Suncatchers (13 page)

When Perry had gotten married, he had come into the kitchen only to eat. Of course, in the early years of their marriage before Dinah had taken a job—the job being another example of her failure to consider his wishes first—she was home all day. Preparing meals was part of her daily routine. It was all part of the homemaker package.

In those days he had worked a part-time job writing copy for an advertising agency, and then spent the rest of his workday writing his dissertation, shut away in what he called his study—at the time a storage nook under the stairway in their apartment, outfitted with a card table, a cheap word processor, and a small lamp. It wasn't like he was loafing all day while Dinah slaved at home. He had his work, and she had hers.

Then later, after he had earned his doctoral degree and researched and sold his first book, he had dropped his part-time job to become a full-time self-employed writer. He was busy then writing or researching all the time—well, most of the time. And Dinah was still a homemaker, and everything was fine. They had moved before Troy was born to a house with three bedrooms, one of which became his study, and everything was still fine. Dinah had seemed happy—hadn't she? He hated to admit that his memory of trivia, like the abbreviations of all the elements on the periodic chart and the middle names of all the U.S. presidents, was keener than his memory of the first ten years of his marriage.

But when Troy started to school, Dinah suddenly wanted a job and promptly went out and got one. It had shocked him senseless, though he never let on. She started as a part-time receptionist and typist for a Realtor, then after a few months took a couple of night courses in real estate, and before he knew what had hit him, she was having her own business cards printed.

Not that she had totally neglected her role as homemaker. Frankly, Perry couldn't recall that things were that much different after she had begun her job—at least not in the everyday details like having supper on the table and clean sheets and towels. But she had started to drift from him in small, subtle ways. In her real estate scurrying, she had found her dream house, and Perry had agreed to use his mother's inheritance money as a down payment, and then—well, then he had ended up here in Derby, South Carolina, living in his sister's house.

Would Brother Hawthorne have him believe that helping Dinah clean the house and cook meals would have saved their marriage? She had never even asked him to help her. If she had wanted his help, she should have come to him as Edna had gone to her husband, taking his hands off the computer keyboard and gently placing them inside hers and telling him she had a problem and wanted his help. But no, not Dinah. She had filed for divorce instead.

Anyway, it wasn't as if he didn't do
anything
around the house, Perry argued silently. He had regularly started the dishwasher when it was full and taken out the trash whenever Dinah set it beside the back door. He even remembered once when he had helped Dinah fold sheets warm from the dryer. Well, he had
tried
to help. She had become so exasperated with him that she finally yanked them away and said, “Oh, I can do it faster by myself.”

Perry was suddenly aware of movement around him. Jewel and Joe Leonard were sidestepping their way from the pew out to the center aisle. Twenty or so little boys and girls had come to life and were eagerly surging out of the auditorium through a side door.

“You coming with us to Peewee Powwow?” Eldeen whispered as she rose.

“Oh, sure,” Perry said, and as he followed Eldeen out, he heard Brother Hawthorne say, “Who would like to be the first to share your prayer burden with us?”

The children were lined up, giggling and squirming, at the door of a small classroom in the back hallway. Inside, Joe Leonard had put on a feathered headdress made out of construction paper and was spreading rug squares on the floor while Jewel, wearing a less elaborate headgear, admitted the children one by one and assigned them a rug. After they were all seated, Eldeen looked down inside her big purse and extracted a red Tootsie Pop. This must have been part of the regular procedure, for Perry noticed all eyes upon her. Eldeen lifted the Tootsie Pop high and waved it around. “Looka here what I got. This'll be for whoever's the best little brave or squaw tonight. Is everybody going to try their
very
hardest to win the Peewee Prize tonight?”

All the children sat cross-legged with their hands folded in their laps, nodding eagerly as their eyes followed the Tootsie Pop closely. They reminded Perry of little frogs ready to nab a fly. Perry sat in a chair against the wall as Jewel stepped around quickly, setting on each child's head a paper headband sporting two paper feathers.

Joe Leonard unsnapped a black case and lifted out an Autoharp. Perry hadn't seen one of those since elementary school. It brought back a memory of Mrs. Stubblefield, the jolly music teacher, strumming her way violently through “Wabash Cannonball” and “Skip to My Lou” while the boys all snickered at the jiggle of her fleshy upper arm with each brisk stroke.

Joe Leonard set the Autoharp on a small table and sat in front of it, holding the pick poised above the metal strings. He leaned over the instrument, pressing several of the key selections with his left hand as if practicing silently. Jewel nodded to him, and he began strumming softly. As Jewel began singing, the children's voices joined in. “This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine!” they sang joyously. Eldeen came over and sat beside Perry, her thick voice an octave below the others as she sang: “This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.” The second verse admonished against letting Satan blow out the little light, and all the children blew a puff of air on their pretend candles to illustrate what they weren't supposed to do.

Next Jewel led the children in a rousing verse of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Levi Hawthorne, seated on the carpet square closest to Perry, belted out “Onward, Christian shoulders” but no one, not even Levi himself, seemed to notice the error. After another song with one line that said, “The gate to the fort of my heart is the Bible”—a fairly complicated metaphorical idea for children, Perry thought—Joe Leonard moved three metal folding chairs in front of the children, then quickly set up a pair of poles on flat wooden bases on each side of the row of three chairs. Jewel unfolded what looked like a tablecloth and tied the two top corners around notches in the poles so that the cloth was stretched between the poles like a tight curtain.

During all of this Perry studied the children in disbelief. They were watching the procedure with expressions of anticipation, a few of them moving their hands in silent clapping motions. How can they sit so still? Perry wondered. These kids were abnormal. Everyone knew children were supposed to wiggle and squeal. He remembered Troy's last birthday party—ten eight-year-olds inside their house on a rainy Saturday afternoon. He had vowed after that to have all subsequent parties at large rented facilities far away from their house.

But these children were all younger than Troy and his friends by three or four years. Maybe that was why they were so good. Maybe if you got to them early enough, you could train them to be mutes. Perry counted—there were twenty-two of them, more than twice the number of guests at Troy's party. Was the secret in the Tootsie Pop? Eldeen had set it on top of a storage cabinet, and Perry noticed the children's eyes straying to it frequently.

Jewel removed a large grocery sack from the cabinet and carried it behind the makeshift curtain. Then she, Joe Leonard, and Eldeen sat in the three chairs behind the curtain, which shielded them from the children's view. Joe Leonard gave both Eldeen and Jewel one of the handwritten sheets he had been reading earlier. The children stared intently at the top of the curtain with rapt expressions. Seated to the side, Perry didn't know what to expect. What was going on here? Everyone seemed to know except him.

Then he saw. It was supposed to represent a stage. Above the top of the curtain appeared two puppets—a large mouse dressed in overalls and a straw hat and a raccoon wearing a little sailor cap. The children laughed with delight, then grew quiet. Perry recognized Jewel's voice as Philip the Field Mouse and Joe Leonard's as Bandit, Philip's sailor cousin who had come to the farm to visit. No one seemed to question the logic of a mouse and raccoon being cousins.

The gist of the story was that Bandit was a troublemaker, never wanting to follow the rules, always looking for shortcuts and reveling in mischief. Philip tried to influence him not to play near the thresher, and Mrs. Field Mouse, played by Eldeen, even made a brief appearance to lay down the law about what was off limits.

In the end, of course, Bandit disobeyed, and Joe Leonard gave a very convincing performance of the naughty raccoon in convulsive agony after getting his striped tail caught in the thresher, which Eldeen represented by holding up a toy tractor and emitting a series of deep, husky rumbles. In the final scene Bandit slowly turned around and showed the children his backside, now missing its tail. Levi Hawthorne put both hands over his mouth and stared wide-eyed. Perry wondered where the tail had gone. Had Joe Leonard yanked it off behind the curtain, mutilating the raccoon just for the sake of this one lesson? Maybe it had only been pinned on in the first place.

After “prayer request time,” during which a snaggletoothed kindergartner asked for prayer for her grandfather, who had a disease called diarrhea, and a swarthy little black-haired boy requested prayer for his cat, which had “gone to sleep” at the vet's, Jewel led the children in another song called “God Answers Prayer.” Then Eldeen prayed, mentioning every child's request individually. When she paused at one point, Perry saw her wiping her eyes. Was she crying, he wondered, or chuckling over something one of the children had said?

The Peewee Prize was awarded to a little girl named Sandra Sue, who smiled shyly and refused to come forward for the sucker when her name was called. Joe Leonard stepped between rug squares to hand it to her, and Sandra Sue lowered her eyes away from all the longing looks of the other children. Again Perry marveled at the self-control exhibited here. Any one of the children would have every right to kick up a fuss about not being the honored recipient. As far as he could tell, they had all behaved faultlessly.

Before they dismissed the Peewee Powwow, Eldeen stood up and announced, “We have a visitor with us tonight. I'm sure you little Indians noticed.” As Perry felt the eyes of the children upon him, he wondered if Eldeen had ever heard of the term
Native Americans
. He doubted it. She probably still used the word
Negro
, too.

Eldeen smiled broadly and swept her arm toward Perry as if introducing a dignitary. “This here is Perry Warren,” she said, “and he just might come back again sometime. Now, if he does, we need to give him a name so all you braves and squaws'll know what to call him. Can anybody think up a good name? Remember, it's got to be something our Almighty Creator God made.” Immediately Levi Hawthorne's hand shot up. “What's your idea, Levi honey?” Eldeen asked.

Levi pointed at Perry solemnly and said, “Chief Field Mouse.” How fitting, thought Perry. Even this child could tell that Perry's counterpart in the animal kingdom was nothing strong and heroic like a lion or a stallion, nothing noble and beautiful like a deer, swift and free like an eagle, soft and useful like a sheep. No, people took one look at him and pegged him right off: the common field mouse.

9

The Middle of a Lake

On the following Monday morning, a little before nine o'clock, Perry was in the kitchen refilling his coffee cup when he heard the Blanchards' side door open and close, then the sound of heavy shuffling across the driveway. He watched Eldeen from the kitchen window. Could it have been only a little more than a week since he had first met her? It seemed that he had known her for years. She had her black boots on again, and a dark green scarf was tied tightly around her head. She hefted herself up the steps to Perry's side door and rapped loudly on the pane. When he went to open the door, he saw her face against the glass, circled by her large gloved hands. Her breath had already made a dense foggy patch on the pane.

“Oh, good. I was hoping you were up,” she said as soon as he opened the door. She stepped inside. “I really wasn't sure how late you like to sleep, so I was a little afraid to ring the bell, although I guess writers as a rule don't lollygag in bed too long since the stories must just be
itching
to get out of their heads. Isn't this just the awfulest cold snap?” she said, drawing her thick eyebrows together in a gnomelike grimace. “It's down to twenty-eight this morning and supposed to get even colder tomorrow.”

“It's cold all right,” Perry said, recalling that the weather map had shown the temperature to be between zero and five degrees in Rockford over the weekend. These people in Derby didn't know what cold really was. He wondered if Dinah had been using the fireplace. To his knowledge, she didn't even know how to start a fire. He had never thought of that before. Troy didn't either, as far as he knew. He pictured the two of them huddled next to the heating ducts and felt a chill go over him. What kind of man would leave his wife and son so ill protected? How would Dinah shovel the driveway if there was snow?

“If it's going to be so cold as all this, I wish it'd just go ahead and snow,” Eldeen said. “But I don't expect any. We didn't get diddly-squat last winter and only some little old flurries the year before that. It always misses us. We did get us a few inches about three years back, though.” She smiled proudly, apparently unaware that she had just contradicted herself.

“Well, you never know,” Perry said. “The weather forecast shows a chance.” He saw Eldeen glance at the kitchen table. “You want to sit down?” he said.