Hidden Riches (5 page)

As the man of the Futrell house, Clayton had been designated as the family spokesman today, a job Delcine thought was rightfully hers as the oldest. So when his name was finally called to give reflections on the life of his older sister, Clayton rose.

The pulpit overflowed with preachers and holy women, so many that folding metal chairs from the funeral parlor had been brought in to accommodate all of them. More flowers in sprays and bouquets and memorial tributes filled every other spot.

The flowers alone astonished every single one of the Futrells. Who knew people cared that much about Ana Mae? Since Delcine spoke at the wake and Clayton would now speak at the funeral, JoJo had been the designated family member who would collect the cards. They'd go through them later. Not that any of them actually knew the people who had sent them.

Forcing his mind back to what he was supposed to be thinking about, Clayton unconsciously straightened his tie, then put the first foot on the three steps leading to the pulpit and microphone.

Reverend le Baptiste cleared his throat. Loudly.

Clayton put his right foot on the next step.

Coughing broke out on the dais.

He glanced up. The pastor of Ana Mae's church and about a dozen other clergy members were giving him what could best be described as the evil eye. Definitely a
thou shalt not
look.

Unsure, Clayton paused on the step.

“Brother Futrell,” someone said behind him. “There's a microphone for you right here.”

Suddenly furious and feeling tenfold the slights he'd endured his entire life in Drapersville and Ahoskie, Clayton refused to let them intimidate him.

“It's all right,” he said, stepping up to the pulpit. “I'll just stand here.”

Gasps erupted from both the mourners and the preachers, mostly Baptists, with a few Pentecostals and Evangelicals also in the mix.

Three on the dais rose, as if to block the sacrilegious from their holy ground.

“It's all right,” Reverend Toussaint le Baptiste said. “Let the boy go on.”

Clayton, not knowing that he'd broken a cardinal rule of the black church—thou shalt not step into the pulpit unless ordained—nodded his thanks to the minister and patiently waited for the sputtering from the three and the murmuring from the assembly to quiet down. He glanced at Archer, who smiled at him.

Clayton's mouth dropped open.

It was the first true smile he'd seen from his partner in a long time. A long, long time.

They'd been going through a rough patch lately. Well, he conceded, it was more than a patch. They were just about splitsville. This trip to the East Coast, to bury the sister Clayton never took time to get to know, was probably their last as a couple. So to see Archer smile, to get that silent encouragement from him meant more than words could ever say.

Tears welled in his eyes. He tried to blink them back, but to no avail.

“That's all right, brother. We understand,” someone called from the audience.

Clayton wiped his eyes, wondering for a moment what the person was talking about and when in the history of the church it became acceptable for people to holler at the person standing at the lectern.

Then he remembered.

Ana Mae.

They thought he was crying about the death of Ana Mae.

He took a deep breath, sent a tremulous smile toward Archer, and pulled out the note cards he'd tucked in his pocket.

“First, my sisters and I would like to thank all of you for your prayers and expressions of sympathy. As some of you know, all three of us left Drapersville many years ago. We didn't stay in touch with each other or with Ana Mae as often as we should have.”

He paused for a moment and the amen corner encouraged him to “Take your time, son.”

Clayton glanced in that direction, saw someone he remembered from a long time ago, and lost his train of thought for a moment. Reginald Crispin, an old lover, apparently remained so deep in the closet that he felt safe masquerading as a deacon in the church.

The hypocrisy galled Clayton. Then the anger started bubbling up again.

In truth, he didn't have that much to say about Ana Mae, but he could and would give these people a piece of his mind for his own peace of mind. He opened his mouth to lambaste the hypocrites.

A throat cleared in the congregation.

Clayton recognized that particular sound. Archer.

He met his partner's gaze for barely a second, and in it he saw what mattered most to him. Clayton smiled, took another moment to compose himself. And with a roll of his shoulders, he let the injustices go. This was about Ana Mae, not about the painful prejudices of his past.

“Yes,” he then said, “Ana Mae was the only one of us who stayed. As the presence of each and every one of you here today indicates, that choice she made to stay made this church and this community richer.”

Clayton talked for five more minutes about Ana Mae, relating a story about the four of them one summer.

From the pulpit, he glanced down at JoJo and Delcine, then smiled. “I hope my sisters don't mind me telling you all this,” he said, “but it really illustrates the type of big sister Ana Mae was to us. There used to be a fair that came through town every year. They'd set up in that field on the other side of the old mill.”

“Still do,” someone in the congregation yelled out.

JoJo and Delcine, both remembering, sat there smiling and shaking their heads at Clayton.

“One summer, Mama was working and said she would take us over there on Saturday right after she got paid. Well, JoJo and I wanted to go that first night, Wednesday.”

“When they give away the free ice cream,” another mourner hollered up.

Clayton laughed. “Exactly. Since the ice cream was free, we figured all we needed was bus fare or jitney fare to get over there, since it was too far for us to walk.”

“Oh, Lord,” Delcine said, to the amusement of the people across the aisle from her.

“Ana Mae was where she usually was on Wednesday nights,” Clayton said.

“At church,” half the congregation said.

Nodding, Clayton, a natural storyteller, continued. “JoJo and I enlisted Delcine in the plan.”

“You mean you co-opted me,” she said.

That earned a laugh from the congregation.

“She was supposed to be babysitting until Ana Mae got home from prayer meeting. We, er, well, to put it delicately, we liberated some change from ajar Mama kept on the kitchen counter.”

“Oh, Lord have mercy,” one of the amen corner residents intoned.

“You've got that right, deacon,” Clayton said.

“We took what we thought we would need and headed out and over to the Day-Ree Mart to catch a jitney to the fair. Somebody—and to this day I don't know who—but somebody must have seen us and hightailed it over to the church to report that them three little Futrell kids were running away from home,” he said, his voice taking on the Southern drawl of a town tattletale.

“Well, it took Ana Mae maybe all of three seconds to figure out where we were headed.

“No sooner had we paid the jitney and got in the line than we heard a horn blowing and some yelling behind us. It was Ana Mae. With a switch. Waving it out the car window and hollering.”

The mourners gathered for Ana Mae's homegoing roared with laughter. They knew what was coming next.

“We were this close,” Clayton said, holding his hands about a foot apart, “to claiming that free ice cream when a car screeched to a halt, tires kicking up dust and gravel, and Ana Mae jumped out.”

Behind Clayton, Reverend Toussaint was wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. “That was me,” he said between guffaws. “Lord, I haven't thought about that in years.”

Clayton turned and grinned. “That was you?”

Reverend Toussaint nodded and got a few jabs from the ministers sitting next to him.

“All we knew,” Clayton told the congregation, “was that Ana Mae had commandeered somebody's car. She came out of that front seat yelling, ‘No ice cream for those three!' and waving that switch like she was gonna give a whupping to every kid standing in that line. The poor carnival man probably thought she was our mother, the way she was carrying on. But we were wrong and all three of us knew it. I was crying by then and JoJo over there,” he said, with a nod toward her, “she was whining about the ice cream. And Delcine was saying, ‘They made me do it. They made me do it.' ”

The sisters were falling over their husbands and Archer, laughing in the pews.

“We piled into the backseat of that car and got a sermon and a half about lying, stealing, leaving the house, and disobeying Mama, who'd said no carnival until Saturday. Frankly, we knew we were dead. But you know what,” Clayton said, his voice lowering as he leaned into the microphone.

Folks sat forward in their seats to hear what happened.

Clayton closed his eyes for a moment even as the laughter died down. “Ana Mae never told on us. Not a peep.

“Of course, we didn't know that,” he said, standing straight again and chuckling to himself. “We were scared . . .”

“Terrified,” Delcine called out to renewed laughter.

“. . . about what Mama was gonna do to us. Delcine told us Mama was just biding her time, waiting to punish us. It never came, though, and we learned a valuable lesson that day and week about the love of an older sister.”

As he left the pulpit to thunderous applause, the congregants were still chuckling. When he took his seat, Archer beamed at him.

More than an hour and a half later, after the mourners listened to and hollered back at Reverend Toussaint's sermon about the virtuous woman, an altar call—“That we would be dishonoring God and Sister Ana Mae if we didn't have”—and another protracted song about flying away to glory, Ana Mae Futrell's funeral finally came to a close.

Afterward, no one would recall just how the receiving line came to be, but the Futrell family stood in a line in the vestibule getting condolences and healthy doses of “I'm gonna keep y'all all in my prayers.”

A brief lull in the line, which had to be at least four miles long, had Archer leaning over. “Does that mean because we're sinners?”

Clayton tried not to crack a smile. He failed.

“That's all right, Brother Futrell. Let it out. Sister Ana Mae enjoyed a good laugh too.”

Clayton looked up to see the Reverend le Baptiste. But the reverend's eyes were on Archer. Really on Archer.

Remembering what Archer had said about the preacher, Clayton studied the older man. Well, he guessed he was older. The Reverend Toussaint le Baptiste could have been anywhere from forty to sixty years old. His slicked-back hair—today either straightened with a hot comb or relaxed—was long enough to be in a ponytail. But the look suited him. He was tall, at least a head taller than both Clayton and Archer.

Clayton couldn't see it. But Archer's gaydar was usually pretty accurate. This time, though, he was wrong. Drapersville didn't suffer homosexuals lightly, and there was no way a gay preacher, no matter how deep on the down-low, could survive if the culture in the black community was the same as it had been when Clayton was coming along . . . and coming out.

His suit, the blue so dark it was almost black, was a throwback to an earlier age. Clayton pegged it as '60s vintage and liked it a lot. What he didn't like was the way the man's gaze seemed to gobble up Archer. Almost as if Clayton wasn't standing right there.

“Reverend!” Rosalee bustled over, breaking both the growing green settling somewhere in Clayton's midsection and the minister's intense perusal.

Clayton looked at Archer, who winked at him.

The playful gesture confused Clayton.

“Be right with you, Sister Jenkins,” Reverend Toussaint called. “I am truly sorry for your loss,” he said, directing his comment toward Clayton. “Ana Mae was a special woman. We're all going to miss her dearly.”

“Would you just look at that?”

“What?”

Bertie and Eula Lee, two of Drapersville's busiest busybodies, had a view of all the goings-on. Their attention at the moment zeroed in on the area where the Futrells greeted the mourners a few feet away. Their lasers trained on the three couples.

Eula Lee looked at Bertie. “You sure he's a little . . .” She waggled her wrist to make her point.

“Oh, yeah. Everybody knew when he was growing up.”

“Not him,” Eula Lee said. “The other one, the good-looking white boy with him.”

“He's the one who was named in the paper. The partner,” Bertie said, with emphasis on the word as if it didn't quite sit well with her. “I thought all those sissy boys were, well, you know, sissy-like. But he's looks regular. Real easy on the eyes too.”