Suncatchers (63 page)

Joe Leonard had grinned and blushed when he opened his present from Perry and found a dark green sweater, and Jewel had been delighted with her new metronome. She promised to give Willard his gift to open when he came over that night.

The last gift was in a small box. Perry had found it at the Hallmark store in the mall and had bought it several weeks ago. He handed it to Eldeen to open, and she exclaimed, “Oh, but you've done given me something, a
great big
something! I can't take this, too!” But she had, and when she removed the lid from the small box, she gasped. “Oh, looka here, Jewel, it's a
suncatcher
to go with all our others! I'll be if it's not a little yellow
lighthouse!
If that's not the funniest thing. Think of it—a
lighthouse
for a suncatcher.” She was laughing and talking at the same time. “What a twist-around
that
is. Why, normally a lighthouse does its business in the dark and then gets to rest up during the daytime. But this little feller's gonna just shine and shine all day, then take hisself a nap at nighttime. Somebody sure had a sense of humor to think this up!” She lifted it out and held it high. “If that's not just the prettiest thing—look at it when I hold it up to the light!”

Perry had told them then that he couldn't stay, that he had decided to drive to Rockford and that he needed to get on the road. For a moment all three of them had stared in surprise. Then Eldeen had hugged the suncatcher to her breast and said, “Oh, Perry, you just don't know how hard I've been praying for this. Your wife and little boy are going to have the best Christmas present ever!” Jewel had smiled warmly and said simply, “We'll pray for all of you.” Joe Leonard had offered to help him load his car. Before he left, they had filled a brown paper bag with sandwiches and cookies for the trip, and a few minutes later Jewel, Eldeen, and Joe Leonard stood in their driveway waving as Perry backed out.

“I'll be back in time for the wedding,” he had called to them. “And for our birthdays, too,” he had called to Eldeen, who yelled back, “You got you a deal! This one'll be
eighty
for me, remember!” As he was ready to turn onto Lily Lane, he glanced back and saw the three of them framed inside the rear window, the sun a great golden sphere suspended above the treetops. Jewel and Joe Leonard stood shoulder to shoulder, but Eldeen had moved forward a few steps and was still waving good-bye, fluttering both hands at once.

Another song was playing on the radio now. It was “Jingle Bells,” but Perry hadn't heard this version of it for years. It was a group of dogs barking the melody in different pitches. He thought of Hormel, of his alert little eyes and inquisitive nose, his vigilant ears and his aversion for strangers. He thought of the dachshund's stubby legs and his long, streamlined body, a physique perfectly suited to slipping through the small hole he had recently dug under the fence. He remembered Eldeen laughing over the phone call they'd gotten from Glenda Finch, asking if Hormel was missing. Glenda had seen him furiously digging at their neighbor's back fence, inside which lived a little female boxer. “Now if that wouldn't of been some kind of odd-looking puppies if Hormel had of gotten his way!” Eldeen had said, whooping with laughter. Joe Leonard had filled up the holes under both fences and had returned home with the thwarted but unabashed Hormel.

From Lexington to Indianapolis the memories continued to weave themselves through Perry's mind, smoothly sliding in and out, turning back on themselves, changing colors. He saw a billboard with a picture of a stately brick building advertising
BENNETT'S MORTUARY—WE CARE FOR YOU IN YOUR TIME OF NEED
. It dawned on Perry that the sedate brick building was really the only related object that could tastefully be pictured on such a billboard. It would be morbid to have large drawings of caskets, mourning wreaths, headstones, or even the face of a concerned funeral director gazing down at the freeway sympathetically. Perry suddenly remembered a comment of Cal's during his most recent phone call. “So no funerals, huh? Those people must be a pretty healthy lot.”

“None yet,” Perry had replied. “A couple of relatives have died, but nobody around here.” He felt a little guilty when he realized how disappointed both he and Cal were at the gap this was going to leave in his book.

The radio kept him going. It was amazing that in every song some detail looped a thread back to Derby, South Carolina. On his way to Indianapolis he thought about everything from the nesting dove in the Hawthornes' carport to Eldeen's brother Arko, who had ridden the bus from Arkansas to visit for four days at Thanksgiving. Arko had turned out to be a large, loose-jowled man with a deep, hollow, barking laugh. Everything about him had reminded Perry of a walrus.

He thought of Chinese checkers, surprise muffins, and the movie he had driven to Greenwood to see one lonely Friday night in August, the day before Troy's ninth birthday. “The summer's best story” it had been hailed. It had received generous praise from both critics and the public in general, and Perry had been in dire need of a good story that weekend. He couldn't remember much about the plot, however, an understandable lapse considering he had left before the movie was half over. His sudden rising from his seat, stumbling past four people, and stepping directly onto the toe of one of them had both surprised and puzzled him.

He remembered how hot it had been that August night, yet how blessedly cool it felt once he was out of the air-conditioned theater and walking toward his car. He wasn't sure he could have explained to anyone why he left. He couldn't even explain it to himself, except that he had been troubled by the hard faces of all the women on the screen. In one graphically steamy scene, he had been filled with something akin to loathing—but for what, he couldn't say.
Why?
he had asked himself. Any red-blooded man who had been living like a monk in an overchurched backwoods town like Derby should have welcomed a scene like that. But he recalled now that when the camera had moved in for a close-up of the woman's face a few minutes later, her full lips had parted, and she had laughingly uttered an obscenity. She had been a beautiful, lusty brunette with deep dimples. Maybe it was because her face, especially the dimples, had reminded him of Jewel's that he had leaped from his seat and pushed his way to the aisle.

As he had driven home from the theater that night, he had imagined the faces of women—Jewel's fair features, Eldeen's kind brow puckered with someone else's burden, Birdie Freeman's sweet plainness, Glenda Finch's radiant smile, Edna Hawthorne's rosy plumpness, Nina Tillman's gypsy-dark eyes, Barb Chewning's fresh athletic glow. He saw Dinah also—beautiful in that wide, versatile way that some women have of looking childishly innocent one moment and gloriously sophisticated the next, but always with a heart wholesome and trustworthy and guileless. Women—the salvation of the world. If women fell, where was man's hope? He thought of the sad faces of Jewel and Eldeen if they ever found out he had been to such a movie tonight.

Between Indianapolis and Chicago, Perry happened upon a radio station playing traditional Christmas carols one right after the other. For several miles he thought about the recent Christmas program at the Church of the Open Door. Then suddenly “Thou Didst Leave Thy Throne” ended, and without any transition whatsoever, a man's deep voice began reading from the book of Isaiah. “‘He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. . . . '” It was a resonant, expressive voice, artistic in its shadings of words, yet the thought occurred to Perry that the passage was inappropriate to the Christmas season. Had someone at the radio station made a mistake and punched the wrong button? “‘Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.'” Why not a chapter from one of the Gospels, something pertaining to the birth of Jesus? “‘But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed.'”

The language was lovely, richly textured and mournfully evocative, but it didn't exactly foster the Christmas spirit. Surely any minute now someone at the station would notice the mistake and correct it. But the voice continued its grave intonation. Maybe the person at the control board had fallen asleep. Perry knew there couldn't be many other people listening to the radio at three o'clock on Christmas morning. The whole business would probably go unreported. “‘All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.'”

In the future Perry was to refer, privately, to the experience that followed as an epiphany, but at the moment he didn't think to put a label to it. All he knew was that by the time the reader had reached the final words several verses later—”‘And he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors'”—something had illuminated his thinking, as suddenly as day must have sprung forth when God said, “Let there be light.” Of course, he thought, what more perfect subject for Christmas than the Crucifixion? It's the whole reason behind the birth in the manger. It's the grand culmination of God's love to sinful humanity. One can't talk about Christmas without talking about the cross.

And the Crucifixion wasn't complete by itself either. The Resurrection had to be faced and dealt with. You couldn't very well believe in one and not the other. It made no sense to Perry to place faith in certain parts of the Bible but to discount others as lacking credibility. Every story in the Bible, from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to the wise men's journey from the East to John's revelation on the Isle of Patmos, hinged on what one believed concerning the very existence and nature of God. It was all part of the big picture. You either believed it all, or you threw it all out.

Perry thought of Hollister Abrams's ruddy face as he had said, “Everything in this whole world is so . . . so linked together.” And he remembered the words to a song Edna Hawthorne had sung recently: “What will you do with Jesus?” The question branded itself on his mind now. It had all been so easy before. He hadn't had to answer such questions before because he had known so little of Jesus except as a shadowy, controversial historical figure. But now—now it was different. He had read the whole Bible, had heard it preached regularly for almost a year. He had to admit that it seemed to fit together.

He thought of an axiom he had heard somewhere, one of those pedantic moralisms he had always hated: “Knowledge carries with it responsibility.” So now he had a little knowledge. What was he going to do about it? He could feel the pulsing of his heart, could
hear
it in his head. What if it stopped all of a sudden? What if he suddenly just stopped breathing or had a wreck? What then? He turned off the radio and drove in dark silence for many miles, pondering.

————

It was a little before six o'clock when he finally pulled into a motel on the outskirts of Rockford. A man came out from a back room when Perry opened the door. He looked suspicious when asked about renting a room for an hour, but he gave Perry a key anyway and took his money.

He showered first—a long hot shower—then shaved slowly, ritualistically. He put on clean clothes. The shirt was one Dinah had given him for a birthday several years ago. He thought suddenly of his birthday coming up in a couple of weeks. He remembered the day several months ago when Eldeen had discovered that their birthdays were exactly a week apart. “January the sixth and January the thirteenth! Now if that doesn't beat all! There's another coincidence for you!” Perry smiled over her loose definition of the word
coincidence
, over her capacity to get excited about even the most trivial of circumstances.

When he returned the motel key to the desk, the clerk took it without smiling. The thought struck Perry that maybe the man was sulking over having to work on Christmas Day. “It could be worse,” he wanted to tell the man. “You could be on your way to a house you had run away from, where you will probably face a lukewarm, if not a hostile, reception. You could be right now frantically groping around for something to say by way of introduction, hoping intensely for a miracle you knew you didn't deserve. You could be overcome with the sickness of dread, wondering why you had undertaken such a foolhardy task.”

Exactly twelve minutes later, at 7:09
A.M.
, he pulled up in front of the house and turned off the engine of his Toyota. The sun was rising feebly. His heart was thudding, and his hands felt cold and sticky. What was he going to say when she opened the door—if she did? He hadn't come up with the first workable idea.

He tried again to think of all the things going on in the world at this moment, things to put his own small trial into perspective. Somewhere a fire was blazing out of control, wreaking destruction. Somewhere a car was rounding a curve to collide head on with another. Somewhere a child was starving to death. But it didn't work. Fires and accident and starvation were all impersonal. This meeting with Dinah was personal and it was
now
. He looked up toward the house. All right, God, let's see how this prayer thing translates to everyday life, he thought. This time I'm going to do it on purpose—not like that other time walking around the neighborhood. As he sat there in his car with his eyes closed, he felt calm for the first time during the entire trip. His mind was clear, his lips set in a purposeful line. He felt that he wasn't the only one interested in the outcome of this thing he was about to do. Could it be that Eldeen was awake back in Derby, kneeling by her bed, praying for him? She did get up early to pray—he knew that. The thought was comforting, but he didn't have time now to muse about possibilities. As he opened the car door, stepped out onto the street, and turned his steps toward the front door of his house, seven words filled his mind: “Dear God, please fix this broken thing.”