Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen

by Susan Gregg Gilmore

  Miss Margaret Raines, our Sunday-school teacher, illustrated these stories using the green-felt board hanging on the front wall of our classroom. She moved from Tuscaloosa when I was about eight and taught the one and only first-grade class at the Ringgold Elementary School. She said she had come to teach for only a couple of years before moving on to something better. Well, she didn't say it quite like that, but I knew what she meant. Anyway, that was so many years ago now, I've lost count, and Miss Raines is still teaching the only first-grade class at Ringgold Elementary School.

  I always figured she would be kind of tired of looking at kids by the weekend, but she was in Sunday school every week, although she looked different when she was at church. At school, she wore her long, blond hair tied back in a ponytail or a bun. But on Sundays she wore it hanging down in pretty soft curls.

  She's the only adult I know who's won the perfect-attendance pin three years in a row, although I was never quite sure if she was coming to church with such regularity to praise the good Lord or to admire the handsome preacher. Miss Raines and my daddy were more than friends. I knew that, and I knew why. She was smart and nice and loved the Lord and definitely was the only Bible teacher at Cedar Grove who didn't have blue hair.

  I could never admit this to my daddy, but I probably learned more about the Bible from her than from anybody else. She could move those paper figures on that felt board so smooth that sometimes I thought I was standing right there in Palestine witnessing it all with my very own eyes. The first time I saw her separate the Red Sea, I just sat there, speechless, amazed and angry all at the same time. God Almighty could part an ocean for this crowd but couldn't even bother to clear one narrow path in Chickamauga Creek for Lena Mae Cline. I sat in my chair getting madder and madder. He could have saved my mama if He had wanted to. I knew it, and I had known it all along, but now I had proof.

  “Boys and girls,” Miss Raines continued, not even noticing my personal indignation, “this was the handiwork of the Lord Himself. This was a miraculous event. This was an exodus of biblical proportions.”

  Maybe. But I still wasn't happy about it. And Martha Ann, well, she was more impressed with Miss Raines's choice of words than with what she had actually said. My sister admired all sorts of pretty things, like the daffodils that bloom as soon as the winter days start to turn warm and the full moon that hangs over Taylor's Ridge. But more than anything else, Martha Ann admired words, especially those that just rolled off her tongue in some sort of melodic rhythm like butter rolling off a hot biscuit.

  Martha Ann loved to read, and she always had a book in her hand. She swore reading was even better than eating a Dilly Bar. By and by, she developed a real appreciation for the English language, and when she heard words put together like “of biblical proportions,” she would try to squeeze them into every possible conversation for the rest of the day.

  “Daddy, that pot roast is so good it is of biblical proportions,” Martha Ann announced at the dinner table later that night.

  Sometimes she didn't make any sense at all, but it didn't change the fact that Moses had led God's people into freedom. And after giving it more thought, I finally decided that even if the Lord didn't save my mama, and even if Moses did end up wandering around the desert for forty years, it was still an exodus worthy of admiration, if not an inspiration for my own eventual great departure.

  My wanting to leave town had nothing to do with my daddy, although sometimes I wondered if that's what he thought. He really did do a good job of mothering us. He cooked our dinners, washed our hair in the kitchen sink so the soap wouldn't get in our eyes, and even dried our tears when our knees were bleeding or our hearts were aching. But I'm not sure if he really ever did understand my wanting to know something different.

  Daddy was just more concerned with raising us right than dreaming of places he'd never seen. He always said the good Lord had one Golden Rule, but I think Daddy had two: Go to church on Sundays and set a good example every day. And that was what we did. Our pigtails may not have looked as even and tidy as the other girls' and our dresses may not have been as perfectly pressed as theirs, either. And maybe we never learned how to embroider or needlepoint, but there were two things we knew better than any other girl in town: the Bible and Georgia football.

  Come September we understood that the weather was about to change and so was our way of living. It was time to put away the baby dolls and start tossing the football. We could throw a tight spiral fifty yards by the time we were nine and talk the game as much as the boys, something most of the other girls thought was very unladylike.

  “Catherine Grace, I swear it does sound like you are speaking gibberish when you start that football talk. Screen passes and draw plays, you know the boys aren't gonna find that attractive,” announced Ruthie Morgan at the lunch table one Monday when I was in the midst of recounting the winning drive that led the Bulldogs to a come-from-behind, six-point victory over the Tennessee Volunteers.

  Ruthie Morgan lived next door and was about as girly a girl as you could ever hope to find. She always wore a pink dress and had a pink barrette clipped in her hair. I bet it took her mama at least three tries to get that barrette hanging so straight. From time to time, Ruthie Morgan and I would jump rope together or play badminton, not because we particularly liked each other but because there was nothing else to do. Of course, it should be no big surprise that Ruthie Morgan and Emma Sue were good friends, even though Ruthie Morgan was a full two years older. I always called Ruthie Morgan by her first and last names, placing just enough emphasis on the first syllable of her last name to convey my abiding irritation with her.

  During football season, Ruthie Morgan would not step foot in our house, not that I really cared. Too bad for her, I always said, ’cause on game days we drank red Kool-Aid, ate red Jell-O, and dressed our Barbies in little red dresses all in honor of the fightin’ Dawgs. We screamed and yelled at that television set while Ruthie Morgan was probably stuck inside ironing her mother's linen napkins for Sunday lunch.

  Even though I would have never admitted this to her, or my daddy, I would have loved to iron some napkins for Mama. She would have set the temperature gauge on low so I wouldn't get burned, and I'd press on that iron till I smoothed every single crease and wrinkle out of that linen. I envied all the ironing Ruthie Morgan got to do, all the pretty white napkins and her daddy's big, square handkerchiefs.

  My daddy didn't much believe in ironing. He said if you couldn't wash and wear it, it wasn't worth buying. Even at the Sunday dinner table we wiped our hands on paper napkins Daddy bought by the hundreds at the Shop Rite.

  Once I tried ironing one of Martha Ann's dresses, the one she was planning on wearing to Emma Sue's tenth birthday party. Mrs. Roberta Huckstep always felt obligated to invite at least one of the preacher's daughters, and thankfully for me, Martha Ann was her favorite. She told Emma Sue that Martha Ann was a lovely young girl, but she had to wonder if my mama's tragic accident, as she always called it, had left me scarred. She said that it was fortunate for Martha Ann that she was barely four at the time and would have been too young to have been damaged by the tragic-ness of it.

  Scarred or not, if Martha Ann was going to a Huckstep party, I was determined she was going to look just as pretty as the birthday girl and all her prissy little friends. Unfortunately, by the time I was done ironing, the dress had a big brown burn mark on the back. I told her nobody would notice, even though I knew I was lying. I tried tying the sash so it covered most of the burn, but it's hard to shape a bow as big as that one needed to be. Martha Ann wore that dress anyway, never letting on that she was upset with me.

  At least the Lord left us one female in our lives who was willing to teach us some of the more womanly things we needed to know. Gloria Jean Graves was the most feminine woman I knew, and she lived right next door. When Daddy worked late, Gloria Jean took care of us, but, more important, she was the one we went to when we needed help making cookies for a Valentine's party
or our hair fixed smooth and neat for our annual school picture.

  She was the one who taught us how to shave our legs without drawing blood and to put on a pair of nylons without causing a run. And she was the one who told me what to do when my period started, the mechanics of which I would never have been able to discuss with my daddy.

  Gloria Jean insisted we call her by her first name. She said Mrs. Graves made her sound too old, like one of those blue-haired grandmamas with one foot in the grave. Gloria Jean was definitely not our grandmama. She was real handsome but in a different way than any of the other women I knew. She looked more like she belonged in the television set with all the other beautiful people. Nothing about Gloria Jean was simple or plain.

  God Almighty only knows the true color of Gloria Jean's hair. She went to the beauty parlor every other week, without fail, and had it colored a bright, beautiful shade of auburn. Your hair, she said, was your crowning glory, and it should be given the proper attention. Every day she'd tease and pile her hair on the top of her head and then spray it in place. Not even the wind blowing before a thunderstorm could knock a hair on her head loose. She kept a small bottle of Aqua Net in her purse because a girl, she said, had to be prepared for any emergency. She would even spray it on her skirt if it started clinging to her nylons.

  One Fourth of July, she stuck real-live lightning bugs inside her hair and then covered it all with netting. Her head glowed like some kind of fancy firecracker till all the lightning bugs choked on her hairspray and died. She paid Martha Ann and me fifty cents apiece to pick all those poor little bugs from her hair. Nope, nothing about Gloria Jean was ever simple or plain.

  Her face was made up with all sorts of pretty colors, all the time. Martha Ann and I spent the night with her once and when she tucked us into bed her eyelids were blue, and when she called us to breakfast the next morning, her eyelids were green. Looking at her face was kind of like looking at a rainbow.

  She painted everything, including her fingernails and toenails. And they were always the most beautiful shade of pink or red, depending on what color outfit she was wearing that day. She had a collection of nail polish that even Ruthie Morgan found enviable. There must have been thirty or forty bottles of polish, from Chrysanthemum Pink to Paris Evening Red, neatly stacked on the bottom shelf of her bathroom closet. And when it was raining and we couldn't go outside and play, Gloria Jean would give me and Martha Ann a manicure, just like in a real beauty parlor.

  Sitting out on her television set was a photograph of herself. She was standing in front of the fountain at city hall with her legs positioned just like a model in one of those Vogue magazines she kept laying around the house. She looked so fancy in her full, pleated skirt and her high, pointed heels. Her hair was swept up on her head and her lips were painted a deep ruby red. Gloria Jean had been a sure-enough beauty in her day. Even Martha Ann and I could figure that out.

  Apparently a lot of men had figured that out, too. She had been married five times, something I considered an amazing accomplishment but something you could tell didn't impress my daddy much. Gloria Jean said herself that she hadn't given up on love, just the official marital ritual. In fact, she had a steady boyfriend who lived down in Calhoun. His name was Meeler Dickson, and he worked in a carpet mill, and that was all I knew about him. She visited him the third weekend of every month without fail, but she never once let him come to her house.

  She said she wouldn't feel right about a man in her house with the preacher living next door. But I think she was more concerned about Ida Belle Fletcher, who lived two doors down, spooning out the details of her private life just as freely as she did the creamed corn at church suppers.

  Martha Ann and I loved it when Gloria Jean talked about her husbands and her weddings. She'd begin with some simple piece of advice like, “Oh girls, don't you ever marry a man that comes to the church late for his own wedding.” Then we knew it was time to pay close attention because Gloria Jean was about to share a story even juicier than those soap operas she loved to watch on the television.

  “My first husband, remember girls, Cel Beauchamp, from Louisiana. He was late to the church, and I just knew that was a sign from God that I should hightail it out the back door. If a man can't show up for his own wedding on time, girls, then he'll never be able to keep a woman happy,” Gloria Jean said with the conviction that comes only from experience. “But the church was already filled with people, the candles were lit, my veil was on, and my mother said, ‘Unless that leg of yours is in a cast, you are walking down that aisle.’

  “Girls, hear me out, there is always time to turn back. You know why he was late? ’Cause he was getting drunk at some bar up in Soddy Daisy. I left him after three months of wedded bliss. He come home one too many nights smelling of Jack Daniel's and homemade cigars. But I did all right. I walked away with one fine diamond ring, a brand-new double-wide, and a set of Corning Ware that's still sitting in my kitchen cupboard, never even taken it out of the box.”

  “Oh Daddy, Gloria Jean is just so neat,” I told him when he got home from visiting the sick late one night. “You know she wore white at all five weddings. She says that is a bride's prerogative. She even said that when I get married, I can wear one of her dresses.”

  “Catherine Grace,” Daddy replied in an unusually firm tone, “there's a reason a bride wears white on her wedding day, and we will discuss that when you're a little older. But remember this, husbands and wedding dresses are not meant to be collected. You only need one of each.”

  Daddy never seemed particularly fond of Gloria Jean. I guess he considered divorce to be one of those get-down-on- your-knees-and-beg-for-forgiveness kind of sins. And the colorful way she lived her life probably didn't seem like that of a repentant woman. I wasn't troubled by the number of times she'd been married. It could have been twenty for all I cared. She was one of the most loving and exciting people I knew.

  But I think, more than anything, I liked being around her because she would talk about my mama. She was the only person in town who ever talked about my mama. Any old thing might remind her of her friend Lena Mae, like when the clouds in the sky come together to look like a bunny rabbit. Then Gloria Jean would say something like, “Oh honey, your mama loved to sprawl out in the grass and look for animals floating across the sky. She was nothing more than a little girl herself when she married your daddy.”

  Gloria Jean said she and my mama had been friends ever since Lena Mae came to town. Turned out our mama's aunt in Willacoochee was Gloria Jean's fifth husband's first cousin. “It's a small world, girls,” she'd laugh, “especially when you've married half of it.”

  You could tell Gloria Jean really loved Lena Mae Cline. She was just extra special, she'd say. And you could tell she saw something in my mama that nobody else saw. “Catherine Grace, I knew it from the minute I laid eyes on her. She was such a pretty thing. She didn't need all these creams and powders I wear to be pretty. She just was. And she was so eager to be a good wife and mother. Yep, she was a real beauty, hon, inside and out,” she'd say, making me feel so proud to be her daughter.

  “And, boy howdy, could she sing like a bird. She had the best voice in the Cedar Grove church choir. I told her that voice of hers surely made the Lord smile. I even begged her to take what the Lord had given her and head on over to Nashville and give it a go. There ain't no sin in singing for money. The Lord loves Loretta, Dolly, and Tammy just as much as He does Lena Mae Cline.”

  Gloria Jean really believed my mama could have been a country music star. Sometimes I tried to imagine what life would have been like if she had been, me and Martha Ann and Mama and Daddy driving around in Mama's big fancy tour bus, stopping in a place like Ringgold only to buy some gas and sign a few autographs. But that dream, just like all the others crowding my head, always ended with me waking up the preacher's daughter in my bed in Ringgold, Georgia.

  “Yes, sirree, girls, your mama had what it took to be on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry.
But the minute she'd start dreaming, well, she was real quick to remind me that her place was here with you girls and your daddy. I guess that don't really matter now. Either one of you know what time it is?” she'd say, always looking for a way to change the subject whenever my daddy's name drifted into the conversation.

  Gloria Jean never said a mean thing about my daddy; that wasn't her way. But I knew that since Mama died, she quit going to church. She said it was just too painful to look up in the choir and not see her friend standing there singing her praises to Jesus. But sometimes I wondered if Gloria Jean thought my daddy hadn't treated my mama quite right, that maybe he hadn't appreciated all of Lena Mae's God-given gifts and talents. I don't know, but somehow I knew that was her business, not mine.

  “Come on, girls. Let's get out the marshmallow whip and Ritz crackers and make us a little snack before the Guiding Light comes on,” Gloria Jean would say, and then we'd sit and watch the heartache and drama in somebody else's life for an hour.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Wandering Through the Desert with a Jar of Strawberry Jam

  When the lightning bugs came out to decorate the night sky, my daddy started working overtime, redeeming Ringgold's unsaved souls from an eternity of hellfire and damnation. He figured he had only three, maybe four, months at best when the water at Nottely Lake was warm enough to baptize those willing to dedicate their lives to their Savior Jesus Christ. Even Daddy knew that God's beloved children wouldn't go looking for salvation in freezing cold water.

  So by the middle of June, Daddy's sermons were running a good fifteen minutes longer than normal, and the choir's singing of the final hymn seemed never ending. Daddy wouldn't give the poor choir a rest until he was convinced he had collected as many recruits for the Almighty as possible, which can be a tedious task in a town where 99 percent of the population has already committed itself to the Lord at least twice. He would stand in front of the pulpit, rocking back and forth as the choir sang softly behind him, and remind his flock that the time had come for them to reexamine their lives because tomorrow could be too late.