The Queen of Sleepy Eye (9 page)

A familiar ache roosted under my heart. I hugged a pillow to my chest.

“Lord, will anyone ever love me?”

I peeked through the velvet draperies of the chapel to watch for Mrs. Clancy. She had insisted I accompany her on my first Sunday at Spruce Street Church. The church itself intrigued me. Constructed of tan stone, the building evoked images of King Arthur with its round turret crowned by a stone parapet. To emphasize the church's identity crisis, a brass ball topped the party-hat roof rather than a cross. The stained-glass windows bore none of the themes you would expect, say the Good Shepherd or Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. Varying shades of green glass patched the windows on the south side, only to taint the glory of the remaining windows.

Old women with Easter-egg hair walked up the steps of the church, most leaning heavily on the railing to steady themselves in the wind that plastered skirts around arthritic knees and cushioned bottoms. I returned to the bathroom for one more dousing of White Rain. My bun felt like a Brillo pad.

On the way back to the chapel, I stopped to check on Mom. Even her snores were delicate, melodious. I blinked away the tears to grab my purse, Bible, and a notebook. I met Mrs. Clancy at the kitchen door.

“You won't need that,” said Mrs. Clancy. She stepped inside, straining her neck to look from the kitchen to the small sitting room. She tugged at her bodice. “The church has Bibles in every pew.”

If she had told me to leave my dress at home, I couldn't have been more surprised. I'd won a galaxy of gold stars for bringing my Bible to Sunday school. I stood there dumbly, vacillating between my ache to belong, if only for a few months, and wanting to please Mrs. Clancy because I believed many had tried and failed. I was competitive that way.

“Never mind,” she said, walking down the stairs. Her hind end tipped precariously with each step. “Bring your Bible if doing so will keep your jaw from slacking like a dolt. The service starts in five minutes.” She looked at her watch and held up three fingers. “Three minutes.”

A brood of women stopped their clucking the moment Mrs. Clancy entered the narthex, but their eyes were on me. They nodded, cooed, touched my arms with their cool hands. One patted my cheek and welcomed me to Spruce Street Church. The churn of my stomach slowed. I was a chick safely returned to the henhouse after a misadventure in the coyote-infested hinterlands. I learned from a woman with three chins that the young people came for the Sunday school hour in the basement at eleven and left the moment the clock chimed noon.

“I don't know what they do down there,” she said, wringing her hands. “How are they expecting to be part of the church if they don't attend services? I fear for the future of the church.”

“It's so nice to see a young person interested in the heart of the church,” another woman offered. She looked me up and down. “You don't seem like other folks new to Cordial. You're sensible and modest. Lovely, just lovely, and you have a sweet face.”

I'd chosen what I wore carefully, a gingham and eyelet dress with a flounce that covered my ankles. “Thanks.”

“Last year's summer intern was a bit too progressive, I think,” added a woman doused with rose water and powdered like a donut. “Without asking, he up and painted the youth room a ghastly blue. Terribly gaudy, I don't mind telling you. Some families stopped attending altogether.” And as surprising as a garter snake, her anger flared. “We sent the intern back where he came from, we did.”

I must have jumped because she leaned toward me. “Oh, we have a very nice youth director now. I was on the selection committee.”

Mrs. Clancy tugged my arm, and I followed her to the second row. I pushed a needlepoint pillow over to clear a spot before sitting. A woman as flighty as a finch grabbed the pillow with a huff and off she went, shaking her head.

Above me, the plastered walls arched toward each other on wooden beams as graceful as whale bones. And I'd been wrong about the stained-glass windows. An opened Bible topped each trio of windows.

Good.

A tall man in a black robe that barely cleared his knees entered from a door behind the pulpit and sat in a throne of a chair. I jumped when the organist pounced on the hymn's first chord. I'd never sung a hymn with six verses before. I shared a hymnal with Mrs. Clancy, and when the high notes pinched her throat, she spat on my hand. By the time we sang amen, the bubble of sputum had slid into my palm.
Yuck!
Rather than embarrass Mrs. Clancy, I waited until we
sat down to smooth the folds of my dress. No more spit. She tugged on my arm to stand for the doxology, so I paid closer attention to the bulletin. An asterisk beside a hymn or a congregational prayer meant to stand, but there was no corresponding signal to sit down. Instead, I listened for the grunts and sighs of the women around me. Those proved signal enough.

As the ushers gathered the offering, the Reverend Dr. Theodore Maxwell, whom Mrs. Clancy referred to as Pastor Ted, thrummed his fingers on a black notebook. He watched his congregation with round black eyes as two creases deepened between them. He removed his glasses to rub the folds, but the creases persisted. His eyes appeared even smaller with his glasses resting in his lap. He wasn't a bad-looking man, in a scholarly-pallor and soft-hands sort of way. He looked to be older than Mom but much younger than Mrs. Clancy. What a disappointing time that must be for adults, when all that is fresh and new has passed and heaven is all they have to look forward to. The absence of a wedding ring kept speculations flying through my head until he returned his glasses to his face to bless the offering.

Pastor Ted stepped behind the pulpit, opened the black notebook with deliberation, licking his finger to find his place among the many pages. I would crochet him a bookmark so he could find his place faster. I dated the first blank page of my notebook. He cast a wary eye over the congregation and cleared his throat. “Please turn with me to the Gospel of Luke, chapter one, verse five, page 948 in the pew Bibles.”

He read the Scripture like a lullaby. Every word enunciated. No hesitation. As he described the significance of Zechariah's priestly service, his voice grew stronger. He described the inner and outer chambers of the temple—the sights, the sounds, the smells. He spoke with great tenderness of Elizabeth's disappointment and piety, and as he did, his mouth curled into a slight smile. At first, I thought he
was looking at me, but when a woman with wrought-iron posture in front of me squirmed under his gaze, I knew his attention had landed on her.

Interesting.

As Pastor Ted gave the benediction from the back of the church, I wrote a note in the margin of my Bible that Zechariah's lack of faith hadn't thwarted God's purposes. Mrs. Clancy looked at me, my Bible, and shook her head.

After the service, I sidled free of the worshipers to read a calendar of events I'd noticed earlier in the narthex. No mid-week Bible study for college students or Bible study of any kind, really, only mission circles and bingo.

Mrs. Clancy caught me by the arm. “They're waiting for you downstairs.”

“For me? Who?”

“Your Sunday school class. Our new youth director teaches the class. He certainly has a way with the young people.”

I didn't want to hang out with a bunch of squirrelly high school students. “Someone might call the funeral home.” I said and leaned into her. “You know, a death call.”

“There won't be anyone calling until two o'clock. It's understood that I go to church and out to lunch with the ladies every Sunday. You have plenty of time for Sunday school.”

In the basement, I sat on a wooden chair that pinched my left cheek when I shifted to straighten my skirt. I slid over a chair, felt guilty about subjecting someone else to the bottom-pinching chair, and slid back. Since I sat alone, I rehearsed a speech for the youth director, suggesting that a college-bound person might intimidate the high school participants. Having settled on my approach, I took in my surroundings.

Whoever had attempted to cover the electric-blue walls had failed. Blue bled through the roller strokes, and a fringe of blue remained near the ceiling. The photographic posters with inspirational sayings curled away from the tape holding them to the wall. Overhead, pipes gurgled and groaned. The large circle of chairs demonstrated ambitious hopes of attracting the major portion of the teenagers who lived in Cordial. I'd read about their commencement in the newspaper. Less than thirty seniors had graduated from the high school that year. When someone overhead finally rang a bell to announce the start of Sunday school, only H and I sat with the freshly scrubbed intern, John.

“Okay,” he said, rubbing his hands together, “this is great. H, our class has doubled in size in just two weeks. You must be out there talking Sunday school up. That's real good. Okay now, let's, well, pray. H, would you lead us?”

H looked at me and then the boy-wonder youth director. “Lord, uh, well, thank Thee for the food we are about to—”

John cleared his throat. A rush of water rumbled the pipes. H rubbed his hands on his pants. “Yeah, well, thanks for all the good stuff you give us. Amen.”

John handed H and I each a copy of
How to Be Your Own Best
Friend.
“Because you haven't had a chance to read the book, I'll read an essay I wrote for my ministerial chaplaincy class to serve as an introduction.”

I'd been going to Sunday school since we had moved in the second grade. I met Lauren at my new school. Her folks didn't want their daughter hanging out with a heathen, so they drove me to church every Sunday. We memorized Scripture verses, listened to Bible stories acted out on flannel boards, and sang songs with hand motions. Crafts meant glue and glitter. Once Lauren and I graduated into the high-school Sunday school class, we read and discussed books
like
The Late Great Planet Earth,
which frankly had done more for my prayer life than just about any other book. I prayed earnestly for Jesus to stall his second coming long enough for me to get married and have babies, which started me praying for a boyfriend. I was still waiting for the answer to that prayer. My sophomore year, Mrs. Hinck made the girls read and discuss
The Richest Lady in Town.
For me, the book's enduring message had been to keep my toenails clean on the thin chance of meeting the author, Joyce Landorf.

While John read his essay, I looked over the book. First of all, it was skinny. That was good. And the type was large with many expanded paragraph separations. Even better. A smiling couple, the authors, sat close together for the back cover photograph.
Nice.
I flipped the pages. No Scripture verses quoted. No capitalized masculine pronouns. This wasn't a Sunday school type of book.

John rolled up the essay,
A
+ side out, and used it to drum his knee. “So what do you think?”

I held up the photograph of the authors. “Are these people Christians?”

“Truth isn't limited to the Bible, Amy. Just because these folks don't write in the language of Christianese, don't discount the wisdom they've captured in the pages of the book.”

“But Jesus is
the
way,
the
truth, and
the
life. This smacks of humanism.” That last bit came straight out of the lips of my youth director in Gilbertsville when Garrett Walker admitted reading
I'm Okay—You're Okay.

“Jesus said loving your neighbor as yourself is one of the two commandments we must keep,” John countered. “You can't love others without loving yourself.”

I fought to keep my voice even. “You can't truly love yourself if you don't understand the scope of God's love and sacrifice.”

“Jesus wasn't the only Jew to die on a Roman cross, Amy. Did you know that?”

H rolled his eyes and stretched. The sleeves of his suit jacket rose to his elbows.

“You know what? I don't belong in this class,” I said, standing. “I'm a college student. I only came as a favor to Mrs. Clancy. I don't want to dominate the discussion.”

H stood up too. “I have enough credits to graduate early.” He directed me toward the door. “Let's go.”

* * *

THE AIR, COOLED by the rush of the river, settled on me like a sheet fresh from the clothesline. Along the shore a tumble of boulders provided stadium seating to watch the North Fork River cut a languid S across the valley floor. The water was Coke-bottle green where it rippled and foamed over pale stones and deepened to jade over shadowed depths. Beyond the treetops, the mountains lay like slumbering elephants.

H loosened his tie and draped his jacket over a boulder. “You owe me your life.”

I lifted my face to the sun. My eyelids went red in the brightness. “You'd be back there becoming your own best friend if I hadn't said something.” The sound of shifting rocks piqued my curiosity.

“I was about to fake a fainting spell,” he said, hunting for something among the rocks.

I shielded my eyes to watch him. “Will you get in trouble?”

“Definitely.” He lofted a stone the size of a volleyball into the river. “My dad will make me apologize to Johnny boy, and he'll dream up a job for me to do. Last time, he made me remove about twenty junipers from the backyard. I itched for a week.”

“Thanks, then.”

H muscled a rock out of the bank and tossed it into the middle of the river.

“Do you
have
to do that?” The stones of the river clacked like castanets as they tumbled under the rush of water. “The river is singing a song.”

H hefted another melon-sized rock into the river. “What song?”

So listening to the music of nature wasn't H's thing. Maybe geography with a bit of speculation would stop his salvos. “Do you ever wonder how far the river will push a stone before it finds that one place where it fits and stays forever?”

Although H stood squinting against the bright sunshine, the question darkened his face. “There's no place like that, not for rocks and certainly not for humans.”