The Truth Is the Light

by Vanessa Davie Griggs

  “Wait a minute,” Gabrielle held her hand up as she sat down at the kitchen table. “You’re telling me that he actually had three thousand dollars, and that’s what he chose to do with it? That?”

  “Yeah,” Aunt Cee-Cee said nonchalantly as she took out a large pan of golden-brown biscuits and placed the pan next to the stove without using anything to keep it from burning the counter.

  “Will you please put that pan on that cooling plate so it won’t scorch my counter,” Gabrielle said, veering slightly from the subject at hand. Her aunt picked up the pan and placed it on the cooling apparatus. Gabrielle continued. “Back to Jesse and his stereo. You knew about this purchase prior to him making it?”

  “Of course. Jesse tells me everything. He’s been saving up for that stereo for a year now.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gabrielle said, “but maybe I’m missing something somewhere. You all have been evicted out of your home and it’s okay with you if Jesse throws three thousand dollars away on a stereo system that, by the way, he technically has nowhere to put or plug into, other than from the kindness and generosity of others.”

  Aunt Cee-Cee carefully poured the eighteen whipped-up eggs into the frying pan of bacon drippings. She turned to Gabrielle as she stirred the scrambled eggs in the pan to keep them from scorching. “I see nothing wrong with him taking his own money and using it for whatever he wants to. It’s his money.” She turned the eye off after the eggs were done and walked toward the entranceway. “Kids, breakfast is ready!” she yelled.

  “I’m through now. You can use the kitchen if you want to fix your breakfast,” Aunt Cee-Cee said. “But there are no more eggs, bacon, sausage, or biscuits left. There is a box of cereal still in the cabinet. None of us really like that kind, anyway. When you come home from church, can you stop and pick up a few more things for me?”

  “What do you mean when I come home from church?” Gabrielle said. “I thought all of you were going to church with me today.”

  “Kids! Luke, Laura, Jesse, Angie! I’m not going to call you again! Your food’s getting cold!” She turned back to Gabrielle. “We’re not going to make it today. As you know, Jesse and Luke went out last night, as did Laura. They all came back pretty early this morning. Had to wake me up, calling me on my prepaid phone, using up my minutes, since you won’t give us a key to your house so we can come and go as we please. Of course, Angie has her children, and if I’d agreed to keep them, she would have been out.”

  “So, none of you are going to church today?”

  “No, but I promise you that we’re going to go next Sunday. You just need to remind us Saturday night so we’ll be ready.”

  Gabrielle nodded slowly as she pressed her lips tightly. “Okay. Let me see if I can’t put this in the best Christian way possible. Hold up, because I don’t want to get it wrong.” She got the Bible she kept in the kitchen and turned the pages. “Just so you won’t accuse me of saying it wrong or being wrong, this is coming from Joshua 24:15. And it says, ‘And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.’ You can disregard the reference to the Euphrates, which is what the other side of the flood was. And you can disregard the allusion to the Amorites, which in this scripture was referring to the people who occupied the land where the children of Israel were at the time. But the part that says to choose you this day whom you will serve is relevant to our conversation, as is the part about ‘as for me and my house.’ You see, I realize you don’t respect me, but this is still my house.”

  “That’s all folks say Christians tend to do,” Aunt Cee-Cee said. “They will take scripture out of the Bible and just use them all Willy Neely however it suits their purpose at the time. If I can disregard the Amotites . . . Amorites or whatever you called them, and if I can overlook the reference to the flood, then I can disregard that statement about my house.”

  “Good try, but the ‘my house’ part stands. Because the Word of God is saying to me right now that anybody living in my house, whether invited or not, will be at church or will not be living here.” Gabrielle folded her arms.

  “I told you, Gabrielle. We’ll go next Sunday. Aren’t you supposed to be doing things to win us over to Christ? Aren’t you supposed to be showing love and compassion and not attitude and threats? How are you supposed to get us to want to even visit your church if all we hear from you is you complaining about your stuff and things, and what we’re using up, messing up, or eating up? God is still working on me. At least, He’s gotten my attention, that’s for sure. Now, you just need to be a bit more patient. Maybe you should pray for more patience while you’re at church today.”

  “And maybe you should go to church today and pray for somewhere for you and your family to live,” Gabrielle said. “Because come Saturday, all of you will be out of this house, or at least on your way out. I think that’s being more than understanding and compassionate. Six more days; I’m giving you six more days to find another place to live. And if that doesn’t work for you, then you’re more than welcome to leave today.”

  Angie walked into the kitchen with all three of her children. “Ma, I don’t feel good,” she whined. “Can you keep the children for me today while I go back to bed?”

  Aunt Cee-Cee went over and felt Angie’s head. “Well, at least you don’t have a fever. I sure hope you’re not getting that swine flu or H1N1, whatever they call it.”

  Angie handed her mother the baby and sat the other two at the table. She turned to leave, then turned back around. “Oh, Gabrielle. Some dude called you yesterday and some lady. The lady called twice, in fact. She said it was important. She said she’d left you a message already the second time, but she hadn’t heard back from you yet.”

  “Did you happen to get their names?” Gabrielle said.

  “I told you the last time that I don’t have a pen and paper so I can’t write anything down. Besides, I’m not your personal secretary. It’s not my job to take messages. They ought to call back. That’s what my friends do when they call. They call until they get me. I think the guy’s name was Zebedee or Mallory, something like that.”

  “Zachary?” Gabrielle said.

  “Yeah, that’s it. Zachary. Come to think of it, I think he called twice, too. And the woman might have been the same one that called you the other day. Don’t even try and ask me her name because I told her you weren’t here. When she kept talking, she should have known I wasn’t listening because I quickly clicked back to my call.” Angie walked over to the stove and looked at the food. “Ma, can you fix me a plate and bring it up to me?”

  “Sure, baby,” Aunt Cee-Cee said, holding on to all three children.

  “Oh, and Trey is coming over later so be sure and send him right up to my room when he gets here,” Angie added.

  “That’s not going to happen,” Gabrielle said.

  “Why is she always tripping?!” Angie said about Gabrielle. “Will you please tell her that I’m grown, and she can’t tell me what to do?” Angie said to her mother.

  “Angie, I don’t want your friends at my house or in my house. There will be no fornication or anything remotely resembling that going on, not up in here. So you need to call Trey back and tell him not to even bother coming to this address. Not here.”

  “I thought you were going to church anyway. You won’t even be here for anything to bother you,” Angie said.

  The phone started ringing. Angie went to answer it. Gabrielle was closer and snatched it up before Angie got to it. She looked at Angie as though she was questioning her sanity for real this time.

  “Hello, this is Jessica Noble. May I please speak with Gabrielle? Please.”

  Gabrielle heard the panicked urgency in her voice. “This is she,” Gabrielle said.

  “Thank God you answered. I’ve been trying to call you for the last
three days. I’ve left you several messages. The doctors have things set up for your blood test to see if you’re a good match,” Jessica said. “But we need to hurry. My daughter is getting worse with each passing day.”

  “Tell me when and where. Hold on; let me get something to write on.” She pulled paper from a notepad held with a magnet on the side of her refrigerator. Jessica then gave her all the details she would need in order to go forward.

  “I’m going to say a special prayer for her while I’m at church today. She’s going to be all right. I just know she is. This is going to work. I believe that.”

  “Thank you. I certainly believe in the power of prayer. And Gabrielle, thank you for everything you’re doing. I know you aren’t obligated to do any of this. And this definitely wasn’t what you signed up for. I appreciate your heart when it comes to this.”

  “I choose to believe God has already worked this all out. We’re just going to have to trust Him and move in the way He’s directing us to go. That’s all we can do.”

  When Gabrielle hung up, she looked at the digital clock on the stove. She only had an hour left to get ready and make it to church on time. Where did the time go?

  Chapter 61

  And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.

  —Ezekiel 37:3

  “How did it go?” Brent asked Angela after they got the sleeping boys in the house. She was at her grandmother’s house for more than five hours.

  “Okay. You should have been there.”

  “I wanted to be there. You told me you didn’t think I should go,” Brent said.

  “I know, I know. But how was I supposed to know what would happen?”

  “I’m all ears,” Brent said as they sat down on the couch. He shifted his body slightly to angle more toward her.

  She grabbed his ears gently and tugged on them. “I love your ears.”

  “Just tell me what happened. You’re such a tease.”

  “No, I’m just in love with my wonderful, handsome husband,” Angela said.

  “I think you need to stay on message,” Brent said.

  “Okay, okay.” She told him how Arletha insisted she go and get Ransom from the car. “That was actually a relief because I didn’t have to convince her to let him in. Gramps came in”—she giggled—“isn’t it something that everybody already calls him Gramps and now it turns out he really is my great-gramps.”

  “So, Arletha and he agree that he’s really her father?”

  “Just let me tell this my way.”

  Brent picked up her feet, slipped off her flats, and began massaging her feet.

  “See, now, you’re wrong,” Angela said. “You know how much I love when you do that.”

  He smiled. “Okay, so Ransom goes in the house, and then what?”

  “Grand is playing with the boys in the kitchen. I walk inside just in front of Gramps. Grand is giving the boys a sandwich and she sees me walk in and she’s about to ask if we’d like something to eat. When she sees Gramps, nothing comes out of her mouth. Dead silence. In fact, she’s standing there with her mouth wide-open. Seeing her hit Gramps so hard, she and he both had to sit down. It was as if somebody had punched him in his stomach. He sat across from her and they literally stared at each other.” Angela closed her eyes when Brent started rotating her toes. She rotated her head as though her head and toes were connected.

  “Brent, I’m telling you,” Angela continued with opened eyes, “I thought that they resembled each other. But when you have the two of them together in the same room, it’s like their features are reflecting off of each other. And they have some identical mannerisms. Gramps didn’t have to tell her why he was there. She knew who he was. Then he pulled out that photo of himself and handed it to her. She started crying when she realized that the man in the picture standing next to her mother was actually Ransom Perdue and not Samuel L. Williams, as she’d first believed as well. Maybe if she had stayed around instead of running away when she was sixteen, she might have figured out Samuel Williams wasn’t her real daddy. Maybe Great-granny would have told her the truth. Who can say?”

  “Wow, you’re right. That must have been something to witness.”

  “And then Gramps told her how it might have happened that he was her father, not the man she’d grown up believing was. Gramps had been falsely imprisoned for ten years. When he was released, he came back to Asheville to find Sarah and his daughter. Now, here’s where I possibly had some information that I hadn’t even thought about that would affect Grand. I stopped Gramps’s storytelling to inform Grand that Memory was the daughter he’d come back to find. ‘Memory?’ Grand said with this eerie, puzzled look on her face. He then told Grand how he’d finally gotten to meet this daughter only a few weeks ago, for the first time in her whole seventy-five years of life.”

  “So that means Arletha and this Memory person are half-sisters,” Brent said.

  “That’s correct. I believe it was a woman named Memory who told my cousin Gayle . . . you remember Gayle? She came in early and helped out with our wedding. I think Memory told Gayle she’d met a woman named Arletha in Birmingham after Gayle mentioned she was searching for someone by that name.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Brent said. “My head is swimming. You’re going too fast.”

  “I thought you said I take too long to tell a story,” Angela said, slipping her feet out of his lap and back onto the floor. She then grabbed his feet, pulled off his shoes, and began to return the favor.

  “So what you’re saying is that Arletha and Memory know each other,” Brent said.

  “Yeah, and it turns out to have been a total shock to Arletha’s system. In fact, I thought she was going to pass out right there on the spot when she heard it. We had to move from the kitchen to the den because she needed to lie back on the couch a minute to get herself right.”

  “I bet.”

  “No, you don’t know all of it. It turns out Arletha and Memory actually lived together for a while when Memory was hiding out, or something like that. Can you imagine learning that someone you thought was a stranger, and by some lining up of the stars, you had rented out a room in your house to her, turns out to be your half-sister? I can’t imagine how Grand felt.”

  “Well, that means they already know each other, so that has to be a good thing. Right? Now Ransom will only have to tell Memory that Arletha is her sister,” Brent said.

  “You would think, right? Only, Grand admitted that she and Memory didn’t part ways on the best of terms. In fact, I believe it was pretty bad, pretty bad.”

  “How bad? Did she say?”

  “Bad enough that she drove the elderly woman to church—our church, in fact—and dropped her off at the front door, telling her not to ever darken her door again.”

  “Whoa, that’s pretty rough.”

  “Yeah. Grand admitted as much. And now Gramps is planning on telling Memory about Arletha. I suggested he call Memory then, but Arletha thought not. They’re all going to be here for his birthday celebration. It should be an interesting birthday, that’s for sure.” She picked his feet up from her lap and placed them back on the floor.

  “You’re finished?” Brent asked with a frown.

  “Yes, I’m finished. I was only planning to rub your feet for a little while.”

  “No, not ‘are you finished rubbing my feet.’ Are you finished with the story? You were talking about Ransom telling her how he happened to be her father. Remember?”

  “Oh, yeah. I got a little off track when I was telling you about Memory and Arletha knowing each other. Okay, Gramps had returned home after being on a chain gang for ten years. When he got back, Pearl told him he needed to lay low because Sarah’s half-brother, Heath, was still out to get him. Heath just happens to be the father of that monster I’ve told you about named Montgomery Powell the Second. You remember, I told you how he almost caused Pastor Landris to lose his religion; at least that’s what Johnnie Mae t
old me since I wasn’t there that time. When Montgomery raised his hand to her and was about to hit her.”

  Brent nodded. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember you telling me about that.”

  “Anyway, Great-granny talked him into making a show of leaving town for anybody who knew he’d come back. Then he sneaked back in town and hid out with Great-granny, who told him about everything that had happened, which included facts that only three people knew at the time—that his daughter hadn’t died, the way everybody had been led to believe. They faked her death, placed her with a woman named Mamie Patterson, and she was safe. But they didn’t know whether Sarah was alive or dead. Not after Heath took over when her father died and had Sarah declared insane and put her away.”

  “Man, no wonder you were over there so long. This is like a soap opera or some kind of a miniseries.”

  “Oh, it was interesting, for sure. Gramps said he left at the end of April 1943. He had no doubt, sitting there looking in her face, that the child originally named Arletha Jane Black was his daughter. But he never knew Pearl was carrying his child. After he left, he didn’t come back. And she had no way of getting in touch with him, even if she’d wanted to. Which, knowing her—for his safety—she wouldn’t have done. Early on, he was never in one place long enough for anyone to get in touch with him.”

  “So he probably didn’t know about the man Pearl married and who Arletha grew up believing was her father.”

  “Gramps gave his thoughts on that. He, Pearl, and Samuel Williams were all the best of friends. He believes when Great-granny learned she was pregnant, especially at her age, which was thirty-nine at the time, and especially since she didn’t even believe she could carry another child . . . Okay, side note. It appears Great-granny had been married when she was twenty-two to a man who was extremely abusive. His last abusive act caused her to lose the baby she was carrying, and the injury sustained was said to prevent her from ever conceiving any children. Gramps believes Samuel, also Great-granny’s friend, must have plotted with her to keep anyone from knowing who the real father was. He threw the out-of-wedlock pregnancy suspicions onto himself, then later married her to seal the deal. Knowing now that she could conceive children, she and Samuel had three together.”