The Swan House (54 page)

“Long enough to know that you've been doing some business with the Lord.” A distance of about five feet separated us. He got up, came to me, put his strong arms around me and squeezed me tightly. “That's mighty fine, girl. That's mighty fine.” Then he kissed me gently on the forehead and whispered, “I sure do care about you a lot, Mary Swan.” He took my hand and led me down the stairs, saying, “Come on, girl. I'm gonna get you home before your daddy starts to worry.” And that pure, peaceful feeling flooded through me again.

We drove to Buckhead in silence, watching the snow land on the windshield to be brushed away by the wipers. The streets were shiny, and a little of the snow had stuck to the ground. “You gonna be okay, Mary Swan?” Carl said as he approached my house.

“Yes, I think so.”

“I'll be prayin' for you, girl.”

“Oh yes, Carl. Please pray for me. I don't know what I've just done.”

He stopped at the bottom of my driveway. “You just turned your life over to the God of the universe. Best thing you could ever do, Mary Swan.” Then he patted my back and gave me a hug across the seat, the kind of hug a big brother might give his sister. And he left me standing in front of my house with the snow falling gently on my face.

Chapter 25

S
omehow it mattered greatly that the snow was still on the ground the next morning when I woke up. It mattered that the sun had barely risen and that I, in my sweatshirt and jeans and wool pea jacket, tiptoed into Mama's
atelier
and retrieved an easel and a palette and an empty canvas and left the house while Daddy and Jimmy were still asleep.

The path to the Swan House was dusted in snow, so that the leaves poked their pointed edges through the white. “‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep,'” I quoted aloud as my boots made soft imprints on the snow-covered leaves. “‘But I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep.'”

Promises!
The truth will make you free
. That was God's promise to me. And I had made a promise to Him too. Some sort of surging excitement welled up in me as I remembered my prayer on my knees at Mt. Carmel. “I put my trust in you, God.” It came out in a whisper. Then I lifted my face and peered through the bare trees to the whitewashed sky and yelled, “I believe!”

When I came out at the bottom of the long yard leading up to the mansion, I took a deep breath and said out loud, “Thank you, God!” The whole long avenue of grass was covered in white, and nothing had spoiled it. Not the imprints of squirrels, or the heat of the sun leaving little pockets of grass where the snow had melted.

I stood the wooden easel out in the middle of the yard near the street, where the wrought-iron fence kept would-be visitors out. I had on my woolen gloves, the ones I'd cut the tips of the fingers out of so that I could play the flute in the raw night air for an outdoor performance the year before. I blew out breaths of frosty air, tightened the scarf around my neck, and began to paint. This is what Mama did at Resthaven, I thought. She painted in what Cezanne called
plein air
, when the light affected everything you saw. I had never painted outside, and certainly not at eight o'clock in the morning, but this day I felt I could have floated to paradise and back. Free! Free and pristine as the untouched snow in front of me.

Mama had written that she tried not to paint subjects, but rather impressions of light. I knew the Swan House by heart and had sketched it dozens of times from this very perspective. But today, I just painted what I felt: the frost in the pure air, the undisturbed beauty of the snow, the majesty of the mansion, which stood unchanged under its new white winter coat. These things I painted without knowing how to make them real on my canvas. I simply knew that I
had
to paint this morning. I had to recall in my own feeble way what rebirth felt like. I wouldn't transform some poet's masterpiece to make it mine. No, this had to be from me, from my heart, as Carl had said.

And so I painted, teeth chattering and goose pimples breaking out on my arms and legs and tingles running down my spine. I painted my representation of what it meant to be free.

Getting home was not easy, holding the easel, palette, and paints in one arm with the wet canvas turned away from me in the other. By now it was almost nine o'clock, and Daddy would be sitting at the kitchen table sipping his coffee and eating a piece of toast with jelly on it while he read the
Atlanta Constitution
. So I avoided the house, traipsing instead through the backyard to where the swimming pool lay empty of water. I quickly stashed my painting and easel and paints in one of the changing rooms in the pool house. Then I walked back to the house and came in the back door.

“Hi, Daddy!”

“Mary Swan! For goodness' sakes! Where have you been? I thought you were still asleep.”

“I've been outside walking, Daddy. Isn't it absolutely beautiful?”

“Yes, I suppose it is, Mary Swan. Very rare to have snow stick like this.”

“It's like God's giving us a new start, Daddy.”

He looked perplexed with that comment, so I just hugged him tight and said, “I'm going to get ready for church.” And I raced up the two sets of stairs, still feeling the tingle of cold in my fingers and on my cheeks.

I had never before participated in the church service at St. Philip's as I did that day. When I knelt on the prayer bench in front of the pew, I really prayed, and when we read from the prayer book, the words seemed to speak directly to me. I listened to the sermon and realized, perhaps for the first time, that the dean was preaching about the same Jesus that Pastor James and Miss Abigail talked about. The form was different. No one swayed with the music, and Dean Hard-man did not yell out any “amens” from the pulpit. But the service was filled with a radiant and reverent adoration, which laced itself around me so that I felt something holy going on in that cathedral.

Without quite knowing why, I found Robbie out by the gardens after the service. “I have to talk to you sometime,” I said, stuffing my hands in the pockets of my coat, barely daring to look at him.

Robbie narrowed his eyes in a suspicious, hurt way. “What about, Mary Swan?”

“About things that are happening to me. Strange, good things.”

He looked hesitant, reluctant, so I continued. “I don't feel like I ever really got to explain things to you, Robbie, and I want to. I need to. You deserve that.”

He shuffled from one foot to the other. “I guess I owe you that, Mary Swan. We could go to the Varsity tonight, just like good ole times.” He grinned sadly. “Guess we'd have to keep the top up on the convertible tonight.”

“Yeah, pretty neat, all the snow, huh?”

He nodded, scuffing his tasseled leather loafers through the white powder.

“I'd really like to do that, Robbie.”

“Okay. I'll pick you up at seven o'clock, Mary Swan.”

When he turned and walked away, I couldn't resist squatting down and making a snowball from the powder. I hurled it at him, but it was already breaking in the air, so that when it hit his back, it simply dusted his coat with snow.

He turned around then, a mischievous grin on his face, scooped up a handful of snow, and said in a playful, menacing way, “You're asking for it now, young lady!” He ran over, grabbed me around the waist with one hand, while stuffing snow down the back of my coat with the other.

I shook all over, squealing as the snow pricked me on my neck. Then we just stood there, breathing hard and laughing at each other and wondering what to do with the way our hearts were melting, as the snow was doing down my back.

“You'll never guess what happened to me yesterday,” I told Rachel as we sat curled like contented cats in front of the fireplace in her den, warming ourselves after our ride on our frisky mares.

“Something's always happening to you, Swan.” She didn't seem very interested. “Well, spit it out.”

“I became a Christian.”

“Right. You were already a Christian, you nincompoop.”

“No, I mean I've become a real one.”

There was this silence as pragmatic Rachel turned that over in her mind. “What in the world do you mean?”

“I don't know, Rachel. But something has happened inside me. Not anything to do with going to church. Something happened in my heart.”

“Oh great, Swan,” she said sarcastically. “You're not gonna get weird on me, are you? Like one of Mama's friends who keeps telling us that we Jews are going straight to hell.”

“Gosh, I hope not.” I felt a tinge of regret. “It's just that I've been thinking about what Miss Abigail says about God and freedom and stuff.”

“Don't go getting religion on me, Swan. Please.”

“It's not religion. It's something else.”

“What?”

“I don't know exactly. Faith. I think it's faith.”

She rolled her eyes.

I brightened. “No, really. Let me explain. Last night when Carl brought me home, I told him I didn't know what I'd done. And he said this, ‘You jus' turned your life over to the God of the universe. Best thing you could ever do, Mary Swan!'”

Rachel wrinkled her brow. “Carl said that? Wait a minute, Swan. What was Carl doing bringing you home last night?”

“It's a long story.” I beamed.

“All right, then. I'll put on JP and you can tell me your story.” She sounded irritated, but I could tell she was dying to know every last tidbit of my adventure.

So with Jean-Pierre Rampal's flute serenading us and the warm fire blazing in the fireplace, I burst out with my story. “It started with Ella Mae being sick. Real sick. So Daddy took me down to Grant Park. Can you believe it? Daddy? And then it was snowing and Miss Abigail had to get a baby to the hospital and the church was jammed with hungry people, so we finished late and so she asked Carl and me to hand out all the clothes and food over at the Baptist church on More-land Avenue. So we did, and then afterward Carl and I went to the zoo and he paid for me because I'd forgotten my purse and we had this really neat talk and then I went back to Miss Abigail's and she was lying down because she was tired, and the phone rang and I answered it so she wouldn't be disturbed and it was this kid screaming on the phone that his daddy had a knife and was trying to kill him. So I woke up Miss Abigail and she ran over to the house, and I went with her, and the man was drunk out of his mind, waving a butcher's knife and Miss Abigail told him she was going to pray with him, if you can believe that, and he was mad as all get out and even madder to see me there, but Miss Abigail told me to go take care of the kids. And I was petrified out of my mind. But I went to the bedroom and stayed with the three kids who were hiding by the bed and I tried to pray. But I didn't know how and so we sang and stuff and pretty soon the police arrived and carted off the dad, and Miss Abigail took the kids to her house, so she couldn't bring me home like she had promised, and she asked Carl to do it. But I'd forgotten my purse at church, so Carl took me back there and I got it but, for some strange reason, I couldn't leave the church so I went into the sanctuary and that's when I saw the cross.” I paused, out of breath, and not at all sure how to explain the next part to Rachel. She had scooted closer to me and looked more astounded with every detail I gave.

“Well, go on, Swan. What happened?”

“Something big and important. And nothing. Nothing that you could see. But I stared at that cross and I started crying and then talking out loud to God.”

“What were you saying?” She was dumbfounded.

“Stuff. I don't know.”

“You have to know what you said. You're not making sense.”

“Okay, I'll tell you. But it's hard to explain, so please don't laugh.”

“No laughing, Swan. I swear.”

“Carl had been talking about how he wasn't afraid in scary times because he knew God was with him. And I asked him how he knew. And then he started saying how the ground was even at the foot of the cross, which means, in his words, that everybody needs a Savior. That's exactly how he put it. The rich and the poor. Everybody. Which of course Miss Abigail has always said. And Cassandra had told me that when she cried out to God for forgiveness, well, she'd felt clean and peaceful because she knew that Jesus was in control and He could take care of all her problems and help her choose the right things in life. Something like that.” I eyed Rachel. “You following me?”

“Sort of,” she said with a strange look on her face.

“So I guess I just combined all that information and told God that I needed Him and that I didn't have faith like Miss Abigail and Carl. When I was in that drunk man's house, I'd seen that I didn't have one bit of faith. But suddenly I wanted to believe so bad. And so I begged God to set me free and forgive me for the way I've been and to please take control of my life.” I stopped suddenly. “Do you think I'm crazy, Rach? Was that a big mistake?”

“You are a crazy lunatic, girl, no doubt about it.” But she smiled almost sympathetically. “So what's supposed to happen?”

“I think I'm supposed to feel clean and that God is supposed to start showing me what to do.”

“Well, do you and has He?”

“I do feel clean, brand-new, like the snow. That's for sure,” I said brightly. Then I nibbled my fingernail. “But I don't really know what God wants me to do next.”

Rachel didn't say anything for a few minutes. We both just stared at the fire crackling in the fireplace. Finally she sighed. “All I can say is don't drag me into it. Don't go complaining to me if weird things start happening to you.”

“But, Rachel, who in the world will I talk to if not you? I have to talk to you. I have to.”

“Okay, talk, then, if you want. But don't you dare ever think I'm going to swallow that stuff.”