by Joe Derkacht
“What are you fussin’ about, Stella Jo?” She asked, finally showing her concern.
“I still can’t remember that poor girl’s name.”
“Well, we’ll know soon enough,” Ioletta said. “The way you described her, I should think she’ll eat everything we’re fixin’ now and then some.”
“I didn’t describe her like that!”
“Well, I jus’ had the feelin’.”
“Oh, you and your feelings.”
“I don’t know why you had to go and invite somebody new, anyhow. We have us enough people to cook for Sundays.”
“Ioletta Brown!” She exclaimed. “I told you it was the Lord. If I feel His leading, I follow it--just like you.”
“Sometimes you have to ask questions, make sure it’s the Lord.”
Stella couldn’t argue that logic.
“We can only feed so many,” Ioletta added. “It ain’t like we can feed the 5,000 with two loaves and a few little fishes.”
“The Lord did,” Stella said.
“Yeah, but we ain’t the Lord.”
“Didn’t say we were. But if we bless others, He blesses us.”
“I know that,” Ioletta said. “You don’t have to go tellin’ me.”
“Just making sure.”
By now, both women were grinning. Sweating from the work and the terrible heat, but grinning nonetheless.
“You still can’t remember the poor girl’s name!” Ioletta exclaimed with a hoot.
“It’s true, I can’t,” Stella confessed, laughing at herself. She glanced over at Angel, bestirred from his nap by their sudden burst of laughter.
“Try this,” Ioletta said. “I always go through the alphabet when I can’t remember somebody’s name. Did it start with a’ A? Ay, ah, uh? How ’bout a B? Bee, bah, buh, bo? C, soft Cee or hard C?”
“That’s pretty smart.”
“Did somebody say I was stoopid?” Ioletta demanded.
Stella was thinking, quickly running through the alphabet, knowing Ioletta didn’t expect an answer.
“I still don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I was so upset that day, it just slipped my mind.”
“About the boy.”
“About the boy,” Stella admitted. Mumbling, she quietly began repeating the alphabet to herself.
Ioletta, finished with slicing the eggs into neat circles, shoved her bowl away and threw down her knife.
“I’m done,” she declared, sitting back on the couch and wiping soggy ringlets from her forehead. “Cain’t nobody expect more work out of me today.”
“I believe it was an H,” Stella Jo announced.
“A’ aitch?”
“An H. Her--Hermione, I think. Hermione--Hermione Th-Th-Tharpewood!” Stella exclaimed with pleasure.
“Hermione Tharpewood!” Ioletta wailed. “Oh Lord oh Lord oh Lord!”
“Do you know her?” Stella asked in alarm.
“Oh Lord, oh Jesus, oh Lord, she’s invited a hooker into the house!” Ioletta cried, ignoring Stella’s question, her hands rising and falling in her excitement--a veritable Leonard Bernstein, minus the baton.
“A hooker?” Stella asked meekly.
“A hooker!” Ioletta exclaimed. “A hooker! Don’t you know what a hooker is? A prostitute, girl. You’ve lived such a sheltered life, Stella Jo.”
“Well, now I don’t know about that,” she said. “And it’s no reason for you to work yourself into a tizzy. The Lord Jesus ate with prostitutes.”
“The Lord Jesus!” Ioletta exclaimed, covering her face with her hands. “Oh, now she’s blasphemin’, Lord. Don’t-please-don’t-strike-her-with-lightnin’.”
For a second, Stella didn’t know if her friend’s paroxysms were convulsions of fear or of laughter.
“Don’t you know the Scripture?” She asked. “Jesus forgave the woman brought to him by those awful men to cast the first stone at her because she had been caught in adultery.”
“Yes, I knows. But he didn’t eat with her,” Ioletta argued from behind her hands.
“There was the woman at the well. She’d had five husbands and she wasn’t married to the one she was living with.”
“But-but--”
“The Book says he ate with sinners of all kinds,” Stella finished primly.
“We won’t be sent to the bad place?” Ioletta asked, peeking out from behind her hands.
“Ioletta Brown, you tell me right this moment how you know all about this Hermione Tharpewood.”
Ioletta groaned deeply and let her hands down, where they fell limp beside her on the sofa.
“She’d be a niece of mine,” she admitted, staring straight ahead at the front door.
“Well, I’ve never heard of her or seen her before, Ioletta! I certainly never heard you speak of the poor girl.”
“No, no,” she answered, nodding deeply. “I keep my sufferin’ to myself.”
“Your sufferin’!” Stella cried. “You complain as much as anyone I’ve ever known.”
“I do not!”
“Yes you do, and don’t make me call you a liar.”
“Well!” Ioletta harrumphed. Almost, she would have risen from the sofa and fled the house, but she was hot and weary. And there was the food to consider. It would be wrong to waste any of it, especially Stella’s oven-baked barbecue chicken with the secret ingredient.
“While you were sufferin’, as you say, just think how her poor parents were suffering,” Stella said. “What did it do to them, to see their daughter turning to prostitution? And are they Christians?”
Ioletta nodded slowly. Maybe Stella was right.
“You just sit there and tell me all about the poor girl. You know, today could be a homecoming for the prodigal daughter.”
As Ioletta turned toward her, her eyes growing as large as saucers, Stella added, “That would be just like the Lord, now wouldn’t it?”
****
Chapter 13
Rushing in like starlings, the children of the neighborhood came first, gibbering and jabbering, darting everywhere, leaping and jumping and shouting, yielding neither to sun, threatening clouds, nor humidity, spirits undampened by the mere elements. In sharp contrast to the children, their parents proceeded sedately to the McIlhenny house, as if with great dignity, when it was only the life-sapping weather that made them do it, drawing out sunglasses as well as sweat, and here and there either a straw hat or an ancient parasol to accompany them on the journey.
The first order of business, for parents or children, it seemed, upon reaching Stella Jo’s property, was the spreading of blankets beneath the weeping willow, until the only real shade left in the yard was on the east side of the porch or perhaps a spot behind one of Angel’s many statues. The second order of business was the pouring of lemonade or iced tea, followed by more rounds of the same. Then came the lure of the food hauled out to the porch, where it was piled atop Stella’s several card tables. Naturally everyone knew the card tables, when not used for displaying an impressive array of foodstuffs, were for playing Skip Bo and Yahtzee and Go Fish, certainly not low-brow poker or high-brow bridge. One table was dedicated exclusively to desserts, where curious eyes were surprised to see two sheet cakes (both drowning in runny chocolate frosting), especially when most people knew her favorite desserts were fruit pies of one kind or another. Apple or blackberry or strawberry or rhubarb or cherry or peach, as long as it was fruit, it was her specialty. Thankfully, a few neighbors were kind enough to lay out samples of their own pie-baking efforts alongside the cakes (and to leave under the table one or two cardboard barrels of vanilla ice cream picked up from the local ice cream factory), so there weren’t any objections or embarrassing questions. Then again, maybe people simply felt too puny to ask embarrassing questions, which take more energy out of a person than the normal, everyday variety sort of questions, if they only know the difference between the two.
Maybe it was the heat, maybe not, mayb
e it was just the sheer number of people and the timidity that sometimes puts on a person, but no one volunteered to offer up grace before the eating could begin. They had their paper plates and eating utensils and napkins in hand, all right, but no one was digging in quite yet, seemingly satisfied, rather, to mill around the porch or to loll on the steps.
Stella put out a general announcement, asking for someone to say thanks, at which a chorus of thanks was heard from the crowd, that terribly original variation on saying grace. And yes, most folks still expected everyone else to laugh in response. The children giggled the loudest, and then en masse, silence reigned supreme among them, since it is on such occasions that some child is usually selected for the privilege of praying out loud in front of God and the whole world.
Stella Jo smiled encouragingly at suddenly pale little faces, at faces withdrawing behind skirts, at faces shyly obscured by nail-biting. No takers. Which left the honor, the privilege, the duty, the obligation, the burden, the onus, to an adult.
Mr. Rames, Stella’s midnight waterer from over on Bowline Ave., squirming under Ioletta Brown’s harsh gaze, mistook her expression to mean that he should be the one to do the prayin’, and so he intoned one he’d learned in his youth, speaking out in a fine voice one of those table prayers any child of Catholic persuasion could recite even blindfolded for pin the tail on the donkey or while sinking beneath the waves for the third time. In any case, Catholic table prayers being works of art, when it comes to brevity, this one impressed the gathered multitude, whether Baptists, backslidden Baptists, or the unsaved who had yet to learn they should become Baptists.
Rames beamed at the sudden attention and the appreciative words that came his way, but his pleasure was short-lived, considering Ioletta’s unrelenting frown. Regardless, he really couldn’t have hoped for his moment in the sun to endure long--the tables of food beckoned, and everyone, much more interested in eating, “fell to,” as they say. In short order the crowd had flocked, with the majority of the food transferred to their plates, to the blankets under the solitary, lonely willow, with scant regard paid to whose blanket was whose.
Perhaps because of the oppressive heat, there commenced a great deal of munching but little in the way of conversation. A collective sigh went up from the assembled multitude. The younger children, many of them taking up positions behind this or that statue on the property, ate contentedly in their own private shadows, punctuating the occasion with giggles or shrieks of delight that raised little more than eyebrows among the adults.
Mr. Rames, who’d settled himself as distantly as possible from Ioletta, while yet remaining within the generous shade of the willow, made Stella’s secret-recipe chicken his first order of business, thereby sealing his fate. The banana peel awaited, just like it does for everyone, though some see it lying across their path, while others rush blindly on, never suspecting the day of reckoning is about to descend upon their heads. Mr. Rames was like that, and it was because of his love for good food. As soon as he bit into the succulent breast, its reddish-bronze skin tantalizingly crisp and the juices squirting over his tongue, he knew he’d died and gone to heaven. It was the best whiskey-flavored chicken he’d ever eaten.
He swallowed, almost reluctant to let the morsel of chicken depart from his taste buds. He smacked his lips. The best ever. Most definitely.
“Stella Jo McIlhenny,” Rames said. All eyes turned toward him, the man of spiritual refinement, as everyone knew from his prayer of thanksgiving, and a man of culinary good taste, as they were about to discover.
“Yes, Mr. Rames?” She answered, equally unaware of banana peels and their dangers, and how they can sometimes bear down upon a person like fate’s own runaway freight train.
“That is simply the most delicious, the most superb, the grumptious bestest, the--the--” He had exhausted his vocabulary of superlatives. Scrumptious flickered through his consciousness but was rejected because it did not have a masculine ring to it.
“Yes?” Stella smiled encouragingly. Mr. Rames’ abandonment of midnight waterings in favor of early mornings had redeemed her opinion of the man. She had never really held it against him that he lived a few streets down from Flowers Ave.
“That is the most wonderful whiskey-flavored chicken I’ve ever had the pleasure of eating,” he said at last. There, the words were out.
Someone gasped. Perhaps several someones. Stella Jo stiffened in surprise, her mouth opening and closing wordlessly, like gills to hot air.
“Lordamighty!” Ioletta exploded. Few mortals could have spoken with such force or admirable indignation without actually cursing. Or spitting, either. “Stella Jo McIlhenny is a fine Christian lady and would never touch likker. How dare you barge in upon our friendly little picnic and accuse her of such a horrible thing?”
Two banana peels with one stone! If Ioletta were paying attention, she would have seen that her friend Stella Jo shrank as much as the despised Mr. Rames under her withering fire.
What saved the day was a screech of tires from the street. Every head turned, as a new, midnight blue Buick Le Sabre backed up with another screech of tires, lurched forward, then back again, in accompaniment to yet more protests from brakes and tires. The hapless driver, invisible through the Le Sabre’s heavily tinted windows, was attempting to park. While everyone else snickered, Rames quietly exited through Stella’s gate and approached the car. He tapped lightly on the driver’s window.
It lowered smoothly, as only a power window can do. A woman glared from behind thick glasses.
“Would you like a gentleman’s help in parking your car--Miss?” He asked, first glancing desperately to see if she wore a wedding band, and grateful that at the last moment she placed her left hand on the sill of the car window. After his blunder over the whiskey-flavored chicken, he felt highly motivated about where to place his foot next in the minefield that is called etiquette.
“Why yes, that would be very kind of you--and the name is Miss Tharpewood,” she replied, her features softening with relief.
The thickset Rames, opening the door, kindly helped her out of the car. He managed it, too, without huffing or puffing, or groaning with the strain, or even bunching his considerably heavy eyebrows.
“Thank you, sir,” Hermione said, curtseying with her head.
“You’re welcome, Miss Tharpewood,” he said. He allowed her to reach the sidewalk so that she could watch, and then slid into the driver’s seat and effortlessly parked the car with two turns of the wheel.
She allowed him to open the gate for her, and watched with satisfaction as he waited for her to enter first. Her head swiveled, taking in the people, the house, the statues, the crazy-quilt patchwork of vegetable gardens baking under a relentless sun.
“Lovely statues,” she said, as he closed the gate and came around to take her by the arm.
“Yes they are, works of genius,” he agreed, starting her toward the porch. “I’m sure you would like to make a selection for your plate and join us in the shade, Miss Tharpewood.”
“Please call me Hermione, Mister--?”
“Carlos Rames,” he answered in kind. “But my friends call me Carl. My father hailed from Portugal.”
“Really, Carl. I’ll be careful not to hold that against ya.”
He glanced her way and saw she was grinning. He grinned in return, and wondered what she looked like without her glasses.
“Make sure you try some of Miz McIlhenny’s secret recipe chicken,” he said, handing her a plate. “It tastes like a million bucks.”
“A million, really? You have very expensive tastes, Carlos--Carl, I mean.”
He would have answered her, but Stella was coming up the stairs.
“Thank you so much for assisting Miss Tharpewood, Mr. Rames,” she said, fanning herself with a napkin. To Hermione, she remarked, “He moves very fast, for this heat, doesn’t he?”
“Carl?” She asked, winking at him. “Yes, it’s refreshing
to meet a true gentleman in this day and age, isn’t it?”
“Carl--?” Stella began, taking a moment to put two-and-two together, before she realized Carl and Mr. Rames were one and the same. It seemed Mr. Rames, or Carl, as Hermione had called him, really did move fast.
He recognized the narrowing of the eyebrows and sudden focus on him. Perhaps he had said enough and done enough for one day.
“I’ll fetch us some lemonade and meet you under the tree, Hermione, but after that I’m afraid I will have to make my departure--other obligations, you understand.”
“Really?” She said, obviously disappointed.
“Do you have to rush off so soon?” Stella asked. “No one else is leaving yet.”
He threw up a hand in apology. “Prior obligations.”
“Well, then I guess that settles it,” she said, dismissing the matter from her mind. It wasn’t that she necessarily wanted Carl, who was still Mr. Rames, to her, to leave, even if he had let the cat out of the bag about her secret recipe chicken. He had said there were prior obligations, and to her mind that meant promises had been made. A man’s word was a man’s word was a man’s word.
Almost, he would have stayed, despite the professed obligations, except that he felt eyes boring into him from somewhere in the direction of Stella’s weeping willow tree. What made up his mind was sight of Ioletta Brown emerging from the shade to make her way toward the house.
“I’ll be fetchin’ that lemonade, now,” he said.
Both Stella and Hermione watched as he hurriedly splashed lemonade into two paper cups and was on his way down the stairs. The man really was in a hurry, ignoring the path and instead zigzagging his way past various garden plots and their guardian statues. Stella watched anxiously, hoping he would be careful not to trample anyone’s vegetables. Whenever someone’s plot suffered the inevitable damage, she was first to hear about it. Complaints from injured parties sometimes made her wish she had never received the inspiration for opening her property to the neighborhood.
But divine inspiration was exactly what she thought it had been, so she persevered. She was not one to quail when a little trouble came her way along with the leading. She knew people sometimes turned nasty or crotchety with one another, and she could point to times in her own life when she had said or done things she was not proud of, herself. Besides, the gardens really did bring neighbors together and helped to feed a lot of people who would not otherwise eat nearly so well.
