Saint Ginther

 

The convenience store is a holy site for the wishful and the lucky, famous first across Texas then beyond it. A highway gas station a hundred miles in every direction from any city, on the outskirts of a town the size of a urinal cake, across twenty-three years one woman won the lottery four times buying her tickets across its counter. They grow quiet around here, and cotton. Storefronts downtown are boarded up, the spirits of past modest affluence have left for Dallas or Houston or Austin. Their descendants remain behind and frequent the Times Market owned by Ms. Bae, purchase their coffee and beer there, their cigarettes, their scratch-offs. Not the kind of place anyone would have any reason to know existed, unless something unusual occurred there. 

Three scratch-offs, one lottery draw. Nearly a quarter century between the first and the last. The woman who had mastered luck and brought it down to a human level had been born in Bishop, had left decades before to attend Stanford, a doctorate in applied statistics. She had been exceptional by the town’s standards long before she had become legendary, unmarried, friendly, shy around people she didn’t know, warmer with people she’d grown up among. Her mother had died in the early years of her luck, leaving her father yet another widower in the town’s untended history. Rumors circulated beyond town that she lived in Las Vegas but travelled home several times a year to visit her father and buy more tickets. Since she had come good four times at one store, it was assumed the Times Market was the only place where she worked the lottery. She didn’t own a cell phone nor did she dresss like a lucky person. She drove a Nissan sedan that blended impeccably among traffic or cars parked in a lot beside it. Photographs of the woman were few, all decades old, depicting a young woman with a beehive hairdo outdated even at the time of their taking. No one could blame her for valuing her privacy yet few besides the townspeople felt inspired to honor it. Asked by well-heeled auslanders with cameras and microphones whether they might sit or stand for an interview, they politely declined: they would walk. The woman was one of their own and they were country people, careful to uphold common manners. It was their right to gossip among their own, and they would protect it, serene in their knowledge that finally the larger world sought something from them it couldn’t have. Such was the close nature of relations between woman and town that even after the woman’s father died some years earlier, she continued to visit, make the rounds among locals, helping out in small ways and before leaving purchasing a clutch of tickets second-hand through a friend. It had long ago ceased being possible for her to visit the Town Market without harassment by out-of-towners seeking a better life on the other side of a winning ticket. 

Her generous works were kept private but the town attributed her graciousness to her upbringing and so in a roundabout way paid itself a partial compliment. She bought the town’s one Baptist church a van. She gave money loan-free to the family that ran the Days Inn a mile outside of town. After her father passed, she donated her childhood home to charity. She purchased reams of lotto tickets for others and once bought a Cadillac for the son of one of her father’s close friends. She had no need for mystique because among the few thousand of a small Texas town she had an upstanding reputation. None there begrudged her the better life she’d devised for herself, gaming the numbers in a way no expert analyst could quite yet accurately identify. After her second win she had been investigated by the state and cleared of suspicion of wrongdoing, and almost as a comment on their efforts not long after won ten million dollars off a fifty dollar scratch-off. The investigation may have verified her innocence but it made her famous, and old photographs were found and broadcast on local then national television. Ms. Bae was pleased with the free advertising, but apologetic about the woman’s loss of privacy. In the one interview she granted, brief and conducted while she stood beside a bin of cheap Mexican movie DVDs, clear plastic dispensers of scratch-offs behind her, she expressed amazement at the distances some of her newer customers would travel to purchase tickets, but acknowledged this meant it was no longer a welcoming place for her luckiest customer. If she travelled home, she would have to do so in secret. One couple from Arkansas moved to town and attempted to buy the woman’s childhood home, thinking this would court a winning number. Others filled the rooms of motels, staying for as long as it took them to realize it was more expensive than they could afford, pouring their meager savings into the state of Texas in hopes it would return the favor. 

They came from nearby towns at first then from Oklahoma and New Mexico. They arrived by bus or car, a trickle of true believers lining up to be blessed by the ATM. A whole town economy flourished from a rumor verified as fact by state investigation. Ms. Bae, her son Tren, her daughter Loula, the waitresses at the Lodestar Cafe or Denny’s, were treated as privileged representatives of cosmic powers channelling through the unremarkable but very real portal of the Town Market: here is where luck grew like weeds or wildflowers. The longer these visitor stayed in town, the longer they loitered within the vicinity of Ms. Bae’s convenience store, they more they breathed it and became it. Powerball, Mega Millions, Pick 3, Daily 4, Cash Five, All or Nothing, payable by annuity or one-time payout. Some, before they stepped in line at the Town Market in the morning, drove by the woman’s childhood home to tear a handful of grass, fill their pockets with it. Others carried photos of her in their purses or wallets. Joan Ginther, patron saint of sudden affluence. All left poorer than they arrived, but contrived explanations for why they had not been graced with good fortune, solid errors on their part which could be righted with a little effort on their part, next time. An unlikely reversal of the common pattern, as if ticks attached themselves to a host body for the privilege of being drained. Having drawn a tick’s-worth of blood into itself, the body shed them, husks brittle and dry, freshly infused with what little they had to offer. Elsewhere Texas’ most famous mystery sips her morning coffee in the modestly-sized kitchen of a home in southwest Las Vegas, on Paradise Drive. 

Halfway across the world, at Lourdes, the infirm and hopeful wait in lines dressed in white cloth robes. They have travelled from across oceans and over clouds to be healed of their maladies, as advertised. Belief has brought them there, to be laid in baths of mountain spring water, which apparently have restored hearing to the deaf, sight to the blind, dissolved cancers instantly. The story goes: once there was a country girl who was beset upon by visions of the Virgin Mary and these visions led her to discover a mountain spring. This spring, virgin itself, just as the girl was, proved a healer of anyone who dipped a hand in it, to sip its waters. Within a century or so the legend became an industry for the religion that sold it. The desperate and unwell sought supernatural treatment there and received a bath instead. Some well-known exceptions were cured of their illness, displayed their bodies as evidence: the impossible could happen, look at them. These outliers were hope incarnate and could hardly be doubted. To doubt them would be to give up on oneself.