“You ought not to been doing that.”
“I guess not. But I’ll bet you-all did the same thing about us.”
“Never. All I knew at Copy-Op that day was that you were pretty. Mighty pretty.” Wesley slips toward Phoebe, puts his hand on her leg, looks straight ahead, waiting for her response, prepared for anything. She doesn’t seem to mind. This kind of thing is okay for a Christian to do.
Mrs. Rigsbee’s house is just ahead. “This is it. Right there. That porch is where I tried to get in and steal some pound cake one time. I mean, you know, I was planning to leave some money, so it wouldn’t really be stealing, but anyway . . . this is it.”
Mrs. Rigsbee sits in her spot on the living room couch. Wesley and Phoebe sit in chairs. Wesley always chooses the chair he sat in that first night he was ever here. It’s the green chair with the big fat arms.
Wesley tells about Vernon’s screaming. “So a sliced tomato is what his daddy gives him every time. The second time it happened we were sitting in Dr. Fleming’s office and in rolls this woman in a wheelchair. Her name was Tina Johnson Dillworth. Some woman was pushing her. See, what had happened was I moved this gold plaque that had her name on it beside this classroom. They got them things all over the place, I don’t know, so I just got bored or something and unscrewed hers one day and screwed it in the wall right next to a broom closet. Well, somebody was rolling her on a little tour and she saw her plaque beside the broom closet and started having these hissy fits and got rolled right into Dr. Fleming’s office and Vernon got to talking to her, and she asked him why he had to rock back and forth all the time. Well, everything got real quiet, but I seen his eyes getting big behind his glasses, so I said to Dr. Fleming, ‘Do you know where I can get a tomato?’, and she just looks at me funny. Then Vernon starts screaming. They had to roll the wheelchair lady outside, and I had to go all the way to the snack bar before I could find a tomato. They had to let out a couple of classes.”
“It’s just horrible the way some people get raised,” says Mattie. “And spend all that time in front of a television set. My Lord. And buy all that junk they advertise on television. I declare, somebody ought to be put in jail. You take that Jimmy Jo Bathroom Cleaner. They go on and on about how it cleans this, that, and the other. Show it in the toilet bowl just a cleaning in one swish, and you go buy some for I don’t know how much and it won’t clean no better than dirty water. It’s mostly lies. Just out and out lies. And people wonder why young people lie so much these days. Why, it’s in front of their faces, and everybody tolerates it like they think they ought to. Hitler and them used all kinds of propaganda in World War II. Lies. Well, this is the same thing. They all ought to be in jail, I tell you. Whoever it is that writes that stuff up. I use baking soda for all my cleaning. If people bought what they needed instead of what they wanted then some of those crooked concerns would go out of business.
“So. Anyway. And you been over in this boy’s house? This retarded boy?”
“Yes ma’am. I cooked a meal.”
“Well, good for you. What’d you cook?”
“Okra, cornbread, pork chops, potatoes.”
“You didn’t let the pork chops get dry, did you?”
“No ma’am. I put the water in and the lid on and all. They were tender.”
“Good. Now, how about you, Phoebe?” says Mattie. “Are both your parents living?”
“No, my mother died four years ago, but my father has just moved down here from Michigan. He’s the new dean at Ballard University, and is looking around for a house. I think he might want me to move in with him once he finds one.”
“And you’re at the Nutrition House?”
“Yes. They have a really good program. I’ve already lost a good bit, and I just started at the beginning of the semester.”
“Well, idn’t that wonderful? Appearance does count for a lot, don’t it? That’s one thing I tried to teach Wesley when he was staying here. And I did help him out with his teeth some.”
“You did?”
“Phoebe teaches kindergarten at the church,” says Wesley.
Mattie looks at Wesley. “I just wanted to tell her a little about your teeth,” she says.
“Phoebe works at the church—Mt. Gilead.”
“So, you work at the church?” Mattie says to Phoebe. She looks back at Wesley.
“Yes, I’m an aide in the kindergarten. I’m working on a degree in childhood education from Michigan State and so this has worked out real well.”
“And your daddy’s a dean?”
“That’s right.”
“What does a dean do?”
“Oh, he’s an administrator. Administration things.”
“I declare, it’s all getting so complicated. It’s getting so you don’t know what to expect from college students. I guess they stopped teaching them anything about the Bible a long time ago.”
“I had an Old Testament course last year,” said Phoebe, “where we had to read the Old Testament. It was something.”
“I been reading that stuff about David,” says Wesley, “that I didn’t know was in there. I asked you about that,” he says to Mattie. “David had some little bastards, I think, and he slept with these women that won’t his wives.”
“Watch your language. God settled up with David.”
“Where does it say that?”
“It’s in there.”
“Well, it don’t bring it up in the place where it happened.”
“Son, the Scriptures are there for inspiration. It’s all there. Don’t you worry about that. You read Second Timothy. That will tell you. And the fact is—David got forgiven. That’s what’s important. Everybody knew David had done wrong. That’s very clear. Maybe you ought to sit down and read the whole Bible. Not just jump around. You ought to sit down and start reading it straight through.”
“Okay. Maybe I’ll do that. But jumping around is what they do in Sunday school.”
Phoebe is surprised that the conversation is heating up.
“I know,” says Mattie, “but they got men working all that up so that it fits together. They got men preparing those Sunday school lessons. Do y’all teach Bible stories in kindergarten?” Mattie asks Phoebe.
“Oh, yes, that’s about all we teach.”
“You wouldn’t talk to me about Song of Solomon, either,” Wesley says to Mattie.
“I don’t remember much about it.”
“Just read it sometime. You do that—you read Song of Solomon for me, and I’ll start at the beginning and read the whole Bible straight through for you.” I don’t want to get mad in front of Phoebe, Wesley thinks.
“Don’t go too far before you read the New Testament,” says Mattie. “That’s what’s important. Don’t you-all want a little more tea?”
“This is just fine,” says Phoebe.
“I’ll take a little more,” says Wesley. “I can get it.”
“I’ll get it. Give me your glass.”
After Mattie leaves the room, Phoebe looks around and says, “I can see how it would be nice living here.”
“I gained some weight while I was here.”
“What was that about your teeth?”
“Oh, nothing. A few fillings, stuff like that.”
Mattie returns with fresh iced tea for Wesley. “Don’t y’all want to stay for supper?”
“No ma’am,” says Wesley. “We got to get on back.”
“What about us stopping by the mall for a little bit?” says Wesley on their way out to the car.
That means the mall, then the lake, thinks Phoebe. “Okay, I guess so.”
At the mall, Phoebe gets a bag of popcorn and they sit on their bench across from the pet shop.
“She’s getting pretty old,” says Phoebe.
“Pretty old, yeah.”
“I wonder what’s going to happen when she gets so she can’t take care of herself.”
“Oh, she can take care of herself. She’ll be taking care of herself for a long
time yet. She’ll probably outlive me and you.”
“She’s what—eighty-six?”
“Yeah, but she’s good for a long time yet.” Wesley tries, but can’t picture a really frail Mrs. Rigsbee.
“Does she have any children?”
“Two,” says Wesley. “She kept wanting them to have grandchildren, but they wouldn’t get married. So when they finally got married, they moved away. Idn’t that funny? I figured ole Elaine—that’s her daughter—would move away. She was weird. But I didn’t think Robert would. But he married this woman that was kind of like Mrs. Rigsbee, except she was meaner, and when she got ready to move, she moved and Robert went with her.”
“It’s a good thing she had you.”
“Yeah, I guess it is. But that was all happening to her about the same time I was involved with the car business.”
“You never told me about that. Why in the world would you steal a car?”
“I don’t know. It was just something to do. What do you say, let’s go to the lake.”
Phoebe’s nostrils are flaring. She’s breathing hard. Wesley’s hot fingers are under her blouse, moving back and forth. She opens her eyes. The moon shines on the water. She can’t decide what to do with her hands. She’s been moving them up and down slowly over the shirt on his back. But she doesn’t want to seem too eager. She’s got to maintain some control over all this. But her breathing. She can’t control her breath. It’s coming so strong she has to break the kiss, open her mouth for air to rush in and out. Oh God, it feels so, so good. His mouth finds hers again. He’s doing things with his tongue, in her ear and on her neck. They had talked and then. . . . Now this. She opens her eyes, looks at the moon on the water, closes them.
A sticky sweat is working up on both of them. They work hard, they long for each other, long to be closer and closer and closer.
Wesley longs with a memory of what it was like with Patricia holding him within her while wild horses strained, stretched high into the air, suddenly left the ground twisting and turning, while they were shot through with pure hot molten gold, then dropped back, limp white fish—that memory of what it was like, the memory of what it was like before this, his new life with Jesus and real love; he longs for the hot gold here at the lake with Phoebe—somehow along with Jesus and real love.
And Phoebe wonders what finding Wesley within her could ever be like, what it could mean to her life. She wonders whether she, unmarried, should ever become totally intimate with him here at the lake no no of course not, whether she should maybe drink a lot of wine so she could be saved from deciding no of course not. Her daddy is still alive, the lights of right and wrong still shine into her life. She finds the window handle with her hand, turns it, feels cool air, saves herself again by fumbling upright in the seat. She straightens her clothes. “Wesley, we’d better get back.”
“Phoebe, Phoebe, Phoebe . . . Phoebe, baby.”
Chapter 12
Wesley, Carla, and Linda have been raking and bagging leaves—the last scheduled leaf-raking for the year at BOTA House. Now they are sitting on the front porch steps, taking a break.
Ned Sears parks on the side street and goes in the back door.
“Why does he always go in the back door?” asks Linda.
“Sneaking around,” says Carla, taking off her work gloves. “Thinks he’s going to catch something going on. He’s a case, ain’t he? Pure hell would be being married to somebody like that.”
“Hell for me,” says Linda, “would be being married to anybody.”
“How you and Phoebe getting along?” Carla asks Wesley. She leans back against the concrete step behind her.
“Good. Good.”
“She’s lost some weight, ain’t she?”
“Oh yeah.”
“She’s got a real sweet personality,” says Carla.
“Great skin,” says Linda.
“Yeah, that’s one thing I like about her.”
“My skin is like the Sahara Desert,” says Linda.
“You do have dry skin,” says Carla, standing, slipping her gloves back on, picking up a rake. “If Phoebe’s smart,” she says to Wesley, “she’ll write out a contract before y’all get married.”
“We ain’t planning to get married. Not right away, anyhow. Not until after I get out of here. And I ain’t real sure about her old man and all. She might move in with him.” Wesley locks his fingers behind his head, leans back on the steps. “When he buys a house it could get complicated. I don’t think he likes me.
“Last time I saw my sister,” says Carla, “she was about to get married and I told her, I said, ‘You get you a contract before you marry him and you make it say something about where he’s going to be spending his time, because if you ain’t careful he’ll be one hell of a lot more free after he’s married than he was before. You get a contract and a good lawyer to tell you what to put in it. I’ll tell you one thing: love and marriage don’t necessarily go together. What it is is love, marriage, and divorce, and I’ll tell you one man never got over his divorce—my husband. He never got over it because I shot him before he had a chance to get over it. And that’s why I find my young ass right here on this porch. It was one big mess and I ain’t no criminal either, which is why they got me here instead of behind bars, but this is what a life of hell can end up in.”
“I didn’t hear someone cursing, did I?” The screen door creaks. Ned Sears steps out onto the porch.
“I said ‘hell’ but I won’t cursing, sir,” says Carla.
“There’s a thin line there,” says Sears.
“I was talking about a life of hell.”
“Well, the hell I know about is far worse that anything we can experience here on earth.”
“Maybe so.”
“Wesley,” says Sears, “could I chat with you a moment inside.”
Wesley looks at Sears over his shoulder. “Sure.” It’s going to be about the wall, Wesley thinks.
Inside, Sears speaks to Wesley from behind Mrs. White’s desk. “Have a seat, Wesley. I just wanted to let you know that the Board of Trustees was happy about the plans for the band tour and about the fact that we’ll soon be getting the Lord’s music out into the community. This will be a unique outreach effort from the Ballard family. And all of us in the administration are happy with it, too. The president especially. We believe it may bring us new students, and new support of all kinds.” Sears stands. “So I just wanted to express our happiness with all this. After all, if a person only hears what they’re doing wrong, how are they ever going to know what to do right?”
“I don’t know. I never thought about it.” Wesley pulls at his ear, looks at his foot. So—it ain’t the wall.
“I don’t think they will.” Sears moves around to the front of the desk, sits in a chair. “And there is one other item. We’re going to need to move that wall one more time. But then that’ll be it. Just one more time. My wife feels, and I agree, that we need to open up the space just a bit more there in the living room, and the perfect place for a reading area is at the top of the stairs in that little foyer. Mrs. White agrees. A brick wall will add a certain amount of privacy up there, I think. So we’ll need to get right on that.”
That afternoon, before supper, after tearing down half of the wall, Wesley balls up his pillow against the headboard on his bed, sits against it, and thinks about blues riffs on the National Steel. And he thinks about Mrs. Rigsbee, about Phoebe, about moving that damn wall again, Vernon, Project Promise.
If he can teach Vernon the band songs, then get him in the band, playing bass, then that will free Wesley up to play the National Steel all the time rather than just part of the time. People will be hearing him do the riffs, hearing him get down on some of the stuff he’s been learning. He can work some of it into the gospel and then be ready for the blues.
Back at the orphanage, in his room in the afternoons, he used to listen to blues records—the ones given by the Civitans. The blue notes, the bass runs. The flatt
ed thirds and fifths, sevenths. Bent notes. Rhythm-and-blues had it. Blues had it. Black gospel had it. It was like food. Blues music, good blues music, was like Mrs. Rigsbee’s pound cake and apple pie, except he ate it with a different part of himself. He had to have it. He had to have the sweetness of it. Blues tasted sweet like her food and it was sad sometimes and there was something about it that sounded like a part of the feeling, the sweet ache in his body when the horses were twisting in the air, getting shot through with hot gold. And that’s what he could have with Phoebe if he could figure it all out. He knows he’s on the way—now he knows how to love a woman in her heart, whereas he hadn’t known about that before. But somehow with Jesus it got more complicated. You give up all the other stuff until you’re married. He thinks about the Bible, about reading it straight through. Figuring things out. He needs somebody to talk to about it once he does get started. Somebody to listen to him while he tries to figure it out. Somebody who don’t know it all, who will help him figure it out.
Wesley opens the bedside drawer, gets out the Bible Mrs. Rigsbee gave him. Maybe he should read the whole thing like she said to. From start to finish. She’d been right about a lot of things. Find out for sure what all is in there. There’s no telling. If there was that stuff about David and the concubines and all that, then there’s no telling what else he might find. He thumbs through the first few pages, finds Genesis I.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
As he reads, Wesley suddenly sees himself—as if from below, from the front row of an audience—dressed in a white shirt, striped blue-and-white tie, and a navy blue suit, standing behind a lectern, preaching. He sees the sun shining through a window behind him, brightening the fuzz on his cheek.
At first it was all dark, he says aloud.
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