Reading by Lightning (16 page)

In the meeting I sit between Gracie and Betty Stalling. Gracie has a pencil. She writes in the front of the hymnbook and tips it towards me:
His wife wears the same dress every night.
I push the hymnbook back at her and she closes it, hurt. On my other side Betty turns her face towards me. Tears swell in her eyes. My restless prickling legs have stilled. A familiar pain has started in my back, risen up from the hard, rough plank and seized hold of my legs and hips, clamping me to the bench.

And why have
you
come to the Lord's tabernacle tonight?
Wesley Moore cries.
Why are you sitting among the Lord's anointed? You have come to mock! You have come to sneer! You sneer at the precious love of Jesus-uh. Do you think God is blind-uh? God is not blind-uh! God knows your heart!
I half close my eyes, so that his pacing figure blurs. I would plug my ears if I could do it without drawing attention to myself. Since the
Crusade began I've been thinking about Christian, of his brave and honest heart.
I am weary of my inner sickness,
he said. Where is
The Pilgrim's Progress?
I asked my mother that afternoon. Oh, she said. I threw it out a long time ago. It had all fallen apart.

Betty sits too close to me. The music starts up, Sister Adele's soft, lavish playing. I wish I could see my dad — I don't know where he's sitting.
The Lord knows your heart, your selfish heart. Bring it up and lay it on the altar-uh!
Betty looks at me with her lashless, red-rimmed eyes. Go on, she says. I'll go with you. They begin to sing.
Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me.
Sobs shake my chest. Suddenly I'm standing. We push our way down the row, past Gracie, getting briefly tangled in someone's crossed legs. At the aisle I feel a huge up-swell of revulsion and terror and I jerk my arm free of her hand. I turn, turn and run towards the back of the tent. Faces lift, eyes open.
Come home, come ho-o-ome,
they sing with dreadful tenderness. I scuttle out of the tent, dodging the guy ropes, and stumble across the field, across the soft dirt of the racetrack to the grass on the other side. Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn, I moan, casting myself on the ground, feeling the prickly weeds under my bare palms, working my fingers into a crack the drought made in the earth. Oh no, no, no, I cry. Tears pour from my face onto the dust. I seem to see smoke issuing from a crack in the ground. I'm blind with humiliation and longing and self-disgust.

Someone's bending over me, someone has followed me. Not Betty Stalling. It's Mr. Gorrie, his knees creaking and his thighs bulging like saddlebags when he crouches beside me. I roll over on the grass and sit up. I see eyes behind his tinted spectacles, small round eyes looking at me knowingly, like fish through glass.

You might as well get it over with, he says. The Lord is not going to leave you alone until you do.

The roof of the tent has disappeared against the dark sky: the only light anywhere is the shining yellow band from the kerosene lamps hanging along the sides of the tent. I pull back from his outstretched hand and get up on my own. The air is cool on my wet cheeks. I wipe my face with the back of my hand and brush off my skirt. By then they're singing,
Just as I am without one plea but that Thy blood was shed for me, and that Thou bidd'st me come to Thee… Oh lamb of God, I come, I come,
the voices of people I know, each one lifting alone and all of them swelling together. I hear loveliness and longing in the simple melody.

Mr. Gorrie takes me by the elbow and I let myself move with him. We walk slowly towards the figures of the singers silhouetted against the light. We are pilgrims approaching the Celestial City. At the edge of the tent we duck our heads to enter and start up the aisle, where other feet have worn a path in the grass. He drops his hand, but he stays with me all the way to the front. We walk side by side all the way up the long aisle between the rows of singers and then across the open space before the stage, where the ground is littered with the bodies of moths that have battered themselves to inevitable death on the lamps strung across the front of the tent. There we stand among all the other penitents who have come forward, stand with our heads bowed while everyone sings,
Oh lamb of God, I come, I come.

And so she is born again. Mr. Gorrie hands her over to Mr. Dalrymple, who is the one who leads her to the Lord. They sit on a bench set for that purpose on the grass behind the stage and Mr. Dalrymple reads her a few Bible verses, although afterwards she can't remember which ones. He's indifferent to the impulse that drew her forward — he's not interested in anything particular she might say, he knows young girls. Her
voice is thick and stupid and when he says, Let's bow our heads and pray, she sits stupidly until he says the first line of a prayer and asks her to repeat it, Dear Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ
(Dear Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ),
I come to you tonight admitting I am a sinner (
I come to you tonight admitting I am a sinner),
a whole long prayer line by line like marriage vows. Perhaps she should know how to pray after all those years in church, but she feels as though her mind has been wiped clean. That, she suddenly understands, is as it must be.

Her parents and brother are waiting for her outside the tent. Phillip looks stonily in another direction, her father smiles at her quickly and then calls a comment to another man, one of his rare, nervous, overreaching efforts at jocularity (not about his daughter going forward but about the prospect of getting the Ford out of the parking lot), Betty and the other girls watch her shyly. Her mother clasps her waist in such a tender way that the girl sees that it was her all along, her own rebellion and outrageousness that made Mother the sort of mother she was, and that this surrender now frees her to be the sort of mother she can be.

When they drive into the yard Joe Pye is sitting by the side of the house smoking. He gets up and he and Dad go to the barn. Mother follows her into her bedroom as though that room and everything the girl is are now open to her. She is carrying the Bible and she sets it down on the bureau and gazes at the girl and says, Oh, you don't know how hard I've been praying for this day!

Then she smiles glowingly and says, Just a minute, and darts back down the hall. When she returns she's carrying the inkpot and pen. She sits down on the bed and opens the Bible to the front page, where someone in England has written,
The Lord Watch Between Me And Thee While We Are Absent One From Another.
She passes the inkpot to the girl to hold, and steadying the Bible on her knee she writes,
Welcomed into the
fold, July 6, 1933,
and signs,
Lily Piper.
She shows it to the girl and the girl is astonished to see above it the inscription
Welcomed into the fold, May 14, 1931. Phillip Piper.

Then she says, Let's pray together, Lily. There is so much true gladness in her voice, her face is so happy that the girl feels something breaking deep inside her stomach, shards of ice or spun sugar, and she begins to cry and turns her face into the front of her mother's dress, into a place where she has no memory of it ever being before, although it must have been there often when she was a little child. Her tears magnify the white bone of her mother's buttons and splash down in dark stains onto her mother's dress and a light, bright place opens inside her. This is the joy they talk about, flowing like a river.

Around her mother Lily is safe, for Mother knows exactly what she should do. On Saturday afternoons when the cleaning is done they bake angel food cake, for if there is something they have it is eggs. Mother measures out the flour and sugar, and Lily beats the egg whites by hand into glossy peaks, beating until the muscles in her arm burn. Mother knows when the eggs are stiff enough, she knows exactly what Lily should do, task by task. God is their commander and Mother is his lieutenant. Or Lily is a tightrope walker and Mother is her partner, standing on the other side of the tent and holding Lily's eye intently to keep her from looking at her feet, to keep her from falling.
You are one of us now,
Mother's expression says.

At church people smile at Lily. Mrs. Feazel clasps her hand and says, I'm so happy, and Lily likes her for it. Then Mrs. Stalling, Betty's stepmother, her eyeglasses glinting and the smell of raw onion on her breath, comes and clamps one arm around Lily and says, Well, at last! Thank the Lord! By then Lily's smile has frozen on her face and she knows that
Mrs. Stalling is testing her and sees her smile for what it is, false. Oh, it is so hard. Her good self is a starved little creature, she can hardly call up a sense of it. It's like tuning the dial of Joe Pye's radio to find KLS in Salt Lake City or WHP Des Moines, patiently combing for a break in the static, for the tiny voice you hope is out there somewhere.

Her dad sends her to the drugstore to get liniment for Joe Pye. When she walks up to the counter Mr. Gorrie looks at her and up close like that she can see through his dark glasses a keen proprietorial eye. Every time he says, in a voice that speaks of the hidden depths within his question, How are you, Laura? He doesn't even know her name! It is strange that Wesley Moore, whom she sees to be a charlatan, and Mr. Dalrymple, whom she sees to be a sour and nasty old man, and Mr. Gorrie, whom she sees to be a misfit in any society he chooses to associate himself with, were the ones God used to speak to her. But then she understands that God chose it to be this way: he can discern the intents of her heart and he knows that what she needs most is to humble herself.

All she has from her old life is her love for her father, and around him she fears her misery will swell up inside her and burst out, blowing a ragged hole in her chest. Secretly she questions whether God is doing his part. She thinks about when Vera Stalling was baptized, her wading to the shore holding Mr. Dalrymple's arm, the way her drenched skirt clung to her legs and her standing-up nipples showed right through her bodice. When thoughts like that come Lily knows she should pray:
Oh, Lord, cleanse my thoughts.
But instead despair stirs inside her. Nothing is different for her. As the days go by, her mother's expression turns from jubilation back to anxiety. Lily says something mean to Gracie in the churchyard and her mother overhears. She takes Lily back into the church and says softly, Jesus expects better of you now. Lily
sits alone in the church for a while and digs her fingernails into her calves and leaves a little row of half-moons on her skin, but this is wrong too, this is
dramatic.

On the morning she is to be baptized they are driving down the river road, Betty and Gracie and various people from the church in the back of the Ford, trying to get to the baptism before the water dries up, but she is still wearing her nightgown, branches from both sides of the road whipping against the windshield of the truck, the shame of her unpreparedness filling her. Later she has the Ford, she has turned back on her own to get her dress, she's the one driving when someone standing by the side of the road flags her over. She follows him into the bush, walking then, almost blind with the dread of being late. He is wearing a white shirt and she follows it, and there in the bush against a scrub oak is her mother, suspended against the tree, her pale hair tangled in the branches like vines of wild hops, her bloodless face hanging, her soul there but her spirit divided from it by some terrible event, some ritualistic visitation. Then nausea seizes Lily, and she struggles up from her bed and runs out into the bright morning. She is almost at the outhouse before she vomits in the weeds beside the path.