New Stories from the Midwest

Sister Light-of-Love Love Dove

173 Sister Light-of-Love Love dove ■ Judith Cooper I was a nothing and a nobody before I met Father. I was no spotless virgin, but a no-good, man-hustling, whisky-guzzling, moneysneaking slavified harlot who couldn’t see past the end of the day. Until I found Heaven. Heaven healed me, but it didn’t happen all at once. You don’t just dial in to God and see the mystery. But good is contagionized, just like evil, and once I started to see the good around me, that good spread throughout me, too. Let me start at the beginning, or at least closer to the beginning. The beginning of the end, it seemed at the time. My momma, Clarisse, lived with me in a tiny room in the middle of the worst place you can think of, with shared running water facilities down the hall. They were running when they worked, that is. My daddy skipped out on us when I was too young to remember him, and me and Clarisse have been all of the family ever since. When I was little, Clarisse worked three jobs to keep me just barely fed and clothed with fourth-hand stuff we found in the Salvation Army. She really wanted to raise me right in the sanctified way, but then when I was twelve she got hit by a car in between jobs two and three and ends up flat on her back in a hospital ward for six solid weeks. Well, what could I do? If I just sat tight, we would have lost our room and been out on the street in no time flat, given the hard-hearted ways of our landlord, Mr. Peaches Hernandez. A tight-fisted man he was, not even willing to give up the time of day. But he was willing to take something from me each night on the iron fire escape that let out onto the alley, where nothing but hungry stray dogs and rat-infested garbage cans were witness to the wrong, wrong things we did. And then there was more, too, because all that nightly payment did was keep us our room, but I still had to find food and when Clarisse got out of the hospital I had to get her medicine, too, painkillers and such that didn’t come cheap. When she 174 ■ Judith Cooper came home she was mostly confined to her bed, and it fell to me to make up for the sorry state of our finances. We had went to the Live Ever, Die Never Church up to that point, three hours of weeping and wailing for the glory of Jesus every Sunday, but once word got out what I was doing with Mr. Hernandez to keep ends met, those holy sisters and heavenly men couldn’t kick us out fast enough, no chance of casseroles or invitations there for my poor Clarisse who’d stayed to the straight and narrow her entire life. No, she was forever tainted by association with me. Yet taking care of her after her accident was the only good thing I’d done in my selfish life up to that point. Before her accident, I’d never really thought about how hard she had to work at those thankless jobs just to keep me in clean clothes and fed and ready for school each day. To do what I had to do, it was like my body from my heart down was a lump of ice. I couldn’t feel anything, because if I felt anything there was no way I could keep going. It started with innocent errands and then escalated to numbers running and selling drugs, and soon enough I wasn’t just selling drugs but using, too, because it’s a hard way of life unless you make yourself numb. From there it was drinking and partying with the worst of the worst, snorting and sniffing and shooting up, till there was nothing I wouldn’t do and nobody I wouldn’t do it with, as long as I could keep the feelings away and take a little something home to Clarisse each day. Mr. Hernandez was just the tip of the iceberg, but I kept my date with him each day, too. If only I could use my talent for good instead of dark. But all that hustling got me nowhere. There were no jobs for used-up adolescents like me who dropped...