I drew a chair up, the farthest to the back of the eight or so people who had gathered. One by one they opened their mouths and rolled their eyes or closed them tight and let the words fly out of them until they begin to garble and the sounds from their mouths resembled some ancient, dizzying speech. At first, I was so uncomfortable with all of the strangeness, and even a little faint from the airlessness and smells, that I breathed in with shallow gulps, and I shut the language out. But gradually, slowly, it worked its way in and I felt dizzy until I was seized.
The words are inside and outside of me, hanging in the air like small pottery triangles, broken and curved. But they are forming and crumbling so fast that I’m breathing dust, the sharp antibiotic bitterness, medicine, death, sweat. My eyes sting and I’m starting to choke. All the blood goes out of my head and down, along my arms, into the ends of my fingers. My hands feel swollen, twice as big as normal, like big puffed gloves. I get out of the chair and turn to leave, but he is there.
“Go on,” he says. “Go on and touch her.”
The others have their hands on Ed’s mother. They are touching her with one hand and praying, the other palm held high, blind, feeling for the spirit like antennae. Billy pushes me, not by making any contact, just by inching up behind me so I feel the forcefulness and move. Two people make room and then I am standing over Ed’s mother. She is absolutely motionless, still, as though she is a corpse, except that her pinched mouth has turned down at the edges so she frowns into her own dark.
I put my hands out, still huge, prickling. I am curious to see what will happen when I do touch her, if she’ll respond. But when I place my hands down on her stomach, low and soft, she makes no motion at all. Nothing flows from me, no healing powers. Instead, I am filled with the rushing dark of what she suffers. It fills me suddenly as water from a faucet brims a jug, and spills over.
This is when it happens.
I’m not stupid, I have never been stupid. I have pictures. I can get a picture in my head at any moment, focus it so brilliant and detailed it seems real. That’s what I do. That’s what my uncle does when he’s just staring. It’s what I started when my mom and dad went for each other. When I heard them downstairs I always knew there’d be a moment. One of them would scream, tear through the stillness. It would rise up, that howl, and fill the house, and then one would come running. One would come and take hold of me. It would be my mother, smelling of smoked chicken, rice, and coffee grounds. It would be my father, sweat-soured, scorched with cigarette smoke from in the garage, bitter with the dust of his fields. Then I would be somewhere in no-man’s-land, between them, and that was the unsafest place in the world. Except for the gaze grip of my uncle. So I would leave it. I would go limp and enter my pictures.
I have a picture. I go into it right off when I touch Ed’s mother, veering off her thin pain. She grew up in Montana and now I see what she sees. Here’s a grainy deep blue range of mountains hovering off the valley in the west; their foothills are blue, strips of dark blue flannel, and their tops are cloudy halls. The sun strikes through, once, twice, a pink radiance that dazzles patterns into their corridors so they gleam back, moon-pocked. Watch them, watch close, Ed’s mother, and they start to walk. I keep talking until I know we are approaching these mountains together. She is dimming her lights, she is turning thin as tissue under my hands. She is dying as she goes into my picture with me, goes in strong, goes in willingly. And once she is in the picture she gains peace from it, gains the rock strength, the power, just like I always do.
The Daniels
WE WANDERED IN the desert three years, and I bore two children in the daze and rush of Billy’s traveling visions. His cognitions came on us like Mack trucks, bowling us from tent to tent and town to town. He would howl with the signal, then writhe at tremendous sights he saw, shout for a pen and paper, growl and puke and wrestle with the knowledge until he lay calm on the bathroom floor, spent, saying to me, Now, do you doubt?
I never did. I had faith in Billy from that first night I heard him speak. I had faith and I cleaved to him, utterly. But as the months and then the years went by, I missed my mother and my father. I missed their ordinary routine, their low drama, even the familiarity of their quarrels. I missed that I could read their danger, and knew a safe place to be around them — in my pictures. I was having trouble with the pictures. I had to stay on this plane of existence with my babies, that was why. And because I could not disappear into my pictures I needed to go home.
JUDAH IS FLUSHED and peaceful, lips red and soft as petals, his cheeks bright and marked with the seams of the fabric of my blouse. And Lilith, so small and hot, pressed into the folds of my skirt, sighs and falls into a glutted sleep.
“Let’s go see Grandma and Grandpa,” I say to my babies, thinking of my mother’s face. She hasn’t seen them yet.
Nothing can pry this idea loose, I am bent on it.
“Billy,” I say when he walks in. “We’re going home.”
“No,” he says without a beat of hesitation.
“We’ve got to,” I tell him.
I’ve never crossed him before and my fierceness surprises, then shakes him.
“Your parents died when you were young,” I tell him. “Your sister raised you until you went into the army, then she went to the dogs, I guess. So you don’t really understand the idea of home, or folks, or a place you grew up in that you want to return to. But now it’s time.”
He sits down on the edge of the little bed in our motel room. I have made him a hot pot of coffee, which he drinks like he is listening.
“Tomorrow,” I say.
I tell him that I have spoken to my parents on the telephone more often lately. As their grandchildren came along, they grew more resigned to Billy, and even will say hello to him on holidays and birthdays. I know if we go back home and bring the babies, things will be all right. My parents will come around. It seems to me that it is time for this to happen, for the break to be mended.
“I’ve never asked you for anything before,” I say to Billy, and that is true. “I’m going home,” I repeat.
“But I’ve just started my ministry here. I can’t leave behind our membership.”
We have signed on eight retired persons, who have liquidated all of their assets to join our congregation. We are based in motor homes, on land one of them has donated, in the Gallatin Valley near Bozeman. It’s just two acres, and we’re crowded together, always listening to the whine of someone else’s radio.
“You’ve got reservation land,” I said, “and we could get a bigger parcel of land out near my folks. We could buy up a building in town and open a God-based bookstore. But I want to live back where my family lives, close to the farm. I miss all that flat land, green crops, those clouds. We grew everything,” I tell him. “The big crops, soybeans, flowers, flax. I miss the blue fields. The yellow mustard fields. Sunflowers turning all day to catch the light. I miss the house garden. Mint for iced tea. Tomatoes big as your foot.”