Suncatchers (24 page)

Brother Hawthorne was reading a passage of Scripture now. “‘If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.'” In Perry's opinion, this didn't seem like the most cheerful verse the pastor could have chosen to read on such a peppy national holiday. But everyone was nodding in agreement in the pause that followed before Brother Hawthorne cleared his throat and began a prayer, emotional and ardent in its plea for God's hand of revival on a sinful nation.

The choir sang three numbers in a row, during which Perry had disturbing visions of Dinah lying on a large beach towel, her eyes shut, while Troy romped in the water with the children of strangers. In one song, as they sang “For He chastens whom He loves,” a picture emerged in Perry's mind of Troy throwing a tantrum and Dinah lifting her hand to strike him. After each number an appreciative chorus of amens rose from the congregation.

Birdie, the organist, played “God of Our Fathers” during the offering, and Joe Leonard slipped out of the choir to get his tuba. Perry noticed for the first time that Eldeen was no longer sitting on the front row. She must have gone back to change into her costume. He had no idea what it was she was going to do. He wished more than ever that he wasn't sitting in plain view of everybody. The church was more crowded than usual this morning. People he had never seen were interspersed among the regular members. Where had they all come from? Perry wondered. He thought he saw Belinda, the bank teller, sitting near the back.

After the offering Joe Leonard played “My Country 'Tis of Thee” on his tuba, and after that Edna Hawthorne walked to the pulpit to sing a solo. It was a song Perry had never heard before, called “Christ Our Hope,” which was full of requests in the imperative mode for God to “rouse feeble spirits to lift high the cross” and “lure us with the fire of Thy love from sin's darkness” and “make of our land a prospering kingdom of light.” Perry still marveled that these people never let an opportunity pass to push their religion to the front. They acted like every holiday was made especially for them. He wondered what they would do with Labor Day.

Suddenly Perry noticed that Eldeen had begun mounting the steps to the platform—slowly, like a giant toddler, lifting one foot to a step, then pulling the other one up to stand a moment before tackling the next step. Brother Hawthorne jumped to her assistance before she reached the second step and stood beside her, supporting her arm the rest of the way. The auditorium fell silent. Probably from shock, Perry guessed. Eldeen was swathed in a white sheet that was probably supposed to signify a classic Greek or Roman robe of some kind but which could also be interpreted as burial swaddling. Sitting on top of her head was a small circlet of greenery. Reaching the platform, she turned to face the audience and lifted her right arm. Perry heard a dull click and saw a beam of light wobbling across the ceiling. It was only then that he realized she was holding a large lantern-type flashlight wrapped in aluminum foil. Jewel began to play the piano softly, and Eldeen began her recitation.

Perry wondered if others caught on faster than he did that she was supposed to be portraying Lady Liberty. “‘Give me your tired, your poor,'” she declaimed, “‘Your huddled masses yearnin' to breathe free.'” No one laughed. No one even moved. “‘The wretched refuse of your teemin' shore,'” she continued. “‘Send
these
, the homeless, tempest-tost to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.'” By the time she finished the short poem, her right arm had begun sagging, and the flashlight was shining into the faces of the audience. Several children put their hands over their eyes. Eldeen clicked the light off, put her hand down by her side, and stood straight, gazing out at the audience, smiling faintly like a stage actress receiving the silent awe of her admirers. Her deep phlegmy voice still echoed in Perry's mind, and he knew that her image, a thick tubular shape wrapped in white, would be brightly imprinted in his memory for the rest of his life. He thought of the sausages wrapped in white butcher paper his mother used to bring home from the corner grocery.

Mayme Snyder and her mother, Vonda, came to the platform to sing the words to Emma Lazarus's poem Eldeen had just recited. Perry wondered if they had made up the music themselves or if it was a real song they had found in a book somewhere. It wasn't bad, really, and at least they harmonized well. Mayme's pretty inverted ponytail swished ever so slightly as she sang. He had heard that Vonda used to sing in Nashville in the sixties before she was saved. Eldeen had told him the story once of how Vonda had met her husband, Walt, at a gas station when her group, the Red Embers, had an engine fire in their tour van.

Perry could hardly concentrate during Brother Hawthorne's sermon later, though he tried to take a few notes because the title, “Liberty in Bondage,” interested him. The general idea was that conformity to Christ afforded freedom in ways the world could not understand. He got that much. But each time as he lowered his head to write, he kept seeing Eldeen standing with proud dignity while Vonda Snyder and her daughter, Mayme, sang. Then the picture of Eldeen as Lady Liberty would begin to recede, and, inexplicably, Perry would see an endless trail of Depression-era Okies leaning into the wind, stumbling along dirt roads pulling little wagons—old black-and-white photographic images of whole families strung out in single file with long, sad faces, scanning the parched fields beneath the hazy sky, the sun blotted out by the grit of swirling dust.

Then the Dust Bowl scene would vanish, and once again Perry would see Dinah in her purple and teal bathing suit, lying beside the lake asleep, while Troy bobbed up and down in the water, drifting farther and farther from shore.

16

Bursts of Color

Perry sat on the couch and stared at the telephone on the end table. It looked just like the one he remembered from the narrow dark house where he had grown up. Not yet old enough to be labeled an antique, but give it a few years and it might be worth something. Now that he thought about it, he was quite sure it must be the one from his boyhood home in Rockford. Beth had probably taken it at some time—practical, frugal Beth, for whom fashion and design meant nothing as long as her columns of numbers worked out right. Perry reached for the telephone, then glanced at the clock. No, not yet. Ten more minutes. He put his head back and closed his eyes.

He never remembered July Fourths lasting this long when he lived in Rockford. Today had been a full, bombastic day with all the stops pulled out. His ears were still ringing. After the morning service, there had been a big, noisy churchwide dinner in Fellowship Hall. Everybody sat jammed together at long metal tables. There was a continual jostling as people kept getting up for seconds, returning with their paper plates soggily weighted down. Next to Perry, Bernie Paulson ate four amazing platefuls, talking all the while.

Bernie had no method of eating, Perry noticed. He just troweled in forkful after forkful of whatever he scooped up. Once Perry watched him take a single bite that consisted of four different foods—rice pudding, green beans, and coleslaw, all coated with melting strawberry Jell-O. Seated between Bernie on one side and Eldeen on the other, Perry nodded his way through the dinner and wondered if he was the only one who thought that people were talking five times louder today than usual.

Brother Hawthorne's family sat across the table and several seats down from Perry. He watched Brother Hawthorne get up three times before taking his first bite of food—once to get a napkin for Esther, once to get a spoon for Levi, who dropped his on the floor, and again to bring Edna her sweater and place it around her shoulders. How anyone could be too cool on a day like today was beyond Perry's understanding, even in the air-conditioned Fellowship Hall, but he noticed quite a few women wearing shawls and sweaters.

While Bernie Paulson recounted a story about running into the tail gunner of his World War II bombing crew while he was at Six Flags with his grandchildren, Perry watched Brother Hawthorne and Edna. How could a man seemingly as intelligent as Theodore Hawthorne be content in a place like this? Perry wondered. What secrets were behind that calm, sincere exterior? Was the man just biding his time here in Derby until something bigger and better opened up? Most of all, Perry wondered if Brother Hawthorne really believed in his heart and consistently lived all the things he preached from the pulpit. Did Edna ever get exasperated with him and flounce out of the room as Dinah used to do?

He watched as one of the little Hawthorne girls, the one named Hannah, tipped over her cup of Kool-Aid. Someone appeared with a stack of paper towels from the kitchen, and Brother Hawthorne moved plates and cups as Edna sopped up the spill. Then Brother Hawthorne leaned close to Hannah and whispered something. Perry wondered what he had said. “You're going to get it when we get home”? Or “It will cost us seven dollars to take this suit to the cleaners”? Or “Don't expect anything else to drink, young lady”? Whatever it was, Hannah looked up at her father and stopped crying. She gave him a weak smile and buried her face against his sleeve for a brief moment. Then Brother Hawthorne kissed the top of her head and left the table for the fourth time.

“ . . . and I says, ‘Your name isn't by any chance Ferdy Lopez, is it?' There he was, imagine it, sitting on a bench down by the Mind Bender eating a corn dog, and I looked at him and knew in a flash who it was.” Perry nodded at Bernie and watched him take an enormous bite of spaghetti, carrot and raisin salad, and lima beans.

On the other side of him, he heard Eldeen telling Nina Tillman about the blueberry bushes Jewel's husband, Bailey, had planted in the backyard four years before he died. “You don't normally think of growing blueberries here in South Carolina, but it sure can be done. That's a fact! Yes, sir, ours are prosperin' up a storm!” Brother Hawthorne returned with a new cup of Kool-Aid and sat back down.

Bernie gave Perry a soft dig with his elbow. “To think we hadn't seen each other for almost fifty years and I knew him without batting an eye. 'Course, the scar all the way acrost his forehead helped some. He'd got it as a kid playing swords with his cousin—with garden spades.”

“ . . . and they's covered right now with nets that Ginger Coker gave me that used to belong to her uncle who raised tobacco, 'cause if you don't keep 'em covered the birds'll have theirselves a feast, and you won't get a single berry for all your hard work!”

Brother Hawthorne was leaning forward as Myrt Silvester shouted something from across the table. He smiled and replied, then took a bite of food and leaned over to Edna. They both laughed and looked down at Levi, whose mouth was outlined with dark chocolate pudding.

“ . . . for a dollar a pint,” Eldeen said to Nina, “and he's getting phone calls now from folks all up and down the street and all over Montroyal wanting to buy some more. Some of 'em's as big as grapes—and sweet, oh, you just never saw the likes, although we got some bushes that bears the tart kind, too.”

Bernie was gazing steadily at Perry. “I'm sorry, did you say something?” Perry asked.

“I asked you what you thought the odds were of meeting up with somebody you knew fifty years ago, when you hadn't laid eyes on each other in all that time and you lived in South Carolina and he lived in New Mexico and was out visiting his daughter in Atlanta and he was supposed to be there a month earlier instead of then but had gone and changed his plans at the last minute because his wife took sick and
you
were supposed to be there a week
later
but had decided to go on and take the kids a week early since one of them was playing baseball and their team had made it into the championship game that was the next week.”

Perry slowly shook his head to gain time, wondering at the strange things that happened in the lives of these people and thinking how much fun it would be to try to break Bernie's sentence into its component parts, to diagram it on the blackboard as they had done every day of the school year in Miss Whitcomb's English class in tenth grade. He heard Eldeen erupt into laughter on the other side of him—deep bass chuckles tumbling over each other. “Yes, sir, burned them muffins crisper than a cornflake!” she said, slapping the table with her large palm. “And them berries on top was blacker than coal pellets!”

“Not very likely, I'd say,” Perry said to Bernie.

Bernie threw his head back and laughed. “I like that! Oh, I like that a lot! ‘Not very likely'—I like that. You got a way with words, Perry.”

Down the table Brother Hawthorne was smiling again at something Esther had said, and Edna was shaking with laughter, her mouth covered with her napkin. Across the table from him on the other side, Perry heard Wally Grimes telling Joe Leonard and the Chewning twins about hunting raccoons when he was a boy. “And we run that hunk of barbed wire up inside that tree holler till we run up against that 'coon, and then we twisted it around in a circle, gittin' it all tangled up in his fur, and then we yanked us out a 'coon!” Wally was half standing, acting out the feat over the top of the table, using his fork to represent the barbed wire. The three boys laughed appreciatively, and Josh Chewning imitated the sound of a wounded, enraged raccoon. Archie Gowdy called from farther down the table, “Give that hungry boy some more food!” It seemed to Perry that the whole room was combustible, and, ignited by this one remark, it was soon engulfed in hot flames of laughter.

Perry felt like jumping up onto the table, stepping right on top of plates of chicken pot pie and brown-and-serve rolls, knocking over paper cups of tea and Kool-Aid, and shouting, “Stop it! Stop all this laughter and chatter! Stop it! Stop it right now! Talk one at a time!”