The Promise of Jesse Woods

by Chris Fabry

  “I won’t be coming to your church picnic,” Jesse said matter-of-factly.

  “You don’t have to believe in God to go to the picnic,” Dickie said. “You just have to believe in fried chicken and potato salad. And flies.”

  Jesse almost smiled at that.

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 8, 1984

  I sat in the parking lot of the Dogwood Food and Drug trying to figure out which car was Jesse’s.

  There wasn’t a spot in town that didn’t spark vivid images. The gas station on the other side of the grocery, for instance, had been an Esso. They had changed the sign to Exxon, but the inside remained the same. Dickie had found a copy of the Green Book behind a shelf when we went inside for a pop. The smell of gasoline and oil hung heavy as he leafed through it. Underneath the title were the words Negro Traveler’s Guide, 1964.

  “Bet you never had to use one of these,” he said.

  Dogwood Food and Drug had eventually run Blake’s out of business. It was evidence of the slow economic encroachment. Dogwood Feed and Implement still stood on its original site, but most farmers drove farther east to a supply store. There was also fear that bigger churches would siphon off members of other congregations with revivals or special speakers. My father believed that faith was meant to be lived where you did. It wasn’t a spectator sport. As a child, I’d agreed with him.

  I closed my eyes and listened to the birds preparing for their flight south. A train whistled and rolled under the overpass. Tires on pavement lulled me and I drifted off, a trickle of sweat dropping from my underarm. A soft, leaf-laden breeze blew through both of my open windows and I felt a sense of contentment, wanting to bottle these sounds and feelings and smells.

  A week after stealing from Blake’s store, Jesse had turned to me as we rode by the railroad tracks. We were searching for signs of her father’s missing arm. She spat in her hand and held it out.

  I looked at it with disdain and horror. “What are you doing?”

  “Go on and shake,” she said.

  Not understanding the native ways and not wanting to offend, I held out a tentative hand and Jesse grabbed it. “There, you satisfied?”

  “I don’t know what you’re doing,” I said, wiping my hand on my shorts.

  “Dickie and I talked. You was right about Old Man Blake. We promise not to do it again. Cross our hearts and hope to die.”

  “Dickie said that too?”

  “He said he never liked stealing. He did it so I wouldn’t feel alone.”

  That made me smile.

  She stared a hole through me. “A promise is a promise. I give my word, you can bank on it. No more stealing from Blake’s or anywhere else.”

  “Okay,” I said, looking at my hand. “Thank you.”

  Jesse curled her top lip, something that always reminded me of Elvis, and poked me in the chest. “But don’t go trying to change me. What you see is what you get.”

  So many memories flooded now, the good and bad flowing together in a torrent until I opened my door and walked into the Food and Drug like Odysseus returning from battle.

  A cashier at the front didn’t look up. You had to take the long route by the deli to get to the meat department. I had worked here as a bagger in high school. I knew every aisle, every rat in the back room, and where the “mystery item” was that went on sale each Tuesday.

  “Matt Plumley?” someone said to my right.

  I turned toward the canned goods and Gwen Bailey smiled at me.

  Gwen had been a bright bulb in our class. She had excelled at Latin, biology, and physics and everyone saw her as most likely to become a medical doctor. Her family faithfully attended our church until they had a run-in with Blackwood. I shook her hand and her mother waved from the canned corn.

  “What are you doing here?” Gwen said. “I heard you were in Chicago.”

  “I’m back for a visit.”

  Life has a way of circling. While I had looked at Jesse as an unrequited love, Gwen had looked at me the same. She had played Emily Webb in the production of Our Town, opposite my George Gibbs. Backstage in rehearsals she had invited me to her house to run lines. She was having trouble keeping her scenes straight, she said, and I obliged, showing up on the appointed evening at the appointed time.

  Gwen’s parents were out and I could tell she wanted to do more than practice the play. She wore loose terry-cloth shorts that crept up when she sat on the couch. She’d extended her bare feet and stretched them like a cat, touching my leg.

  Gwen was not a homely girl. In fact, she was quite pretty. She had been on the plump side in junior high, like I had been in my early teens—all that studying and little interest in sports had given her a full figure. Now she smiled and again I saw the difference money and orthodontia can make.

  “Do you ever think of our school days? All the fun we had?”

  I could think of them, but Gwen’s days had been pool parties and majorettes and pizza after football games. Compared with Jesse, hers was an easy life with an intact family and a paved road with college at the end.

  “Are you finished with school?” I said, changing the subject.

  “I finish grad school in December.”

  “Something in the medical field, I suppose?”

  “Anesthesiology,” she said.

  “Bless you,” I said.

  She laughed. “Oh, I miss that quick wit of yours. You were always so funny.” She touched my shoulder. “One of these days I’m going to get up to Chicago and see you in a play.”

  I looked behind me at the meat counter, but there was no one there. “I haven’t exactly broken into the big time. In fact, I’m mostly counseling young kids—”

  “You were always such a success. Do you have a girlfriend up there?”

  I winced but tried to hide it. “Still looking, I guess.”

  Someone pushed a cart past us and we moved closer to the stewed tomatoes.

  “‘Does anyone ever realize life while they live it . . . ?’ Do you remember that from Our Town?”

  I nodded.

  “‘Every, every minute?’”

  I pulled the dialogue from memory. ‘No. Saints and poets maybe . . . they do some.’” I said the line as a good-bye.

  Gwen smiled sadly. “It’s a shame about us. We would have been good together. Maybe we still can be.”

  I thought of some quick-witted joke about being married to an anesthesiologist, that you never had to worry about insomnia, but I held back. It was my quick wit that she loved.

  “It was good seeing you again, Gwen.”

  She followed her mother toward checkout and I glanced behind me at the bloody meat counter. Gwen’s life had been high heels and dance shoes and I couldn’t help comparing her to Jesse’s rough feet. Gwen waved from the front of the aisle and I turned to the back of the store.

  The meat counter was empty but I noticed a fresh chicken on a wooden slab with a cleaver next to it. Dexter Crowley, a boy two years ahead of me in school, pushed a load of laundry detergent toward a far aisle and stopped.

  “Matt Plumley,” he said, sticking out a rough hand.

  Dexter had the frame of a football player but not much coordination. He was all arms and gangling legs and a blank stare that felt like menace to opposing teams but was more Dexter trying to remember who he was supposed to block.

  I shook his hand and he wiped his nose with his sleeve. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m back for a few days. Is Jesse working today?”

  His mouth was open as he glanced at the counter. “Yeah, she was there a minute ago. She works all this week except for Saturday. Did you know she’s getting married?”

  “I heard.”

  “First time I heard it, I thought they was funnin’ me. But she showed me the ring and said it was true. And Earl, he comes in here—why, there’s Verle now.”

  Verle Turley was cut from the same cloth as his brother, and if there had been a sound track for his approach, it would have been a cross betw
een the banjo from Deliverance and the strings in Jaws. He walked up to Dexter with a John Deere hat pulled low.

  “Verle, you remember Matt Plumley, don’t you? He was in those plays at school.” He turned back to me. “You know, the one I remember was when you played that guy who sees the ghosts at Christmas. Remember that?”

  I nodded as Verle gave me a slack-jawed stare. He crossed his arms and planted his logger boots. “I didn’t know you was here.” His voice was as flat as a skipping rock.

  “I didn’t know I had to file a report.”

  After an uncomfortable silence, Dexter threw back his head and laughed. He was slow but exuberant. “That’s a good one, Matt.”

  “When I tell Earl you was in here, he’s not going to be happy,” Verle said.

  “I doubt I’m as committed to his happiness as you are.”

  Verle drew a little closer, and judging from the bulge in his lower lip, he had only a couple of minutes before he needed to spit. “I’m watching you, Plumley.”

  “I see that,” I said, matching his tone.

  I turned and took one more look at the empty meat department. I didn’t want to put her in the middle. Not now.

  “Nice seeing you again, Dexter,” I said, clapping his shoulder.

  I went back to the car and drove through the parking lot to where Dumpsters lined the alley and the loading dock sat empty. I waited a few minutes, hoping she might appear behind the plastic liners over the door. When she didn’t, I drove to my parents’ house and slipped inside without notice. I closed the door to my room and fell into bed still dressed, burrowing my head into the pillow.

  JUNE 1972

  The church picnic was not just the introduction of the new pastor but a social affair rivaling a state dinner at the White House. Instead of fine china and sterling, we had paper plates and plastic forks. Instead of steak and lobster, we ate freshly cut watermelon and coleslaw by the gallon along with burgers and hot dogs. The weight of the potato salad made the folding tables wobble.

  The elders had canceled Sunday school that morning, the only time that would happen in my days there, with the exception of one major snowfall and a bitterly cold day in 1978 when the downstairs pipes burst. My father accompanied the elders to the platform and sat behind the pulpit while my mother played the piano. The organist was a teenage boy not much older than me who tried valiantly to keep up.

  On Sundays, all the Massey Ferguson and John Deere hats came off at the door, and the men who had strong leanings toward unions and political platforms politely put aside their differences and mingled, though it was interesting to walk through the parking lot and see the ratio of Nixon to McGovern bumper stickers. Older women wore dresses and hose and smelled of sickly sweet perfume. Their hair was usually up, while younger women wore theirs down, cascading to the shoulders of their modest dresses. Boys wore white T-shirts under their button-ups and there was a smattering of ties, but those boys usually stretched at their collars throughout the service. You could tell the haves and have-nots from pants and shoes. Well-fitting pants meant you were in the upper echelon. High-water pants meant it had been a while since you had enough money for new. Men who owned a pair of wing-tip oxfords were on one end of the economic scale, while at the other were those with freshly hosed work boots. Men smelled of tobacco, peppermint, and shoe polish.

  “Matt, you’re going to see people in church and school who don’t have much,” my mother had said that morning before we left the house. “Don’t ever look down on anyone and never laugh at anybody’s clothes. That’s the cruelest thing you can do.”

  I could think of a few things more cruel, but her point was well-taken. I wondered if she was speaking from experience. She and my father had grown up in the Depression and I had heard stories about how hard things had been.

  “Now I want you to look for Gwen Bailey,” my mother said. “She’s real smart. Loves to read, just like you. And she’s real pretty.”

  The prospect of being set up made me sweat. I agreed I would look for her, but inside, I was hoping I wouldn’t have to interact. I was always nervous around girls, another reason I liked Jesse. I could be myself around her.

  “Is Mawmaw coming?”

  “She doesn’t feel comfortable in church with the medication she’s on.”

  “You want me to keep her company?”

  She pulled my tie tight. “Get in the car, Matt.”

  Red, spine-worn hymnals populated the pew back in front of me. I sat alone in the third row, feeling every eye of the congregation and tugging at my collar. My mother had insisted I have a haircut, so my father buzzed me the day before and stray hairs scratched. The church had not invested in air-conditioning, so the windows were open and the large ceiling fans were working overtime. They did little to quell the heat. As a heavy child, I was used to sweating even in winter. But sweating outside, riding your bike with the wind in your face, was different from sweating in your Sunday best.

  The song leader, Gerald Grassley, was a middle-aged man with a mustache between a prominent nose and jutting chin. He had a car and lawn mower repair shop in Dogwood that gave free oil changes to widows. Though he tried to clean them, his fingernails were always a shade of black and he wore extra Brut to cover up the smell of ether and gasoline that seemed to leak through his pores.

  Gerald’s arm rose and fell the same way to any song he led, no matter the time signature. He had a nasal twang when he spoke and sang, like a younger Grandpa Jones, but his pitch wasn’t bad and he seemed to enjoy song leading. His job was to get everybody started at the same place and everybody stopped when the song was over, but whatever happened in the middle was up to God and the congregation.

  To his right were empty choir chairs in a loft section beside the pulpit. Those would be filled once my mother recruited eligible singers. Behind was the baptistery, a cutout section in the knotty pine walls that looked like an oversize window flanked by velvet curtains. There was a mural on the wall behind it painted by an art teacher from a nearby high school. It was a peaceful scene of trees and hills, and a stream flowed from top to bottom, ending in the baptismal waters. Something was off in the scale, though, because the trees in the foreground were smaller than those on the hills and the sparrow that sat on the limb of a sycamore looked the size of a crow. When you stared at it long enough, you got vertigo.

  I peeked over my shoulder to see if Jesse and Dickie might have arrived, but every head turned toward me, including that of a girl with a pink ribbon in her hair and a dress suitable for Easter Sunday. That had to be Gwen.

  I stared at the bulletin, scanning the names of church leaders. The order of service was printed on a mimeograph machine that made every e on the page look like an o with a faint, crooked line through it. The page had been printed crooked, so you had to hold it at an angle. After the words Introduction of Now Pastor, the name Basil Blackwood was printed.

  Even with the uneven printing I recognized the man who owned the horse. My heart sank and I scooted down in the seat as he stepped to the pulpit.

  “As you all know, we’ve gone and hired a new shepherd. Calvin Plumley grew up here, just down the road from me. He comes from a good family. A little mistaken in their politics, of course.”

  The congregation gave a reserved laugh.

  “He has two children, one still in the nest,” Mr. Blackwood said. “And his wife, Ramona, has graciously agreed to accompany us each week and get the choir started again. Anybody who wants to be in the choir, be here at five o’clock tonight before the evening service.”

  My mother stood at the piano and nodded, then lifted a hand toward me to stand. I was far down in the pew, trying to avoid the gaze of the man in the pulpit, but when my mother didn’t relent, I stood. I lost my balance and grabbed the pew in front of me, nearly rocking it over. It banged with a terrific crack and I waved as I sat. The girl with the ribbon smiled.

  Mr. Blackwood stared at me as if the abomination of desolation had just entered the Temple.
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  “We’ve made it clear the reason we’re bringing in Plumley is to get us on track. We need the Word of God. What we have in this country is not the fear of the Lord, and that’s what we sorely need. I’m hoping we’ll hear messages about the great and terrible Day of the Lord. And the lake of fire God is preparing. And I’m expecting there to be some baptisms back there.” Blackwood pointed a thumb behind him. “It’s been a dry spell.”

  My stomach growled, half from hunger and half from nervousness for my father. I hadn’t considered the people’s expectations of him. He had preached in churches near Pittsburgh, but there’s a difference between speaking once and walking out the door and having to live with those you’re speaking to.

  “Now we don’t usually do this in the Lord’s house, but before we hear him speak and commission him, I think it’s appropriate to welcome our new pastor with a round of applause.”

  People clapped work-worn hands and my mother slipped into the pew beside me. I felt comforted by her presence. My father stood and put his Bible on the pulpit. I held my breath, hoping he would say something that disarmed Mr. Blackwood and appeased the skeptics.

  He thanked them for giving him the opportunity and thanked God for leading us to Dogwood. “After all the things us Plumley boys got into as kids, I’m surprised you let me in the church, let alone called me as pastor.”

  There was polite laughter, though Mr. Blackwood frowned. My father’s next words made me think the man might storm the pulpit and pull back their call.

  “Now I’m all for preaching the Day of the Lord, the lake of fire, hell, eternal punishment, and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. And a helping of weeping and gnashing of teeth, to boot. The truth is the truth. You don’t hide that under a bushel. But I learned in seminary that if you preach the whole counsel of God’s Word, you can never go wrong. So we’re going one book at a time, verse by verse, and we’re going to hit the Day of the Lord when it gets here. What I think you’ll find is that there’s more about the love and grace and mercy of God than there is hellfire and brimstone. Judgment is coming—God would have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah if he didn’t judge us. But Jesus said that he would build his church and the gates of hell would not prevail against it. I believe that, and I want to be part of that. Do you?”