Adelaide Piper

by Beth Webb Hart

  Juliabelle! She was stuck on Pawleys with Papa Great, and it was up to me to go out and see her. She must be worried sick.

  I slid my finger down the silver pages before opening the book at random to a page full of thees and thous and verbs that ended in -eth. “Can’t be worse than Chaucer,” I murmured as I read the first verse of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

  “Okay, definitely cryptic, but I like the poetry.” I flipped through the chapter, and something stopped me at the reddish-orange words of Christ at the top of a page in the same Gospel, and I read the question that was asked to some crippled man at a pool in a place called Bethesda: “Wilt thou be made whole?”

  My spirit quickened at the question. A sick body might be made well, but what about a crushed heart?

  I jumped down the page and read more of the orange words: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.”

  Looking up from the book and into the mirror above my bureau, I guessed Mama and Daddy had bid the precious stones farewell. The house was quiet except for the faint sound of the eleven o’clock news in the den. And there was a distant ringing in my ears, but it grew closer as I stared back down at the words in red.

  Suddenly, the ringing enveloped me. It was like a tingling heat that started at the back of my head and worked its way down to the backs of my knees. I wanted to collapse into the arms of it, but I didn’t have the faintest idea how.

  “‘Passed from death unto life’?” I said aloud in a doubtful tone, but even through my sarcasm, I couldn’t shake the sense that something was standing right behind me. Breathing on me. I looked back only to find the clouded eyes of my collection of dolls staring dully in my direction.

  Then I went to my window to look out into the shadowy marsh surrounding Williamstown. In the corner of the sill, a large banana spider was tearing down part of its dusty web and reconstructing it again with fresh strands of transparent silk.

  The phone rang, and I answered it.

  “It’s Shannon.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Just wanted to check on you.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “I’m here,” Shannon said.

  “Thank God,” I said.

  “Now you’re talking.”

  I fell into the pillows on my bed and sighed.

  “Wanna go with me to church on Wednesday?” Shannon slipped in without warning. “There’s this lady who is giving her testimony, and I know how you love a good story.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, at least you didn’t say, ‘No, never.’”

  I grinned at just the idea of passing from death to life. Oh, that it were real. That it could actually be true. Then I rested in the comforting lull of my childhood friend’s voice as we chattered on about Bonnie Raitt’s Nick of Time album and the Fourth of July coon-dog parade and a day trip we might take to the boardwalk in Myrtle Beach.

  When we hung up, I put the journal on top of my bedside table and attached the nice ink pen to a clean page. If more questions woke me up in the wee hours, I would pen them down before they slipped through the dusty web of my mind and out into the thick black of the summer night.

  9

  Harriet and Harvest Time

  Harriet von Hasselson Hartness appeared the next evening at a sangria party for the debs on the back porch of Mrs. Bitsy Stillwell’s house. Much to my surprise, she was built like a pumpkin on two sticks, and her dress style was a peculiar blend of hippie and grunge. She looked (and smelled) as though she had just stepped out of a circus tent or an extended Grateful Dead tour with her oversized men’s tank top and her loose tapestry skirt. She wore a low-riding fanny pack cocked on her wide hip, and a frayed rope was tied around her ankle as though she had been shackled somewhere along the way.

  “Harriet von Hasselson Hartness has hairy armpits,” Jif whispered, after sizing her up at a distance while sucking on a potent orange from the sangria pitcher.

  I chuckled as we marveled at the surprise of Miss Hartness. “It’s refreshing,” I said.

  “All that we got right about her was the D cup,” said Jif, “but I bet a week of Slim-Fast would get them down to a C.” (It was all about calorie intake with Jif.)

  “So we don’t know so much after all,” I said, strangely relieved by this realization.

  Harriet looked bewildered and irritated as she tried to carry on a conversation with Nan McCant and Winkie Pride. She was a raccoon in the headlights of the quirky Williamstown social scene, and I hurried across the porch to rescue her.

  “Hi, Harriet,” I said, extending my hand. “I’m Adelaide Piper, and I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

  Jif was surely rolling her eyes somewhere beyond the chips and salsa.

  “At least it’s real sangria,” Harriet responded, motioning to the table full of Mexican food, “but I’m a vegan, and I can’t eat any of this stuff.”

  “A vegan?”

  Harriet shrugged as if this word were an everyday one in Williamstown.

  “Is that some kind of religion?” I asked in a hushed and considerate tone.

  Harriet laughed out loud and explained, “It means I don’t eat any animal products. And that I respect all life by eating only plant-based foods.”

  This remark seemed to grip the attention of most everyone in the party, and before long there was a semicircle of debs, mothers, and little old ladies who were trying to understand what vegan meant.

  “You mean you’re a vegetarian, dear.” Bitsy Stillwell, who considered herself up on things, tried to correct Harriet.

  “No,” said Harriet as she wiped her nose with the back of her hand, “some vegetarians eat seafood and eggs. But they don’t realize that they are contributing to the deaths of two hundred million male chicks a year.”

  “Oh my!” Mrs. Kitteridge crooned.

  “Oh yes,” Harriet stated with confidence. “Since a male chicken can’t lay eggs, they serve no purpose to the egg industry and are killed shortly after hatching. The female chickens are kept five to a tiny battery cage and are usually killed before their second birthday to make way for the younger hens.”

  “Nonsense!” Mrs. Zapes said. She was known around town for her delectable deviled eggs, and her recipe had even made the state paper last Independence Day.

  Harriet’s mother didn’t seem to be present, but her grandmother, Mrs. Marguerite Hartness, made her way over to Harriet in an effort to end the discussion by steering her out into the back garden.

  “Dahlin’,” she said as she placed an arm around Harriet’s freckled shoulder, “have you seen Ms. Stillwell’s garden?”

  “You don’t even want to know about the cows,” Harriet said to me, and she nodded in the direction of the beef tacos in the center of the table before accepting her grandmother’s invitation to the garden. “Or the leather soles of your shoes,” she added over her shoulder.

  Miss Pringle gasped, and the little old ladies murmured among themselves before inspecting the bottoms of their high heels.

  I looked back at Jif and grinned with excitement. This gal was going to stir things up around here, and we were both going to enjoy it.

  After touring the garden for a moment, I sat on a bench beneath the weeping willow tree. While my appetite for tacos had vanished, my mind was ingesting: if I had been so wrong about Harriet von Hasselson Hartness, could I be wrong about other things too? I pictured the journal on my bedside table and the childhood Bible on my dresser. What about Shannon and the invitation to the hand-raising church on Route 39? What did I have to lose in just going and hearing one lady’s story?

  I stroked this thought as if it were a smooth pebble plucked from the bottom of the Santee River. The katydid song upstaged the clink of china as the debs grazed on their Mexican buffet, and I heard a breeze pushing
through the thick summer air. It dangled the tips of the weeping willow branches before lifting the wisps of hair on my forehead.

  Toward the end of the evening, I had another refreshing conversation with Harriet, who turned out to be a movie buff and an English major who yearned to find the South in the Flannery O’Connor short stories she’d studied last semester at Sarah Lawrence College.

  “Are there peacocks around here?” she asked. “I came here to see the peacocks and the busybody warthog ladies who spray down their pigpens and dream of a caste system in heaven. And the folks with gimp legs and the traveling Bible salesmen.”

  “Well,” I whispered, “there are a few busybodies in this immediate circle, but to tell you the truth, you’ve landed in the wrong socioeconomic group. You need to go on down to the mill village or the mobile homes on Route 39 if you want to glimpse vestiges of that sort of thing.”

  “Will I really see it?” Harriet asked hopefully.

  “You need to know,” I said with a wink, as I recalled the O’Connor short story that had made a lasting impression on me, “a good, grotesque Southerner is hard to find.” We both laughed until Harriet snorted.

  “Gracious me,” a warbly voice clucked somewhere behind us.

  Then I motioned for Jif to come on over and join us, and we talked unreservedly about the highlights of our coastal town: climbing the water tower, rafting down the Santee River, picking the tomato fields after the migrant workers left town, and sucking on honeysuckle at the edge of Pawleys Island.

  It seemed that Harriet loathed the well-to-do world of Greenwich, Connecticut, where she had been raised, and she was yearning for a drastic change. Her parents had split when she was five years old. Her father, a psychiatrist, lived in Las Vegas, where he ran his own psychotherapy practice, and her mother, a depressed New York socialite with Southern roots, had remarried a Wall Street investment banker, forcing Harriet into a blended suburban family with his two perfect offspring, who were at the tops of their classes at a New England prep school and an Ivy League institution.

  “Ever been to Darlington?” Jif asked with a gleam in her eye.

  “Can’t say that I have,” Harriet said.

  “Well, you haven’t seen the South until you’ve seen NASCAR,” Jif informed her. “I’ve a cousin who lives there, and he’ll take us around before the big race. His daddy sells T-shirts for Richard Petty.”

  “For sure!” Harriet said before taking some sort of soybean snack from her fanny pack and offering it to us. “I just knew this place would be brimming with life.”

  “That’s one way to put it,” I replied, though the irony was not lost on me: Harriet had sought out sooty old Williamstown to find the wonder while I had fled to NBU for much the same reason.

  When I got home that night, I called Juliabelle first to say, “I’m okay. And I’ll be out in a few days to see you.”

  Then I called Shannon on a whim and said, “Okay, I’ll go.”

  “Go where?”

  “To hear the lady at your church.”

  “Awesome!” Shannon said. “Now, it’s a little different than what you’re used to in a church.”

  “I’m game.”

  “Then I’ll pick you up Wednesday afternoon at five thirty.”

  When I hung up the phone, I heard Daddy calling out to Dizzy from the front porch. She had shimmied down the magnolia tree in the front yard and was scurrying toward a car just beyond the hydrangea bushes whose motor was running though the lights were off.

  “Where do you think you are going this time of night, Dizzy?”

  “Ah, crap!” she said, turning around toward him. “Daddy, I’m sixteen years old. Every sixteen-year-old in the county goes out this time of night.”

  “Everyone but you,” Daddy said, walking past her and toward the car that suddenly turned on its lights and drove around the bend toward Main Street.

  “Get in your room,” he said, pulling the purse off her shoulder and crumpling the pack of cigarettes and matches inside.

  “Just because your life is miserable doesn’t mean mine has to be,” she said.

  “Don’t you talk to your daddy that way,” Mama said. She was on the porch in her nightgown, and I could make out the outline of her petite little body through the white cotton eyelet.

  Dizzy stormed past them into the house, ran up to her room, and turned on her Cure CD full blast. I heard her screaming the lyrics to “Just Like Heaven”: “You-oo-oo, lost and lonely . . .”

  “So you still back me up on some things?” Daddy said to Mama as he pulled her close and rocked her back and forth, keeping time with the churning of the steel-mill furnace blasts beyond Main Street.

  She nuzzled beneath the crook of his shoulder, kissed his chest, and said, “I want what’s best for our family, Zane.”

  “I know you do.”

  Two nights later, Shannon and I made our way into the gravelly parking lot of Harvest Time Assembly Church. The cinder-block sanctuary was a former barbecue joint on Route 39 (as I had suspected), and it was run by some “church planters” by the names of Dale and Darla Pelzer. Shannon had taken great pains to explain to me the Pelzers’ mission and how she had come to know them. She had met them once at the Young Life camp where she gave her soul away and then again at a Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting at the University of South Carolina last semester, where they shared their vision for starting churches in poor communities all over the South. Williamstown was their first stop, and their plan was to share the gospel with the migrant workers and the leftover families from the mill villages.

  A church with a social conscience, I thought as we made our way to the outskirts of town, and I pictured the sullen girl staring back at me from the old mill home the day I went to NBU. I felt a twinge of guilt as I recalled the poem I wrote in response to that exchange. Had I ever made an effort to reach out to anyone in the struggling section of my hometown? Nope. All I ever wanted to do was get away from them.

  “Now, it’s a covered-dish dinner,” Shannon had told me when we stopped at the Piggly Wiggly on the way to pick up two gallons of sweet tea. “After we eat, we’ll hear the testimony, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “Sounds pretty painless,” I had said, “and a far cry from St. Anne’s.”

  We had both laughed as we envisioned the pristine Tudor-style Episcopal church where I was baptized and confirmed, with its sterling silver chalices and ornate stained-glass windows.

  “It’s a bit earthier than St. Anne’s.”

  “‘Earthier’ is putting it mildly,” I now joked as I read the letters on the marquee outside the crude sanctuary: “Exposure to the Son can prevent burning.”

  Shannon handed me a gallon of tea and prodded me out of the car. “Sometimes it’s necessary to get right to the point. Now, keep an open mind, O Enlightened One.”

  When we entered the cinder-block building set on its thin concrete slab, I felt a kind of energy envelop me. Then my mouth began to water as I scanned the wobbly card tables filled with fried flounder and tamales and banana pudding. This sure beats country-club chicken salad, I thought to myself as a large lady named Charlie Farley greeted me with a soft, warm hug that smelled like sugar and baby powder. She was the female version of the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

  “Shannon told me you were coming, and I’m so happy to meet you, Adelaide.”

  “Thanks,” I said hesitantly as I flashed Shannon an inquisitive look, but before my friend could respond, a young Mexican lady pulled her away for counsel.

  “I’m the parish greeter,” Charlie Farley said, “and I’ve got a place set for you right by me so that I can introduce you around.” Then she whispered into my ear, “The Lord is moving in this place, and your presence here is another great blessing He’s given us tonight.”

  Before I could say, “I think you’ve confused me with someone else,” Charlie Farley had gathered a group of five middle-aged ladies, who encircled me as they spouted out their questions: How did I kno
w Shannon? What part of town was I from? What did I like to eat? After one lady offered to fix me a plate, a couple of college students from neighboring small towns came over and introduced themselves. Teddy Mee was enrolled at Columbia Bible College, while Sarah Spicer and Rob Marjenhoff were upperclassmen at the University of South Carolina. They were all helping the Pelzers get this church going, and Teddy was already planning the next mission field in the little towns of Mullins and Greeleyville.

  “You’d think we wouldn’t need churches in the Bible Belt, Adelaide,”

  Teddy explained, “but there’s a lot of poor folks who are displaced and haven’t ever heard the gospel before. Take the migrant workers, for instance. They have been right under our noses every harvest season, but nobody has taken the time to share the Word with them.”

  “Dale and Darla have a heart for these folks,” Sarah Spicer added.

  “This is their calling.”

  “And we’re just trying to do our part in carrying out the Great Commission,” Rob Marjenhoff said, and they all nodded in unison.

  The Word? The Great Commission? Having a calling? I had no idea exactly what they were talking about, but I was curiously drawn to their fervor for what they were doing. I sure would like to know what the heck my calling is!

  Shannon, who had made an attempt to make her way back to me, was now off in a corner, praying for the young Mexican lady, who was wiping her wet eyes with the heels of her hands.

  “Sit right over here by me,” Charlie Farley called. An older woman had piled my plate high with food and set it in the center of the table.

  As Dale Pelzer got up to say the blessing, everyone took their seats, and I scanned the rest of the room to get my bearings.

  There was a group of migrant workers who could barely speak English in the front corner. Shannon had told me that the church was partnering with Habitat for Humanity to help construct permanent homes for them so that the wives and children could put down roots and get a steady education. And Dale and Darla were taking Spanish lessons from my high school Spanish teacher, Señora Barker, so that they could better communicate with them.