Suncatchers (11 page)

“
Any
fundamental church? Why ours?” Brother Hawthorne leaned forward a little.

“That part is just luck, I guess,” Perry said. Maybe he shouldn't have said
luck
. He doubted that these people believed in luck. “What I mean,” he went on, “is that my sister's house just happened to be sitting empty for a year, and she knew about your church, and so it worked out for me to come live here while she's away, and . . .” He couldn't think of what else to say. This was what he hated so much about conversations in which he was forced to participate. He could never end his part right. He was always trailing off lamely and leaving thoughts unfinished. People would never guess he was a writer from the way he talked. Maybe he should suggest using pencil and paper for a conversation sometime. He was sure he could come across better if he could write his responses.

Pastor Hawthorne pinched the crease in his pants and ran his fingers down it slowly. He looked back at Perry, frowning slightly. “Just out of curiosity, what is your religious background, Perry? Are you from a Christian family?”

Perry shook his head. “I don't think I'd call it that, no,” he said.

“Do your parents belong to a church?” Brother Hawthorne asked.

Again Perry shook his head. “My father died when I was only five. He drank himself to death. And my mother never saw much fairness in that, I guess, because she never talked to us about religion.” He paused, but when the pastor said nothing, he continued. “I mean, she did take us to church a few times, but it wasn't a big part of our lives . . . or anything like that.”

He remembered the trouble he and Beth had gone through trying to decide on a minister to conduct their mother's funeral. They didn't know any. The funeral director had finally gotten somebody to do it, but Perry couldn't even remember now what kind of church the minister was from.

“So you have no quarrel with fundamental Christianity, am I right?” Brother Hawthorne said. “You simply have very little experience with it—maybe we could even say no interest in it until you started this book? Is that right?”

“I guess you could put it that way. I just want to see what . . . you do here, and . . .”

Brother Hawthorne nodded and patted his Bible. “I believe you, Perry. Normally I'd be wary of something like this, but I think you're truthful. We certainly don't have anything to hide here, so I'm going to approve the arrangement for now. It interests me a great deal, to be honest with you. I never thought anybody out there”—he made a wide gesture toward the window—“cared what we Christians did in our churches. I don't want to worry you, but I'm wondering who's going to buy your book.” He smiled and held out his hand again. “I won't tell anyone about this, but it's only fair to warn you that I'll be praying for you. This is a unique opportunity for me, and one that I'll take every advantage of.”

“Well . . . thank you,” Perry said. He guessed he was thankful, although he felt a little uneasy about this “opportunity” Brother Hawthorne had mentioned. He stood up, immensely relieved that the session seemed to be over. “Oh, I can show you a portfolio if you'd like to check my credentials,” he said as they walked toward the door. “In fact, I have it in the car, along with a copy of one of my books. I can go get it all if you want to see it. I wasn't sure . . .”

“That would be interesting,” Brother Hawthorne said. “Not that I distrust you at all, but I'd like to see what kinds of things you've written. Here, let me get my coat, and I'll walk out with you.”

Neither man spoke again until they neared Perry's car. Brother Hawthorne cleared his throat, then breathed in slowly and deeply. “End of February. I always like this time of year because you know warm days aren't far ahead.” Opening the car door and reaching inside, Perry wondered if the people here really thought this qualified as cold weather. “Hope you're not overly fond of snow, Perry.” The pastor chuckled. “We had a blizzard . . . a couple of years ago, I guess it was. Four whole inches.”

“I can live without it,” he said, handing Brother Hawthorne the binder and the book he had left on the front seat of the car.

Brother Hawthorne flipped through the notebook, then looked up and smiled. “I'll get these back to you.”

“No hurry,” Perry said.

“Oh, say,” said the pastor, frowning slightly. “I just thought of something I should have mentioned in the office.” He squinted and gazed upward as if planning how he should word it. “It might cause problems for the church if, say, you were seen around town doing things our people have strong convictions about—for instance, drinking or . . . well, even smoking. I mean, if the people of Derby assume by your regular attendance that you're one of us, then the testimony of the church might suffer if . . .”

“Don't worry,” Perry said. “I've always been what people call a ‘stick-in-the-mud.'” He could still hear Dinah complaining about his lack of social vices. “You could at least take a cocktail and
hold
it,” she used to say. “It would give you something to do with your hands, for pity's sake! You always walk around fidgeting like a little kid about to play a piano recital.”

Brother Hawthorne was nodding his head. “Well, good,” he said. His face brightened. “You've got some very nice neighbors, by the way. I know they'll take good care of you. I've never met nicer people in all my years of pastoring.”

Perry nodded, then had a sudden thought. “Jewel's husband—did he die . . . or . . . ?”

“Yes, close to three years ago now, I guess it's been.”

“Was it an accident or did he . . . get sick or something?”

“He drowned,” said Brother Hawthorne, looking out toward the vacant lot next to the church.

“Oh.” What else was there to say? Perry felt like a block of ice had fallen to the pit of his stomach. He had always imagined drowning to be the worst of deaths. He used to dream about being caught in an undertow and would wake himself up screaming and thrashing around. “Well, I wondered,” he said. He dug a small hole in the gravel with his heel, then smoothed it out with the toe of his sneaker.

“Jewel took it hard,” Brother Hawthorne said. “She's never been the same since.”

Perry wondered what Jewel's husband had been like. His name was Bailey. He remembered Eldeen mentioning it at supper that night. Marriage was certainly unpredictable. One minute you were happy, and the next minute you felt as if you'd been to hell and back. Or just to hell. He'd often chastised himself in recent months for having grown so dependent on Dinah that he could hardly function for days at a time once he'd lost her. Why should a person lose his footing in life just because of one other person? But marriage was like that. You didn't even realize it was happening until one of you shifted and the whole thing fell down and buried you underneath.

Brother Hawthorne cleared his throat. “I think Jewel or maybe Eldeen told me you were married. Is that right?” He had tucked the folder and book under his arm, Perry noticed, and had shoved both hands inside his overcoat pockets.

“Yes, I was. I'm . . . not anymore. My wife . . . well, we're divorced, or at least will be . . . when it's finalized and all.”

Brother Hawthorne shook his head. “I didn't realize that. I'm sorry.”

Perry opened the car door wider. Brother Hawthorne leaned down as Perry slid into the seat. “I used to have one of these,” he said, patting the roof of the Toyota. “Mine was a '75 Corolla. Dark green. Edna never liked it, though. She called it a ‘toy auto.' I accused her of wanting to start a family just so we'd have to get a car with more room.” Brother Hawthorne stopped talking suddenly and closed the car door. Perry rolled the window down so as not to appear rude.

Brother Hawthorne stood upright and reached inside his overcoat to his shirt pocket. “Here, take one of our church welcome cards. It has my phone number on it—here at the church and at home, too. Call me if I can do anything.”

Perry took the card. “Thanks.” He turned the ignition key.

“I mean it,” Brother Hawthorne said.

Perry nodded and rolled up the window. As he drove slowly out of the parking lot, he glanced down at the card. “Church of the Open Door” was printed in the center in plain boldface, and underneath that “Theodore Hawthorne, Pastor.” Theodore? Was that what Edna called him? Or did he go by Ted? Or Teddy? Or Theo? Or maybe she called him Brother Hawthorne, too.

Pulling out onto the main road, he saw the sign “Derby City Limits, Population 23,000.” And it happened again. He plainly heard Eldeen's voice from Sunday night. “Every time I see that sign I wonder just how far off it is. It's been up for five years now, and anyway, that number couldn't of been right for more'n a day or two when it first went up! Why just think of all the changes just since Christmas. Crystal had her baby and so did Bernice's daughter-in-law. And the Tiptons over on Daffodil adopted that little boy from Korea. And then, my goodness, all the people who've died—Buford Gray and that poor dentist's wife who had cancer and Denny Pyle's mother and Coretta's boy and Harvey Gill's brother we prayed so long for . . .”

Joe Leonard had spoken up. “He lived in Raleigh, though.”

“Well, still,” Eldeen said. “And there's people moving in and out, in and out, in and out all the time. Why, that one house on the corner of Lily and Daisy had three different families in it in just one year.”

“Maybe it all evens out every year,” said Joe Leonard. “All the moving and all the births and deaths.”

Eldeen had swung her head slowly from side to side. “No, sir. I don't believe it for a minute. I hear of new babies here and there, but not near as much as people dying. They just die right and left, right and left.”

Jewel had driven on in silence, leaning forward and gripping the wheel tightly.

8

Kitchen Work

Wednesday night was what Eldeen called “prayer meeting.” “You don't need to keep giving me rides,” Perry had told her that afternoon when she had called on the telephone to invite him to go with them. “I know the way to church now.” He immediately worried that he sounded ungrateful. “I mean, I do want to go, and it's not that I don't like riding with you, but . . . well, you don't need to feel obligated to keep asking me . . . that's all I'm saying.”

She had made a raspy sound as if she'd swallowed something wrong. “Now it would be purely wasteful if you was to drive your car to the very same place we're headed. Where's the sense in that?”

Perry hadn't answered right away. He could hear chewing sounds on the other end of the phone.

“Well, sure, I'll go . . . if it's no bother,” he had said after a moment.

“
Bother!
Why, I'd like to see the day when giving somebody a ride to church is a bother!” Eldeen had said.

They sat in the same pew as on Sunday—third from the front on the left—and Perry noticed that others sat clustered closer to the front tonight in the first several rows.

Harvey Gill stepped across the aisle to shake Perry's hand. “Glad to see you out again,” he said, and his wife leaned forward, smiling, and said, “Is that Eldeen treating you nice?”

Perry nodded and smiled back.

“Oh, Trudy, you know me—I'm as ornery as always!” Eldeen said, then sat back and, without lowering her voice, said to Perry, “Harvey and Trudy Gill has got to be one of the nicest couples in the world. He's a perfect gentleman—and so
smart
in the Word—and Trudy's just a queen, a absolute queen!”

Edna Hawthorne glanced back from the front row and waved to Jewel. Her little boy was peering over the back of the pew, only his large eyes showing. His sisters, both of them wearing enormous bright pink bows in their tightly braided pigtails, had their small heads together.

Two children sitting directly in front of Eldeen turned around and grinned. “Hey, Chief Lightning Bug,” the older one said, and they both giggled.

Eldeen raised her right palm and dropped her voice. “How, little Twinkling Star and Pecan Tree.” Then suddenly she slapped both hands on her knees and leaned over to Perry. “Now
that's
what I kept meaning to tell you about in the car on the way here—our Peewee Powwow we have every Wednesday night with the little folks,” she said. “I knew there was something I was wanting to tell you about, but I reckon we got busy talking about some other subject.”

Eldeen had been the only one talking on the way to church, Perry recalled, and it hadn't been only one subject either. In fact, the swiftness with which her mind ran and the ability of her tongue to keep pace amazed Perry more every time he was with her. He would have to try his game with her sometime—really it was more of a mental exercise—in which he tried to retrace a train of thought. He often realized in the course of a day that his mind had been wandering. While he had started out thinking about, say, getting the oil in his Toyota changed, he had ended up recalling a spoiled cantaloupe his mother had found thirty years ago in the back of the refrigerator. Then he would start backtracking to see if he could fill in all the steps that had led him so far from his original thought. He'd have to try it after one of Eldeen's monologues sometime, see if he could trace it back to its start. That would be a challenge.

“While the grown-ups have prayer time here in the sanctuary,” Eldeen was saying, “we take the children back to a Sunday school room and have Peewee Powwow.”

“Peewee Powwow?” asked Perry.

“Isn't that the cutest name?” Eldeen said. “Joe Leonard thought it up.” She raised her voice a little. “He's got the cleverest mind, that boy does.”