Adelaide Piper (23 page)

Dale pressed on with an article that he removed from his secondhand file cabinet. “Mother Teresa says there are five words that explain the reason she picks those little orphans up out of the gutter in Calcutta: ‘He Did This for Me.'”

“Really?” I said, raising my eyebrows as Dale handed me the article, where I read the very words he had highlighted
.

This is going to shatter the whole protagonist/antagonist literature prototype,
I thought
. I mean, if we're all bad guys after all . . .

“And what about Hitler?” I said. “Do you mean to tell me that he was redeemable?”

“No question Hitler was evil,” Dale said. “Somewhere along the way he turned away from God and became a mighty instrument of the enemy, but to say that he couldn't be saved would be to take away the value of the Cross, and I'm not gonna do that. So yes, Hitler was redeemable, but only the Lord knows if he chose that at the end.”

Darla then added, “We are made right in God's sight when we trust in the shed blood of Christ to take away our sins.”

As Shannon cleared her throat to cite the Scripture, I whispered back a little too loudly, “Take it easy, Miss Bible Beater,” and we all broke out into laughter, relishing this moment of comic relief.

“It's so
simple
,” I said.

Then Dale pulled out a book titled
Mere Christianity
by C. S. Lewis and handed it to me. “The Lord's given you a brain, and He wants you to use it, so try this on for size, and meet with me again when you come home during your next college break.” He threw his frayed toothpick into the trash and added, “This'll be one for you to sink your teeth into. I never have gotten through it.”

C. S. Lewis. I had loved the Chronicles of Narnia as a girl and had passed them down to Lou last year and even read them with her from time to time. Then I remembered peering into that Bible study at NBU where they were reading a book by Lewis—
The Great Divorce
, I remembered.

“Let me leave you with this thought,” Dale said. He put his Bible down and rubbed his knees as he searched for the right words. “It's good to think this through, but it's also good to move ahead and commit when you sense it is right. You never know what tomorrow holds.”

Scare tactic
, I thought, the repulsion making its way back into my throat.
If this is an altar call, I'm not budging.
(I was beginning to feel bipolar.) Clearing my throat, I looked away from Dale and became suddenly conscious of the ticking of a bright yellow “Smile, God loves you!” clock behind his head. I imagined it was a bomb that would detonate any second.

“Let me put it another way,” Dale said. “What could be bigger than eternal life, Adelaide? If you want to plan for your future, think about more than just the next seventy years. There was this bright fellow by the name of Pascal who came to the faith by seeing it in terms of a wager.”

Pascal's wager
. It sounded vaguely familiar, like a reference in a poem, but I couldn't recall.

“Anyhow, what Pascal said was, ‘If God doesn't exist, it doesn't matter how you wager, 'cause there's nothing to win after death and nothing to lose neither. But if God
does
exist, your only chance of winning an eternal life is to believe, and your only chance of losing it is to refuse to believe.'”

Then Dale pulled out another yellowed file that quoted Pascal. He scratched the back of his neck and read, “‘I should be much more afraid of being mistaken and then find out that Christianity is true than of being mistaken in believing it to be true.'”

That's a thought, Mr. Toothpick,
I thought.
But then there's that whole “surrender your life” thing that Shannon brought up before and Darla mentioned in her testimony. My life belongs to me, and I'm not going to hand it over.

Dale pointed the file at me and said, “I mean, if I'm wrong in believing, what did it hurt, but if I choose not to believe and I am wrong, what did I lose?”

“Everything,” I murmured. Still, I wasn't going to budge. I looked into his fiery eyes head-on to let him know.

“But this is not wrong,” Dale concluded as he stared back at me. “It's the truth, and we get confirmation of that every day of our lives.”

I practically felt a breeze from Darla's and Shannon's strong head-nodding beside me.

If God had been courting me all of my life, then the splendor part was all about Him. My search had been for Him all along. Though I considered that this could actually be true, I wasn't ready to accept it.

I thanked Dale and Darla for their time and didn't say much to Shannon on the ride home. But late that night, I wrote the first poem I'd written since April.

Could the chasm

between us

be bridged

with two

slats of

wood?

The Cold War ended later that week while my sisters and I drank cherry icees with Daddy in the backyard by the crab dock. We were listening to the proposal of the Western Alliance over a fuzzy portable radio as Daddy shot off the leftover Roman candles from the Fourth of July out over the marsh.

He was all excited. Uncle Tinka had just gone platinum, and he'd be next with just two more in his downline. He'd just returned from a convention in Atlanta where they gave him a standing ovation when he came out dressed in his star-studded marine uniform, his sleeve folded up to his ribs to show the sacrifice he had made. After that convention, several groups were calling to ask him to speak at seminars and meetings come fall. They ate up his Vietnam War stories, and they could easily weave his message of courage and hope into their own agendas.

But as the world looked forward to its newfound peace, the Piper family's pockets of resistance were gaining strength, and the first battle of a domestic war that would last for years was about to be waged.

It began on August 10, the same day that a letter from NBU arrived stating that because of my poor second-semester grades, my $6,000-a-year scholarship was in jeopardy. I had one semester of grace to pull up my GPA. After that, my parents would have to come up with the extra money to pay the full bill or I would have to transfer.

While Uncle Tinka had pushed Daddy hard to build his own line in Bizway, Mama lost any interest she ever had in the venture after attending a second convention at an Orlando resort where wives flaunted three-carat diamonds and husbands drove fully loaded limousines up to the front of the meeting room so that folks could gawk at their glittery wealth.

“Sure, they're rich,” Mama told Daddy that night as they peered out their fourth-floor hotel window and watched the fireworks display from the Magic Kingdom light up the sky with its dazzling purple-and-gold fire. “But they pop their gum, and their mascara is all lumpy, and they're all overweight even though they're pushing vitamins and health shakes. Something doesn't add up here. And I'm tired of paying fifteen dollars for a hamburger in this godforsaken world of faux.”

“You know what your problem is?” Daddy had said. “You're a small-town snob. Can't you for once try to let me
dream
a little, here?”

Mama had recently warned Daddy again not to upset his father (and employer) by admitting he was fully committed to the pyramid business. It was true that the American textiles industry was slowly collapsing because of cheap labor forces overseas, but Papa Great didn't see it that way.

Daddy had moved on in Bizway against his bride's wishes, and his plan was to work the business on the side until he could get free from the parental hooks that had kept him in an office job most of his adult life.

But on that swarmy summer night of August, Papa Great marched right up to the steps of my home with an ultimatum:

“Zane, you're going to be out of a job in two weeks if you continue in this harebrained pursuit,” he hollered in the foyer. He had refused an iced tea or a seat in the living room. His face was red and bloated, and he pinched his nose so hard I thought steam might pour out of his ears.

“Papa, come on,” Daddy said. “I've tried it your way for years, and you know I'm no good to the mill.”

Papa Great glanced up to find Lou and me leaning over the banister, listening. He pointed up the stairwell in our direction while continuing to stare Daddy down. “And I will not put up the remainder of your eldest daughter's inflated college tuition, either.”

Daddy rubbed his cheek with his stub. “You son of a—”

“I'm meeting with my attorney in two weeks to revise my will.”

He turned back around as Mama cried out, “Wait, Papa!”

“No, Greta,” he said, shaking his head. “You just tell your husband I sure hope it's worth it.” Then he slammed the front door and shuffled toward the Cadillac, and I wondered where Mae Mae and Juliabelle were and if they'd had any idea what he was up to.

Before I knew it, I grabbed one of my Norton anthologies, opened my bedroom window, and threw it at him. “Hog!” I shouted.

It hit his right shoulder as he walked across the lawn.

He stopped in his tracks to look up at me.

I had my hands on my hips, and I strained to see the whites of his eyes.

“All that I can see you've gained from being away at that overpriced college is twenty pounds or so,” he said, sniffing in the humid air.

I shifted my weight and did not take his bait.

“You know what I think, Papa? I think my daddy would have had two good arms and a pro football career if it weren't for you and your boorish expectations. It's time you let him be.”

He sneered, then spit on my anthology.

“Uppity girl.” He kept his gaze on me and shook his head in a combination of disgust and disbelief.

“Adelaide, don't you dare talk to your grandfather that way!” Mama was calling from the front porch. “Papa, now, you come on back inside and let's talk this out.”

I gazed back at him.

He rubbed his shoulder, then pulled his hand away. “She hit me,” he said to Mama, picking up the anthology and toting it to his car.

Lou started to cry from somewhere behind me, and by the time I turned around to check on her, he was driving down the street over the bridge to Pawleys.

If this wasn't bad enough, in the late hours of that same night, Dizzy was arrested for driving under the influence while swerving home from an all-day party on the river at her crazy friend Angel's house.

Zane Piper was madder than a hornet's nest when he wheeled the Country Squire out of the driveway to bail his wild child out of the city jail.

“I've had it with this one,” he screamed after he hung up the phone from talking with a police officer. “She won't be leaving this house for months!”

Mama didn't say anything back to him before he left. She was melting under the pressure of the first day of war, and she cried into her pillow for an hour before her husband and her lost daughter appeared at the front door with long-term consequences to face for their wayward choices.

Poor Mama—all she wanted was a quiet, small-town life. An existence opposite her dysfunctional Charleston upbringing. Now nothing was going according to her plan, and she would have kissed Papa Great's thick, jagged toenails before releasing her Piper family vision.

You could hear a pin drop in the Piper house as Daddy locked the front door and turned off the last light at 3:00 a.m.

“Get up to your room!” he said to Dizzy, and she plodded up the stairs. “I hope you like it up there, 'cause the only time you're going to leave this house over the next three months is to go to school.”

Lou woke up in all of the commotion, and I invited her to stay in my room for the rest of the night. When I went to invite Dizzy, I could not get her attention. Her door was locked, and she was blasting some kind of punk rock through her headphones.

Over the next few days I pondered God and my choices for the coming year: transferring back to USC as Randy proposed or taking out loans to cover Papa Great's half of my tuition, returning to NBU, and giving it another go. I had a call in to an admissions coordinator at Carolina, and she was working on piecing together some financial aid for me.

Mama had sided with Papa Great and refused to join Daddy at any Bizway meeting or convention. Daddy made his choice too—he was making a run for this new career, with or without his inheritance or his wife's support.

How I had yearned to curl up in my mother's arms on my last summer nights—to ask her about God and if I should accept the message that Dale and Darla had presented to me. I wanted to confide in Daddy as well, but he was distant and determined, making phone calls to vets and old football buddies, asking if he could come by and show them his new business plan.

Juliabelle was stuck out on the island with the old Hog, and I couldn't get to her, either, so I drank the last of her tonic and hoped for the best. (Little did I know that she and Mae Mae were going to bat for me in more ways than one.)

As my parents argued about the fate of Dizzy's next year—a rehab camp, homeschooling, boarding school, and the like—I drove her to the first of many Alcoholics Anonymous meetings that Judge Snodgrass had required her to attend.

“Will you come to the meeting?” Dizzy whispered to me. Her head was tilted toward the floorboard of the station wagon as we pulled into a space at Second Baptist Church. (She was not looking anyone in the eye these days.)

“Sure,” I said, squeezing the back of my sister's hand. I, of course, had a million things to do and life-altering decisions to make, but I couldn't stand the thought of letting Dizzy down right now.

When we walked into the smoke-filled church gymnasium where the AA meetings were held, I quickly sensed the energy that I had felt at Harvest Time during that dinner several weeks ago. Dizzy and I sat down in the back row of seats as several kind and weathered faces nodded in our direction and personal stories about the battle with the addiction were told over a cheap and crackly microphone.