by Joe Derkacht
“That was what our Captain Odoms was here for,” Stella said quietly. “He did the selling.”
Ioletta bunched her lips in obvious disbelief. “Still...”
“The check’s on the coffee table, if you care to look at it for yourself.”
Ioletta frowned, shaking her head, still the skeptic. Hermione scraped her chair back from the table.
“What you doin’, Miny?” Ioletta demanded.
“I’m having me a look at that check, Auntie.”
“Auntie? Don’t be callin’ me Auntie, girl. She’s pulling your leg, don’t you have sense to know that?”
“Maybe. But I’d still like to see for myself.”
Ioletta rolled her eyes, as if to say, have it your way. Hermione stood and walked out, careful not to rush, lest she appear undignified. The rest of them remained where they were, Ioletta tapping her fingers on the table top and frowning, as they waited.
There were sudden, undignified shrieks from the living room. Ioletta’s jaw dropped. She rose from her chair as if kicked, and lumbered out. Moments later, from the living room, there were shouts of, “Praise the Lord!”
“Is that what you want to do with the money, Angel, give it away to help rebuild the church?” Stella asked.
Angel smiled broadly and hummed a tune. Stella recognized it easily, I Surrender All, for a few seconds joining in without thinking: “All to Jesus I surrender, All to Him I freely give--
“Then that’s what I guess we’ll do,” she said. “We’ll just give that money to Reverend Champion to rebuild his church. It does seem like a sign from heaven, the man choosing your statue of Mason.”
****
Chapter 37
Rev. Champion pulled a bamboo leaf rake from the trunk of his Cadillac and met Rev. Willimon at the front gate to Stella’s yard. The latter held a shovel propped against his right shoulder, toting it like he was a rifleman on parade. Cedric tiredly shook his head at the unexpected sight of toilet paper--yard upon yard upon yard of the stuff strung between Angel’s numerous statues, around the railing to the stairs and circling the porch, and threaded between the branches of Stella’s willow tree. Her Ford LTD was completely papered over, like an Egyptian mummy awaiting its moment to be launched into the afterlife.
Some kid’s brilliant idea of fun, accomplished long after midnight, Cedric assumed. It had to have been late. For himself, he hadn’t left last night’s Halloween party (held Friday instead of Saturday to avoid the necessity of cleaning up early on Sunday) until he and John, plus a few youth workers, had finished packing up the portable sound equipment, movie screen, and projector.
Were there teenage marauders, even then, lurking in the shadows with loads of excess toilet paper rolls in hand?
“Kids will be kids,” John said with a shrug. “At least that’s what I’ve always been told.”
They opened the gate and marched in, prepared to do battle, John in his favorite paint-spattered work shirt, blue jeans, and Converse sneakers, and Cedric in his black suit, white shirt, black tie, and polished wingtips.
To Cedric, Halloween was a blur of images alternating mostly between The Creature from the Black Lagoon or Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy and bobbing for apples, drinking hot apple cider, and playing lots of games with the kids. It was always good clean fun, and if anyone had doubts about Christians celebrating on a pagan holiday, a youth minister (it being a youth night) read from the Encyclopedia Britannica on the origins of Halloween and how it had been corrupted into a pagan holiday.
Though it was a youth night, nearly as many parents as kids showed up, perhaps mostly to help eat hamburgers, hot dogs, potato chips, Jello salad, and ice cream put out by the church ladies. On years when Abbot and Costello were in red hot pursuit of the mummy (or vice versa), the youth minister (who’d earlier read from the encyclopedia) crashed the showing in full dress mummification, which few of the kids ever seemed to remember or to anticipate until it was too late. Pandemonium would ensue. Last night’s party, the first-ever racially integrated celebration between Flowers and Alliance, had been no different.
“Cedric,” John called softly.
Cedric leaned on his rake and looked questioningly at John, who’d put aside his shovel to pick up stray napkins. John pointed his chin at a statue well known to Cedric; it was of his son Mason, who in his teen years had taken it upon himself to supervise the neighborhood’s garden plots at Stella’s and to haul in dirt when needed. Almond-shaped eyes, passed down from Theodora’s grandfather, a full-blooded Cherokee, made the face strikingly different in appearance from any of the others. A cold wave crashing over his head from the Gulf wouldn’t have shocked him more. The left arm had been broken off above the elbow.
“What do we do?” John asked in anguish.
Cedric let his rake drop to the ground. As if he did this every day, he said, “Find the arm.”
With apprehensive glances toward the house, they began their search. The worst part was that there weren’t many real places of concealment on the property, unless perhaps it was hidden behind another of the statues. To prepare for the Halloween party, the garden plots had been tilled under several days before, baring the ground of all but scattered drifts of willow leaves, drifts too low to hide anything larger than dried twigs.
“What if they took it, Cedric?”
Cedric shook his head in despair and continued hunting. What if they had? The damage was already done, wasn’t it? Vaguely, he wondered if it was someone’s effort to strike out at him, someone’s idea of vengeance? The statue was of his son. Were they trying to send a message? A warning?
“Do you think somebody broke it off last night?” Willimon meant during the party. Had one of their own kids done this?
As they searched, they pulled down streamers of toilet paper. Wads hung in profusion from Cedric’s arms. He stuffed them into a trash barrel.
“Cedric?”
“Do you think anybody could just snap it off without us hearin’?” He asked, struggling with his emotions. “And don’t you think we would’ve noticed it was gone?” He failed to voice another very real problem, the perception it might have happened during the party. How would Sister Stella take it? How would it affect Angel?
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” John said.
They worked their way into the back yard and discovered its two apple trees were festooned with toilet paper, as well. Cedric went for his rake and came back to knock streamers down and to look among the branches for the arm. No luck. He prayed, asking God for help, while wondering what good it might do. It wasn’t like he could reassemble stone with Elmer’s Glue.
“Under the car, maybe?” John asked.
It was the one place they hadn’t looked--under the LTD’s white shroud.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll let you do the honors,” Cedric told him. “I’m feeling too old this morning to be down on my hands and knees, scrabblin’ under a car for something that’s probably not there.”
“Happy to, brother,” John said with a grin. It couldn’t be Cedric was worried about his black suit, now creased with ochre and dusted with bits of leaves.
The morning dew had plastered the toilet paper to the car. Cedric began stripping it away, and John went down on one knee.
“Eureka!”
Cedric looked incredulous. “You kidding me?”
Down on both knees, now, John reached in past the rear tire. He slid the arm out, expecting to see its fingers were broken off and missing. The arm was much heavier than he would have imagined possible. It is stone, he thought to himself. To his surprise, the fingers were perfectly intact. He marveled at the arm’s satiny texture and the sensation of muscle under its flowing, curving surfaces.
Both men heard the screen door open and the scuff of slippered feet.
“Good morning!” Stella called out.
The two men grimaced owlishly at each other. John began the slow, torturous walk t
o the porch, cradling the arm like it was a living baby instead of a thing carved from stone. Cedric dropped the toilet paper in a trash barrel, and trudged behind.
Stella’s smile faded and her eyes widened in alarm. She seemed to half-fall down the steps (it is difficult to truthfully depict someone her size as flying), ignoring the men as she rushed past them in her distress. It was worse than either Cedric or John had imagined. Stella stood before the maimed statue and began shrieking as if it was Angel himself who’d lost an arm.
Cedric rushed to her side and grasped her by the shoulder.
“It’s a statue, it’s not a real person, Sister Stella,” he consoled her. He guided her to the steps and helped keep her from collapsing onto them in a heap. A grief-stricken wail went up from her, like you might have heard back in ancient times, when professional mourners were hired to demonstrate how beloved the departed was to friends and neighbors--except her grief was obviously real.
“No. No, it can’t be,” she blubbered. “God wouldn’t do that--”
John carefully laid the severed arm on the ground and stuck his hand in his back pocket. Out came a rumpled handkerchief and back it went with a frown of disappointment. Cedric pulled out his own neatly ironed, monogrammed handkerchief, and sat down beside Stella. He began to dry her tears as if comforting a small child in need of its mother. Which lasted for perhaps two or three seconds, or until she could push him away and snatch the handkerchief from his hand. In the next moment she sneezed and vigorously blew her nose into the clean, white linen.
“I’m sorry!” She said, suddenly realizing what she had done. Looking awkwardly aside, she dabbed her eyes on the embroidered black C. “I’ll launder it for you.”
Silent and unconcerned about the handkerchief, he patted her arm.
“Some awful racket woke me up around three this morning,” she said. “The street light at the church was out for some strange reason, so I turned the porch light on for a look but couldn’t see anything. Except--everything looked white, almost like it had been snowing or something.”
“Toilet paper,” John muttered.
A look of consternation crossed her face. “No, no thank you, Reverend Johnny,” she said, misunderstanding him. “I have Reverend Champion’s--”
“I meant there were vandals here last night,” he said, barely restraining a grin. “They TP’d your place--and worse, obviously. I bet they broke out the street light, too.”
She sobbed anew into the handkerchief. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, I guess.”
“Everything will be all right,” John said helpfully. “Maybe your son can repair the arm.”
“You don’t understand,” she said, with a pitying look for Cedric. “We just sold it a few days ago.”
John nodded significantly to Cedric. Everything was much clearer now. For a moment, the white minister came dangerously close to reassuring his parishioner that it was all for the good, that the Lord probably hadn’t wanted her to fall into temptation because of the money. Luckily, he let the spasm pass.
She drew a ragged breath and exhaled slowly to steady herself.
“I wouldn’t let Ioletta or Hermione tell you--we wanted it to be a surprise, Brother Champion,” she said mournfully. “I was checking on the taxes, and then the money was all to go to you to help rebuild your church.”
“That’s all right, Sister--” he automatically began, meaning to finish the sentence by mumbling a few consoling words. That was before her words quite registered on his brain. For the second time in a few minutes, he felt as though doused by cold water. His mouth dropped open.
“Wha--why that--!” He spluttered in outrage. His hands flew up, balling into fists. “That dirty devil!”
Neither John nor Stella knew if he was referring to the human culprit who’d done the damage last night, or if he meant the devil himself. Suddenly, like an errant rocket, Cedric shot to his feet and rushed around the property, attacking stray cups, weeds, and leaves with his rake as if they might conceal the devil or maybe even the trapdoor to hell. Outside of his prayer closet or his preaching under the unction, no one had ever seen him more animated. If he could just get at the devil, put his hands around his foul neck--
“How much was it, Sister Stella?” He asked, charging the steps. “How much money?”
“We sold the statue for $7,000,” she answered.
“Seven thousand!” He exploded. Again he rushed about, repeating his performance, raking like crazy. “Seven thousand dollars!”
“Brother Champion,” Rev. Willimon called.
“He’s messin’ in my business!” Cedric roared angrily, tossing the rake like it was a spear. “Devil, you better not be doin’ that again!”
“Brother Champion!” Willimon repeated.
Out in the street, a limousine had pulled up. It idled, as brooding and baleful as a beastly, black beetle, at the curb. Were its occupants perhaps cowed by Cedric’s warlike gestures? Cedric recovered his rake and joined Stella and John by the steps. The three of them watched as the chauffeur, dressed totally in black, as before, emerged first, and opened the rear doors. The man who’d bought Angel’s statue stepped out. Assisted by the chauffeur, a Japanese woman dressed in an elegantly long black coat stepped onto the sidewalk.
The chauffeur opened the gate for them, and the man and woman walked regally up the pathway, hesitating only at sight of the disfigured statue of Mason Champion. When they reached the porch steps, they halted. The man murmured something in Japanese. The woman’s features, as perfect as that of any porcelain doll, turned shockingly pale.
Stella forced herself to stand. Cedric leaned on his rake. John picked up and cradled the disembodied arm.
“I am Mr. Takesugi’s translator,” the woman said with barely a trace of accent. “Is the artist, Mr. McIlhenny, available, or his agent--the man with the policeman’s badge?”
Stella wiped her eyes and said nothing. Cedric and John stared mutely. Takesugi spoke to the woman.
“Mr. Takesugi holds Mr. Odoms, the agent, responsible.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Cedric said.
She translated. Takesugi eyed Cedric with interest. He seemed particularly intrigued by his rake. He spoke to the woman.
“Then you are the one responsible?” She asked.
“Responsible? I’m responsible for a good many things,” he said. “What I meant is that I expect Captain Odoms--the agent, as you called him--was doing a favor for Angel. Angel’s not in the habit of selling his work. Believe me, there’ve been people interested before, but he’s never been interested in selling.”
What he didn’t say was that until now, Angel had always been more likely to give away his work than to sell it. Truth to tell, while he’d never parted with one of his stone sculptures, nearly everyone in the neighborhood possessed one or two of his angels rendered in wood. As Cedric saw it, if there was someone willing to pay, there was no reason to offer more information than necessary.
“Who is this Angel?” The woman asked.
“Michael McIlhenny and Angel are the same,” Rev. Willimon explained. “It’s his nickname.”
“I’ll write out the check for Mr. Takesugi,” Stella said. She looked suddenly startled, as Cedric crooked an arm through her elbow.
“Ask your employer if he would be interested in any of the other statues,” Cedric ordered the woman. Takesugi shook his head and began speaking to his translator before Cedric could finish.
“Besides his duties as president of the North American branch of his corporation, Mr. Takesugi is an expert in just this sort of artwork,” she explained. “He says the broken one was the best of the lot.”
Crestfallen, Cedric released Stella. She started up the steps. Mr. Takesugi said something else to his translator.
“He still wishes to know who is responsible?” She said.
“It will be a police matter,” John answered. “It could be
they’ll be able to come up with fingerprints. Who knows? It still won’t fix things.”
Takesugi nodded his head. As he stared again at the once perfectly formed arm, his face darkened. He barked angrily a few words in Japanese (that’s how it sounded to Cedric and John), something that went untranslated by the woman, whose spine nonetheless stiffened. With a bow first to Cedric and then to John, he turned and left.
Instinctively, Cedric had bowed in return. John seemed too stunned to respond.
“We will wait in the limousine for the check,” the woman said. She bowed, as well, and followed Mr. Takesugi.
John sat on the steps. “I’m sorry, brother. Really sorry.”
Greatly subdued, Cedric returned to his raking. John left the arm behind, and dragged a trash barrel closer for Cedric’s use. Stella came down the stairs and walked to the limousine. Cedric didn’t look up from his work until Stella disappeared back inside her house and the limousine had driven away. His lips were compressed in a thin line. Neither he nor John said a word.
A minute or two later, Stella called to the men to come to the kitchen for coffee.
Angel was polishing off the last of an omelet. John set the arm on the table beside Angel, who bent over it and stared for a moment and then reached out and patted it affectionately.
“I wish I could take it like that,” Cedric muttered.
Stella set out two cups of coffee, and wiped at a tear with the back of her hand. “In a few days, Brother Champion, I’m sure we all will,” she said. “Want sugar and cream?”
Both men shook their heads.
“Right now it feels like the church burned down all over again,” Cedric muttered.
“I guess the Lord has more to teach us,” Stella said, pulling out a chair for herself. She reached for cream and sugar. No one said anything, as Stella stirred her coffee. John made a few noises, without any resulting words.
“What will you do with that arm, Brother Angel?” Cedric asked.
Angel picked up the arm and closely ran his good eye over it. The jagged end needed smoothing. He rotated one palm over it, Cedric wondering if it was in anticipation of grinding and rounding the imperfections, until the arm, by itself, should be transformed into a completed work of art on its own? Elbows on the table, he hefted the arm as if it was as light as balsa wood, the muscles rippling across his forearms and into his biceps. They weren’t smooth, handsomely bulging bodybuilder’s arms, but ropy, strong, and stony to the touch. His grip, too, as anyone who ever shook hands with him knew, was like iron.
