The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival (20 page)

But as I’m walking into Easy Time, my mood changes immediately—and not just because it’s full of lonely, old people waiting to die. My brisk “Hi” to the usually bubbly Marie is met with a curt “Hey, Father” and a dirty glance at my bag. She’s got one hand on the phone and it looks for all the world like she’s going to dial 911 to report me for getting an old lady drunk and jacking up her cholesterol.

“How’s Miss Rita?” I ask.

“Oh, she’s awake,” she says, an edge in her voice.

“Is she sick?”

“No,” she sighs. There are tears in her eyes. “That’s just the nicest thing I could think to say about her this morning.”

“That she’s awake?”

“Yes,” she says, then puts her hand over her mouth and dashes for the bathroom, crying.

I stand in front of Miss Rita’s door a full minute. “Jesus, give me strength,” I say before pushing it open and walking into her room where I find her sitting like a spider waiting for its next victim. An angry, sullen spider wearing a neon-green T-shirt that reads
I’m not your Magical Negro
. She’s got her “You did it this time” rays shooting out of her eyes.

I know better than to say anything. I open up my bag and reach for the Crown Royal and cracklin’s, try to hand them to her.

“Just put them down there,” she says, motioning to the nightstand but keeping her eyes on me.

I stand up straight and try to meet her stare. It’s high noon at the old folks’ home, and I know for certain that I’m going to get shot down by this old lady. I break first.

“New shirt?”

“Brand-new.” Her eyes glint.

I’ve walked right into her trap. I might as well make it quick. “What’s it mean?”

“What do you think it means?”

“I have no earthly idea.”

“Guess you’re not as smart as you think you are.”

Again, we fall into a silent stare. Again, I cave.

“You going to tell me what it means?”

Without taking her eyes off me, she reaches over to the nightstand, fishes the Crown Royal from its purple sack, frees it from its plastic seal, unscrews the cap, and takes a slug. She doesn’t say, “Ahhhh,” and neither does she wipe her mouth. Her lips glisten with whiskey when she presses the call button and speaks again.

“Yall get Carl in here,” she demands.

“Timeka’s free,” Marie says.

“Did I stutter?” Miss Rita asks. “Now tell Carl to get his chubby butt in here.”

Carl comes trotting into the room.

“Hey, Miss Rita,” he says. “Father.” He nods.

“Hi,” I say. I haven’t dealt much with Carl. He’s a soft, pudgy white guy with spiky white hair, a goatee, and a diamond stud in his left ear.

“Carl, can you make my bed?”

He looks at it, a bit confused. “They didn’t make it this morning?”

“Guess they forgot,” she says.

He shrugs. “Okay, then. No problem.”

“Dropped my pillow on the floor, too,” she says.

“Okay,” Carl says, reaching to grab it. When he bends over, a massive expanse of white back fat and ass crack slip out of his waistband.

I turn away to spare myself the sight, and see Miss Rita watching me closely.

“Like what you see, Steve?” she says.

“What?” I say. “What’s that supposed to—”

Carl straightens up, interrupting. “What’s that, Miss Rita?”

“Nothing, Carl,” she says, not taking her eyes off me. “You know what, though, Carl. Father Steve, here? Maybe you two could get together sometime. Occurs to me, yall might have a thing or two in common.”

Carl and I look at each other. He’s turned the color of boiled crawfish and I’m sure I have, too.

“Well, Miss Rita,” he starts, a nervous smile fixed on his face. “I…Um…”

“Don’t worry about it, Carl,” I say. “She’s just in a mood today. Thanks for making the bed.”

He takes that as his cue to leave and hightails it out of there.

“Don’t you dare talk about me like I’m not in the same room,” she says as Carl closes the door behind him.

Suddenly I’m twelve again, and in deep, deep trouble. It’s not the inevitable beating I’m scared of, it’s disappointing Miss Rita, suffering that irrational childhood fear that your bad behavior will make someone suddenly stop loving you. It’s a powerful, primal fear. But I try not to give in. If I start crying now, I’d lose any shot of escaping this conversation with a modicum of dignity.

“What was that about?” As if I didn’t suspect.

Her words rush out in an angry flood, starting out low and fast and building to a righteous shout. “I told you to get you a woman, Steve. I told you a hundred times it wasn’t natural living like that. Told you to start a festival to keep you out of trouble and now come to find out you’re living with a man. A man! Doing Lord knows what! That is a sin, Steve. One of the worst. And you know what else? It woulda killed your mawmaw if she knew. It’s enough to make me want to die! I’m sick. Sick to my stomach and I just want to drop dead right now!”

She’s reached such a volume that Marie and Timeka come bursting through the door. Before either can speak, Miss Rita—again never taking her eyes off me—shouts, “Get the hell out of my room, Marie. I said I’d call you if I needed you. Now get out.”

Marie runs off crying for the second time today. Timeka shoots me a dirty look before pulling the door shut quietly.

So Miss Rita thinks I’m gay. Is that it? That should be easy enough to clear up. Still, I need a shot of courage. When I move for the Crown Royal, she snatches it away and kicks her wheelchair as far as it will go into the corner, knocking over a lamp in the process.

“Miss Rita!”

She says nothing more, just clutches the bottle of Crown to her chest as if it were a life preserver, or perhaps a jug of holy water.

“First of all,” I start. “Gay people aren’t vampires.”

Which is exactly the wrong way to go about this. She starts rocking back and forth, shakes her head from side to side, and whispers to herself, “I knew it. Lord. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. I tried to stop him, Lorine.” She’s talking to Mawmaw now, apparently. “I tried. Nothing I could do. See what your church got him into? You
see?
Now he’s going to burn in hell. Burn in hell for all eternity.”

A small part of me wants to laugh, but that could prove fatal for one or both of us. “I’m not going to burn in hell,” I say.

She stops rocking. “No? You got some fancy-pants reason why not? I know what the Bible says. Go on. Grab it out of my nightstand. Leviticus 18:22. ‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind. It is abomination.’ English don’t get any plainer than that. And there’s more where it came from.”

“Okay, now just hold on a minute.”

“Get that Bible.”

“Miss Rita.”

“Get it.”

I pluck it from her nightstand and hand it to her. She waves it away.

“No, you read it.”

“C’mon, Miss Rita.”

She smacks the arm of her wheelchair with the flat of her hand. “Read it, I said. Leviticus 20:13 this time.”

I read it. “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”

“Your church got some way around that?” she asks.

“No,” I sigh. In fact, St. Paul heaps plenty more coal onto the pile, calling the practice unclean, impure, unnatural, and the act of a depraved mind. “It doesn’t. It hates gay people just as much as your church. I’m sure if there was a contest for gay-hating, it would be a tie.”

“Least they got one thing right,” she mutters.

“We need to set a couple of things straight,” I say.

“You need to get a wet-nap and wipe off the covers of my Bible.”

Unable to stop myself, I laugh.

“Don’t you get smart with me,” she says, her voice rising again. “If I have to, I’ll find a way to get out of this chair and slap the white right off your face. Now wipe the filth off my Bible.”

“No.” Sadly, this is one of the bravest moments of my life.

“What did you say?”

The icy tone in her voice is almost enough to change my mind. Twenty years ago, that phrase would have immediately preceded a switching that would have left my legs welted for a week. Which is why I made it my business to learn never to provoke it.

“I said no.”

“That’s it,” she says. She caps the whiskey bottle, puts it on the floor, then starts struggling to lift herself out of the wheelchair. She’s going to kill herself.

“Damn it, Miss Rita. Sit down.”

We’re both shocked. I half expect God himself to reach down and smack me across the face.

“I’m not wiping your Bible down. Even if you think gays are disease carriers, it doesn’t matter. I’m not gay. You hear me? I’m not gay. Not that it should matter, but I’m not.”

Of course, saying I’m got gay sixty-five thousand times is an odd way of demonstrating that it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t believe me. That much is clear.

“I don’t know what else to say. Mark is a friend. And yes, he’s gay. Gay as the day is long. He needed a place to stay. But I’m not gay.”

She breathes heavily, trying to figure out her next move.

“I want you to swear,” she says.

“God,” I say, sounding like a petulant fourteen-year-old. “I swear.”

“I want you to swear to me, to your mawmaw. I want you to swear on that Bible.”

“Oh, now I can touch it? Now it’s okay to swear on your precious Bible with my filthy hands?”

“Boy,” she says in a way that tells me I’ve reached the limit.

For all intents and purposes, this is a court of law. She takes the Bible, I put one hand on it, raise the other. I pluck up the courage to once again stare her in the face. “I, Father Steve Sibille, swear to Miss Rita, to Mawmaw, to God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost—”

She interrupts. “Swear to Mary, too. Doesn’t mean anything to a Catholic if she ain’t in there.”

“And I swear to our Holy Mother Mary, Queen of Peace, Lady of Mercy, on the Holy Bible, that I am not gay and have never been gay. So help me.”

I stand there for a full minute with one hand up in the air before either of us speaks.

“Put my Bible away,” she says.

“Like I’d lie to you, anyway.” I tuck it back into her nightstand.

I motion for the Crown and she hands it over.

“It’s just wrong, Steve.” She’s confused now more than angry. “Bible says God put man and woman on this earth to make babies.”

“If that’s true, then why did God make them gay in the first place?”

“Steve!”

“Miss Rita!” I say, half mockingly. “And you of all people.”

“Me?”

“That doesn’t sound familiar to you? Being picked on? Threatened? Shut out? Let me ask you something, considering when you grew up and where, the things you went through, would you have chosen to be born black?”

“That was in God’s hands. Not up to me.”

“Wasn’t up to Mark, either. Look, he’s just a friend. He grew up in Gueydan, out in the country. You think he woke up one morning and said, ‘I want to be gay. I want all the other kids to pick on me and beat me up. I want my daddy to stop loving me. I want to make my mama cry. I want everyone in my town to whisper behind my back’?”

“Hmph,” she says again. “He doesn’t have to go fooling around with men. That’s a choice he has.”

“I give up,” I say, throwing myself into a chair. “Thought you’d be smart enough to see that.”

She’s silent for a good long time. This may be the only time a Catholic priest has defended homosexuality to someone of another faith—or any faith. I’m so far off script, I wouldn’t be surprised to go outside and find a papal tow truck taking away my car and a bishop standing in the parking lot demanding my collar.

Finally she looks up. “I’m sorry,” she says. I half expect her to choke Fonzie-like on the word.

What? I keep very, very still, afraid to ruin the moment. Miss Rita doesn’t apologize.

“I understand what you’re trying to tell me. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m wrong. It’s what I been taught, what I believed for a hundred years.”

“I understand,” I say. God only knows what it took for her to apologize. She’s right. A hundred years of an unchallenged prejudice doesn’t just disappear.

“Hope you happy,” she says. “You made an old, dying lady feel ashamed of herself.”

I just can’t help it. “Maybe you should,” I say. “A little, at least.”

“Hmph.”

“Besides, this is the first time in my life I got you to admit you were wrong about something.”

She smiles a little. “ ’Cause it’s the first time in your life I
was
wrong about something.”

“Well, I’m certainly going to mark it down on my calendar.”

“While you at it, might as well mark it down as the first time you had the nuts to stand up to me. Though I wouldn’t go bragging you stood up to somebody in a wheelchair.”

We both force a chuckle at my expense, glad we’re back in familiar territory of laughing at Steve rather than fighting over his immortal soul.

She offers me a weak smile. “This is all your fault, anyway.”

“How so?”

“You’da found you a woman in the first place, I wouldn’t have had to embarrass myself like that.”

“Oh, you’re going to start that again?”

“I never stopped.”

“Miss Rita.”

“What about that girl we went to church with on Christmas? The one always hanging around, helping you with the festival? The one keeping you too busy to come visit me more often?”

I pause just a moment too long before saying, “She’s just a friend.”

“Uh-huh,” she says, with a smile. “Thought you said you couldn’t lie to me.”

I’m blushing again. Damn it.

“Ha!” she shouts, slapping her thigh. “We gonna get you straight yet.”

Exasperated, I find myself back on script. “We’ve been through this all before, Miss Rita. I’m a priest.”

She throws her hands up. “Just stop it right there. You can bend all of them church rules for your gay friend.” Her smile grows a little stronger. “Seems you could bend one or two for yourself.”

“Lord,” I say. “There won’t be any bending of the rules.”

“So don’t bend them,” she says. “Just break them. You know you want to. I know you want to.” She pauses, as if thinking something over. She claps her hands, pleased with herself. “And if that girl’s spending that much time foolin’ with you instead of going out with other men, she probably wants to, too.”