Endless Chain (16 page)

“Has that been your experience?”

Her smile was thin enough to be a veneer. “Only when I let it be. I’ve spoken English since I was a child. To look at me, I could be Italian or Greek or even Mideastern. Of course, Mideastern would make me even less popular these days. Prejudice in this country is like chapters in a book. Chapter One: Hating the Africans and Indians. Chapter Two: Don’t Forget the Irish. Chapter Three: Polish jokes.” She shrugged. “Hispanics? Latinos? Whatever you call us? Maybe we’re Chapter Fifteen or Sixteen on the East Coast, but we’re the preface in the West.”

“If you know about Polish jokes, you’ve been well acquainted with this culture for some time.”

She seemed to step back without moving a muscle. “What shall I do, Sam? Would you like me to clean inside?”

“Helen’s gone to buy food. When she gets back, I bet she’d like to have help putting lunch together.”

“Adoncia’s a wonderful cook. Maybe that’s where she’d be best, too.”

He could not let this opportunity pass. He felt he’d been on the verge of discovery. “You’ve spoken English since childhood? That doesn’t surprise me. And you’ve had a good education, haven’t you? Someday, will you tell me what you’re doing here?”

“
La verdad a medias es mentira verdadera.
”

“The Spanish lessons have begun?”

“Half a truth is a whole lie.” Her expression was troubled. “I would prefer not to lie to you, Sam.”

He suspected she was telling him a lot, without telling him anything. She started to turn away, but he put his hand on her arm. “Have you lied to me already?”

She didn’t answer directly. “I have always tried to tell you as much of the truth as I can. Make of that what you will.”

He dropped his hand, although he didn’t want to. “I can be trusted. You don’t have any reason to be afraid of me.”

“I have reasons to be afraid of everyone.”

She left to intercept Adoncia for a trip to the church kitchen. Sam wondered if he would ever know who she really was.

“Ah, you think you know what it’s like to be poor,” Adoncia told Helen, “but I bet you never made soup from the same chicken four times.”

“Four times? We were so poor when I was a girl, on Thanksgiving day we split one miserable little hen among my family and my aunt’s besides, and still made soup from the bones and feet and sucked the toes.” Helen’s eyes sparkled. “Then we buried the feathers in our garden for fertilizer!”

“Ha! You had a garden? We were so poor we just had pots on a windowsill. We had to grow everything we ate in four little pots. For a family of twelve.”

“You could afford pots? We used rusted tin cans from the landfill.”

Adoncia giggled. “You had a landfill? We had no trash to put in such a thing. Who could afford trash?”

Adoncia and Helen had been trading absurd stories from the moment they’d set eyes on each other. Rarely had Elisa seen two people take to each other so quickly. She wondered how long it would be before Helen had Adoncia and maybe the other women at the park making quilts.

“Okay, you two,” Elisa said. “It’s a tie. You were both poor. And each of you is as good a liar as the other.”

“Oh, don’t spoil our fun,” Helen said. She was sitting at a wide metal table in the middle of the kitchen, slapping sandwiches together from cold cuts and bread she and Dovey had bought at the store. Adoncia was at the industrial-sized stove, finishing a slapdash chili using ingredients she’d dug out of the church freezer and cupboards. Adoncia could make a meal out of anything.

“I think Helen and I should go to this landfill of hers and see what we can find together,” Adoncia said. “We could probably furnish a house or two.”

“Both of you need to be carefully watched.” Elisa poured the tea she’d brewed into glasses filled with ice, then set them on a tray. She had already set up tables in the social hall for the workers.

“Adoncia, I’ll need your telephone number,” Helen said with a loudly audible sniff. “So we can talk when she’s not around to snoop.”

Elisa laughed. “I’ll tell everybody lunch is ready.”

“Oh, good, some time alone,” Adoncia told Helen.

Still smiling, Elisa left the church for
La Casa,
wondering what she would find.

Sam was standing in front with hands dug into the pockets of his jeans, admiring the progress. She halted beside him and gave a low whistle. “The words are gone.”

“It took a lot more primer than we’d expected, but it’ll be ready for yellow paint as soon as that dries.”

“You’re going ahead?” The original plan had been to simply block out the words so the children wouldn’t see them.

“Everybody wants to. We can finish painting after lunch. And they’ve made so much progress inside, we might even be able to use the house today, although there’ll be no computers for a while, not until we get new monitors, at the very least.” The boys had smashed every screen, but she knew Sam was hopeful the computers themselves weren’t damaged.

“Wouldn’t that be great if the kids could come here today?”

He glanced at her. “How do we keep everybody from sitting with their own little group at lunch?”

“We trust them.”

“I like the sound of that. I usually trust people to do the right thing.”

She suspected he wasn’t simply talking about the work crew.

At lunch, just as they’d hoped, the workers sat wherever there was an empty space. Paco, Patia’s boarder, whose English was minimal, ended up between Dovey and Gracie Barnhardt and gave impromptu Spanish lessons, using items on the table for vocabulary. If there had been any lingering reservations, they melted completely when several women who hadn’t been able to assist that morning arrived with dozens of homemade chocolate chip cookies and giant jugs of freshly squeezed lemonade to finish the meal.

Elisa landed across the table from Sam. The conversation turned to the teenagers in the pickups and hopes the sheriff would apprehend them.

Sam caught her gaze. “The sheriff might need to talk to you, in case he thinks these are the same boys who were with Leon that day. You might be able to help me describe them.”

Elisa’s last bite of sandwich felt dry in her throat. She didn’t quite look at him. “I doubt I can tell him anything. It’s been weeks, and I wasn’t paying attention to anyone but Leon.”

Sam waited until she looked right at him. “They’d only want to know about the boys,” he said, softly enough that only she would hear.

“I don’t remember a thing.”

He didn’t look away when he nodded. She was the first to break eye contact. She was sure he had realized that she did not want to talk to the police, whether she remembered details or not. And if he was that astute, he would be growing even more curious about her.

Elisa knew she had already put her future here in jeopardy. Sam had slipped past her defenses too many times. She silently vowed to be more careful.

By two, the first coat of yellow paint had been spread to cover the multiple coats of primer. Everything that could not be repaired had been hauled away, and Kendra and several of the mothers had driven to the nearest discount store to purchase posters to replace the ones that had been destroyed until more vocabulary posters could be ordered. They returned with several chairs for the kitchen table and another rag rug to replace the one that had been urinated on before the boys left the house.

It was a contest in Sam’s mind which act of destruction had most violated the spirit of love and cooperation they had set out to build here.

Sam had not had an opportunity to have more than a moment or two alone with Kendra Taylor or to thank her for her hard work. He found her as she was gathering her things to return to Washington.

“I promise this isn’t a typical day at Community Church,” he told her.

“Not typical, perhaps, but a good example of people of good will doing whatever they can to change the world.”

“Despite setbacks.”

“I may well write that story I mentioned, but I’ll be sure to make what happened here today as important as what happened yesterday.”

“I can’t ask for more.” He held out his hand. “You’ll come back for that talk?”

They shook. “We—my husband and I—own land not far away. I have fantasies of building a house here, Isaac doesn’t. I guess I just wanted to check out the community.”

“Ammunition to convince your husband?”

“Or to dissuade me. It goes a little deeper than that, but we can talk another time.”

“Feel free to come back, Kendra. You’ll always be welcome, and so will your husband.”

“Isaac is not a churchgoer.”

“Then come alone.”

“I may be calling for your take on what happened here.”

“I’ll be available.”

One by one the volunteers said goodbye. He watched Elisa leave with her carload of friends from the park, followed by the others who had come separately. He had thanked each of them personally, and he hoped they knew how genuine his appreciation was. He’d had an idea, too, when saying goodbye to Patia and Paco. If the young man checked out and was willing, Sam thought he might be able to persuade the deacons to allow Paco to stay upstairs at
La Casa
for extra security. There was a room that wasn’t in use that could be fixed up quickly in exchange for patrolling the grounds in the evening and keeping his eyes and ears open. And Paco could use the kitchen and bath downstairs. Of course, they would have to teach him some rudimentary English in case he had to call the police.

The tutors began to arrive, although some had come earlier to clean and merely needed to stay on. Soon after, the school bus arrived and eight children got off, walking shyly up the drive to their newly painted yellow house. Sam was proud and sad simultaneously, and he hoped that they would not be upset that the computers wouldn’t be available today.

Three little girls, holding hands, came to greet him. Two boys of seven and eight had run full tilt for the porch, waving as they passed. An older boy of twelve and two older girls walked slowly past, pretending not to notice him. But just when it was almost too late, each one shot him a smile before climbing the steps to be greeted by the tutors. Together everyone had decided the tutors would explain only the basics. Some boys with nothing better to do had damaged some things, but in a few days the house would look almost the same.

Once the children settled in, Sam planned to bring popcorn and cider for their snack, to go with chocolate chip cookies saved for them by the morning’s volunteers. An extra treat seemed in order.

The front door had closed and the children were safely inside under the care of the tutors when another young man came trudging down the drive. Surprised, Sam waited for Leon Jenkins to reach him.

“How did you get here?” Sam asked.

“School’s out. Somebody dropped me off.”

Sam was casting around for the right way to begin his interrogation when Leon jammed his hands under his arms. “I, well, I just wanted you to know, like, I didn’t have anything to do with this. I guess you probably thought I did, right?”

Sam searched the boy’s face. Leon looked sorry, but not as if he felt personally responsible.

“I considered it,” Sam said honestly, “but I decided it didn’t fit. I believed your apology the other day. Nobody dragged it out of you. And I think you’re too strong to go along with something this vicious.”

“I tried to destroy the sign out front.”

“People change if they’re given the motivation. I think you learned what you needed to from that experience.”

Leon met his eyes. “The thing is, Reverend Sam, I’m pretty sure I know who did this. But I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Because somebody else told
me,
and, well, I promised I wouldn’t say anything. She’s afraid she’ll get in trouble. One of the guys is her cousin.”

It took Sam a moment to put all that together. “So you’re caught? If you tell, you betray a friend. If you don’t, you betray your church.”

“I, well, uh-huh. That’s about it.”

“I saw one of the pickups, and somebody down the road got a better look when it passed her house. It’s only a matter of time. The sheriff will figure it out.”

The boy looked relieved.

“Is there anything you can tell me?” Sam asked. “Without betraying any promises?”

“I could tell you the names of the guys who were with me, when, you know, I tried to knock down the sign that day. You could figure that out just by looking at the yearbook. I guess I could make it easier.”

“And that would help?”

Leon was careful not to give too much away. He shrugged. Sam knew that was as good as a yes.

“That afternoon when I, well, you know?” the boy went on. “I was trying to impress some people. Now look what happened.”

“Son, you’re talking to the master of ‘act, don’t think.’ I can’t tell you how many times I’ve followed an impulse and regretted it later.” Sam thought about Elisa, but he knew that explanation was too simple. His feelings about his sexton had grown well beyond impulse into something deeper and harder to control.