Send Me Down a Miracle (3 page)

"Alabama isn't New Jersey."

"So?"

"So you think you can just move on to New York just easy as pie? Who would you live with? All your kin's right here."

"Adrienne. She said I could. She said when Casper just got too small I could stay with her in New York and really discover myself and my art. She calls me 'soul of my soul.' Did you ever? We're artistic soulmates. And soon as she's done with her sensory deprivation project she's going to give me an art lesson. She said for me to be drawing and practicing all this month so I'll be ready. Isn't it just so splendid? Really, Sharalee, isn't it marvelous?"

Sharalee stuffed another cookie into her mouth and rubbed her greasy hands on the sides of her shorts. "If you're such soulmates all of a sudden what are you doing out here with me? Anyway, I'm the artistic one. I make all my own clothes and you don't even know which end of the needle is—"

"Law, Charity, you better git on home, Daddy's pitching a fit!"

I turned around and saw my sister, Grace, and her best friend, Boo, standing in the hole in the wall, panting.

"What's going on?" I asked, already hurrying around the coffins to the hole.

"All's I know is Daddy saw Mad Joe tending that Miss Adrienne's yard, 'cause Miss Adrienne hired him to do it, and Daddy went and said something to him and then Mad Joe said something that got Daddy plenty mad and he came home and said for me and Boo to find you and he said, 'This instant!'"

Boo nodded his head in emphasis.

I didn't even say good-bye to Sharalee. I ran along to the house with Grace and Boo, and there was Daddy waiting for me out on the porch, pacing and jingling the change in his pockets.

He stopped when he saw us coming. "Boo, you run on home now," he said. "And, Grace, you git on in the house and have yourself a bath. You look as if you spent all day in the mud."

The two of them scattered, leaving me to face my daddy. He stood looking down on me from the top of the steps and his face wore such a dark fury I scrunched my toes down into the dirt to keep his look from knocking me over.

I cleared my throat and spoke up. "Grace said you were wanting to see me, so I hurried on home."

"You went to see Miss Dabney?"

"Yes, sir. You never said not to, did you?" I tried to remember. I tried to think back to what he said after Adrienne left that afternoon. I remembered him watching her step off the porch and walk out the drive. I saw him shake his head when she met up with Mad Joe and the two of them started talking in the middle of the road.

"Isn't it fitting," he had said. "The two of them meeting up." He shook his head again and said, "That woman's of the devil."

Then later at dinner he said something about not consorting with the devil and he pounded the table, but I was thinking he was meaning in a general sense. Lots of times he worked on his sermons in his head at the dinner table and he'd just blurt out a sentence he was wanting to use and wouldn't even realize he'd spoken out loud.

"And what's this I hear about a picnic?" Daddy interrupted my thinking.

"Picnic?"

"Mad Joe's set one of his signs out at the end of Miss Dabney's drive all about a—a coming-out picnic. He said you gave Miss Dabney the idea."

My toes were now scrunching so hard the pain of it was shooting clear up the front of my legs.

"She was wanting a way to please you. Daddy. She said the two of you got off on the wrong foot and she feels that when she offended you she offended the whole town."

Daddy spread his legs apart and folded his aims across his chest. "And she's right."

"She said folks were dropping by to take back their pies and such, and they were saying how they were sorry to have bothered her and to forgive them for displaying such unwanted hospitality, and if she didn't want to be taken into the fold, far be it from them to be shoving her into it.

"She was just wanting a way to make it up to them, and so—well, I thought, well, the church picnic is so much fun and everybody comes and it's the biggest event of the year, so I thought—"

"You just thought another one in the middle of the hottest summer on record would be a good idea?"

"I didn't think of it that way. I was just—"

"You weren't thinking at all! My picnic is in the fall because so many of the older folks can't handle the heat. Think of Miss Tuney Mae."

I pinched at my leg and thought about Miss Tuney Mae, ninety if she's a day, and nothing but a mouth and bones.

"My picnic has had years of fine-tuning: where to park the cars, who brings what, time of year, time of day. That's why it works, that's why it's the event of the year. What does Miss Dabney think, she's going to step out her door come the end of July and there we'll all be with food in our hands?"

"I said I'd take care of the details." I said this so low I knew Daddy didn't hear me.

"What?"

I looked up at him. "Daddy, you're right. I wasn't thinking. I don't know what I'm going to do."

"You're going to pull the sign up and be done with it, is what. Either that or you can go fetch yourself a switch sized to fit the deed and have yourself a whipping."

"But I've already made arrangements." My voice was whining. "I talked to the Cobb sisters and they're setting up the grills, and Old Higgs is fishing up the catfish, and freezing it, and I've got—"

"The Cobb sisters!" Daddy started pacing and jingling his change again. Then he turned on me, throwing up his arms and knocking his glasses off center. "They'll blow the place up! Neither one of them's got a lick of sense."

"Daddy, please. Don't let this picnic fall apart. It can't. It just can't. I promised. And, really, Adrienne isn't of the devil, you'll see. She's in there fasting and everything, just like Jesus. In the Bible it says—"

"Just like Jesus! Child, don't you open your mouth again. Don't you say another blasphemous word, or I'll fetch the switch myself. Now, are you going to march yourself over there this instant and pull up that sign?"

"Yes, sir."

Daddy pointed at the road. "Then git!"

And I got, but once I got past the house I slowed down to a dragging crawl and cried the rest of the way there, just knowing the hurt that would be pounding in Adrienne's heart when she came out and saw there wasn't a forgiving soul in all of Casper.

I did as Daddy told me and removed the picnic sign from Adrienne's yard, and right away folks started rolling into our driveway wanting to see Daddy. They were all saying the same thing: Someone had taken away Daddy's picnic sign!

Miss Tuney Mae said, "And after you was setting this town a good example and turning the other cheek and all."

Mattie-Lynn Pettit nodded. "Forgiving Miss Adrienne and her New York rudeness is just plain Christian, and I'd like to know who in this town took down your sign."

Then Hank Dooley called out from his truck, "I'm just wanting to see what a woman deprived of her senses looks like."

And Old Higgs, standing in our driveway with his fishing pole in one hand and a cooler in the other, said, "I already caught me a mess of catfish. What am I going to do with it all hold a raffle?"

Before the evening was over Daddy was saying how the picnic would certainly go on as planned and he would have Mad Joe make up a new sign. And by the time of Adrienne's coming-out and the picnic, Daddy was running the whole show like it was his idea all along, and never a word was said between us that it wasn't. But, law, it was a long thirty days.

Planning the picnic and teaching Vacation Bible School and drawing pictures for Adrienne to see helped fill up the days, but that still left the mornings and the evenings; it still left too much time for thinking about Mama.

Every morning I'd sit up in bed and sniff the air, hoping that Mama had arrived home in the early dawn and was downstairs frying up bacon and eggs for the family the way she used to. At night I'd lie awake wondering where she was, what she was doing, if she was missing me. I'd try to remember her voice, frightened that I could forget how it sounded in such a short time. She called a couple of times and both times it was so noisy in the background with Cousin Maggie and Aunt Nooney and them laughing and carrying on that Mama didn't hear half of what I said, and most of what she said back was, "What? What did you say?" I asked her when she was coming home. I asked her both times, and both times she said how much she missed me and then asked to speak to Grace.

Grace once asked Daddy when Mama was coming home, and he was so mad at her for bothering him with such a question he sent her off to her room to memorize seven Bible verses. From then on, Grace always looked at Daddy like she suspected him of hiding Mama away in the broom closet or something.

Vacation Bible School was only two weeks long, meaning I still had two more weeks to wait for that picnic, and if they didn't drag on like a sweatin' dog on a dusty trail! I couldn't set still long enough to do any decent drawing anymore, and I couldn't help myself, every day I had to walk over to the Dabney place just to see it. Scary thing was, the house still looked the same as it always had, standing out in the field, boarded up and leaning and all. If it weren't for Mad Joe keeping up the yard, and the new sign for the picnic, I would swear I had imagined the whole splendid, marvelous thing.

Finally the day arrived and the whole town was just buzzing and bustling with activity. I was cooking up some of Mama's chicken delish and looking out the kitchen window, and I could see Daddy rushing between the house and the church, sending folks off with chairs and tables and extra supplies and giving orders to everybody. I could see the stream of cars going down our street to the Dooleys' store for some sugar or eggs or flour so folks could make up their picnic specialties, and I could see Grace and Boo taking the shortcut to Adrienne's with a bag of charcoal between them, dropping it every few feet.

By eleven o'clock we were ready to go, and me and Daddy grabbed up Mama's chicken delish and the jug of iced tea and stuff and hopped in the car. Daddy was wanting to get over to Adrienne's before the Cobb sisters. Miss Becky and Miss Anna, had a chance to start up the grill, so we were speeding along fast as we could.

By the time we pulled onto Adrienne's freshly mowed field, the fire was already going. Problem was, it wasn't in the grill.

'Course we didn't know what was going on at first. All we could see was Miss Becky chasing Miss Anna round and round. She had her accordion in her hands and was squeezing it in and out and holding it up in this peculiar way, like she was about to clobber Miss Anna over the head with it.

Grace and Boo were there, too, jumping up and down and shouting something. We couldn't tell what till Daddy pulled up onto the edge of the lawn and we both jumped out of the car. Then we could hear, clear as clear, Grace and Boo yelling, "Stop, drop, and roll! Stop, drop, and roll!"

Mad Joe was coming round the corner of the house with a hose in his hand, and the two Cobb sisters just kept screaming and running round in circles. That's when I noticed that Miss Anna's braid was on fire and I realized Miss Becky was trying to put it out with the air from her accordion.

Daddy must have realized what was going on about the same time as I did, 'cause he right away dove into the backseat of the car and pulled out the fat jug of iced tea. Then he charged after the sisters, unscrewing the lid and tossing it behind him as he went. When he caught up to them he held tight to the handle and the bottom of the jug and flung the iced tea at Miss Anna. By then Mad Joe had come along with the hose and he was spraying her and Daddy both, and Miss Anna just stood under the shower of iced tea and water, flapping her arms and kicking out her legs. She didn't stop screaming until Daddy yelled at Mad Joe and Mad Joe dropped the hose. Then, after a polite "Thank you. Able, thank you, Joe," she turned to Miss Becky and shouted, "It's out now, Sister, you can put down the accordion. Becky! I said it's out. Stop puffing that thing at me, it's out."

Daddy set down the jug, kicked his wet leg out to the side like a dog, and pointed his finger at the two women. "When you came by to pick up the grills this morning, what did I say to you?"

"I know—we heard you, Able, but you know Sister, here," Miss Anna said. "I turned my back for just a minute and she managed to set it on fire."

"You said to light the grill," Miss Becky replied, her accordion dangling from her hand like all the spirit had gone out of the thing.

"I said,
'Don't
light the grill. '
Don't
light the grill.
Don't!
"

"Oh," said Miss Becky.

After Daddy helped Miss Anna to her car so she could go home and change, we started up the grills and set up the food tables the Dooleys had dropped off.

Then folks started to arrive, and I could tell by the way they were calling out their windows, and kids and dogs were piling out of cars and hopping off the backs of pickups before they had even stopped moving, that every one of them was just as charged with excitement as I was. It was like we were welcoming home a famous explorer; and maybe that's what Adrienne was, 'cause nobody we knew had ever sat in the dark doing nothing for a whole month before.

Daddy was telling everybody where to park and where to put their food and who should be doing what; and Mad Joe was giving his own directions 'cause he didn't want anyone parking too near the house, where he had planted an herb garden as a surprise for Miss Adrienne. And looking at him all clean-shaven and proud and not drunk at all, I wondered at folks calling him Mad.

I stood over the grill and watched to see that the fire didn't get out of control again, and every single body had to stop by to ask me about Mama. Had I heard from her lately? When was she coming home? Didn't we all just miss her so? After hearing the same old questions a million times I got to understanding why Daddy blew up at Grace. I wanted to send every one of those nosy-bodies off to memorize the whole Bible—frontwards and backwards.

I saw Old Higgs Holkum arrive with Sharalee and her family in their truck. Daddy allowed them to back into the driveway, and I knew that meant that Mr. Marshall had loaded up the coffin.