Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen

by Susan Gregg Gilmore

  Taped to the cosmetic bag was a Hallmark card that Daddy must have picked up at the Dollar General Store. A picture of a baby bird about to leap out of his mama's nest was on the front of the card along with this corny saying about needing to love someone enough to let him go because only then will the love come back to you. I got the point. Daddy was going to let me leave town on my eighteenth birthday without a fuss so I could get this big-city foolishness out of my system. But I'd fly back. He was counting on it, just like the little bird on the card.

  When it came right down to it, I'm not sure my daddy was convinced I'd be brave enough to step out of his nest in the first place. Sometimes I wasn't so sure myself. In my most secret moments, I'd been known to do a little down-on- my-knees praying, begging the Lord to send me my very own savior, just like He'd done for the Israelites, except my Moses would take me by the hand and lead me right out of this town and into the Promised Land somewhere down in Fulton County. But with every “Amen” came the realization that God wasn't sending me an escort. Nope, this exodus was going to be up to me.

  I had memorized every nitpicky detail of my long-awaited departure—down to the very minute the Greyhound Bus would be pulling out of the parking lot at the Dairy Queen. The bus schedule was taped to the back of my bedroom door. It was the last thing I stared at every night before closing my eyes. I had rehearsed my good-bye to Daddy and Martha Ann a thousand times, always reassuring my little sister that I'd be ready and waiting when it was her turn to leave the nest. And in my head, I sat on that old, sticky picnic table one last time, licking one more chocolate-covered Dilly Bar for old time's sake.

  The one detail I hadn't planned on was Henry Morel Blankenship. Henry, or Hank, as everybody in town called him except his mother, was the captain of the Ringgold High School football team, leader of the Young Life Christian Fellowship, and president of the local chapter of the Future Farmers of America, all good reasons not to like him, in my opinion. I'd known Hank since, uh, forever. Of course, I'd known everybody in Ringgold since forever. There were only 1,923 of us, depending on who was coming and going from this world on any given day. But Hank and I had never bothered to get to know each other. We were more like two magnets that you try to force together but they just keep pushing themselves apart.

  He was just too perfect. He was the cutest, smartest, most athletic boy in town. His daddy was a dairy farmer, and he must have made a better living than most of the other farmers in the county because Hank lived in a two-story, redbrick house with four white columns holding up the roof. There was even a fountain in the middle of the front yard that did nothing but spout water day and night.

  But if that wasn't reason enough not to like him, he also had the most beautiful mama in town. When we were in grade school, she was always coming by our classroom to help our teacher cut odd little shapes out of colored construction paper and staple our artwork to the bulletin board. On his birthday, she would appear wearing a smoothly pressed dress with her warm golden hair pulled up in a neatly braided twist, and in her hands, she carried a platter of perfectly decorated cupcakes. My mama would have done that for me, I'd tell myself, only my cupcakes would have had chocolate frosting with pink sprinkles on top.

  I told Martha Ann once that Hank was kind of like Joseph with his coat of many colors, which Miss Raines stuck up on the felt board. Joseph's father, Jacob, loved his son. In fact, he loved Joseph more than his other eleven boys. Joseph was handsome and perfect just like Hank. And when Jacob gave Joseph a rich, colorful coat, it made his other brothers so jealous that they threw him in a well and then sold him into slavery for no more than twenty lousy pieces of silver.

  I never planned on throwing Hank in a well, but I can't say I never thought about it. It might have done him some good to sit down there for a while. He had the highest grade point average in Mr. Polter's algebra class, just two points better than my own. He was the town's essay-contest winner three years in a row. And he was always putting down my Bulldogs whenever he got the chance. A boy like that deserved to come down a notch or two.

  But worse than any of that was his dogged determination to personally embarrass me at my daddy's own church. Hank Blankenship won the gold medal at Miss Raines's Bible Verse Sword Drill, every single year; and I know he did it just to make me, the preacher's daughter, look like a fool.

  On the third Sunday in June, the day before the official start of Vacation Bible School, Miss Raines would have us move our chairs into a straight line stretching from one end of the classroom to the other. Each of us was assigned a chair where we would sit with a Bible resting carefully on our laps. Then Miss Raines would slowly and meticulously explain the rules of the Bible Verse Sword Drill, which we already knew by heart. And finally, when you couldn't stand the anticipation any longer, she would draw a small piece of paper from a basket and announce a chapter and a verse.

  “Girls and boys, the first verse is E-PHE-SIANS FIFTEEN THIR-TY-SIX,” she would say, annunciating ev-er-y syl-la-ble.

  We would flip through the pages of our Bibles as fast as we could, racing to be the first to put our left index finger on the verse and our right hand high in the air signaling our success. The last person to find the verse was eliminated from the line, and the first one to go was usually Billy Thornton. Actually it was no big surprise when Billy was diagnosed with some sort of learning problem and sent to a special school down in Marietta. But for now, Billy, who was madly in love with Miss Raines, didn't seem to mind losing much because he still got his prize, standing next to his teacher and watching for hands, and Miss Raines's breasts, flying in the air.

  One by one the others in the class would leave their Bibles in their chairs and take their place at the front of the room. And in the end, year after year, the glory of a first-place finish was always a race between Hank and me. And without fail, that boy would manage to find that last verse just a split second before I could get there. I'd have my finger moving down the page when I'd hear a shout from the other end of the room, “I've got it,” and Hank would leave with another gold medal hanging around his neck.

  By the time I turned sixteen, I had learned to tolerate his perfection, and he had learned to tolerate my surly indifference. “Gee, Catherine Grace,” Ruthie Morgan would tell me, “with that pleasant attitude of yours, I'm sure the boys are just lining up to go out with you.” Ruthie Morgan had always enjoyed pointing out my shortcomings, and now, all grown up, and dressed in a cute baby blue sweater set and freshly polished Papagallos, she seemed to have no visible imperfections of her own. She just made something of a hobby identifying mine.

  Truth be told, most of the other girls were fairly certain I would be left a lonely, bitter spinster. But I think that had more to do with my refusal to attend Miss Lilly Martin's School of Etiquette and Social Graces held every Tuesday for two laborious hours in a house that reeked of mothballs and Glade room freshener.

  Turned out, Lolly and me were the only girls in our graduating class at Ringgold High who did not also possess a diploma from Miss Lilly Martin's School of Etiquette and Social Graces. Lolly's mama said she wasn't going to spend one dime on teaching Lolly how to hold a knife and fork judging by the way she had gained weight. She said she had already figured out how to do that just fine. And Daddy said when it got right down to it, a man would rather have a wife who could talk football than etiquette. So I took my chances.

  But my junior year, something strange and very unexpected happened. I saw Hank as if I were meeting him for the very first time. I was attending a Young Life meeting at church, something my daddy made me do regularly, since apparently being the preacher's daughter meant serving as his personal ambassador to all teenaged Christian functions. Anyway, we were singing the last verse of “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” when Daddy interrupted to ask the group if we would consider putting together a program for the Christmas Eve Cedar Grove Holiday Celebration. Of course, we had no choice but to say yes because when the preacher asked you to do something th
e answer was always yes.

  Hank, not surprisingly, was excited about the chance to show off in front of the entire church. He looked up at my daddy and said something about it being an honor and that we would not let him or the good Lord down. Oh brother.

  “Let's tell the story,” he said with authority, like he had been thinking of this for a long time, “of the night Jesus was born. But let's tell it our way. In our version, Mary and Joseph will hitchhike all the way from some place like Louisville, wander along Highway 127, and then stumble into Ringgold sometime close to midnight. Worn out and dirty from their journey, they'll look for a place for Mary to have her baby. But will somebody in our small town, which, let's face it, was probably not all that different from Bethlehem, welcome a strange couple and embrace them in their time of need?”

  I couldn't believe what I was hearing. The old blue-haired ladies might think this was blasphemy, but I thought it was brilliant. A bunch of teenagers were going to make their very own neighbors, their brethren in Christ, wonder if they would have been kind enough to give Mary a warm, safe place to birth our Savior and Redeemer, which I kind of doubted—remembering how Brother Hawkin's daughter had been hidden down in Texas for a good nine months while her good-for-nothing boyfriend strutted his butt around the county dating anybody with a skirt and drinking beers behind the high school on Saturday nights.

  Anyway, I hated to admit it. I mean I really hated to admit it, but this was a great idea. And I felt like, for the first time, I wasn't the only one who was seeing the small-minded way of thinking here that people seemed to cultivate just as mightily as their gossip and their vegetables. Even Mrs. Roberta Huckstep might be forced to consider if she was Christian enough to let some strange, young couple rest their heads on one of her beds covered with those crisply starched, white cotton sheets that had a big pink H monogrammed on the edge.

  Everybody was excited, patting Hank on the shoulders and chatting about the props and costumes and who should be Mary and who should be Joseph and if anybody in town had a live baby we could borrow for the performance. Hank reminded us that we needed to be humble and right-minded in making all these decisions. Then he closed our meeting with a word of prayer just like he always did.

  “Lord, thank you for bringing your children together tonight for fellowship. We praise you for all you've given us, and please guide us as we prepare for our Christmas pageant. Touch Johnny Blanchard with your healing power ’cause his mama says he has mono, and uh, you better go ahead and touch Lucy Mills while you're at it. And, one more thing, we know you have the weight of the world on your shoulders, but if you could lead the Ringgold Tigers to victory Friday night, well, we'd love to win one before the end of the season. In your name we pray, Amen.”

  I know the Lord works in mysterious ways. I'd seen it for myself like when Daddy healed Ruthie Morgan's dying grandmother simply by laying his hands on her head and praying for one mighty long time. I couldn't make out a single word he said, but the Lord must have heard him, because the very next morning, she was sitting up in bed eating scrambled eggs and fried ham.

  But even that miracle couldn't prepare me for what happened next. Shelley Hatfield, undeniably the most beautiful girl in Ringgold, and undoubtedly the most obvious choice for Mary, said, “I think Catherine Grace Cline should be Mary and, Hank, of course, you should be Joseph.”

  I figured every girl in that room was hoping to be Hank's Mary, especially Shelley Hatfield. I was planning on working behind the curtain, organizing props, turning on lights, anything but being Hank's fiancée knocked up by the Holy Spirit himself.

  Martha Ann opened her mouth in disbelief. “You, Mary. Wait till Gloria Jean hears this,” she said leaning into my ear.

  Being the preacher's daughter had never really been an advantage, at least not as far as I could tell. My mama was gone and that stupid golden egg never did end up in my basket, and not one of those Sword Drill medals ever found its way around my neck. You'd think I'd have at least one pin for perfect attendance since my daddy had dragged me to church every single Sunday in those stupid, patent-leather Mary Janes. Nope, not that either, because I'd usually get some juicy head cold in the middle of February that would keep me in bed one Sunday out of the year. And now Mary, the one thing I didn't want, didn't need, was mine. Everyone else seemed equally amazed by Shelley's suggestion, and in the awkward moment of silence that followed, Hank searched my face looking for some sort of approval.

  The very next day, I was standing in front of my locker putting away my composition notebook, when Joseph himself came up and grabbed me by the arm. “Catherine Grace, you know we need to start practicing as soon as possible. There's only four weeks before the holiday celebration, and I've got football practice almost every afternoon. So I was thinking maybe I could come over to your house on Saturday, and we could start figuring out what we're going to do.”

  “Fine, Hank, we'll work around your very busy schedule because I'm not really doing much of anything with my life, and I'm sure it is so time consuming trying to win one football game,” I shot back, wondering myself why I was acting like such a sharp-tongued jerk.

  “Catherine Grace, that is not what I meant, but if you're going to act like this, well, I might just leave your ass in that stable with the other donkeys, where apparently it belongs.”

  I stared at Hank in disbelief. I couldn't believe Mr. Perfect had said that to me, the preacher's daughter, of all people. Hank Blankenship was human after all. We both burst out laughing. And in that moment, I started looking at Hank differently. I had never noticed that he was a full head taller than me or that his arms were thick and rippling with muscles, or that his eyes were as blue as sapphires, or that Catherine Cline Blankenship had kind of a nice ring to it.

  Oh, my God, I liked a boy, and not just any boy. I liked Henry Morel Blankenship. Gloria Jean said I had had an epiphany, an epiphany of the heart. Martha Ann loved the sound of that. “Oh, an epiphany of the heart,” she echoed, “just like Romeo and Juliet, sort of, well, without the feuding families and the suicidal ending.”

  All I knew was that every time we practiced our lines, I discovered something new and wonderful about him, like this sweet, tiny dimple on the left side of his mouth that grew deeper and deeper the more he smiled.

  No, no way, I kept telling myself. I couldn't like him. And he certainly couldn't like me. But what if he did like me and we started dating and went steady and got engaged and then . . . married? I could end up living in Ringgold, raising his family, and growing his tomatoes. No, no, no. This was not part of the plan that I had rehearsed for the past sixteen years. I could not let some gorgeous, kind, generous, adorable, dimpled, football-playing Christian boy lead me astray.

  Daddy announced our pageant from the pulpit every chance he got, and with so much advance publicity, the church was packed by curtain time. Most of the little kids had to sit on the floor just to make room for their parents. And though Hank and I had practiced our lines a thousand times, now waiting in the hallway, I started to sweat and feel kind of faint. I wasn't really scared about being in front of so many people; practically growing up behind the pulpit, I was used to that. But I had never been in front of so many people with such an important secret hidden in my heart.

  I mean, would they be able to tell how I really felt? Would Miss Raines or Mrs. Roberta Huckstep or Ruthie Morgan or, worse yet, my own daddy know that secretly, deep down inside, I was falling in love with Hank? Would they be able to tell that Mary was having some very impure thoughts about Joseph? Leaning against the wall in the hallway outside the sanctuary, I slowly slid to the floor. I didn't even notice Hank standing in front of me, leaning over my body.

  “Catherine . . . Catherine,” he said ever so gently. “The shepherds are waiting. It's time to go on.” But I just gazed at him standing there draped in an old green sheet that probably came from his mama's linen closet and said nothing.

  “Catherine, hey, are you in there?” he asked, touchin
g my cheek with his fingertips. “Come on, we gotta get you to the barn before the Christ child is born without us.”

  I looked up to see Hank holding out his hand. As I propped myself up against the wall, Hank leaned over me. He held my cheek in his hand and whispered in my ear, “I doubt the Virgin Mary looked as beautiful as you do tonight.” And then he kissed me on the cheek.

  When I walked into that sanctuary holding Hank's hand, I didn't look like some poor pregnant woman in the throes of labor who'd spent the last day or more riding in the back of a tractor-trailer. No, I looked like I had just won the monthly sweepstakes at the Shop Rite. And while the shepherds, or in Hank's version the farmhands, were announcing our Savior's birth, all I could think about was how much I wanted to wrap my arms around Joseph's waist, hold him tight against my chest, and French kiss him long and hard. That's right, I wanted to fall down in the hay and kiss him till my lips were sore. And I was pretty sure that was some kind of very special Christmas sin.

  I said all my lines on cue and even managed to force a tear when the baby Jesus, who would save all mankind from their sinning ways, was finally born. But by that time I figured the entire congregation could see that I was the first sinner who was going to need some saving.

  Miss Raines rushed up to me after the performance and pulled me into her arms.

  “Catherine, you were wonderful. You absolutely glowed tonight. I don't think I've ever seen you with such a smile on your face.”

  “Well, you know, it's, uh, well, the Christmas spirit and all.”

  “Whatever it was, sweetie, you were great,” she said. And then in a hushed tone, she added, “I know that your mama is so proud of you tonight.”

  Oh my Lord. I was so in love with a boy that even my mama could see it from heaven. Oh God, maybe I really was glowing. I pulled my scarf farther down on my face and tried to act as though I had forgotten that Hank had kissed me on the cheek. But inside I felt like a bug flying to the light. I just couldn't resist his strong arms or his warm blue eyes. And he wasn't making it any easier for me, either. After the Christmas pageant, he walked me home with his arm around my shoulders, just to keep me warm, he said. At school on Monday, he found me in the cafeteria and squeezed his body in next to mine at the lunch table. And he started stopping by my house every day on his way home from school. True love was, as Gloria Jean had prophesized, more powerful than the both of us.