Miss Julia Meets Her Match (18 page)

It finally got to where I had to do something. So one morning I walked across the street to the church. By the time I went through the back door and into the Fellowship Hall under the sanctuary, I’d about worked myself up into a swivet.

It was Sam’s fault. He was supposed to have talked to the pastor, who would then get Emma Sue out of the clutches of Curtis Maxwell, who would get mad and go home, leaving those theme park scoundrels including Monique Mooney high and dry with no money to carry on so they’d have to leave town, and, with Little Lloyd none the wiser, we’d all settle down and be back to normal.

Well, except for Tonya Allen, but you couldn’t very well undo the kind of change she’d had.

After crossing the street to the church, I walked through the empty Fellowship Hall to Norma’s office. I knew I’d have to put up with her officious questions but I was more than ready to do battle. I had right on my side, and I intended to let the pastor know that his wife was flirting with danger in the form of Curtis Maxwell. After all, the pastor himself had engaged me to help get Emma Sue back on track and, even though I could take no credit for her abandonment of makeup, he ought to appreciate my efforts and listen to me. I wanted Curtis Maxwell gone and, by the time I was through talking, I hoped the pastor would want him gone, too.

So I marched down the side hall to Norma’s office, where she guarded the pastor from all who sought him. Her door was open, as it customarily was, and I walked in. Before I’d gotten inside the office good, I was hightailing it out of there, my breath coming in gasps and my heart pounding in my chest. I was almost run over crossing Polk Street on the way home, and it was all I could do to get inside the house without collapsing.

“Hazel Marie,” I called as I headed for the kitchen. She was sitting at the table, peeling apples with Lillian. They both came to their feet when they saw the state I was in.

“What’s wrong?” Hazel Marie asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Worse than that,” I gasped, trying to take a deep breath.

“Set yo’self down,” Lillian said, grabbing my arm and leading me to a chair. “You gonna have a heart attack, you don’t watch out. What’s the matter with you?”

I leaned on the table, still trying to catch my breath. “Look at this,” I said, and held out a quivering hand. “I’ve had such a shock.” I patted my chest. “I may never get over it.”

“Lord, Miss Julia,” Hazel Marie said, concern written all over her face. “What happened? Did you fall? Did a car hit you?”

“No, but one almost did. Give me a minute and I’ll tell you.”

“She need something on her stomach,” Lillian pronounced. “You eat, an’ you feel better.”

“Just some water, Lillian. I can’t eat a bite. But, wait, I want you to hear this. I don’t know what in the world to do.”

They leaned over the table, eager to hear my harrowing tale, whatever it might be.

“Well,” I began, “you know I went over to the church to see Pastor Ledbetter, because I’ve been so concerned about Emma Sue. I was going to tell him how Mr. Maxwell seemed to be turning her head. In a nice way, of course. But, well, I never got the chance.”

“Drink that water,” Lillian commanded, so I did.

“I got to Norma’s office,” I went on, “and the door was open as it always is, but she wasn’t there. I didn’t want to see her anyway, so I started across the room to knock on the pastor’s door, and you know there’s carpet on the floor so nobody could hear me. Anyway, I noticed that the door to the pastor’s office was ajar, so I thought maybe he was in there, and I’d just knock and see if he was. Well, I had my hand up to knock, and . . . I don’t believe I can go on.”

“Don’t stop now!” Hazel Marie said. “What’d you see?”

“Not a blessed thing. The door was barely open, so all I could see was his bookcase. But the lights were off in there, and just as I started to knock, I heard all this awful moaning and groaning. Oh, it brought me to a standstill, I tell you that.”

“What you think it was?” Lillian whispered in an awe-filled voice.

“A better question,” Hazel Marie said, “is
who
was it.” Her face was tight with anger. She loved that church, in spite of her Baptist background.

“Well, at first I didn’t know, but then I heard Norma giggle in a throaty kind of way and she said ‘Wait, wait a minute.’ Then she said . . . I don’t believe I can repeat it.”

“Yes, you can,” Hazel Marie said. “What’d she say?”

“She said, ‘Let me unbutton it.’ Oh, that just mortifies me, I can’t tell you how much. And he was groaning and just carrying on something awful. But he never said a word that I could make out.”

“The Lord don’t like that kinda messin’ round in his house,” Lillian said, her mouth tightening in disapproval. “He ain’t gonna put up with it.” Then she leaned in closer. “Who that man doin’ all the carryin’ on?”

“Well, it had to be Pastor Ledbetter,” Hazel Marie said. “Who else would be in his office?”

“Oh, I hate to think it, Hazel Marie,” I said, just swamped with a terrible feeling of loss. You want your pastor to have a spotless life, even if you can’t claim the same for yourself. “Still,” I went on, “it
sounded
like him, though I’ve never heard him groan before, so I don’t have anything to compare it to. I can see him losing his head over money, but a woman? No. Especially with a woman who wears as much makeup as Norma does. She just cakes it on, and you know what a fit he threw when Emma Sue did the same. You’d think he wouldn’t come near a painted woman.”

Hazel Marie said, “I guess he changed his mind.”

I nodded. “He’s been doing a lot of that lately.”

“But you’ve got to finish telling us,” Hazel Marie said. “What’d you do then?”

“Well, I heard Norma say, ‘Let me go lock the back door, so nobody can walk in on us.’ I turned around fast, you better believe, because she was saying, ‘Hold your horses, I’ll be right back.’ And just as I got to the door to the hall, she stepped right into her office, and I was caught. We both looked at each other, and I don’t who was the more shocked. She pulled the door to the pastor’s office closed and stood in front of it like a guard. And her face turned red as a beet, and her lipstick was smeared all over her mouth and the top button on her blouse was undone. And you know her top button is never very high, anyway. Well, we just stood there staring at each other, both too stunned to move, I guess. I know I was, although I’d’ve given anything to be able to sink through the floor. Then, all of a sudden, her face went dead white and she clenched her teeth and said, ‘Why don’t you learn to call before you come over here? We’re not holding open house, you know.’ And I was still so stunned, I couldn’t think what to say, so I just said, ‘Well,’ real strong like, and left.”

“Oh, it must’ve been awful,” Hazel Marie said. “I wish you’d taken her down a peg or two, but I wouldn’t’ve known what to say, either.”

Lillian was just shaking her head at the pity of it.

“I wasn’t through, though. I was halfway out of the Fellowship Hall when I got my nerve back. I turned right around and marched into her office. I stuck my head in and there she was, sitting behind her desk, putting on more lipstick. ‘Norma,’ I said, ‘if you ever lock me or any other member out of this church, you’re going to be walking the street, which is just about what you’re doing now.’ ”

Hazel Marie gasped, as a smile lit up her face. “You didn’t!”

“I certainly did, and I hope she repeats every word to him. There’s nothing worse than a cheating husband, unless it’s a cheating preacher who ought to know better. And furthermore, I’ve thought of lots of other things I wished I’d said to her. I may go back over there and do it, too.”

“You not goin’ nowhere,” Lillian said. “You already had more’n you can handle, so you gonna stay right here an’ settle yo’self down.”

“She’s right, Miss Julia,” Hazel Marie said. “There’s no telling what a shock like that has done to your system.”

“My system is fine. It’s my nerves that’re getting the best of me.”

“I don’t doubt it. Come on, I’ll walk you upstairs and you can lie down. I think you need to.”

“Yessum,” Lillian said, “an’ I’ll bring you a nice tray. You need something on your stomach.”

I staggered to my feet. “Some Pepto-Bismol might not be amiss, either.”

I declare, once you get images and visions in your head, especially of the noxious kind, it’s next to impossible to get them out. I knew I would never be able to erase the picture of Norma and Pastor Ledbetter from my mind if I lived to be a hundred.

Just as I got up to leave the kitchen, I heard Little Lloyd on the back stoop, coming in from school. I sat back down to hear about his day, trying as I did so to put that startling scene in the church out of my mind.

“Hey, everybody,” he said, as Hazel Marie took his raincoat and bookbag from him. “Where’s Latisha?”

“She off visitin’ a little friend from kindygarden,” Lillian said. “She be home after a while. Set down now an’ I fix you a snack.”

“How was your day, Little Lloyd?” I asked, reaching over to pat his arm. It seemed that the more I worried about him, the more I wanted to touch him. And I am not a demonstrative woman, by any means.

“Some firemen came to talk to us,” he said. “They brought their fire truck, and they let us climb all over it.” He smiled as Lillian placed a plate of sugar cookies in front of him. “I might be a fireman when I get grown.”

“We’ll see,” Hazel Marie said as she poured a glass of milk for him. “I remember when you wanted to be a garbage man.”

“But if I was a fireman,” he said, “I’d know what to do when somebody gets hurt. Like just now when I cut across the parking lot at the church.”

He bit into a cookie as the three of us stopped and stared at him.

“What?” Hazel Marie said.

“Who’d you see get hurt?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, dipping a cookie in his milk. “Nobody, really. I just thought he was.”

I pulled my chair closer to him while Hazel Marie leaned on the table. Our sudden interest made him put down the cookie and look from one to the other of us.

“Did I do something wrong?” he asked.

“No, honey,” his mother answered. “But we want to know what you saw. Exactly, Lloyd.”

“Well,” he said, “this man came out of the back door of the church just as I turned the corner, and he was walking real fast. I don’t know who he was, but he had on a real nice suit and tie, and didn’t look like he lived around here.”

“Short, with a slender build?” Hazel Marie asked.

He nodded. “And funny-looking hair in the front.”

Hazel Marie and I exchanged glances.

“Anyway,” Little Lloyd went on, “he was wiping his face with a handkerchief, and it had something red all over it. I thought he’d cut himself. You know, shaving?”

“You thought he’d been shaving in the
church?
” Hazel Marie asked.

He shrugged. “It was just the first thing I thought of, but he didn’t have any pieces of Kleenex on his face, so I guess not.”

I leaned back in my chair, feeling an immense relief. “Then it wasn’t the pastor,” I said to Hazel Marie. “Unless . . .” I stopped, not wanting to say more in front of the child.

“No’m,” Little Lloyd replied with a frown, not having been privy to our earlier speculations. “Nowhere near the pastor. Whoever it was crammed his handkerchief in his pocket when he saw me, and drove off in a big Mercedes. It was a rental. I know, because J. D. told me how to tell.”

So it had been Curtis Maxwell who’d gotten Norma’s attention as well as her makeup all over his face. Unless, I finished the thought I’d almost spoken,
unless
she was running them in, one after the other. It didn’t at all surprise or distress me, though, to hear that Curtis Maxwell was a hypocrite in custom-made clothing. I’d learned long before this that the louder and more publicly a person talked about his faith, the more he probably had to cover up.

Lillian insisted that I go on upstairs and lie down. She said that I’d had more excitement than was good for me. I agreed with her, but I might as well have stayed up for all the rest I got. I could no more turn my thoughts from what I’d heard in the pastor’s office than I could walk on water. Even though I was now certain that it had been Curtis Maxwell unbuttoning Norma’s blouse, and not Pastor Ledbetter, I couldn’t rid myself of the image of our rigid, straightlaced, by-the-book, critical, and judgmental pastor engaging in passionate congress with Norma Cantrell. Well, with any woman, if you want to know the truth, even his own wife. But that’s what happens when your imagination runs wild on you, and mine kept putting Norma and the pastor together, even though I now knew better. Maybe I just wanted the pastor to take a fall to prove he was human. Of course he had proven it, at least twice, since there were two Ledbetter sons.

I sat up in bed, recalling some of the strange beliefs that I’d heard about. And one of the strangest was that conjugal activity had to be reserved for the purpose of procreation. That seemed a little harsh to me, although as far as I was concerned, I could take that activity or leave it. And while I was married to Wesley Lloyd, I’d left it more often than I took it. Well, that wasn’t exactly true, for he was the one who left it. Still, it occurred to me that Pastor Ledbetter might well be one of those procreation-only souls, who was now so deprived that he didn’t have the fortitude to resist a woman who threw herself at him.

That’s it, I thought. That explains both him and Emma Sue. They’d denied themselves of marital comfort for so long that they were ripe pickings for anybody who came along offering temporary alleviation from distress. And that was why he’d been so disturbed by Emma Sue’s pitiful attempt to make herself attractive—it stirred his loins, just as he’d said.

I came off the bed, confident that I’d found the explanation for the unnatural behavior of both the Ledbetters. But with all these thoughts about what takes place within and without marriage, my mind just naturally turned to Sam.