Suncatchers (10 page)

Mr. Hammond frowned up at Eldeen, then over at the tabloids. He leaned forward and studied one, squinting fiercely, his lower jaw jutting forward angrily.

“There, Mr. Hammond, she's ready to ring you up now,” Eldeen called loudly. Turning to Perry, she smiled with anticipation. “You'll like this little checkout girl,” she told him. “Her name's Helena, and she's the sweetest little thing. She finished up with high school last year and is taking some night classes at the vocational school in Hodges, trying to make something of herself. I always admire a young person for pushing ahead that way. So many teenagers today don't have any getup it seems. They'd just as soon take a job at a filling station—which is sure all right if it's the best a body can do. Helena's going places, though.”

Helena looked to be around eighteen, short and plump with smooth dark skin. She worked incredibly fast, Perry noticed, flashing each item across the scanner with lightning speed and shoving it behind her with her left hand while she reached forward for the next item with her right. She smiled the whole time, revealing two rows of straight white teeth as she kept up a steady stream of talk.

“Hello there, Mr. Hammond,” she said. “You loading up on cottage cheese today, huh? Gonna have you some cottage cheese sandwiches I bet. It's a good buy this week, but you shoulda got you some more. This here won't hardly last you no time. The apple juice is two for a dollar ninety-nine. You're wasting a whole penny just buying one.” She obviously didn't expect an answer, and the old man never even looked up at her. “That'll be three eighty-six, Mr. Hammond,” Helena said, flapping open a brown paper bag. The man twisted his head to read the digital numerals on the cash register, then slowly reached deep into the pocket of his limp brown overcoat. Helena had already finished filling his sack. She whipped off the register receipt, dropped it into the bag, and stood grinning at him with her hand outstretched. She raised her voice. “Come on, Mr. Hammond, fork it over.”

Eldeen poked Perry. “She's a real cutup. I get so tickled at her.”

Mr. Hammond was unbuttoning his overcoat now and fumbling inside the pocket of his trousers. His frown had deepened, and he was mouthing words.

“You trying to pull my leg, Mr. Hammond?” Helena was still smiling, but she put her hand down. “You forget your money or something today?” she asked. Mr. Hammond's mouth dropped open, and he looked up at her helplessly.

Eldeen pulled the old man's cart backward out of the way and stepped forward to stand beside him. She leaned down close to his ear. “Can't you find your wallet?” she shouted. He didn't look at her but shook his head.

“Well, here, Mr. Hammond,” she said loudly. “Don't you worry the least little bit. I got me a little secret place in my pocketbook here where I keep some emergency money just for rainy days like this. Even though it's not actually raining outside of course.” Eldeen laughed loudly and stretched open her enormous purse, reaching deep inside. Helena looked back at Perry, raised her eyebrows, and shrugged good-naturedly. Perry heard a solid click from inside Eldeen's purse, and she pulled out a five-dollar bill. “This here is yours, Mr. Hammond,” she announced, placing it in his small wrinkled hand and folding his knobby fingers over it. “It used to be mine, but now it's yours.” And she gave his hand a firm pat as if he were a child being handed his lunch money. “There now, pay your bill.”

The old man looked up at Eldeen sternly for a long moment before Helena finally reached forward and took the five-dollar bill from his hand. “Well, looks like somebody's watching out for you, Mr. Hammond,” the girl said. “That's what I call a good neighbor. But you better look out there. I think Eldeen might be making a pass at you. You know what a flirt she is.” She laughed heartily as she slapped the change into his palm. The old man turned again to gaze up at Eldeen, then slowly dropped the change into his sack of groceries, picked it up, and shuffled toward the door.

“Well, if that don't beat all,” Helena said. “Eldeen, he didn't even give you back the leftover.”

7

A Buggy Ride

Walking across the church parking lot on Tuesday morning, Perry clearly heard a line of poetry spoken aloud. This sort of thing happened to him so often that it had ceased to startle him, but he still marveled over the curiosity of it all and wondered if others had such experiences. It was as if the audio track of his life kept replaying itself. He would do something—the simplest thing, like open a drawer or tie a shoelace or see a mail truck—and suddenly remember exactly what he had been saying or hearing or thinking the last time he did the same thing.

Today it was looking down at his feet as he walked across the gravel parking lot at the Church of the Open Door that triggered the memory. The last time he had been here was Sunday night, with Eldeen, Jewel, and Joe Leonard. As they had pulled into the lot that night, Eldeen had been talking about a woman named Flo, who made crocheted place mats and sold them at the G.O.O.D. Country Store, which, she explained to Perry, stood for the “Golden Oldies of Derby.” Eldeen herself contributed sets of pillowcases to the G.O.O.D. Country Store to sell. “I sew little lamb designs on them to fancy them up,” she told Perry.

“I sure hate it that Flo doesn't see how much she needs the Lord,” Eldeen had said as she slowly swung her legs out the car door and searched with her rubber-soled shoes for a firm footing on the gravel. Heaving herself up and out of the car, she had looked up at the church's small steeple, dark against the February dusk, and uttered solemnly, “Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me.”

“What did you say, Mama?” Jewel asked.

“It's a poem I read in Joe Leonard's English book,” Eldeen had said, taking Jewel's arm. “It was about this lady who went out for a buggy ride with this man, who turned out to be Old Mr. Death hisself. He took her past all the places she was familiar with, like the schoolhouse and the farms and so forth, and he just kept driving so slow and easy, not in any hurry at all, and the lady started getting cold because she wasn't wearing proper clothing, only a thin little gown. He'd come a-callin' when she wasn't expecting him, see, and she didn't have time to change into something sensible. And when they finally stopped at the end of their ride, guess where it was? It was a graveyard.”

No one had spoken for a moment as the four of them crunched their way across the gravel.

“So, see,” Eldeen said, “if Flo doesn't go on and get saved, she's going to find herself in a buggy with Mr. Death before she's ready. She's always saying she's too busy for church, that Sunday's one of her main crocheting days. But I keep telling her, ‘You got to stop and get yourself set to die before it sneaks up on you.'” Eldeen clucked her tongue and shook her head. “‘Jesus might come back,' I tell her, ‘and you sure as sure can't wear a crocheted place mat to heaven. No, sir, you got to be dressed in a robe of pure righteousness,' I tell her.”

“Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me”—Perry heard the words again now, as clearly as if Eldeen were walking right beside him. He never would have expected her to read Emily Dickinson, much less quote her. It was funny how Eldeen's voice, deep and muffled, sounded almost normal to him now after having heard it so much. It had seemed so odd only a few days ago.

The poem was one Perry had known since high school. And liked, too. Dickinson had always been a favorite of his. He liked her elegant phrasing, her tight metaphors, her breezy dashes, her slant way of looking at things. In fact, it was largely because of Dickinson that he had started out as a literature major in college before switching to sociology.

Other lines from the poem came back to him: “The carriage held but just ourselves / And Immortality.” The word
civility
was in there somewhere and something about “fields of gazing grain.” And later on, “For only gossamer, my gown / My tippet—only tulle.” Interesting. He didn't know that he had ever connected that line with being unprepared for death the way Eldeen had. True, he had always had a clear visual picture of the lady in the carriage wearing a delicate gauzy gown and a filmy shawl, but he had never seen it as a lack of foresight on her part, and he'd never really felt the chill of being on such a journey so ill clothed. Probably a teacher somewhere along the line had pointed it out, but it had not taken hold. He had always been better at forming mental images than at feeling.

But that wasn't right either. He
did
feel, he knew he did, despite Dinah's arguments to the contrary. But what he felt was so confusing and required so much work to figure out, and then even more to get it to the surface and express it, that it was easier to keep quiet and concentrate on pictures, something he could see. He used to wonder if he could have become a painter or sculptor instead of a writer. Cal always told him that his descriptive passages knocked editors dead. If he could describe things with words, couldn't he probably do the same with paints and clay? It came to him now that all the scenes he pictured in his idle moments were like silent movies. He imagined people doing things, but rarely were there any sound effects and never any talking. In his novels, though, he had been shocked to discover that he could invent dialogue—lots of it—quite easily. The repartee between two characters in his most recent book had been so brisk and witty, in fact, that Cal had asked him if he was sure it wasn't from an old Cary Grant movie.

The church door was unlocked, as Brother Hawthorne had said it would be, and a door labeled “Pastor's Study” stood slightly ajar off to the left of the foyer. Perry heard the metallic squeak of a swivel chair from inside the study, and before he could knock, the pastor had opened the door and was extending his hand. He wore a white shirt and a bold red tie, and Perry caught the gleam of his polished wing tip shoes without looking down at them. Perry wondered fleetingly what a man like Brother Hawthorne did all day in an office like this. He glanced at the big metal desk against the wall. A sheet of yellow legal paper had been inserted into a manual typewriter, and a few lines had been typed. Several open volumes were spread out on both sides of the typewriter. Next to the desk lamp sat a large framed picture of Edna Hawthorne, her hands clasped dramatically beside her smooth round face, her head tilted, her lips slightly parted, and her eyes turned upward as if admiring something very delightful just out of her reach.

Brother Hawthorne was shorter than Perry by several inches but gripped his hand firmly and spoke with hearty confidence as he led him to a pair of small wing chairs slightly turned to face each other beside the window. Perry was reminded of a job interview, and in a sense he supposed that was what this was all about.

“Have a seat, please,” Brother Hawthorne said, and he waited until Perry had sat down before he took the chair facing him. The pastor crossed one leg over the other and set his Bible on top of his thigh, both hands resting on it. His nails were clipped short, Perry noticed, and his wide gold wedding band caught the sun from the window and glinted. Perry thought again of plump Edna Hawthorne and wondered if this man made her happy. He glanced down at his own wedding band, which he still wore, and wondered how a man went about making a woman happy anyway. He had thought it was so easy at one time, had even been secretly scornful of husbands whose wives left them, sure that the men had been guilty of some heinous misconduct they weren't admitting.

“Let's pray before we begin,” Brother Hawthorne said. Again he paused for a long moment before praying aloud, and Perry wondered what went on during those seconds of silence. Was he thinking of how to start? His prayer was short this time, and when he finished he smiled at Perry and asked, “Now how can I help you, Perry?”

Perry took a deep breath and started. As he explained the book he was going to write, the pastor's eyes never left his face.

When he stopped, Brother Hawthorne cleared his throat before speaking. “And so you will be attending our services and activities regularly for the sole purpose of writing about them?”

“Yes.”

“And you will change all the names—to protect the innocent, isn't that the expression?” The pastor smiled faintly.

“That's right.”

“What about our church members? What about your neighbors? Jewel and Eldeen? Don't you think they should know what you're doing?”

“Maybe they should, but I'm not sure I want them to . . . for the time being at least,” Perry said. “I've found in the past that . . . well, if I could just go about my writing quietly, it will move along better, I think. I wanted you to know, and of course eventually the others will have to know. But for now I was hoping we could . . .”

Perry trailed off. He had been afraid of this, that it would all sound too underhanded to the pastor. Maybe he should just get up one Sunday in church and tell the whole congregation what he was doing. Maybe he could have it printed in the bulletin as part of the agenda, maybe after “Offertory—Organ Solo.” They could list it as “Special Brief Admission of Purpose by Frequent Visiting Nonmember.”

The pastor cleared his throat again and tapped his fingers lightly against the cover of the Bible in his lap. He inhaled sharply. “This book you're writing—will it be . . . well, is it your purpose to write an
objective
report? I don't mean to offend you, but it seems peculiar to me that anyone would want to spend a year here just to watch us, unless there were some . . . ulterior motive. I know you said you've written other books similar to this, and I really do hate to sound suspicious, but I have my people's interests at heart here, you know.”

“I know,” Perry said. “But it really is exactly what I've said. The book is supposed to be about a church that practices fundamental Christianity, and that's what I've been told you are here. I'm not trying to dig up dirt or anything. I'm just supposed to find a relatively small church that meets the requirements and conduct a well-documented study about . . . what it's like . . . and all.” He shrugged his shoulders.