Content Warnings Goodbye, Uriah! Most all of us in the town of Bruta thought Mrs. Peggy Holland’s life went to shit the day the tornado blew the steeple straight off the top of the Baptist church on McNeese Street. It wasn’t like Peggy not to heed the call for communion, but she was nowhere to be found. She must be in distress, many of us thought. Us parishioners had all received the same email: the building was in dire need of prayer, the community would need some rebuilding, and could we all gather in the church parking lot at nine in the morning? Most of us had hidden in basements and crawl-spaces until the wee hours, clutching pillows and covering windows. We felt our houses rattle, wondered if our roofs would show gaping holes that would cost a salary or three when we ascended the stairs. Peggy wasn’t a skittish woman, but maybe this was her secret fear: cyclones of debris swirling around her head, the reminder that there are things, like weather, that we cannot control. We all have our fears, God-fearing and rational as we may often be. Peggy had, after all—Mrs. Jean Hamrick announced to the crowd in the parking lot—been the one to lead a charge against the school board for showing that terrifying video about weather safety that had traumatized Peggy’s youngest, Brian, poor little oddball who, bless him, was probably scared, too, of the shadow a plastic bowl of grapes left on a picnic table on a hot summer afternoon. After the school showed that video, every time the car hit a pothole or a door slammed or a light bulb buzzed, Brian thought they were going to be swept up in a twister. And hell, maybe Peggy had taken on some of her son’s trauma, as good sweet mothers often do, and she was still shivering in a downstairs bathroom somewhere. Someone ought to go check on her. We all nodded our heads, none of us volunteering. There were better things to consider: for what was a church without a steeple? What was a community without its church? “My heavens,” said Mayor Will Tildon’s wife, Melinda, muffling a sob as she alighted from Will’s gaudy gold Cadillac. “It looks like an uncircumcised penis.” “Melinda,” Will hissed, horrified. No one could remember a tornado ever before in this part of North Carolina. Not even the old as dirt Chair of the Finance Committee, Buddy Denton, who muttered expletives to his wife as they pulled into the lot and saw that the fallen steeple had blocked his reserved spot, taking out the sign that staked his claim to it. “Well, honey,” said his wife, sing-songy. “You’ll just have to park somewhere else for a while. No big deal.” “I’m not griping about the parking spot, Bobbie,” he spat, his face turning red. “Jesus. How the hell are we supposed to pay for this?” When Buddy parked, spliced across three spots beside the dumpster, he got out of the car picturing a checkbook the size of the pearly gates themselves. The steeple was ruined, but nothing else had been touched. We all gawked at it. Some grumbled; some wept. Many wondered what this meant the Lord thought of us. “You’ve got to be real mad to topple your own house,” Bobbie Denton whispered to herself. “And, hey,” she said to the crowd, louder and more forceful, like she was known to get on Thursday afternoons at the Country Club during bridge; the liquid in her glass always looked like tea, but a blind dog with a blocked nose would know it wasn’t. “Where’s Peggy?” None of them knew yet, like I did, that Peggy’s husband, Carroll Holland the Third—benefactor, board member, trusted friend—had dropped dead in the front lawn just minutes before the tornado first touched Bruta’s sodden earth, so she was rather understandably preoccupied. “Too preoccupied for the Lord?” Melinda Tildon would ask her husband later that evening, after they all found out. “Melinda,” Will would chide. “Carroll is dead. How is she to cope?” “Well,” Melinda would say. “Has the Lord ever been too preoccupied for us? It’s my understanding of the Good Word that we’re to behave properly in the face of trepidation, not just when mired in blessings that drip from our branches like rain.” I called the ambulance. Maybe because everyone else was already hiding from the impending tornado, or because the paramedics thought it must have already touched down and claimed a life, they arrived in no time. Nobody else on our block even saw it happen. But word gets around in Bruta: everyone talks, even paramedics. By noon the next day, nearly everyone in town had heard that Peggy had been caught scream-crying in her yard with her knees dug into the mud. It would’ve been ungraceful anytime, but I’ll tell you what: it was a special sight in the throngs of rain that stole all the decency of Peggy’s white sundress out from under her like one of the Persian rugs in her foyer. “You might think ill of her for it,” said Peggy’s nosy neighbor, Trina Ford, to a reporter she invited into her home. “And trust me, between the two of us, there are plenty of things to think ill of Peggy Holland for. But mind you, her just-dead husband was laying deader than a doornail in the grass right beside her. How would you act? Goodness me, though, I hear she gave out a holler. Sounded like some kind of animal call: deep, guttural, somethin’ vulgar about it, you know?” Despite her tactlessness, Trina wasn’t wrong. Peggy—God love her—looked like a screaming, chubby jackhammer splattered with mascara-tar, slamming her hands down into dead flesh as if she hoped it would reignite the Lord’s heart in the process. I could’ve told her that ship had sailed long ago, had been picked up like Dorothy’s house and flung to Timbuktu. Oh, me? I’m the heartless bitch who didn’t bring a casserole or a tray of biscuits over to poor Peggy after everyone went to inspect the church. Trina Ford would make sure to tell this to the reporter: Beula was fine, she was in the church parking lot, but she couldn’t spare so much as an afternoon in the kitchen for old grief-stricken Peggy, and aren’t they supposed to be friends, best friends even? What Trina wouldn’t know in that bushy, permed-out head of hers was that I didn’t come bearing delicacies because I knew something no one else knew. About a year earlier, Peggy had said something that gave me pause and set all this in motion—the death, I mean, the performance of grief on the front lawn, not the tornado, though perhaps Peggy and I spawned that, too. Stranger things have happened in Bruta. Stranger things have happened to us. “Beula,” Peggy sighed into her Chardonnay over lunch. “Do you ever think about dying?” That wasn’t lady-talk, and back then I only tolerated lady-talk, at least in public. So I raised my eyebrows, setting my fork delicately on the edge of my plate, and asked her, “What ever do you mean, darling?” “I mean—do you ever think this town might just, I don’t know, kill you? That you just might…” She trailed off, fiddling with her napkin, like she wasn’t even talking to me anymore. “Have to kill before you get killed?” That’s when I knew that Peggy was going to matter to me: not in the Bible study, out to lunch afterwards kind of way—that flimsy glue that keeps the women of this town stuck together like eggs to ungreased Pyrex—but something, for once, deeper. “I do,” I told her, surprised by my own honesty. “I do think that. I think it every day.” *** “You might not think well of me for it, Beula,” Peggy whispered to me on the phone when the crowd of family and friends who had come to perform sympathy had finally left her alone. “But if a tornado ripped the finger off the house of the Lord on purpose, then good. Let him see what it feels like for us in the wake of what he’s done to us, day in, day out.” Then she was quiet for a second, and I thought I could almost hear a smile creep up the sides of her face. “Beula, we’re just like the Philistines—rotting in this Crisco-coated desert of morals. Isn’t that right?” “I think you mean dessert, sweetie,” I told her, smiling back, feeling clever and quippy as all-get-out. “That’s all that’s waiting for us when all of this is over. Sweetness and cake. Remember that.” Now, not every sin is the same. Most of these Biblical literalists around here will tell you that, but they won’t mean it. They won’t say: a person can do a bad thing with good intentions, you know. I say: you just have to understand that behind the big pearly smiles and the good deeds and that just-right amount of hairspray, Peggy Holland had been living in a manmade Hell for years. And what’s the price of a sin when you’re already in Hell? Is there someplace lower? Peggy wasn’t going to let herself end up like that mother and son from the news in Hampton, South Carolina, falling prey to their own husband and father. When she saw the documentary about them, and watched the trial without hardly blinking an eye, it was Divine Intervention if she’d ever felt it: the Lord was telling her to save herself before her insides ended up splattered on the side of some barn while her husband cried the fakest tears the sheriff had ever seen. Everyone would know Carroll had done it. And yet, Peggy had thought with a fright, would anyone do anything about it? Carroll was connected, Carroll had dirt on people, and everyone did what Carroll wanted, almost unequivocally. She was just Carroll’s wife. The privilege of that identity was a large part of why she’d married the bastard in the first place. What goes around, she thought. And now, I know you won’t believe me, but I’ll say it anyway: we didn’t plan to kill him. Not always. Sure, we like our angry country music—women committing vengeful, justified murder and never being caught—and sure, we used to listen to “Goodbye, Earl” together and she’d tell me, “You’re my Wanda. If I ever end up like that Mary Ann, I know you’ll save me.” Sure, we like ourselves some “Gunpowder and Lead.” But those are songs, stories, art. This is real life. I might be okay, but Peggy surely never thought of herself as someone suited for prison. It’d be a death sentence even if that’s not what the judge gave her. The thing is: sometimes doing something drastic is the only way to engender peace. Did God have to trap Jonah in that whale’s abdomen? Did he have to save only two of each animal and drown the whole rest of the earth under Noah’s wooden foot? No, but it worked. We’re taught that the Lord in the Bible is vengeful if nothing else. Peggy and I just decided that the real Lord in real Heaven can’t be so bad—if he sees all, he must see why even some crimes are necessary. The town whispered: there was the New Year’s Eve party about six years back and Peggy, its gracious host, wasn’t spotted for two weeks after. When she reappeared, she’d done a hack job of covering a golf-ball-sized knot in the center of her forehead. Perhaps she wanted help from us; instead, we only focused on what a gorgeous party it had been when she was with us, then that the decorations had been cheap as sin and the food dry as wood as soon as she walked away. Then one Super Bowl Sunday, Peggy said she tripped and fell down the stairs carrying the gargantuan pot of leftover chili that she’d made. She said she smashed her face right into the brick wall in the basement. Now I’ve been to her house many times, and that wall is sheetrock and that floor is covered in carpet and everyone knows it. We should’ve said something then, but what would we have said? How would we have been seen? And, yes, the golf cart, I know. I was hoping to avoid that. It’s true that everyone in Bruta knows about the golf cart incident, just as it’s true no one will talk about it. Some things are a bit too dark and sideways. Just know that it was bad. Bad enough that, afterwards, Peggy couldn’t hardly look at a golf cart, bad enough that she started driving into the Country Club on a back road so she wouldn’t have to pass the course. Bad enough that if Carroll Holland were to suddenly and mysteriously die, I’d argue that the townsfolk were prepared to cry in public while they shrugged their shoulders in private. Maybe that’s why no one ever bothered to notice that Carroll’s autopsy showed a strange conglomeration of medicines and a heavy dash of cumin (his fiercest allergy), which would have been enough to publish in the papers, to report to the Country Club Membership Committee, to the preacher, to cause a scene. But right regal Mrs. Peggy Holland told the police and the medics and the crowd of neighbors that her husband had had a heart attack: her own father had one, too, so she knew the signs, she’d just gone out in the yard too late to be of any use. I heard her say this myself from inside her broom closet where I was hiding. I admit it: I smiled. I even laughed a little to myself, shifting my weight and cracking a dust-pan in two. Who would press? A wife knows her husband, and if she knows more than she lets on, well, let the Lord handle her, she must have a reason. Besides: Lord the man could drink, and he hadn’t had a meal without two thirds of a stick of butter in decades. A heart attack made sense. No one cared to add pain to Peggy’s burden, to appear so heartless and unholy, so anyone who thought to dig any further simply pushed down the urge like Carroll had pushed down poor Peggy’s willpower for twenty-three years of marriage. That’s as many years as Vicki Lawrence had lived when she first sang “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.” Hate doesn’t take long to bloom, even in Eden. The night the lights went out in Carroll Holland’s North Carolina, the Lord, like the neighbors, indeed seemed to turn a blind eye. But a performance of guilt is necessary to evade real guilt. So when Carroll dropped his rake and started rolling around in the grass—palpitations and sun-spots shining through the trees, even with the rain—and only a malevolent, tweeting cardinal overhead seemed to notice, Peggy had to act like it was all her fault. Like she was the most negligent woman in the world, Lord smite her down like Eve, because how hadn’t she heard him struggling from inside? Shouldn’t a woman have a sixth sense for her husband’s wellbeing? When she saw him, and saw that no one else had, she cleared her throat and let out a scream made only for a stage in the biggest theatre on Broadway. Father Jesus, if we ever meet, I know you’ll agree: it’s true we have citizens worthy of gold Oscar statues here in Bruta. *** If someone like Peggy was going to leave a place like Bruta—and how could she not leave, after all this?—she’d fly out like a bat from hell or not at all: She told the preacher in a breeze-by meeting to his pulpit that Melinda Tildon had been drunk as a skunk at the Country Club the night after the tornado; she’d been telling anyone who would listen exactly what she thought the steeple-less church looked like, and when she’d run out of the sanctuary the following day mid-sermon, it wasn’t because she was upset at the loss of her dear friend Carroll, who she not-so-secretly hated for rejecting her advances in the Fellowship Hall coat closet after the Easter party six years ago, but because she was hungover as sin and didn’t quite know where she was and was sick to her stomach, not from grief but from Frangelico and tonic, of all uncivilized, satanic mixtures. Peggy called the same news reporter Trina Ford had talked to the day after Carroll died, and she let him know why Trina had really gotten divorced. If they wanted sensation, here they would find it, and Carroll’s swollen body in a yard would be swept away like cash from Trina’s naked abdomen. Peggy had heard this was quite a common occurrence in a certain basement on Belvedere Avenue. She visited the judge in his chambers, reminding him that she knew he had been sleeping with Carroll’s married sister for years. She wasn’t a gossip, she told him, but she knew how to play a card if it became necessary. Everywhere Peggy went, behind her she left a trail of scorched earth, and by that I mean truth—which can act like lava in a place like Bruta—so that there would be nothing left upon her departure but ashes and tight lips. *** The first time I kissed Peggy, I swear I didn’t mean it. We talked once in church about “divine possession.” The act of possessing a soul is not just reserved for the devil—how could it be? The Lord inhabits us, too, and that day, he reached in my mouth and he pinched my tongue between his big mighty thumb and his long forefinger and he used his other hand to open Peggy’s mouth in laughter and stick part of me right in there. If they heard me say something so salacious, the ladies at McNeese Baptist would gasp, faint, but I swear it’s true. Peggy and Carroll’s son, Brian, turned out gay, of course. I knew it soon as I saw him screaming “Tornado! Tornado!” in the yard on a bright, sunshiny day. That, I thought to myself, is a Drag Queen if I’ve ever seen one. I’ve loved him all his life like he was my own. Peggy once told me—there had been some Pinot Gris that day, I will admit—that she’d snap the offering plate in two and slice the neck of any of those uppity church bitches if they ever said anything nasty about Brian. She meant it, too. I could see it in her eyes. You don’t go scream at the school board for a child you only somewhat love. What I mean is: Peggy wasn’t shocked when she found out how I felt about her, the same time I found it out myself. The Lord acted through her, too, she told me after—it was Him who pulled off my tunic and frizzed out my perm. I feel a bristle up my middle when I think about it, and I need to keep my story straight, so I’ll stop there. Just know that it was on that afternoon, both of us seeing each other as a kind of escape chute, that the idea to do away with Carroll hatched. It just didn’t start with, well, death. These things rarely do. Don’t get to thinking that I don’t have some Biblical trouble with what we did. When I was a girl, I remember my mother, in a family confession—we had such fun Sunday evenings—admitting that her worst sin was ruining a Bible. When she was a teenager, her father had left her mother for another woman; seeking solace in scripture, she let her thumb land where the Lord intended in the middle of the brick-like chunk of pages. She landed on Second Samuel, the portion with the story of Uriah, husband of Bathsheba, who lost the affection of his wife to the leering, lustful eyes of adulterous David. She saw her mother as Uriah—the fearless warrior gone off to battle, and for what? For his love to squander his care? She was mad at God, she said, and she threw the Bible across the room, where it landed face-open on a pile of water around her younger brother’s rain boots. She told us during the confession, tearfully, that she now understood in her adult life that God was trying to say to her: these things happen even in the Bible. You’re not alone. I thought that connection was tenuous at best, but I was more concerned with what I would confess: I’d been churning over the idea of admitting that I’d been harboring a tingly sort of feeling—that’s how I’d practiced proclaiming it, “tingly feeling,” when really it was pure lust—for a girl named Dolly in my homeroom class. If the worst thing my mother had ever done was throw a book across a room, how would she feel about her daughter having thoughts she would certainly deem, if not perversion, than an inversion of goodness? So I suppressed the thought. I cut off my friendship with Dolly and never told her why. I’d venture to say I never so much as looked at her again. I wonder, now, if that’s true, or if it’s just a revision I added somewhere along the way to lull myself and my desires to sleep at night. In any case, it took more than forty years to unearth this feeling again, in Peggy’s kitchen, caution thrown to Bruta’s humid, rain-soaked wind. And could it be said that Carroll, in our story, is Uriah, and I’m nothing more than lewd, crude David, wielding power like an almighty sword? Lord, I come to you in confession: I do not wish to know the answer. If Carroll must be martyred, let him, but I’ll tell you: no one around here seems to think so. Like they sing in “Goodbye, Earl,” he’s a “missing person who nobody missed at all.” You’ll forgive me, I hope. If not, I must say, thanks be to you that I have Peggy and—dare I admit it?—that Carroll, that mean old bastard, is gone. May I meet the fate I deserve, and may I not dishonor my beautiful, garden-bathing Bathsheba. *** I was drawn to Peggy, at first, through our shared hatred for the whole sick town of Bruta, which we uncovered that day at lunch—when she talked about “killing before you get killed.” It seemed metaphorical even to her; that I still believe. We hated the way our friends around the bridge table would say things to her like: “I think it’s just so nice that you do all that work for the Boys and Girls Club. I wouldn’t drive into a neighborhood like that for all the money in the world.” We hated even more that we were expected, in such moments, to respond with smiles: “Well, I do try my best.” I hated that my two sisters were asked to present themselves at the Debutante Ball, and I never was. I hated how everyone thought that this alone had made me an outcast, when really, I’d rather be given a life sentence of dusting plates at the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store (like I was one summer in high school, as punishment for being found with a six-pack of beer in my mother’s basement) than parade myself around at the edge of seventeen in front of a bunch of hoity-toity Country Club bitches in a dress that looked like Queen Victoria’s loofah from hell. Peggy’s contempt ran deeper: she hated herself for not having the strength to defy Bruta’s put-on graces. “Well, I’m letting you have your opinion,” her once-dear friend Trina Ford had said to her over coffee and cocktails one morning years ago. “Why won’t you let me have mine?” “Because,” Peggy told me she had stammered through gritted teeth. “You are using a Bible verse to try and smite down the kind of person my son is. My ‘opinion,’ as you say, is that he can love whoever on God’s Green Earth that he wants to, which does not affect you at all. Your opinion puts him in danger. These, dear, are not the same thing.” To this, Trina had simply said, “Well, I’d better get going, then. Thank you for having me over, darling.” Peggy hated how Trina had not stormed out that day, had not slammed the door like she’d surely wanted to. Because then if Peggy reacted, she’d be the crazy one. Peggy was finally realizing that being the crazy one wasn’t such a bad thing. That maybe, somewhere under the suffocating weight of a marriage that smelled like sweat and tasted like mold, she had been speaking for herself—and not just for Brian—when she berated Trina. *** Two Sundays after the tornado, Peggy showed up in church in a low-cut cocktail dress, knowing no one could judge her after what she planned to do that day. She relished their side-eyed disgust, knowing they’d have to take it back later. She’d heard that Buddy Denton and his Finance Committee had been working tirelessly all week to draw up a budget for fixing the steeple, and she knew what she was going to do, just as soon as he told them how much it would cost. A drizzle of rain swirled in through the gaping ceiling-hole as Buddy spoke: “We ask you to tithe,” he said, “and you tithe. We ask you to give what you can, and you give what you can. So, while it brings great shame on me to ask you for more, I must do just that.” After a sweeping narrative of how money meant nothing to the Lord, and yet our devotion meant everything, he could see that the eyes before him had grown tired, willing him to spit it out already. “Forty-seven thousand dollars,” Buddy said, his knees wobbling. A silence fell over the church—and it was not a pious one. This would mean hundreds and hundreds for every person involved. It was uncouth not to contribute. They all would, even if they really couldn’t afford it. They’d smile all the while. Peggy and I could hardly resist sharing a glance across the sanctuary. *** On our way out of town, just after church, we left an envelope with a check written for fifty thousand dollars inside Buddy Denton’s mailbox (Peggy even deigned to give a tip) with the words “church steeple” written across its front. Peggy used the checkbook that funneled assets from Carroll’s estate, securing her as the faithful beacon of selflessness the town needed her to be, in order never to look into her case again. Sinners repent. Uriah and Bathsheba and David all move on with their lives, some above, some below. Even the holiest of us all take advantage of the world when we need it. Kindness is a weapon; God has taught us that, and we may not be much, but we are good students. Would it be pretentious—sacrilegious, even—to say we saw ourselves a bit like Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt that day? We may not have been so Holy, sure. There’s only so far you can go into the realm of self-righteousness when you’ve killed a man, or helped somebody kill a man. But, for once, we knew we were going somewhere important. We wanted to, as the kinds of women we hoped never to become often say, “live in our truth.” We also wanted to uphold the values of tact, class, and grace that we were raised with. Both, and. Bruta would never allow such a combination, and at least for a beautiful afternoon or two behind the wheel, we allowed ourselves to believe that Bruta was a particular type of place, with particular types of people who uphold particular kinds of morals that put morality to shame. We thought: as long as we could get ourselves somewhere where we could remain momentarily nameless, maybe none of that mentality would follow us. Peggy took her hand off the steering wheel as we passed the “Welcome to Bruta” sign for the last time, a little U-Haul hitched ridiculously to the back of her Mercedes, and she slapped her palm firm against my thigh. She said, “Don’t feel bad now, Beula. He was nothing but a Pharaoh. I saw proof of it more times than you’d ever believe me if I told you.” Then, as we crossed the county line, she moved her hand up higher, closer to my waist, and instead of looking around to see if anybody had noticed, she left it there. For women of our generation, all our flaws and crimes and sins aside, I’m not ashamed to say this felt monumental. Peggy smiled that wide smile I’d only ever seen in private, and she yelled as if to the Heavens, “Maybe if we pass a golf cart, we’ll just hit it as hard as we can!” “Amen,” we both said in synchronicity: to no one and to everyone, perhaps even to God. Maybe one day we’ll return to Bruta and see if Buddy actually used the check for the steeple. Peggy says she wouldn’t put money on it. About the Author Porter Yelton grew up in North Carolina and calls Chicago, Shanghai, and New York home. He is a graduate of New York University and an MFA Candidate in Fiction at The Ohio State University. His writing focuses on fractured familial relationships, LGBTQ+ communities in the rural American South, and Chinese translation. His fiction is forthcoming in Driftwood.
