Suncatchers (25 page)

He had been greatly relieved when the dinner was over. Everybody had helped clear the tables and fold them up out of the way. Then with a great clanging of metal and more laughter, they all pulled their chairs into rows for the next activity, which had been talked about for weeks, printed in the bulletin, and announced in every service—the annual Church of the Open Door Needlework Auction. Half of the proceeds went to the Lena Lansford Home for Girls over in Mount Chesney, South Carolina, and the other half went into the Missions Fund.

Willard Scoggins was the auctioneer, though it was obvious to Perry that Willard had never attended a real auction. The event moved along without haste, with Willard holding up every article, reading aloud the printed tag attached to each one, and then making some general, unfocused remark such as “Now, isn't that nice?” or “This would look real pretty in somebody's house.” The bidding would then start with a great deal of friendly teasing back and forth, and finally Willard would pound his fist on top of the piano and say something like, “Well, then, I guess that's it. Come on up here and pay your money, Earl.”

Perry was sitting in the second row, close enough to see the detail of the needlework. The variety and beauty surprised him. He had imagined that the auction would consist of rough, slapdash pieces. He wasn't prepared for Birdie's pink appliquéd place mats with a white border of something called “tatting” or for Dottie Puckett's pale yellow crocheted baby's blanket with the tiny matching sweater. Edna Hawthorne had made and framed a cross-stitched sampler in bold primary colors, evidently for a child's room, with a verse stitched below the alphabet: “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.” Small pictures of children's toys formed the border of the sampler—a ball, a pail and shovel, a toy soldier, a rocking horse. Brother Hawthorne bid heavily on this one and finally got it after some good-natured rivalry with Harvey Gill. Little Hannah Hawthorne clapped her hands with delight when her father went forward to pay for it. Perry wondered if Edna had already promised Hannah that the picture would be hung in her bedroom.

It seemed that every woman in the church had made something. Even Jewel contributed a set of seven embroidered dish towels, with a day of the week and a picture of some kind of kitchen-related item on each one. Perry saw that on the one for Thursday was stitched a basket of produce and Saturday's held a mixing bowl and spoon. Perry could have predicted what picture would be on the Sunday towel, and he was right—a large black Bible with a red cross stitched on its cover. Willard Scoggins himself bid on Jewel's dish towels and in the end outbid Martha Joy Darrow. Perry couldn't help wondering what Willard would want with seven embroidered kitchen towels.

When Willard held up the last item in the auction, Perry recognized it immediately as Eldeen's. It was a set of pillowcases. Willard read the card aloud. “‘Two pillowcases, all cotton, washed and pressed but not starched of course. Embroidered by Eldeen P. Rafferty. Get ready to count sheep. These woolly lambs will make you sleep good. Ha ha.'” Perry hadn't realized before this that the women must have written their own descriptions on the cards.

No one spoke for a moment as everybody studied the light blue pillowcases. The lambs frisking about in various poses on a green hillside were stitched in bright pinks and reds. The pattern must have slipped as Eldeen was ironing it onto one of the pillowcases because the hill was slanted sideways and the colorful little lambs appeared to be toppling headlong over it.

“Five dollars!” Harvey Gill called out. Brother Hawthorne followed swiftly with “Six dollars!” Bernie Paulson went up to seven, and Marjorie Eckles went to seven-fifty. Harvey bid again and so did Marjorie. Perry could see Willard getting ready to pound his fist during the long pause that followed Bernie Paulson's bid of nine dollars. Perry glanced behind him, where Eldeen was sitting, smiling with pleasure. He imagined her sitting in her living room amid the bright clutter of ceramic owls, afghans, and suncatchers. He saw her adjusting the radio dial, then bending over her pillowcases. He saw her lips moving as she prayed for Mr. Hammond and Belinda and Flo between innings of the Braves games, and he saw her large rough hands slowly pushing the needle in and out, painstakingly forming the outline of a fuchsia lamb.

“Thirty dollars!” He must have shouted it, from the looks on the faces that turned to stare at him.

He heard Eldeen gasp behind him and felt her hand on his shoulder. “Why, Perry Warren, do you know what you just said? You musta meant thirteen, but even that's way high for just a set of pillowcases! Bless your heart, biddin' on my embroidery like that.”

Willard Scoggins had a look of confusion on his face. He stepped closer and spoke in a hushed whisper over the front row. “Did you say thirty or thirteen, Perry?”

From a steady hum of conversation and laughter, Fellowship Hall suddenly fell silent. Even the Chewnings' new baby, who had been crying off and on all during the whole auction, was quiet. All eyes were turned on Perry. It was the kind of moment he had always feared. Something from one of his bad dreams started taking shape in his mind. He was coming out into a brilliantly illuminated circus arena. Someone was holding out a flaming sword to him as the ringmaster's sonorous voice reverberated throughout the big top. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, Perry Warren, filling in for Farouk the Fire-Eater, who has taken ill.” With a sense of foreboding he remembered all his old fears of standing up suddenly to babble incoherently in the midst of large audiences.

Perry blinked several times and forced himself to look hard at the blue pillowcases Willard still held aloft. You're here, he reminded himself, here in Fellowship Hall at the Church of the Open Door in Derby, South Carolina. Stop thinking stupid thoughts.

And it worked. After a brief moment, he swallowed and said evenly, “Thirty. I said thirty dollars.” He was already rising from his chair and reaching for his wallet. For an instant he worried that he might not have thirty dollars in cash. What if he didn't? Would Eldeen unsnap her purse, dig around inside a zippered pocket, and produce the difference? But he did. As he paid his money, he thought about the girls at the Lena Lansford Home. He wasn't sure why they lived there, if they were incorrigibles or orphans or maybe unwed mothers. It sounded like a good cause, though, and besides, he was now the possessor of a set of unique handmade pillowcases.

The day had gone on and on. There had been a two-hour break after the auction, during which people went home to change clothes and take a brief rest if they wanted to. Then at five o'clock they met again for an informal evening service in Fellowship Hall. Willard Scoggins sang “God Bless America,” and the choir gathered around the piano and sang “The Church in the Wildwood,” after which Brother Hawthorne preached a short sermon titled “Our Spiritual Heritage,” and Fern Tucker read a story about a weak young soldier named Jimmy during the Civil War who fell asleep on patrol and was ordered to be whipped but was spared by the mercy of a stronger soldier who offered to take the lashes in Jimmy's place.

Eldeen groaned faintly and bowed her head as Fern concluded the story with a Bible verse, dramatically delivered. “‘Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.'” Perry had never heard of soldiers in the Civil War being
beaten
for failing in a duty. Surely the story wasn't based on fact. Whoever wrote stories like that should be ashamed, he thought, giving all these people a false view of history just to provide a sentimental allegorical vehicle for a Bible verse. But then, maybe it was based on truth after all. Duty had been highly revered in earlier times. He would have to look it up sometime.

Following the service, there had been a softball game in the open field behind the church. The teams consisted of all ages of boys and girls, men and women. Those who didn't want to play carried out folding chairs and sat in the shade under the stand of sweet gum trees along the side of the property bordering the road. When the sides were divided up and Brother Hawthorne's team was short by one player, Eldeen stood up waving her orange straw hat, her enormous culottes ballooning around her calves, and cried out, “Here, get Perry to play! He'll make it come out even!” So Perry had played and had made a run in the second inning and again in the fifth, which Eldeen had loudly pointed out as significant. “See, the preacher's team beat Willard's by
two
runs, and how many did you make? Yes, sir, you made the difference, Perry! You made a plain old ordinary team into a winnin' team!”

There had been hot dogs, lemonade, and homemade ice cream back inside Fellowship Hall at eight o'clock, and at nine-thirty everyone drove over to the stadium at Derby High for the community fireworks display, which had lasted ten whole minutes. With his eyes closed now, Perry could still see the vivid bursts of color exploding against the dark sky. His favorite had been a shower of gold that spread symmetrically over the sky, twinkling like shards of topaz. “It looks like little drizzlets of honey!” Eldeen had exclaimed. And later, during the finale, she had cried, “The whole sky's done exploded!”

Perry opened his eyes and looked again at Beth's old black telephone. He checked the clock again. It was three minutes after ten o'clock. In Rockford it would be three minutes after nine. He was three minutes late for his weekly call.

As he dialed the number, he tried to think of things to say if Dinah answered the phone this time as she had last week. He had made a fool of himself stuttering and halting and finally asking if he could speak to Troy.

“Don't you even wonder how I'm doing?” Dinah had asked, her voice low and tense. And Perry had tripped over his words assuring her that yes, he did, and how was she anyway and how were things going and was it hot there, and then he thought he heard a man's voice in the background, and he had stopped cold. Wait a minute, Dinah had said, let me turn the TV down, and then Troy had picked up the phone when she set it down, and Dinah never had come back to answer his questions.

The rotary dial spun off the last number, and Perry heard a small voice before the second ring. “Dad, is that you? How come you're late?”

17

The Mercy of Women

The whole idea of calling Troy every week had come up two months ago on Mother's Day, when Perry had taken Eldeen, Jewel, and Joe Leonard to the Purple Calliope after church.

“To get to come here two times in only two months is more than a body deserves,” Eldeen had said to Perry as the waiter seated them. Then to the waiter she had said, “
He
”—pointing at Perry—“he brought us here back in March for my daughter's birthday, that one there”—pointing at Jewel—“right after that big snowstorm we had. We had to put it off for a few days till everybody could get situated again, but we finally got to come, and now here he is treatin' us
again
.” Eldeen wrinkled her face as if preparing to laugh but didn't. “I guess he's doin' like the Bible says and taking care of the widows and the orphans!” She grinned up at the waiter, who cocked his head and clasped his hands under his chin, looking slightly dazed, as if wondering whether this woman was using her normal voice or just playing a joke on him.

Jewel opened the menu and lowered her head to study it. Joe Leonard frowned at his plate, as if trying to figure out if he really qualified as an orphan. Soft organ music was playing over the intercom.

Perry watched the waiter fill their water glasses. The man held the pitcher with his pinkie extended and daintily curved. All his movements were close to the body, and as he told them about the specials of the day, he pursed his lips between sentences. He wore a small diamond earring in one ear, and the nametag on the lapel of his short purple waiter's jacket read
STANLEY AT YOUR SERVICE
. He had the kind of looks that could go either way. Without the mannerisms, he could be the sensitive, reticent artist type, the lover of painting and poetry, but with a solid core of manliness—actually, the kind of man Perry fancied himself to be. As it was, Stanley looked, well, as Dinah used to say, more like one of the cheerleaders instead of the quarterback. This should be interesting, thought Perry—Fundamentalist Christians Confront Homosexual. He saw Joe Leonard watching Stanley but couldn't read the boy's expression.

“Those people preach love,” Cal had told him months ago in one of his phone briefs before Perry had even moved to Derby, “but what they're really good at is
hate
. You wait and see if I'm not right. You have to watch for it because they try to decoy you with all their pious talk and little acts of kindness, but underneath it all they've got a deep, dark well of meanness.”

The way Cal remembered it, they hated anybody who didn't do things their way—“especially anybody that looks like they're making a lot of money and having a good time while doing it. And I'm not just talking about a little mild distaste either. I'm talking about out-and-out hatred. Why, if somebody like Michael Jackson walked into one of their church services, he'd never know what hit him.” And, according to Cal, they not only hated individuals like the Kennedys or Madonna, they hated whole groups in general—all liberal Democrats, the NOW, the ACLU, the NAACP, and most of all, homosexuals.

Stanley had left the table, Perry noticed, and the others were reading over their menus. Eldeen was reading hers aloud. “‘Beef brisket marinated in our own special mushroom-garlic sauce.' Now that
might
be good, but then you never know. They's all kinds of mushrooms in the world, and some of 'em's good and some of 'em's like bits of rubber. And if it's heavy on the garlic, we might knock somebody down just by breathin' on 'em, although garlic is good for your digestion, I've read.”