Mary Mae and the Gospel Truth

by Sandra Dutton

  And I know just by watching that crab that my trilobite was alive, whether Mama thinks so or not. I know the Lord loved that trilobite as much as he loves this crab. Trilobite shells wasn't put in the ground to trick us. Them trilobites growed up and ate and swam and got scared just like the rest of us.

  ***

  The hostess says we're next, so I follow Mama, Daddy, and Granny into the dining room. Granny gets the shrimp scampi, Mama orders crab gumbo, and Daddy gets french-fried scallops. Me, I don't feel like eating what I've just been watching, so I order spaghetti.

  Then Mama, Granny, and Daddy all set talking about Brother Lucas and how it's so nice he's doing a puppet show.

  ***

  November 3, it's Granny's eighty-seventh birthday. G-Maw, my real grandma, come—she looks just like Granny, only a little bit bigger—and Great-Uncle Jasper and my cousins from Bloodstone. We have hot dogs, and then give her a big old cake with tiers. Looks like a steamboat at Christmas. Granny opens up cards from her friends down in Crawdad.

  I give her a cushion she can use for wooden seats. It's blue corduroy with GRANNY wrote on it. Granny don't like them hard seats, has me get her a bed pillow all the time.

  Mostly the cousins just give her little things—a tea sampler, some bubble bath, a book of old sayings, since they know she's a-going back to Crawdad and has to put everything in a suitcase.

  We all go into the living room and sing. Give Granny a concert—me playing Granny's guitar. We sing some of her own songs and some just old-time tunes, like "Bonaparte's Retreat" and "Jenny Get Around" and "Wayfaring Stranger."

  And then we's all taking pictures. Family shots with everyone crowded around. Granny and Mama, Daddy, and G-Maw taking turns doing the shooting.

  ***

  Day after Granny's birthday I'm in her room playing guitar again.

  "Mary Mae, I got something I want to give you," she says. She pulls her box of music out from under the bed and asks me to pick it up. It's the one she always thumbs through when she's trying to figure out something to sing. All them scraps of paper and pieces of songs. "Some of these songs goes way back, and a lot of them ain't finished," she says. "You can do what you want with them. You're the one should have them."

  "Granny, them's yours."

  "No, I want to pass these on," she says. "I've had my fun. Now it's your turn. You're the one of all the cousins that cares about music, the one that's got the talent and desire."

  "Thanks, Granny," I say.

  "And I want you to keep my guitar, too."

  "No, you got to have your guitar." I can't picture Granny without it.

  "No," she says, "I'm a-taking my fiddle, and I got my Autoharp back home. That's enough. They need me to sing, I'll just play one of them."

  So I pick up that guitar again and can't believe it's mine. Got little designs all across the top and a strap Granny made herself.

  Then I look through the box of music. Some of them pages is real old—1937, 1942. All yellow and musty. Some got musical chords scribbled down. And some of them just got words. At the bottom of the box there's these old-time records. Big, heavy records.

  "You'll have to get yourself a record player," says Granny. "Watch for one at the Salvation Army that plays seventy-eights."

  "Seventy-eights?" I say.

  "Means the record goes around seventy-eight times per minute. That's how we got our sound in them days."

  I got to ask Daddy can we get one of them players. I want to hear all Granny's records.

  ***

  Today at Sunday school me and Chester's supposed to practice. But Brother Lucas says Chester's home with the croup. "So I'm shortening Noah's Ark," he says. "That way Chester don't have much to learn."

  "But then I won't have much to learn," I say.

  "Nothing I can do about that," says Brother Lucas. "Here's how it's going to be. You and Noah's just tending ship. Them animals is already on the boat. The food's been picked up and stored. And it's been a-raining for three days."

  "But we got us a backdrop with the animals marching in."

  "Nope, they's already been marched in. We'll use the plain backdrop for you and Chester."

  "But I want to know some things. How did Mrs. Noah collect all them pairs? And how did the tiger cats walk in all peaceful with the sheep and the goats? And who rounded up the Komodo dragons? And where did they get enough food? Some of them animals got to have fresh meat, lots of it."

  "Can't answer them questions," says Brother Lucas. "We got a guest preacher speaking this morning."

  "But I want to practice!" I say.

  Even Chloe and Orlin think I should get some practice.

  "Don't have time. Preacher's starting early, so we got to get upstairs."

  ***

  I think about skipping, hiding out in the bathroom and playing my guitar, but when I come up the stairs, I see this man up at the front of the church setting on a metal folding chair. He's got his foot twisted up by his mouth, and he's eating a doughnut off his big toe. Then I see that his sleeves is loose and empty and tucked into his pockets. The adult Bible class is already in their seats. After our class sets down, Sister Coates introduces him. "Pastor Hosea Tilbury," she says. "We are pleased to have him here from Morning, Oklahoma."

  His wife is a-setting off to the side.

  "He's wrote six books," Sister Coates says, "just typing with his toes." We can see them all lined up on the offering table. Sister Coates reads their titles. Swinging with the Lord, Talking with the Lord, First Supper, Last Supper, God's Fat Calf, and the one that was a Christian bestseller, Pearls of Oklahoma.

  Pastor Tilbury stands. "I was born this way," he says. "But my mama and daddy saw to it that I rose to the challenge." He sets back down, shows us how he can do different things, like tie his shoe with his teeth, write his name with his toes, or comb his hair. He's got on socks that fit like gloves, each toe separate.

  During question time, Jonathan Safer wants to know if Pastor Tilbury can work a puppet.

  "Show me one," he says, and Jonathan hands him Adam. He takes it in his teeth by the hair, sticks his foot up the body, then turns his own self upside down quick as a doorknob. Now the puppet is straight up in the air and Pastor Tilbury's a-looking at us upside down and talking. "Don't let the Devil take your courage," he says.

  We all applaud. He flips the puppet off, catches it in his teeth, then turns hisself right-side up.

  ***

  Granny and I sing "Wings of Jesus, Let Me Soar," a tune she found in an old hymnbook.

  Sister Coates asks who would like to give thanks.

  "I'm grateful the Lord brung Pastor Tilbury to our church," says Rowena Chisholm.

  "And we know how courageous we can be," says Ruth Truesdell.

  "Praise the Lord," says Sister Coates.

  She leaves her microphone fastened to the podium. Pastor Tilbury digs into his briefcase with his toes, puts his sermon in his mouth, stands, walks to the podium, puts the sermon down, and turns up the first page with his tongue. "Hallelujah, we are blessed!" he says.

  "Amen!" says Mama, though I don't listen to a word after that. I'm still fussing I didn't get no puppet show practice.

  12. Ice Age

  Monday, Miss Sizemore gives us back our reports. Me and Herschel got A's. Then she gives back all the fossils that was on the display table. I get my little trilobite, and them other fossils I dug up with the class, wrap them up in my old sock, and put them in my book bag.

  Miss Sizemore's taken down all the pictures from the Ordovician age and put up new posters showing how the Ohio River valley looked during the ice age—with woolly mammoths and mastodons, peccaries and musk-oxen, saber-toothed tigers and giant sloths, and a lot of other animals I write down. She hands out maps on glaciers, showing how three of them come down over Ohio. "The last one, the Wisconsonian, left piles of gravel," she says.

  After recess, she leads our class down Mason Street, then straight up through the woods, till we're standing
at the edge of the grassy part overlooking the city. Miss Sizemore's wearing sneakers and a jacket, and the wind's blowing her red hair all around in the sun like a dandelion. She points down to Hanrahan Street, at the foot of the hill, says that's where the Ohio River used to flow, looping around toward the expressway.

  "You mean the Ohio River used to come through DeSailles?" says Dexter Bodley.

  "Fifty thousand years ago," says Miss Sizemore. "But the glaciers pushed it south, and when the last one melted, it left a pile of gravel." I'd seen that gravel lots of times, but never knowed it was left by a glacier. We all look down to the foot of the cliff, and there it is. "That gravel is called a glacial moraine," says Miss Sizemore. Me and Herschel pick up a few pieces on the way back.

  Then Miss Sizemore leads our class down Hanrahan Street, the old bed of the river.

  Even Shirley Whirly's spooked. "We'd be thirty feet under," she says.

  Just thinking about the ice age gives me the shivers. All them animals wandering around, and the glacier moving and creaking. I start thinking about them icy-blue Popsicles they got down at the pony keg, the ones that stick to your tongue, and how the world must have been that color then.

  And I'm thinking if the Lord wanted to do us in again, he could turn the whole world into an ice ball.

  ***

  I show Granny the glacier maps and tell her about walking down the bed of the old river.

  "Lordy," she says, "musta been cold."

  "They was lots of animals living around here, too," I say. "Saber-toothed tigers and big giant sloths and peccaries." I show her my list.

  "What's a peccary?" says Granny.

  "Like a pig. Got a big, long snout."

  I go upstairs, pull my cigar box out, and add the fossils and gravel to my collection, then come back down.

  Granny gets her fiddle, I get my guitar, and we make up a song.

  "Peccary a-nosing down the glacier in the morning,

  Yellow-bellied sapsucker finds him a tree.

  Woodchuck says, 'I'm a-looking for some huckleberries.'

  Short-faced bear says, 'Come with me.'"

  We sing that verse again, trying to ease into a second verse. We's trying different chords, different words. Then Mama comes home. She sets her things down in the kitchen, goes upstairs. Me and Granny's quiet for a few seconds, thinking. And then I hear Mama. Throwing things around. Mumbling real loud. Next thing I know, Mama's clomping down the stairs.

  She's got my cigar box.

  I forgot to hide it.

  "Mary Mae," she says, "I thought I told you to throw these out." She slams the box down on the coffee table. I picture the trilobite banging heads with the crinoid.

  Then she picks up my "Interview with a Trilobite." I showed Granny but forgot to put it away. "I told you, you was not to study such things. You was to tell your teacher to give you other assignments."

  I glance at Granny.

  She's putting her fiddle away, but I know she's taking it all in.

  "So what I got to do," says Mama, "and I don't want to do it—Lord knows I got enough to do at work—but as a Christian person, I got to take you out of school."

  "We're building a glacier tomorrow."

  "You ain't a-building nothing. This is where you're having school from now on. You ain't a-playing music, neither." She takes my guitar, puts it in the closet. Then she picks up my cigar box and takes it out to the trash.

  ***

  Daddy comes home.

  "We got a problem," says Mama. "I'm telling you, Farley, I can't have this. Mary Mae's writing papers on things we don't believe in."

  "Like what?" says Daddy. He don't know what she's talking about.

  "Trailerbites."

  "Trilobites," I say.

  "I don't care what they's called," says Mama. "Them's trick rocks. Belong in the ground, and you didn't throw them out when you was told to."

  Daddy still don't know what she's talking about, but he chimes in, "Should have listened to your mama."

  "I got no choice, Farley."

  Daddy's raising his eyebrows, like as if to ask what.

  "Got to teach her at home," says Mama.

  "Is that allowed?" says Daddy.

  "You bet it is," she says. "I been reading about it in Christian Testament."

  "But how are you going to do that and work?"

  "We'll just get up early," says Mama. "I'll give Mary Mae her assignments, and Granny can make sure she does them. You don't mind, do you, Granny?"

  "I'm here all day," says Granny. "Though I ain't going to be here forever."

  "We'll worry about that when the time comes," says Mama.

  "You got to know what you're doing," Daddy says to Mama.

  "Farley, I can teach," says Mama. "You just make assignments. Besides," she says, going to the sink for water, "I been to college."

  Mama's got a business certificate.

  "We get Mary Mae on the right track," says Mama, "we can let her go to public high school."

  "High school! I'll run away before I have to wait for high school," I say.

  Mama slaps my face. "I don't care what you want. We're going down to school tomorrow, picking up your things, then coming back home." Mama sets back down.

  "I ain't eating dinner," I say, and I go upstairs. I go into my room and set on my bed. Then I see Mrs. Noah, perched on that pop bottle on my dressing table. Now, I love Mrs. Noah—especially since I done her face myself—but I hate Mama right now more than I love Mrs. Noah, so I grab her by the hair and take her downstairs. Mama, Daddy, and Granny's still setting in the kitchen. I walk past, waving that puppet, go out the back door to the garbage can. I throw Mrs. Noah on top of my cigar box. Then I come back in. "I ain't a-playing Mrs. Noah, neither," I say.

  "Yes you are, young lady," says Mama. "You go out and take that puppet out of the trash!"

  "No, just leave it there," says Daddy. "She'll have no privileges for a month."

  "I ain't got no privileges now," I say, and stomp back upstairs.

  "I want her in that puppet play," I hear Mama saying.

  "Then you better save that puppet," says Daddy.

  "Well, Farley, you're closer to the door."

  I'm pleased to hear them arguing over Mrs. Noah. I plop down by the register. I can hear Mama on the phone telling Mr. Harbin she'll be late tomorrow. And then she calls Sister Coates. "Sister Coates is a-praying for us," she says.

  Daddy calls me for dinner.

  "I ain't coming down," I say.

  "You're coming down here," says Mama, yelling up the stairs.

  "You're coming down right now," says Daddy.

  So I come down, but I don't eat nothing. Just push my food around.

  "Eat!" says Mama. Then she shakes her head. "What did I do to deserve this?"

  I clear the table, then go back up to my room.

  ***

  I hear Granny when she comes up to her room, and I go stand in her doorway. "It ain't fair, Granny," I tell her.

  "No, it ain't," she says. "What you gonna do about it?"

  "I'm running away," I say.

  "Where to?"

  "Zimbabwe."

  "What would you do there?" says Granny.

  "I don't know. Pick fruit."

  "Well I'd think twice about that."

  "You ain't no help," I say.

  I go to my room, climb into bed with my clothes on. I ain't never going to sleep.

  ***

  But I wake up at midnight. House is quiet. I creep downstairs, open up the back door, and walk out to the trash. With the moon, it's light enough to see. I lift up a garbage bag, and there's my cigar box. Mrs. Noah's missing. I feel around in some potato peels, find two fossils that fell out, and put them back in the box. I take it out, put the garbage back in, put the lid back on.

  Then I look up at the stars. Miss Sizemore says each one of them stars is the center of a universe just like ours. It makes my head swoosh just thinking about it and how compared to the world, I'
m no bigger than a dust mite. Except unless God thinks I'm important. I hope he thinks I'm important. Lord help me, I say. I want to stay in Miss Sizemore's class. She's the best teacher I've ever had.

  13. Mr. Trimble's

  I don't feel like brushing my teeth or washing my face, so I don't. And I have on what I slept in, but Mama don't even notice. She plaits my hair, yanking it hard. We get into the car. I don't think I should have to go to school if I can't stay there. Mama could turn my books in for me and pick up my school supplies.

  She puts on her best slacks, the ones with the cuffs, and we drive down to school. She parks out in front of the new addition, and we walk up to Mr. Trimble's office. He's the principal.

  Mama stiffens up the minute she walks into his office. It's filled with sculptures he's built out of Popsicle sticks—a castle, a Ferris wheel, a fort, and dangling over the copy machine, something that looks like a space station.

  "Good morning, Mary Mae," he says. "And Mrs. Krebs?"

  Him and Mama shake hands.

  "What can I do for you?"

  Mama clears her throat. "Mary Mae ain't a-going to school no more."

  "Oh?" Mr. Trimble straightens his glasses. "Are you moving?"

  "No, we ain't a-moving," says Mama. "I'm teaching Mary Mae at home."

  "I see." Mr. Trimble looks sort of mixed up. "Why don't you have a seat?" Me and Mama set down on folding chairs, and Mr. Trimble calls Miss Sizemore up on the intercom. "Please come down," he says. "We have Mary Mae and her mother here."

  He arranges some papers on his desk, pins an announcement to his bulletin board, then takes a note from a first-grader.

  He sets down, and in comes Miss Sizemore.

  "Morning, Mary Mae," she says. "And you must be Mrs. Krebs." She puts out her hand and Mama shakes it, though I know she don't want to. Miss Sizemore pulls up a chair.

  "Mrs. Krebs says she's taking Mary Mae out of school," Mr. Trimble tells Miss Sizemore. "She wants to teach her at home." Then he says to Mama, "Can you tell us why?"

  Mama tells them about the fossils and the paper I oughtn't to have written. "We don't believe in trilobites," she says, showing him my interview.