“Amen,” Gerald softly said. I doubt anyone else other than me heard him. But I did not flinch. The unattractive young man’s words cut through my ears like a scalpel. Somewhere in a Louisiana prison my daughter sat at the level of a snake and needed to hear this message. I pictured her soul empty and drained.
“And don’t sit there thinking who else needs to hear this message,” Lee said, suddenly standing. A few sprigs of his hair still stood on end like he had undergone an electric shock.
“We’re all the same in God’s sight. We all have to take the same step regardless of our circumstance.”
“The church is not a place for anybody who thinks they’re perfect. We’re a hospital for hurting people. Do you know the One from Galilee who can heal the weary and bear your yoke? The Word tells us no one comes to the Father except by Jesus. All you have to do is call on Him. Ask Jesus to forgive you of your sins. Confess Him to be the great I Am who was crucified and rose on the third day so we may have eternal life in glory. Folks, the Jesus who died for us gives us a second chance. What truer friend could we have?”
Gerald’s wide index finger, manicured with automotive oil, guided my eyes on the page of the battered hymnal through the stanzas of “Turn Your Eyes upon Jesus.” The humble voices rang out against the steady strum of the piano. I was too tired to sing. Too tired of predicting, fixing, and controlling. Hush, just listen, I imagined Aunt Stella telling me. Gerald’s low, deep voice echoed in my ear. “And the things of earth will look strangely dim in the eyes of His glory and grace.”
“Mama wants a glass of orange juice,” Patricia said the following Saturday morning. She entered the kitchen, the part of the house I claimed as my territory. She smelled of Miss Claudia’s flowered perfume and carried a wooden tray with a plate of wheat toast. One piece was torn at the edge as though some tiny mouse had nibbled it.
I started to protest and demand that Patricia make Miss Claudia eat. Now we’re at the point where she won’t even eat toast. I yanked the refrigerator door open so hard Richard’s physician appointment cards slanted under the rainbow magnet. “All right. Let me get her some Florida sunshine,” I said with an edge to my voice.
Patricia ignored me and studied the yellow legal pad she held out in front of her. “Oh, Lord. Doctor Tom slipped up and invited the Thompsons.” The way she threw her teased hair back and fanned the pad in the air, I expected her to pass out any minute. I would step right over her plump waist and barge into Miss Claudia’s room. “Lauren Thompson said she’d rather take a beating than attend Cotillion with Margaret Linville. And Margaret’s daughter is coming out. So naturally I have to include her.” Patricia’s bright pink fingernail began scanning the guest list.
Did Lauren whatever-her-name-was even know what a beating felt like? I wondered as I poured the orange juice into the crystal glass. And for that matter, did Patricia even know the black-and-blue souvenirs left by licks to the flesh and soul? But Miss Claudia and me knew. All the more reason I should be the one seeing after her. While Patricia shook her head and scratched off names on her pad, I pushed the white swinging kitchen door open.
“Now, you know Mama’s not up to visitors,” Patricia said, not looking up from her list of Wiregrass’s social best.
I wanted to lash out at Patricia. To tell her the secrets Miss Claudia shared with me. I watched Patricia’s broad khaki rump twist down the hallway with Miss Claudia’s glass of breakfast, lunch, and supper. I hated Patricia that moment. Hated her for making me feel less than the person I knew Miss Claudia respected. Hated her being lucky enough to have a mother like Miss Claudia and not having the sense to appreciate her.
“Girl, you got to be either crazy or sick to miss Mel Gibson. You feeling all right?” Kasi asked and fluffed up her platinum hair in the reflection of my living-room mirror. The one with the red Coca-Cola logo on the bottom, won, most likely, by a member of Miss Trellis’s family at a traveling carnival. Now the soft-drink-inspired furniture was part of the extra hundred-dollar rental collection I paid.
“No, really, y’all go on,” I said, not even bothering with a reason why I didn’t want to join Kasi, Laurel, and Cher at the dollar movie.
My mood struck faster than a migraine and caused me to want to curl up into a ball on my bed. Come on, gal, you been through worse than this, I reminded myself. The usual strength visited me for a second and then evaporated like smoke from a fired shotgun.
“I just reckon that leg’s giving her a fit,” Gerald said on the other end of the phone. I was sorry I even answered. Part of me hoped it was LaRue calling for Cher. I was in the mood to cuss and blame to damnation. LaRue would’ve been the perfect specimen. But I should’ve known better than to think he would call Cher. Their communication was always her financial responsibility.
“Don’t worry about her. She’s got a strong constitution.” Gerald’s tone sounded too fatherly, and I resisted hanging up.
A sigh is the only noise I could make. He made his feelings known about my worry about Miss Claudia the day at the lake. I heard the sounds of squealing brakes and fast-paced music. More than likely he’s watching TV and not even paying a bit of attention to what I’m trying to say about Miss Claudia.
“Marcie just left. You should’ve seen this place when I come in from the shop. I bet you I could eat supper off the kitchen floor it’s so clean.”
I raised my free hand up in the air and rolled my eyes. “Well, I guess…”
“Her and Chase are going out to eat tonight. They got a new barbecue place. Old boy I used to go to school with opened it up. I was thinking maybe we could…”
“Uh…be right there,” I yelled and paused a second. “Let me go. Somebody’s knocking at my door.”
“Uh, no, I better hang on to make sure nothing’s the matter. You know with Cher’s sorry daddy and everything. Go on and see who it is. I’ll hold the line.”
Instead of being mad at him for telling me what to do, I felt guilty for lying. I walked over and opened the door. “Hey,” I said real loud. The chirps of crickets and a steady beat from a bullfrog filled the night air. Feeling stupid and nasty for pulling a trick on the only man who would help me if I needed him to, I dreaded to get back on the phone.
“Oh, it’s Miss Trellis checking to make sure our electricity is on. She said hers is off. I’ll call you back, okay?”
“Oh, okay. You going to church with me tomorrow?”
I ran my hand over my slick hair and rolled my eyes. “Well, I…Hey, I better go check my breaker box. You know, for any problems or anything.”
I hung up the phone feeling stupid and more guilty for wanting to avoid him. The conversation exhausted me even further. I collapsed on the bed and wondered if the paralysis I was feeling inside was a sign of a stroke. Who would care for me? I then shut my eyes in horror, thinking of a mandatory return to Cross City. More than likely I would be put in Piney View Nursing Home. My only visitor, besides Cher, would be the occasional vision of Mama. “If you’d listened to me and kept your tail at home, you wouldn’t had no stroke,” she would surely say.
My body was very still as I stared up at the brown spot on the corner of my bedroom ceiling—a leak, long ago repaired, but its victim permanently damaged. Maybe Mama was right. Maybe liberty and freedom were meant for the chosen few.
Freedom. That’s where I was heading before LaRue stuck his head out from under his rock. Cher’s phone conversations with him were never mentioned, but I knew they were there. Like that brown leak stain on my ceiling, Cher’s calls to LaRue were things I wanted to ignore. She was walking away from me and everything I had tried to do for her. And now even Miss Claudia was becoming distant. “She ain’t no different from the rest, honey child,” I said up to my spotted ceiling. “All you got is ol’ Erma Lee.”
Gerald’s pastor’s voice floated through my mind. His tenor voice echoed words of freedom and support. Eyes closed, I lay on the bed and felt my stomach rise with each breath. I pictured the young preacher lea
ning on the yellow padded stool, his hair all spiky like Kasi’s. Instead of giggling like I did the first time I saw the sight in person, tears began to roll down the sides of my face and drip in my ears. The inner strength that had gotten me through beatings, through Suzette’s wasteland, and beyond the county lines of Cross City, Louisiana, was as far away as Timbuktu. “I got nobody,” I screamed out into the empty trailer. My words bounced back from the kitchen.
Turn your eyes towards Jesus, look full in His wonderful face. And the things of life will go strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace. The words I heard at Gerald’s church were as loud as they had been the day I was too stunned to sing them. Stunned because the inner strength that held me all those times before had collapsed, just like Lee had on the yellow padded stool. I wanted his stool. I wanted his peace. Gerald’s peace. The peace Miss Claudia once had.
“Jesus, help me,” I called out. “Please forgive me for resting on my own stool. I need you to take over here.” The bountiful tears that fell on my bedspread were a backwash from a sewer system long filled with clogged waste. “Forgive me for my sins. Forgive me for always wanting to be the boss,” I cried out. My arms stretched upward, not sure what to do next.
When I finally opened my eyes and wiped my salty, wet cheeks, I expected something, anything. I tiptoed through my narrow hallway inspecting the paneled walls. An angel, a new body, a different view of my earthly belongings, I’m not sure what I expected, but I knew something was different.
The rabbit-eared TV, Cher’s pink radio, the burnt-orange refrigerator door, they looked the same. But when I turned towards the Coca-Cola mirror and saw my bloodshot eyes and blotchy checks, I felt lighter. The reflection of my own eyes as they pierced through me was level with the red Coca-Cola signature on the mirror’s corner. Examining the puffy brown eyes with streaks of red, I visualized resting on an indestructible steel stool. I pictured myself soaring over Courthouse Square in Wiregrass and around the Haggar factory in Cross City. Soaring on the everlasting stool, far above tribulation and trials.
The screech of the screened kitchen door reminded me that I needed to pick up a can of WD-40 at the grocery store. I held my hand against the white wood and eased the door closed. Suddenly, I felt like a trespasser coming into my usual place of sanctuary. They really should lock the doors. I made a mental note to get onto Richard.
Gunfire echoed from the big-screen TV, and Richard was sunk onto the sofa like some pitiful soul long shot out of his misery. The front page of the Wall Street Journal blanketed the top of his chest. His head was thrown backwards on the sofa, and his bare feet were propped on the coffee table. Richard’s clipped snores were the only evidence that he was a living person.
Richard was supposedly Miss Claudia’s attentive caregiver this evening. Patricia was a few miles away at her big home on the golf course honoring Wiregrass’s next generation of Patricias and couldn’t be bothered with caregiving. A Cotillion. A coming-out club, she’d called it. Now I was in such a club. A club with Miss Claudia. The floor creaked with each step, and I prayed that my new membership would pull her out of the haze that clouded her.
The big grandfather clock by Miss Claudia’s bedroom door registered the time as nine-seventeen. I stood at the door with my hand on the gold knob and looked down upon the stand that Patricia had placed to hold plates of uneaten food. A container of Wendy’s French fries sat on a rose-trimmed china plate. Dinner provided by Richard, I assumed. Funny, on the way over to Miss Claudia’s house I was jubilant and felt like I was going to bring her back. Now, with the opportunity to report what happened at the trailer, I felt foolish. She’ll think I’ve lost my senses, I thought. What if she’s sleeping?
The coughs behind the heavy door gave me an excuse to enter. I was concerned when I heard the coughs, I would tell her. My arm pushed the door open, and at first I thought I was in the wrong home on Elm Drive. She sat with the usual red Bible on her lap, but the greasy hair slicked back from her forehead and the pale face were unknown.
“Erma Lee, what in the world?” She pulled at her powder blue silk gown and turned her face from me. “I’m not feeling up to company. Now, I just need time and…”
“I asked the Lord to come into my heart,” I said so fast I could barely keep my tongue inside my mouth.
The steady tick from the grandfather clock was the only sound for a few moments. Miss Claudia tucked her head down and smoothed out the thin pages of her Bible like she was dusting off a relic.
Because I feared she might ask me to leave, the words poured out of my mouth. I described the sermon, the emptiness, and now the fullness I felt inside me. She smiled and dabbed the edges of her sunken eyes. I didn’t want her to feel sad about all this and, in fact, tried to act as though the last time I had entered her room was yesterday, not three weeks ago. She motioned for me to pull the wingback chair close to her bed. Her cold, bony fingers enclosed mine.
Miss Claudia handed her open Bible to me. The paint-chipped fingernail marked the spot I read. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone and the new has come. I wanted to run down the stairs and toss Richard’s newspaper up in the air like people do with confetti on New Year’s Eve. Like a new year, I was celebrating a new life. Miss Claudia’s red Bible told me so. The thin pages were lined and marked like a trusty road map. I saw how her road map brought her through the desert and wilderness. At a dead end with nothing but kudzu in front of me, I wanted to follow.
“Tell me the details again. You know, about the dogwood bloom and the resurrection and all that.” I knew in my gut that she would either come out of her misty haze or ask me to leave.
Miss Claudia softly sighed and then formed her chapped lips into a smile. Her words of hope eternal fell upon me with the force of driving rain.
“If you want me to, I’ll go down front with you,” Gerald said on the way to church. He’d been so happy when I called him with the news of my decision that he insisted on taking Cher and me to church.
I adjusted the air-conditioning vent towards the truck ceiling. Cher moaned and turned the frigid air back towards the passenger window. She hated sitting in the middle of Gerald and me, complaining that she never had enough room because of Gerald’s mounted cellular phone under the dashboard.
“What you mean, go down to the front?” I thought of the sticky wooden steps that I had leaned on during Vacation Bible School. “I’ve already done that.”
“Well, yeah. But you told me last night you just joined the church back then. You said you never really accepted the Lord before.”
My newfound peace was evaporating as fast as the foggy spots on Gerald’s windshield. I dreaded walking down the long aisle at the end of Lee’s sermon. Suddenly, I felt naked just thinking of standing before the congregation. What would Brownie and the other members at Wiregrass Community Church think of me? The lady friend, one old man had called me during my first visit. The lady friend, coming to take the place of poor sweet Leslie, stolen away from them by a drunk.
And there would be Marcie to deal with. She’d probably run out of the church crying with the line of friends trailing behind her. Friends who had known Leslie and hated Gerald’s new lady friend for snaking into his life. “I bet she ain’t even really saved,” I imagined them saying in chorus, patting Marcie’s heaving shoulders in the church parking lot.
“I’m freezing,” Cher yelled. With one quick slap at the air-conditioning vent, the icy air stung my face.
At the close of worship that day, Miss Claudia’s words echoed through my mind. The Lord lives inside you now. You’re never alone. He’s your strength.
While the plump girl with wiry brown hair sat at the piano and flipped through a faded green hymnal, Lee stood at the front of the church with his hands behind his back and licked his lips. “We offer this time as a chance for decision. A chance to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior and a chance to join this church by statement of faith in Christ.” Soft piano no
tes began to drift over Lee’s words. “Wiregrass Community Church sure ain’t perfect, but praise God, we’re trying. If you feel led, and only if you feel led by the Holy Spirit, won’t you come.”
“Just as I am without one plea…” Before the church members could finish the first line of the song, I slipped out of the pew alone. Part of me said to keep my tail in the pew. Girl, you’ve been through all this before, my mind kept repeating during Lee’s invitation to come down front.
But Gerald was right. The first time I walked the aisle in a church was because I thought it was the proper thing for a girl my age to do. After all, Becky walked that day during Vacation Bible School, and her mama was the church pianist. Whether I was baptized one time or two hundred, I was determined to make sure every letter of this contract was signed, sealed, and delivered.
My newfound church members were too important to risk dragging the late Leslie’s husband down the aisle with me. Any woman who went to church for Wednesday night prayer meeting had to be a church member like Aunt Stella—the type who organized Bible School, kept up with the sick folks in the hospital, and helped cook fried chicken for dinners on the ground. Walking down the aisle, I tried to force myself not to think of Leslie. This is a sacred moment, I kept repeating in my mind. But when I made it to the front and grasped Lee’s long fingers, I couldn’t help but think I was probably standing in the same spot where Leslie’s casket sat during her funeral.
Uneasiness was soon lost to the kind words from well-wishers who came by to greet me after Lee announced my decision of faith.
“Hey,” Marcie said in a singing kind of voice. I caught myself opening my mouth, trying to match her excitement. She flipped her hair and lightly hugged me. “I’m just so happy for you,” she whispered in my ear. The cinnamon scent of her chewing gum lingered long after she walked towards the group of women gathered around the piano.
A Place Called Wiregrass Page 17
