A Place Called Wiregrass (18 page)

“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 leaning 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 notes 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.

After lunch, Cher reported she saw Donnie roll his eyes when I stood at the front of the church with Lee. All that day, Cher’s sighs and general bad attitude reflected an ugliness that I still was excusing as puberty.
Oh well, at least I had a whole bunch of people be nice to me. I just got to think about them.
I surprised myself with my enthusiasm.

“Mama told me about all the changes in your life,” Patricia said behind the big wooden desk. Her teased brown hair never moved as she nodded and grinned. “And she told me how you came over to the house Saturday evening.”

“Now, I know I shouldn’t have, but…”

Patricia shook her finger. The finger-shaking told me to keep quiet and let her give me a tongue-lashing.
If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have any money coming in,
I reminded myself.
Just smile and agree.

“No, it was good you went and shared your little news with Mama. I’ll be honest, I think it helped pull her out of that spell she was in.”

I kinda giggled and felt foolish. “You mean it?”

“Honey, she’s on cloud nine today,” Patricia said and snorted with laughter.

Watching Patricia gain her composure and straighten the shoulder pad under her blouse, I realized that it was the unpredictability of this woman that made me nervous. Much like I’d get nervous whenever Bozo would lean against the open door on late Friday afternoons with a lone beer dangling from the ring of plastic circles.