by Rilla Askew
Oh. The little click came from a cell phone. She should have recognized that. Sweet glanced to her left, couldn’t tell where the sound had come from. Would it be worse if it was one of the visitors taking her picture or one of her own church members? She didn’t know. She felt like she was swimming through cotton. Brother Oren preached a while longer on merchandise in the temple, and his voice was the closest thing to fiery she’d ever heard, and he didn’t have to keep walking back over to the pulpit to check his notes. Terry ought to be here to see this, she thought.
The rest of the sermon was short, though, and the invitation even shorter. Nobody went forward. Nobody wanted to go rededicating their life or anything, lest others in the church body think they’d been changing money in the temple themselves. So they just sang two soft choruses of “I Surrender All,” and then Brother Oren asked Clyde Herrington to pray the benediction. Then he did something else out of the ordinary: instead of slipping quietly up the aisle during the prayer so he could be at the front door to shake everybody’s hands as they came out, Brother Oren stopped beside Sweet and tapped her shoulder. She’d had her head bowed and eyes closed, so naturally she jumped. Brother Oren put his finger to his lips in a shush gesture, stepped back, and his little low-key wife, Vicki, came and took Sweet’s arm, and the two of them ushered her silently toward the door to the right of the altar that led to the attached prefab building that housed Fellowship Hall.
Sweet hadn’t planned on going to the potluck dinner—for one thing she wanted to get to the jail early, and for another, she didn’t want to have to answer questions about why her son and husband weren’t in church this morning—but it didn’t matter what she wanted. The preacher and his wife, plus three women from her Dorcas class, put her at the head of the buffet line in front of the slow, messy children. Vicki kept hold of her arm like she was afraid Sweet might fly off while Brother Oren asked the blessing, and after Sweet filled her plate, they guided her to a table in the far corner. They brought her an iced tea. They brought her three kinds of desserts. They asked if she wanted coffee. Sweet picked at her broccoli casserole. Something was wrong.
Well, everything was wrong, yes, but there was something really off-kilter about how three women from her class sat down on either side and across from her, and the others carried their plates to the opposite end of Fellowship Hall and sat at the farthest table next to the glass double doors. The song leader and his wife came and spoke to her, said they were keeping the family in their prayers, but the head deacon Kenneth Spears shot glares at her from the kitchen, where he was helping the women serve. Her husband’s friend Wade Free came and stood by the table with his ball cap in his hands. He and Tee worked together at Arkoma; they’d graduated school the same year. She expected him to ask about Terry, but he just stood awkwardly a moment, his throat working, then he bobbed his head once, slapped his cap on, and left through the glass doors. Gossipy old Claudie Ott waddled up behind her to whisper, “Don’t you worry, Georgia Ann, they’ll find him. My boy Leon has been out looking since before daylight.”
And so it was throughout the dinner: about a third or so of the congregation hovered around her like worker bees around a queen; the rest of them avoided her like a plot of poison oak. The hall was so packed that several people were eating standing up. Sweet saw members from Cedar Church of Christ, Assembly of God, and both the Free Will and Missionary Baptist, which was unheard of, everybody crossing denominations like that. Plus all the strangers! Folks she’d never seen before in her life. She would’ve laid it off to them being here as search party members, except there were as many women as men, and teenagers, too, all of them watching her.
That was maybe what bothered her most—how some of the ones from her own church kept their eyes averted, like they didn’t know her, while most of the strangers stared straight at her and gawked. The only bit of relief came from the fact that nobody asked about Terry and Carl Albert. It became plain after a while that people just assumed they were out searching. She was glad enough to let them think it. Glad enough to surrender to the ministrations of the preacher’s wife and the women from her class, who seemed to be running interference for her the same way Brother Oren had positioned himself between her and the reporters, to protect her. Sweet was grateful. She was grateful, in fact, that she could even feel grateful—at least there was that.
The whole thirteen miles to Wilburton she tried to imagine what she was going to say to her father. She worried she might have to be the one to tell him about Dustin—she didn’t know how much news reached the county prisoners—and she would promise herself to lead up to it gently, but then she’d find herself saying, Oh, Daddy, if only you hadn’t . . . Other times, in her mind, she just flat chewed him out: Dustin running away. His fault. The church folks acting weird. His fault. Misty Dawn blabbing to the world. His fault. The family separated and going broke. His fault. Sweet losing her everloving mind. His fault, his fault, his fault. Lips crimped, throat tight, her chest cold with dread, Sweet turned off the Wilburton main street, drove past the courthouse, circled around and parked inside the covered breezeway at the side of Jones-Hawkins Funeral Home across the street from the jail.
The sheriff had the alley cordoned off so that the news vans were all corralled to one side. There were three of them, even on a Sunday when nobody hardly watched the news. The cold clamp on Sweet’s chest screwed down tighter. She sat in her car eyeing the different jail visitors as they stopped to talk to the reporters. Dyed-blond overweight young mothers holding stringy-headed kids, for the most part. One guy in overalls and a ball cap, no jacket. A sad-looking older couple who walked on past the news people and didn’t stop. The rest of them, though, seemed tickled to stand and talk. What could they possibly be saying? Those girls didn’t have one thing in this world to do with her family! If everybody would just ignore the reporters and their stupid cameras, maybe they’d all go away.
In the beginning, of course, last Thursday, Sweet herself had been willing to talk. Spreading the word about Dustin could only help, she’d thought. The TV reporters asked for an appeal from the family, and Sweet had repeated into the cameras what they told her to say: “If there’s anybody out there who knows anything, who’s seen anything, please call the Latimer County Sheriff’s Office. Please. We just want our boy to come home.” But when she watched the news later, she was mortified at how stiff and wooden she appeared, like she was faking it, and not even faking it well. She’d looked about as believable as one of those country and western singers trying to act in a movie. And she hated how the newscasters shaped things—they kept trying to make it sound like it was all of a piece: “The boy’s grandfather, Robert John Brown, arrested and jailed one week ago on felony charges of harboring and transporting illegal aliens”—aliens, they all said, not Mexicans, like those people had landed here from outer space—“the boy’s grandfather Robert John Brown, currently in the Latimer County Jail without bond . . .” They acted like there was some kind of human smuggling operation going on in southeastern Oklahoma. On one Tulsa channel the anchors did a little happy talk about the meth labs and marijuana patches down in these mountains—well, good grief, that stuff had been here for ages! Illegal commerce wasn’t exactly new in these parts. That didn’t have a thing to do with Dustin being gone. Sweet kept feeling like she was in a weird movie, her family’s story played out on the local news, but they didn’t get half their facts right. Or if they got the right facts, they didn’t get the right intention. The back door of
the jail opened and the boys in orange jumpsuits filed out, began lining up along the fence. Where was Daddy? And Pastor Garcia? Even with the media cordoned off, Sweet was not about to go over there until her daddy emerged. At which time she would let him have it. She really would.
But when she saw him finally, small and defeated looking, walking out blinking in the sunlight, she knew she couldn’t chew him out. The heartbreak etched in her daddy’s features was awful. Oh, he knew about Dustin all right—and more than that, he understood his part. Her father stood at the fence scanning the beat-up cars and pickup trucks parked in the alley; he turned to check the VFW lot next door. It hadn’t occurred to him, Sweet could tell, to look across the street to the funeral home where her Taurus was half concealed in the covered driveway. Pastor Garcia stopped behind Daddy and put his hand on his shoulder, said something to him, then bowed his head to pray. Daddy didn’t bow his head, he just kept scanning the parked vehicles—looking for hers, Sweet knew that. The camera operators were shooting from behind the yellow line. They probably had zooms on those cameras, Sweet thought. They were probably capturing every molecule of pain on her daddy’s face. In close-up living color. For tomorrow’s early morning news.
Go, she told herself. Get out of this car and go over there. What was wrong with her? This was her chance to talk with her daddy in private, or at least without the sheriff listening; they could make a plan together that would solve everything, and she wouldn’t condemn him or ask why. What they needed to do was figure out about Dustin. What should we do, Daddy? You know him better than anybody, where would he go? What would he do? Yes, yes, we’ve looked there, we’ve looked everywhere, but where else? Can’t you think of where else? Because this wasn’t like Gaylene. Gaylene had done the same thing, run away, vanished, nobody saw or heard from her for six months. But Gaylene was fifteen, not ten, and pregnant, as it turned out, and she’d only gone as far as Okmulgee. It’s not your fault, Daddy, Sweet had told her father back then.
“Not your fault,” she repeated now, aloud in the cold Taurus. She wouldn’t switch on the motor to warm up the car. Her daddy might hear. He might lift his face, see her, and then she would have to walk across that empty cold street by herself, all the cameras turning, the smoking mothers and orange-clad meth cookers and the fat deputy in his chair, all turning to look at her, and Daddy’s eyes, too, turning, holding up the truth to her, where she couldn’t help but see. Who was it that had been supposed to be taking care of Dustin? Who doped poor old Mr. Bledsoe and went off and left him? Whose husband had turned whose daddy in?
Sunday | February 24, 2008 | 11:55 P.M.
Latimer County Jail | Wilburton
Deep in the night Bob Brown lay with his arms over his face, listening. The main cells had quieted, the only sound now the hum of the fluorescent lights overhead, the electric heater outside in the hallway, and, in the nearby bunk, at slow, regular intervals, the pastor’s snores. Will you not watch with me one night? Brown thought. Watch and pray. He turned heavily onto his side, the cement slab hard underneath him—hard as the fist-sized rock in his chest. His bones ached. No meat on them anymore, nothing to cushion the ache except old, drying flesh. That’s how he felt now, old, dried out. A skeleton. An old scrawny spook. One week ago he’d come in here a young man for his age. Now he was old.
Jesus Lord, don’t let anything bad happen to him. Send Sweet back here. Don’t let her get up on her high horse. Soften her heart.
That afternoon, when the deputies tweeted their whistles to signal the end of men’s visitation, Brown had heard at last the familiar high-pitched whine. He’d turned and spied his daughter’s old blue-green Taurus bumping down out of the funeral home parking lot across the street, turning east, driving away. She had come, and watched, and left without talking to him—without him being able to talk to her. And that’s the main thing he’d been wanting to do ever since Arvin Holloway appeared on the other side of the bars, casually cleaning his fingernails with a nail clipper, saying, “Your grandson’s run off.” Nonchalantly. Not much of a problem.
And really, in those first hours, that first day, it hadn’t seemed like a problem, because Sweet had told him, hadn’t she? On Wednesday. That Dustin had gone back out to the farm—but what would you expect? The boy would want to be home, even without somebody there to take care of him. But Dustin could take care of himself, better than your average ten-year-old, Brown knew that. He hadn’t become truly worried until last night, when that squeezed-fisted feeling had suddenly kicked up in his chest. He kept seeing the boy coming down the back steps with the deputy’s hand on his shoulder, or he’d see him standing in the jail parking lot beside the preacher’s car, his hands cupped, the bright blood pouring—oh, if Sweet would have just brought him up here like he’d told her to! Why wouldn’t she come talk to him this afternoon? What was she doing parked yonder at the funeral home—spying on him? Surely she hadn’t joined sides with her husband.
Please, Jesus, don’t let it be that.
Arvin Holloway was the one who’d brought that news, too—early on, when they’d only been here two days. Bob Brown himself couldn’t have made it up. If anybody had ever said to him: your son-in-law is going to one day betray you, and here’s how he’s going to do it, Brown would have answered, Yes, sir, when hell turns into an ice-skating rink. But here he sat in jail on account of Terry Kirkendall—
No. It wasn’t that. Things had turned as they turned. They were doing the Lord’s will. They had followed as they’d been led.
Didn’t we, Lord Jesus?
He listened, his arm crooked under his head for a pillow, his eyes closed against the light. For thirty years Bob Brown had trusted the quiet voice, the peace that passeth understanding, ever since the day he came out of a blackout in a lousy no-name motel somewhere in Louisiana, sick to his soul, hating himself beyond all ways he had ever hated. He had stumbled to the bathroom and looked in the scaly mirror at his unshaven stinking foul miserable self; he’d thought of his two little girls at home with nobody but a Choctaw neighbor lady to see about them, and he decided fully in his heart he was not going to do this anymore. But how many times had he said that? A hundred times. A thousand. But that miserable rock-bottom morning in Louisiana, he got down on his knees on the filthy motel carpet and said maybe the first real prayer he’d ever said in his life: “Lord Jesus, I can’t do this. I can’t. Help me.” At once the peace had entered him—and with it a slim hopeful sense that maybe this time, this time he would make it. He hadn’t touched a drop of whiskey since. For thirty years he had tried to walk as the peace led him. The still small voice. If things turned as they turned, wasn’t that because the Lord willed it?
But not this, Lord. Not Dustin.
Brown groaned softly, pushed himself up from the cold slab. He felt for his eyeglasses on the floor, put them on, sat with his hands clasped, shielding his eyes. The unyielding light was as bad as the concrete. On the nearby bunk the pastor snored on. Brown had not slept at all the past two nights—not since that knot of fear came and fisted up inside him. The same thoughts nagged him over and over. Where would Dusty go? The boy would want to . . . what?
Go home. So why wasn’t Dustin out at the farm? Or maybe he was there but just hiding . . . but where would he hide that they couldn’t find him in all this time? Not the barn, not the house; they’d gone over the whole place with a silver comb, Holloway said.
Holloway. That son of a bitch.
Forgive me, Jesus. Forgive him.
Brown took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t stop seeing the picture: Dustin coming down the back steps, blinking through his too-long shaggy hair, the deputy’s paw on his shoulder steering him toward the barnyard, where the silent Mexicans were being cursed and prodded along toward the waiti
ng van in the midst of all the flashing lights, the radio squawks and yelling, and Dustin looking at them, looking around for his grandpa, and Bob Brown locked in the backseat of a cruiser with his hands cuffed behind him and the windows shut, unable to signal to his boy that the Lord was in this, the Lord was in this, everything happens for a reason. All things work together for good . . .
Help my boy, Jesus! Protect him. Keep him safe.
The boy standing beside the car. The bright blood pouring. The deputy steering him down the porch steps. The big paw clamped on his shoulder. The confused fear on his grandson’s face.
If I’ve failed Thee, Lord Jesus, if I’ve misunderstood, if I’ve been selfish and pigheaded, it’s not Dusty’s fault! Protect him, Lord Jesus. Hold him in the cleft of Your hand. Thy will, not mine. Thy will, not mine. Show me, Lord, what You would have me do.