A Garden of Earthly Delights (16 page)

At the church—not as big as Clara had hoped, but clean and white—the boy said to Clara, “When you get sick of that crap in there, come out. I'm gonna be over there.” He pointed down the street to a gas station.

Mrs. Foster was waiting inside for her. She held a book pressed up against her chest, and when Clara came in she seemed almost ready to embrace her. “Ah, yes, yes,” she said, smiling sadly, “so wonderful that you could—such an opportunity for you—”

Clara looked around, smiling in her confusion. The church reminded her of a schoolhouse. There were maybe eight people there, sitting in pews right up at the front.

Mrs. Foster kept talking about the “opportunity” Clara had. She walked with her up the aisle, whispering and nodding sadly. Mrs. Wylie was sitting by herself in one of the pews, her head bowed, whispering to herself. Clara noticed that the other people—three
men and four women and a crippled boy with a crutch propped up near him—were also whispering to themselves. The men's voices occasionally turned into murmurs.

Mrs. Foster had her sit on the side. She felt cold and shaky. At the front of the church was a raised platform, and on that was a podium for the minister. Off to one side was an organ. She waited, glancing over now and then at the praying people, who seemed very serious and unaware of anything except their prayers. After a while there was a bustle in the back and Clara saw an enormously fat woman in a dark silk dress come in. She smiled at Mrs. Foster, who was back at the door waiting for people to come in, and her eyes were fast and bouncy like a girl's. Clara saw that her dress was stuck to her legs and looked funny. Then another man came in, tall and thin and stoop-shouldered. He whispered to Mrs. Foster and they both looked over toward Clara. She began to smile at them, but they did not quite see her—not exactly her. Then the man came over to her and put out his hand for her to shake. Clara saw that there was a dull red rash on it, as if he'd been scratching himself there hard.

“My dear, I am Reverend Bargman. Mrs. Foster has told me about you. Let me say we are all so happy you came tonight.”

Clara smiled. He was a tall, earnest, gawky man, with a smile that cut the lower part of his face in two. “You may be entering the threshold of a new life. A new life,” he whispered. Clara nodded eagerly. He went on for a minute or two, using the words “threshold” and “opportunity.” Then he excused himself, stood for a while near the wall with his hands behind him, staring at the floor, and finally shook his head as if to wake himself. He strode to the front of the church, scratching the back of his hand.

He began:
“My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, let us give thanks for our being here this evening—for our church, our wonderful new building— And let us begin by singing hymn number 114. All together—let us rise and sing all together—”

They moved slowly. He seemed to be pulling and nudging them with his hands and little prodding movements of his body; everyone stood. Clara stood. She had found a hymnbook on the pew beside her and leafed through it. They had already begun singing,
without any music behind them, before she found the hymn in the book. They made a thin, discordant mixture of voices that kept trying to waver apart. Clara stared hard at the music in the book. She had never seen music before. And the words were big words. She felt perspiration break out on her and she wondered if everyone was waiting for her to sing her part— Just ahead of her the fat woman sang, raising and lowering her head with a deliberate meekness. She was a warm, energetic partridge of a woman, with damp spots on her dress that looked like wings folded back.

Clara had thought the song was ending but it began again. The back of her neck was damp. She raised the book closer to her face and tried to read the words. Then she noticed that the minister was crying! He sang words that Clara could not even make out and these words were so sad that he was crying. He shook his head sadly. Clara waited tensely, wondering what there could be in words to make a person cry. She only cried when something real came along. But she never did find out what the words meant. After the song ended a few people cleared their throats, as if self-conscious at the silence. The minister closed his hymnbook and everyone else did the same. They sat.

“I see,” he said, with a special little smile, “that I have not worked hard enough this week. I have not worked hard enough.”

There was an intake of a breath or two. Clara did not understand. “Only this child is new to us,” the minister said, looking kindly at her. “I have not worked hard enough this week. I have not brought people to our worship of Christ.”

Mrs. Foster sighed.

“No, I have not worked hard enough. Just this child … And it is through the efforts of Mrs. Foster and Mrs. Wylie that … No, I have not worked hard enough.” He did not wipe his eyes or even his nose, Clara saw. He let the tears run down as if he were proud of them, and when he smiled she could see tears glistening around his mouth. He bowed his head and clasped his hands before him, out before him as if he were going to help pull someone up there with him, and prayed aloud. Clara stared at the top of his head. It was thick with dark hair in some places but thin in others; she wanted to laugh at it. Everything made her so nervous that she wanted to
laugh. He prayed in a loud, demanding voice that got more and more angry as it went on, about Christ and blood and redemption and little children and sin and the world and money and city life and the federal government and the Sunday collection and Pontius Pilate … and his voice was angry and hard as any man's, not about to cry at all, and he began to pace tightly around on the little platform as his voice rose higher in a sudden upward swerve, as if something had caught hold of it and jerked it right up toward heaven. “God is watching! God is listening! You people in sin, how can you think God isn't with you all the time? Right now, tomorrow, yesterday, next year—always—God is always with you—”

Just when his voice was hardest, though, it collapsed down into a sob. He could not get his breath for a moment. Clara pressed her hand against her mouth to keep from smiling. In the center section women were crying freely, their heads bowed; the men stared down at the minister's shoes. Only the crippled boy was looking around the way Clara was. Their eyes met and he seemed not to see her; he had lines on his forehead and around his mouth like a man getting old.

Someone had once told Clara that God was watching her, or maybe Christ, someone was with her all the time and watching her. She hadn't bothered with it because it didn't make sense. It might or might not have been true, like many complicated things, but since it didn't make sense she forgot about it. But tonight when the minister said the same thing, it struck Clara that if God was watching anyone, it was not the people here. He was probably watching other people who were more interesting. Clara knew that God would never bother with her and she thought this was a good idea.

The minister was clearing his throat and Clara cleared her throat involuntarily, in sympathy with him. She felt the way she felt when her father or Nancy was acting silly, wanting to help but a little impatient. Then something extraordinary happened: The fat lady with the damp dress lumbered out of the pew and headed for the platform. Clara wondered if she was going to hit the minister or do something violent—maybe she was his wife. She could see the woman's thick, pale, doughlike arms, the flesh swinging free just beneath the sleeves, and her legs in brown stockings round and thick
as tree limbs, working her up to the front. There she knelt, heavily, and buried her face in her hands. She was sobbing too and the minister bent over her and let his eyes streak across the pews as if drawing everyone else up to him. A pouchy-eyed spider he was, drawing the buzzing flies to him. “To Jesus! To Jesus!” he whispered loudly.

A man in a bulky drab-yellow suit coat and brown trousers gave a little sob—“Amen! Jesus!” He pushed clumsily—desperately— over knees and legs to get out into the aisle. He was panting and his face was oily-slick with happiness. “Amen! Oh Jesus, have mercy!” Clara had to pinch herself not to laugh aloud, was everybody in this place
crazy
? This man hurried to Reverend Bargman, too, and knelt so hard you could feel the vibrations. There came an older man, with a face like something rotted, and there was a nice-looking lady who might've been Mrs. Wylie's sister, they looked so much alike. And a chunky teenaged girl with bad skin, leaking tears behind her hands. It was so strange! What did it mean! Clara was scared something would draw her forward, too; like a magnet; she could feel invisible things in the air, like waves; like the beating of birds' wings; or maybe they were spirits, nudging and bumping against her. Why was everybody so happy, and why was everybody sobbing? Why would you sob if you weren't hurt—except out of a fear of being hurt in the future? Was it to stop God from wanting to hurt you? To show how weak you are? Clara was smiling so hard her cheeks felt like bursting. If she could fix her gaze on God she'd have gone
all eyes
and make Him like her but—where was God? Where was Jesus?

Crock of shit
Carleton said of religion. Clara hoped if there was a God, He wouldn't blame her for her pa's opinions.

But here was her chance, Clara saw. Her opportunity. She slipped onto her knees onto the hard floor. She hid her face in her hands like God seemed to want, and made herself weak and placating praying for Rosalie. Clara had no prayer for herself, she would take care of herself, but Rosalie needed her help, maybe. After her father was taken away the rest of the family disappeared overnight and the rumor was they'd been given bus tickets back to Texas. Clara prayed
Jesus let Rosalie into Heaven. Jesus let Rosalie's baby that died into Heaven. And Rosalie's pa. Jesus have mercy.

That was enough. Either it would work, or it would not.

Clara was out in the aisle. On her feet, and in the aisle. She wasn't going to be drawn to Reverend Bargman though she could see he was waiting for her, his pouchy eyes greedy upon her. He'd seen her praying, on her knees. He'd seen, and he was waiting. But Clara just laughed at him, ugly old spider, turned and ran out of the church. She was so happy! She could feel her hair flapping between her shoulder blades.
I'm not a sinner like these people. Whatever they have done, I'm not one of them.

Outside, she discovered the damn old hymnbook in her hand, she tossed it down on the top step where they'd be sure to find it.

First they went to a little restaurant near some railroad tracks. There were several trucks parked outside, and inside were men who shouted and laughed in one another's faces. Their fists and elbows struck the tables accidentally and made them wobble. Clara, who had never been in a restaurant before, said right out to the young waitress: “I'm hungry, I want some hamburgers. I want a Coke.”

The boy was older than Clara had thought. He had a blotched, heavy face with eyes sunk back into his skull. He kept joking and interrupting himself and laughing nervously; he played with his car keys for a while. In his shirt pocket were five cigars wrapped in cellophane. Clara smiled at him and showed her teeth and kept pushing her hair back out of her eyes. With the table between them and other people around, what did she care? “You got out of there faster'n I did,” he said. His name was LeRoy. He was Mrs. Foster's only son and he was going to join the Navy and get out of Florence forever, as soon as he had some operation he had to have before they'd let him in. “My old bastard of a father that's dead now, he had me carry anvils and junk all around the barn. That's what done it,” he said sourly, smiling and twisting the cap on the ketchup bottle. He got ketchup on his fingers and wiped them underneath the table.

A song began on the jukebox. It was a country song with a twangy, forlorn, sleepy voice. Clara tried to imagine what that man would
look like and she knew he wouldn't look like LeRoy. But LeRoy hummed along with the music, grinning and squinting at her and turning the cap on the ketchup bottle nervously. He seemed so excited he couldn't sit still.

“Don't you want nothin to eat?” Clara said.

“I'm just gonna sit and watch you.”

He shook his car keys once more and dropped them in his shirt pocket. He laughed and snickered at something he thought of, then put his elbow down on the table and his chin in his palm and watched her. Clara ate her hamburger fast, licking her lips and then licking her fingers. She drank the Coke so fast it hurt her throat. This made LeRoy laugh. “You're such a cute little girl,” he said. “I bet you know that.”

He wanted to drive out to the country, but Clara said she knew a place she wanted to go—it was a tavern she'd heard about. People from the camp went there. She wondered if she had made a mistake, going with him, when he did not quite turn into the tavern drive but idled out on the road, saying something vaguely about a better place a few miles on. He hadn't looked at her. “Like hell,” Clara said. So he turned into the drive. Clara got her door open fast and was outside before he had even turned off the ignition. He jumped out and ran around the car, his feet making heavy crunching noises in the gravel. He started breezy little sentences that went nowhere, like “If my ma— What a night— That's the way things are—” He opened the screen door for her and Clara went inside as if she'd never seen him before. “My sweet Jesus,” the boy said, wiping his forehead.

Clara felt a little dizzy with excitement. The man behind the bar, who looked like LeRoy, said: “How old are you, sweetheart?”

“How old do you need to be?” she said.

The man and LeRoy both roared, this made them so happy. Clara took the bottle of beer someone handed her and sipped at it, looking around. Her eyes darted from face to face, not as if she were looking for someone she knew but as if she supposed there was someone here who might know her. Her hair was hot and heavy about her head. One time in the evening LeRoy took a bunch of it in his hand and Clara jerked away like a cat.

“O.K., no scratchin, no bitin!” LeRoy laughed. He put out his hands to defend himself. Now that he had been drinking a while, his laughter was wheezing.