Suncatchers
Authors: Jamie Langston Turner
Suncatchers
Jamie Langston Turner
© 1995, 2000 by Jamie Langston Turner
Suncatchers
is a revision of
The Suncatchers
published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson, Inc., Publishers, 1995.
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
www.bakerpublishinggroup.com
Ebook edition created 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansâfor example, electronic, photocopy, recordingâwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-6264-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Unless otherwise identified, Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Cover design by Lookout Design, Inc.
TO DANIEL
As the apple tree among
the trees of the wood, so
is my beloved among the sons.
S
ONG OF
S
OLOMON
2:3
Contents
19. Fractured Blues and Purples
Part One
Candlelight
When his candle shined upon my head, and when by his light I walked through darkness.
Job 29:3
1
A Cold, Dark Place
Perry had opened a dozen boxes hoping they'd be this one. He didn't know why he should feel so relieved, but he did. He knew he should have labeled all the boxes on the outside: Office Supplies, Glassware, Linens, etc. That's what Dinah would have recommended if she'd been supervising the packing. But she hadn't been. She had sorted through everything in the other house, though, and stacked his allotment against a wall. She'd even gotten empty boxes from somewhere and set them along the same wall. Dinah could be very efficient when she had something she wanted badly enough. Then she had taken Troy and gone to her mother's while Perry cleared out.
He couldn't remember much about the actual packing except for the thoughts that kept whirling around inside his head each time he folded down the four flaps of another box top.
This can't be happening to me. I'm not really leaving. It's all a dream
. But when the dream ended, he woke up and found it was all true. And now here he was hundreds of miles from home, unpacking those same boxes, and still numb from the shock of it all.
He reached down inside the box and carefully lifted an object wrapped in a blue-flowered pillowcase. He could feel the heavy, hard roundness of the glass globe and sense the gentle sloshing of water inside. He unwrapped it and spread his palm over the smooth dome. He had always called it a music box, but Dinah had always said no, that a box was square or rectangular, so this was a musical snow globe. Anyway, it played a tune when the knob was wound and created a snowstorm when turned upside down. It hadn't been in the pile of things Dinah had set aside for him, but he had taken it anyway. It wasn't hard to imagine how furious she had been when she noticed it missing.
He was still holding the music box when he heard the soft, regular swish of sweeping next door. He walked to the kitchen window and looked out. That must be the woman his sister Beth had talked so much aboutâJewel Blanchard. Taller than he had imagined and a little younger. Or younger-looking. But it was hard to tell from this distance.
He knew for a fact she was forty-five. That's what Beth had told him. He realized now that he had already given her a face and a size and even a personality over the past month or so, and it startled him somewhat that he had been so far off in her looks. He wondered what she'd do if he opened the window and yelled, “Hey, you're not supposed to look like that!” Perry couldn't remember when he had started doing thisâwondering how people would respond to startling statements. It had become so much a habit with him that sometimes he had to stop and think very hard to remember if he had only imagined saying something or if perhaps he really had. One of his worst fears was that someday he was actually going to carry through and humiliate himself.
Sometimes in a concert or a crowded store, he would get a panicky feeling imagining the shocked expressions, the sharp intakes of breath if he were to suddenly stand on a chair and shout something crazy. He found himself more and more wanting to know if the responses would be as dramatic as he imagined. Maybe everybody would simply look straight past him as if nothing had happened. Or maybe his outburst would trigger a whole series of similar responses from those around him. Maybe everybody was just waiting for someone else to start it all. Maybe now if he yanked open the window and told Jewel she wasn't supposed to look like that, she'd just holler back, “Yeah, well, the world is hanging in space by a single cat whisker!” and calmly go on sweeping.
He wished she would lift her head so he could see her better. She had her hood up, but the hair he could see looked dark, almost black. He had pictured it as lighter, a sandy brown going to gray.
He watched her make her way slowly down the driveway. The broom was a sorry excuse, with only a short stubble of straw left on it. She needed a new one. Maybe he should get her one after his year here was up, as a parting gift when he was ready to move on. But by then she would know what he had been up to, and she might not want a broom or anything else from him. She might do like Dinah and bring over a load of empty boxes, then order him to pack up and leave the neighborhood.
But he had nothing to worry about, he told himself again. He had kept reminding himself of that as he drove all day yesterday. What he was doing wasn't
wrong
. Not at all. He was going to study these people and then write about them, simple as that. He'd done it before and had never suffered any pangs of conscience. That's what research was all about, and that's what writers all over the world did. They studied people just as investors studied the stock market. Anyway, he would tell these people sooner or later what he was doing, but not right off. He wanted them to act natural as long as possible.
He used to envy writers, like Charles Kuralt, who were always aboveboard with the people they interviewed. Whenever somebody like Kuralt sat and chatted with, say, a country fiddler in Galax, Virginia, or ate hot tamales with the cook at Bigger's in Imogene, Mississippi, or toured Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with a man who used to make bricks by hand, six at a time, he always told them up front about the book he was writing. He didn't go around on false pretenses, encouraging people to talk freely, casually, innocently, then spring the news on them later, after he had his story.
But, of course, that was a different kind of book altogetherâa collection of journalistic human-interest stories, not at all on the same level with true sociological research. Whereas Kuralt was
selecting
his data and rearranging it to tell a story, almost picaresque-style, a sociologist had to collect and organize all the facts, regardless of whether the subjects or the readers
liked
the picture that resulted. What would it be like, Perry had wondered more than once during his early days of research, to be able to relax and just write whatever struck his fancy?
The woman outside stooped to pick up something in the driveway, turned it over in her hand, then slipped it inside her coat pocket and resumed her sweeping. Watching her from behind the curtain, Perry couldn't help wondering how she would fit into the book he was going to write. For the first time he felt the faintest stirring of interest in the projectâthe moment he used to call “the spark,” a moment that had always happened much earlier during the research for his other books.
But he was rusty at all this. It had been eight years since he had last done this kind of writing, although at one time he had intended to make it his life's work. “A brilliant ethnographer, all the more phenomenal for his youth,” he'd been praised on the dust jacket of his third book, the one titled
New Verena
, in which he had revealed the inner workings of a tiny community of Lithuanians in central Illinois. “Scholarly yet delightfully readable,” another critic had written of the book. He clearly remembered Dinah holding the first copy of the book reverently in her hands when they received it from the publisher. “Book number
three
,” she had said, leafing through its pages. “What does it feel like,” she had asked him, “to be successful?” The question had embarrassed him, but she had kept pressing it. “No, come on, now, tell me. How does it feel to be a big hit?”
A big hit? His books maybe, not him. It was funnyâhe never associated his writing with himself, which he realized in the split second before he opened his mouth to answer Dinah would be impossible to explain. When he wrote, he wasn't Perry Warren. Perry Warren was a quiet, tongue-tied, nondescript sort of person you wouldn't even notice if you passed on the street. Perry Warren was
not
a big hit. But there stood Dinah, sincerely believing she was married to someone famous, someone from whom she expected a breezy, pithy answer to her question.
So he had taken refuge in comedy, the kind of impromptu bluster he could pull off only with Dinah. “It feels, my dear, as if you're dangling helplessly at the end of a fraying rope above raging waters teeming with starving crocodiles. If it's real, you face the burden of being expected to do something heroic, and if you discover it's all a dream, you drive yourself insane wondering what you would do if it really were true.” And Dinah had laughed as always, then set about cutting the celebration cake, which she had made and decorated to look like a large open book, topped with small white candles arranged to form the numeral
3
.
But a few days after the last piece of cake had been eaten, he woke up and realized he had lost the thrill of it all. How it had happened he had no idea. He could well remember his first bookâwaking early every morning, skipping meals, walking through rain and snow, worrying Dinah sick with his single-mindedness, all for the joy of recording every observable detail at Lifegate, a private preschool for children with orthopedic disabilities. Then the second book published three years laterâa study of an artists' colony outside Beloit called The Lemon Groveâhad absorbed his interest just as much. Then
New Verena
two years later. Then it was over. If it had been a telegram, his research career would have read
Lifegate
,
The Lemon Grove
,
New Verena
, STOP.
In less time than it takes to blow out a candle, the desire was gone. His work began to seem inconsequential. Not that the lives of the children, the artists, or the Lithuanians seemed trivial, but his writing about them had lost its purpose. What
difference
was he making going about observing these subcultures and reporting on everything from toilet schedules to spices used in cooking to experimental sculptures made out of things like the pull-tabs of soda cans? He saw himself as sneaky and nosyâa busybody peering over people's shoulders, slinking around corners, eavesdropping, yet unable to answer the most elemental of questions: Why?
