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“That’s the trouble,” he said. “I get all worked up over a sermon, and then, on Sunday, it just disappears into thin air. What have I got to show for it?”
“People are thinking about it.”
“Yeah? Maybe. Sometimes I wish I was, say, a cobbler or a furniture maker—someone who actually produced something, you know, an object. Think of working all week and then having a nice, solid chair. You could show it to your friends, take a picture of it. Hell, you could sit in it.”
“But this way you’re using your head.”
“My head only gets in the way.” His ice cream started to drip, spilling down the side of the cone onto his fingers. He slurped along the edge of the chocolate with his tongue and then borrowed my napkin to mop up. “Why can’t they make this stuff colder, so you can at least have a normal conversation before it melts?” he grumbled.
A maroon Chevy packed with hoods cruised down Walker Street, slowing to check out the action at the Dairy Queen. A boy in the front seat spotted me and called out something I couldn’t understand.
“Was that a friend of yours?” Reverend Vaughn asked.
“No, he’s just a hood. His name’s Larry. He used to be in my class, but he flunked.”
“Oh. Charming guy.”
The car swerved and turned left up Church Street.
The minister stood and walked over to the trash bin. “I suppose I shouldn’t complain,” he said, dumping a wad of sticky napkins into the metal container. “By Friday I’ll be wrapped up in another sermon and won’t have time to think about whether it’s worth it. At least this keeps me occupied. Shall we go?”
Suddenly, the screech of skidding tires tore through the damp air. The sound rose, then fell, then rose again. Reverend Vaughn stopped and turned his head to listen. With a long, rubbery whine, the maroon Chevy shot out of Gora Street and made a skidding turn onto Walker. An approaching milk truck jolted noisily to a stop, and the Chevy slid sideways across the pavement, stopping just short of the sidewalk. The wheels dug in again, and the Chevy raced up toward the Dairy Queen.
“What the hell’s this?” mumbled Reverend Vaughn.
The hood named Larry was leaning out the front window on the passenger side, and a hood I didn’t recognize was halfway out a window in back. They were yelling and waving their arms. From the side, the car looked like some kind of big insect with a head full of jointed feelers. The Chevy roared up to the Dairy Queen and swept into the gravelly parking lot. The wheels on the right side missed part of the driveway and bounced off the curb.
“Jesus Christ!” yelled the minister. He grabbed for me, wrapping a long arm around my shoulder and turning his back on the car as a shield. The Chevy braked and swerved across the parking lot, just a few feet in front of us, churning up a cloud of gravel and dust. Larry and his buddies kept screaming. I took a moment to nestle my head into the soft place on Reverend Vaughn’s chest, just beneath his shoulder. A clean, starchy smell, faintly dizzying, came off his clothes.
The Chevy finished its turn and without stopping roared out of the driveway and on down Walker, the hoods still leaning out the windows making nonsense noises. At best, the sounds were like a recitation of vowels, screamed at full volume: “A-E-I-O-U! A-E-I-O-U!” The noise trailed off as the car rocketed down Walker.
The girl working in the Dairy Queen rapped on the glass window, and Reverend Vaughn dropped his arm from around my shoulder. “Did you know those boys?” she asked in an excited voice.
“Hell, no,” he said.
The girl looked startled. She’d probably never heard a clergyman swear before.
Reverend Vaughn dumped what was left of his cone in the trash can. He asked if I was all right, and I nodded. “Then let’s get out of here before Attila and the Huns come back,” he said.
“Oh, you do know them,” the girl called out as we left.
TWENTY
In the evening, the sky cleared and the moon came out. As I lay in bed, a shaft of moonlight, so thick and silvery it seemed to have weight, poured through the slit between the curtains and pressed down on my legs. My pulse had started pounding back at the Dairy Queen, and it hadn’t slowed, beating along like something apart from me, a tiny motor racing with the much larger engine in the hoods’ car. Is it possible to have a heart attack at sixteen? To calm myself, I sat up and looked out the window. The backyard was all shades of gray and black, like a wood carving in a book, or an old, faded photograph. The Porter house was completely dark. Mr. and Mrs. Porter always went to bed dreadfully early, and, of course, Grandma Porter was usually ahead of them. Several times, from across the yard, I’d watched her tuck herself in, probably eager to start dreaming again of her escape. What was his name? Harry. Harry was coming to rescue her. It occurred to me that we all had our white knights. Grandma Porter had Harry. Bunny had Eddie. Mrs. Vernon had Jesus. And I had Reverend Vaughn.
I lay back down on the bed. There, I told myself. That ought to prove how realistic I was being. Harry, Eddie, Jesus—and Reverend Vaughn. What an idiot I was. It was ridiculous to think he cared a whit for me—or, at least, a whit more than he cared for any of the other people in the Congo. He was a minister doing his job, that was all. He was supposed to seem interested in people and their problems. Still … what about all the time he’d spent with me and the talks we’d had? Those weren’t normal, preacherly conversations. He didn’t open up like that with everyone. And at the Dairy Queen, he’d pulled me to him at the first sign of trouble. He didn’t push me to safety, or step in the way. What he did was … well, he gave me a kind of embrace. I could still feel, on my cheek, the slippery softness of his fine white shirt. Had I closed my eyes? I shouldn’t have, but I think I did. I actually fit there, right under his arm.
I remembered that when I was little, I used to cut out paper dolls and save them in a shoebox. After a while, I had dozens of paper dolls—mothers, fathers, sons, daughters—dolls of all shapes and sizes. Day after day, I’d take them out, shuffling them constantly into new families, testing how a blue cardboard son fit with a family made of drawing paper, or how a father clipped from an illustration in the Saturday Evening Post got along with a mother in a Life photograph. Thinking back, I realized that I’d obeyed only one rule with the families—a single, constant rule that was frightening for a tall girl, but still I never broke it: The father had to be taller than the mother. How do you fight an instinct like that?
I wished Bunny were more help in all this. She should have picked up some romantic insights over the years—though maybe that was wishful thinking, given the men she’d chosen. Anyway, I could tell she didn’t like Reverend Vaughn; at least, she didn’t like to talk about him. I’d bring him up and she’d complain or change the subject. It was funny, Grandmother had been the same way about Bunny when Bunny talked about her boyfriends. Of course, Bunny was almost obsessive about it. Something about being at Grandmother’s house made Bunny babble on about the latest man in her life. It drove Grandmother crazy. Bunny would be going on, and Grandmother’s knitting would get faster and faster, the needles clicking away like the sound of a typewriter.
She never actually criticized Bunny, though once, at the end of dinner, after Bunny had been rambling on about Lester Vincent and about some terrific job he was about to get, Grandmother got up to clear the dishes and said in a soft voice, “A woman’s only supposed to have one man in her life.” Thinking about it later, I realized that she said it when she did so there couldn’t be any arguing. She just dropped the idea there for all of us and went into the kitchen. Of course, for her there was only one man. She was married for thirty-one years to Arthur Stoneham, a farmer. He died long before I was born—before Bunny was born, too, as a matter of fact. He and Grandmother weren’t Bunny’s real parents. Bunny’s not even sure who her mother was, probably some farm girl from around Indian Falls who got in trouble. The girl needed someone to take her baby, and Grandmother was lonely without Arthur around. Grandmother had had four children of her own—three boys and a girl—but by the time Bunny arrived, they’d grown up and moved away. We never saw them much, and they were hardly ever mentioned, by Bunny or by Grandmother.
Bunny was devoted to Grandmother and we used to go up to the farm all the time when she was alive. Tom and I hated those trips. To us, the farm seemed terribly lonely and primitive. The animals were gone by then, except for a few old geese that dirtied up the yard and nipped at you if you got too close, and the rickety old house was usually chilly. Grandmother always wore layers of wool sweaters.
In those days, she was too old to keep things up by herself. Grandmother was in her eighties when we knew her. She had been small to begin with, and as she grew old, her back had developed a slight curve, so she was always hunched over. She was sweet to Tom and me, but she never talked much. By then, she was warm and content there inside her sweaters and didn’t need anyone else to keep her company.
Bunny took it hard when Grandmother died. It happened in the winter, when I was eleven. The Indian Falls sheriff called on a Saturday afternoon. Grandmoth
