by M. E. Kerr
“… and that poor old man, dying, having already made his peace with that idea, was only worried about one thing now: his dog, a mutt he’d loved with all his heart for fourteen years, faithful companion, there every night on his hearth looking up at him, wagging his tail, how many of us haven’t known the simple, lovely feeling of having our dog at our feet on an evening for comfort?”
My father paused, and then asked softly: “Could any of us die in peace knowing our old, loyal, mutt dog was in some crowded animal shelter, thrust from his familiar surroundings to a filthy, cement-floored environment where no one would even know or care about his name, there to stay maybe until he died of a broken heart? Looking up every time the shelter door opened, expecting to see his master, until that expectancy turned into disappointment, daily realizing no one was coming for him. And maybe worse. You know animal shelters can only shelter those poor, unwanted, unclaimed critters for so long. That’s a fact of life.”
On and on until finally he said, “I wonder how many people heard him say he was worried about his dog? I wonder how long that old man lay there with that burdening worry before someone—and I’m proud to say it was my own son—heard him. Jesse, would you like to introduce Yellow? And I pray with all my heart that old man has some heavenly way of looking down right now.”
The cameras zoomed in on Yellow and me.
Yellow was dancing around while I held him, wagging his tail, then trying to jump up on his frail, old legs and lick my chin.
I said, “Well, Dad, he’s just had a big breakfast, and he’s ready for a run, and then a long nap.”
“Not up on our couch in the living room, I hope.” My father chuckled. “I sat down on that couch last night and there were some very suspicious yellow hairs on my dark suit when I got back up.” Ha ha, from the audience.
“He’s got his own bed now,” I said, and I don’t remember what else I managed to get out, but before I knew it the camera was back on my father and he was shouting: “Do all you can! To all you can! In all the ways you can! As often as you can! For as long as you can!”
And The Challenge Choir came in at the end, thundering out “Brighten the Corner Where You Are.”
Some ACE staff members helped me get Yellow back down the stairs and into the vestry before my old man started his sermon.
Seal was waiting for me. She threw her arms around me and said, “Oh, Jesse, that was just super! Aren’t you pleased?”
“I am now.”
We walked hand in hand down to my house with Yellow, people in their cars smiling and waving at us as we passed the lot.
At noon we sat together in the living room to watch the show.
Even if Yellow had wanted to, he couldn’t have gotten his old bones up on the couch. He flopped down on the rug with his head on his paws, while Seal and I sank into the couch cushions and stuck our feet up on the coffee table.
We watched through to the end, my father in top form, acting out The Oracle hunting down The Happiest Man.
As soon as he’d finished, the choir began, “Run, climb, reach for a star,” and the phone rang.
“That’s Dickie,” Seal said. “I’ll get it.”
“Dickie?” I said.
“Dickie Cloward,” she said, walking over to the telephone. “I told him to call me here.”
I got down on all fours and nuzzled Yellow while she talked to him. She was saying super this and super that, laughing a lot, telling him she’d designed a hat with an arrow going through it to wear to the Cheeks’ party. She was telling him to just wear horns, Taurus was the bull.
After she hung up, she came across and sat down on the floor with me.
“Dickie said to tell you he thought you were just super!”
I didn’t say anything. I was ducking Yellow, who was trying to lick my face.
“Dickie’s Taurus on the cusp of Gemini, so I said he should just rig up some horns on a cap, for Taurus the bull. It’d be super.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“He really did think you were super, Jesse. He likes you a lot.”
“Okay.”
“He said you were really super to Opal up at the Cheeks’.”
“You ought to find another adjective besides ‘super,’” I said.
She looked at me, surprised.
“What’s the matter with you, anyway?” she said.
The cost of televising It’s Up to You ate up ACE funds as fast as we could raise them. Donald and my father spent all their spare time dreaming up new gimmicks for fund raising, and Seal and I were working overtime to help get each new show off the ground.
That Sunday afternoon our project was The Good Turn Tree. There was an enormous pine tree beside The Summer House, and we were supposed to tie a ribbon to it for everyone who did a “good turn” by sending in money to keep us on the tube.
Donald had figured out that we’d been stressing family four weeks straight, and it was time to shift to country. He wanted a huge American flag suspended from the balcony beside the tree. On the tree, a white ribbon represented a ten dollar gift; a twenty-five dollar gift got a red ribbon; any gift over twenty-five dollars got a blue one.
The gifts were called Good Turns, and in exchange my father was launching a new campaign the next Sunday, with a “one good turn deserves another” theme, tied in to the idea that that was the American way.
Earlier that morning, I’d seen my father’s scratch pad on his desk, where he was working on the sermon.
If you have an impossible dream, do a good turn, and see what happens to that dream.
That’s the American way! We’re a country of buy one, get one free. We’re a country that knows impossible dreams come true, because when you give it, you get it!
“Give, and it shall be given unto you,” it is written in Luke.
I couldn’t resist penciling in “Thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money,” it is written in Acts.
Seal and I were starting the tree off with several hundred ribbons that were supposed to represent advance gifts from friends and neighbors. … It wasn’t a total lie. Seal’s family had made a $50 donation. Donald had tossed in $25. There were a few donations from the ACE staff, my mother, and our cook. The rest was bait.
(“Bait?” my mother said. “Then so’s the Golden Rule bait. If you like to think of it as a fishing expedition, then think of it as fishing lost souls out of dark waters. We’re coming into peoples’ homes to help them, not to frisk them.”)
It was a warm, sunny afternoon with a little breeze and a quiet ocean. Seal and I were doing the bottom branches, stapling on the ribbons. Later I’d drive the ACE truck up beside the tree and do the top ones from the cherry picker.
Seal and I were talking back and forth while the ACE organist practiced inside The Summer House.
“They’re doing a lot of kinky stuff down at The Hand,” Seal said. “Arnelle tells my mother about it and my mother says she has all she can do to keep from asking her a hundred and one questions about it.”
“What’s wrong with asking a hundred and one questions?”
“Oh, Jesse, really. Someone says something to you like we’re having a leg-growing session at the morning service, you just catch your breath and hope you’ll get a few more facts—don’t you know what I mean? It’s like someone casually telling you God was in his bedroom the night before. I mean, you don’t say, ‘Oh, really, where?’ It’s too far out.”
“Leg growing isn’t all that kinky.”
“Leg growing isn’t all that kinky? Leg growing?”
“A lot of healers grow legs, or claim to.”
“Okay,” said Seal, “say that you’re right. Say that there are a lot of healers who are leg growers. Say that’s possible. Where do all these people come from with one leg shorter than the other?”
“They aren’t so short you’d notice,” I said. “Most healers claim a person’s one leg is a third or a half inch shorter than the other. It’s just something
they say they see. They say it’s what’s causing backaches or bad feet—it’s no big deal.”
“Please spare me,” Seal said. “All of that is a little too far out for me.”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “Stick with more down-to-earth things like walking on water or parting the Red Sea.”
Seal and I stood back from the pine tree and viewed our handiwork.
“We’re heavy on white ribbons,” I said.
“We’re supposed to be,” she said. “You discourage people if you make it look like everyone gives more than you can afford.”
We took a break, stretched out on the lawn, and listened to an organ rendition of “Heaven’s Sounding Sweeter.”
In a pail next to us were the key ribbons I had to plant later, so that my father could pluck them from the tree the next Sunday, and read out an impossible dream. (“Here’s a twenty-seven-year-old sweeper in an industrial plant whose impossible dream is going into business for himself. May the dream come true! It’s—up—to—you!”)
“Speaking of impossible dreams,” Seal said, “why don’t you kick in ten dollars and see if Opal will come to life at the Cheeks’ party. She’s so timid it’s gross.”
I said, “Here’s a seventeen-year-old rich girl with her own sports car and her own swimming pool, whose impossible dream is that a sixteen-year-old girl without a pot to pee in will become socially acceptable overnight. May the dream come true! It’s—up—to—you!”
“I’m not talking about socially acceptable,” Seal said. “I’d just like to see her happy. It’s super that you’ve asked her. I’d like to see you both happy.”
“We’ll manage,” I said. I kept meaning to call Opal again, but I’d put it off. I could tell her father didn’t like me calling, and it was hard to make conversation with her, too. The other thing was my preoccupation with what I kept telling myself couldn’t be happening between Seal and Dickie.
Seal said, “Bud used to say she could be real pretty if she knew what to do with herself.”
I was even glad when Bud’s name came back into the conversation.
Seal said, “Bud loved telling me what I looked good in. He was always right.”
“Bud was only wrong once,” I said. “That was the time he thought he was wrong.”
“The poor thing doesn’t really know what to do with herself.”
“Worry about you and Dickie,” I said.
“Are you jealous of Dickie?” Seal chuckled. “I think you are.” She rolled over on her stomach and rested her head on her arm. “I gave Opal some of my things, but I never see her in them.”
“Maybe she’s too embarrassed to wear them around you.”
“She wasn’t too embarrassed to take them.”
“Maybe she wears them to Central High,” I said. “I asked Opal because you wanted me to, now maybe you ought to get off her case.”
“Maybe you’ve got the hots for her and won’t admit it.”
“Maybe it’s you I’ve got the hots for,” I said, and pounced on top of her, wrestling and laughing with her under the Good Turn Tree, rolling over finally to find my father glaring down at us.
He was dressed in Bermuda shorts, a Lacoste shirt and Top-Siders, fresh from his Sunday afternoon tennis game at The Hadefield Club. I started to make some crack about how I hoped he’d free the slaves so they could play games Sunday afternoons, too. But I decided that since Seal and I were rolling around on the lawn instead of working, it wouldn’t go over big, and I decided, based on years of intimacy with him, there was something waiting to be unleashed after he gave one of his tight, little, polite smiles to Seal.
“Jesse, I’d like a word with you. Alone.”
He began to look like a human bomb about to take off and turn into a mushroom cloud.
Seal whispered, “I bet he got beat again.”
My father was notoriously lousy at sports. Much as he tried to be the kind of good old boy Donald was encouraging him to be, he was about as at home in locker rooms, along fairways, and on tennis courts as I was in poolrooms or pornographic bookstores.
We took a walk together down the path through the elephant grass, toward our house.
He said, “On the night of The Last Dance, I want you to make a presentation of five hundred dollars to The Ladies’ Association from ACE. The town suffers the crowds we draw. One good turn deserves another.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Is that what you wanted to tell me?”
He didn’t answer my question. He said, “I’m arranging to have a place for you on the program. You’ll make a short speech of gratitude.”
“Yes, sir.”
Then he took a deep breath and let it out. “You’ll never be Bud,” he said finally. “Bud did things with love. But you, Jesse.”
“Me what?”
“Don’t try to imitate your brother, that’s my advice. Don’t try to take your brother’s place. Find your own place.”
I looked up at the brightly colored kites flying in the sky above the beach, squinting at the sun, beginning to feel the edge of anger move in closer to my gut. I said, “Seal and I were just horsing around … sir. … Did you ever just horse around?”
“Sometimes I think I horsed around all the time, where you’re concerned,” he said. “I’m not talking about the scene I just happened upon. I’m not dense enough to think Seal would change her loyalty from Bud to you.”
“Thanks for that one,” I said.
“You can attack, but I can’t,” he said. “And I don’t. Not the way you do.”
“What are you so damn mad at?” I said. “Sir?”
“I’m damned mad because you’re damned vicious. Bud criticized my work because he thought he knew better ways to do it. You just go for the jugular. You just scribble something across my notes because you’re a smart ass, not because you give a damn about me or ACE. Bud gave a damn!”
“If Bud had written that on your sermon pad, you would have laughed it off. Sir.”
“Probably. Because it would have come from love, or it would have come from hate. But it wouldn’t have come from indifference. It was just an indifferent, smart-aleck wisecrack!”
He stopped walking in the middle of the path and looked down at me.
“When did you change your mind about me?” he said. “Or did you always think I was just a money-grabbing crook?”
I suppose he had every right to be steamed, but I wished just once he’d give it to me, without a testimony to my brother first.
“You called it right,” I said with a mild shrug, determined not to let it build into the kind of brawl he and Bud went in for. “It was just a smart-aleck wisecrack.”
But I’d thought about saying: When did you change your mind about being a preacher, or did you always think you ought to be a TV star?
He looked down at the ground. “Maybe I’m touchy, son, because I don’t like certain things I have to do myself.” Then he looked up and gave me one of those little smiles he pulled on camera, right before he made some kind of confession about how hard it was to ask for money, how much it was against his nature. (A week didn’t go by they didn’t flash the 800 numbers, and the “Call in your contribution” sign following them.)
He said, “This TV business is like a bottomless pit, Jesse. It was a lot simpler in the old days. We just passed the plate.”
I could have said a lot back before he trotted down to the house to mix his martini before dinner, but I decided to shove it. I said, “It’s not your fault, Dad.”
He said that wasn’t what he wanted to hear, really, and I raised my hand and let it drop in a gesture of helplessness, because it wasn’t what I wanted to say, really.
Then he clapped one hand around my shoulder, hugged me, and got even in his own way, calling me Bud by accident, as he gave his usual end-of-conversation benediction. “I love you, son. I love you, Bud.”
Then he corrected himself. “Jesse.”
He feinted an embarrassed little punch near my chin
, and I tried to let him off the hook by laughing hard with him.
Eleven
OPAL RINGER
“HERE’S A TWENTY-SEVEN-year-old sweeper in an industrial plant whose impossible dream is going into business for himself! May the dream come true! It’s up to you!”
“God Bless America” was playing softly in the background while Jesse’s father reached out from the balcony to take another ribbon off The Good Turn Tree.
“He’s a good showman, I’ll give him that,” Brother Dudley said, running his palm across his bald head, a glass of Flavor-Aid in his other hand, as he lay back in Daddy’s Barcalounger, with his feet up in the air. “He’s right up there with P. T. Barnum or the Ringling Brothers.”
“If you like circuses,” Daddy said. “They were circus people. … Oh, I admit, I admit, Guy Pegler’s got more tricks up his sleeve than a hound dog’s got fleas in August.”
“Well, we got some tricks up our sleeves, too, Royal. We just got to learn to let people know about them.”
“We got no tricks. We got The Power, that’s what we got to let people know. I’m going to get in my van and go up and down the streets of this town, and the next town, and the next one after that. I’m aiming for five hundred people on our Saturday Soaking.” He shot me a look. “Including you, Opal.”
“I know including me,” I said.
Daddy was still sitting at the card table, where they’d finished dividing up the offering from the morning service at The Hand. Brother Dudley’d grown six legs and they’d split three hundred dollars, but Daddy said there’d likely be more coming in next Wednesday night, once word got out Brother Dudley’d be back then. Daddy said pray God there’d be more on the way, because we were in debt up to our necks now. It was the reason for the Saturday-night Soaking, a twenty-four hour prayer/healing session to “help The Hand help the Lord help you.”… Bobby John had his own idea to drag Guy Pegler to a memorial service for Willard Peyton, said Dr. Pegler owed Willard that much, and he’d be a drawing card, likely donate some of the money he got from Willard. (Daddy’d said it was a dumb idea and Bobby John went off to Drive-In Burger in a snit, to work the afternoon shift.)