Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger (24 page)

First I powdered my face, so I would be ready to go when Lavonne got there. Then I sat back down to write some more of my column, this paragraph I had been framing in my mind for weeks about how sweet potatoes are not what they used to be. They taste gritty and dry now, compared to how they were. I don’t know the cause of it, whether it is man on the moon or pollution in the ecology or what, but it is true. They taste awful.

Then my door came bursting open in a way that Lavonne would never do it and I knew it was Sally Peck from next door. Sally is loud and excitable but she has a good heart. She would do anything for you. “Hold on to your hat, Joline!” she hollered. Sally is so loud because she’s deaf. Sally was just huffing and puffing — she is a heavy woman — and she had rollers still up in her hair and her old housecoat on with the buttons off.

“Why, Sally!” I exclaimed. “You are all wrought up!”

Sally sat down in my rocker and spread out her legs and started fanning herself with my
Family Circle
magazine. “If you think I’m wrought up,” she said finally, “it is nothing compared to what you are going to be. We have had us a suicide, right here in Salt Lick. Margie Kettles put her head inside her gas oven in the night.”

“Margie?” I said. My heart was just pumping.

“Yes, and a little neighbor girl was the one who found her, they say. She went over to borrow some baking soda for her mama’s biscuits at seven o’clock a.m.” Sally looked real hard at me. “Now wasn’t she related to you all?”

“Why,” I said just as easily, “why, yes, she was Glenn’s adopted half sister, of course, when they were nothing but a child. But we haven’t had anything to do with her for years as you can well imagine.”

“Well, they say Glenn is making the burial arrangements,” Sally spoke up. She was getting her own back that day, I’ll have to admit it. Usually I’m the one with all the news.

“I have to finish my column now and then Lavonne is taking me in to Greenville to see old Mr. Biggers who is breathing his last,” I said.

“Well,” Sally said, hauling herself up out of my chair, “I’ll be going along then. I just didn’t know if you knew it or not.” Now Sally Peck is not a spiteful woman in all truth. I have known her since we were little girls sitting out in the yard looking at a magazine together. It is hard to imagine being as old as I am now, or knowing Sally Peck — who was Sally Bland then — so long.

Of course I couldn’t get my mind back on sweet potatoes after she left. I just sat still and fiddled with the pigeonholes in my desk and the whole kitchen seemed like it was moving and rocking back and forth around me. Margie dead! Sooner or later I would have to write it up tastefully in my column. Well, I must say I had never thought of Margie dying. Before God, I never hoped for that in all my life. I didn’t know what it would do to
me,
in fact, to me and Glenn and Marshall and the way we live because you know how the habits and the ways of people can build up over the years. It was too much for me to take in at one time. I couldn’t see how anybody committing suicide could choose to stick their head in the oven anyway — you can imagine the position you would be found in.

Well, in came Lavonne at that point, sort of hanging back and stuttering like she always does, and that child of hers, Sherry Lynn, hanging on to her skirt for dear life. I saw no reason at that time to tell Lavonne about the death of Margie Kettles. She would hear it sooner or later anyway. Instead, I gave her some plant food
that I had ordered two for the price of one from Montgomery Ward some days before.

“Are you all ready, Mama?” Lavonne asked in that quavery way she has, and I said indeed I was, as soon as I got my hat, which I did, and we went out and got in Lavonne’s Buick Electra and set off on our trip. Sherry Lynn sat in the back, coloring in her coloring book. She is a real good child. “How’s Ron?” I said. Ron is Lavonne’s husband, an electrician, as up and coming a boy as you would want to see. Glenn and I are as proud as punch of Ron, and actually I never have gotten over the shock of Lavonne marrying him in the first place. All through high school she never showed any signs of marrying anybody, and you could have knocked me over with a feather the day she told us she was secretly engaged. I’ll tell you, our Lavonne was not the marrying sort! Or so I thought.

But that day in the car she told me, “Mama, I wanted to talk to you and tell you I am thinking of getting a d-i-v-o-r-c-e.”

I shot a quick look into the backseat, but Sherry Lynn wasn’t hearing a thing. She was coloring Wonder Woman in her book.

“Now, Lavonne,” I said. “What in the world is it? Why, I’ll bet you can work it out.” Part of me was listening to Lavonne, as you can imagine, but part of me was still stuck in that oven with crazy Margie. I was not myself.

I told her that. “Lavonne,” I said, “I am not myself today. But I’ll tell you one thing. You give this some careful thought. You don’t want to go off half cocked. What is the problem, anyway?”

“It’s a man where I work,” Lavonne said. She works in the Welfare Department, part time, typing. “He is just giving me a fit. I guess you can pray for me, Mama, because I don’t know what I’ll decide to do.”

“Can we get an Icee?” asked Sherry Lynn.

“Has anything happened between you?” I asked. You have to get all the facts.

“Why,
no
!” Lavonne was shocked. “Why, I wouldn’t do anything like that! Mama, for goodness’ sakes! We just have coffee together so far.”

That’s Lavonne all over. She never has been very bright. “Honey,” I said, “I would think twice before I threw up a perfectly good marriage and a new brick home for the sake of a cup of coffee. If you don’t have enough to keep you busy, go take a course at the community college. Make yourself a new pantsuit. This is just a mood, believe me.”

“Well,” Lavonne said. Her voice was shaking and her eyes were swimming in tears that just stayed there and never rolled down her cheeks. “Well,” she said again.

As for me, I was lost in thought. It was when I was a young married woman like Lavonne that I committed my own great sin. I had the girls, and things were fine with Glenn and all, and there was simply not any reason to ascribe to it. It was just something I did out of loving pure and simple, did because I wanted to do it. I knew and have always known the consequences, yet God is full of grace, I pray and believe, and His mercy is everlasting.

To make a long story short, we had a visiting evangelist from Louisville, Kentucky, for a two-week revival that year. John Marcel Wilkes. If I say it myself, John Marcel Wilkes was a real humdinger! He had the yellowest hair you ever saw, curly, and the finest singing voice available. Oh, he was something, and that very first night he brought two souls into Christ. The next day I went over to the church with a pan of brownies just to tell him
how much I personally had received from his message. I thought, of course, that there would be other people around — the Reverend Mr. Clark, or the youth director, or somebody cleaning. But to my surprise that church was totally empty except for John Marcel Wilkes himself reading the Bible in the fellowship hall and making notes on a pad of paper. The sun came in a window on his head. It was early June, I remember, and I had on a blue dress with little white cap sleeves and open-toed sandals. John Marcel Wilkes looked up at me and his face gave off light like the sun.

“Why, Mrs. Newhouse,” he said. “What an unexpected pleasure!” His voice echoed out in the empty fellowship hall. He had the most beautiful voice too — strong and deep, like it had bells in it. Everything he said had a ring to it.

He stood up and came around the table to where I was. I put the brownies down on the table and stood there. We both just stood there, real close without touching each other, for the longest time, looking into each other’s eyes. The he took my hands and brought them up to his mouth and kissed them, which nobody ever did to me before or since, and then he kissed me on the mouth. I thought I would die. After some time of that, we went together out into the hot June day where the bees were all buzzing around the flowers there by the back gate and I couldn’t think straight. “Come,” said John Marcel Wilkes. We went out in the woods behind the church to the prettiest place, and when it was all over I could look up across his curly yellow head and over the trees and see the white church steeple stuck up against that blue, blue sky like it was pasted there. This was not all. Two more times we went out there during that revival. John Marcel Wilkes left
after that and I have never heard a word of him since. I do not know where he is, or what has become of him in all these years. I do know that I never bake a pan of brownies, or hear the church bells ring, but what I think of him. So I have to pity Lavonne and her cup of coffee if you see what I mean, just like I have to spend the rest of my life to live my sinning down. But I’ll tell you this: if I had it all to do over, I would do it all over again, and I would not trade it in for anything.

Lavonne drove off to look at fabric and get Sherry Lynn an Icee, and I went to the hospital. I hate the way they smell. As soon as I entered Mr. Biggers’s room, I could see he was breathing his last. He was so tiny in the bed you almost missed him, a poor little shriveled-up thing. His family sat all around.

“Aren’t you sweet to come?” they said. “Looky here, honey, it’s Mrs. Newhouse.”

He didn’t move a muscle, all hooked up to tubes. You could hear him breathing all over that room.

“It’s Mrs. Newhouse,” they said, louder. “Mrs. Newhouse is here. Last night he was asking for everybody,” they said to me. “Now he won’t open his eyes. You are real sweet to come,” they said. “You certainly did brighten his days.” Now I knew this was true because the family had remarked on it before.

“I’m so glad,” I said. Then some more people came in the door and everybody was talking at once, and while they were doing that, I went over to the bed and got right up by his ear.

“Mr. Biggers!” I said. “Mr. Biggers, it’s Joline Newhouse here.”

He opened one little old bleary eye.

“Mr. Biggers!” I said right into his ear. “Mr. Biggers, you know those cardinals in my column? Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal? Well, I
made them up, Mr. Biggers. They never were real at all.” Mr. Biggers closed his eye and a nurse came in and I stood up.

“Thank you so much for coming, Mrs. Newhouse,” his daughter said.

“He is one fine old gentleman,” I told them all, and then I left.

Outside the hall, I had to lean against the tile wall for support while I waited for the elevator to come. Imagine, me saying such a thing to a dying man! I was not myself that day.

Lavonne took me to the big Kroger’s in north Greenville and we did our shopping, and on the way back in the car she told me she had been giving everything a lot of thought and she guessed I was right after all.

“You’re not going to tell anybody, are you?” she asked me anxiously, popping her eyes. “You’re not going to tell Daddy, are you?” she said.

“Why, Lord no, honey!” I told her. “It is the farthest thing from my mind.”

Sitting in the backseat among all the grocery bags, Sherry Lynn sang a little song she had learned at school. “Make new friends but keep the old, some are silver but the other gold,” she sang.

“I don’t know what I was thinking of,” Lavonne said.

Glenn was not home yet when I got there — making his arrangements, I suppose. I took off my hat, made myself a cup of Sanka, and sat down and finished off my column on a high inspirational note, saving Margie and Mr. Biggers for the next week. I cooked up some ham and red-eye gravy, which Glenn just loves, and then I made some biscuits. The time seemed to pass so slow. The phone rang two times while I was fixing supper, but I just let it go. I thought I had received enough news for
that
day. I still
couldn’t get over Margie putting her head in the oven, or what I had said to poor Mr. Biggers, which was not at all like me you can be sure. I buzzed around that kitchen doing first one thing, then another. I couldn’t keep my mind on anything I did.

After a while Marshall came home, and ate, and went in the front room to watch TV. He cannot keep it in his head that watching TV in the dark will ruin your eyes, so I always have to go in there and turn on a light for him. This night, though, I didn’t. I just let him sit there in the recliner in the dark, watching his show, and in the pale blue light from that TV set he just looked like anybody else.

I put on a sweater and went out on the front porch and sat in the swing to watch for Glenn. It was nice weather for that time of year, still a little cold but you could smell spring in the air already and I knew it wouldn’t be long before the redbud would come out again on the hills. Out in the dark where I couldn’t see them, around the front steps, my crocuses were already up. After a while of sitting out there I began to take on a chill, due more to my age no doubt than the weather, but just then some lights came around the bend, two headlights, and I knew it was Glenn coming home.

Glenn parked the truck and came up the steps. He was dog tired, I could see that. He came over to the swing and put his hand on my shoulder. A little wind came up, and by then it was so dark you could see lights on all the ridges where the people live. “Well, Joline,” he said.

“Dinner is waiting on you,” I said. “You go on in and wash up and I’ll be there directly. I was getting worried about you,” I said.

Glenn went on and I sat there swaying on the breeze for a
minute before I went after him. Now where will it all end? I ask you. All this pain and loving, mystery and loss. And it just goes on and on, from Glenn’s mother taking up with dark-skinned gypsies to my own daddy and his postcard to that silly Lavonne and her cup of coffee to Margie with her head in the oven, to John Marcel Wilkes and myself, God help me, and all of it so long ago out in those holy woods.

Tongues of Fire

T
he year I was thirteen — 1957 — my father had a nervous breakdown, my brother had a wreck, and I started speaking in tongues. The nervous breakdown had been going on for a long time before I knew anything about it. Then one day that fall, Mama took me downtown in the car to get some Baskin-Robbins ice cream, something she never did, and while we were sitting on the curly chairs facing each other across the little white table, Mama took a deep breath, licked her red lipstick, leaned forward in a very significant way, and said, “Karen, you may have noticed that your father is
not himself
lately.”