by Cathy Holton
Reverend Reeves was an old-time fire-and-brimstone preacher, and he didn’t take kindly to her queries. She could have found another denomination, of course, one that didn’t mind its congregants asking questions relating to faith and fairness, but she had grown up in the Harvest Hollow Baptist Church, as had her parents and grandparents before her, and the church had provided a sort of framework, a scaffolding to build her entire life upon. She couldn’t very well tear that scaffolding down unless she had something else to replace it with. And Mitchell had grown up in the church, too, and was comfortable there, as were the boys, who, with the benefit of a worldview shaped by Sesame Street, Barney the Purple Dinosaur, and Thomas the Tank Engine, seemed oblivious to the more apocalyptic aspects of Reverend Reeves’s sermons.
From time to time Mitchell would ask her, “Honey, what’s wrong?” And she would be tempted to tell him, to lay it all out for him in black and white. But to do that she would have to start at the beginning, she would have to go all the way back to that moment at the Mexican restaurant when she made the conscious decision to sleep with Paul Ballard, and thereby changed the course of her life forever. She would have had to use Mitchell as her confessor and try as hard as she might, she could not imagine herself being cowardly enough to do that.
It did no good to talk about forgiveness because the reality was, sin was sin. In moments of quiet contemplation, with the tick-tock banging in her head like a drum, Annie felt like Marie Antoinette on her way to the guillotine.
Annie had donated clothes and money to the Baptist Home for Children but she’d never actually volunteered to work there. The home was a kind of halfway house for children whose parents were incarcerated but who didn’t want to give up custody or place their children in the dubious foster care system. It was located on approximately seventy acres of land south of Nashville, and included a pond, a recreation center, a chapel, and a series of cottages scattered throughout where children lived with houseparents and attended a local Christian school.
Annie had attended numerous fund-raisers for the home but had never actually set foot on the grounds. So when she got a call from Mildred Dodd asking her if she’d be willing to do some volunteer work on the campus, she was, for a moment, struck dumb. This was on a Tuesday afternoon not long after Carleton had first left for college. Annie was lying on a deck chair out by the pool reading one of her trashy novels.
“Hello,” Mildred said finally. “Are you there?”
“Yes, I’m here,” Annie said. “Sorry. When did you say you needed me?” It was one thing to send money and clothes, but something else entirely to have physical contact with the poor unfortunates who lived at the Baptist Home for Children. Annie wondered if, given her current fragile emotional state, that was such a good idea.
“Next Thursday. We need someone to volunteer in the afterschool care program. You know. Just help with homework, that sort of thing.”
Annie said, “Homework?”
“These are elementary schoolchildren, so the homework is really no big deal.”
“Thursday, did you say? Let me check my calendar.” Annie put her hand over the receiver and sighed. She watched a calico cat prowl the outer edges of the wrought-iron fence dividing the back lawn from the north pasture. It must be one of Alan Jackson’s cats; she’d never seen it before. Sparky, who was lying just underneath her chair, lifted his grizzled snout and growled. He had once been a fierce Jack Russell terrier, but over the years had suffered a series of strokes so that now his head sat at an odd angle on his shoulders, and his tongue protruded slightly to one side. He was nearly blind and deaf and incontinent, and he dragged one leg when he walked. Other than that, he was in pretty good shape. The vet predicted that with the proper (expensive) medication and perhaps a surgery or two (also expensive) Sparky would live at least another three or four years. Mitchell would have put him down long ago (Damn, honey, that’s just sad) if Annie had not stubbornly refused to allow that. Sparky might be sad, but he was all she had left of the boys’ childhoods.
She took her hand off the receiver. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’ve checked my calendar, and Thursday won’t work for me.”
“How about Tuesday?”
Annie pretended to look. “No, I’m sorry, Tuesdays and Thursdays are pretty much booked. But thank you so much for thinking of me!” She had learned years ago how to graciously turn down a volunteer position. She’d had lots of practice.
Mildred Dodd, however, was wise to all the usual moves. “Well,” she said archly, “I’m also in charge of the church thrift shop committee, and I note that you haven’t worked a shift in quite a while, so let me see … how about the week of October second? Or the week of October sixteenth,” she added smoothly.
Annie mentally calculated her proposal. One day at the Baptist Children’s Home versus one week working at the church thrift shop. She had to hand it to Mildred; the woman was cunning. “Oh, wait just a moment,” she said, pretending to check her calendar again. “I think I may have an opening after all. I can’t work at the home this coming Thursday, but I can the following Thursday.”
“Lovely!” Mildred said. “Check in at the administration cottage at two o’clock. That’s the first building on your left, just inside the gates.”
Annie clicked off the phone and tossed it on to the patio table. Sparky waited until the cat had disappeared and then dragged himself over to the fence to investigate. The metronome in her head went tick-tock-tick-tock.
Annie had never really liked Mildred Dodd, which was not very Christian, but true. Mildred had ruled the Women of God meetings with an iron fist for the last twenty years. It was Mildred who had organized Face the Truth Day, when rows and rows of little white crosses symbolizing aborted babies had been set up on the church lawn. Annie hadn’t said anything at the planning meeting but when they pulled up in front of the church the following Sunday morning and she saw the rows and rows of little white crosses, she felt sick to her stomach. She put her hand to her waist and Mitchell said, “What? Are you sick?” and she said, “Yes, take me home.”
Later, after he’d gone back to catch the late service, she’d sat out by the pool and cried. Clouds the color of babies’ ears drifted across the wide blue sky and Annie thought of Mildred Dodd, and the more she thought of Mildred, the more hypocritical she seemed, at least to Annie. Mildred cared for the unborn more than she did for the already born. Here was a woman who, to Annie’s knowledge, had never volunteered at a shelter for abused children, who’d never attended a class for unwed mothers or done anything to address inner-city poverty or the plight of single mothers everywhere trying to raise a family on minimum wages. Here was a woman who had never acted as a foster parent or offered to adopt a crack baby.
Instead she spent her days planting little white crosses on the church lawn, trying to make other people feel bad about decisions they’d had no choice but to make.
Glancing up at the exterior of her big house, at the lovely pool surrounded by banks of lamium and creeping phlox, and stands of rhododendron and azalea, Annie was suddenly ashamed of herself. Here she was with all the blessings in the world, a nice house, a loving husband, two healthy sons, complaining about having to spend an afternoon with a group of poor, unfortunate children. Really, what was wrong with her? When had she become so callous and hard-hearted? If she kept on this track, she’d become as bad as Mildred Dodd.
She called to Sparky and stood up to go into the house, determined not to think of this as an ordeal, something to be endured and hurried through as quickly as possible. She would think of it, instead, as a chance to spend time with some sweet and deserving children who simply needed help with their reading and multiplication tables.
The place was larger than she had expected, and as she pulled into the grounds she was amazed by the expanse of rolling tree-lined hills. She passed a pond bordered by a stone wall and farther on, a steep-roofed chapel. Ranch-style cottages were laid out along a series of narrow streets, so the
place had the feel of a small English village. It was quaint and peaceful, and much nicer than Annie had expected. She followed the signs to the administration cottage.
Afterschool homework sessions were held in the recreation hall. Annie followed a pleasant, round-faced woman named Amanda down a narrow, winding stone path toward the hall. As they approached, they could hear the sound of children’s voices growing louder. It sounded like a playground at recess.
“Oh, dear,” Amanda said, hurrying her steps. “Oh, dear.”
Annie followed behind her wondering what might be the trouble. She had expected a school run on the old-fashioned Christian principles of spare the rod, spoil the child, a place where order and civility were maintained at all costs, kind of like a Dickensian boarding school, only less harsh. So she was surprised when Amanda flung open the door on a scene of utter and complete chaos. Children were standing on tables and benches, and along the outskirts of the room, shouting and jostling one another like spectators at a dogfight. A harried-looking young teacher was trying to separate two children who were slugging it out in the middle of the room, rolling around on the floor and pummeling each other, a huge brightly colored mass of flailing fists and kicking feet.
Amanda, with a smooth move indicating much practice, put a large whistle to her lips and began to blow a series of sharp, loud blasts. Instantly, the spectator children lined up along the far wall. The young teacher managed to grab one of the children, a boy of maybe ten, and hauled him to his feet. His nose was bleeding and he had a cut on his upper lip. Amanda grabbed the other child, who turned out, to Annie’s surprise, to be a girl. She was a lovely little thing, with skin the color of walnut shells and eyes so black you couldn’t see the pupils. Despite her dirty T-shirt and uncombed hair, the child had the delicate face of an angel. Annie was instantly entranced.
“Agnes Grace, what has gotten into you?” Amanda asked, giving the girl’s collar a little shake. “This is your third fight this week. What do you have to say for yourself?” Annie thought, Agnes Grace. What a lovely name.
Agnes Grace sniffed and wiped her top lip with a grimy finger. “That fucker started it,” she said.
The other children sucked in their breath. Amanda said sharply, “Language!” Annie stood transfixed like a woman under a spell, trying to figure out if she’d heard the child right.
“Sorry, Matron,” Agnes Grace said.
“She hit me first,” the boy said, and began to sob.
“That’s right, go ahead and cry, you big blubberpuss,” Agnes Grace said.
“You started it.”
“You called my mama a meth-head.”
“Your mama is a meth-head.”
Agnes Grace took a swing at him but Amanda held her tight. “All right, that’s enough,” she said. “Mrs. Stites, perhaps you can take Agnes Grace out to the pond and help her with her reading.” Annie stood there looking at her dumbly. She wasn’t sure she wanted to take Agnes Grace anywhere. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be in the same room with Agnes Grace unless she’d been run through a metal detector and strapped into a straitjacket first. Agnes Grace shrugged out of Amanda’s grasp, walked over to a table, and picked up a book. She walked to the door and looked at Annie over one shoulder. “Are you coming or not?” she asked.
Annie followed her to the pond. Once out of earshot of Amanda and the young teacher, Agnes Grace opened up about her life. Her mother, Dee, was in prison for stabbing her drug dealer in the back. He didn’t die but he was “messed up,” and that’s why Dee was doing time. Agnes Grace was one of nine children.
“Nine children?” Annie asked, aghast.
“She’s only thirty-six, and she’s got nine kids and all her teeth,” Agnes Grace said proudly. She walked beside Annie with a jaunty step, pulling the blooms off a mass of scarlet trumpet vine trailing along a fence, and crushing them in her tiny hands. Annie did her best to listen to Agnes Grace’s life story without appearing too shocked, which was hard to do considering that the child had a vocabulary that would make a Juarez drug dealer blush. By the time they got to the pond, Annie felt like she’d been beaten about the head with a blunt object. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore.
She put her hand up and said, “Don’t you know that young ladies aren’t supposed to talk like that?”
“Who says?” Agnes Grace asked suspiciously.
“Everybody says. Parents, teachers, the president. God.”
“Shit.” Agnes Grace hooted derisively. She tilted her head and looked up at Annie. “Hon, how old are you?” she said.
“That’s not a question you should ask a grown-up lady. How old are you?”
The child winked one eye slyly and said, “Old enough to know not to wet on an electric fence.” She poked Annie in the ribs with a skinny elbow. “Get it?” she said.
Annie didn’t know what was more disturbing, the child’s language or the fact that she acted like a thirty-five-year-old stuck in an eight-year-old’s body. (She was guessing about the age but she’d noted that on the inside of her book it read, AGNES GRACE SIBLEY—THIRD GRADE.) “Let’s get started on our reading, shall we?” Annie said, sitting down on the edge of the stone wall.
“Hell’s bells, woman, what’s your hurry?” The girl skipped a stone sidearm across the placid pond.
“You have to read if you want to learn. You have to learn if you want to go to college and get a good job.”
The girl did a couple of cartwheels and then came up in front of Annie and stood with her hands on her hips. “You got any kids?”
“Two. Two boys. They’re grown now and in college. I used to read to them.”
Agnes Grace winced to let Annie know that she wasn’t falling for this. “Huh,” she said. “Two? That’s all you got?”
Annie resettled herself on the wall. “Two’s all I ever needed.”
“Hey, what’s your name?”
“Mrs. Stites.”
“Sucks for you,” Agnes Grace said. Annie gave her a deadpan look and the child said, “No, really, what’s your other name?”
“It’s not proper for a child to call an adult by her first name.”
“Shit, lady, you sure got a lot of rules.”
“Rules are good. Without rules, civilization would crumble. And don’t say, shit; it isn’t nice.”
“Hey, you got any candy on you?”
“No. I’ll bring some next time.”
“Yeah, sure,” Agnes Grace said, scratching idly at her crotch. “I heard that before.”
• • •
Annie was so shook up by her afternoon with Agnes Grace that she forgot to cook dinner. She went home and poured herself a glass of white wine, and she was still sitting at the breakfast bar in the dark, drinking, when Mitchell got home.
“What’s the matter?” he said, when he saw her. “Are the boys okay?”
“The boys are fine,” she said, rapping her knuckles repeatedly against a wooden column just to be sure. “I didn’t feel like cooking is all.”
“Okay.” He’d never come home to a dark house and no dinner on the table, and he wondered if this might be a case of bad female hormones. He put his briefcase down on the counter, moving slowly and warily, like a man confronting a coiled snake. “No problemo. We can eat out. Let’s go out to dinner, what do you say, Punkin? Just the two of us for a romantic little dinner for two.”
Annie lifted her glass. “Don’t call me Punkin,” she said.
Two hours and three chardonnays later, Annie had made up her mind. She did not need to feel guilty about not going back to the Baptist Children’s Home. She had heard the clear challenge in the girl’s voice, Yeah, sure, I heard that before, but she was under no obligation to respond. The girl was someone else’s responsibility. She was someone else’s problem. She was damaged goods, tainted irreparably by an insidious drug culture and a broken social system that spit out tens of thousands of hopeless children every year. Agnes Grace was a problem beyond Annie’s ability to fix. She was a bright
-eyed Lolita, a pornographer’s dream. There was absolutely nothing Annie could do.
She went to bed that night, for the first time, without tick-tock ringing in her head. In its place was the drumming refrain, Yeah-sure-yeah-sure-yeah-sure. She finally managed to fall asleep around three o’clock, and dreamed she had a wart on the bottom of her foot, a plumy growth like a scarlet trumpet bloom that she couldn’t get rid of, no matter how hard she tried. She tried burning it off, but it grew back. She tried cutting it off, but it reappeared even larger. Each attempt to uproot it only drove its roots deeper into her foot until they wound like a thorny vine up through her leg, growing inexorably and lethally toward her heart.
The next morning she called Mildred Dodd and volunteered to spend Tuesday and Thursday afternoons out at the Baptist Children’s Home.
Agnes Grace wasn’t really as bad as she appeared on first impression. Over the next eighteen months Annie got to know her better and discovered many admirable qualities in the girl’s personality. Or maybe she just got used to her headstrong ways. Anyway, they developed a kind of friendship that grew into something deeper over the months they spent together. Annie began to look forward to her Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Baptist Children’s Home, and after a while she set it up so that on Wednesdays she and Agnes Grace spent time together away from the home, shopping for school clothes, attending a museum, or (Agnes Grace’s favorite thing) visiting the Nashville Zoo.
She had a way with animals. They seemed to bring out her gentler nature. When a nest of baby starlings was found in the chimney of one of the cottages, she took them home with her in a cardboard box and nursed them with an eyedropper. Abandoned by the mother and refused by the zoo, the baby birds were not given much chance to live. But Agnes Grace fed them a pureed insect concoction she made herself, and the birds not only lived, they thrived. They developed plump gray-feathered bodies and bright beady eyes. Annie would pull up some afternoons to find Agnes Grace sitting on the concrete stoop outside her cottage like a female St. Francis of Assisi, the birds resting on her outstretched arms or fluttering gaily around her head. When it came time for the birds to fly, Agnes Grace took each one out into the yard, and with gentle hands, threw it high into the sky, and watched as it sailed above the trees, circled twice around the yard, and then flew off forever.
