“Is that all you’re going to put on it?” She grimaced. “I’ll bet you don’t eat gravy on your meat, and vegetables never touch on your plate.”
His smile was rusty with disuse.
She blinked in surprise, then turned to her tomato. “Well, don’t short me the same way.”
Two sandwiches were nearly finished when she brought the tomato and lettuce to the table. He had added a slice of cheese to his, but hers was a masterpiece.
“One of everything? Not much imagination, but it looks delicious.” She sat, waving in the direction of the refrigerator. “Get yourself a drink. There’s a little of everything in there.”
He came back with club soda and two glasses. She nodded when he lifted the can in question and accepted one of the glasses after he had poured her share.
Thomas observed Garnet as he ate. She ate as if food were her whole world, as if the sensations against her tongue and throat were the reasons for existence. Halfway through his own sandwich Thomas watched her press the crumbs on her plate against her index finger and lick them off with a flourish.
“You didn’t have breakfast,” he said.
“Sure I did. Last night’s fried chicken and biscuits with cream gravy.” She thought a moment. “And pineapple upside-down cake.”
He wondered where she put all the food. Her figure was lush, but by no one’s standards was she overweight.
“I burn it off,” she said, as if in answer. “The best thing about working here.”
“What’s the worst?”
He was approaching her psyche through a back door. She had to admire his ability to ask leading questions.
She wondered what else he was that good at. She watched him take a bite of his sandwich as he waited for her answer. He ate as if the food wasn’t even there. A means to an end. Someone had told him he was supposed to eat three times a day, and he didn’t question authority.
Did that attitude pervade his life? Did he meet his other needs with the same disregard for his own pleasure? For a moment she imagined Thomas Stonehill in bed. It wasn’t a large leap into fantasy. She told herself he was just the type of man who provoked those thoughts in women. There was something about his brooding eyes and a body that, unclothed, probably qualified as a miracle.
He must have a wife. All preachers had to have wives, didn’t they? Who played the organ or taught Sunday school if the preacher wasn’t married? Did Thomas and his wife make love on Wednesdays and Saturdays because someone had told him that was the expected thing? Did he partake of the pleasures of love without tasting those, too?
“There is no worst?” he asked, when she still hadn’t answered.
She hauled her attention back to the conversation. “The worst is that time, by definition, is limited. I work too hard. There’s only so much I can do, and everywhere I look there’s more that needs doing.”
“I know that feeling.”
“Do you?” She sat back and sipped her soda.
“That surprises you?”
“I thought the passing of time thrilled you minister types. Doesn’t it take you closer to your heavenly home or something?”
Emotion flickered behind his steady gaze. She saw it as surely as she didn’t understand it.
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t thrill this minister. All you have to do is look around to see how much needs to be done on earth.”
“Well, you can’t do it all. I can’t do it all.” She reached for an apple in a fruit bowl on the table. Mr. Loo, who ran the vegetable market two streets over, saved damaged and overripe fruit for her. She had hauled in two bushel baskets of spotted apples and given them away this morning. One of her young mothers was going to make apple pies with her share.
“Are you really that offhanded about what you can’t do?” he asked.
“Really?” She crunched a large bite. Juice spurted across her tongue, and she savored it before speaking again. “Yeah.”
“Then you can turn off what you see here every day?”
“If I believed that worrying all the time was going to help somebody, I could work myself up. But it won’t help.” She nearly echoed Serena’s words of yesterday. "The Corners will be The Corners when I’m gone. I was born here, and I’ll probably die here. Maybe even sooner than later. In between, I’ll do what I can.”
Thomas had checked up on Garnet before seeking her out. He had discovered that Mother and Child was her own creation, that it was the only social service project in the community that had been started right here and not by an outside charitable organization. He knew, from a conversation with Dorothy Brown, that even though she was only somewhere in her mid to late twenties, Garnet had single-handedly whipped up interest, grubbed for funding and orchestrated every aspect of the fledgling clinic.
Dorothy had nothing but respect for Garnet, but Thomas himself wasn’t so sure. Her attitude irritated and simultaneously intrigued him. Now only the irritation showed. The intrigued portion was more dangerous. “Why do you work so hard if you don’t care whether things change?”
With practiced expertise she tossed her apple core in the garbage pail across the room. She sat for a moment, studying the wall behind it. When she turned to him, her eyes were a smoldering fire. “At any point along the way did I say I didn’t care?”
“Close.”
“I said I know I can’t change the world. I’m from here. Maybe that gives me perspective. Your perspective comes from somewhere else. From the accent and the manners, I’d say Eastern seaboard. Private schools, upper middle-class family?” She watched his face. He was very good. His expression hardly changed. But she saw—because she had trained herself to be perceptive in order to survive—that she was right.
She went on before he could respond. “You’re here because for some reason your social conscience is as big as the potholes in Wilford Avenue. Maybe you grew up with everything and one day it hit you that some of us grew up with nothing. So you’re here, in the Corners, serving out your own personal version of the Peace Corps. And you’re so damned sure you’re doing what’s right that you don’t think anybody else could be doing anything right, too.”
“From what I’ve seen of this place, it looks like you’re doing some things right.”
“But not for the right reasons, huh, Padre? Not because God came down and told me to. Not because I think I’m so important I can change hell into heaven. I’m doing it because it needs to be done. And I’m doing everything I can to make it fun along the way. That’s what bothers you. Joy bothers you and your kind. I’m not serious enough for you. And I’m not pompous enough.”
“Not pompous enough?”
She stood. “Get off your high horse, Padre. The world’s going to keep right on spinning when you’re wearing angel wings. Whatever we can do here isn’t even a drop in the bucket. It’s less than vapor. It’s nothing. Nada. So lighten up. If you’re going to subject yourself to living here, at least be realistic about it. Don’t kill yourself trying to make a difference. Soon enough this place will kill you anyway.”
“You were angry that I tried to protect you yesterday. You were angry today because I want to help your sister. Now you’re angry just because I’m here?”
“Angry?” She shrugged. “Nothing so important. I’ve just seen your kind come and go until I’m tired of turning my head. You want to change things. One day you wake up and find out how little you can do. So you leave. And all the people who were starting to count on you feel a little worse than they did before you came. When you’ve served your time, you’ll go back to some pretty little rose-covered church with a steeple pointing the way to heaven, and we’ll still be right here. Just trying to make it one day at a time and finding what joy we can in little things.”
“There’s no little rose-covered church in my future.”
“No? The evangelism circuit, then? A worldwide television ministry? Politics? What? Don’t tell me we’re not just a stopping place on your way to somewhere.”
He stood, too. Face-to-face, she was all too aware how much taller and altogether larger he was. His shoulders were broad enough to take on the Corners’ problems—if he stayed long enough to try.
“This is the first time I’ve been anywhere in a long, long time,” he said. “I intend to stay. But not to prove anything to you or even to myself. I’m going to stay because there’s no place else to go.”
Before she could answer him, he gave a curt nod. “Thanks for lunch. I think.”
Then he was gone, and she was left to wonder why every time she was in the presence of Thomas Stonehill she sounded as if she cared far more than she did. About everything.
3
Thomas stood outside the entrance of the Church of the Samaritan and looked at the bleak stretch of land directly across from the church on Twelfth Street. Once Kensington Park had been a green jewel, but once the Corners had been a community to be proud of, too. Now the park was a squalid wasteland of litter. The worn, damaged benches had been removed by the city and never replaced. The water fountains hadn’t been turned on for the summer because of a leak underground. No flowers had been planted in the expansive beds surrounding the graffiti-adorned statue of Carroll Kensington, one of the Corners’ founding fathers.
Once the park had been a playground for laughing children. Now it was a business center for drug dealers and hookers.
Thomas hadn’t lived here long enough to know exactly when the changes had begun. The Corners was just a small section of a Great Lakes industrial city. The city itself was irrelevant, since it had washed its hands of the Corners long ago. The Corners could have been lifted intact and deposited in Detroit or Chicago, and no one would have been surprised to find it there. Its history was one of immigrant groups who, one after the other, replaced the original settlers who had built solid stone and brick buildings and wide, tree-lined streets.
The new residents had made what improvements they could; then they had moved on to wealthier, more congenial neighborhoods with better schools and more political clout. For one reason or another, those left behind had never realized the American dream. Tenaciously they had hung on to what they had. The Corners was better, oh, so much better, than inner-city this or inner-city that. There had always been hope here.
Until recently.
Thomas watched a man and a woman with two children skirt the edges of Kensington Park, protective hands on the children’s shoulders. It might be Sunday morning, but as usual business was being conducted at the park and in front of the Kensington Hotel, a temporary stop for the homeless across from the park’s eastern corner.
Others passed by as Thomas waited outside the church, and he found the array of skin colors beautiful. The Corners might be like a hundred other communities throughout the Northeast and Great Lakes region, but it was fairly unique in its mixture of races. People had moved out and people had moved in. But those who had stayed had made room for everyone.
As a student of human nature, he doubted that this unusual kind of coexistence was due to a deep-seated commitment to equality. People who couldn’t move to the suburbs had simply dug in rather than leave for something potentially worse. And because people had stayed right where they were, there were no divided streets in the Corners. Blacks lived next door to whites, who lived next door to Asians or Hispanics. Central Americans, Filipinos and Chinese, the newest immigrant groups to flock to the Corners, had moved into a house here, an apartment there. Wilford Heights, the only housing project in the community, was a model of integration, if not of anything else.
The divisions in the Corners were rarely along racial lines. The congregation of the Church of the Samaritan was mixed. The youth gangs that had formed weren’t even divided. They were devoted to turf, and since the turf was integrated, so were the gangs, which made them less likely to be infiltrated and controlled by the larger criminal gangs that were stretching their tentacles across the nation.
From a sociologist’s standpoint, all that might be worth studying, but from Thomas’s standpoint the differences didn’t mean a whole lot. The MidKnights and the Coroners might be rainbow colored, but they were still gangs, increasingly devoting their energies to violence and crimes against property. The community had to do something about them.
“Morning, Reverend Stonehill.”
Thomas held out his hand to the couple with the two children. They had braved the park and crossed the street to come to church. It was the equivalent of running the gauntlet.
“How are you, Sarah? Jack?” he asked.
He listened to their polite replies before he squatted to say hello to the children. “Kimmy? Who’s your friend?”
The little girl smiled shyly and held out her teddy bear for him to see.
“Does he keep you company at night?” Thomas asked.
She nodded.
“Frankie.” Thomas held out his hand to the little boy. Frankie rested his hand in Thomas’s, and Thomas shook solemnly. “I’ve been told there’s a special treat after Sunday school,” Thomas said.
“Doughnuts?”
“I promised I wouldn’t tell.”
Frankie’s eyes sparkled. “I bet it’s doughnuts!”
Thomas stood, and the family went inside to settle the children upstairs in Thomas’s apartment, which served as the Sunday school wing. For the next ten minutes he was busy greeting his parishioners. Then, when the small stream trickled away, he went inside, too. At his appearance the pianist struck up a bluesy medley of hymns as Thomas walked up to the front of the church.
The pianist, Greg, a young man with shoulder-length blond hair and inch-thick glasses, made his living performing in a jazz club uptown. The congregation was blessed to have him. Greg had wandered in one day, seemingly out of nowhere, and volunteered. He could play anything in his own style, and although there had been raised eyebrows when he played his first service, now there were only tapping feet.
For a moment, listening to Greg’s splashy finale, Thomas thought of Garnet. She had spoken of the need for grabbing a little joy. There was joy in Greg’s music. Thomas suspected that some of the people sitting in the fold-up chairs were here just to listen to Greg.
He didn’t care why they were here. He was just glad they were.
The first part of the service went off without a hitch. There were announcements, prayers, hymns and readings. He used eclectic sources for his readings. Truth and meaning were found everywhere. It was his job to share what he found with his congregation. Sometimes he saw understanding and even enlightenment in their eyes when he hit upon something that had special meaning to their lives. Sometimes he saw irritation. But he never saw boredom. There were many things that could be said about Thomas’s ministry, but never that it was boring.
The choir of eight came up to stand in front of the picture of Jesus. They wore the cast-off green robes of another church, but as few as they were, they sang like angels. That was Greg’s doing, too. He worked with them on Wednesday and Sunday nights, his two nights off. Today their anthem was a gospel standard. They swayed in rhythm and featured Cretia Barnes, a large woman with more than her share of soul. When they sat down, the church was appropriately silent and awed.
Thomas stood and walked to the pulpit.
“The text this morning comes from Isaiah 35, verse 7. ‘And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes.’“
Thomas set aside his Bible. He looked over the small group gathered to hear his words of wisdom. For a moment something very much like fear clutched at him. What right did he have to be standing here? How could he possibly think that anything he had to say was worth these good people’s time?
He couldn’t talk to them with God’s voice. He and God weren’t on speaking terms anymore. He couldn’t tell them about his life. What part of it could he hold up as a model? And what sins had he committed that he would willingly share?
He looked at face
s and saw Ema, not visibly bruised today, but bruised and aching inside. He saw Cretia, who despite her rich, booming voice was fighting an illness that threatened to take her life. He saw Sarah and Jack, Kimmy and Frankie’s parents, trying against terrible odds to raise their children to be good citizens despite Jack’s recent unemployment.
They were all looking to him for comfort, for sustenance, for something they could take away that day to nurture them in the coming week.
And what could he give them?
The door creaked, and a woman slid through the narrow opening, spilling sunlight across the floor before the door shut once more. Dressed in white as always, Garnet met his eyes. Then, as he waited to begin, she moved across the room to take the nearest empty seat.
His greatest critic had arrived. When she spoke to him of his fallibility, she spoke with his own voice. He was nothing, and he had no right to be here. She had seen through him from the start.
He looked away and saw the other faces again. Pleading, yearning faces. He was nothing. He had nothing to say. And still he had no choice but to offer them what he could.
“The habitation of dragons,” he said. “We live in the habitation of dragons, don’t we? All we have to do is open that door and look outside. Look at the streets. Look at Kensington Park. Stare at the sidewalks in front of Wilford Heights long enough and you’ll watch a crime being committed.
“This is the Corners. Dragons abide here. And the ground is parched and aching with thirst.”
He moved away from the pulpit. Most of the time he just used it as a place to leave his Bible. He had never liked to have anything separating him from the people to whom he spoke. The pulpit in his former church had been raised ten steps off the floor, like the ornate prow of a ship. He had climbed those steps because it had been expected of him. He had stood halfway to heaven and looked down at the congregation to see rapt, worshipful faces.
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