Suncatchers (31 page)

“Oh, fine. Everything's going fine. They . . . they sure have their own view of life, their own little world really. It's been an interesting experience.” Actually, though he couldn't tell Cal this, he woke up most mornings feeling as if he had started out on a normal, predictable journey but somehow had gotten lost along the way. He had even dreamed one night that he was crawling on all fours, slowly traversing a vast expanse, having lost his sense of direction. He saw people standing far above him, as if at a scenic lookout point, watching his labored movement and motioning wildly, shouting individual words he recognized but arranging them in sentences he couldn't understand, like “Darkly feed irrelevant tailgate march!” But all this was too much to try to explain to Cal.

“Ha! An interesting experience—that's one way to put it,” Cal said. “I don't see how you can keep your sanity. To be honest, that's the first thing I thought of when I opened this envelope of yours. I said to myself, ‘Oh no, they're getting to him. Perry's losing his grip.'”

Perry smiled. “Well, my sanity may be a matter of question, but I don't think
they
have anything to do with it. That equipment has always been prone to malfunction.” He held his picture at arm's length and studied it. “The people at this church are all . . . so
different
,” he said. Suddenly he noticed that a small figure eight above the curls would make a perfect butterfly preparing for a landing. He added two long antennae and began shading in the wings.

“Different! Hey, you don't have to tell me!” Cal broke off for a hearty laugh.

“No, I don't mean that way. I mean they're all so different from each other,” Perry said. “Just take the way they look. Nina Tillman could be on the front of a fashion magazine, and Louise Farnsworth wears lumpy knit dresses she must've pulled out of a ragbag. Some of them wear dime-store jewelry, and some of them don't wear any. And then there's Marvella Gowdy, who wears a string of real pearls with the polyester sweaters she probably buys at the Dollar Store.”

“Well, that's true anywhere, Perry.”

“But it's everything, not just their clothes. Harvey Gill could lecture on geology at Yale, but Grady Ferguson just learned to read, and he's sixty-seven. And Mickey Freeman is forty-eight and works at a mill, but Curtis Chewning, who's the same age, is a pediatrician.” Perry knew he was talking fast, but he couldn't stop himself. He had to get it out. He had to prove his point. “And Wally Grimes is almost always sick but laughs and smiles like he's having the time of his life, and Mayfield Spalding hardly ever even speaks to anybody, much less smiles. And the pastor looks like an aerobics instructor, but Willard Scoggins . . .”

Perry stopped. He could feel Cal's response hovering almost palpably between them—a deafeningly loud but unspoken “So what?” Perry knew there was no way to describe the diversity of the church members—and maybe it didn't matter anyway.

“Well, I'm glad it's you doing this book and not me,” Cal said. “I can't cope with those Bible zanies.” He emitted a harsh woof of laughter. “Everything that comes up, they say it's either the Lord's judgment or the Lord's blessing—I mean, sometimes the same thing can even qualify for both! And they're always
talking
about it all, even advertising it with bumper stickers. My grandmother had one on her car that said, ‘Jesus is my copilot.' The woman drove like a maniac, too. I tried to get the thing off after she died so we could sell the car, but it must've been
welded
on. I finally got it all off but the
Jesus
, and I just finally gave up.”

Then Cal plunged into a story about a great-uncle of his in Georgia who used to send half of his social security check every month to an evangelist who claimed to use all donations to print Romanian Bibles. Perry had heard Cal tell the story of the scam before, though he thought in the original version it was a grandfather instead of a great-uncle.

He kept wanting to break in, to say that Eldeen and Jewel and the others weren't like the people Cal had known growing up in Georgia, but he didn't. He couldn't help thinking, though, of Eldeen's reaction a few weeks back when they had pulled up to a stoplight behind a car with a “Honk if you love Jesus” bumper sticker. “That makes me madder than a hornet's nest!” she had said, shaking her finger with every accented syllable.

“What are you talking about, Mama?” Jewel had asked her.

“That sticker on that fender in front of us!” Eldeen had said. They were too close to the car now for any of the rest of them to see what it said, but Eldeen didn't stop to explain. “It's disrespectful is what it is! Like our Jesus would be pleased by a noisy, blaring hullabaloo like that! My Bible tells me Jesus is somebody to stand in worshipful awe of, not toot at! He's the Alpha and Omega, our High Priest, with eyes like a fiery flame and a voice like the sound of many waters. He carries seven stars and the keys to victory over death in His right hand, and His face shines brighter than the noonday sun! He's the Son of God, not somebody to have a pep rally for!” No one had spoken after this surprising outburst, and Eldeen had scowled disapprovingly after the car when it made a left turn a block later. Perry finally saw what the bumper sticker said and wondered what Eldeen would have done if he had leaned over the seat and beeped the horn.

He remembered being confused over the whole incident. Just when he thought he had figured these people out, they went and did something like this. If anyone had asked him, he would have guessed that Eldeen would be thrilled over a bumper sticker that said “Honk if you love Jesus.” He would have said she would be the first to honk and would honk the loudest and longest. But no, it turned out that she was highly offended. The thought slowly settled over him that he still had a lot to learn. These people had some quirks that defied a predictable pattern. Just like the comment Eldeen had made another time about Rush Limbaugh. Perry would have expected her to extol the man's conservative political views, views he knew she shared, but instead she had said, “He rides a mighty high horse, that man does, and he's profane, and I don't like the way he cuts people down either.”

When Cal finally wound down and said good-bye several minutes later, Perry hung up the phone and stared down at the profile he had drawn. During Cal's story he had filled in several warts and moles and darkened in a hairy eyebrow. The figure looked like a sexual mutant, neither distinctively male nor female. He neatly tore the page out of his Day-Timer and walked over to the refrigerator, where he secured the drawing under a pineapple magnet. There, that added a homey touch. A stranger walking through the house would see that and think there was a child living here. Well, maybe not. Children were rarely ambiguous about the sexual orientation of the people in their artwork.

He picked up his coffee cup and emptied it into the sink. For a long moment he stood at the window over the sink and looked out into the backyard. Someone before Beth's time had planted a number of flowering trees and bushes, all of which were in various stages of bloom now. The mimosa was still covered with what looked like the feathery pink puffs on a pair of frivolous acrylic heels Dinah had once bought as a joke and worn around the house with a frilly yellow robe. The hydrangea blooms were heavy and lush—a rich lapis blue—and a row of tall plants Eldeen had identified as hollyhocks boasted showy purplish flowers.

Toward the back of the yard stood a lone crape myrtle with a slim gnarled trunk and white lacy clusters just beginning to bloom. A large fig tree took up one whole corner of the yard, its wide leaves spread out like flat green mittens to shield the ripening figs. If the person who had planted all this had taken any time to do a little preliminary planning, the effect might have been quite attractive. As it was, it looked accidental. The hedge along the side fence was in need of a trim, but Perry quickly dismissed the thought of working outside in this weather. Yard work held no appeal for him anyway.

He leaned closer to the window and found that he could see most of Jewel's backyard, too—the small storage shed, the badminton net, the blueberry bushes partially sheathed with white gauze netting. To his surprise, as he watched, one of the bushes trembled slightly, and the white netting slipped down farther on one side. Joe Leonard stood up suddenly in the middle of the bushes and looked up at the sun. He was wearing a white T-shirt, Perry noticed, and he had a handkerchief tied around his forehead. He stepped out from among the bushes and set a small bucket on the ground, then busied himself recovering the bushes with the net.

Watching Joe Leonard now, Perry felt the sudden transfer in time that he often did when observing his neighbors. If he weren't standing in a house cooled by three air-conditioning window units with a new Toyota sitting in the driveway, he could easily believe it was around the turn of the century. Joe Leonard, with his freckles and rolled-up denim jeans, picking up his pail of berries, could easily pass for Tom Sawyer. He could imagine the boy walking on a rail fence and rafting down the river. Of course, he couldn't imagine him sneaking out of the house at night or telling bald-faced lies, but then Tom Sawyer hadn't lived with the likes of Eldeen either. He started wondering how differently Mark Twain's book would have shaped up if Aunt Polly had been Eldeen instead. That would have changed things from the outset. Huck Finn would have gotten saved in the second or third chapter, and his drunk pappy would have sobered up and become a traveling preacher.

Joe Leonard stopped at the storage shed and set his pail down. Perry saw him lift a brick beside the door and remove the Ziploc bag that held the key to the shed. He unlocked the door, then carefully slipped the key back into the plastic bag, ran his thumb and index finger along the seal, and set it back between the two bricks. He swung open the shed door and rolled out the lawn mower. Turning it over, he examined the blades, then set it upright again. He stepped back inside the shed and brought out a small red gasoline tank. It was hard for Perry to see Troy ever reaching this level of responsibility—regularly tending a dozen blueberry bushes, handling gasoline, keeping up with the yards of eight or ten neighbors. He even did housework. Perry had been paying him for over three months now to vacuum and dust Beth's house every Saturday.

He thought of a line of the poem he'd just sent Cal. “The lean hand, the slow swell of sinew.” He had watched Joe Leonard's hands last Sunday when he had played his tuba for the July Fourth service at church. He had studied him afterward as he gingerly set the tuba on its large bell beside the piano and stepped back into the choir. He saw Joe Leonard's long fingers nimbly open his black folder and smooth the pages of the next choir number they were preparing to sing. He wondered what those hands would do in years to come. Then the choir rose, and though Perry knew he should be watching Willard for the cue to begin singing, he couldn't take his eyes off Joe Leonard. The boy's lips parted, and he came in confidently: “O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain.”

Now, as he watched Joe Leonard tightly rescrew the lid to the gasoline can and take it back into the shed, he remembered the last line of the poem he had typed out and sent to Cal. “The steady eye, the scanning for bottles washing into port.”

21

A Mirror of Heaven

“Look at them big old poofy white clouds!” Eldeen said later that day as she and Perry walked across the gravel parking lot toward the church. “What a pretty day for a wedding!”

Perry nodded in assent, although his idea of a pretty day was one about twenty degrees cooler and without the oppressive humidity. Why two people would choose to be married during the hottest month and in the hottest part of the afternoon was a mystery to him. But he was glad for the wedding. He had told Cal in an earlier phone conversation that he was hoping he would get in on a wedding and a funeral during his year here. He had already witnessed several baptismal and Communion services and had typed them up in detail in a file labeled
ORDINANCES
, although he had omitted the part about little Micah Spivey losing his footing in the baptistry and splashing water onto some of the choir members.

Now for the wedding. He couldn't remember the last time he had gone to a wedding. It could have been the one he and Dinah had attended at the biggest church in Chicago. The bride was a distant cousin of Dinah's, and the wedding was a flashy, spectacular affair, with ten attendants, all of whom looked like Barbie clones. If he remembered correctly, the marriage had lasted only a little longer than it had taken the bridesmaids to get down the aisle.

“I'm so glad Pat found her such a nice young man to marry,” Eldeen was saying. “It was just the Lord's timing that brought them together that way.” The story of Pat Tillman's meeting Marty Chest had been repeated many times among the churchfolk, but Eldeen still loved to talk about it. On the first day of classes back in January at a Christian college in Alabama, Pat had been looking for a blue pen she'd dropped during chapel. She was running her hand up under the seats when she felt another hand all of a sudden. She had drawn back immediately and looked behind her, and there sat Marty Chest, blushing bright red. She leaned down again and peered under her seat, and there she saw her blue pen lying right beside a gold one. She picked them both up and passed the gold one back to Marty, and then after chapel he had thanked her and apologized for the trouble.

They had discovered the next day that Marty was sitting in the wrong place when the girl assigned to that seat showed up. He moved to his right seat two rows back, but he and Pat continued to say hello and smile at each other.

“But Pat couldn't get the sight of them blue and gold pens out of her mind!” Eldeen said now as they started up the four wide steps to the church. “Said it reminded her of a husband and a wife going through life side by side. And I guess Marty couldn't either 'cause he started writing Pat little notes and asking her to go places with him. To think they
both
dropped their pens at the same time, and they landed right smack next to each other! The Lord sure uses curious ways to bring people together!”