Suncatchers (12 page)

Joe Leonard was absorbed in reading over some handwritten sheets of notebook paper and didn't look up.

Jewel walked to the piano and began playing. Willard Scoggins came forward and whispered to her as she played. She looked up at him and said something, then listened to his reply and said something else. How can she do that, Perry wondered—carry on a conversation and keep the music going at the same time?

Eldeen was still talking. “ . . . and to make it more fun and keep up with our Indian theme, we said we'd let them make up names for theirselves. This was a good while ago, way back in the summertime I guess, and we took them all outdoors one night while the adults were here inside, and we told them to look around at all God's mighty, wondrous creation and pick theirself out a name. And Jewel wrote them all down on a pad. It had to be something God made, we told them, and you shoulda heard some of the things they came up with. One little boy—well, it was Levi Hawthorne is who it was, he's the preacher's son—named hisself Mud Puddle.” Eldeen broke off to laugh, so loudly that people all over the small auditorium looked over curiously and smiled.

As Willard Scoggins rose to announce the first song, Eldeen lowered her voice to a gravelly whisper. “We let them give
us
names, too. Jewel's is Chief Broken Branch and Joe Leonard's is Chief Hopping Cricket and I'm Chief Lightning Bug.” As the congregation began singing the first verse of “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” Eldeen leaned over and spoke directly into Perry's ear, very slowly, pronouncing each word with exaggerated clarity. “When it's time to split up, you can either come to Peewee Powwow with us, or you can stay in here with the regular folks.”

Brother Hawthorne came striding briskly down the center aisle during the chorus of the song and stood beside Edna on the front row. From the back, Edna's soft roundness contrasted sharply with the wiry compactness of her husband. As Levi moved from the other side of his mother to wedge in next to his father, Perry saw Brother Hawthorne glance at Edna with a fond smile, then place his hand on top of his son's white-blond curls.

The service was different from the ones on Sunday. For one thing, Willard Scoggins asked the people to call out four requests to sing, and like eager bidders at an auction, several shouted out song numbers. They sang only one stanza of each, and it was easy to tell these were favorites. One of the songs, “Victory in Jesus,” had a line that struck Perry as odd. “He loved me ere I knew Him, and all my love was due Him.” Many people sang the poetic archaism “ere” as if it were “air,” Perry noticed.

After the songs, Brother Hawthorne stood up and faced the congregation. He set his Bible on a small lectern beside the piano and then picked the lectern up and moved it closer to the center aisle. He paused before speaking, studying the faces of everyone in the audience.

“Continuing our family emphasis,” he said, “please turn to Ephesians chapter five.” There was a light rippling of pages, and Eldeen held out her large-print Bible for Perry to share.

For the next fifteen minutes Brother Hawthorne expounded on only one verse in the chapter, the twenty-first: “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.” The man had a natural gift for public speaking, there was no doubt about it. Perry wondered if he had taken classes in oratory at the Bible college he attended or if he had just been born with the talent. He could easily imagine Theodore Hawthorne as a young child standing among his toys and stuffed animals, pretending to preach to them, or out in his backyard with small woodland creatures in an attentive circle around him.

After listening to Brother Hawthorne's opening remarks, Perry slipped his Day-Timer out of his pocket to take notes. The first sentence he wrote down was a simple statement the pastor repeated three times in a row, each time emphasizing a different word: “In marriage,
submitting
means always thinking of your partner first. In marriage, submitting means
always
thinking of your partner first. In marriage, submitting means always thinking of your
partner
first.” That one sentence was as far as Perry got in his note-taking.

Later, looking down at the single line of small, neat manuscript he had written, he failed at his old game of retracing his thoughts. He knew where they had started—with a sudden vision of Dinah brushing her hair. Amber was the color he had always called it, and he used to lie in bed watching her in the bathroom, his eyes half closed so that if she suddenly looked at him she would think he was asleep. She would stand in front of the mirror over the sink swinging the shiny curtain of her hair first over one shoulder, then the other, brushing slowly from the crown of her head all the way down to the lightly curled ends.

He had loved the long pastel nightgowns she had worn, the delicate arch of her small wrist, the hypnotic motion of her brush. She would hum as she brushed, never a recognizable melody but just a rise and fall of mellow notes, and then when the ritual was ended, she would stop humming abruptly and gather the loose hairs from the sink with her fingertips, turn and drop them into the wastebasket, then dust her palms together.

She certainly hadn't thought of Perry's wishes first, though, when she had come home one day two years ago with her hair cut as short as Troy's. He still remembered hearing her come into the kitchen through the back door that afternoon. He had been writing a particularly slow-moving chapter in a new adventure novel titled
Galactic Battlements
. He had just typed the phrase “charging with murderous fury, blind and bloody, toward the golden light” and then quickly deleted it. He had used all those words before, maybe in different arrangements, but still, they sounded too tritely overstated, like something he had read a million times. Besides, Cal had cautioned him to downplay the gore in this book since it was aimed at younger readers.

He had rubbed his eyes and gotten up from his desk. These days Dinah still smiled sometimes when he came up behind her and kissed her ear, though he hadn't tried it in many weeks. She had been running water into a saucepan when he quietly eased into the kitchen, hoping to judge her mood before he approached her.

But he stopped just inside the doorway. He knew it was Dinah from the set of her shoulders, the royal blue blouse she wore, her narrow waist. He knew no other woman would be in their kitchen running water at the sink. Dinah turned off the water and placed the pan on the stove, then twisted the burner knob. She bent down, opened the cupboard under the sink, and got out several small potatoes. She rummaged through the silverware basket in the dish drain and found the peeler. Then she must have sensed him in the room because she had suddenly whirled around and clutched at her throat.

“Oh, Perry, don't do that!” she had said. “Don't sneak up on me like that! You know I hate it!”

He had stared at her without speaking. The short haircut made her look taller for some reason. It accented her cheekbones, it lengthened her neck, it widened her eyes—it changed her in so many ways that he could very well have believed her to be someone else if she hadn't been standing here in their house preparing to peel a potato.

He had turned and left the kitchen, bewildered. She had never once mentioned wanting to cut her hair. What had come over her? He had gone back to his desk and squeezed his eyes shut. All he could see was Dinah sitting in a chair with a plastic cape around her shoulders, some maniacal beautician poised above her with gigantic silver-bladed scissors, while thick cascades of amber hair slid in shining pools to the floor.

He wondered what they had done with her hair. Had someone swept it up with all the rest and thrown it in a trash bin? He took quick, shallow breaths. Then he looked up at his computer screen, lifted his fingers, and typed “charging with murderous fury, choking convulsively as crimson bubbles frothed from his charred lips, tearing savagely with vulturelike claws at his own empty oozing eyesockets, shrieking with terror as he groped madly for the golden shards of warm light that had vanished.” Later, of course, he had deleted that one, too.

“Always thinking of your partner first.” That was how Brother Hawthorne had started. But what was the magic formula? It sounded good, but who really did it? Dinah certainly hadn't. A few minutes after he had disappeared to his study that day, Perry had looked up to see her leaning against the doorway. “Do I take it from your hasty exit that you're not exactly overwhelmed by my new look?” she had said, and he had kept typing, not trusting himself to speak. He was overwhelmed all right.

From Dinah's hair, Perry's thoughts during Brother Hawthorne's message had scattered in so many different directions that he couldn't begin to get them in order. He did know that he emerged from his private world in time to hear the pastor's closing illustration in which he told about the early years of his marriage to Edna. He had enjoyed coming home after a long day of graduate classes at the college where he was attending, he said, and propping his feet up while he took a short nap. Then he would pour himself a glass of orange juice and open the paper. Edna would usually arrive home about this time, after having spent the entire day since eight o'clock in the morning typing and filing reports for an insurance company. “There she was, working to put me through Bible school,” Brother Hawthorne said, “and then she would come home a little past five o'clock and go straight to the kitchen to start supper, not even taking time to change into something more comfortable.”

“It never once hit me,” he continued, “that I had a pretty easy time of it compared to Edna. I would hear her night after night opening and closing cupboard doors, setting dishes on the table, walking back and forth across the tile. Every night I heard the clink of silverware, the whir of the mixer, all the normal kitchen sounds—and it never sank in that here was this wonderful gem of a wife I had married, in there still working—and for no pay—while I was taking it easy.

“One evening after we had eaten another good meal, Edna cleared away the dishes and then came to the little desk where I had my books and papers spread about. She said she wanted to talk with me, so I put my studying aside and sat with her on the couch.”

Brother Hawthorne paused here and looked at Edna. Her face was lifted toward him as he spoke, but Perry couldn't see her expression. “She didn't know I was going to share this with you tonight,” Brother Hawthorne said, “but I don't think she'll mind.” Edna shook her head.

“She put her hands in mine,” Brother Hawthorne continued, “and said she was struggling with resentment and wanted my help. I assured her that she would have any help I could give. She then told me plainly yet gently that she didn't mean just a few words of encouragement and a prayer. She meant my
literal
help—the kind where your hands get involved. She pointed out that if I would help her in the kitchen each night, we could eat earlier and get things cleaned up earlier and move on to our evening's work earlier.”

Brother Hawthorne looked down at his Bible for a long moment.

At last he looked up again and continued. “Of course, the selfish part of me immediately rose to my own defense and started listing all the long hard hours of classes I faced each day, the studying I did in the evenings, the papers I had to write, the sermon outlines I had to prepare. That hour of relaxation before supper was richly earned, I told myself.

“But then I paused long enough to look at it from Edna's perspective. Where was her hour of relaxation? I asked myself. After supper she often sewed. Several ladies in the church we were attending paid her to make clothes for them, and this money was part of our budget. She also typed all my papers and sometimes did typing for other students. Many evenings she did housework, since she didn't have time for any of that during the day.”

The auditorium was quiet. Even the children were still. Brother Hawthorne narrowed his eyes as if he were straining to see something far in the distance. “I felt ashamed,” he said. “I had never even thought about helping her in the kitchen—not once had it entered my mind. Here I was studying for the ministry so I could meet the spiritual needs of others, yet I had failed to meet a very simple physical need in my own home.” He cleared his throat and looked into the faces of his small congregation. “Sorry, men, I know this won't be one of my more popular Wednesday evening talks.” There was a shifting of bodies and a low murmur of laughter.

“By the way,” he said, “I did change. Edna can tell you that.” Edna's head bobbed gently. Brother Hawthorne closed his Bible and walked around to stand in front of the lectern. “It's no excuse for a Christian husband to say, ‘But that wasn't the way I was brought up' or ‘Kitchen work is for women.' Did you notice that the pronoun in Ephesians 5:21 is plural—
yourselves?
The principle of submission runs in two directions, men. Let's not demand something of our wives that we ourselves don't demonstrate.”

Perry hardly knew what to think about this story. First of all, he hadn't expected anything like this. Cal had told him once that all fundamentalists rejected the motto “Times change” in favor of “
Times
change, but
we
don't.” It was a little thing, he supposed, but he wouldn't have thought these people would be so modern in their views of men's and women's roles. This was important enough to include in his book. He'd have to try to get it down on paper tonight after he got home.

He tried briefly to imagine what Dinah would have done if he had shown up in the kitchen to help her. Like Brother Hawthorne, the idea of pitching in to cook supper and clean up had never crossed Perry's mind. He had grown up in a home where his mother had spent most of her waking hours in the kitchen. She had never expected his help. She had probably never even wanted it. Looking back now, Perry could see that kitchen work had been his mother's escape from all the disappointments she had borne in other rooms of the house. The only times he remembered seeing her smile were when she slid something from the oven or hung up a freshly ironed dress.