Songbird (18 page)

I call Harlan who's over at Bee's as soon as I leave the building. “I’m by that Eckerd store.”

“How did it go?”

I sigh, feeling silly all of a sudden. “I signed. Their lawyer is named William Williams. He goes by Billy.”

And Harlan and I laugh and laugh.

“Don't worry, Shug. You'll do all right. You know that.”

I wish I had his optimism. Lately, though, it's all I can do to even summon up the smallest bit of real enthusiasm. And I outright snapped at Grace the other day. I feel so testy!

Harlan says, “How about if we celebrate tonight? We're pulling out tomorrow morning for Greensboro.”

“You want to go out to eat?”

Harlan and I hardly ever go out to eat. Evangelists rely on “love offerings” and let me tell you, born-again types are the most tight-fisted group of people you've ever seen. One time we had a church take out a portion of the love offering for the extra gas and electric it took to turn on the lights of the church for those few services not normally scheduled during the week.

“You know I love to eat out. Where do you want to go?”

“How about the Western Sizzlin’?”

“Really? Steak?”

“You know it, Shug. It's not every day a beautiful lady signs on with a real Nashville agent.”

“That sure is the truth. Okay, I’m on my way home.”

So I climb into Bee's little Mazda and make my way back to Lebanon. But I stop in at the Kroger for some Sominex. I don't know why, but I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately. I wish I could blame it on Hope, but to be honest, that child sleeps like a teenager!

Poor Harlan, too. My libido is down to nothing these days but I’m able to muster up some semblance of enthusiasm for his sake. And once we really get started, I do enjoy myself.

Nevertheless, when I step up into the RV and see Harlan standing there holding our baby, I smile. “Mama!” she cries and lunges for me. I drop the bag and catch her before she crashes to the ground.

Harlan picks up the bag and looks inside. “What's this for? You having trouble sleeping, Charmaine?”

“Just falling asleep, Harlan. I feel so keyed up nowadays.”

“Must just be the excitement of your singing career.”

“Must be.”

A big homemade sign is taped to a cabinet in the kitchenette.
KNOCK ‘EM DEAD, SHUG!

I hug my husband, kiss my baby, and can't wait until morning when we pull out of here. I’ll still be all curled up with Hope in the bed at the back of the van, feeling warm and sleepy.

I can't say I understand Harlan's drive to go around preaching like he does. But I can understand why he doesn't want to settle down. Still, he takes good care of us. I guess maybe I should be more like him.

I’d like to say I am one of those people in search of their father. But I’m not. Because I doubt Mama had any idea who my father was.

I suppose I could get all sentimental and imagine some fairy-tale scenario.

1. They were childhood sweethearts and he came to visit her at Randolph Macon, they succumbed to a night of pleasure due to the passion in their hearts. He promised his heart forever, slipping a ring on her finger, and on the way back to Suffolk he died in a tragic car accident.

2. He was an older man, a rich widower with an aching heart. He saw my Mama walking home from class one day, her books bumping slightly against her slender, youthful hips, and he asked her out. She never really loved him, but she pitied him, allowing herself into his arms for only a short time. After that she told him it could go no further. She wanted to fall in love, you see, to feel that heady blush of a fully beating heart, but it never happened. She never told him about the pregnancy to avoid complications and the accusations from Lynchburg society at large that she only slept with him to ensnare him.

3. He was a dying young man with only six months to live. She sat at his bedside until the end, hiding her belly as it expanded to keep the failing invalid from experiencing yet more pain as his sweet young life faded away. But he knew. Yes, somehow he knew and as he died he said, “Take care of the child. Take good care.”

Most likely, my father was none of those. Most likely he could have been one of ten subordinary people, and what child wants to deal with that?

9

I
t's the autumn of 1983, and Harlan, Hope, and I are headed to Suffolk for a crusade. Mama's hometown. So it's easy to imagine the butterflies I feel. No need to diet this week. I couldn't put more than dry toast in my mouth even if I wanted to. Only one time was I more nervous than this that I can remember and that was when
Bowl-O-Rama
began to shoot my scene. But when I compare meeting that eccentric director to possibly meeting my grandma Min, well, it's like comparing a deli-counter turkey sandwich on white hold the mayo, to a gooey cheesesteak sub, extra cheese, and fried onions, if you please.

I tell you what, I thought those Sominex pills would work. I am so tired of being tired. Lying there awake at night I do too much thinking. It's that simple. And when I do too much thinking, I hate to admit it, but I do miss Mama a little. Or I miss what Mama and I might have been, I guess. I definitely miss Mrs. Evans in the true sense of the word. Francie and I talk every couple of weeks now and that makes things hard. Daddy this and Daddy that, and James this and James that, and I feel like such an outsider, despite the fact that I’m raising Hope as my own. They all agreed she should call us “Mama” and “Daddy” because everyone has a right to have parents.

We'll adopt her soon.

Well, we are almost to Suffolk. This Route 58 is so boring that I’ve decided to lie down with Hope for a nap, not that I’ll sleep, but I’m going through a list of ingredients in my head for the crème brûlée I’m going to make. After that cherries jubilee nightmare, I figure I need to give the whole gourmet dessert affair another chance. I’ll get one of the boys to run to Food Lion later on.

Melvin's driving today because Harlan is sitting at the dinette going over his new series of messages entitled, “What's
Really
Eating at You?”

Lord, help us, but he's on this antipsychology kick right now. As if people don't think Christians are strange enough.

I draw Hope's little body close to mine, slipping my arm beneath her tender neck and cuddling her childish form into my own. She smells so good. Harlan got us a Rubbermaid tub to put in the shower stall for her baths. When we give her a bath he sits in the narrow hallway outside the bathroom door and I sit on the toilet with the lid closed and she splashes and plays. And you know, she doesn't even mind getting her hair washed? I thought all children hated getting their hair washed. One time, Luella told me about Esteban and how he screamed so much during his baths she dubbed them “The Bath of a Thousand Screams.”

“How much longer, Melvin?” I hear Harlan ask.

“About twenty more miles, reverend.”

Rain pings the tin roof of the motor home. I grieve inside because I know I will try to find my grandma and I know I will do it behind my sweet Harlan's back. This is something I must do without him because I couldn't bear telling him if Grandma's dead or doesn't want anything to do with me.

Harlan unknowingly heaps guilt upon my already loaded conscience when he makes his way to the back and curls up with “his girls,” as he calls us with his particular brand of corny sentimentality. He whispers softly in prayer, so softly I cannot understand the words.

I pretend I am asleep.

I often wonder nowadays what ever attracted Harlan to me in the first place.

Route 58 unravels before us.

I look over at Harlan, asleep now beside me on the bed. His mouth gently sags to the side and a soft, whistly sort of snore blows from the gap. Hope's profile, sculpted with the smoothness of Ivory soap and about as lacking in porousness, steals my gaze, but not my thoughts. We've pulled into the church parking lot. Over the phone, the church was quick to apologize for being so new. Harlan told me about it after he first talked to them. “They said, ‘We're not one of the old historic churches, Reverend Hopewell, but we do know how to praise the Lord here at Grace and Truth Assembly.’”

We laughed ourselves a good one.

“Not one of the historic churches?” I asked.

“That's what they said.”

“Must be a stuffy old town, Suffolk.” No wonder Mama wouldn't go back. Unless she did go back. Oh, dear Lord! What if I find her right there with my grandma Min?

I hear Melvin hooking up the electrical to the church and I peer out the small window at the back, relieved to see our motor home is parked behind the church. It's embarrassing enough to live in a motor home without being parked in plain view to all passersby.

“Harlan?” I rouse him. “We're here.”

He opens his eyes but does not sit up. “What's the place like?”

I peer out again. “Not much. Little red-brick, country-style church. Looks like it was built in the fifties.”

“That's new to these people?”

“I guess so.”

He sighs. “How much money do we have left in the account for salaries this month?”

“About fifteen hundred dollars.” I keep the books.

We have seven people on the crusade payroll now. Harlan and I, Henry Windsor, Ruby and Grace, Mel and his nephew Randall, who we never see because once he sets up our sound system and all, he heads off to the bars. Mel was hoping this stint with the crusade would go far in saving his soul.

Harlan sighs again. “I was hoping to get you a nice surprise, honey. But I think it's going to have to wait. Thought I could stow a little more away.”

“It's a surprise you're
saving
for?”

“Yep. It's going to be real nice. But we've got to make payroll.”

“God will provide, Harlan,” I say. “He always does.”

There, that sounds holy.

Harlan nods, kisses my cheek, and rises out of the bed. “Your desires can't be first in the pocketbook, Charmaine, but they are first in my heart. Do you know that?”

“I do. I do know that.”

He sits back down and I curl up against him, my head on his lap. “I never promised riches, did I, honey? Did I lead you to believe we'd ever be comfortable?”

“Well, not in a financial sense. But I think we've achieved comfort of another kind.”

He strokes my hair, really softly, over the top layer of hair because Harlan knows better than to try and run his fingers through my rat's nest. “And maybe heavenly riches? Can you be content with those rewards in the meantime?”

“They're the only kind I’ve ever had anyway, Harlan. I wouldn't even know what the other kind looks like!” I try to lighten it all up so he'll be at his best tonight. With Hope asleep there I can't make love to him to boost him up, not that I really feel like it anyway, so I figure I’ll make love to his male ego and his sense of purpose. “We live for heaven, Harlan. I may not know much about much, but I know the difference between corruptible and incorruptible.”

Just like my little pink King James Bible says.

And then I give his buns a squeeze to let him know we are in this together and we always will be. He laughs, like I knew he would.

“You don't get serious for long, do you, honey?”

“Nope. It embarrasses me.”

“That's all right. It just makes me listen hard the first time.”

“Pastor Hopewell?” It's Melvin's voice. “Pastor Chorey's in his office. You coming out?”

“Be right there.”

Harlan quickly brushes his teeth, puts on a little fresh cologne, and I watch him out the window as he strides toward the church.

“Melvin?”

“Yes, ma'am?”

Melvin stands outside the motor home. I speak to him through the louvered window. I can see the hood of his yellow rain slicker.

“I need a local phone book.”

“I’ll fetch you one.”

“I need to get my hair cut.”

“That's fine, Mrs. Hopewell.”

“It's been a while.”

He just shakes his head and hurries toward the church to do my bidding.

10

M
ama didn't buy me many toys as one could well imagine. However, she did get me a Lite-Brite. I loved that contraption. I loved all the colors, even the clear pegs. Sometimes I’d do the snowman with little clear pegs, making snowflakes all around him. I loved the butterfly and the groovy flowers. I loved the house and sometimes made up my own houses that never, ever looked like Mrs. Blackburn's boarding house.

My favorite Lite-Brite creation was my own name. Mama said to me once, a smirk on her face, “Myrtle, you just have a thing for seeing your name in lights, don't you?”

I just nodded and said, “I guess so, Mama.”

Now, I don't see my name in lights per se very much but every once in a while I do see it in those plastic letters they use on lighted church signs. And there it glows on the Suffolk church's sign. Ruby, who's driving me in the crusade pickup truck to get my hair cut in the vast metropolis of Suffolk, Virginia, says, “How come Grace and I never get our names up there?”

I bark out a laugh. “If you'd have been the one to marry Harlan, you'd have yours up there.”

“Well, then, I suppose I ought to be thankful it's not. So what are you going to get done to your hair?”

“Just a trim.”

“Charmaine, nobody in this darn crusade can afford a trim. So what's the real deal?”

I sigh. “Ruby, how can you
always
tell when I’ve got something else in mind?”

She points a finger at me, turns on the right turn signal and pulls out of the church parking lot. “You may call it something else in mind’ but where I come from we call it ‘being up to something.’”

Here is the chance to finally tell somebody the truth. I know I can trust Ruby, I just don't know if she wants the responsibility.

“You're hiding something, aren't you, Charmaine?”

I nod. “You want to hear all about it?”

“It's not an affair, is it?”

“Oh, my lands, no!”

“Is it some other kind of sin problem?”

“In a roundabout way, I guess.”

“How long have you been carrying this secret around?”

“Good heavens, Ruby, do you want to hear it or not?”