robes and long blond hair curled in ringlets, sprayed to a starch. No one in town had seen him in over ten years—he’d been on mission trips around the world, it was said, casting God into the hearts of infidels. The top of his head was shaved clean in what he called a Spirit Hole, so that God could reach him without hair in the way.
“I’ll bring the rain,” he’d told everyone on his first day. And even though Peaches was in desperation times—several farmers, including my own grampa Jackie, had killed themselves over the shame of their barren crops, drank bottles of pesticide and lay down for the long sleep—and even though there were threats to turn off the water for good and condemn the whole place to death, the doubters in the congregation had gawked at Vern with little faith. For they did not yet know the most important thing about working the land, and that was that the land was not theirs to work, but God’s.
Of the Herd women, only my grandma Cherry attended church at that time, grasping at faith after the death of Grampa Jackie. She had stood in the fields to see Vern command God’s attention. He had knelt in the dry burrs and thrown up his hands. Cherry had seen the clean sky turn back like a page, gray eating blue, rolling into a great thunderclap. She felt the first drops on her hot skin, and then it was crashing rain for days. When it flooded the streets, when the old Peaches canal overflowed, when the news reported the rain had only fallen in the bounds of our little county—population 1,008, barely 3.2 square miles in size—there was no avoiding the truth. Vern had shown our town what God could do. He’d summoned something from nothing and no one was the same after that.
The next Sunday, rain still falling, my mother and I had lined up with everyone else to touch the new pastor’s robes. To listen to that magical voice that had brought the rains. And who was my mother then?
She was a day late and a dollar short, a water bottle of gin in her purse, in the glove box, a waitressing job at the Grape Tray, and one lousy boyfriend after another who sat potbellied and spread-legged in our kitchen, yellowed fingers ashing cigarettes into empty chili cans.
And me?
I was only her bastard daughter, unsaved and seven years old, daddyless and dirt-kneed, whole mind a sin plain, my fingers pocketing gumdrops from the candy store, eyes watching cartoons of coyotes dropping anvils on heads. Someone I can hardly remember. But thank the good God, I learned that day, the past was of no matter. The rain soaked my sundress and Vern blessed us out of that life and into another.
I STEPPED OUT of the shower and let the heat of the apartment dry me. My mother was still at the bathroom mirror, head flipped upside down, filling the bathroom with hair spray. Some might think a good religious woman must be plain and clean-faced, but at Gifts of the Spirit it was fine for a woman to prepare her body and adorn herself in God’s light. The brighter the shine, the easier His angels could spot us. Vern wanted the women pretty because everything Godsaved was beautiful. He wanted the women pretty maybe, I wondered sometimes but did not say, to attract infidels to the church, to dangle a prize to be awarded on the other side of conversion. Nevertheless, it was something of evil to make a man stumble.
Whenever the sermons turned to the matter of stumbling, I pictured men with black holes for eyes, walking but falling, arms reaching out, hands landing upon women’s bodies unawares. Under a trance they were, and whose fault was it?
Women, God created beauty.
Women, lead men not into temptation.
But what was my mother to do with her beauty? She couldn’t pray it away. It came up from inside her. It was not just the arrangement of eyes and nose and mouth. It was something unnameable that could not be achieved with makeup or manipulation of hairstyle. She had a gap between her front teeth that she considered an imperfection, but it was what threw her beauty over the edge. It was what drove her men crazy. I knew Vern was captivated by the way she looked, considered it to be God’s gift. I had to agree. It was a gift. I imagined no