were delivered by angels, so everyone who laid eyes upon the men of the church would be pulled into belief, the capes so hypnotic. Like many traditions of the church, I couldn’t remember when exactly the capes arrived for the men, only that they did. Cherry wore black for she was widowed, and my mother and I were in jean dresses smudged with dirt. On my mother’s feet was an unmatched pair of flip-flops.
Lyle walked in and came straight for Cherry and kissed her on the cheek, but his eyes were on my mother and me. I tried to nudge her so she’d sit up, look alive, but her legs splayed apart instead. He sat between Aunt Pearl, my mother’s older sister, and Uncle Perd, her husband. Pearl shook her head at my mother and faced forward. “Lordy be,” she said.
Vern stood at the front wearing a special gold robe of sequins over loose-slung jean overalls with holes worn in the knees from frequent prayer. He raised his arms, his curls gleaming under the new bright spotlight they’d just installed. His feet were bare, the tops of them sun-browned. I knew if I were to kneel and kiss them I would see he had penned a little black cross on each toenail. Music filtered in from the line of ten stereos all set to play the same CD at the same time, a ghostly refrain of screaming bagpipes.
“He is Risen,” Vern said now, jumping a little bit off the ground. The Body bellowed back, “He is Risen indeed!”
I hoisted my mother up for the singing but she shook me off and leaned against the back of the pew in front of her, her butt on full display to the Stam family, who sat behind us. Wiley, the father, stared openly, his tongue hanging out like a dog’s in the desert, while his wife shoved the hymnal before him. Their daughter, Sharon, was my age, a fellow Bible study girl, and she looked at my mother side-eyed and amused. She had never expressly seemed to want to be my friend—her eyes struck me as judgmental and joking, the way whenever I said anything, Bible verse or prayer request, she sort of covered her mouth in a private laugh, but what she was laughing at exactly, I never knew. Her pig-faced brother, Laramie, stood still, mouth unmoving, his fat fists clenched at all times ready for a fight. I met Sharon’s eyes and she crossed them and her mother nudged her. I was so embarrassed by my mother I could have happily never looked at her again.
At the center of the stage, Vern knelt on one knee and held up a hand to catch the spirit. “Yes!” he shouted. “I’ve heard what’s been said about Peaches. Oh, I’ve heard. That Peaches’s soil is no good. That Peaches might as well be shut down, but I’ll tell you, this is not God’s plan. God will restore Peaches’s soil and Peaches’s sky. He will bring the bounty up from the ground, He will bring forth water from thin air. This is the holiest uprising that Peaches . . .” He paused, his face screwed up, reeling in the message. “No. That the world will ever know!”
My mother and Cherry liked to say Vern could have been a televangelist star with his bravado, the way he could really make you feel something when nothing else was happening to make you feel that thing. That was spirituality, my mother explained once when I asked her why sometimes I wanted to cry just because Vern was, even if I hadn’t been paying that much attention to what he was saying. Why when the Body stood up and swayed in song, did my body do the same almost on its own? These were the mysteries of faith. And one of the tenets of faith was accepting that mystery, living in it day after day, and liking it.
I loved when Vern spoke his goodness like he did now, but I was distracted by my mother, who was drawing lazy pictures of the moon cycle on the back of her hand with a silver pen she’d taken to keeping in her pocket. She had been on about the moon lately, about planets in retrograde and our sign compatibility. It seemed like a new religion to her. Two Aries in one house, she’d said to me the week before, holding her hand to her heart like she was delivering some real