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Raney

Page 6

by Clyde Edgerton


  Madora’s as fine a Christian as you’ll find—judging from what all she does for people, and how good she is to her mama and daddy. I drunk only one sip. I told her it was better than champagne. She said champagne was wine, which surprised me because they don’t taste the same at all.

  We picked up Millie at the airport at about one o’clock Monday afternoon. She was wearing dark green slacks and a blouse she seemed too old for, and she brought me a present—some of those little knitted soap holders I never use.

  We waited for her bags forever. She had two great big brown leather suitcases and one little one. Lord knows what all she had in there—for just one week.

  To get from the airport to Listre you have to go through Bethel, so on the way home we stopped in at Mama’s for a few minutes. Mama had insisted, and I thought it was a good idea.

  Mama and Aunt Naomi were there, sitting in the living room, talking. They had been to a sale at Belks.

  Everybody said hello to everybody and we all sat down and Mama said something about the sale. She got a navy blue bedspread for forty percent off and Aunt Naomi got a throw rug and two lamp shades for half price. Then they mentioned that on the way back from the sale they’d stopped by the funeral home to see Hattie Rigsbee who had died of a stroke the day before.

  “She looked so good,” Mama said. “Her skin was clear, good color, no swelling.”

  “I’ve seen them awful swelled,” says Aunt Naomi. “They say it happens worse when they have a heart attack and nobody gets there right away. I remember Wingate Bryant looked awful. They figured he died right after he went to bed, laid there all night and when Rose got up to go to work she figured he was still asleep, until she brought him a plate of spaghetti at lunch and there he was: still in bed. She worked at the school cafeteria,” she said to Millie, “across the street, and would bring him a plate of whatever they had. He was retired. From the telephone company.”

  “I remember that,” says Mama. “You know, I do believe Hattie Rigsbee, today, was about the best looking corpse I’ve ever seen.” She looked straight at Millie, then at Charles, to get them in the conversation.

  Charles stands up and walks to the kitchen. I could tell he was mad about something; but Lord knows, I didn’t know what, and I hoped Mama and Aunt Naomi and Millie hadn’t noticed.

  “Let me put on some coffee,” I said, “and see if I can rustle up some cookies.” I followed Charles on back to the kitchen and whispered, “Charles, what in the world is the matter with you?”

  “What’s the matter?” he whispers, staring. “What’s the matter? Did you hear what she said?”

  “Who?” I whispered.

  “Who? Who? Your mother.”

  “About what?”

  “About what?” he whispers louder. “About the corpse looking good and all that.”

  “Well, I guess I did. I was sitting there, won’t I? What in the world was wrong with that?”

  “What’s wrong with it? It’s uncivilized—that’s what’s wrong with it. Raney, the body in the funeral home is not the person. It’s the person’s body. Why can’t your mother talk about the person, for God’s sake?”

  “Don’t you use profanity in this kitchen. And don’t get uppity because your mother’s here. What do you expect? They were being respectful of Hattie Rigsbee. That’s all. I’ll bet you didn’t even know she died.”

  “Respect is not the word. Morbid is the word. No, I didn’t know Hattie Rigsbee died. I didn’t even know Hattie Rigsbee. I didn’t even know Hattie Rigsbee was born.”

  “Well, you should have. You been living around here long enough.” I was looking for cookies as hard as I could.

  “Raney, we don’t live around here. We live in Listre.”

  About that time I heard Mama coming down the hall. She came on in the kitchen. “Look, it’s no need to mess with coffee,” she said. “Mrs. Shepherd says she needs to get on over to ya’ll’s house and get settled. Next Sunday you’re all invited over here after church for dinner. Her airplane don’t leave until six-thirty so it’ll work out just right. And we can all go to church together Sunday morning.”

  We drove home and got Millie and all her bags settled in the guest room. I’d planned to fix a meatloaf for supper but remembered Sunday about her being a vegetarian. Charles said to fix omelettes but I’d never cooked a omelette so I had to call Madora for a recipe. I practiced Sunday night, so the real thing Monday night turned out pretty good. Millie helped.

  Charles had cooked—of all things—one of Aunt Flossie’s apple pies. He got her to show him exactly how to cook one—he likes them so much. After his mama had a piece she raved about it and asked me what the recipe was. That Charles just sat there smiling and did not say one thing until I explained to Millie that Charles fixed it, not me. She thought I was kidding until Charles talked through about the ingredients and how you fix it. I didn’t dare mention that I hadn’t ever taken on any kind of pie. This one was good. It was a little tart, but it was good.

  I was just beginning to relax when Millie asks, “Is there an Episcopal church nearby?” I had forgot about her changing over to the Episcopals.

  “There’s one in White Level,” says Charles. “Sara—at the library—goes there.”

  “You’re more than welcome to come to our church,” I said. “And since we’re going to eat at Mama’s, we’ll be close by.”

  “I really like the formality of the Episcopal service,” says Millie. “I’ve gotten used to it. Charles, give them a call this week and if they’re celebrating Eucharist Sunday morning at around ten or eleven, I could slip over for that.”

  I didn’t know what a Eucharist was. Likely as not they’d be celebrating something.

  “Or,” she says, “if you two like, you could come along with me.”

  “I don’t think I could go to an Episcopal church,” I said.

  “Why not?” they both said.

  “They’re against some of the things we believe in most.”

  “What do you mean by that?” said Charles.

  “Well, they serve real wine at the Lord’s supper. And they have priests, don’t they?”

  “Yes,” said Millie.

  “Well, I don’t especially approve of the way priests drink.”

  “Jesus drank—if that’s what you mean—as I understand it,” she says.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, he turned the water into wine at the wedding feast.”

  “Yes, but that was grape juice.”

  “Grape juice?”

  “If Jesus turned water into wine on the spot,” I said, “it had to be grape juice because it didn’t have time to ferment.”

  There was a pause.

  “If Jesus could make wine,” says Charles (you could tell whose side he was on), “he could just as easily make it fermented as not, couldn’t he? Why mess around with half a miracle?”

  “I’ve been going to Bethel Free Will Baptist Church for twenty-four years now,” I said, “and Mr. Brooks, Mr. Tolley, Mr. Honneycutt, and all these other men have been studying the Bible for all their lives and they say it’s grape juice. All added together they’ve probably studied the Bible over a hundred years. I’m not going to sit in my own kitchen and go against that.”

  “But there are Buddhist monks,” says Charles, “who have studied religion for an accumulation of millions of years and they say Jesus was only a holy man and not the son of God. You can find anybody who’s studied something for X number of years. I’m not sure what that proves.”

  “These Buddhist monks were not studying the Bible,” I said. “They were studying the Koran. We talked about that in Sunday School.”

  “I don’t think they were studying the Koran,” says Mrs. Shepherd. “You’re talking about Islam.”

  “Well, the point is: I’m not talking about the Bible. If it’s not in the Bible I’m not interested in it because if I have to stop believing in the Bible I might as well stop living on earth.”

 
“Here, let’s get the dishes washed up,” says Mrs. Shepherd. “I appreciate your faith—I guess it’s a small matter anyway. Sometimes I think we spend too much time on relatively picky religious matters.”

  It won’t no picky matter to me.

  While we were cleaning up I saw where Charles got his habit of taking the strainer out of the sink and leaving it out, and turning on the faucet and leaving it on. But I didn’t say anything. She was nice to help.

  Before we finished cleaning up, somebody knocked on the front door. That durn TEA Club meeting. I felt like I hadn’t had time to get my bearings.

  The meeting was something, and Millie joined in just like she knew everybody.

  There was this woman dressed in rags who brought her baby in a sack on her back. Looked like she’d just walked away from a plane crash with her baby all tangled up in her clothes. What’s more, she was cock-eyed. Looked like she was looking in two directions at once. Like those pictures of John Kennedy.

  There were more unusual people there. But listen to what the meeting was about: they all, including Charles, and his mama, just flown in from Atlanta, are dead set against the Ferris-Jones nuclear power plant being built north of here.

  That takes a lot a gall. These scientists have been working for years to get this plant built and Charles and these, well . . . a couple of them looked like hippies to me, and there was a doctor and two college teachers who looked like they don’t eat right and the one with the baby—they all get together and in about fifteen minutes decide that the nuclear power plant has got to go. Has got to go, mind you.

  They haven’t hurt anything at the power plant. And electricity certainly has to come from somewhere.

  I was in Pope’s the other day and the mayor, Mr. Crenshaw, was talking to Mrs. Moss. He said the power plant was the best thing that ever happened to Listre—that it would bring new jobs and make taxes lower.

  Now he’s the mayor. He’s somebody I can listen to. Somebody with a respectable position in the community who has to know what he’s talking about, else he wouldn’t be mayor.

  Sometimes I believe these hippies and college professors sit around and frown and complain about what’s helping a community most.

  Look at the war. These hippies and such were telling the people who knew the most about it how to run it. So we lost. Now they’re doing the same thing with this power plant. Do you see the people from the power plant telling the hippies how to be hippies? No, because they don’t know anything about it. So they keep their mouths shut.

  Charles told me I could come up front to the meeting but I stayed back in the kitchen. After about thirty minutes, Millie did come back and talk to me about how nice Charles and me had fixed up the house. She had a glass of wine, but that’s the only one she drunk as far as I know. I never thought I’d see wine under a roof I lived under. Live and learn. I won’t be a prude; but I do have principles and I will certainly keep close guard on what goes on. We’re not going to have any alcohol under this roof for more than twelve hours, and otherwise only on some special occasions of Charles’s. And when we have a child we’ll have to discuss the whole thing very seriously. I never saw a drop of alcohol at home except in a bottle Uncle Nate brought in.

  I told Millie about Charles painting the living room and she thought it was funny about not being able to find any drapes to go with the old paint. She said Charles had a good “role model” for fixing up around the house because Bill, Dr. Shepherd, had always helped her. I thought about Daddy. He’s never done anything, as far as I can remember, inside the house. He works outside, but not inside. I don’t think Mama wants him working in the house. She certainly never lets anybody do anything in the kitchen.

  Charles won’t do a thing outside but pull up crabgrass out of the sidewalk cracks once in a while. I don’t know why he gets such a kick out of that. I think it’s connected somehow to his strange ideas about germs. He buys these big jars of alcohol to clean the bathroom sink with. I’ve seen him through the bathroom door—through the crack. He’ll scrub around the hole in the bottom of the sink with a ball of cotton soaked in alcohol. Lord knows where else he scrubs. I’ll bet he goes through a bottle of alcohol every two weeks. I go in there some mornings and it smells like County Hospital. I started to ask Millie about that but I didn’t. Maybe he got it from her. (It’s funny what all you find out about your husband after you get married.)

  When they finished the meeting, Charles came back to the kitchen and showed me this letter they wrote with Charles’s name signed. Charles asked me what I thought. I said if they all wrote it, why didn’t they all sign it? This is the letter. Millie told him a couple of words to change.

  DEAR EDITOR:

  A state geologist has recently claimed that an area near the proposed Ferris-Jones nuclear power plant is ideal for a hazardous waste disposal site. One of the reasons given is the low population of the area. I suppose the reasoning is that if there are problems, then fewer people will suffer.

  It occurs to me that any reason to NOT put something in a highly populated area should also be a good reason NOT to put it in an area of low population.

  The sad fact is that problems of nuclear waste disposal are not solved. This generation should not be making decisions that will cause future generations to suffer horrible consequences.

  Charles Shepherd

  Charles took off work Tuesday afternoon; we took his mama to the airport; and when we got back home we had a little talk which turned into a argument.

  I merely asked Charles why he has to be friends with these college professors and such—why he can’t be friends with my friends. He went with me once to see Madora and her husband, Larry. And Sandra and Billy Ferrell have asked us over for supper twice and he wouldn’t go either time. I know they won’t ask us again.

  “These people think,” he says.

  “Think?” I said. “Who don’t think? Everybody thinks.”

  “I mean think about something important, something beyond the confines of their own lives.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means getting beyond Listre and Bethel. That’s what it means. Raney, the way it works is this: small people talk about themselves; mediocre people talk about other people; and thinking people talk about ideas.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” I said. See, what happens is: Charles spouts out this stuff he’s read in the library and expects the words to be formed in gold in my head. But I’m sorry.

  “It has to do with who I want to be friends with,” says Charles. “Madora and—what’s his name?—Larry are not interested in anything outside their kitchen, living room, and bedroom.”

  “I’ll have you know,” I said, “that Madora and Larry go to Bethel Free Will Baptist Church. Don’t tell me that Jesus Christ is only in their kitchen, living room, and bedroom.”

  “The problem,” says Charles, “the whole problem is just that: Jesus wouldn’t have a kitchen, living room, and bedroom.”

  “He would if he lived in Bethel.” I tried to let that sink in. “No matter what your mama thinks.”

  “Why are you bringing her into this?” (I wasn’t sure.) “Raney. Jesus Christ was a radical. If the people at Bethel Free Will Baptist met Jesus they’d laugh at him . . . or lynch him.”

  “A radical? Charles, I had a personal experience with Jesus Christ when I was twelve years old. He wasn’t a radical then. And I did not laugh. As a matter of fact, I cried.”

  “Were you saved, Raney? Is that it? Were you saved and now you’re going to heaven and nothing else matters?”

  “Charles,” I said, and I was mad, “you can run down whoever and whatever you want to, but when you run down my experience with Jesus Christ you are putting yourself below the belly of a hog.” I was tore up. I had to cry. I walked out of the kitchen, into the bedroom and slammed the door with both hands as hard as I could; and Charles goes out the front door and drives off. And didn’t come back for thirty minutes.
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br />   VII

  We didn’t speak Wednesday or Thursday, but had started warming up some on Friday. Then Friday night we went to see a movie—some awful thing Charles wanted to see—and then Saturday morning the Sneeds business was all over The Hansen County Pilot. As I said, Sneeds runs Daddy’s store. Sneeds Perry. I don’t know him except from when I go in the store. He’s always seemed nice.

  What he did was get arrested in Raleigh at two A.M. Friday night for trying to pick up this woman he thought was a you-know-what but instead was a policewoman. They caught him red-handed. And then the whole subject had to come up at Sunday dinner with Mrs.—, with Millie, there visiting.

  She came back Saturday night on the airplane, which was late, and I could of sworn I smelled liquor on her breath. Then we had to wait for all those suitcases, which we loaded into the trunk and carted home and into the guest room again.

  Charles had found out that the Episcopal service started at 10:30 A.M. Sunday and that they were having that Eucharist, so they decided they’d go for sure and Millie wanted to know if I was going with them. They seemed like they wanted me to, so I said yes. I wanted to see what the service was like, if nothing else.

  The service was the most unusual church service you’ve ever seen. First of all, I didn’t know any of the hymns, and neither did the regular people there. You’d expect the regular people there to know their own hymns. They wandered all around on notes that didn’t have anything to do with the melody and, all in all, didn’t sing with any spunk. And they kept kneeling on these teenie-tiny benches. It was up and down, up and down. I got right nervous looking out the corner of my eye to see when it was up and when it was down.

  The priest had a yellow robe with a butterfly on the back. Now that is plum sacrilegious if you ask me. A house of worship is no place to play Halloween.

 

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