Suncatchers (61 page)

Even as he noted the flaws, however, he leapt to Eldeen's defense. Anyone who could instinctively manipulate rhythm and rhyme so
regularly
could surely learn the artistry of variation and subtlety. Remember, he told himself, this was written by a woman who was forced to quit school at the age of twelve.

He read the poem a third time. There was something around the edges of his consciousness trying to get through. It was more than just feeling sorry for a kind old woman whose opportunities for formal schooling as a child had been turned off like a faucet, whose affection for him had both surprised and warmed him. It was more than just the memory of her delight over surprising everyone and winning the fifty dollars. It was something in the poem itself.

And then it came to him. First of all, Eldeen had created a persona, though she probably wouldn't have known what to call it. Perry knew the “I” in the first three stanzas wasn't Eldeen herself. If she had ever had an apple tree or well, he was certain she would have effervesced with thankfulness, and to any special friend she had failed to appreciate she would have offered prompt and profuse apologies. But the average person reading the newspaper wouldn't know that about her, and it moved Perry to think that Eldeen would put herself forward so unflatteringly, as a tight-lipped ingrate.

He thought about the interview of Eldeen that he had recorded on two cassette tapes. He had had to stop her after an hour and insert a second tape, which she had also filled up. The interview was a virtual paean to God's goodness to her since she had been a baby. Every memory she brought forth was steeped with gratitude. Even quitting school—as she had put it, “It just made me feel so
chosen
to know that I could help out my family by working that way, because I sure knew—I mean I
sure knew
my mama and daddy was working their fingers to the bone to provide for me and Arko and Klim and baby Nori.” They had felt bad, she said, about asking her to go live with her uncle Marshall, whose wife had just died, and take care of a brood of young cousins, two of them little twin newborns, but Uncle Marshall had offered to pay her, and in her words, “I saw it as a real compliment that they'd ask me to accept a responsibility like that.” About growing up poor, she said, “Now I wouldn't of wanted it any other way. It teaches you so much about life! Why, my favorite toy as a little girl was a little cardboard box my mama gave me. I fixed up little scenes inside it with paper and sticks and leftover this-and-that and just had me the biggest time with that cardboard play-pretty!”

About her first husband's death of a horrible lingering cancer, it was “Malcolm was out of his head before it was over, but I counted it a privilege to be able to nurse him at home and see the blessed peace on his poor face when he finally breathed his last breath and entered the gates of heaven.” She had been thirty years old and childless. “My, how I did want me a baby!” she had said. “I wanted one the whole twelve years Malcolm and I were married, but something must of been wrong—I never could have one. Then after he died, I kept thinking about how a baby would of given me comfort. There my sister Nori was just married a little over a year by then, and she already had her a little baby, and she was the
sweetest
little thing—but a niece just doesn't match up with having one of your very own.” But even about the baby, she had said, “But I knew God could hear my prayers, so I had to hang onto His promise to supply all my
needs
, and I had to realize that a baby must not of been something I really needed right then.”

Her first husband had been gone for almost thirteen years when she had met Hiram Rafferty, a widower with a little girl. “Oh, I just thought I was in heaven!” she had declared. “Here was a man who wanted me to marry him—and he had the most precious little blue-eyed angel of a child you ever seen in your whole life!”

Perry remembered how emotional she had become telling about this part of her life. She hadn't even tried to stop and get her weeping under control but had kept right on talking, her face crinkled into its peculiar mask of anguished joy in spite of the tears, her throaty voice trembling. “So see, God gave me my own child in His own time, and I've never stopped thanking Him for a minute! If I had of already had a baby, then Jewel might not of been quite so special, and God knew all that. 'Course I was in my forties by then, so I knew I probably wouldn't ever be having any babies—but Jewel couldn't of been anymore like my own flesh and blood than if I'd carried her around here inside of me!” She had patted her stomach, then laid both her large hands on her face and wiped away the tears. Perry could clearly recall what she did next. Looking up at the ceiling, she had said aloud, “Thank you, dear loving Father, for sending me Hiram—and little Jewel!” Looking back at Perry, she had leaned forward and pointed upward. “And later on He gave me a grandson besides!”

Not once had she grumbled. About Hiram's sudden death from a heart attack at the age of sixty, she had said, “But praise the Lord he didn't have to suffer! He was gone in a flash, the doctor said. Just think, being here one minute and then being in heaven just like that,” and she had snapped her fingers. About Bailey's mysterious drowning, she had thought a moment, her eyes sunken deep beneath the dark hood of her eyebrows, then said, “Now that was a real hard time. It's been a heartache to see Joe Leonard without a daddy and poor Jewel so tore up, but”—and then her face had brightened—“but, oh, just see what God's done in bringing Willard along! Joe Leonard's going to have him a new daddy, and Jewel's happy again like I've not seen her since Bailey died. It just proves it's true! ‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning'!” The whole interview, both tapes front and back, was like that. “Oh, God's given me a
good
,
good
life,” she had concluded at the end. “He has just poured down blessings on me above all that I could ever ask or think!”

Perry was still standing in the spare room, still holding the poem, staring past it. How long he had been there he couldn't have said. His eyes fell again on the poem. He looked at the organization of the stanzas. The first one dealt with food. Hadn't he heard apples called “the perfect food”? The second stanza was about water, the consummate sustainer of life. The third was about another essential of life: love. By placing love last, before the final moralizing stanza, Eldeen had pointed it up as most important. Had she done all that intentionally? Did she know about climactic ordering in effective argumentation?

He walked slowly from the spare room into his bedroom, rereading the poem once more. Behind his eyes a dull, heavy ache pounded. He lay down on the bed fully clothed and held the poem above him. The lines blurred together, then curled themselves into black circles that spun tighter and tighter.

When Perry woke up, it was a few minutes after three o'clock. It took him a moment to figure out why the sun was streaming through the window at three o'clock. Then he remembered. It was three o'clock in the afternoon—and it was Christmas Eve. As he sat up and placed his feet on the floor, he knew exactly what he must do. What were people going to say if he tried to explain it? “It came to me in a dream” sounded like something a weirdo from the lunatic fringe would say. But he couldn't stop now to think about what people were going to say.

The poem had fallen to the floor, and he picked it up again. It was all so simple. Eldeen had written this poem for a local contest, but it might as well have been addressed directly to Perry. He was beyond defending himself. He knew he hadn't shown a minute's worth of gratitude during his entire life. And whereas before he would have vehemently argued that he had scarcely had cause to express gratitude, now he knew better. And “I'm sorry” and “I love you”—how often had he said those words—
said
, not
thought
? The verse from the book of Daniel came to him. “Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.” He had been touched by poetry before, but never like this, and never ever by such a clumsily crafted poem. It was almost embarrassing to think that he was finally being propelled into action by something like this—a hokey little ditty written by an old woman.

He wondered now as he swung his suitcase onto the bed and unlatched it whether he would be doing this had the poem been written by someone he'd never heard of and he'd run across it in, say, a magazine. He'd have to think about that later, after he was on the road.

As he hurried around the room yanking open drawers and tossing clothes into the suitcase, he counted the hours. Fifteen—that's about what it would take to drive straight through from Derby to Rockford. If he got away by four o'clock, that would be three o'clock in Rockford, so he should get there by six o'clock. Was that right? He ran through it again. Yes, he should be there by sunrise on Christmas Day.

He set his Bible on top of his clothes in the suitcase and went into the bathroom to pack his shaving kit. A picture flashed through his mind a few minutes later as he strode down the cramped hallway and set his suitcase beside the front door. He saw himself on a strong, nimble horse, bending into the wind as it galloped toward the sun.

39

A Man of Sorrows

When Perry thought about it later, the trip was one of those paradoxes of time, both fleeting and interminable. He arrived in Rockford long before he had worked out a proper stage entrance, though early during the course of the eleven hundred miles he had considered and discarded dozens of ideas—poses to strike, witty dialogue to toss off, meaningful gestures to convey attitude—and had developed a variety of scenarios in his mind to prepare himself for the many ways Dinah might respond upon first sight of him. In another sense, however, the miles seemed to creep by. With every road sign, he was disappointed that he still had so far to go.

Somewhere past Asheville, after an extended period of imagining an especially bleak chain of events upon his arrival in Rockford, Perry made up his mind to stop worrying and think about something else. He hit upon the idea of looking at the past ten months retrospectively, reviewing his life in Derby from every angle, trying to recall details of every incident. As he drove through the Smoky Mountains, he realized, happily, that he had a wealth of memories from Derby to draw on. He was well stocked for the whole trip.

For a time thereafter the trip took on a two-tiered aspect. On the one level he was a man in a Toyota on a simple mission—driving home for Christmas. It was on this level that he took note of the red needle on his fuel indicator, the exit ramps, mileage signs, billboards. It was on this level that he was aware of the lights of the cities, the deserted parking lots of malls at the edges of towns, the darkened windows of houses as the night wore on, the relief of finding a truck plaza open on Christmas Eve and the sense of wonder that it was, another “Open” sign at a Waffle House farther on. He saw the winking of Christmas lights around cities, a little girl asleep on a pile of blankets in the back of a station wagon, a highway patrol car pulled up behind a stranded minivan on the emergency lane.

Nor were his concerns on this level purely objective. Certain sights activated his imagination from time to time. He wondered if the car with the Oregon license plate really was headed for Oregon and where it had been. He tried to imagine why the driver, a middle-aged woman wearing glasses, was so far from home. He mused briefly about a farmhouse he saw with a single light burning downstairs. Were parents still working frantically inside, trying to put together a dollhouse or a train set? How did the attendant at the truck plaza get stuck with the Christmas Eve shift? Perry wondered if the man had a wife who was fuming over being at home alone.

While conscious of these details of his trip, on another level he was walking through a book—not the book he had written, but a colorfully illustrated picture book of his months in Derby. At first he tried to start back in February and progress sequentially, but he soon ran into difficulty, for every earlier incident seemed to create a synapse to a later one, the memories moving as fast as nerve impulses, refusing the confines of chronological order. Was that all memories were anyway—nerve impulses zipping around inside the brain? Perry stopped to consider this a moment. Was there a lobe of the brain where memory originated? He tried to remember the diagrams of brains in his old schoolbooks, the ones where little arrows pointed to sections labeled “speech center” and “motor skills.” He could remember terms—cerebellum, medulla, cerebrum, right brain functions, left brain functions—but he couldn't recall any teacher ever discussing how memory worked. Why did some people, even highly intelligent people, forget things almost instantly, while others, like Perry, hung onto the most trivial details, often things they didn't even realize they had noticed the first time, much less stored away to retrieve and rehash years later? Did these people have some kind of abnormally enlarged pouch somewhere in their brains? Yet these same people so often seemed to overlook the big, important principles of life.

Perry tried once again to put the events of February in order, but almost immediately found his memory hurtling forward to July, to an incident from the closing program of Daily Vacation Bible School, during which the visiting organizer—an authentic Australian who called himself “Wally B.”—led the children in a song about a little lost “jumbuck” who wandered from the herd. The jumbuck, of course, came to symbolize a wandering sinner as the song progressed. Between the verses of the song, little Levi Hawthorne had crawled around the platform on all fours, dressed in a woolly lamb costume, bleating pitifully. Wally B. had adopted as the theme for DVBS something he called “Boomerang Behavior,” which emphasized the principle of “getting back what you give out.” Perry remembered the frightening sound of all those light childish voices joined in perfect unison as they recited, almost shouted, together the Vacation Bible School Verse of the Week: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap!”