Wild Things Page 4

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  Henry came back near sundown, but it wasn’t long before I was wishing he hadn’t. At first he seemed okay, tired but civil, even forked over my fifty dollars when Fred testified he’d seen the cat.

  “He’s black and white and has a mustache!” I told him.

  “Well, I haven’t seen him with my own eyes, now have I?” Henry said.

  “Fred saw him. Didn’t you, Fred?”

  Fred nodded. “Big fella. Must weigh twelve or thirteen pounds. Watched him swallow half a catfish from last night’s supper.”

  Henry looked doubtful, like maybe we’d cooked up this story between us.

  “And guess what else?” I said, waving the bills in the air. “I got arrested!”

  “What?” Henry turned to Fred.

  “Sheriff Bean put on a little show,” Fred explained.

  “It wasn’t any show! I got fingerprinted and Fred had to pay a fine.”

  “Fine?” Henry asked.

  “Twelve whole packs of Juicy Fruit,” I told him.

  “Sheriff Bean’s quit tobacco again,” Fred put in.

  “I see,” Henry said.

  “He says if I get so much as a sprained ankle, he’ll put you in jail and throw away the key!”

  “There’s justice for you,” Henry muttered.

  “And after that, I got released into Fred’s custody and met the Padre and Bessie!”

  “Bessie all right?” Henry asked.

  “She had a fine day,” Fred told him. “How about you?”

  Henry sighed and looked grumpy. More so after Fred handed him a pile of phone messages, all from the same woman, who’d called three or four times since Fred and I had been back. Henry cursed and stormed off to his workshop out back the second he read her name.

  I headed for my room. Past experience with angry grown-ups had taught me to get out of the line of fire. A few minutes later Fred’s truck pulled out of the drive. Henry’s machines started up out back and his miserable music blared. He’d forgotten all about me. I brushed my teeth, took up my notebook, and climbed into bed.

  I looked at all the things Fred and I had charged to Henry on our trip into town, mostly clothes for the coming winter: a warm jacket, two sweaters, three pairs of jeans, and a half-dozen long-sleeved shirts in different colors. Not one item was a hand-me-down or thrift-store special with stained places or holes you had to tuck in or wear a sweater over so nobody saw. Everything was really and truly new, still in the plastic packages with price tags attached. A half-dozen pairs each of new socks and underwear sat on top of my dresser, and on the floor of my closet was a pair of new sneakers that didn’t rub my heels or pinch my toes, alongside my prized new possession: a pair of red leather boots almost too beautiful to wear.

  I lay back on the pillows remembering the good parts of the day, starting with the cat. He was big and black with a white bib and belly and four white feet, plus a triangle of white around his nose, and a black spot like half a mustache to one side. We sat in Fred’s truck, still and quiet, watching him eat every bit of food, after which he looked up at us with sleepy green-gold eyes, licked his muzzle, and then lumbered back to his weeds.

  Sheriff Bean’s blue lights flashed behind us almost as soon as we left the drive. He was short and round and wore sunglasses and a cowboy hat with a star stuck to the front. He had a wart on the end of his nose that would’ve made me crosseyed if it had been mine, and his teeth were tobacco-stained dark brown.

  “Looks like we got us a couple of dangerous criminals,” he said sternly, peering into the driver’s side. Then he lifted his sunglasses and smiled his brown smile, and he and Fred laughed.

  After Fred and I went shopping, we met him at the sheriff’s department, where he fingerprinted me. He said it was just for fun, but I heard him whisper to Fred, “Now, if she ever goes missing, we’ll have ’em on file.”

  He told me all four of his girls were grown now, and if I took a dislike to Henry, he and Mrs. Bean had empty bedrooms waiting. Then Fred’s cell phone rang and Fred looked worried, but it was only Bessie wondering where in the heck we were.

  Fred and Bessie lived at the end of a long, winding drive planted on either side with sunflowers, zinnias, and marigolds. Around their big log cabin, all kinds of flowers in every color reached for the sky or tumbled out of the beds. The air was busy with bees, yellow and blue butterflies, and little green and red hummingbirds that zipped up, down, backward, and sideways through the air like a tiny flying circus. One even came and hovered within a foot of my nose, studying me. There were other birds, too, black-capped chickadees and sparrows and bright red cardinals, to name some I knew.

  Fred said that he used to farm tobacco, but it didn’t pay anymore.

  “Now I just make the land beautiful for Bessie and sell flowers to the fancy flower markets. You wouldn’t believe what people’ll pay for a half-dozen sunflowers these days,” he said.

  “How much?”

  “Five or six dollars, retail. Bessie says folks are starved for beauty.”

  “Huh.” I’d never thought how a person might be hungry for beauty.

  “Mostly the flowers give her something to look at. It’s hard having to stay in bed.”

  “Henry can’t fix her?” I asked.

  “Not all the way. She wouldn’t even consider the heart transplant he recommended.”

  “I bet he could do it.”

  “He offered, but that wasn’t the point. Bessie believes a body’s beating heart makes that person who they are, that if they took out her heart she wouldn’t be herself anymore. She’s sure she wouldn’t recognize me without her own heart to tell her who I was. And she doesn’t even want to think what might happen if she had a stranger’s heart inside her.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Bessie was an unusual thinker. Fred said, “I know that look, but there’s no reasoning with somebody who believes such things. It’s like trying to argue somebody out of believing in angels. And she believes in them, too.”

  He shook his head and parked the pickup behind an old sedan that didn’t look like it had been driven in a while. A faded bumper sticker on its trunk read: Driving under the Influence of the Holy Spirit.

  He saw me reading it. “That’s Bessie,” he said. “Just so you know.”

  We stepped into the homiest place I’d ever seen. A tiny old woman lay propped up in the four-poster bed in the center of the living room. All around it were big overstuffed chairs with patchwork quilts and plump pillows thrown over them. Curtains in multicolored patterns hung in the windows, like something out of the story of Aladdin. Lamps made of tinted glass threw colors onto the walls, and prisms hanging from the curtain rods made little shivering rainbows everywhere. A kitchen area to one side had a big wooden table with cushiony chairs all round, and on the other side of the room a huge claw-footed bathtub peeked out from behind a beaded curtain.

  I could tell the old woman in the bed had been pretty when she was young. A sparkle seemed to come from inside her. Her eyes were almond-shaped and soft brown, and she wore a tie-dyed cloth around her hair like a turban. She was sewing on a quilt that was held tight by a big wooden hoop in her lap and talking a mile a minute to a pink-faced man with wisps of white hair combed over his balding pink head. He sat hunched up in one of the big chairs, his hands resting on the crook of a cane between his legs.

  “Father,” she said as her eyes lit on me, “I’m having a vision.”

  “Then I’m having it too,” said the old man, turning stiffly in my direction. “I’m Father Philip.”

  “Mostly known as the Padre,” Bessie added.

  “I’d get up,” he said, “but I’m old and decrepit.”

  “I’m Bessie, honey,” the woman told me, smiling. She set her sewing down and reached toward me with both small hands, so I couldn’t help but take them in mine.

  “Zoë,” I said.

  She leaned forward and pressed my cheeks in her cool palms. She smelled like cinnamon. “I prayed and pra
yed for God to send me a child, and you look as if you could use some holy mothering. What on earth took you so long to get here?”

  “I don’t really know,” I said.

  She and Father Philip looked at each other and laughed, and Fred just stood there, shaking his head. “I’ll make your tea,” he told her, moving off into the kitchen.

  “You made all these quilts?” I asked, settling in a big chair.

  “Every one,” she said. “Gives me something to do besides watch television and worry over the sorry state of people’s souls.”

  “You let me worry about that,” said the old man.

  Bessie turned to me. “The Padre’s having trouble with his sermon.”

  “You’re a preacher?” I asked him.

  “Apparently not,” he said. “Not a good one, anyway.”

  “Our congregation’s complaining,” Bessie said. “They say he gives the same sermon every Sunday.”

  “And it’s true, really,” the old man said cheerfully.

  “You say exactly the same thing every week?” I asked.

  “Pretty much,” he said.

  Bessie stabbed her needle into the quilt. “I say he should keep right on saying it till they hear.”

  “Mrs. Wilson says I’m a broken record,” said the old man, not seeming to mind the criticism one bit.

  I made a face. “I met her.”

  “Old cow,” Bessie agreed.

  “Sounding unchristian in there,” called Fred from the kitchen.

  “Oh, hush up, you old heathen,” Bessie said. “We’re speaking gospel truths.”

  “So what is it you’re saying over and over?” I asked.

  “That we should love God and each other,” the Padre replied matter-of-factly. “That’s the heart of the matter.”

  I thought a lot could be said for his message, except the God part.

  “Maybe,” I ventured, “it’s how you’re saying it. I could help you write it, except …”

  “Except what?” the Padre asked.

  “God’s not really my favorite subject.”

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  I hesitated.

  “Spit it out,” Bessie said. “We speak our minds around here.”

  “And then some,” Fred said, coming back with her tea and several pills on a tray. He set the tray on Bessie’s lap with a look of worried adoration.

  “Well,” I said, “if I ever come face to face with God Almighty, He’s got some serious explaining to do. I got a whole list of things to ask Him, starting with why He gave me to the mama He did.”

  They all three stared at me for a few seconds, but two shakes later you never heard a roomful of people laugh so hard.

  “Honey,” Bessie said, “you and I are going to be best friends.”

  “You know,” the Padre said, “a story along those lines might be just the thing. A story about Saint Teresa of Avila.”

  I knew some about saints. Manny’s mama, Rita, was a regular churchgoer, and she’d hauled me with her to Sunday Mass sometimes. She talked about Saint This One and Saint That One like they were her next-door neighbors or people she’d just run into at the grocery store, except that they wore halos. “I asked Saint Martha to get Manny Sr. off his lazy butt to help me with the dishes,” she’d say, or “I’d still be wandering the mall parking lot if Saint Anthony hadn’t helped me find my Eldorado.” Rita said every saint had special abilities, like Saint Anthony finding lost things and Saint Martha helping housewives. She herself had been named after Saint Rita, patron saint of the impossible, because the doctor had told Rita’s mama that she couldn’t have kids. Rita’s second favorite was Saint Jude Thaddeus, helper of hopeless causes. Rita was forever burning poor Saint Jude’s ear about Manny.

  “I’ve never heard of Saint Teresa,” I said.

  “You remind me of her,” said the Padre.

  “How come?”

  “About five hundred years ago Saint Teresa was riding through Spain on a donkey. God knocked her off the donkey into the dirt and said, ‘That’s how I treat My friends.’ And she replied, ‘That’s why You have so few of them.’”

  The Padre gave us a sly look and we all laughed.

  “Saint Teresa, one,” I said, licking my finger and marking an imaginary score in the air. “God, nothing.”

  “Nice touch,” the Padre said.

  “That story’d start a fine sermon,” I told him, “but Mrs. Wilson won’t like it.”

  “She’ll have a fit!” Bessie cried, cackling.

  “You be sure and tell her where you got the idea,” I said.

  “Y’all are piling up serious purgatory time today,” Fred teased.

  But Bessie just grinned. “Worth every suffering minute.”

  “I know another story,” the Padre said.

  “Another saint story?”

  He considered. “Could be.”

  I sat back in my chair.

  “It’s about the day Henry hung the crucifix Bessie hired him to make in the church,” the Padre said. “It was four or five years ago, about an hour before the Saturday vigil Mass. I was in the sacristy, right off the altar. A few members of the parish had come to church early and were kneeling in prayer. Henry was up on a rickety ladder at the back of the altar. The plaster he was trying to drill into was crumbling, and Henry was telling that plaster where it could go and calling upon any number of holy names.”

  “That’s Henry,” I said.

  The Padre nodded. “This went on for some time. One of the more diplomatic church ladies came to me, all anxious and wringing her hands, and she said, ‘Father, Father, you’ve got to speak to Dr. Royster about his blaspheming! The parishioners are complaining. Please ask him to stop.’

  “I said, ‘I’m aware of the situation, Abigail, and sympathetic to your discomfort, but I never interrupt a man when he’s praying.’”

  We all burst out laughing again, Bessie most of all.

  “I’ll never forget, Lucinda Wilson came in right after Henry finished putting up that cross,” the Padre said. “She took one look at it and said to Henry’s face, ‘That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.’ And Henry told her, ‘If you close your eyes, it will go away.’”

  Bessie clapped her hands, said she never tired of hearing that story, and demanded another, but Fred told her she needed her afternoon nap. She fussed about that, saying he kept her chained to her bed, but I thought she looked tired.

  She seemed to read my mind, because as Fred was helping the Padre rise from his chair, she reached out for my hands again, looked me in the eye, and said, “Don’t let Fred turn you into an old mother hen. One’s more than enough around here. And tell Henry Royster I said he’s the second-sweetest man who ever lived.”

  Sweet was not a word I associated with Henry, and I swear she saw me thinking that, too, because she squinted and said, “You’ll see.”

  “You a mind reader?” I asked her.

  She pressed my cheeks between her cool hands. “Honey,” she whispered, “your face is as clear as glass.”

  I was going to have to watch myself around Bessie.

  Fred and I drove the Padre back to his church, which was not far up the road from Henry’s. It was a white frame country church with a steeple and a graveyard beside it. A couple of old ladies looked up from arranging flowers in the headstone urns and waved. The Padre shuddered and slid down in his seat. “Hideous,” he said, shaking his head. “A slap in the Creator’s face.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Plastic flowers. Abominable things.”

  This was some strange holy man. “If you close your eyes …” I reminded him.

  “Quite right,” he said, smiling. “Please get me inside so I don’t have to look at them.”

  The church was empty and hushed. He showed me the crucifix Henry had made for the altar, as unusual a thing as I’d ever seen. It wasn’t at all like the crucifixes in Rita’s church. It was made with just two pieces of curved silver metal att
ached to a plain darker metal cross. The Padre pointed out that the lighter silver metal represented Jesus’ outstretched arms and twisted body, and that spare as the piece was, it was exactly right. The metal figure seemed to be dying, rising, comforting, and yearning all at the same time.

  Loud banging from Henry’s workshop interrupted my replay of the afternoon, but I wasn’t letting anything spoil it. I’d won a bet, been fingerprinted, helped write a sermon, and met a mind reader, all in one day. If Henry wanted to be an old crank, let him be one. He could close his eyes anytime; I’d go away.

  Henry hammered on, but I drifted off. Next thing I knew, a phone was ringing. Somebody had switched off my light, tucked me under the covers, and set my notebook and pencil on the night table beside a glass of water. I slipped out of bed. From the window I saw the light from Henry’s bedroom still shining on the lawn below and heard the sound of his sleepy voice upstairs. I climbed the steps and stood in the dark hall, listening.

  “I know, Susan, I got your messages…. Yes, well, something more urgent came up and your check slipped my mind, I’m sorry.… You know, Susan, it’s late. It’s been a long day and I’m just too tired to go there tonight. How about I concede that I’m a low-down, no-account rat and put the check in the mail tomorrow? How would that be?”

  I stepped silently inside the room as he slammed down the phone. He pushed his glasses up on top of his bare head and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. He was lying on his bed, dressed in a work shirt and jeans, a book facedown on his chest. Folders and papers and the sheaf of phone messages Fred had taken for him littered the bedspread. He looked up and saw me standing there, and set his glasses back on his nose.

  “Sorry about the phone,” he said.

  “So are you?” I asked him.

  “What?”

  “A low-down, no-account rat.”

  He snorted. “My ex-wives certainly think so.”

  “How many wives have you had?”

  “Three.”

  “All three of them divorced you?”

  “Just two.”