Suncatchers (48 page)

“Maybe it's still inside here,” Perry said, peering inside the washing machine. He ran his hand around the inside but felt nothing. He suddenly remembered something that had happened years ago when Troy was just a baby. Their washing machine had leaked all over the floor, and Dinah had called a repairman, who had pulled out one of Troy's little booties and said it had probably gotten swept over the top rim of the inside tub somehow and lodged in the discharge pipe.

Perry shoved the agitator basket to one side and tried to peer down the side but couldn't see anything. He examined the top of the washer. There was a top panel that probably lifted up if he could figure out how.

“Do you have a screwdriver?” he asked. “I want to check something.” He doubted that anything the size of Eldeen's slipper-sock could get washed over and wedged between the agitator basket and the tub, but it was worth a try. “And a coat hanger, too,” he called after Eldeen as she headed for the hall closet.

When he pulled out the coat hanger ten minutes later with a large fuzzy red sock snagged on the end, Eldeen gaped in disbelief. For a moment Perry thought she had truly been rendered speechless, but then she launched into a display of ardent emotion in which she spun together into an amazing speech a number of the new words she had been studying, including “culprit,” “recalcitrant,” “laudatory,” and “ingenious.”

As he closed the screen door behind him, Perry heard Eldeen talking to Mr. Garland's answering machine. “This is Eldeen Rafferty again, and I just wanted to tell you to mark us off your list, for our smart neighbor has gone and
cured
the malfunction in our decrepit old washing machine.”

Wouldn't Dinah laugh if she knew about this, thought Perry. He had actually lucked onto an idea and swiftly executed a solution. He had come across as a hero. He saw a picture of himself dressed in shining armor, riding a white steed, brandishing a gleaming rapier from the tip of which flapped a bright red, furry sock.

31

A Prayer Circle

“Perry, there's been an accident.” Something in the chill of Jewel's voice and the frozen blue of her eyes told Perry that this was more than a washing machine overflow. She was supporting herself with one outstretched hand against Perry's front doorjamb. Her breath was coming in shallow gasps.

Later Perry couldn't remember the act of moving toward her, but somehow he found his hands grasping her shoulders—partly, he thought, to steady her but also to prepare himself for what was coming. In the fleeting moment before she spoke again, he chastised himself for forgetting during these past few months how shaky the course of a day could be. He had allowed himself to be caught off guard, and he had vowed almost a year ago never to let that happen again. When Dinah had calmly announced her defection that morning, he had reminded himself thereafter to expect only the worst from a day. Thereafter he had begun waking each morning with a sense of dread, tiptoeing through the day's routine, wondering at what moment the next blow would fall, reminding himself that anything pleasant was only temporary, only a decoy to tease him into relaxing his vigil. And it had worked. He had never let life take him by surprise again—not until now.

He swallowed hard. How long they stood there looking into each other's fearful eyes he couldn't have said. He wondered later if Jewel had seen his fragility and purposely delayed telling him, or if perhaps he had simply experienced the suspension of time common in moments of crisis. As she opened her mouth to speak, he tried to hope that it wasn't as bad as he feared. Maybe Hormel had gotten hurt, or maybe someone at the church had taken ill. Maybe a neighbor had fallen and broken a leg. Maybe Jewel's car had been stolen. But no, he could see the station wagon in the driveway behind her. In fact, he could hear it idling.

“Can you drive us to the hospital?” Jewel asked, her voice trembling. “I don't trust myself to drive.”

“Who's
us
?” Perry asked and immediately despised himself. Anyone else, he knew, would have asked what had happened, but he had asked who would be riding in the car with them. It was his old custom of postponing the inevitable—trying to avoid ingesting the whole horrible truth in one huge gulp, asking for it in small bites, hoping to piece it together by indirect clues. Maybe if he heard the names of those he'd be transporting, he could eliminate a few possibilities in the array of tragedies now playing themselves out in his mind.

“Mama and me,” Jewel said. Just then Perry heard a door slam and saw Eldeen approaching the station wagon, her gray cape flaring behind her. She looked toward Perry's front door and motioned wildly.

“Come on. No time to waste!” she shouted. “Joe Leonard needs us like he's never needed us before!”

So it was Joe Leonard. Something had happened to Joe Leonard.

“Let's go,” Perry told Jewel. “I'm ready right now.” He gave only a passing thought to the fact that his computer was still turned on, that he was wearing jeans, an undershirt, and rubber thongs. He took Jewel's arm and led her to the car. As they backed out of the driveway, Perry saw the big orange pumpkin Eldeen had brought home from Thrifty-Mart a few days earlier. It was sitting on the front steps, its thick stem curled on top like a sprightly cap. He felt a terrible ache of sadness now, remembering how excited Eldeen had been about the pumpkin, what happy plans she had laid for the carving of a jack-o'-lantern and the dispensing of Halloween treats in a few days to “all the little spooks and goblins” in the neighborhood. She had told him about Joe Leonard dressing up every year like a hobo to greet the children at the door and Jewel playing scary music on the piano. And now Joe Leonard was at the hospital, Jewel was sitting pale and motionless in the backseat, and Eldeen's face was a contortion of agony. How quickly things changed.

On the way to the hospital he learned some of the details about the accident. Jewel told them herself in short clusters of words, stopping often to catch her breath. She held her hand at her throat, Perry saw through the rearview mirror, and her eyes stared over his shoulder at the road ahead. It was cruel, Perry thought, how gentle the autumn breeze was, how crisp and clear the October air, how vivid the russet dogwood leaves even in the dimness of the lilac dusk. The maples along Iris Street, halfway into their autumn transformation, incandesced with citrus colors: lime green, lemon yellow, tangerine. To the west the sky was grapefruit pink, the clouds bruised purple. Everywhere he looked he saw the kinds of pictures they put on calendars. In stories, the weather was always blustery and foreboding during a disaster. Why couldn't the weather sympathize in real life?

It was cruel, too, how blithely the rest of the world was going about its business. In fact, it angered Perry. He saw a woman reach over and kiss her toddler in a car at a stoplight. At a corner two paperboys were laughing uproariously. A police car cruised Fredericks Road, the officer inside speaking into his radio. Perry had murderous thoughts toward a squirrel sitting beside the trunk of a pecan tree, busily prying with his little paws. Overhead, a large flock of birds suddenly blackened the sky on some urgent migratory pilgrimage. Where are they going? Perry wondered. Why don't they stay here? He felt a swift hatred for birds. The first hint of trouble and off they flew.

Joe Leonard had stayed after school that day for basketball tryouts. Jewel didn't know the whole story yet, but around five o'clock Joe Leonard had evidently started walking home, then realized he must have left something he needed—maybe a book—back in the locker room at school. When he went back to get it, he had stumbled into a fight in progress in the locker room. Actually, Jewel said, it was pretty one-sided, with three boys ganging up on one. There were knives being flashed around, and the boy on the floor was bleeding pretty badly—though it was hard to tell if he'd been stabbed or just beaten and kicked. When Joe Leonard had crawled out of the locker room to find help a few minutes later, he was holding his own side with one bloodied hand. Rob Finch, the assistant coach, had been the one to call Jewel. But first he had stayed with Joe Leonard and the other boy while Coach Hampton ran to call the police and an ambulance. The three attackers had fled, but Joe Leonard had recognized them all and gave their names to the police.

“If he could tell their names,” Eldeen said, “then maybe he's not hurt as bad as my heart tells me he is.” But Perry remembered all the stories and newspaper accounts he'd read of dying people gasping out the names of their killers with their last breath.

As they neared the hospital, Eldeen began reciting Scripture verses. Perry recognized them as coming from the book of Job, but he wasn't sure she was quoting them in sequence. Still, it struck him as remarkable that she had such a storehouse of Bible verses at her disposal.

“‘Is not God in the height of heaven? and behold the height of the stars, how high are they! Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace: thereby good shall come unto thee.'” The whole time she recited, she swayed slowly back and forth, her eyes shut, her hands clamped together on top of her big black purse. “‘When men are cast down, then thou shalt say, There is lifting up; and he shall save the humble person. He shall deliver the island of the innocent: and it is delivered by the pureness of thine hands. . . . But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold. . . . He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing. . . . For he looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven. . . . I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee. . . . In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind. . . . Which doeth great things past finding out; yea, and wonders without number.'”

In Sunday school Harvey Gill had recently conducted a series of lessons on the book of Job, and Perry had found himself studying ahead each week for the next lesson. Eldeen could be quoting so many other verses from the book that would be more applicable, Perry thought now—the ones about the arrows of God being set against Job, poison invading his spirit, terrors besieging him, misery besetting his soul, traps lying hidden along the path; others about God hiding his face, striking down the righteous, casting his fury upon the weary, delivering the godly into the hands of the wicked. How was it, he wondered, that those were not the verses that came to Eldeen's mind in her own time of trouble?

When they entered the emergency room of the Dickson County Hospital, Perry walked briskly to the secretary standing behind the admitting desk, trying to scrunch his toes together to keep his thongs from snapping so loudly. Jewel and Eldeen followed him. A television blared in the waiting room: “Police have apprehended a suspect in the bombing of one of Columbia's oldest and largest churches,” the resonant voice of an anchorman declared.

“We're looking for Joe Leonard Blanchard,” Perry said to the woman behind the desk.

“Just a minute, sir,” the woman said, looking up at him quickly and then leaning over to press a computer key. Perry tried to search her face for clues about the boy's condition, but all he could see was her brow, slightly furrowed, and her full pouty red lips. They should have a more optimistic-looking person working here, Perry thought, someone who could understand what people must be going through when they came to this desk. The woman squinted at the screen and crimped in the corner of her mouth. Was she trying to think of a way to tell them Joe Leonard was gone, that the doctors had done all they could?

“He's in surgery now, sir,” she finally said, looking up from the screen. “Are you his parents?”

“I'm his mother,” Jewel said quietly, stepping forward.

“And I'm his grandmother,” Eldeen said. “This here's our good friend,” she added, pointing to Perry.

“Can you tell us anything about him?” Perry asked.

The woman shook her head, and her face softened. Perry saw that he had misjudged her, for she reached over the counter to touch Jewel's arm sympathetically. “I need some information about your son if you're up to giving it,” she said. Jewel nodded, and the woman turned to Perry and Eldeen. “Why don't you sit down over there in the waiting room? We won't take long. The doctor will be out as soon as he's done, and he'll talk with all of you. It's hard to know how long it'll be, though.”

“Did you see him when they brought him in?” Jewel asked, her eyes fastened on the woman's face.

“No, not out here,” she said kindly. “They took him straight to the operating room. He's in good hands, Mrs. Blanchard. Try not to worry.” Perry wanted to scream out the same words Dinah had said to him on the telephone: “It's easy for
you
to say ‘Don't worry'!”

Perry led Eldeen to a row of empty chairs along a wall, glad that she walked so slowly. Maybe no one would notice his flip-flops. Around forty people sat scattered throughout the waiting room, all with exhausted faces, all watching the television screen with glazed, stupefied expressions. Can it be, thought Perry, that this many people in Derby and the outlying towns are going through the same emotional disruption in their lives that Jewel and Eldeen and I are going through? An elderly woman across the room had a blood-stained shirt clutched to her chest as she stared unblinking at the television. A baby cried fretfully and strained to get out of his father's arms. The man looked beaten and disheveled. A teenaged girl at a pay phone wept convulsively.

Suddenly Brother Hawthorne and Edna entered the waiting room, followed closely by Willard Scoggins and Harvey and Trudy Gill. The women embraced Jewel up by the desk, and Jewel laid her head briefly on Willard's shoulder. Brother Hawthorne then led the way toward Perry and Eldeen and pulled the chairs around them into a circle. “Let's pray,” Brother Hawthorne said simply, and they all bowed their heads.