Second Sunday (17 page)

“And Mozelle, how in the world did Oscar Lee get into that club? Even with Christmas Jefferson sponsoring him, he ain’t cool
enough to be a Mellow Slick Cougar. Look at Christmas—
The World
newspaper is always reporting that he was seen here or there, at this dance, that club, this tavern opening, and at every
thinkable celebration and sale over at Londell’s Men’s Shop. Oscar Lee ain’t never had and never will have the kind of man-about-town
exposure of a playboy like Christmas Jefferson.”

“I was kind of thinking the same thing,” Mozelle said. “Oscar’s just too dry and stiff to be a successful player. He don’t
even know how to have a good time. But what I do think got him in the club was paying cash for a whole year’s dues, and that
car—a lot of them liked the car, especially the color. At least, that is what I overheard Old Daddy, the founder of the club,
saying when he came by the house to tell Oscar he was in. When they saw his car, they felt that he really did have enough
cool and style to be a Mellow Slick Cougar.”

“Old Daddy?” Louise said. “Girl,
what
is his real name?”

“I don’t think I ever heard. He been Old Daddy for as long as I’ve known him. And girl, how old is Old Daddy, anyway?”

“Old,” Louise answered her. “Louis Loomis almost seventy-six and he said Old Daddy is a good fifteen years older than him.”

“You lying, Louise. That man past ninety?”

“Umm-hmm. But he show don’t look it. And Lord knows he show don’t act it, the way he keep some little fifty-year-old hanging
on his arm.”

“Girl, you saying something. ’Cause come to tell it, I ain’t never seen Old Daddy with a woman old enough to have gone through
the complete change. She might be playing with it but she ain’t changed nothing yet. Just like that mean Warlene girl he rumored
to be fooling around with.”

Louise snickered. “You know, last thing I want to do is talk down in Old Daddy’s pants,” she said. “But he like Lazarus or
something. ’Cause if he got them little chickies all up on him, child,
something
getting called back from the dead.”

“Ooh, Louise Williams! You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“Well, I ain’t.”

Mozelle was giggling so hard, she almost forgot about her troubles with Oscar.

Louise got a bit more serious and said, “You know something, girl. We need to figure ourselves a way to get up in that club.
I want to see with my own eyes what is so
mel-low
about the Mellow Slick Cougars Club.”

“You and me both. But you know that is the last place Oscar Lee Thomas would ever want me to be.”

“Well, that is just too bad. ’Cause we gone get into that club, and Oscar Lee Thomas won’t be able to do a thing about it.”

Soon after joining the Mellow Slick Cougars Club, Oscar started acting like Mozelle was to blame for every unhappiness he
ever suffered in his life. Just to be mean, he refused to take her anywhere—not to church, not to the grocery store, not to
the doctor, and definitely not to visit her friends. The one time Mozelle, who couldn’t drive, confronted him, he picked up
his car keys, dangled them up under her nose, and said, “If you think I’m your chauffeur, you thinking like Caesar. And everybody
know what happened to him.”

So Louise, fed up and thoroughly disgusted with Oscar, started driving Mozelle wherever she needed to go. For as she told
her friend, “Girl, there ain’t no way I’m leaving you at home buried in all of Oscar Lee’s garbage.”

Louise’s intervention came right on time, too, for it got Mozelle to church one Sunday when Rev. Wilson happened to preach
the very sermon she needed to hear.

The morning’s service was hot from the start that morning, with the Holy Rollers and Sister Hershey Jones performing “His
Eye Is on the Sparrow.” Hershey’s singing had folks up and running around that sanctuary with such fervor that Mr. Louis Loomis
whispered to MamaLouise, “Lawd, these people acting like they at the Twelve Tribes of Israel Holiness Church down the street.”

Louise nodded. The Twelve Tribes didn’t play. Sometimes they came out the church doors still shouting after service was over,
and this morning, Gethsemane was in the same mood. Bertha got the Holy Ghost, fell out, and almost gave poor Melvin Jr. a
heart attack. When she came to, he helped her up off the floor, just fussing. “Baby, next time you go in your prayer closet,
you need to consult the Lord about the effect of falling out like that on the baby.”

The singing and shouting comforted and strengthened Mozelle, filling her with the kind of peace that can be an anchor in a
raging storm. And then George began to speak. “Church,” he said, “we need to grow in the Lord, to expand in our stewardship
and ministries, especially in the neighborhood we have been called upon to serve. But before we can do all of that, we must
get right with God. And y’all know that Gethsemane has some serious work to do in that area.”

Where there had been plenty of noise and shouting just minutes before, silence fell, as the congregation tried to digest those
words. Clearly Rev. Wilson had struck a nerve, highlighting the political dissension in the church. But the rancor he was
talking about also described Mozelle’s marriage, Louise thought.

“Now, Gethsemane,” George was saying, “there’s not a person sitting in here who doesn’t have a sense of what can happen if
the core and foundation of something isn’t rock solid. And for a church to embark upon any venture without first being filled
with the Holy Ghost and seeking direction from the Lord, both as individuals and as a Christian body, is crazy. You do something
like that, you might as well stand up and then go and deliberately fall flat on your own face.

“So, before this church goes anywhere under my leadership, we gone do some good old-fashioned, country spring-cleaning up
in here. And y’all know exactly what I’m talkin’ ’bout, too. It’s the kind of cleaning your grandmothers made you do. Taking
rugs outside to be beat and purified in the sunshine. Cleaning down in every nook and cranny, getting rid of clutter and junk
and anything else you don’t need. You have to do that first, before you can put your house in order.

“What we need, Gethsemane, is a rejuvenation of the very soul of this church. We all, myself included, got to get rededicated
to the Lord.”

As Louise listened, she kept envisioning Mozelle doing a spring-cleaning of her marriage and her life. Sometimes trials came
to you not to make life bad but to get you moving to the next level. After the service, as she pulled the car out of the parking
space that her two sons-in-law, Bert and Wendell, always made sure was waiting for her on Sunday morning, Louise formed her
mouth to speak the words that had come into her heart.

“Mozelle, we’ve been friends since the fifth grade down in Falcon, Mississippi, when we beat up that bully Eugene Willie White
for taking your biscuit, fried fatback, and molasses sandwich.”

Mozelle smiled. How could she forget that fight with Eugene Willie White? He knew she loved fried fatback on a biscuit with
molasses all over it, and he went and took it anyway. She and Louise had to “tear that boy up.”

“That’s a long time for girls our age,” Louise was saying. “But lately, you been getting on my nerves, acting like you actin’
over Oscar Lee.”

At first Mozelle was kind of hurt, then she got mad. “Fine friend you are, Louise Williams,” she said, “to talk ’bout how
I’m acting. You had a good marriage with Joseph, and now that he’s gone, you done found yourself another good man. So what
do you know about the kind of sorrow, loneliness, and heartache that cause me to act the way I do?”

Louise almost stopped driving the car right in the middle of Kingshighway Boulevard. She was shocked to learn that Mozelle
knew she had a man. She had been so smooth that not even her nosy daughters, Nettie and Viola, or those two busy granddaughters
of hers had gotten wind of it. Lord knows her youngest grandbaby, Bertha Kaye, was always trying to get all up in her business,
as if her “Miss-I’m-Gone-Get-Me-a-Baby” self didn’t have her hands full.

Mozelle seemed to read her thoughts. She said, “How they gone peep you out, Louise, when they ain’t never really seen more
than a passing glimpse of that side of you?”

“Huh?”

“You wondering how I know about you and Louis Loomis, when your own children don’t have a clue—think you walking around all
by your lonesome with nothing but a Bible and a prayer to ease your troubled mind. But girl, this me—Mozelle. I know how you
act when you smellin’ yourself over a man. Remember, I used to help you sneak out the house to be all up on Joseph and kissing
him, when we were young.”

Louise blushed. She had only recently started dating Louis Loomis. She’d felt kind of bad about not telling Mozelle but thought
it best to wait until some of this turmoil with Oscar had blown over.

“I know,” Mozelle went on matter-of-factly, “because you actin’ frisky, ’cause you called him ‘Louis’—something nobody at
our church has done since his wife died—and ’cause he looks at you like he a biscuit and you some gravy he want to sop up.”

Louise was glad they had reached a stoplight, because she was laughing too hard to drive. Mozelle was always funny. Folks
just rarely saw it, especially when Oscar was around. He didn’t have much of a sense of humor and didn’t seem to appreciate
it in her, either. The look on Mozelle’s face warmed her heart, because she had what Louise called her “Little Imp” expression.

“Well, I see you on your way back to the land of the living, because you got some mischief bubbling up in you. So I guess
now is as good a time as any to ask you—what’s up with that husband of yours?”

“Oscar having an affair with some young woman named Queenie Tyler, who he met over at the club.”

“No!” Louise said. “He know his old rusty, Cornhusker behind need to quit. Just how young
is
this little heifer, anyway?”

“That heifer ain’t hardly ‘little’ from what I’ve heard. And she’s about forty or so, somewhere close to our oldest daughter
Dee Dee’s age.”

Louise was just plain disgusted with Oscar Lee, having the nerve to be laying up with a woman who probably went to high school
with Dee Dee. She said, “Oscar Lee know he wrong as two left shoes.”

“I know,” Mozelle said miserably.

Louise pulled into a parking space in front of Mozelle’s house, relieved that the burnt orange Cadillac was nowhere to be
seen. They walked into the house and dropped their purses on the couch, then Louise headed straight for the kitchen while
Mozelle went to change her clothes. After a good look around to make absolutely sure Oscar wasn’t there, Louise sat down at
the table until Mozelle came back, looking comfortable in a soft pink cotton duster. She opened the refrigerator and took
out a colander full of chicken waiting to be fried and started making up the batter and seasoning. She put water on to heat
for her pole beans, then stuck the macaroni and cheese she had mixed up last night into the oven to bake.

Louise got up and poured herself some of Mozelle’s special “dress-up tea,” made with top-secret ingredients. Nobody knew what
Mozelle put in that tea, but it show did taste good.

“Kids coming over for dinner today?” Louise asked.

“No. Told them I wanted some quiet time. I’m not ready to let them know things not right with me and they daddy.”

She sat down across the table from Louise, and started to cry. “Louise, what have I done that is so wrong, to deserve this
from Oscar Lee? I don’t know what to do.”

“Only thing you done wrong is fail to see that the problem doesn’t lie with you. It’s Oscar and it always has been Oscar.
I’ve tried to tell you this for years, but every time I opened my mouth, you shushed me, ’cause you didn’t want to hear a
bad word about him. So, I guess the way he’s running around now and showing his little narrow behind is a blessing in disguise.”

“A blessing?” Mozelle said.

“Yes,” Louise answered firmly, “a blessing. Sometimes storms are just making ways out of no-ways, clearing out what you don’t
need to make room for your true blessings to come pouring into your life. Quit resisting this storm, Mozelle. You trying to
fight this battle all by yourself, but the Father is standing right here, ready and willing to help you. You just got to have
the faith and courage to let the Lord do His job. Don’t you think that the One who made the heavens and the earth and all
the firmament knows what to do with a little banty-rooster like Oscar Lee Thomas? Our Father works in mysterious ways. No
telling what wonders of mysteries He wants to work out in your life, if you will only let Him.

“And Mozelle, I just know the Lord leading me to help you. He always did like to enlist the help of his children, because
He knows that we learn from helping others and doing His will.”

All of a sudden Mozelle started laughing. If ever the Lord had a servant able and willing to get involved when somebody did
somebody else wrong, it was Louise Williams. She said, “Louise, it’s a good thing you wasn’t around back in the Bible days.
’Cause you would have knocked that angel down, trying to get to Mary to tell her that she was about to miss her monthly cycle.”

Louise tried to act like she didn’t know what Mozelle was talking about. But after a moment, she had to laugh. Mozelle was
right. If she were back in the Bible days, she would have run herself ragged.

“Well,” Louise said, “if you up to working with a servant of the Lord, I’m up to getting you straight.”

The first thing Louise did was make an appointment for Mozelle at her hairdresser, instructing her to give Mozelle a snappy
new cut, along with a rinse to make the silver in her hair shine and shimmer when she moved her head. She had Mozelle get
her nails done and then took her to Essie Lee Clothiers, located on Delmar Avenue, right on the border of a suburb of St.
Louis called University City. “Now,” Louise said, “we gone get you some smooth Foxy Brown–looking clothes. If Oscar can walk
around trying to look like the Mack, you sure as heck can walk around looking like Pam Grier.”