Faith Unit
I was the patron saint Drive-Thru on some Idaho border, and who was to say what that was, or where it was going. More church things. Not exactly church. There was a group of five singing nuns and two Catholic girls from Oregon, which is where the name Faith Unit came from, more or less, and that was already part of the Idaho problem.
Long ago, it had to have been a couple of days, these Spanish nuns made their way to earth and landed in Soda Springs and Pocatello of all places, about forty minutes from Ottumwa, Iowa, and made their way to Idaho. Maybe for the Drive-Thrus, and the hamburgers, or maybe for the catholic Saints. And it was late summer and the air was thick and churches were set out in the wheat fields along the road and almost no one visited them, and it was like that for a long time.
I took that small church choir of ladies and told them to be psychedelic with me, while still spreading the need of the Lord. They tried to be hip and came up with a few strange ideas and some of them worked because they belonged only to them. The music was not spectacular and the vocals went up all together, like someone’s aunt doing her thing, but it held. And so together we were named Faith Unit. They played acoustic guitars and kept it simple.
The nuns liked this Belgian singer and brought her music into my place of work, the Cloud 9 Vape store, and played it for me more than once, to keep something in place, or near it. It was meant to help with faith. I did not mind. Her voice was good and the songs stayed simple, and the guitar did not move too far from itself. I do not mind this at all. It sounded like Faith Unit’s guitar songs. It felt like the kind of thing that would keep playing after, in Idaho and everywhere else that was close to it.
At dawn we put the groceries in a bag and walked away, the buying feeling was that of stunning warmth. Life was not much, to say the least. No hidden geniuses, no lost classics, nothing like that. Maybe later. None of anything right now was meant for anything larger, and things were forgotten in a way that made sense. Still, we were nice to listen to. And still for some reason, we wanted to sing.
Sister Sherry
Personally I kind of liked Sister Sherry. She was one of the nuns. She lived in a mid 20th century cooperative processing building, and I found it strange that no one could remember anything about it. It had tall vertical windows with a rendered facade and Sherry had pointed out its severe shape, “Most likely because of rural modernization,” she said, and that was that.
She was very simple and a little silly, more of a novelty than anything, but she had an innocence that keeps her warm, instead of becoming the kind of thing that irritates you. She was a woman after all, thank God not the kind of man that irritates all.
Most other buildings in the area were abandoned after long use. They had been used for grain storage, milling, cheese processing, and agricultural cooperatives, and were eventually left behind. But this building lacked something. No one remembered it, and it did not appear on any of the town maps. It had been repurposed, possibly to the point of no purpose.
I could see the industrial hybrid through my wide angled balcony, and Sherry would walk at night pacing around monumental tall windows, that were repetitive as was her walking, like she was keeping time.
“Oh, Sister Sherry,” I said, standing out on the balcony. She closed her ears and whispered, “Father John sang Christmas, dear Lord,” or something close to that.
The feeling in Idaho was right if you liked things that were amateur and a little off. I liked that kind of place and that kind of music, or enough of it, so I could stay even when things did not do very much. It is not for everybody, but if it is for you then it works, and it is good that our lives were taken from wherever they were and given somewhere to be.
Roundabout Girl
The town led up to a castle that was Motte-and-Bailey style, that was an early and fast way of building a castle back in older times. But the castle was too quickly built, so right now it was only half, so maybe either Motte or either Bailey, but certainly not both. When walking up to it, there was no prior air of legend or prestige.
Some old man had balanced his rounded soft-edge car on four slabs of concrete, and now looked even more ruined than the proud standing Motte castle, or Bailey castle, or rather proudly fallen. He smoked cigarettes all around it and made it a big point to show the semblance of absolute non-civic duty. He was a trash-goer, unfollowing local rules to keep sidewalks, parks, and building entrances filthy.
So this castle was a half castle and in Idaho that meant that it could not go unused. Originally, a mix of water, cement, sand, and gravel was prepared and leveled, but underneath was no water or drainage, so the town was filled with potholes. So then, they laid gravel and bitumen over drainage, and the cattle was now on a Motte-and-Bailey-Highway, and the townies looked onward like in middle ages, if the middle was between Motte and Bailey.
So now there was a new roundabout, the castle in the middle like a large island, and cars went counterclockwise around it. Who could have warned the grand Bishop of Idaho in the middle ages, that his monumental castle would convert into a multi-functional highway rotunda, a legendary ghost of the past resurrected now in contemporary Idaho, but now Idaho had no witches and no military order, just some Drive-Thrus, and kitchen ghosts, and a dirty man throwing his chicken buckets along the castle walls.
The Pocatello stones held light flat on the ground that brought up heat in round smoke rings around Idaho, and Sherry and I were stuck in traffic with all the nuns in the back talking together very loud. And all I could hear was something humming Wha-Hall-A-Lula and Lee-La, Wa-Hall-Lu-La, so loud it felt like Pocatello smoke coming in through my ears and nose, and it made me dizzy.
In Sherry I saw, the look of love. Take it for what it is or isn’t. For me it stays a distant memory I cannot shake. I saw her a couple of days later dissolved in thin Idaho air, floating right above the abandoned factory, brushing against the backdrop in spring with spring sheep running.
I wanted her love more than anything. My middle-age woman that was pure beauty, Wha-Hall-A-Lula, things always sounded like that around her.
But the real thing is, well. People in town talked endlessly that night, and more than an hour passed of me drinking and talking, and it felt like only minutes, but I had to go to sleep. My mind was a hotbed for Idaho. When I awoke early in the morning my nuns had resurrected in plush red waves through the blue sky, and I followed their feeling.
I know when sleep wins, I do nothing, it is a kind of violence, and after a while you know, and it is alright, like it was always going to be.
Candy Nevada works across writing, radio, archives, and film. Her work follows roadside Americana through Hinduism, fast-food architecture, distant highways, and small systems of relief-belief. She has worked with the Film Department at the Museum of Modern Art, produces radio between New York and Paris, and works part-time as a fiction reader.
