Slow Way Home (19 page)

Not looking up from the gun, Parker said, “Brandon, your teacher came and got Beau. She needed him at the snow-cone booth.

You might want to check it out.” Bullets clipped as I turned to go.

Nana grabbed my shoulder. “Now where exactly are you going to be? That white tent right over there?”

Poppy gave her a look, and then she let me go. All the while I felt her eyes watching each step I made.

After we had poured blue liquid on the last snow cone of our shift at the school booth, Beau and me took Josh for a ride on the Ferris wheel. We waited in a long line while the man who operated the machine told us all the details that the gas station owner had already spilled. I watched the way he smiled at the girls and whispered close to their ears until they laughed. Right down to the belt buckle engraved with the words “Groove Thing,” he seemed like somebody Mama would bring home. Maybe that’s why I didn’t laugh at his one-liners the way Beau and Josh did. He locked us in the yellow-seated cart and kicked us off in such a way that the cart began to spin. Josh clamped harder on to the handle and tried to make us think he liked it by yelling real loud. The night sky filled our senses as we moved higher and higher towards the stars.

“I bet this is what the astronauts see right when they’re taking off,” I said and threw my head back until the rocking of the cart made me feel dizzy.

“Look at them down there. They look like little bitsy ants.” Beau pointed at our classmates selling the snow cones. Miss Travick’s blonde hair might as well have been straw pasted on a stick figure.

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“They say you can see clean over to Tallahassee,” I added.

When the Ferris wheel suddenly stopped, Josh never looked down. “What’s that over there?” Josh let go of the safety bar long enough to point in the direction south of town.

Red streaks rose up from a clearing of trees. The flames danced higher out of the darkness and clawed at the stars.

“It’s Dead Man’s Curve. See it? There’s a fire right over there.”

Beau’s finger held the position, and he turned to look at me.

Due south of Dead Man’s Curve could have been either of our places. I pictured our camper boiling in flames and ashes of money from the pickle jar drifting all the way up to the Ferris wheel.

We must have had the visions at the same time, because all at once we started yelling, “Fire. Fire. Let us down!”

Josh was flailing around, making the cart swing faster than it did when we first took off. The man down below was laughing with a girl who had her hair pulled back in a braid. She pointed up, and only then did he snatch the lever that made us come back to earth.

Beau was the first to reach Parker at the booth with basketball hoops.

“Fire! Something’s on fire just past Dead Man’s Curve.”

We followed Parker across the street to the gas station. On the same phone that we used to communicate with our past I watched Parker dial the sheriff and then the volunteer fire department. All the while my stomach twisted in a knot that I had thought it had forgotten how to tie. A knot that was supposed to be left back in North Carolina.

The big cross planted in the middle of the churchyard seemed to be filled with electric currents. Angry flames shot out in all directions.

The symbol that was stamped on the Bible that Sister Delores had given me suddenly seemed like something ugly. Behind it the roof of God’s Hospital caved in and flames busted upward towards the trees.

Even the whine from the fire-truck sirens couldn’t break my stare.

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When the church steeple broke off and tumbled to the ground, I pictured the same soot that rose up in the sky dirtying my insides.

Men still dressed in clothes they wore at the fair began spraying water on the sanctuary. Magnolia trees that had blanketed us for dinners on the ground now popped and twisted against the flames.

Beau looked at me and then ran towards the trees. He pulled the garden hose from the house next door and began spraying. “Are you just gonna stand there?” he yelled. But as much as I wanted to move, all I could do was watch as God’s Hospital, Sister Delores’s church, my church, sank down right along with my spirit.

Twelve

S
ister Delores sat in the back of the sheriff’s car with the door wide open. Sounds from the radio crackled and then fell silent. I figured Sister Delores, like the radio, was all cried out. Tears had left a map down her face. She just sat staring at the smoke that drifted away from what remained of the charred building. The lone cross that had been electric with flames in the churchyard had long since fallen and lay broken in two pieces, charred and blackened.

While men in orange shirts walked around kicking the edges of the building and placing pieces of the church into plastic bags, Bonita and Nana stood with Harvey behind the sheriff ’s car. With the rhythm of an old hymn, Bonita kept a steady pat on Harvey’s shoulder.

Parker and two deputies took a piece of the cross and placed it in a bag. When one of the gloved men peeled away the gold medallion, I stretched against the barrier of yellow tape. The deputy held it up as if it might be some treasure unearthed in the scorched grass. Part of the gold circle was twisted towards the grooves. My heart raced as the strange necklace and medallion that Josh found the day we cleaned out Mama Rose’s attic swept through my mind.

Regular church members crowded behind the sheriff ’s car. They stared at Sister Delores like she was one of the women the fair had left
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behind. A woman with snakes growing from her hair. The crowd began to mumble when Sister Delores stepped out of the car. Harvey ran to her and whispered something unknown but to God and the two of them. She pushed his hands and slid underneath the tape.

She moved as if the cross might revive and produce a new spray of flames. When she kicked it, a trail of smoke escaped. Not even the crunching sound of burned wood could mask her scream. A scream so piercing that I turned to look for a protective nod from Nana, a nod indicating only a minor setback. But Nana was like all the rest, her brow wrinkled and jaw clinched as she took it all in.

Sister Delores fell to her knees, and Harvey stood behind her trying to pull her up. She lifted her head high towards the trees; pine straw filled her clinched fists. “Lord, I did everything you told me. But I can’t do this no more. You promised strength to the weary and power to the weak. Well, Father, bring it on, because I just can’t do this no more.”

By the time Parker and Harvey had lifted Sister Delores from the ground, she was moaning a deep growl that I had first heard playing on the eight-track tape in her car. But this time my heart managed to translate each octave of pain.

Within a week, traffic was able to pass by the church without so much as slowing down. The charred foundation soon seemed nothing more than an unfilled cavity.

It began slowly at first, with the clearing of black crumbled wood, and then two weeks later new pilings began to rise up along with our spirits.

“What in the world . . . ,” said Nana as we drove past the church.

Cars, trucks, and church buses filled the lot next to the place where the cross had once burned. Nana, Poppy, and me got out of the truck to find makeshift tables covered with plastic coffee cups and boxes of doughnuts. Men with construction aprons began unloading boards from a flatbed truck.

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“Let’s rock and roll,” Miss Travick said. Her smile was as wide as the truck that held the lumber.

“Where did all these folks come from?” Poppy asked.

“Well, after the story ran, I got my friend at the
Tallahassee Demo-crat
to cover it too. Then she got her friend at the TV station to mention it. Before you knew it, my phone was ringing off the hook.”

“Look, there’s Frank McCloud, preacher down at the Church of Christ.” Nana pointed at the man carrying a saw.

“And Darrell Harvey,” Poppy said. “He works down at the marina.”

“Praise Jesus,” Sister Delores said as she walked towards us dressed in blue jeans. “I sure do appreciate y’all coming by.”

“Listen, gal. We just appreciate how much you’ve done to help those men at the marina feed their families.” Poppy looked away at the group unloading the wood. “I’d better give them a hand.”

While Sister Delores went around hugging everybody, Miss Travick paired us up. Beau and me were given a bucket and scrub brushes. We scrubbed the concrete steps leading up to what used to be the door until our knuckles were raw.

Every so often Beau would pause long enough to look at me and whisper, “I don’t care what you say. Alvin wasn’t in that truck.” By the third time, I dropped the brush into the pail and slipped away behind the vehicles.

As much as I wanted to ignore the events that led up to the burning of God’s Hospital, Poppy couldn’t stop talking about them. We stood outside of the filling station making the regular call to Uncle Cecil as if nothing had changed. A thick wind of early summer cut through the cracks of the bathroom door and stirred with a howl of anger.

Nana reached for the phone, but Poppy turned his back.

“Don’t worry, we slipped away when all the newspeople showed up.”

By the time Nana got to talk, the look of disgust had swept down from her wrinkled brow to every crease around her lips. She snatched
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the phone from Poppy and only spoke a few sentences before the operator announced time had run out.

Inside the café downtown, she held the menu decorated with sketches of shrimp with top hats and never said another word. But Poppy was making up for anything she might have wanted to say.

He was smearing butter onto a cracker and talking all at the same time. “They tell me the Klan meets down at the swamp. Old Joe down at work said his cousin used to belong. Said if anybody got to talking out of turn about their plans they’d just cut the man’s tongue . . .”

The table jarred, and pieces of cracker wrappers drifted to the floor. “Will you please hush about burning churches and cutting out tongues. As it was, you wasted the entire call with Cecil worrying about business he doesn’t care a thing about. Never once thinking to check about the note on the farm.”

Nana turned back to the menu, and a young girl with braces flipped a new page in her pad. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“Yes, ma’am. I think I’ll take me the biggest glass of tea you got in the place. How ’bout you, Brandon?”

“Pepsi.”

Before Poppy could turn to look at Nana, the bell on the door chimed and she had walked out. Acid grew in my throat as I watched a pair of seagulls fly away from the railing of the boardwalk. The waitress’s thighbone brushed against my shoulder when I slipped by.

Nana’s pant legs slapped together as she walked faster towards a bench by the river. By the time she sat down, I was standing behind her.

“Where are you going?”

She reached up and patted my hand. Her fingers felt as tattered as the shrimp nets that lined the boardwalk railing. “Don’t you worry about all that. He just never did care about the farm the same way I do. To him it’s just land. Land that’s got my family’s sweat and tears in every square inch of it.”

A soft breeze made the collar of her blouse flutter. The beat of her heart pulsated against my thumb as a small mullet boat drifted by with a pack of seagulls hovering behind it.

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Poppy’s footsteps were heavy on the boards of the dock. He stopped right when a seagull cried out one last time before flying away from the boat. “Brandon, I grabbed a mess of hush puppies. Why don’t you go see if they’re interested in feeding.”

Grabbing the clumps of meal inside the napkin, I watched Nana smile that way she had. The smile that said worry was a nuisance that we did not have space for in our new lives. Poppy slid down on the bench and patted her leg.

While seagulls circled in mid-flight around me, I watched the two of them more than the birds. She never responded when he reached over to hold her hand. She simply gazed at the boat as if it could carry her back to dry land that was reserved for the past.

Bonita and Parker had set the trip up right after the church burned.

Little did I know when I accepted their invitation to spend the day at the amusement park in Panama City that Beau and me would communicate only through Josh.

“Hey, let’s ride the Spider,” Josh said.

I shrugged my shoulders and looked down at Josh. Blue food dye from the cotton candy outlined his lips. “I’ll do it. But I don’t know about him. He’s too chicken.”

“You tell him that I can ride that dadgum roller coaster with my hands straight up in the air. I’ll ride that thing, but I won’t sit by him.”

By now Josh had gotten used to being a translator and was tired of repeating the words that he had first said through broken laughter.

The joke died down before we entered the park gates.

As we rode the Spider, black metal arms stretched out low over the park. Bonita and Parker looked like action figures standing in front of the shooting gallery. The cart would spin out of control before they had a chance to hear us call out their names. It was the first time that day that we had all laughed at the same time.

Beau’s words were clipped as rock music blasted out of the cart’s speaker, but I did not need a translator to understand them. “I don’t know why you think Alvin burned that place down.”

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Josh was pushed into Beau as the cart made another dip towards the ground. His face was twisted even more than the arms of the ride.

“Burned what place?”

“Brandon thinks Alvin burned down God’s Hospital. Said that gold thing they found on the cross was the same one Alvin had at his house the day we went out there.”

“That’s stupid.” Josh cut his eyes to Beau for confirmation.

When we turned again, Josh slid over to me but grabbed the metal bar and pulled himself away.