Kind of Kin (21 page)

Tuesday | February 26, 2008 | 5:15
P.M.

Baptist parsonage | Cedar

T
here was nowhere else to turn. She couldn't think of anyplace. Anybody. Sweet tapped on the parsonage storm door. She waited, listened, snapped closed her jean jacket against the cold. After five o'clock on a wintry Tuesday evening, it was almost full dark, the temp dropping toward freezing. Behind her the street was empty, the Senior Citizens cooks and Heartland Home Health workers gone home now. No news vans. No reporters. She pulled open the storm door, knocked on the wooden inside door. It was obvious nobody was home, but she couldn't make herself give it up. She had to get those kids out of that coal mine—tonight. She pounded on the wood. Where was Vicki anyway? The preacher's wife was almost always here. Sweet rattled the metal storm door, let it fall to. She glanced at the empty church porch next door. Maybe Brother Oren was over there in the Pastor's Study.

She came down off the concrete steps and started around the house toward the Fellowship Hall entrance. That's when she saw the preacher sitting inside his old Toyota inside the dim, cold carport. Well, not so much sitting as lying—leaned back almost prone in the reclined seat, his pale, thinning hair mussed, his eyes closed. Was he sleeping? Or praying. Or, God help us, the way things had been falling apart lately—was Brother Oren maybe laying there in the driver's seat dead?

The preacher reached up with one hand, eyes closed, and scratched his nose. Thank you, Lord. Sweet let go of the breath she'd been holding. She rapped on the car window. Brother Oren jumped like a rabbit. He closed his eyelids a second, opened them, blinked at Sweet; then he popped the seat forward, cranked down the window. “Evening,” he said, like it wasn't strange, him sitting outside in the dark car.

“I need to talk to you,” Sweet said.

“You sure startled me.” His voice got excited: “There's news about Dustin?”

Sweet shook her head. “Reckon we could go inside a minute? It's cold.”

“Vicki and the boys are at her mother's. I just got back from running them over to Stigler.” No further explanation needed. A preacher couldn't invite a woman inside his house if his wife wasn't present. A smart one wouldn't even counsel a female member in the Pastor's Study unless there were other church members around and he kept the door open. “Let's go in Fellowship Hall,” Sweet said, and left the carport, hurried along the angled sidewalk toward the glass doors leading to the prefab addition attached to the side of the old church. She stood shivering on the dark walkway while the preacher got his keys and came on. The warm blast of central heat made up for the ugly fluorescent glare when Brother Oren flipped on the lights. Sweet crossed to the long table nearest the kitchen counter and sat. Then she got up and went into the brightly lit kitchen and started making coffee. The lowest nick on the inside of the forty-eight-cup urn said twelve cups, so that's what she made. The preacher stood on the other side of the counter looking baffled, and awkward, and worn out.

How to start? Sweet asked herself. How to start. She clamped the lid on the coffeemaker, plugged it in, and remained facing the outlet, her back to the preacher. The lights buzzed overhead, the kitchen sink dripped a slow quiet plink. After a moment the coffeemaker began its low burble. Sweet turned around, crossed her arms, rested her tailbone against the kitchen counter. “I need your help,” she said.
Hisss, gurgle, glub
went the coffeemaker. The preacher's bland hazel eyes asked her to please not ask anything more from him, but Sweet opened her mouth, and the words poured.

The story was all jumbled, out of order, not even half explained—those kids
had
to come out of there
tonight,
she said, there was freezing rain in the forecast and the creek was probably down by now which was good but that made it worse really because that made it more likely somebody might go out there where she'd had to hide them because Misty Dawn showed up in the middle of the night with her husband who got deported last fall and maybe Tee had turned him in too like he'd turned in Sweet's daddy, which was only part of it really, and she'd been meaning to talk to the preacher about that because she knew divorce did not really go with Baptist doctrine but there were plenty of divorced Baptists, all you had to do was look around, only she just hadn't had time to make an appointment but she was going to do that just as soon as this mess was finished and the truth of the matter was she'd like to wring that khaki-headed woman's neck she really would but the biggest problem was the ice storm headed this way those kids couldn't just stay out there in it but they couldn't stay at her house her yard was also crawling with reporters—and the whole time she was rattling on, Sweet watched the preacher's young-old face to see if she was making sense. She must have been, she decided, because Brother Oren sat down at the nearest table and buried his face in his hands.

A minute passed. Two. The coffee machine burped behind her, went silent. A click told her the red light had come on. Still the preacher sat motionless with his hands covering his face. Quietly, as if not to wake him, Sweet opened an overhead cupboard and got down two stumpy white mugs and set one under the black spigot, flipped the handle forward. She poured both mugs full, came out from behind the counter, set one in front of the preacher, seated herself on the opposite side of the table and a couple of chairs down.

When Brother Oren finally uncovered his face, he looked at his watch. Then he pulled the mug toward himself, sat with both hands wrapped around it. “Which woman is that?” he said quietly.

“What? Oh, that carpetbagger from McAlester. That Monica Moorehouse.”

The preacher looked confused at first, then relieved. “Ohhh. Right,” he said. Uh-huh, Sweet thought. The preacher had been at the farm this morning; he'd seen how she acted. Brother Oren stared down at his coffee, nodding. “I'm sorry. I thought you meant Terry was . . . Well, that's good. Okay.” He blinked, rubbed his palms up and down over his face. “I'm not sure I got this all straight. Whose baby are we talking about?”

“Misty Dawn's. She's not a little baby-baby, we just call her that. She's a little girl.”

“And who's Misty Dawn again?”

“My niece in Tulsa.”

“She's in Tulsa.”

“No, she's here. At the coal mine.”

“The coal mine?”

“On Daddy's land!” Sweet stopped herself. Brother Oren wasn't ordinarily this dense. Maybe he was just tired. He looked tired. “Out there on the ridge behind the house,” she said more reasonably.

The preacher nodded again, but his face didn't show much comprehension. “And her husband's illegal, I take it.”

“I don't know. I guess. Yes.”

“He's been deported.”

“Well, he was. But he's back. He's out at the mine with her and the baby, that's the whole point! I mean, that's what I'm saying.”

“What about Dustin?”

“What about him?”

“He's with them?”

“No! Where'd you get that idea? Good grief, we wouldn't be in this mess if we knew where Dustin is! Half the state wouldn't be camped out at my daddy's farm, and the other half wouldn't be parked in their dadgum news vans across the street from my house!”

The preacher began to draw on the butcher paper with his finger. “And what you're asking is . . .”

“If they can stay here.”

“Here? At the church?” Brother Oren looked scared—not quick, startled scared, like when she tapped on the car window, but slow, fathoming scared, like he knew this was coming. Like he'd been dreading this moment his entire short middle-aged life.

Sweet waved her arms around. “Look, here's a kitchen. There's a bathroom. It's warm. I'll fix them a pallet. Just for tonight. Just till the bad weather is past.” She saw the faintest movement of his head, the beginnings of a tiny side-to-side wag. “Brother Oren,” she whispered, “that little girl's only three years old.”

The preacher was silent a beat too long, and when he spoke, it seemed like he was changing the subject. “They called a special deacons' meeting for tonight. Clyde Herrington came by this afternoon to tell me.” Sweet frowned. What did this have to do with anything? “Ken Spears called it.”

“Kenneth Spears?” The chairman of the deacons, that old bachelor retired schoolteacher, and a retired marine before that—a time-and-rules-stickler who, in Sweet's opinion, would have been a whole lot better off if he'd ever had a wife to keep him from sticking his nose in everybody's business. Then she realized what Brother Oren was saying. “You mean they called a deacons' meeting without you?” The preacher nodded. “Oh,” Sweet said. “They're fixing to fire you.”

“Deacons can't fire the pastor, you know that. But some of them want to call for a vote of confidence from the church body.”

“Oh. That's bad.”

Brother Oren went back to tracing invisible lines on the table. He wouldn't meet her gaze. “I got to explain something to you, Sweet. I'm not just only your family's pastor. I've got a whole flock to consider. I got my own family.”

A
cold spitty rain was falling. Her wiper blades were shot. Sweet hunched forward to peer through the arc of smeared road film, working hard to hold to the unmarked blacktop. She wanted to be mad, she just couldn't. That was so strange. Oh, she could get her hackles up at that woman politician easily enough, but right now it was the preacher Sweet wanted to be mad at, and somehow all she could dredge up was disappointment, and pity, and fear. What was she going to do now? She'd had a more or less workable plan, but the preacher had nixed it, so, well. Just go. That's all she knew. Go out to the mine where the kids were waiting. She would get past all the people in the barnyard somehow.

Not that she'd figured out how to do that yesterday, or this morning, or this afternoon. Her daddy's yard had looked like a tribal casino parking lot for two days now, and Sweet hadn't yet finagled a way past all the vehicles and the people milling. When she took the supplies out there yesterday, she'd found them waiting fretfully inside the pickup the baby whining, the kids frowning. She had explained everything to a sulky Misty Dawn—searchers headquartering at the farm now, the sheriff due back soon—but when she told her they were going to have to wait inside the mine till the coast was clear, the girl snapped, “No way! We're not doing that!” Sweet said, “Suit yourself. If you want to take a chance on the sheriff finding your husband . . .” and Misty Dawn had immediately climbed out of the truck and started helping her lug the black trash bags up the ridge toward the mine mouth. Juanito drove the Ram in under a cedar thicket to hide it, where Sweet showed him, and then she'd lit the lamps, gotten the kids settled, told them she'd be back for them as quick as she could. She'd never dreamed it would take this long.

But what could she do? There'd been even more men hanging around the barn when she went back by there, everybody waiting on the sheriff, waiting and waiting. Sweet had stayed as long as she could stand it, and then she told Terry she was leaving, she would let him know when he could bring Carl Albert home. Tee's face was baffled at first, and then furious, but she drove off without giving him a chance to lay into her. She went home, hurried into her house past all the reporters, sat in the front room with the phones off and the blinds shut all evening, watching cable news. When she went back to her daddy's farm this morning, that woman politician was holding a press conference in front of the barn, and the milling crowds were even worse. And it wasn't just news people and searchers, either, but every kind of old gawker and hanger-on—now, what was that about? People's giddiness and hunger for excitement, Sweet figured. Their ambition. How they all wanted to be on camera.

No, of course that wasn't it. People wanted to help find Dustin. Truly they did. Why was Sweet's spirit so mean? She tried to think nice thoughts, grateful thoughts, but somehow in her mind's eye all she could see was that bunch of strangers milling around her daddy's house this morning, crowding up the kitchen and the front room and both porches, jamming the narrow hallway while they waited in line to use the bathroom, and who were they, anyway? Search team leaders, somebody said. Volunteer firemen from all over eastern Oklahoma. Preachers of apparently every stripe and denomination. The Wilburton mayor and the Cedar school superintendent and that khaki-headed state representative and her froggy-eyed husband and that long drink of water Senator Langley, plus all those church women trooping in with their covered dishes and then hanging around way longer than necessary just to drop off a pan of cowboy bean casserole, not to mention more deputies than you could shake a stick at. Everybody trying to act like they didn't see the reporters or that film crew from
Disappeared!
Everybody talking in those self-conscious voices, creasing their brows in those fake worried frowns.

Sweet reached up to give the fogging windshield a swipe. When we get to the end of days, she thought, we're going to find out the video camera was actually an invention of the Devil. Something sneaky and innocent
looking he dreamed up to entice folks into sinning—like line dancing or Powerball lottery. And that Monica Moorehouse was the biggest camera hog of all. Sweet found herself working up a good fury right there in the car, thinking about that woman standing in front of the barn this morning in her fake cowboy-cut jacket, drawling out her fake concern in her fake Okie accent, saying the same things to the cameras over and over, the same exact words, the same phrases—“our hearts go out to the family,” “cannot surrender to this illegal alien invasion,” “leave no stone unturned,” “despite special-interest groups and drug traffickers who want to turn our state into a sanctuary for illegal aliens,” “these heroic men,” “this tragic situation,” “very important not to confuse the two issues,” “our thoughts and prayers are with the family,” “cannot let this deter us from the fight”—all totally rehearsed, smiling that fake smile every minute—
smiling!
—with that mouth full of bleached teeth. And there wasn't a thing in the world Sweet could do about it. She couldn't even vote against her in the next election; the woman's district was the next one over.