Accidental Happiness (13 page)

“Well, I’ve got to make sure I’ve got a photographer lined up before I do anything else,” Gina said, standing up. “You need help cleaning up?”

“Go,” Reese told her, before Lane could answer. “Get your Sunday come-to-meetin’ shindig all lined up. Angel and I will pitch in on kitchen duty. Right, kid?”

Angel nodded, but she seemed subdued, worlds different from the child who had announced the meal only an hour before. Reese felt the panic begin to rise. Fear could paralyze her if she let it. That wouldn’t do Angel any good at all. But life was changing fast, and Angel had noticed. The world they had come from, the only world Angel had known, wouldn’t be intact for much longer.

Gina mumbled her thanks to Lane and made her way out.

“Come on, sweetie,” Reese said, standing. Her leg was numb from sitting at the cramped table. She stretched it out, tried to shake off her unease. She couldn’t let her guard down until she knew what to do. She reached for the empty bacon platter, hoped to God her hands would cooperate. “Let’s pitch in here, okay?”

“Okay.” Angel began to gather the dishes. She took it as an earnest task, her brow creased with good intentions. The sight of her daughter trying so hard was enough to break Reese’s heart.

10

Gina

I
sent Angel inside the church. She wanted to hear the songs. Jake, the photographer, had been late meeting us at the marina, so the service was well under way when we got to Mt. Sinai. I stayed outside to help decide the shots he would need, but Angel wanted to go in. I’d agreed to take the child for Lane’s sake, little more; but if I’d imagined the outing to be a sharing experience for the two of us, I would have been disappointed. Best I could tell, she just wanted to go to church.

I looked up at the small bluff where the graveyard sat. The temperature had dipped to under 90 degrees, making the day almost pleasant outside. From the distance, I couldn’t make out the new ground of Ben’s grave any longer. Grass had grown over it, and I hadn’t gotten around to choosing a headstone for him. I hadn’t been back in a couple of weeks.

Just after the funeral, I’d come every day, but the ritual, the one-sided conversations with Benjamin, started to wear on me. The cemetery stood above the small brick church, as if the dead were charged with steady watch over all they left behind.

“Ground’s more solid up there for the bodies.” The woman’s voice startled me.

I turned to see a plump matron in a green shirtwaist dress. The starched cotton collar at her neck stood up admirably to the midday humidity. I thought I knew all of the women at Mt. Sinai, at least by face if not by name. The entire membership barely reached two hundred, and that included the nursing home shut-ins who remained on the roster. But I hadn’t seen this woman before.

“Solid ground?” I wasn’t sure what the proper response would be to such a statement.

“For the bodies,” she repeated. “That’s why the cemetery is up high, so far away from the church.” As she talked, she spread a large cloth over one of several picnic tables behind the building. It was the last one to be covered, the white cloths lending an altarlike quality to the plank-and-nail constructions.

“The ground is soft down here this close to the water level,” she explained. “We go to higher ground for the cemetery.”

“What do you mean?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“This close to the water, the ground stays saturated; tides shift it here and there. That’s why the church is raised.”

There were shrubs and a fence to disguise it, but I’d noticed before that the foundation of the church consisted of raised blocks.

“We want to make sure those caskets stay where we put ’em.” She smiled, as if the mischievous dead bodies might misbehave given the slightest opportunity. I imagined Benjamin and all of his new, otherworldly companions, making a swim for the shore as the water rose.

“I’m Rena,” the woman said, having completed her task. She extended her hand to me.

“I’m Gina,” I said. “We rhyme.” She didn’t get my humor, so I thought it best not to mention my imaginings about my newly buried husband. “I’ve only been coming a couple of months, but I don’t think I’ve met you.”

“No,” she said, getting busy with the organization of plastic utensils on the table closest to the church building. “I’ve been staying with my daughter this summer. She had a baby in June. I’m just back this Sunday. Very nice to meet you . . . Gina, was it? How come you aren’t inside, dear?”

“I’m here on business today,” I said, watching her lay out silver serving spoons for people to put with their dishes as they’d set them down. “I freelance for the Charleston paper and I’m doing a story on food and churches.”

“Well,” she said in a newly affected tone, “you came to the right place.”

The music inside the church gathered volume as the voices picked up on the final hymn. Outside with us, Myra, a thin woman in a blue suit, stood at a smaller square table off to the side. She held a rhythmic course, scooping ice from a cooler and pouring it into plastic cups. The crunch of the ice provided a percussive quality to the lumbering hymn.

Two other women—Martha, who worked in the office, and Jane, a younger girl—were putting salt shakers and various condiments at the ends of each table.

“So you all don’t get to hear the sermon on Homecoming?” I asked Rena as she unfolded metal chairs in a row off to the side.

“We slipped out during the offertory.” She smiled, as if the clandestine exit had thrilled her. “So we caught most of the service. He outdid himself today, I’ll tell you.”

I considered asking if she skipped out on her offering as well, but decided that my humor might once again escape her.

“I would help you,” I told her instead. It felt awkward, watching her work. “But Jake’s taking pictures of the setup and I don’t want to be in them.”

“Oh, we’re used to this, hon,” she said, still opening chairs. “It doesn’t take any time at all. Are we going to be in the paper?”

“He takes a lot of shots, so it’s hard to say.” She looked disappointed enough for me to add, “But there’s a good chance you will be.”

The photographer, an older guy who’d taken pictures for the paper almost longer than I’d been alive, moved at odd angles around the women. He looked over at me, gestured for me to offer up any ideas. I shrugged and shook my head. Later I’d ask him to get a long shot of the trail and the cemetery overhead.

Minutes after the service, the efficiency with which food came out of the cars and onto the tables amazed me. Coolers full of deviled eggs, cheese straws, Jell-O molds, pork roasts, oyster casserole, and fried chicken . . . not to mention all manner of local berries baked into pies and cakes that looked like bakery displays. The tremendous spread finally got the best of Jake, and he put his camera aside and filled up a plate. I was right behind him.

I glanced around for Angel, saw her sitting off to the side, balancing a plate on her knees while she searched for a level spot to set her iced tea. I watched her struggle to accomplish this with her bum arm interfering at every turn. As I started toward her to help, two ladies came her way and immediately adopted her, so I decided to concentrate on getting notes for my story.

“My mother got that recipe from the governor’s housekeeper in 1932,” Miss Ronnie Meeks, an older lady in the parish, explained as I juggled my own paper plate on my knees while trying to jot down notes on a pad. Even with
two
working arms, I found it difficult.

The flower attached to Miss Ronnie’s Sunday hat hung by barely a thread, so the flower itself bopped around with her animated gesturing.

“It was the governor’s favorite,” she told me.

The recipe involved was the oyster casserole, and, having just taken a bite, I decided that the governorship had its perks.

“My mother was hired to hang drapes at the governor’s residence, and she smelled the casserole cooking one day. She offered to pay the old housekeeper if she would raid the cook’s recipe box for the ingredients. That old woman said no, but Mama happened to mention that my daddy made homemade spirits in his spare time. The housekeeper was happy to trade the recipe for a bottle of moonshine. My mother drove back that afternoon and made the trade. The housekeeper declared homemade liquor was the only thing that cleared up her chronic chest congestion.”

Moonshine . . . congestion . . . governor’s house . . . drapes . . . I hoped my scrawl would make sense to me when I got home. I suddenly wanted to talk to Ben, the way we always had. I wanted to tell him the anecdotes, see the quirky center of the day filtered through his eyes. Our experiences became whole, three-dimensional, when we shared them with each other. The last three months had been a flat screen to me.

I slipped in another bite of food, a variety of fried okra with seasoned cornmeal that did wonders with my least favorite vegetable. The low buzz of insects and conversation ran like a current through the thick salt air. It felt soothing and right. Church people—most of them no more than acquaintances, some downright strangers—seemed to anchor the world in a way that left me safe. If I’d had time, I would have planned on several gatherings at different churches before writing the article. Especially since my life was shy of home-cooked meals since moving onto the boat. But a short deadline put an end that that idea, so I had to be satisfied with the one afternoon.

I watched Jake at work again. He moved through the crowd, squatted low, bent back—all in the service of good photographs that would bring out the best in the story. After a particularly acrobatic series of shots, especially for a man his age, he headed over my way.

“I got a picture of the preacher surrounded by a half-dozen women all shoving food onto his plate, then standing there to watch him eat it. He looked damned uncomfortable.” Jake stood behind my chair, leaned over to share his thoughts with me in low tones, but not low enough.

“It’s the funniest thing,” Miss Ronnie chimed in. “His wife won’t pay him a bit of mind, but not a woman between the ages of twenty-five and fifty in this church will leave him be.” Then she added, “ ’Course I’d be over there myself if I was ten years younger.”

She was right. Andrew Hanes had a lot of admirers, but Diane, his wife, seemed to either not notice or not care.

“Just look at ’em over there,” Miss Ronnie said, inclining her head toward the preacher and his female entourage.

Jake shook his head, gave up on discretion. “I’ve taken pictures of rock stars that don’t get that much attention.”

For my money, I didn’t think the preacher had any extraordinary attributes. He was a few years older than I was, not particularly tall, though he did appear compact, like muscle and bone all came together tightly for an efficient result. His hair was short, very short, a few millimeters shy of a crew cut.

“I don’t know his wife very well,” I said to Ronnie. “Or him for that matter. What’s their story?”

Over two months’ time, I couldn’t say I’d ever had this much conversation with anyone at the church. I came and went, just listening to Preacher Andrew’s sermons, which were quite good for a country congregation, then leaving quickly with only polite exchanges to mark my attendance. As Miss Ronnie was answering my question about the preacher and his wife, I jotted down a note to myself about food and socialization, how eating together brings out easy, intimate talk among people. After a moment she stopped, my note-taking apparently making her nervous.

“Don’t you write this down,” she interjected in midexplanation of Andrew’s former military career.

“No, I’m making a note about something else that just occurred to me. I’m not writing anything down about the state of the preacher’s marriage. I wouldn’t do that. Sorry.”

“Well, as I was saying,” Ronnie launched back in, obviously satisfied that I would keep the pastor’s dirty laundry out of the Sunday paper. “She may have signed on to be a military wife, but I don’t think she counted on this turn of events.”

Jolly and talkative, Ronnie offered a perfect chorus to the drama of Saint Andrew and his groupies, a narrative that had shifted, abruptly, to the dessert table.

“Besides, I think Diane Hanes has other things on her mind, other concerns.”

“Like what?” I had gotten way off the topic of food, but I couldn’t bring myself to change the subject.

“I don’t know. She seems out of her element sometimes. Maybe she misses the life she came from. Like I said, he was military before. There’s a certain amount of excitement that goes with that. Moving around, travel . . . I think it suited her. This church lady business . . . I don’t know.” The older woman paused, taking an impressive bite of ham biscuit midsentence. I waited for her to chew and swallow, and had plenty of time to feel guilty for being so curious in the first place. “The other thing is,” she continued when she could speak again, “I think children are an issue. But I’m not sure what the problem is, exactly.”

Something ran through me. She’d hit a little too close to home, and I hoped she wouldn’t linger on the subject; but between the biscuit and the thrill of an interested person on the receiving end of her conversation, I don’t think she noticed my unease.

“And,” she went on, “it’s got to be a little hard on her here. I feel right bad for the woman. ’Cause truth be told, nobody much likes her.”

She stood up.

“Just listen to me talk,” she said. “Now, like I told you, don’t you go printing any of that old-lady gossip.” She chuckled at her own indiscretion as she headed off toward the dessert spread that had just been vacated by the preacher and his loyal flock.

“What do you think, Jake?” I asked.

“About what?”

“About all this.” I looked around. The lines were thinning at the tables, but there seemed to be the same amount of food. “And how come there’s still so much food?” I asked before he came up with an answer to my first question.

“Loaves and fishes,” he said. An enigmatic response from a less-than-poetic guy.

“Listen, before you go,” I changed the subject. “Would you get some pictures of the cemetery up there? From down here looking up is fine. In fact, far away is better since I’ll be talking about why it’s so removed from the church.”

“Higher ground,” he said as he headed off to take the shot. “Keeps the bodies from moving around.”

It seemed I’d found a second source to confirm information gleaned while breaking bread with Miss Ronnie.