He circuited the room as he did up his tie. “Now, I know your special … situation,” he said, pointing between her legs, “means it’s easy to get confused about what’s what. We all have our special burdens, and that’s one of yours. You got to keep your eye on the prize. We will make over this world as God intended, but only if we live it according to his laws. Homosexuality is a white man’s disease, and you cannot let yourself succumb.” He jutted his fist out in the air in her direction. “It’s hard at first, but once you get into the routine of your wifely duties, it will become second nature. So get your ass up, and cook breakfast.” His nostrils flared angrily as he lorded around the bedroom.
“Gogo!” Vern called, and shook her lover awake.
Gogo’s eyes flashed open, and she groaned. “What?” she muttered, voice full of sleep.
“He’s here,” Vern said, pointing to her husband. “He’s here.”
“It’s just us, baby. Just us. They can’t hurt you,” rasped Gogo, rubbing each of her eyes with her fist.
“It’s Reverend Sherman. Look.”
Gogo wrapped her arms around Vern and squeezed with a force only a woman altered by fungus could take. “There’s no one there,” said Gogo in an understanding whisper.
“Get your ass up out of bed, girl,” Sherman said again, intonation identical to before. “I said get up. You need to make breakfast. This kind of behavior is beneath you. Get up.”
As he got dressed, he began his upbraiding all over. “I’ve told you time and again, Vern, that if you don’t repent and live the life the God of Cain wants for you, I will not be able to protect you from his reign of vengeance.”
He repeated the diatribe from before, and Gogo was frozen in his presence.
“Tell me what’s happening. Talk to me,” said Gogo, shaking Vern hard.
“It’s a memory,” said Vern. “I think he’s here because—I think he knows what we done.” Vern’s shame had summoned this haunting.
“Listen to me. Listen to me. Breathe. Blink and think. This will pass. They always pass.”
“No,” cried Vern. “He knows what I done. He won’t leave until I repent, and I will not repent.”
Reverend Sherman spoke on. “I saw the way you were looking at that woman in town yesterday. Everybody could.” he repeated.
“Stop,” she yelled at him. “Stop.”
What she wanted didn’t matter. He’d play out his track until he was good and ready to stop. Until she was dead.
“Homosexuality is a white man’s disease.”
Vern sprang out of bed and pounced. “Shut up,” she snarled. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.” She put her hand on his neck and squeezed, the same way Lucy had squeezed Thelonious’s.
Her aggression did not disrupt him. His speech played on. “They knew what you were,” he said. “You can’t let them see that.”
She pleaded with him in her mind to leave her be, to give her the smallest parcel of quiet. “Get your ass up out of bed,” he said one last time, then stopped.
His eyes, dazed and twitching, found hers. “Vern?” he asked. “That you?”
She squeezed his neck harder, pressing with all her strength. “You haven’t changed,” he said with a chuckle, alive in her mind, sentient. “Moody as always. I see the years away have only hardened you more.” He licked his lips, grinning. “Please, remove your hands from my neck,” he said, and Vern, on reflex, obeyed. Her cells knew his voice, knew how to respond when he was at the limit of how much he could be needled.
“You still got some sense in you,” he said.
The dubious compliment reminded Vern of her mother’s oft-repeated words. You got more opinions than sense. Maybe that was how it should be. Remembering that adage snapped Vern from her docile trance.
She seized his throat once more, calling on the same mental reserves that had kept her and her children alive for years in the forest, and squashed his windpipe. She silenced him to whimpers.
“What’s happening?” Gogo asked, her tone coarse and demanding.
“He’s talking to me,” said Vern. “I’m talking to him.”
“He’s not real. It’s a memory. Come back to me,” said Gogo.
“No, he’s here. Alive. Like the bodies in the tree that called my name.” Like that girl writing on her slate.
Reverend Sherman had come alive from the memories, too. He was thinking, feeling, fuming—doing everything a living person did but breathe. “It’s him. It’s really him.”