Suncatchers (37 page)

Can she pick a bale of cotton, charming Billy?

She can pick a bale of cotton even though her teeth are rotten
,

She's a young thing and cannot leave her mother
.

Can she count from one to ten, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?

Can she count from one to ten, charming Billy?

She can count from one to ten, then go back to one again
,

She's a young thing and cannot leave her mother
.

The children broke down into giggles between stanzas.

Can she chop a pile of wood, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?

Can she chop a pile of wood, charming Billy?

She can chop a pile of wood like Paul Bunyan wished he could
,

She's a young thing and cannot leave her mother
.

Jewel stopped playing the piano and stood up and smiled. She gestured to the chalkboard with one hand, fingering the cameo at her neck with the other. She said something and laughed, and all the children laughed, too. Perry wondered if maybe they had made up the words they had been singing. While Jewel played through the song two more times, the children filed from their chairs by rows, marching in time to the music, and stood in front of the door. Two of them stayed behind to collect books from the chairs and put them away. When Jewel opened the door and saw Perry, she clasped her hands and closed her eyes. “Oh, thank the Lord, you found them! I've been praying all during this class period that you wouldn't have any trouble.”

The words to her prayer leaped to Perry's mind. “Can he find the things I need, dear Lord, dear Lord? Can he find the things I need, oh dear Lord? He can find the things I need if you will only lead. . . .” The last phrase didn't come to him until he was almost out the front door of the school. “He's a poor man who has no wife or mother.”

As he pulled away from the school, he looked at his watch—almost one-thirty. He needed to stop at Thrifty-Mart for bread. Then he'd try to write another three or four hours before taking a supper break.

Legalism
. He thought again of the three criteria Brother Hawthorne had laid out in response to his questions about movies, dancing, and the other “no-no's,” as Cal called them. Perry had recorded all three on the sheet of paper. In fact, that's about all he had written down: (1)
Does the Bible expressly forbid it?
(2)
Would I feel uncomfortable telling someone about Jesus while I was doing it?
(3)
Will it in any way harm my relationship with Christ and other believers?

“This is how we approach these things with our people,” Brother Hawthorne had said. “You don't hear me harp on specifics that much from the pulpit, but I cover the principles regularly.” And it was true. Perry had heard it all before. He knew that someone like Cal could probably find a dozen loopholes in the reasoning, but to himself, Perry had to admit that it seemed perfectly consistent with everything he'd observed at the Church of the Open Door. “I see the standard for Christian conduct as being that which will please God most and offend others least,” Brother Hawthorne had added. Then he had smiled and said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and body—and then do whatever you want!”

Perry felt certain that an exposé was what Cal was secretly hoping for—or at least a study with subtly sarcastic overtones. Though he had recognized and praised Perry's objectivity in the earlier research projects, Perry knew Cal had a deeper personal interest in this one—and a longtime grudge that yearned for gratification. He recalled a recent phone conversation when Cal had verged on sullenness. “Good grief, you sound like you're starting to
like
these kooks!” he had exclaimed at one point.

“I always get interested in the people I study—you know that,” Perry had answered. But he knew it was more than that really. It was more than being interested in them. He
liked
them, especially Eldeen, Jewel, and Joe Leonard.

“What do the fundamentalists do for
fun
these days?” Cal had asked another time. And Perry had been so overwhelmed with an abundance of memories that for a few seconds he hadn't been able to speak. He saw the church people singing, eating potluck dinners, playing softball, sitting around in folding chairs laughing and talking. He saw Jewel and Joe Leonard playing tennis and badminton; he saw Eldeen's look of glee after a quadruple jump in Chinese checkers; he saw Willard's luminous, round face as he pulled in a fish. He remembered the Hawthornes eating ice cream and Fern Tucker reciting poetry and Joe Leonard playing his tuba and Jewel leading the Peewee Powwow children in “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.” At some point over the last eight months he had ceased to doubt that these people truly enjoyed themselves. They in no way matched up with the “long-faced sourpusses” Cal had described.

“The best argument against fundamentalism,” Cal had declared, making a gagging noise, “is
fundamentalists
.” He always pronounced the word with the greatest contempt, as if these people were on the same level with serial killers, whoremongers, or pedophiles.

And now, as Perry pulled into a parking space at the grocery store, he looked up at the clear, translucent blue of the October sky and was struck with another thought. “And maybe the best argument
for
fundamentalism is fundamentalists, too, not in general but in specific—like Eldeen, Jewel, Joe Leonard, Edna, Theodore, Willard, Sid, Bernie, Harvey, Nina . . .” His thoughts trailed off as he opened his car door.

A rusting red Pinto pulsating with rock music jerked into the parking space next to his, and a teenager bounded out of the passenger side and went running toward the entrance of the grocery store. There was a huge ragged hole torn in one leg of his jeans. The driver yelled after him, “Hey, get
two
packs!” Why weren't these kids in school? Perry wondered. As he passed the Pinto, the driver turned the volume of the radio up even louder and sat whacking the steering wheel with the heels of his hands in time to the pounding beat. Perry couldn't begin to decipher the words of the song, but he thought he heard “baby” several times in a row. Walking across the parking lot, he matched his steps to the beat of the song. Lyrics formed in his mind. “Can they dance to rock-and-roll, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? Can they dance to rock-and-roll, charming Billy? If they danced to rock-and-roll, could they touch a sinner's soul? They are Christians; they live for God and others.” As the automatic door opened and then closed behind him, the beat subsided and then ceased.

25

Dividing Lines

Perry certainly hadn't started out with the intention of looking in people's windows, but it just happened. It was after nine o'clock the next night, Tuesday, when he pushed his chair back from the computer keyboard and realized he hadn't eaten anything since the ham sandwich at noon. He rubbed his eyes, then tilted the oval mirror up to study his face. He needed to be careful. This was the point in a project when he always became driven. He remembered Dinah fretting over his health during the writing of his other research studies, and usually for good cause. Near the end of the Lithuanian project, he had been consigned to bed for two weeks—a sentence he had fudged on, he recalled. Once when Dinah had run out for an hour, he had sneaked out of bed just to reword a paragraph that had haunted him since the onset of his illness. But one thing had led to another, and before he knew it, there was Dinah gasping as she came into the room and saw him typing. Her mouth constricted and tears sprang to her eyes. “Perry, how could you?” she had said, and he had meekly returned to bed.

He turned off the computer now and out of habit walked into the kitchen. Then he saw the pan he had almost ruined during last night's supper preparations still sitting in the sink, filled with rust-colored water on which little islands of whitish scum were floating, and he knew that the thought of cooking something now—at 9:15 at night—was not to be considered. He slipped on his windbreaker and headed to Hardee's.

At first he meant to drive, as he always did, but when he stepped outside and breathed in the fresh October night and heard the wind sifting through the tree branches and saw the starry canopy of sky, he decided to walk. He made his way across the front yard, his feet scuffling softly through the newly fallen oak leaves, then crunching the tiny acorns scattered over the driveway.

Next door Hormel came to life, barking frenetically and leaping against the gate with his stubby legs.

“Cork it, short stuff,” Perry called softly, walking over into Jewel's driveway. “See, it's just me, your buddy, the Oreo man.” Hormel stopped barking and jammed his pointed snout through the chain link fence. “Pipe down and I'll give you another one when I get back,” Perry said, and when he reached the street and looked back, Hormel was still sitting there, as if prepared to wait indefinitely for the fulfillment of the promise.

A snatch of an old poem came to Perry's mind. “The faithful collie watching at the meadow gate, / His boy, no friend to time, was ne'er before so late.” It was a sappy little poem he had learned in ninth grade, and he couldn't recall the rest of it. He only remembered that the boy never came home—he had gone off to war, he thought—but the dog kept his vigil beside the gate, a picture of undying hope and loyalty. Funny how dogs seemed to have more powers of steady devotion than most people had.

Perry stepped out into the street, then stopped again. In all the months he had lived here, he had never really examined his neighborhood at night. He looked around him now.

Joe Leonard's bedroom light was on next door as well as the living room light, and Perry tried to picture what they were all doing. Maybe Joe Leonard was studying for a history test, or maybe he needed to, but Eldeen had his history book tied up for the evening. They had all discussed the American Revolutionary War on the way to church Sunday night because Eldeen said she'd been reading about it in Joe Leonard's history book and announced that she wasn't “so sure that was the right thing for them colonists to do—rise up in arms like that and charge out shootin' right and left at the redcoats!” She had gone on to say that “if the good Lord had of wanted 'em to be free”—and she believed he did—“then He sure could of worked it out another way if only they hadn't been so hotheaded and bloodthirsty.”

Perry wondered what Jewel was doing tonight. Maybe she was thinking up more stanzas for “Billy Boy” or practicing her recorder again—or maybe even talking to Willard on the telephone.

There were only nine houses on the cul-de-sac of Blossom Circle, plus an empty lot between Beth's house and the next one, which belonged to the Musselmans, a couple in their fifties who both worked third shift at the bottling company. Perry was sure there must be a story behind the empty lot, but no one seemed to know for sure what it was. Eldeen said she thought she had heard once from the Musselmans that the Montroyal developers had originally put a gazebo on the lot with plans to form a little community band to give open-air concerts, but that the gazebo had been burned down by some teenagers and never rebuilt. The lot had become a tangle of weeds and tall grass, with a few pecan trees. Eldeen said she was sure she had seen raccoons scuttling back and forth in the undergrowth.

The Musselmans' house was dark now, but the Whittingtons'—the next house over—was ablaze with lights. Gene Whittington drove a green pickup truck and worked for the power company. Perry couldn't help wondering as he noted the lights at every window whether the employees got a discounted rate on their electric bill.

Unlike the other streets in Montroyal, Blossom Circle had no sidewalk, so Perry walked slowly down the middle of the dark street, studying the houses. Joanne DePalma lived next to the Whittingtons. She was a divorced woman with two teenaged girls. A steady motorcade of low-slung cars with loud mufflers cruised the circle regularly, honking and idling their engines until one of the DePalma girls, both of them skinny blondes who were partial to spandex bodywear, came running out barefoot, squealing something like “Hey ya, Chuckie, sweetie! Whatcha doin'?”

Right now there was an orange Karmann Ghia parked in front, and one of the DePalmas was squatting down beside the window talking to the driver, stopping to screech with laughter between exchanges. As Perry passed, he heard her say, “It was like
totally
wild! I was going, ‘Okay, man, whatever you say, no problem.' I mean, he was, like, ready to . . .” She broke off as she noticed Perry. He quickened his pace, then heard her burst out laughing. “My word, I thought that was
him
!” she said.

The St. Johns, who lived next to the DePalmas, were a young couple with a baby. Perry knew Eldeen had embroidered a miniature pillowcase for them when they brought the baby home from the hospital, and Jewel had made a turkey casserole and taken it over. They had visited the Church of the Open Door a few times recently, too.

It was the St. Johns' open window, with the shade pulled up, that started it all. It was a bedroom, he supposed, for he could see what looked like a large framed mirror above a dresser. A woman passed in front of it, wearing something loose and flowing. Perry glanced away quickly, conscious of the DePalma girl behind him, but then looked again. The woman had come back to the mirror and was bending over, her hair falling around her head like a skein of fine yarn. Perry slackened his pace and watched her till he could no longer see her. She wasn't a pretty woman. In fact, the first time he had seen her, her face had made him think of a small weaselly animal like a badger or ferret. But the vision of her supple movements as she brushed her hair over her head reminded him again of all the different forms feminine beauty could take.