Mama ended her pep talks to Brother Terrell with a reminder that he was God’s chosen vessel. It was a vocation for which he was increasingly well paid. Our garage held two new Mercedes and a Lincoln Continental. The driveway at the back of our house was filled with his-and-hers Thunderbirds, a new pickup, and a station wagon. My mother wouldn’t drive the fancier cars, so once a week, we went from car to car, turning them on and letting them idle in place to keep the batteries from running down. These were our personal automobiles. There was also a fleet of corporate vehicles that included more Mercedes, a few Cadillacs, a couple of run-of-the-mill Ford LTDs, a luxury bus, a prop plane, and a six-passenger jet. Brother Terrell drove up to the house one day towing a horse trailer with a movie-star horse inside. He had admired the horse on
The Virginian
, his favorite TV Western, and when it came up for sale, well, didn’t the Bible say God grants the desires of our hearts? A movie-star horse couldn’t live on an ordinary farm, so Brother Terrell bought a fancy horse farm in Tennessee. He bought other properties as well, including a ranch close to Brownwood, Texas; a house with acreage in Palestine, Texas; and a two-hundred-and-sixty-acre farm outside Lampasas, Texas.
I asked my mother on occasion where all the money came from, and she replied in a haughty, you-shouldn’t-ask-that-kind-of-thing voice that everything we had was paid for with love offerings, money people gave Brother Terrell for his personal use. Besides, Brother Terrell traveled so much, he needed reliable, comfortable transportation. And he had grown up poor as dirt and had given up so much for the gospel; he deserved a few nice things. And no one thought a thing when the people of the world, movie stars and entertainers, bought fancy things.
She gave Brother Terrell an entirely different perspective, reminding him that people sacrificed, some giving everything they owned, so the gospel could be preached, not so we could pile up riches on earth. Her refrain became: “How many cars can you drive? How many houses can you live in? How many suits can you wear?” He darted away without answering and said he had to go to town to make a few business calls. He couldn’t make calls from our house phone, he said. Someone might trace them. The persecution complex was turning into paranoia, nursed along by tussles with law enforcement, the Klan, and no doubt by his secret relationship with my mother. Mama rationalized it as a natural response to all the horrible things the Lord had shown him in visions. The Old Testament prophets were not happy-go-lucky guys, she said. Probably not, but I hoped Brother Terrell would not pull a Jeremiah and take to the streets of our new hometown, crying judgment and eating dung. Anything was possible.
The people in Groesbeck were the friendliest I had encountered outside the tent—a congeniality purchased, at least in part, with our newfound affluence. Bankers, lawyers, and shopkeepers went out of their way to say hello on the street. Kids at school assumed I was worth knowing. A seventh-grade cheerleader wanted to be my best friend. Girls invited me to slumber parties. I threw parties, and kids actually came. I nagged my mother into letting me see a movie endorsed by Billy Graham that was playing at the local theater. Afterward, I was able to see every movie that came to town, no matter the rating. Football games, bowling, and skating outings followed. Groesbeck gave me a chance to fit in, to be normal, but I couldn’t quite pull it off. After hours of making and hanging posters encouraging the juniorhigh football team to “Fight, Goats, Fight!” I was jonesing for excitement. Normal was not in my repertoire, nor was it in Mama’s. She didn’t have a clue that I was the only girl in seventh grade who dated high-school seniors. By eighth grade I was dating college guys, with Mama’s blessing, and smoking pot (no blessing involved). The only caveat: My boyfriends and I had to attend the Bible study she led on Friday nights before we headed down one of the country roads to make out or get stoned. She never questioned why I showed up late for curfew (ran out of gas, again) with glassy red eyes (oh, those dusty roads). She didn’t want to be suspicious like her daddy, she said. She didn’t want to make me feel guilty every time I looked at a boy.
In reality (whatever that was), my mother didn’t have much time to wonder about my activities. She cared for my sister and brother, wrote the magazine, duplicated tapes for the radio broadcast, kept up the house and its surrounding thirty acres, and fed and saw to the care of the menagerie of birds, monkeys, dogs, horses, and livestock Brother Terrell brought home. Then there were the preparations for the end-time: planting and harvesting two vegetable gardens large enough to feed a small community and canning and freezing the produce from those gardens. Plus, she was pregnant again, with twins. She broke the news with a dazed look on her face as Gary and I slurped cereal one morning. My brother laughed—twins, ha, how funny—and went out to play in his tree house. I was stunned.
“Mama, y’all aren’t married. He’s not even divorced.”
She stared past me. “He’s working everything out.”
“But what will you tell the kids when they grow up?”
“Jesus will come before then. David said so.”
I studied my cereal bowl in utter defeat.
For the first two or three years of my sisters’ lives, we dropped them off for long weekends with a neighbor once or twice a year while we attended one of Brother Terrell’s tent revivals. We climbed into the car as the middle-class Ter-
rell
family from Groesbeck and emerged a few hours later in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, or wherever the revival happened to be, transformed into Sister Johnson, Brother Terrell’s longtime associate and ghostwriter (the one secret everyone seemed to know), and her two obedient kids. Gary replaced his sleeveless T-shirts with a long-sleeved button-down, and I traded my jeans for a dress. We looked the part. People under the tent congratulated Mama on bringing us up with God-fearing ways.
“It’s like the Bible says, you train your children up the way they should go and they shall not depart from it.”
Under the tent I became the person believers thought I was: a good and virtuous Holy Ghost girl. When I wriggled into my jeans and played with my sisters at home, I was my other self, and still another when I smoked a joint and went skinny-dipping, and yet another when I read Yeats and scribbled bad poetry, and someone else altogether when I pinned on my homecoming mum with its long red and white ribbons and plastic dangling footballs. I was all of these people. Maybe that’s why Brother Terrell’s latest incarnation did not shock me.
He walked onto the platform dressed all in black, carrying a sevenfoot staff with a crook on the end, a far cry from the dandy who zipped in and out of Groesbeck in a powder-blue Mercedes. He walked down the prayer ramp, stood level with the audience, and stretched out the staff. He was Moses parting the water. Ezekiel calling up the dry bones. Elijah calling down the fire.
“The Lord God Almighty has called for a famine on this land. Hordes of locusts, clouds of grasshoppers darkening the sky. Crops are destroyed. They’re eating everything: corn, beans, tomatoes, wheat. I see hungry people everywhere. Hungry children. I see people throwing their money in the streets. Their money is no good. Banks are failing. Babies are hungry, asking their mamas for food, but they don’t have none to give.”
He shook the staff in the air and began to weep. “Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe to the cities. Woe to the merchants. Woe to those who call good evil and evil good.” He threw down the staff, pulled his shirttail from his pants, and ripped one side and then the other. He stalked the aisles with his torn shirt flapping.
“Judgment, judgment, judgment. Judgment on America! Judgment on America! The only people who survive will be those who have made themselves ready, those who heed the word of this man”—meaning himself—“those who move to the country and become selfsufficient. The Great Depression won’t be nothing compared to what’s fixing to hit this country.”
The prophecy rambled on for hours, ending with predictions of earthquakes, floods, and airplane crashes—all disasters God would allow so that we would know Brother Terrell was a true prophet. With the last “thus saith the Lord,” he walked back up the ramp to the platform. A woman minister who sat behind him on the platform brought him a box of handkerchiefs. He pulled them out of the box and rubbed them over some part of his face or neck, talking into the microphone the entire time.
“The Bible says the prophet will sustain you. The Lord told me that these handkerchiefs will work miracles. Tie them on your cars and your door handles. The anointing of God is in them. Get me some more handkerchiefs. I want everyone to have one. Y’all line up around the tent and come on up here.”
Some say it was my mother who first placed the prophet mantle on Brother Terrell’s shoulders. If that’s so, she sealed her fate. As a prophet Brother Terrell came to believe that everything he said, everything he did, and everything he
thought
was sanctioned by God. He said this from the platform, and he said God would not tolerate those who questioned his anointing. The emergence of the prophet changed the dynamic between my mother and Brother Terrell—she had no right to question him about money or anything else. It also changed the dynamic of the ministry. Employees who once feared Brother Terrell’s temper now feared the word of the prophet. That fear overshadowed the love that had always been present. People who questioned the prophet died. It was biblical. Brother Cotton and several other longtime colleagues had left or been replaced by employees who bowed and scraped when they approached him.
“Ah, Brother Terrell, sir, if you don’t mind, I was wondering if I could talk with you for a minute, please, only if you can spare the time. Yes, sir, yes, sir. Thank you, sir, thank you.”
They disapproved when his children or Gary and I treated him with familiarity. Young ministers and even the tent hands who traveled with him began to adopt his mannerisms and dress. I stepped behind the platform one night and witnessed six iterations of Brother Terrell pacing about, hands jammed in pockets, change jingling. Their impression of him was pitch-perfect, down to the lean, haunted expression on their faces and the incessant movement of their lips in prayer. I laughed out loud and their necks popped up from their collars. I knew our reality was not sane, but that knowledge didn’t stop me from tying “blessed” handkerchiefs around the doorknobs in my room when I got home. When friends asked me what they were for, I shrugged.
“I dunno. Something my brother did.”
My mother called me and my date into the living room at the end of her Friday night Bible study. The date was a twenty-two-year-old law student I had gone out with for a year, and despite his professed agnosticism, my mother liked him. The neighbor family who attended the study had already gone, and the room was quiet and mostly dark. A small lamp squatted on a tabletop at either end of the couch and cast the only circles of light in the room. My mother waved us over to the couch. We anchored one end and she took the other.
“I don’t know what y’all are going to do about this, but I thought I should tell you that we are going to be moving in a few months.”
For several months, my mother and siblings had met Brother Terrell for prolonged visits at some “ranch” out in the middle of nowhere. He was worried that our house in Groesbeck was not remote enough, that “the enemy” would find him. I refused to go with them for these visits, and when my mother tried to tell me about the ranch, I left the room with my hands over my ears. And now here it was, the big announcement. I told my mother I couldn’t bear to move, that I would not move. The boyfriend spoke up.
“Look, we’ll go to Oklahoma and get married. I think the age of consent is fifteen there. I know for sure it’s a lot younger than it is here.”
Mama didn’t say anything for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was smooth and fat with satisfaction. “Well, now, y’all don’t have to do that. We can have a wedding, a real wedding, before the move.”
I had planned to break up with the law-school boyfriend. He was kind and smart and talked to me about Nietzsche and existentialism, but I also felt overwhelmed and voiceless around him. And there was a boy in high school. A boy with whom I felt, for the first time in a long time, like a kid. I didn’t want to get married. I wanted to continue waking up in the yellow house every day, and going to school and coming home until it was time, really time, to do something else. All of this had seemed possible, but it wasn’t and probably never had been. My choices were to marry or to move to the middle of nowhere and wait for the end of the world.
I married a month before I turned sixteen. Mama sold the house, and my family hightailed it out of town. I quit school. It’s one thing to leave home and another to have home leave you. I missed my family. Everything that had been familiar began to look and feel like a foreign object, including me. I stopped eating and was hospitalized for pneumonia. I began to talk to God.
Please help me. I am so lost.
One day a friend from the nearby town of Mexia (a Spanish word mangled as “Ma-hair” by local farmer-rancher types) dropped by, and for lack of anything better to do we took a stroll around the courthouse. I pointed to the statue of the World War II soldier and told him about the time a visiting movie star, a hometown boy made good, got drunk and hung a dead skunk from the bayonet of the statue’s rifle, just in time for the homecoming parade. My friend said something about being surprised he hadn’t read
that
on the front page, and pulled a folded copy of the
Mexia News
from his jacket. There on the front page was an AP wire story on evangelist David Terrell, along with a photograph. I stammered through an explanation of why we kept my stepdad’s profession a secret, and heard my mother’s voice.
“It’s so he can get some rest. People would bother him day and night if they knew where he lived.”