Send Me Down a Miracle (6 page)

I examined the fringe Sharalee had sewn along the edge of the shawl. "I think it's cool. It's the new me."

"It's the old Adrienne Dabney's what it is, Charity," she mumbled around the bread. "And you know it and so will your papa."

"Well, maybe so, but it's the new me."

"Your daddy would say, if you want to change, you have to start from the inside and then the outside just takes care of itself."

"First of all. Daddy puts it a lot better than that, and second of all, he's talking about the changes that happen when you let Jesus into your life, and third of all, since when do you listen to any of Daddy's sermons?"

"You're not the only one who's changing in this town, miss artsy-smartsy. There now, I'm done." She gulped down the last of her iced tea and I saw the glop of undissolved sugar slip along the glass and into her mouth.

"Law, Sharalee, that's disgusting!"

"Since when? Now, turn around and let me make sure the hem's even before I sew it in."

Right before I left her house, the precious outfit tucked under my arm in a grocery bag, Sharalee dared me to wear it to church on Sunday.

Now here it was Sunday and I was planning to do my first ever back-down on a Sharalee Marshall dare.

I picked up the shawl and wrapped it around me. I pushed aside the large wicker birdcage setting on my bureau and studied myself in the mirror. I noticed how the blue in the print made my eyes look more blue and less "seaworthy gray," as Mama called them.

"Adrienne wouldn't worry about what everyone would say," I told my reflection. I flipped my head forward, then back, to make my hair fluff out more, and then raised my eyebrows to make them look arched like Adrienne's. "What's that, Father dear? You say I look like a tramp?" I gave my reflection an Adrienne laugh. "Nonsense. I'm just young. Father dear. I'm free. I'm an artist." I nodded to myself. "Yes, I'm an artist. I'm an artist. I'm not a preacher lady. I'm a preacher's daughter and I'm an artist." I tossed one long end of the shawl over my shoulder, told myself I wasn't going to back down from this no matter what Daddy said, and turned back to the skirt.

I kept my nerve all the way through putting on the skirt and tank top, with no bra, and all the way through not curling my hair but just sort of teasing it to get it to look a bit wilder, and even all the way through not putting on the stockings, which really everyone should have thanked me for 'cause I hadn't washed them all year, but I lost it right quick when I started for the stairs and heard Daddy arguing with Mama on the phone. I sat up on the top stairs and listened.

"It's obvious you've never heard of resting on the Sabbath," Daddy was saying.

"What do you mean, you're not just a preacher's wife? Of course you are, and I'd like to know what gets into you at those conventions." Daddy listened a minute and then in a raised voice he said, "I know you're not still at the convention. How very well I know it!" He paused, listening again, and then said, "Now, what kind of wild talk is that?" And then, getting angrier and wilder himself, he said, "I think y'all had better come on home. Yes, now. This instant! No, I'm not ordering you, I'm just saying..." Daddy listened again for a long while, and I thought about their last fight.

It happened about a week before Mama left for the Birdcage Collectors' Convention. That morning Mama had gone off to the Dooleys' store for some coffee and toilet tissue, and didn't come back till dinnertime. Turned out she had gone shopping with Aunt Nooney. She claimed she'd run into her at Dooleys' and they just took off on a whim. Daddy said she had been having too many whims lately and it was time she took hold of herself before it got out of hand. Daddy was right, too, 'cause she had been coming home with all kinds of useless stuff. One time she brought home eight bags filled with yellow plastic tulips. She said she was going to fill some of her larger birdcages with them but she never did. Another time she bought several boxes of preemie diapers and Daddy wanted to know if now she was planning to diaper the cages. Mama just fell over hysterical with laughter, which got us all upset, 'cause Mama never thought Daddy was funny before, and she was acting different, not her quiet self atall.

Then the time they had their last fight, there we were all in the kitchen finishing up dinner when Mama came in with three bags filled with what must have been a whole display of Christmas socks. Mama said she got them way marked down since it was almost summer, but Daddy didn't care. He called her behavior outlandish and wanted to know the meaning of it all. And Mama said, "There is no meaning. That's what I like about it. I just bought them." Mama tossed the bags onto the kitchen table, just missing Grace's glass of milk, flopped down in her chair, and said, "I'm tired of everything having meaning, Able." And she looked tired, too. She had been looking tired all the time lately, up until the day she started packing for the convention. Her eyes were droopy looking and her mouth couldn't hold a smile for more than a second, as if her smile were broken from having to use it so much being the preacher's wife. She was going round in a pair of shoes with the heels so worn down on the outside they made her feet slant sideways, and the hem of her favorite brown skirt had come down in the back and she wore it every day anyway.

Daddy told her that he didn't like the changes going on with her, and Mama said Daddy didn't like any kind of change and that was his whole problem. She said, "Everything changes. Able, but you keep trying to hold everything still, pin the whole world down, and you can't. If things don't change they just up and die, and I'm tired of dying. I'm just so tired of it all."

Well, Grace heard that about Mama dying and took off from the table, and Daddy said, "Now see what you've done? You've upset the child."

But it wasn't Mama that Grace was upset with, it was Daddy. She said it was all Daddy's fault Mama was dying, and no amount of reminding her how much Daddy loved Mama and explaining about figures of speech and such could change Grace's mind.

I got so caught up with remembering Daddy and Mama fighting and listening in on their phone conversation that when Daddy said good-bye in this real quiet voice and put down the receiver, I headed on into the kitchen to ask Daddy about Mama coming back and forgot all about my new outfit.

Daddy's hand was still on the receiver, his head bent forward, when I came clomping in wearing the sandals Sharalee had loaned me. Each step made a loud
clomp-clomp
sound on the wood floor, and when I heard them I remembered what I had on and just froze in my tracks. Daddy lifted his head and stared at me like he was catching sight of Lady Godiva with a head shave.

I could feel my face burning but then I thought of how Adrienne stood up in front of all those folks the day before, like she just had a right to do so, and I looked straight at my daddy's face and said, "Morning, Daddy, hope you had a good night's sleep. Mmm, what's for breakfast? I smell something good."

I walked over to the table and with my back to him pulled my chair out. I was about to set down when I felt the chair jerked out from under me. I turned back around and I swanee, what I saw, it wasn't my daddy atall. It was just this monster in Daddy's beige suit and hairpiece. This purple-faced, blood-drooling ape-man was fighting with the chair like it was alive and trying to strangle him. He picked it up with both hands and snarled and yanked it around several times as if he were trying to wad it up into a wooden ball so he could throw it at someone. Then he threw it down and kicked it across the room, pounded on it, and did that fighting yanking thing again. He hit his head on the pink birdcage hanging from the ceiling and his glasses flew off and slid across the floor, but he just kept going at that chair. Then he turned toward me with such fury in his face and pain in his eyes I screamed and flew out of the kitchen and up those stairs. I tore at my outfit like it was on fire. I ignored all the ripping sounds and just kept tearing until it was all off. I heard someone on the stairs and I slammed my door and screamed some more. I screamed while I scraped the comb through my hair and screamed when I saw big clumps of my hair dropping to the dresser. I screamed into my bra and I screamed into last year's sundress with the daisies on it. I screamed into my stockings and screamed when I shredded the left side of the stockings with one of my fingernails and had to take them off. I pulled on the first pair of socks I could find, not caring even if they matched so long as my shoes didn't pinch. Then, feeling dressed to Daddy's satisfaction, I opened my door, ran past someone in the hall, screamed down the stairs and out the side door.

I didn't stop running until I reached the graveyard that lay between our house and the church. My whole body was still shaking and my throat hurt from all my screaming. I set down on the grass and leaned against one of the gravestones. I thought maybe I'd just stay out there forever, maybe just melt into the ground next to one of the dead people. I couldn't stop crying.

"Is that just you. Charity?" I heard Boo whisper from somewhere behind me.

I jumped up and spun around, looking for him while I answered. "Well, who do you think it is, some ghost? Where are you? Grace? Boo?"

Boo stepped out from behind a huge block of granite. Grace stepped out behind him.

"We thought maybe it was the reverend," Grace said.

"The reverend? Does Daddy know you're calling him that?" I wiped the tears off my face.

Grace didn't answer.

I turned on Boo, who stood there looking like a ghost himself in all his baldness. The boy didn't have a hair on his body. Miss Tuney Mae claimed it was because his mama had had some awful fright when he was still in her womb and it caused the both of them to lose their hair; only difference was she got to wear a wig.

"Law, Boo, don't be creeping up on me like that, you hear? Anyway, what are you two up to? I thought you were supposed to be out on the porch, shelling peas."

"We were just wondering what's wrong with the reverend," Boo said.

"Nothing. What do you mean, what's wrong?"

Boo's eyes sort of rolled around in his head a few times, and then he said, "Why was he so angry? You were screaming. Did he beat you?"

I looked at Grace. "'Course not. I swanee, Grace, don't you set him straight on anything?"

Grace just shrugged. "We were scared," she said.

"What are you two inventing now? Calling Daddy the reverend and then thinking he's in there beating me up. Lordy-loo, Grace, you ought to know better."

"I've never seen him so angry," Grace muttered. "We saw through the window. We were scared."

"What was he so mad about?" Boo asked again.

"I don't know. I don't know—maybe 'cause Mama's gone, or maybe he didn't like what I had on, or maybe it was that Jesus chair thing, I don't know. Does there have to be a reason anymore? Seems to me that lately he's just angry to be angry. Law, what I wouldn't give to be with Mama right now—to be anywhere but here."

I turned away from them, walking out of the cemetery and the yard and down the road toward the cornfields. Grace and Boo followed behind me like spies. I walked faster, feeling the sweat on my forehead and under my arms building up to a couple of good trickles. The two of them trotted up alongside of me. I didn't say anything to them and they didn't seem to expect me to, so we marched on in silence, stomping around the cornfields and down the street. I heard a train hooting down the tracks that cut across the road about a half mile away, and its call made something inside me squeeze until I thought I wouldn't be able to take another breath.

Then Grace poked my shoulder and said, "Look, there's Mad Joe."

Sure enough, there he was, down on his knees in front of Adrienne's house, digging in the herb bed and singing some kind of lonesome song.

"Law, if he's got his shotgun we're running the other way," I said.

"He wouldn't shoot us, Charity," Boo said. "We ain't worms."

"Yes, but in his usual Sunday-morning condition we might just look like worms to him. Now I mean it, you two, you stay with me."

"He doesn't look in his usual Sunday condition, though," Grace said. "He's just digging."

"Hey, Mad Joe!" Grace and Boo both called out.

Mad Joe raised up from the garden and waved his trowel.

Grace and Boo took off and were down on their knees digging beside him before I could catch hold of either one of their shirts and stop them.

I hurried across the lawn to catch up.

"Hey, Mr. Joe Dunn, sir," I said, standing behind the three of them, my eyes searching the truck bed beside us for his shotgun.

Mad Joe twisted himself around and sat back on his heels. "Well, gracious me, Charity, look at you. You 'bout as tall as your daddy, I'm thinking." Mad Joe had this delighted look on his face like he was really glad to see me.

I smiled back. "Yes, sir, I am. I'm five foot seven."

"That's good. Yes, siree, that sure is."

Then both of us looked at each other like we were each waiting for the other to say something else.

Mad Joe took off his hat and set it on Boo's head.

Boo lifted his head. "I can't see."

Mad Joe laughed, this
he-he-he
kind of laugh. "You keep it on anyway. You oughtn't to be going round without a hat on, Mr. Boo—and be careful with that rosemary, it ain't holding up so well." He turned back to me. "You here to see the Jesus chair?"

Funny thing, I didn't know why I was there. I hadn't meant to be going anywhere special and then there I was. But now that he asked me, I was wanting awful bad to see the chair, to talk to it.

"Yes, sir," I said.

Mad Joe rubbed his hands together and clumps of dirt dropped to the ground.

"It's a miracle, it sure is," he said.

"Yes, sir."

"I knew it, too. You know that? I knew Miss Adrienne was a messenger sent from Datina."

"Datina—your wife, you mean?" I asked.

"Yes, ma'am, my wife." Mad Joe nodded. "She always telling me to have the faith. Always saying, 'Don't give up on our babies.' Always saying to expect a miracle, and I been waiting. I been waiting on her to send down a miracle, 'cause I know no doctor'll cure my babies—and then, soon as I set eyes on this Miss Adrienne, I knew my Datina was working a miracle. My babies got a book full of paintings of angels, and don't every one of them look like this Miss Adrienne. So I been here every day waiting. Been waiting just to see what my Datina would do next, and Lord have mercy, she done sent me a Jesus chair. Now, you just see if my babies don't get a cure." He turned back around and started digging again, taking the trowel away from Boo and sending him off to fetch the watering can.