Dessie sat toward the front of an oversized brown leather chair facing the desk, her ankles crossed under her dark blue jumper. Lissy and I pulled up armchairs on either side of her. He was a slender man, dressed in a lightweight pale yellow button-down shirt, clean shaven, with bristles of sandy hair, long on the top. He had the softest hands I’d ever shaken in a man or a woman. A ceiling fan clattered overhead, spreading the rich smell of potato salad and fried chicken around the room, and I hoped my stomach would not start growling.
Reverend began by praising the mission of the ladies’ auxiliary, and he mentioned the name of each woman who had given up her time to prepare food for the faithful and baskets for shut-ins and disabled veterans. We all nodded together, even me, heathen that I am.
Reverend’s light green eyes were directed over his reading glasses toward Dessie with a mixture of concern and respect. “How are you getting along, Dessie?” he asked. I shook off the feeling that I was back in grade school in the principal’s office. I focused on my sister.
A cluster of pink blotches broke out on Dessie’s neck and cheeks, and she began scratching at the back of her left hand, like the whole situation had given her hives. Suddenly I thought about Mom. In a low voice, I said to Dessie that Mom would have been there with all the older women setting out dinner in the fellowship hall.
As soon as I said that, I felt like an idiot, like I might have added to her sorrows and losses by mentioning Mom. But Dessie nodded, and we all smiled at the thought. My sister became collected enough to answer his question. “Reverend Shorter,” she said, “such a nice service today. Uhm, so good of you to take time out of your day for us. I know what we all are here for. I just don’t know what to say. I feel like by now I should be fine. But, well, uhm, well . . .” Then she stopped. I looked at Lissy. Her dark eyes were brimming with tears. I wanted to get out of my seat and hug Lissy right then. Her loss of her father had been swept aside in all this. But I held off. I wanted to see what Reverend would say, if he had the kind of answers my sister needed.
Reverend got right to work. “It’s not supposed to be easy, Dessie, and you too, Lissy. You both shouldn’t take yourself to task if you don’t feel like your old selves, like you can take on the world,” he said. “There is no magic spell, no one prayer, or special words anyone can say to take away the pain.”
We sat there in the quiet of his office. Dessie and Lissy dabbed at their eyes. Dessie said, “I know that, Reverend. I know. Some days I can’t figure out the right words to say. Then, when I talk, I can’t stand the way my words bounce around the house and echo back at me.” She looked into his young eyes, chewed at her lower lip. “I feel all useless and used up, like I’m an empty old vase without a drop of water left, set up on a shelf, all the flowers brown, all the stalks dried up.” Dessie looked at us, and we nodded to show we knew what she meant. “Uhm, that’s—well, when I turn on the TV, the preaching lifts my spirit. It helps me to think about the Lord. It feels so good to know that the whole flock, pastors, members, people all over the country are praying, praying for me,” Dessie said, and then she looked around at all of us. “So I think that’s the reason I want to give them something, to keep the shows on the air, so they can help me and help others in the same state as me.”
Reverend looked directly at her. “Dessie,” he said, “The people you watch on TV, the ones who you want to pray for you, they are not your loved ones, and they will not be the ones to heal your heart. Sometimes strangers on TV can seem like friends because they are in your house, but we know that they only just seem like that. Really, they are in some studio talking to a camera in a city halfway across the country.” I hoped that got to Dessie. She sat stock-still, barely blinking. Lissy nodded. While he spoke, I sat there thinking about the difference between Clay Shorter’s office and the corny, fake-looking Greek columns behind some of those TV ministers.
Reverend paused, as Dessie seemed lost in thought. “Dessie,” he said. “If Lux was here, what do you think he would say to you?” he asked.
“That’s just it, Reverend Shorter,” Dessie answered. “Lux isn’t here. It’s crazy to say this, but there was always a plan, or a project, always something he had going, something we had to figure out together. Now I don’t have anyone to keep me on my toes. Little Lux and Ronnie are gone off, Tommy is about grown, Billie is busy looking after Alan Ray and her boys, Lissy has Jeanie and Glenn and his whole family keeping her running circles. I don’t want to be a busybody or push my way into their lives.” She looked at all of us as if to say that this is how things stand, but it’s OK, it’s not anything that should change. She frowned. “Reverend, when you were talking about the ladies’ auxiliary, I felt even worse, more useless, like I should have stepped up to help out, and also, ashamed for feeling sorry for myself. Does that make any sense?” she said.
Reverend looked at all of three of us, and then looked directly at my sister again. “Dessie, can I speak openly in front of everyone?”
My sister nodded. Reverend Shorter reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a magazine article about the legal troubles of the Bakker ministry. He also had a newspaper article with photographs of the million-dollar mansions, Oriental rugs, solid gold chandeliers, luxury limos, yachts, lavish possessions of TV ministers including Robert Tilton and Oral Roberts. Those kind of folks, he said, used people’s money for their own enrichment. The cable company had graced them with a wide reach; they counted many millionaires in their flock. They would be well provided for without her donations, though they were going to act like they needed every last cent.
Dessie looked squarely at the Reverend. “Do you think I want that money?” she asked. “That money is just a bunch of paper, is all it is. That insurance money will not bring back Lux.” Tears streamed down her cheeks. “I just thought I could send it to someone who could do some good with it,” she said. I cast a quick look at Lissy. I wondered whether she was thinking the same thing I was thinking, that grief had taken hold of my poor sister’s brain.
Reverend looked up at Dessie. “I get it. I do, Dessie,” he said. “But please, don’t confuse the message with the messenger.” In the face of her recent loss, he said, those TV ministers could never provide her with the true sense of purpose, to enrich her life without Lux in a way that she so needed. She would not move on by sitting in front of the TV all day. That healing would come directly from the Holy Spirit to her through weekly worship and through service, doing the Lord’s work.
The truth of his words was not lost on her. Reverend leaned forward, looking at all three of us, gently suggesting that so much was needed right here in Fairchance, where friends and neighbors cared for each other through the toughest times of their lives, where we all need each other, and that real charity begins at home. My sister reached into her purse for a handkerchief and nodded through her tears. Lissy patted her mom’s left hand. Dessie reached out with her right for my hand, and I could feel her whole body trembling as the Reverend came to a close.
GLORY BE! Reverend Shorter’s words began to sink in. When the final installment of the A-1 life insurance arrived, Dessie arranged with the First Apostolic treasurer to sponsor an outdoor spotlight in the parking lot in Lux’s name, which was fitting since that was about as close as Lux would ever get to the indoors of the chapel. Then, come summer, when Tommy was done with tenth grade, she and Tommy made a plan to fix up her farmhouse. She said she did not yet know how, but it came to her that she would use it to do the Lord’s work. One rainy afternoon in June I stopped in, and she showed me a sketch of her idea for a downstairs bathroom, all planned out on sheets of graph paper, all the angles and measurements to scale. It was worked out to the last detail, each wall and doorway.
With the help of some of the deacons from the church, she framed out a closet-sized bathroom by splitting off a section of the back bedroom. Tommy and my boys helped when they weren’t at football practice. She broke out Lux’s favorite toolbox, started remembering his carpentry tricks.
Lux was by her side, telling her to measure twice and cut once, she said to me one afternoon, standing in the midst of her construction site, giant leather tool belt around her waist, pencil stuck behind her ear, Lux’s A-1 cap on her head.
She even gave Jeanie her own tape measure, a pad, and a pencil case, and small jobs to teach her numbers and measuring. I sewed a small red-and-yellow shop apron for Jeanie, two big pockets in the front and a big letter J like the S in Supergirl on the chest, with a little red cape to match so Jeanie could keep her tools in the pockets. I was never good with tools, but when I could, I brought supper, fresh-picked garden vegetables, cornbread, and Jeanie’s favorite, ice pops made from fruit juice.
Dessie found the sink, vanity, and commode on sale at the lumberyard, and for the first time she called up to the house and asked Alan Ray to come help. Alan Ray, Tommy, and my boys did a whole bunch of head scratching, but after working on it all weekend, they figured it out. They would not take any money, but when she and Tommy offered Lux’s coonhounds and the dog box, they did not turn that away.
By the time the A-1 insurance money ran out, just as school was ready to start around Labor Day, the outside of the old farmhouse was freshly painted, and that divided downstairs bedroom was done. Edgar Sutton came and set up a septic tank and drain field, so the house could meet the county codes. I told her that Mom and Dad and Lux would all be proud, and she replied that she wanted to do things right, so the Lord would see fit to put her to use. I don’t know why or how these things happen, but that very week Marcia Lee showed up at her door with her two little boys in need of care.
Somehow that did not surprise me. What did surprise me was when a pickup truck pulled up the drive with a piano tuner sign on the side. It was old Mr. Mosier from the church, who had last tuned Mom’s upright piano about twenty years earlier. After he left, I walked up the stairs to her porch with a bushel of pole beans that the boys picked. Not only was no preacher setting the fear o’ God into the faithful on the tube, but as I stood at the door, I heard her picking out the slow and steady chords of “In the Sweet Bye and Bye.” She kept at it, day by day, and sang when she played, mostly the older hymns, “The Old Rugged Cross,” or “Just as I Am,” or “All the Way My Savior Leads Me.” The words and tunes I hadn’t heard in half a lifetime came fluttering back from some hidden pocket of my mind, as familiar as a nursery rhyme or the sound of the dinner bell.
Dessie took up reading too, and not just daily Bible devotional passages. Library books were stacked by twos and threes on the kitchen table. She found remodeling books when she and Tommy were working on the bathroom. Then she went after baby and childcare books, telling me things we should have known but didn’t when we had our little ones, like how swaddling works, and how important it was to set babies on their backs to sleep.
Finally, she dug into Dr. Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking books, but for some reason, whenever she talked about living her life without a bit of worry, I started getting more worried. The televangelists were gone, as far as we could tell, but we still were not sure who Dessie would become. Tommy and Lissy said they wanted their old mother back, the one who watched soaps and wore her hair down, and cussed like a sailor when she thought no one was listening. They were afraid to tell her, but when they came to me, my only answer to them was to hold off and be patient. “Can you blame her?” I said, more to myself than to them, thinking about how some cracks might never get mended, not matter how much glue you try.
A FEW weeks after she began to watch Jasmine on Saturdays, Dessie stopped in one morning on her way to town, to see if I had any clothes I could spare. “She’s a pretty girl, thin as a twig and tall for her age, like you were. She wears the same oversize T-shirt and torn-up blue jeans every Saturday.”
“How’s it going? How are you two getting along?” I asked.
“She’s not that hard to get along with, but she must be going through a backward stage. I try everything to get her to talk. Last Saturday I asked if she wanted to bake cookies. She said she didn’t, but then she hung around while I baked. Since she was right there, I gave her a little job, reading the recipe while I beat the shortening and the eggs. She stared at me the whole time, and I just knew she never baked cookies before. But you don’t know the worst of it. She couldn’t even read the recipe.”
“Des, are you sure?” I said.
“Oh, I’m sure,” Dessie said. “This girl could not get the word ‘blend’ or the word ‘sugar’ from the cookbook. She’s got more than reading problems. She follows me around, saying, ‘No. No, dammit, N. O.’ to everything I ask her, but always touching, poking things. I don’t know whether to hug her or to wash her mouth out with soap.”
I didn’t want to argue, but “sugar” might be a tough word to sound out for anyone who never saw it before. Also, being in a new place with new people could make everything more difficult for the girl. Dessie had a way with the young ones, but since Jasmine was older, she might be a tougher case to crack. And then, suddenly, I found myself wishing that Jasmine would actually be a good cause for my sister to take on, someone who could grow and learn under her watchful eye.
That afternoon I checked my closet for any clothes that a young girl would want. I found a bag of clothes that I had gotten at the church rummage sale, a couple of T-shirts and matching shorts, and a sweatshirt that had seemed fine at first, but later Minnie and Mickey seemed too silly for a grown woman to wear. “If they don’t fit Jasmine, save them for Jeanie,” I said when I brought the clothes over, holding them up for Dessie’s approval. “By the way, have you found out anything more about Jasmine’s parents?” I asked.
“Not a word,” she said, “but something’s going on there. I think Jasmine’s mother abandoned her, and if her grandmother hadn’t come to get her, the social services would have placed her into a home. I just can’t figure out why she can’t read. I mean, she’s made it to fifth grade. She brings her Michael Jackson music and sings along. Y’ought to see her dance. It is something else again.” Dessie got up from the kitchen table, stepped sideways, pushed her hips back and forth, then stopped, hopped forward, and grabbed at her privates, swirled around, and ended in an exaggerated and obscene thrust. If the menfolks were around, Alan Ray would have howled and Lux would have slammed out of the house. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to pretend that I found it shocking. Then she frowned, so I held off. I called her to the porch with me, so I could light up a smoke.
“It’s funny,” she said, settling into the porch swing. “It’s been more work than I thought, but every morning I look forward to Marcia dropping off those little Lee brothers. Lux was out a lot, always off at the mill, or helping folks, or in the woods, and it seemed like he was never around that much. But now he’s gone, really gone,” she said, walking back into the kitchen. “We all had to tiptoe around his temper sometimes, and he wasn’t always easy. He was really hard on Ronnie, ‘My way or the highway’ with the all the boys, but this is much worse.”
She kept talking, and I just listened. “Maybe I have too much time to think these days? I know I could have been different too. I think of the things I could have said, or what he would have said back. What if I failed him somehow? I want to do it all over again, do it better. I go to sleep praying to see him in a dream at night. Even the sound of his voice.” She trailed off, and then she said, “If only I would have bought us an answering machine for the phone, or had us all make a cassette tape. I feel like I am losing the sound of him.”
She looked up at me and blinked back her tears. I hoped she didn’t cry. If she cried, I’d start in bawling too. Her blue eyes began to brim over, and I felt a shudder come up into my throat. She got up, held open the door, and I followed her into the kitchen so she could grab a napkin to wipe her eyes. “Oh, Billie,” she said, looking around to see if Tommy was downstairs. “Oh, shit,” she said. “That’s the whole thing, and I just have to face it. It won’t change. I can put the TV on, but I can’t even look at tho
se ministers anymore. I can play the piano, but as soon as I stop, it is just too damn quiet around here.”
“You’re right,” I answered. There was no radio or TV show, also no preacher’s voice rattling through some speaker in the house somewhere. Just then, a memory circled into the front of my mind. The night after Dad died, a screech owl started wailing at dusk in the valley below our houses. Just like that, it happened again when Lux died last spring. People say that screech owls haunted a homestead to let everyone know after a death. It hung around for about a week, wailing like someone calling from another world. It was such a sorrowful sound, I didn’t want to go outside at sundown, but finally the little creature stopped as the summer came on. The crazy thing is that the silence was worse, like an emptiness that we could not shake.
“What can I do, Des?,” I asked her.
“Do you want to come over and help out with Jasmine sometime?” she asked me.
“I’ll try,” I said. “What if I find some of my old makeup and a curling iron, bring it by for Jasmine and maybe for Jeanie? I have a giant baggie full of that stuff. I never use it. Where the heck would I go, all made up?” I said. “You remember? I used to love wearing Mom’s makeup when we were little.”
She looked a little surprised, then kind of smiled, but did not say anything. She never wore makeup any more. Neither of us did. Maybe these days she thought makeup sent the wrong message to a young girl.
I folded the clothes I’d brought over and set them on the piano bench. The kitchen and the living room were clean, no sawdust, no strewn-around tools or clutter, spotless floors with a green braided oval rag rug on the floor for babies to crawl on, a toy basket with little cars and trucks, children’s Bible story books, but too damn quiet. High on the wall hung Lux’s gun rack made of deer antlers, and then there were two barnwood shelves below. On the top one was Lux’s baseball glove, his eyepatch, the arrowhead he gave her that he found on Chestnut Ridge as a boy. On the lower shelf, just below my eye level, a pair of his old steel-toe work boots, cleaner than they ever were in life. She must have set all this in place, somehow, and I did not stop to notice it.
Goshen Road Page 23