Suncatchers (44 page)

“I-m-p-o-1-i-t-e!” declared Josh, grinning and pointing at Joe Leonard.

“Well, I didn't know old Joe Leo here would turn so vicious,” said Howie loudly, laughing a little too brightly, obviously chagrined over losing. “But I invite everybody to watch me take him on in a regular game. How about it, Joe Leo? Not afraid to get beat, are you?” Howie picked up a paddle and ball and poised as if ready to serve.

But Sid Puckett stood up then and corralled everybody over toward the piano. Marilee Tucker accompanied while Sid tried to lead a few choruses, but the words on the chart he had written out were hard to read and only the six members of the youth group knew the tunes anyway.

“I'm not going to preach to you tonight,” Sid said after the third song, “but I did ask our young people to be ready to give a few words of testimony before we have prayer and eat dessert.” He looked around hopefully. “Who'll go first?”

Bonita Puckett stood up, twisting her hands. “I just want to say thanks to my mom and dad for planning all this for us and for starting the youth group activities this fall, because we never used to do anything like this just for us. And I want to thank Rochelle for coming with me, since Dad told us all we couldn't come unless we brought someone with us.” Everyone laughed nervously as if to help Bonita out. She cleared her throat, took a deep breath, then said, “I'm glad I'm a Christian, and I'm thankful to God for the way he directs us. I prayed that he'd show me who to ask tonight, and the very next day Rochelle stopped by my locker and asked if I had a pencil she could borrow. So we made this trade—she got the pencil and I got her to come with me tonight . . . and I'm just thankful for a good church like this and a good family and good friends . . . and I guess that's all.” She shrugged and giggled, then sat down.

“Bet she never gave the pencil back!” Josh called out.

“Did too!” Rochelle shot back.

“Okay, you two,” Sid said, laughing. “We're going to make you sit by each other if you don't learn to get along.”

“She started it!” Josh cried, pointing at Rochelle and pushing out his lips in a fake pout.

“Let's get back to our testimonies,” Sid said. “Who wants to go next? Josh, how about you?”

Josh sprang to his feet. “At your service, sir!” he exclaimed, saluting crisply. Perry expected a comedy routine, but instead Josh sobered and delivered a short speech that he had obviously thought about beforehand. Perry had already heard from Eldeen that the Chewning twins were bright, but Josh's testimony proved it. Remembering the stub of a pencil behind his ear, Perry jotted down a few of Josh's points on a paper napkin so he could remember them later. “I always wanted to be a star” was how Josh led into his testimony. Two or three of the visitors started to laugh but stopped when no one else joined in. The church young people somehow seemed to know Josh had switched from silly to serious.

Josh proceeded to develop three ways he had decided he could be a star. The first was “to shine
wherever
God puts me,” and he talked briefly about being willing to go to the mission field if that's where God led him someday. He said he thought maybe God wanted him to go to Peru or Chile, but his family was praying about it. The second way he could be a star, he said, was “to radiate light in a dark world,” and he quoted the verse from Matthew, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” The third way was “to shine
all
the time,” and he pointed out that the stars were always up there, even in the daytime, even on cloudy nights. They never quit shining just because they weren't on display.

After Joshua sat down, Perry looked back over the short outline he had written down. Surely the boy hadn't come up with this on his own. Had he read it somewhere? The kid was only fourteen years old. Where had he learned to speak like that—so fluently, so convincingly, so sincerely, so
maturely
? Perry looked over at Rochelle. She was staring at Josh with a puzzled expression, looking almost rebuked, as if wondering, “Is this the same kid I called immature earlier?”

Marilee Tucker was speaking now, but Perry could hardly concentrate. It came to him that this whole concept of the youth activity was a pretty good one for accomplishing the church's objectives. It wasn't a dating thing, yet there was the fun of boys and girls being together. There were alert chaperones and no dangerous dead time. It fulfilled the principle Brother Hawthorne was so adamant about: “Reaching out to others.” There was friendly competition, besides good food and lots of laughter—and now an opportunity for the church teens to tell a captive audience about their Christianity. And they were all doing it, too—standing up one by one to say their piece. How did these fundamentalists do it? How did they raise kids like this? It had to take constant effort.

He recalled a Wednesday evening talk Brother Hawthorne had addressed specifically to fathers, in which he had spoken about the subject of discipline. “Part of my love for Hannah, Esther, and Levi,” he had said, “includes my saying things like ‘No, you may not play in the street, and if you disobey, you will face my judgment.' My love goes hand in hand with my chastening. I wouldn't fully love my children if I didn't take the time to discipline them. In that way we fathers are to our earthly children what God is to His spiritual children.”

Brother Hawthorne had paused, then continued. “You cannot bring your children up properly, fathers, if you fail to correct them—lovingly yet consistently. Even when your favorite football team is on television. It can't wait till halftime. You have to be willing to get up and take care of first things first.” Perry had felt uncomfortable as the pastor's words sank in. He thought back to all the times he had overlooked Troy's fits of temper, had given in to him, had intervened when Dinah had wanted to take a firm hand. Maybe part of the fundamentalists' success with their children—at least the six here at the Church of the Open Door—had to do with the fathers. Perry wished he knew for sure.

“ . . . and for Perry, too.” Joe Leonard was talking now, looking first down at his feet, then up to the ceiling. Perry wished he had been paying attention better. “I know God sent him to us,” Joe Leonard continued. “He's . . . well, he's been an awfully good neighbor . . . and a friend, too, and I guess in a lot of ways like a . . .”

In the short space of time it took Joe Leonard to form his thoughts, Perry hoped earnestly, almost frantically,
Don't, please don't say that I've been like a father to you. You know it's not true. Fathers teach their children, they guide them, they provide them with confidence to face life, they encourage them, they . . . do so many things that I don't even do with my own son, much less you, don't say it. Please don't say it
.

“ . . . well, he's like a . . . big
brother
to me, and I always wanted one of those,” Joe Leonard concluded. Dottie Puckett looked over at Perry and smiled warmly. Joe Leonard paused again and even from behind him, Perry could tell the boy was blushing by the way his ears pinkened.

29

The Corners of His Memory

“And those are some of my memories,”
Perry wrote on the last page of the little book he had bought at the card shop. He twisted his gold Cross pen, retracting its ball nib, then set it down neatly beside the book. There. He was finished. He picked up the book and thumbed back through the pages, surprised at how easy it had been to fill them all. He had actually written something in ink without a rough draft. He had started late Friday night after he had come home from Jewel's, added a few pages on Saturday and more last night after talking with Troy on the telephone, then finished it this morning. Now as his eye caught phrases he had written, something inside him said again, “You'll never mail this to her. It's too revealing. You'll intend to, say you're going to, maybe even wrap it up and address it. But in the end you'll choke. When it comes to releasing it to the care of the United States Postal Service, you'll snatch it back.”

Looking back over his own written words, he was troubled by a strange sensation, somewhat like that of studying his own face in a mirror. Is this really me? he often found himself thinking as he shaved in the morning. Am I really standing here shaving? He wished he could remember the name of the ancient Chinese philosopher who had had a dream about being a butterfly but posed the question afterward: “Was I a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I am a man?” During his first two months here in Derby, Perry had frequently looked around in Beth's house and asked himself, “Am I
really
here, or is this something I'm
imagining
for a book I'm writing?” He often felt like he had somehow managed to transfer himself to some past time and was simply remembering a place he had once visited.

He usually printed his notes, but he had written the words in the little book in cursive. Dinah used to say his penmanship belonged on the Declaration of Independence, that he could easily forge the original document if he ever wanted to. Studying the ruled pages now, he found it hard to believe he had really written these words, slanted so uniformly, set down so boldly. But who else would have written phrases like “your wide-brimmed straw hat tipped rakishly, your amber hair spilling out beneath its circle of summer flowers,” “the delicate, swift curves of your tapered fingers—the ballet of your hands as you talk,” “the grace of your classical features, the glow of your romantic eyes”? Certainly not Thomas Jefferson or John Hancock. The founding fathers would surely blush at such sappiness.

He turned back to the first page.
“These are some of my memories,”
he had started out a few minutes before midnight on Friday. He had just seen Willard's wistful, shining eyes searching the skies overhead, had just heard his whimsical entreaty “Star light, star bright,” had sensed the plaintive urgency behind it, had felt a tug of desire in his own heart as he stepped into his empty kitchen and saw Dinah's birthday gift wrapped in its shiny gold paper sitting beside his bags of groceries on the table.

In recording his memories in the little book, he had reached far back—to the first time he had seen Dinah sitting beside the old stone fountain in a shady, secluded alcove outside the Student Union. She had been reading, but from time to time she looked up toward the little naked cherubs spewing water from their stained copper mouths.

He had been pretending to read himself—excerpts from William Bradford's
Of Plymouth Plantation
, John Winthrop's
Journal
, and the poetry of Anne Bradstreet. Vivid phrases jumped out at him, but none of the prose passages held together with the least bit of cohesion—“a hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men,” “riotous prodigality and profuse excess,” “took a rapier and ran him through.” Only Bradstreet's poetry made any sense whatsoever, but even then only a single line here and there—“The earth reflects her glances in thy face,” “I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,” “There's none on earth can parallel.” He had been forced to reread the entire twenty-page assignment later that night, at which time he saw that he had completely missed the overall meaning in his earlier reading.

Having begun writing on Friday night, committing on white lined pages in unequivocal black ink his memories of Dinah, Perry had compiled an amazing assortment of specifics. And Dinah had always scolded him for being in a daze. This would show her that he had been paying a lot more attention all those years than she had given him credit for—if he decided to send it. He even surprised himself at some of the details he had poked out of the corners of his memory.

He was hoping in his handwritten chronicle to run across some memory that might unlock the mystery of Dinah's disaffection, but the last page was now filled and nothing had come to light. One detail disturbed him, though, and he wasn't sure why it hadn't signaled danger the first time he observed it. Probably because he wasn't looking for danger.

It had happened about two years earlier. He had driven to Chicago to meet with Cal about several matters. It had turned out to be a setup, however, with a former sociology professor of Perry's who had left Urbana for a teaching job at the University of Chicago. This professor had wanted to collaborate with somebody on a book about a street gang called the Scorpios, and Cal had suggested Perry, then lured him to lunch with Professor Jernigan. It hadn't worked, of course. Perry was deep into a science-fiction trilogy at the time, with plans for a second series after that one, and had no intention of returning to academic writing anytime soon.

He had gotten home earlier that night than he had expected to and had entered the house without Troy or Dinah hearing him. He wasn't
trying
to sneak up on them, but once inside, hearing the sound of their voices in Troy's bedroom, he had walked quietly down the hallway and stood outside the door, observing them around the corner. They had been playing the Memory Game, a simple little matching game with rows of pictures turned face down, a game that Dinah insisted on playing regularly, holding to the theory that it would increase Troy's attention span, which had been a problem in second grade.

“I
knew
it was there!” he had heard Troy say triumphantly, adding a pair of cards to his small stack.

“You get to go again,” Dinah had prodded, followed by a moment of silence.

“Where was that other train?” Troy had said. “I think it was . . .”

“Sorry,” Dinah said. “You were close. It was right next to it. See?”

“Mo-o-o-om.” The inflection was one they heard often, stretching out the word and weighting it with exasperation, blame, whiny protest.