Homefires (21 page)

I knocked on Jessica’s pristine white front door. From within the modest ranch-brick structure, quietness smote me. Presently, I heard brisk footsteps and the door swung open.

“Come in, Janeece,” Jessica smiled and stepped back, pulling me inside with the momentum of her warmth. “Deborah and Toby are out back on the patio having some refreshments. It’s been such a nice, sunny day, I thought they’d enjoy a picnic outside.” She talked as she walked, focused and purposeful and with a grace that made me feel klutzy. “Here,” she pulled out a patio chair for me to join my son and his friend, “Have some cookies and lemonade.”

Toby sprang to his feet, then remembering Deborah’s propensity to react to undue stimuli, slowly took her hand and asked very nicely, “would you like to go exploring with me? I heard something in that bush over there. It might be a big – ” Mentally checking himself again, Toby shrugged, “just a little old bird or somethin’. Wanna look?”

Deborah looked blankly at him for a long moment and then, seeing his curiosity peaking, got awkwardly to her feet, shook loose of his small hand and, twisting her twig of hair, trailed him to Jessica’s tiny evergreen garden.

“They’re getting along well,” said Jessica, looking pleased.

“Thank you,” I said without forethought.

She gazed at me. “For what?”

“For taking on my little rambunctious guy.”

Jessica reared back and laughed, a sound that rolled from her like stringed alto arpeggios. Once loose, her mirth was as unfettered as her decorum. “Janeece – think about what you just said.” She peered at me and cut loose again with laughter.

“No way
!”
Deborah bellowed from where Toby crouched over shrubbery, his stick probing and separating leaves. She rocked from one foot to the other in her baggy jeans and big loose blouse – she abhorred garments hugging her skin – holding her bang-twig, scowling at Toby, fighting her own burgeoning inquisitiveness.

“Look, Deborah,” Toby squealed, then immediately lowered his voice, “look, will ya?”

Deborah slid one sensibly shoed foot forward and stretched her lean body to view Toby’s discovery, a green frog that leaped from obscurity, then frantically away from the two voyeurs.

Toby punctuated his belly laugh with three somersaults.

Deborah flung back her head, arched her back and poked out her lips into a huge donut that emitted excited huffs of soundless glee. “
Huhhh! Huhhh! Huhhh!”
Red-faced, she lumbered about in zigzagging circles, shaking and flailing her hands in the air as though freeing them of some invisible, burning liquid. She
spewed
energy and what I recognized as joy. This was Deborah’s celebration, this silent ritual of exuberance.

It moved me profoundly, bringing both tears and laughter.

Jessica and I looked at each other through mists of wonder.

The unlikely pair: Toby and Deborah, actually taming each other. Who’d have ever thought it? And gazing at my friend Jessica, who found humor and joy in a life that limited her horizons, I felt ashamed of every complaint I’d ever uttered.

The phone rang. It was Mollie Pleasant, Callie’s mother. “I got a letter from Callie today,” she said. “You asked me to get with you when I heard from her.”

Mollie went on to tell me that Callie was divorcing her current husband Joe, number three, whose ready-made family of three children had unexpectedly delighted my old buddy. Unfortunately, Joe’s drinking brought out his darker side and Callie had sustained much abuse before throwing in the towel. I thanked Mollie for calling and hung up, reeling.

Callie – abused?
I had to sit down.

What had happened to my spirited friend who called all the shots?

I’d gleaned from mutual friends that Callie had, through the years, developed a drinking problem. She’d always seemed so – smart. Yet, Callie’s insatiable quest for thrills had always overrun reason. I felt a stirring of anger. At her. At
it,
the demon that drove her. In the next heartbeat, an incredible sadness swallowed it up.

Ours had been a unique closeness, Callie’s and mine. Polar opposites, we’d posed no threat one to the other and when we shared, it was wholeheartedly and with love unconditional.

And with the next breath, I knew I still felt that way about my friend. I loved her. Period. Didn’t matter what she’d done: she was still
Callie.

I rummaged for my stationery and began to write her a letter. I poured out my concern and care, relating to our younger days and my talk with her mother. I poured out my aspirations for her well-being and her spiritual safety. Tears dripped onto the pages and by the time I finished and sealed the envelope, I felt drained.

I felt peace.

A festive Farewell Service packed out the sanctuary. Wonderful food smells wafted from the fellowship hall, where the gathering would convene for a covered dish luncheon. I looked around. Heather sat with the pre-teens and Toby with Jessica and Deborah. I occupied my front-pew seat, growing more misty-eyed by the moment because, despite the less than affectionate start for me at Hopewell Methodist Church, I’d bonded to this flock as surely as to the one at Possum Creek. Time
can
heal most things, I’d learned during those long months there. Just love folks and give them time: they’ll come around.

Krissie quietly slipped into the seat beside me, followed by her carrot-topped friend Sandy. My little shadow, I thought. Krissie always opted to be near me and I found myself, at times, nudging her to reach out to others her age, to assert herself into their circles, but shyness held her back. How I understood. I reached for her hand and squeezed it, a thing that would have mortified Heather before her friends.

Heather. I covertly watched my oldest swapping notes with pals, avoiding my gaze, like she didn’t know me. Two sides of the coin she was: one side a stranger who detested me, the other, a misty-eyed woman-child who, in rare, private times, told me how wonderful I was, how beautiful. I smiled and faced the front again, thinking how she’d never admit it to her peers, even under torture. Thinking, too, how nothing I did came off
right
in her estimation. I’d slid from being her whole world to being
a big fat zero. It was as though she’d launched off to Teen-Planet where nobody spoke my language and only barely acknowledged my alien-existence. But everybody with teens told me it was only a phase. I wished it would zip by more quickly. I missed my daughter.

Andrea Smith finished her solo selection, one of Kirk’s favorites,
Beulah Land,

and I thought of how fortunate Hopewell was with several trained pianists, singers and musicians. I thought of how Andrea, proper,
musically accurate
Andrea, was offended when, at a chain-gang prison service, one inmate had asked her to sing
Just a Little Talk with Jesus
and she’d told him she couldn’t sing such a song. Such an undignified,
irreverent
composition went against her conscience.

Dear, dear,
I now imagined how that inmate must have felt in the face of such snobbery. Why, Lizzie would have shook the rafters with her rendition and had ‘em dancing in the aisles.

I checked the program. The final presentation was a processional with flags, escorting Kirk from the sanctuary to the place of honor in the fellowship hall. The organ rumbled and the piano chimed strains of Charles Wesley’s
O For A Thousand Tongues to sing my great redeemer’s praise,
and majestic banners swept past, borne by a color guard consisting of church elders.

“Ahh, Crap!”
Deborah bellowed, springing to her feet and charging down the aisle, her red face rampant with mutiny.

“Deborah, come back,” Jessica commanded and with Toby shadowing her, pursued.

“
Deborah
,” Toby wailed, scuttling past Jessica, “Don’t be scared.”

“
Stupid
! Stupid! – ” came Deborah’s foghorn-trumpet howl as she collided with elder Ben Johnson, who, flag and all, went crashing into a pew, knocking Doris Hepplehoff’s new hat askew and drawing a screech of either pain or shock from deacon Silas Tate, who mostly napped through services.

Deborah froze mid-aisle, except for fingers twisting her twig, her mien one of scowled bewilderment.

“It’s okay,” Toby took her hand and patted it. “Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m hungry!” howled Deborah, her nose slightly sniffing the aromatic smells. “I wanna eat.”

“Shhh.” Jessica took her daughter’s other arm and along with Toby, tugged her through the double doors into the vestibule. No real damage was done other than to Ben’s dignity, which recovered rather quickly. Doris set her hat aright, and Silas roused for lunch.

And more than at any other time, I felt truly at home there.

PART TWO

1973-74

CHAPTER EIGHT

 

Moving to coastal Solomon, South Carolina, brought refreshing change for the family, though at first, Heather insisted upon calling the lovely rural setting
Purgatory.

“Poor baby,” I wrapped my arms around her, dodging movers who scuttled past toting boxes stuffed with Crenshaw paraphernalia, sliding them into empty spaces around walls still smelling of fresh lumber and paint. The recently built, pristine manse was a bonus to the sudden offer of conference officials to shift us to a bigger harvest field. An
opportunity,
they said, heightening my wariness.

Toby and Krissie romped outside – out of the workers’ way – lickety-splitting to examine the ancient cemetery beyond the lovely brick church with its white steeple, investigating with a child’s clarity the mysteries of what lay beneath those flattened, verdant mounds towered over by headstones bearing cryptic inscriptions. Some marble finishes, dulled by mildew, revealed hazy pictures of the departed. What Toby could not decipher, Krissie patiently read and explained.

The parsonage, a gracious sprawling brick ranch, came fully furnished and offered the Crenshaws the distinction of being its very first occupants. Until now, an older town dwelling had housed Solomon Methodist’s clergy. Our old hodge-podge furniture went into storage, but my resilience ran out when I refused to part with the rich cherrywood four-poster upon which two of our children were conceived.

“Okay,” I told the children, “you each get a room of your own. Go pick it out,” and laughed when they scattered like startled flies in three directions. I proceeded to place folded sleepwear in drawers, bracing myself for the usual calamity, but surprisingly, peace prevailed. My instincts – as to which room fit whom – panned out. Heather, of course, got first dibs, but the two younger harbored no opposition. Glory be! Already, I could see the influence of the tranquil environment.

Mid-afternoon, Kirk, in gray coveralls, came up behind me, as I stretched clothes on hangers for our his-and-hers
walk-in closets and pressed himself to me. I dropped the garment and turned into the familiarity of his arms, a haven amid disorder. And we embraced for long moments, soaking from one another solace and ongoing oneness, augmented among virtual strangers.

“Honey?” Kirk lifted his face, the sharp planes and angles softened by an atypical vulnerability. “Did I make the right decision – coming here?”

I peered at him, mystified by his sudden qualms. Rarely did my husband look backward. He could have stayed on at Hopewell for another term. This two hundred-plus mile transfer had been his decision – a quick one at that, given the fact that annual Conference sat upon us as he weighed his choices. His. Because, as in most major resolutions, I acquiesced to Kirk. A simple matter of trusting his logic.

“After all,” I’d told him when he asked my opinion and I knew what he wanted – needed – to hear, “you’re the one who stands up there in the pulpit, looks them in the eye, feels their pulse. It has to be your decision when to leave one flock and embrace another.”

The move, so sudden,
blurred
with a ridiculously haphazard twenty-four hour period of packing and loading moving vans, manned by low-country, new-flock men who snatched boxes literally from beneath my hands and open drawers and slapped them onto the porch where, under my glazed direction, they loaded valuables and tossed away trash.