—

The first time I saw Nana high, I didn’t understand what I was seeing. He was slumped down on the couch, his eyes rolled back, a faint smile on his face. I thought he was half asleep, dreaming the sweetest of dreams. Days went by like this, then a week. Finally, I figured it out. No dream could wreak the havoc this wreaked.

It took me a while to gather the courage, but I once asked Nana if he could describe what it felt like when he took the pills or shot up. He was six months into his addiction, two and a half years away from his death. I don’t know what emboldened me to ask a question like that. Up until that point I had exercised a “don’t dare mention it” kind of policy, figuring that if I avoided any talk of drugs or addiction, then the problem would go away on its own. But it wasn’t just that I avoided mentioning Nana’s addiction because I wanted it to go away; it was that it was so ever-present that mentioning it felt ridiculous, redundant. In just that short amount of time, Nana’s addiction had become the sun around which all of our lives revolved. I didn’t want to stare directly at it.

When I’d asked Nana what it felt like to be high, he had smirked at me a little and rubbed his forehead.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t describe it.”

    “Try.”

“It just feels good.”

“Try harder,” I said. The anger in my voice surprised us both. Nana had already become accustomed to all the yelling and pleading and crying from our mother as she tried to urge him to stop, but I never yelled. I was too scared to be angry, too sad.

Nana couldn’t bring himself to look at me, but when he finally did, I looked away. For years before he died, I would look at his face and think, What a pity. What a waste.

Nana sighed and said, “It feels amazing, like everything inside my head just empties out and then there’s nothing left—in a good way.”

29

My mother had to work the Sunday night after Nana’s accident. The bottle of OxyContin had not yet started to dwindle at a rate faster than it should have, and so we didn’t yet know to worry about anything other than his ankle. She had taken the week off to care for him, until an angry voice mail from her boss sent her back to the Palmer house.

I asked her if she would take me to church on her way to her night shift, and she was so excited to see me wanting to go to church on my own, without her prodding, that she didn’t even seem to mind that it was out of her way.

There weren’t that many people there that evening. I chose a seat in the middle pew and urged myself to stay awake. The worship leader that night was the woman with the warbling voice.

“To hiiiiim whooo siiiiiits onnnnn the thronnnnneeeee,” she sang, her vibrato so strong that it threw her a half step off beat.

I clapped along, fighting the urge to plug my ears until some other soloist got a chance to shine.

After worship, Pastor John went up to the pulpit. He preached from the book of Isaiah, a short, dull sermon that did little to move the few congregants who had decided to get some God in before their workweek. Even Pastor John seemed bored by his own message.

    He cleared his throat and said a quick closing prayer, and then he made the altar call.

“Now, I know someone out there is sitting with a heavy heart. I know someone out there is tired of carrying a cross. And I’m telling you now, you don’t have to leave here the same as when you came in. Amen? God’s got a plan for you. Amen? All you have to do is ask Jesus into your heart. He’ll do the rest. Is there anyone who’d like to come down to the altar today? Is there anyone who’d like to give their life to Christ?”

The sanctuary was quiet. People started looking at their watches, packing up their Bibles, counting down the number of hours they had left until Monday came and work beckoned.

I didn’t move at all. Something came over me. Something came over me, filled me and took hold. I had heard that altar call hundreds of times and felt absolutely nothing. I had prayed my prayers, written my journal entries, and heard only the faintest whisper of Christ. And that whisper was one I distrusted, because maybe it was the whisper of my mother or of my own desperate need to be good, to please. I hadn’t expected to hear the loud knocking on my heart’s door, but that night I heard it. I heard it. These days, because I have been trained to ask questions, I find myself questioning that moment. I ask myself, “What came over you?” I say, “Be specific.”

I had never felt anything like it before, and I have never felt anything like it since. Sometimes I tell myself that I made it all up, the feeling of my heart full to bursting, the desire to know God and be known by him, but that is not true either. What I felt that night was real. It was as real as anything a person can feel, and insofar as we know anything at all, I knew what I needed to do.

I was in the fourth grade. I raised my hand as I had been taught to do in school. Pastor John, who had been closing his Bible, saw me in that tiny crowd, in that center pew.

    “Praise God,” he said. “Praise God. Gifty, come on down to the altar.”

I walked that long, lonely walk of trembling. I knelt down before my pastor as he placed a hand on my forehead and I felt the pressure of his hand like a beam of light from God himself. It was almost unbearable. And the smattering of congregants in the sanctuary of the First Assemblies of God stretched out their hands toward me and prayed, some under their breaths, some shouting, some in tongues. And I repeated Pastor John’s prayer, asking Jesus to come into my heart, and when I stood up to leave the sanctuary, I knew, without even the slightest of doubts, that God was already there.

30

Being saved was incredible. Every day I would head to school, and look at my classmates with delicious pity, worrying over their poor, poor souls. My salvation was a secret, a wonderful secret, burning hot in my heart, and what a shame it was that they didn’t have it too. Even Mrs. Bell, my teacher, was the recipient of one of my benevolent smiles, my lunchtime prayers.

But this was Alabama, and who was I kidding? My secret wasn’t mine at all. As soon as I told Misty Moore that I was saved, she told me that she’d been saved two years before, and I felt embarrassed by what little joy I’d carried for a week. Consciously, I knew it wasn’t a contest, but subconsciously, I thought I had won, and to hear that Misty Moore, a girl who had once lifted up her shirt at recess so that Daniel Gentry could see the rumor of her breasts, had been sanctified before me, a girl with no rumors to speak of, stung. The shine wore off, but I did my best to hold on to the feeling of all those hands stretched out toward me, the sanctuary buzzing with prayers.

My mother was back at work, and Nana was always asleep on the couch. There was no one to share my good news with. I started volunteering at my church in an attempt to make use of my salvation. There wasn’t much that needed to be done at the First Assemblies. Occasionally, I would pick up the hymnals that had been left in the pews and put them back in their places. About once every two months my church would take a van down to the soup kitchen to help serve, but more often than not, I would be the only person to show up. P.T., who drove the van for those trips, would take one look at me, standing in my raggedy jeans and T-shirt, and sigh. “Just you today, huh?” he’d ask, and I’d wonder who else he’d been expecting.

    The First Assemblies of God also had a fireworks stand, just off the highway at the Tennessee border, called Bama Boom!. I still don’t understand why we had it. Maybe we got it under the guise of ministry. Maybe it was about earning a little extra money. I suspect now that Pastor John just had a fireworks kink and used our church to live it out. I was technically too young to volunteer at the stand, but it wasn’t as though people came around to check ID, so once in a while I would put my name on the sign-up sheet and head to the border with P.T. and the older youth group kids, who were much more interested in hanging out at the stand selling rocket blasters than they were in ladling soup for the homeless.