![]() ![]() ![]() By himself, he could not run the ranch, and they often had to ask their neighbors to throw together and give them a hand. First, an impaired husband, the endless labor and (sometimes forced) good humor that were expected of women, then a bad-girl daughter, and now the bad girl’s baby to raise. She was used to praising thankless work as the right and good way, but what she was going to do without Jim Bakker’s exhortation and encouragement she didn’t know. Ranch-raised and -trained, she counted the grandchild as a difficulty that had to be met. The road to the ranch had been named Sixteen Mile, though no one was sure what that distance signified.īottle-blond Bonita (her great-grandfather had been a squaw man, and black hair was in the genes) made an early grandmother. Since that pioneer time, the country had become trammelled and gnawed, stippled with cattle, coal mines, oil wells, and gas rigs, striated with pipelines. Dakotah was almost sure she could see a wisp of smoke curling up, but Bonita said it was just dust raised by the wind. She held one hand behind her back, and Verl said this was because she smoked a pipe. Verl treasured a photograph showing her with the deed, standing in front of her neat clapboard house, a frowsy white dog leaning against her checkered skirt. At a time when the mourning period for a husband was two or three years, and for a wife three months, she had worn black for her first husband an insulting six weeks before taking up a homestead claim. Verl had named Dakotah after his homesteading great-grandmother, born in the territory, married and widowed and married again only after she had proved up on her land and the deed was in her name and in her hand. And inherited the ranch was the implied finish to the sentence. If it had been a boy, Verl said, letting the words squeeze out around his roll-yer-own, he could have helped with the chores when he got to size. Verl and Bonita Lister were in their late thirties and stuck with the baby. He wanted to get rid of the set, but Bonita said there was no sense in locking up the horse after the barn burned down. on the teevee and so she done it,” he said. Bonita’s husband, Verl, blamed the television for Shaina’s wildness and for her hatred of the ranch. It was the same day the television evangelist Jim Bakker, an exposed and confessed adulterer, resigned from his Praise the Lord money mill, his fall mourned by Bonita Lister, Shaina’s mother. People said that Shaina Lister, with aquamarine eyes and curls the shining maroon of water-birch bark, had won all the kiddie beauty contests and then had become the high-school slut, knocked up when she was fifteen and cutting out the day after Dakotah was born, slinking and wincing, still in her hospital johnny, down the back stairs of Mercy Maternity to the street, where one of her greasy pals picked her up and headed west for Los Angeles. ![]() Her mother had been knockout beautiful and no good, and Dakotah had heard this from the time she could recognize words. ![]()
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