Suncatchers (22 page)

A man admired by folks far and wide,

And especially to us who knew you inside.'”

Eldeen had known Bart Gosnell before he died, and she paused after the poem to tell about how he used to lead the Independence Day parade as the oldest veteran, still wearing his World War I uniform, which was actually too loose on him in his old age.

She turned at last to the sports section and spent the next several minutes expounding on the assets and liabilities of the Atlanta Braves. “Gettin' Greg Maddux was sure a bonus,” she said, “but I tell you, if them fielders lets one more ball drop through their fingers, I'm gonna write Bobby Cox a letter and say send them back to the Little League!” It had surprised Perry to discover Eldeen's love for baseball. Once, in April, when she had asked him for a ride to the G.O.O.D. Store to drop off some sets of pillowcases, she had added a qualification. “But it can't be between two-thirty and five 'cause I'll be listening to the Braves on the radio.” He had been puzzled at first, thinking he had misunderstood her. Maybe the Braves were a singing group, older brothers and sisters of the Peewee Powwow children at church perhaps, who were giving a program on the local religious station. But for two and a half hours? “I hope Smoltz smokes the Dodgers' socks off!” Eldeen had added, and then Perry had put it all together.

Joe Leonard was looking for them as they drove up to the big building called the Tabernacle, situated in the center of the campgrounds. He was standing with two other boys but broke away as soon as he saw the car and came toward them smiling shyly. “Hey,” he said, stopping awkwardly beside Perry's door.

Stepping out of the car, Perry noticed immediately that the air was fresher and cooler up here in the mountains. He breathed in deeply. The flag in front of the Tabernacle was fluttering lightly.

Jewel got out of the backseat and gave her son a one-armed hug and patted his shoulder. “We missed you,” she said, smiling at him. Perry had never noticed before that Joe Leonard was a little taller than Jewel. Had the boy grown over the past week?

Joe Leonard extended his hand, and Perry shook it. “I hear you've had a busy week,” he said, and Joe Leonard nodded, grinning widely. His freckles looked darker, and his hair, not slicked down as usual, stuck up in little tufts on top. He wore khaki slacks and a royal blue camp T-shirt.

Eldeen finally made it around the car and approached Joe Leonard with her hands outstretched, her smile gleefully contorting her face. “I didn't think this day would ever come!” she cried. “You can't begin to know how long this week has been—and so quiet, why, I thought I was living in a graveyard!” Perry couldn't see how a boy as reserved as Joe Leonard could possibly make such a difference in the noise level at home, but maybe it was because Eldeen had had one fewer person to address her comments to. She hugged the boy enthusiastically, and Perry noticed that while Joe Leonard didn't exactly return her hug, neither did he pull away.

Someone rang a large bell beside the flagpole, and teenagers came from all directions, heading for the Tabernacle. They all wore the same royal blue camp shirts and carried Bibles. Inside, Joe Leonard went to sit with his cabin mates, and Perry followed Jewel and Eldeen to a section marked off for visiting parents and friends.

Brent Geyer had been a missionary for twenty years but had returned to the States when his wife grew ill in Kenya. His closing sermon to the teens was titled “Down from the Mountaintop” and blended together two ideas. First, the difficulty of returning to normal life after a week of what he called “spiritual mountain climbing” at camp, and second, the descent of Moses from Mount Sinai, when “his face shone with the glory of having communed with God.”

During the course of the message, Brent Geyer told about having climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with a group of native Kenyans and tourists. The trip had taken five days, the first three being moderately paced to acclimatize themselves to the change in altitude, then the rigorous fourth day during which they pushed to the summit and started back down, then the last day of completing the trip down. He told about an old woman living in a hut at the base of Kilimanjaro, who cautioned every group of climbers about the importance of taking the ascent slowly, and about two young men—brash, cocky athletes from Europe—who saw themselves as the exception and pushed too hard. “One of them died right there in Africa at the age of twenty-six,” he said, “and the other was hospitalized for several weeks. They thought the rules didn't apply to them, but they were wrong. Dead wrong.” He paused a moment and rapped his index finger loudly against the wooden podium.

“Now we've had some changes this week in
spiritual altitude
,” he continued, “and the results have been some important changes in
attitude
.” He looked across the audience and then draped himself over the podium so far that Perry worried that he would lose his balance and tip forward. “You have heard some things this week,” Brent Geyer said, pointing his finger at the campers, “things that can make a difference for the rest of your life. We haven't pushed you too fast, but we've challenged you. You can either take the principles you've heard and apply them to your lives—or reject them at your own risk.” A man moved to the piano and began playing softly. Perry saw two other young men bending over the fireplace. Soon a small fire was burning.

Brent Geyer asked the audience to bow their heads. “Many of you have already made life-changing commitments this week,” he said. “Others are on the brink of doing that, and we want you to have the opportunity to do so today before you leave.” He paused and removed the microphone from the stand. Holding it, he went to stand beside the fireplace. “In a few moments, as the piano plays, I want you to decide whether you're serious about following God. If you are, then I'll ask you to step forward, take a small stick from this box, and throw it into the fire as a sign of your surrendering your life to burn out for Christ.”

Perry glanced around. Burn out for Christ? What was going on here? This went a step further than the harmless candlelighting ceremony he recalled from the Baptist camp. It brought to mind all those gruesome stories of martyrs being torched alive. Combining fire and religion seemed dangerous. It reminded him of occult ceremonies he'd read about, the ones where unidentified charred remains were left behind. He thought of the Buddhist monk years ago who had immolated himself. The news coverage had shown the event over and over. “Take it easy,” he wanted to shout now. “Douse the fire!”

But one by one the teenagers began leaving their chairs and slowly, calmly filing to the front, plucking sticks from the cardboard box, tossing them into the fire, then returning to their seats, their heads bowed as if in deep sorrow. Was this for real? Perry wondered. Were these kids' brains in operation throughout this procedure? Or were they just playing a slightly more sophisticated version of Follow the Leader, all the while itching to return home to normality? Joe Leonard had joined the procession, and Perry watched as he walked forward and took a stick. He knew it was only his imagination, but the flames seemed to leap a little higher as Joe Leonard dropped his stick into the fire.

He remembered Cal's words: “Keep your eye on the kids. That's where you can prove the failure of the system.” Perry studied the teens as they slowly filed back and forth. None of them wore jeans with holes ripped in them. There were no shorts, no spiked hair, no tank tops or baseball caps worn backwards. The boys wore no jewelry, and most of them had short haircuts. The girls wore skirts, and everywhere he looked he saw the royal blue camp shirt. Even Brent Geyer had one on. What were these kids like, he wondered—
really
like? They all seemed so compliant. Was it fear? Had the camp leaders threatened them? Browbeaten and brainwashed them—taken away all their gumption? Surely there weren't this many teenagers who truly wanted their lives to “burn out for Christ.”

All the adults seemed to understand that the appeal to participate in the fire ceremony was only for the campers, but as Perry felt a rustling beside him, he saw that Eldeen was moving out into the aisle to join the teenagers. No one tried to stop her, though, and she finally made her way to the front, at the end of the line. Perry watched her lean over the box, feel around inside, then remove several sticks. She examined them all and then selected one—a small forked stick—and tossed the others back into the box. She stood motionless for several moments, pointing her stick toward the fire, clutching it with both hands as if it were a divining rod and moving her lips in silent prayer, then she threw the stick into the flames quite forcefully and nodded with satisfaction. As she returned to her chair beside Perry, she was audibly singing the words to the song the piano was playing, “I surrender all, I surrender all, All to Thee my blessed Savior, I surrender all.”

Perry looked around, but no one was reacting. He could imagine one of these teenagers later hanging out at a drive-in somewhere and laughing about all this. “And then, this old lady, I mean, like,
really old and really big
, comes wobbling out and gets her a stick and hurls it into the fire like Nolan Ryan or something, and then she goes back to her seat
singing out loud
in this
bass
voice.” Then after everybody had laughed uproariously, Darrell from Pop's Pizza Palace would chime in, “Yeah, well, let me tell you about this retard I suckered into buying two pizzas off me one time. He was the
dumbest
guy you've ever seen.” Teenagers could be so heartless. Perry moved closer to Eldeen. She had stopped singing and was swinging her head slowly as if suffering from a deep incurable wound. He had a sudden urge to put his arm around her protectively and offer comfort. In spite of her bulk, she seemed so pathetic and vulnerable. But he stood still, his arms hanging rigidly by his side.

The piano played through several more stanzas and even switched to a different song finally. Brent Geyer asked everyone to sit down but to keep praying. People were moving back and forth, some headed to a smaller room in the back while others approached the front, talking in intimate huddles with adults stationed close to the fireplace. Perry marveled that the temperature in the room seemed so tolerable with a fire blazing in the middle of summer, with the closely packed rows of metal folding chairs, with the pressure put to bear on all these young souls to “get things right with God.”

It must be the cool mountain air. Or maybe he was just experiencing another of his retreats from real life. It was odd, though. Sometimes, like in Eldeen's living room that first time or during Joe Leonard's band concert, he became so feverishly hot that he thought he would pass out. It was funny how unpredictable things were. He felt perfectly calm now. Seeing the counselors occupied so wholly with the teenagers, he no longer feared being cornered about salvation. No troubling memories about Dinah were brewing at the present. He was simply observing, having emotionally distanced himself to a cool hilltop to spy on the encampment below.

Then it was over. Everyone seemed to be breathing more easily. The campers all smiled cheerfully and turned around in their chairs, talking excitedly. Brent Geyer had yielded the microphone to another man, this one so stocky and jolly, with his enormous bulbous nose and white hair, that Perry was sure he must be in great demand around Christmastime. “That there's Carl Chastain,” Eldeen said. “He's the camp director and a real crackerjack, too.”

Carl Chastain proceeded to announce the awards for the week. “Cabin of the Week” went to Counselor Andy's cabin, number 8. Perry watched in surprise as Joe Leonard leaped to his feet and cheered along with seven other boys, all of them pummeling each other on the back and slapping hands. He'd never before seen such an open display of emotion from Joe Leonard.

Then came “Campers of the Week.” Carl Chastain announced the “young lady winner” first, reading off her accomplishments during the week, her hometown, church, school, and finally her name—Gina Simons. Everyone broke out into applause, and a girl stood and was pushed forward, covering her face with both hands. At first Perry thought she was crying, but when she took her hands down to receive the plaque of honor, he saw that she was laughing. “I can't believe it!” she kept saying, and then she'd burst out laughing again as if she'd just caught the punch line to a joke.

The “young man winner” had won something called the Devotional Award, had scored highest in the individual free-throw contest, had earned four hundred points for Scripture memory, two hundred for hiking to the top of King's Peak, and a hundred for winning his cabin's Ping-Pong tournament. “He's a member of the quiz team at Calvary Bible Church in Helman, Georgia, and will be a senior this fall at East Valley Christian School,” said Carl Chastain, beaming toward the section where the boys were seated, where one boy—a solidly built blonde—was already being assailed by the others. Carl Chastain's voice thundered over the din. “Jonathan Macintosh, come on down!”

Perry gave a short bark of laughter, but to his relief no one noticed in all the noise. He wondered if Jonathan Macintosh had ever been to Rome and whether he lived with his Granny Smith near an apple orchard. Evidently the humor of the name hadn't escaped the others, for someone started up a chant as the boy strode forward. “Applesauce! Applesauce! Applesauce!”

Supper was served at five o'clock, and Eldeen seemed to forget her earlier wishes when she saw the table spread with hamburgers and macaroni and cheese. “Now, doesn't this look good?” she exclaimed. “Looka there, Joe Leonard, they got green Jell-O and lemonade, too.” Turning to Perry, she said, “Them's two of his favorites.”

Perry studied the campers as they ate. They looked like typical teenagers as they took huge bites out of their hamburgers, filled their forks with macaroni and cheese, and poured seconds of lemonade. They used their napkins and passed dishes in the normal fashion. The dining hall was noisy, with the constant scraping of silverware across plates, the hum of a large ceiling fan, and the animated voices of the campers. Perry caught snatches of their conversation, which included a variety of subjects ranging from the Chicago Bulls to white-water rafting. “He's such a goofball!” he heard one girl say, and then “You know what he said to Amanda?” Several heads bent together before an explosion of laughter. Perry glanced away quickly when one of the girls looked over at him. What had the goofball said to Amanda? he wondered.