spoke this time, he spoke in tongues.

  Chills broke over Misty’s arms, though it was not the first time she’d heard the preacher speak this way. The sound was unlike any other language, as though for God to speak through one of his faithful, he had to bend them first, to reshape their mouths to hold His name. The preacher’s tongue became a round thing rolling across his teeth, and the words rolled with it. There seemed to be no space between the words at all, just one long sound connected. And the only reason the word ended at all is because it was in such a small body, such a worldly vessel.

  In the mouth of God, the sound might never end, might go on and on and on, might tell and untell and retell the universe from beginning to end, unravel it and start again. Such force couldn’t be contained in a preacher’s body or in any body for long, lest their teeth be ground to dust inside their mouth and their body collapse under the weight of all they’d known. The preacher stomped again and the words stopped.