Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind

by Ann B. Ross

  “I need some paregoric.”

  Norma’s eyebrows went up like they were on springs.

  “Can’t do it, Miz Springer. Have to have a prescription now.”

  I rolled my eyes at that. Somebody’s always changing rules that’ve worked well enough for years. I said, “And just what are people supposed to do when they need relief? Call a doctor and pay his bill, too?”

  Buck and Norma exchanged knowing glances, as if they thought I was blind or too crazy to notice.

  “Well, now, Miz Springer,” Buck said, pulling at the tail of his white jacket. He loved to dispense medical information along with his pills. He’d wanted to be a doctor or a veterinarian. I couldn’t remember which, but they wouldn’t let him in.

  “It’s a controlled substance now,” he informed me. “Too many people self-medicating themselves with it. Want me to call your doctor and get a prescription for it?”

  “No, if I need it bad enough I’ll call him myself.” I wasn’t ready to explain to a doctor why I wanted a prescription for a painkiller. “Just give me a large bottle of Pepto-Bismol for now.”

  Norma couldn’t stand it any longer. “What’re you going to do with all that stuff, Miz Springer? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “I do mind, Norma,” I said. “But since you have, I’ll tell you. Instead of letting the church tear down my house, I’m going to turn it into a home for injured cats and dogs. And when they’re better, I’m going to let them run around in the church parking lot. So be prepared to do some scooping.”

  I paid for my purchases and left the drugstore, aware of Norma’s squinty-eyed appraisal following me down the sidewalk.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  LILLIAN AND I doctored on Hazel Marie for some time when I got home with the medical supplies. I kept hoping she’d drop off to sleep, but every time her eyes began to close she’d think of Little Lloyd and start crying again. And every time I turned around Lillian was handing her another drink. If it wasn’t ginger ale, it was a milk shake or a glass of lemonade, saying she had to have something on her stomach. It’s a wonder she didn’t begin to float. After a while, she ate a slice of dry toast and kept it down, which relieved me considerably.

  She kept wanting to get up and look for the boy, but we convinced her that the best thing she could do was stay in bed until we knew where to look.

  I volunteered to call all her relatives down in Benson’s Gap, and we decided that I’d pretend to be somebody wanting Brother Vern for a preaching service and not mention Little Lloyd at all.

  “That’s the best way to do it,” I said. “We don’t know how many others are in this with him, but I’ll bet that wherever the Reverend Vernon Puckett is, the boy is, too.”

  “He may have him hid somewheres,” Lillian said.

  “Don’t create problems,” I told her. “Besides, if I find Brother Puckett, you better believe I’ll find Little Lloyd. I’ll have that man in jail so fast his head’ll swim. The idea of lying to me to get that child. To say nothing of ransacking my house. I tell you, he’ll think twice about messing with me again.”

  Hazel Marie slept most of the afternoon, except for the times Lillian woke her with another glass of something to drink. During that time, I spoke to more Pucketts than I’d ever known existed. At first it was hard to do, unaccustomed as I am to lying. But after a while, I about convinced myself that the little church I’d made up really needed Brother Vern’s ministry. Most of the people I spoke to had that local mountain twang, and I found myself following along.

  “I’m alookin’ for Brother Vernon Puckett,” I’d say. “They’s a need for his preachin’ in our church, ’cause it’s about to split in two, and we need a revival real bad.”

  That certainly got more cooperation than when I said something like, “I wonder if you could tell me, please, where I might find the Reverend Puckett.”

  But none of them knew where he was. Or if they did, they weren’t telling.

  After that disappointment, I had another idea. It was Tuesday, and Brother Vern’s telecast was supposed to run at nine o’clock that night. Unless he canceled out and ran a substitute in, we’d know he was in Spartanburg for at least an hour.

  When I told Hazel Marie what I’d come up with, she wanted to head down the mountain right then and wait for him to get to the studio.

  “No,” I said. “If he sees you before he starts his program, he’ll just drive off. You ought to wait and see if he’s on live and not just running a tape. Which he might be, if he thinks you’re able to get to him.”

  When Lillian heard what we were going to do, she announced that she was staying to watch, too. So we kept Hazel Marie in bed in my room until Deputy Bates was up and gone, and then we helped her downstairs. I’d offered her either my cotton chenille zip-up robe or my blue satin wraparound with lace inserts, the one I kept in case I ever had to go to the hospital. She chose the blue satin, and why wasn’t I surprised?

  “Come to the kitchen first,” Lillian told her. “You need to rinch yo’ mouth again with salty water. An’ I fixed you another milk shake to put some meat on yo’ bones.”

  Hazel Marie brought the milk shake into the living room, and Lillian made her comfortable on the sofa with pillows behind her back. I turned the television on and we all leaned forward to watch the Feeding the Flame program, coming to you live with Brother Vernon Puckett, the anointed of God, preaching with Holy Ghost power the good news of the Gospel.

  And there he was, in a royal blue suit and matching tie with a white dove on it. His hair looked wet and slicked back, except for that little curly swirl on his forehead. He made a big thing of attaching what he called a lavaliere microphone to his lapel, laughing and pretending he didn’t know how it worked. Just your average workingman, unfamiliar with technical devices. Uh-huh, and those one-eight-hundred numbers running across the screen in front of him.

  “Pray with me now, all you brothers and sisters in the telecast-viewing audience,” he started out, but not a one of us bowed our heads. “Lord, we ask that You send the devil packin’ tonight, and let your angels just camp around us so we’ll be in a frame of mind to receive your blessin’, praise God, amen.

  “Now then,” he went on, hardly taking a breath. “I want you-all to know that a special blessin’ is comin’ to you tonight. I don’t want to say I’m happy about this, you know how it is, but Brother Winslow, who has the next hour after us, has taken sick, and we’re prayin’ for you, Brother Winslow, but the good people here at the station has asked if I can go on for two hours instead of my usual one.” He paused, looked around, and put this surprised look on his face. “Can I go on for two hours? Brethren, I can go on for ten hours! It don’t take no effort for me to preach just as long as somebody’s out there to listen! But now, before I get revved up good, let’s hear from Sister Rubynell. Come on out here, Rubynell, and backin’ her up is the Glory Boys Band; take a bow, boys. They all down here from up in Shelby, North Carolina, and we thank you for it.”

  Hazel Marie sat up and said, “He’s going to be there for two hours, and I can be there in that time. I’m going to Spartanburg and make him tell me where he’s got Junior.”

  “Wait,” I said, waving her back. “You don’t have a way to get there, and we don’t know yet if this is a rerun. Let’s be sure this is live before you do anything.”

  By that time, Sister Rubynell had appeared in what looked like one of my housedresses, and she was a sight to see. Her hair was silvery white and teased so high that Norma Cantrell’s couldn’t hold a candle to it. She looked about my age, with a few more pounds on her and a whole lot more wrinkles. In spite of that curled mass of hair, she wasn’t wearing a lick of makeup except for a thick layer of blue eye shadow. The contrast was jarring, to say the least.

  “That woman look like she been rode hard and put up wet,” Lillian said, frowning at the screen.

  She sounded it, too, because when she opened her mouth, without so much as an introduction by the ba
nd, she came out with a loud, piercing rendition of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” Fingernails on a chalkboard, I thought, turning down the volume. But she evermore got into it, at one point snapping her fingers and saying, “Pick it up, boys,” in spite of their flailing away to do just that, and she didn’t miss a beat. She had a set of lungs on her, I gave her that.

  I cut my eyes over at Lillian and Hazel Marie to see how they were taking this, not wanting to offend anybody by saying what I was thinking. Lillian’s church likes hand-clapping, foot-tapping music sung on key by rich voices, so she was sitting there with a frown on her face. Hazel Marie, on the other hand, was watching intently and nodding her head in time to Sister Rubynell’s screeching. We Presbyterians like semiprofessional choirs to do our singing for us, with only a few congregational hymns to mumble our way through.

  “Thank you, Sister, and all you Glory Boys,” Brother Vern sang out on the last twang of the electric guitar. There was a smattering of applause as the camera panned across an audience of a dozen or so people sitting on folding chairs.

  “Now, I want all you folks in the telecast-viewing area to listen up, ’cause I got some good news and I got some bad news,” Brother Vern said. “The bad news is, there’s a devil loose out there lookin’ for whoever he can devour. Make no mistake about it, he don’t want no New York strip with A.1. sauce and he don’t want no strawberry shortcake neither. He craves the souls of men. And women’s and children’s. Don’t matter to him, he’ll take ’em all. But the good news is, JEE-sus was hungry, too, and you know what he ate? Help me now, He swallowed up death. Praise God, He took death and swallowed it whole and not a one of us has to be afraid of the devil’s appetite no more. Listen to me, now, ’cause I’m agonna tell you all about it. Just as soon as I wipe my face here.”

  He laughed in that folksy way of his, and took a large white handkerchief from his pocket. He mopped the sweat from his face, which was glistening in the television lights.

  “All right, lissen to me now,” he went on as he paced back and forth. “You got to have JEE-sus in your heart. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Lissen here, you don’t have to mix up a cup of Kool-Aid or hitch a ride on Hale-Bopp to find Him. Nossir, that ain’t the way to do it. All you have to do is say, ‘Come on in, Jesus,’ and that’s it. Wait a minute, don’t turn that dial, all you gonna see is somebody trying to sell you a car or a double-decker hamburger. You don’t need that, so stay tuned ’cause I got lots more to tell you.

  “But first, I want you to meet a real special guest right here in the studio with us. He come all the way from Memphis, Tennessee, to tell us about a special ministry that God has called him to. Come on over here with that television camera.” As Brother Vern moved to the side, he kept looking over his shoulder to be sure the camera had him in view. He pulled up a chair beside a sofa where a very wide woman was sitting. She held a toddler on a lap that looked full of an unborn child. Beside her was a wisp of a man, bald head shining, who was holding another toddler. Between them was a little older child.

  “This here’s Brother Stedman Jones and his good wife, Sister Leesie. Welcome to the Fanning the Flame program, good people. Now, folks,” Brother Vern said, looking directly into the camera, “Brother Stedman and Sister Leesie take to heart the Lord’s commandment to be fruitful and multiply, ’cause they got, count ’em now, sixteen children, praise God!”

  The camera panned quickly across a row of children bunched up behind the sofa. Lillian shook her head and said, “Sixteen head of chil’ren. How they feed ’em?”

  The camera came back to Brother Vern, who leaned toward his guests and said, “What’s the Lord got you doing now, Brother Stedman?”

  “Glad you asked,” Brother Stedman said, unrolling a narrow two-foot long piece of paper. “I want everybody to call in right now to get this special gift for only twenty-three dollars, plus postage and handlin’. See, it’s a bumper sticker that tells everybody where you’re goin’. And, believe you me, it ain’t to no Wal-Mart’s.”

  “What that thing say?” Lillian asked.

  “It says,” I said, squinting against the glare of the television lights on the shiny paper, “‘Warning! Driver May Disappear at Any Moment.’ What in the world does that mean?”

  “It’s talking about the Rapture,” Hazel Marie said, surprising me no end. “You know, when all the believers will be taken up in the air.” I vaguely remembered hearing something about that from a visiting evangelist in First Church. But most of us mainline Presbyterians are post-dispensationalists, or so Wesley Lloyd told me.

  “I declare,” I said, turning my attention back to the set.

  “Hear that, folks?” Brother Vern took one end of the banner and held it up high. “Put one of these on your bumper, and you’ll be doing your neighbors a favor, telling them to watch out for cars going every whichaway when that final trump sounds. In the twinklin’ of an eye we’ll be swept right up outta our sports-utility vehicles and our pickups and our living room recliners, ain’t that right, Brother Stedman? Now, why don’t you tell us what all you been doing over in Memphis. I know you been busy.”

  “Yessir, I sure have,” Brother Stedman said, and I thought of those sixteen children and figured out what he’d been busy doing. “Besides running off these bumper stickers, I been workin’ on them abortion clinics. I’ve closed down two of ’em and been put in jail three times, praise God. I need your prayers real bad, ’cause you got your liberals, and your secular humanists, and your homasexals, and they’re all dead set against me.”

  “Well, you got my prayers, Brother,” Brother Vern assured him. While Brother Vern went on, it came to me how some Christians seemed to always need to have something or somebody to be against. If it wasn’t desegregation, it was women’s lib. If it wasn’t sex education, it was secular humanism. And if it wasn’t one-worlders, it was just plain Democrats. Now it was abortionists and homosexuals who were ruining the country and destroying Christianity. Well, I had more faith in the Lord of Calvin and Knox than to get carried away over that unlikely possibility. He’d been running things since the beginning, and I didn’t figure He’d have much trouble keeping a lid on things in this day and age. Besides, we didn’t have any abortion clinics in Abbotsville. Or homosexuals, either.

  “Now,” Brother Vern said, drawing my attention back to him. “Brother Stedman, I want to give our telecast viewers a good look at your fine family. Smile, young’uns, you’re on Candid Camera! Come on, put the camera on ever’one of ’em, praise God for the stars in your crown, Sister Leesie.”

  That poor woman had sat all through this with a smile plastered on her face, without a word to say for herself. Of course, nobody had given her a chance to speak, and she was probably too tired anyway. I kept wondering how she got all those children fed, washed, and dressed to make their appearance on television.

  “Look!” Lillian yelled, jumping up and pointing at the screen. “Look right there!”

  “What is it?” I strained to see what she was pointing at.

  “It’s Junior!” Hazel Marie came off the sofa, holding her ribs and spilling her milk shake all over my Oriental. “It’s him! Brother Vern’s got him in that family! He’s right there, don’t you see him?”

  “It is him,” I said, seeing that little pinched face with the thick glasses sliding down his nose. All the children were smiling and posing for the camera like they’d done it a hundred times before, while Little Lloyd stood in their midst looking lost and forlorn. I noticed that he had on his clip-on tie because, I was sure, he didn’t have anybody to make the knot in his good one.

  “I got to get down there,” Hazel Marie said. “Miz Springer, I hate to ask you, but could you loan me enough money for a taxi? I’ll pay you back if it takes me twenty years.”

  “A taxi? To Spartanburg? That’s forty miles from here, and I certainly will not.” I stood up and clicked off the television. “We’ll take my car. Get yourself together and let’s get started.”

  CH
APTER NINETEEN

  WAIT FOR ME,” Lillian said. “I’m goin’, too, but I got to get this milk shake up.”

  “Leave it,” I said, “we don’t have time to be cleaning rugs. It’s forty miles down there, and he’s going to be on the air for”—I looked at my watch—“another hour and a half. If we hurry, we can be down there about the time he’s through.”

  “Oh, please, let’s hurry,” Hazel Marie said. She was so jittery that the blue satin robe was shaking and shimmering around her.

  Lillian looked at her and then at me. “You want me to go get her clothes?”

  “No,” I said, “it takes too long to get her dressed. You two go on out to the car, and I’ll lock up the house.”

  I got my pocketbook, checked the cash in my change purse, turned out the lights, and hurried outside to the garage. Hazel Marie was already in the passenger seat, while Lillian stood waiting for me.

  “You want me to drive?” she asked.

  “I do not. I’m perfectly capable of driving this car.”

  “Well, I know you don’t see too good at night.”

  “Neither do you,” I said. “Besides, I do have headlights, so get on in and let’s go.”

  She pulled back the driver’s seat and started cramming herself into the narrow backseat, moaning and groaning as she did. “Whew,” she said as she plopped in, “this ain’t built for no normal person.”

  Hazel Marie had her hands clasped in her lap, staring straight ahead, willing us to get started.

  I drove through town, seeing only a few cars at that time of night, but half blinded by the headlights of the ones we did meet. By the time we got to the interstate I’d learned not to look right into them. There were only a few headlights way off in the distance when I got ready to merge, so I was able to do it without having to fit in between a stream of cars.

  “Miz Springer,” Hazel Marie said softly and a little hesitantly, “you don’t have to stop and look on a ramp. You can just go on out in the nearest lane. If you don’t mind me saying so.”