God’s Light

“Raise up your students to hear My voice, to go where My light is dim, where My voice is heard small, and My healing power is not known, even to the uttermost bounds of the earth. Their work will exceed yours, and in this, I am well pleased.”

• God, as relayed to Oral Roberts in 1955

She ran her brittle fingers through every crack, fold, and line on her face while she examined herself in her hallway mirror that was sporting a fine array of webbed cracks throughout. She’d had to find the perfect angle to even get a good full-on view of herself. It seemed metaphorical to everything else. Sixty-seven had just come calling at her front door the day before, and it in its visitation it had begat new sensations of exhaustion that had begun bursting inside her chest like ash-filled balloons.

“How did I let my feet lead me here, oh lord?”

She glanced over her shoulder at the canvas sack lying atop her bed, and then snapped immediately back to her reflection, tugging at the loose flap of skin that hang from below her neck, mouthing into the mirror “just a closer walk with thee, oh please Jesus hear my plea”. She pulled down the skin beneath her eyes, and tears began swelling up in the corners. A lone streak cut hard down her face as she tried to collect herself. She’d just returned from the morning shift at the SonShine senior center, doling out whatever bilge and gruel they’d decided was worthy of feeding the veterans and hillfolk that sat catatonic in their main room every other weekday morning, and then on Sundays for the pancake breakfast. Edna Rickston had cussed her up one wall and down the other this morning from her wheelchair, but it was an easily forgivable offense, as the dementia had gotten the better of her after Rick had passed on and she’d become a mean ole cuss to anyone in her line of sight. Even at that, the old bitch had damn good sight for 96, she thought. At the mere thought of this meanness, she asked forgiveness quietly. A holy woman was she, Jean ruminated to herself.

Larry Hoyle had tried to ask her out on a date to eat funnel cake and ride the Ferris wheel at the county fair, but had dropped his entire spoonful of oatmeal in his lap while doing so and turned red about the face, all conversation dying right there. Parkinson’s had ate him up. All sixty pitiful years, she’d thought, and then asked forgiveness again.

It was all she knew these days to ask, and the lord above was the only ears that’d hear her pleas, or her effervescent and over the top apologies. Everyone else seemed to look right through her as though she were an apparition that floated about the town. Even her son and daughter never picked up their phones anymore. They even avoided her if they were to happen across her path at the grocery store. A ghost of apologies and ill intent, though gilded with an air of holiness. She used to by god be somebody.

She’d seen goddamned Hank Williams in the flesh. Now how many folks these days could say that? No, that’s right. Not many. Boy, she loved to tell that story too. He’d flirted with her even, and they’d shared a small bottle of Jim Beam after the beanpole had sauntered offstage, fresh from an hour of swaggerin’ his hips in a ripping hot horse-showing barn right down the way in Y City. Maybe they’d even kissed a time or two, but she was a lady and a lady never did tell.

As she stood observing herself in the spiderwebbed hallway mirror, reminding herself that the king of country music had drank out of the same whiskey bottle she had, her phone rang. The cold and shrill tones raised the hair on her arms as she jerked her head back again, looking at the sack that lay atop her bed. She made her way down the hallway, and picked up the handset from her side table.

“Hello?” She sang out in a lilting tone.

“Jean, this is Eleanor at SonShine. I’m afraid we need to have ourselves a little talk, if’n you’ve got a moment.”

Her hand tightened around the handset, and her breaths came in short, ragged bursts all of a sudden.

“Why hello there, Ellie. What ever can I help you with?” She chirped.

The other line was silent for a moment, as if she were measuring her next words carefully. Jean’s hand tightened more.

“Jean, this is a very hard phone call to have to make, but we’ve just talked with the senior center board, and it would seem..” she held on that word a moment.

Jean’s grip clamped as tight as it could now, the handset audibly cracking in her hand.

“… it would seem that you’ve been reported for abuse by Mrs. Rickson. She came into our offices with a purple bruise running all over the side of her face, and she told us…”

Jean slammed the handset down, bitter tears beginning to fall again. She returned to her mirror and extended her ragged pointer finger at her reflection, and said “You were somebody, and don’t nobody give no goddamned nevermind. You were the captain of the girl’s basketball team that took them to the state finals. You were the valedictorian of your class, Jean McMurtry. You graduated top of the pile at Bible university. You were friends with Oral Roberts. By god, Kenneth Copeland brought his Mama to your wedding!” She howled into the mirror, tears dancing down her face as if they were doing the Tennessee waltz. “They’re all gonna see me again. They’re all gonna have to ask for my…” a sob cracked her voice like a balpeen hammer on fine porcelain.

“… my… forgiveness” she choked out, and spun around to her bedroom.

Next to her bed on the nightstand lay a stack of letters, and she examined the one atop the pile. It was her church, excusing her from their congregation on grounds of egregious and abusive behavior. She’d come home and tied on a mean one that Sunday. In fact, Jean couldn’t remember what day that was, or if she’d stopped drinking yet. She couldn’t remember much of anything. She thought of her daddy. She thought of Hank Williams. She thought of her children. Her grandchildren they’d never been kind enough to let her know. Those ungrateful bitches, she thought. She asked forgiveness again.

She turned to the canvas sack, ran her fingers over it, and tucked it beneath her arm. She sat it in her chair while she retrieved her overcoat from the rack, hauled it back up, and walked out the door into the wet and cold November morning.

The entire walk to Shady Gap, she sang. She sang of the brave Christian soldier. Of the deck of cards the soldier had. Of being washed in the blood. Yes, that precious blood of the lamb. She sang through tears for two miles as she hobbled along the road to the Shady Gap bridge. Her feet were on fire by the time she reached the bridge, but she barely noticed. She was washed in that blood, and man’s laws and petty discordance couldn’t hold down a woman of god.

No ma’am. Not Jean McMurtry.

She’d kissed Hank Williams.

She’d forced her only daughter to wash her face and brush her teeth with water from the toilet for a week straight until she’d come down with a bacterial infection and been hospitalized, but god hadn’t let her die. God never let them die. God knew discipline, and she was a vessel of god.

Washed in the blood.

She’d left her infant son in his playpen with two dogs and nary a drop of milk for three days, and the hand of the lord was over him. He was not harmed. She was a testament.

She’d drank whiskey with Hank Williams.

Washed clean as white robes.

Ain’t none of them know about Jean.

As she stood on the bridge looking down into the crystalline water of the Marigold Pass Creek that flow beneath her feet, she sobbed into the breeze, and emptied her canvas bag over the railing.

As she stood there transfixed, she smiled.

She smiled because from where she stood, her three month old grandson seemed to float down into those churning waters like a feather plucked from a dove. When he landed in the current, she thought of god. Thought of Oral Roberts. Thought of SonShine. Thought of heaven.

They didn’t know Jean McMurtry.

They didn’t know God’s Light.

Gods light don’t touch Pencil Bluff, Arkansas.