The Color of Ordinary Time (3 page)

I squished down that part of me almost as soon as it rose up from the shadows. But I wasn’t fast enough. Ivy caught the harsh look in my eyes the hard set of my jaw, and immediately knew what I was thinking. She’d been around my father enough to know what he would have said, too.

“If your father had suspected any of this, he’d never have let us be friends,” Ivy said as I felt the ridged glare melt from my face, and my jaw unclench.

“He wasn’t so keen on the idea anyway.”

“I know.”

“He always considered me a failure when it came to your family. I was supposed to convert you all to Unbridled Holiness. I didn’t do my job. Sorry. It was a knee-jerk reaction.”

“It’s okay. Like John always says,
Kay Kay’s got her preaching face on.
I understand.”

“Still, it was a rush to judge when all we have is the most basic suspicions. No excuses for that.”

“If you think I haven’t wondered the same thing...”

“Yeah, but you’re her daughter. I’m not even family.”

“They’d disagree if you said that.”

“Sure. But it would still be true.”

The only part of the rest of that day I remember clearly is the walk I took with John that night. John, the oldest of Ivy’s three younger brothers, had been a good friend of mine since his sophomore year of high school, and my freshman year of college. I’m ashamed to say he had tried to befriend me before that, but the combination of his youth, and the fact that he was male, made me keep him at arm’s length. I wasn’t used to having boys show interest in me, even just friendly interest.

We walked the dirt roads that night as we often did, through the corn fields toward town. I gave him the college graduation present I had gotten for him. It was a cookbook about cooking for one. I teased him about all the girls he was stringing along. He teased me about all the men I was supposedly stringing along. We were both persistently single. Me — by choice, in a way. Him, because he only seemed to notice a girl was interested after she gave up on him, and started dating someone else. We did not speak of Ivy. We never spoke of Ivy. Their relationship was close, but not easy. If he had noticed anything odd about her mood, he did not mention it.

I suppose it may seem odd that I don’t remember more. Arriving at the Brandt’s is something I do in much the way I make coffee in the morning. I remember that it happened, I reap the benefits of having performed the actions, and I plan to do it again. But was it yesterday or the day before that I spilled coffee grounds on the floor? Was it the year we were twenty-five, or the year we were twenty-six, that Dory met us on the lawn with limeade instead of ice tea? I just have no idea.

I do know there were hugs exchanged all around when we arrived. John, Mark, Lemuel, and Ivy’s father Linus were called in from the back yard where they were putting plants out in Dory’s garden. I know we were sent up to put our bags in the room that had been Ivy’s all her life. I’m pretty sure that while we were up in Ivy’s white and yellow princess room, I started to unpack. I usually do.

At dinner, we all chatted. Dory carried on for a while about the new pastor at the Lutheran church. She thought he was cute. Linus, never very outspoken, summed him up as
young, nervous, and single
. I remember mentioning I had an appointment that Monday to look over the church paraments and start repairs. But this, too, is a conversation that could have happened any year. I made those paraments, and every year I look them over, and make repairs as needed. I really only remember that the appointment was for a Monday that year, in the light of other events. Context, not the constancy of my memory.

Later that night, after my walk with John, after a game of Monopoly and a glass of wine a piece, Ivy and I would stay up whispering in the dark. She, laying under the frilly yellow canopy of her girlhood bed, while I occupied the trundle bed next to it. We did not talk about fathers, or Dylan Morris, or Dory. That much I remember. Instead we made plans for our vacation. Shopping, reading, getting a jump on our work. It was good to be home.

What I do remember vividly is the next morning.

I guess we all have our own private little traditions. One of mine is that whenever I return to Charity, I buy a new dress to wear to church on Sunday. It’s not that St. Paul Lutheran is a particularly formal congregation. Even if it was, I’m not even a member there anymore. In reality, I guess I barely was a member there. Still, it is my church home in a way no other church will ever really be. So I shop, and I make sure I look nice on Sundays when I’m there. That year I had purchased a sea-green sundress with a light cream sweater to wear over it. I thought I looked very well. Not pretty, exactly, but interesting, and attractive.

I was standing with Linus and Dory in their kitchen, waiting for the others to be ready, drinking a cup of Linus’ good coffee, when the phone rang. Linus answered it, probably expecting it to be a choir member needing a ride, or the pastor wondering about a change for the morning service.

“Keziah, it’s for you,” he said moments later, handing the old-fashioned handset to me in a way that stretched the yellow cord across the kitchen door. As he backed away, and I lifted the phone to my ear, I saw him stage whisper “Susan” to Dory. Dory frowned.

“Hello,” I said.

“Keziah, it’s Susan. I need your help. Your father got arrested. We’re in Dresden, Kentucky. We don’t have any way to get him out. We don’t have the money, and they only want to turn him over to a family member. Please come.”

“Susan, I can’t.”

“Please, Keziah. He doesn’t deserve to be locked up like this. He was just following God’s lead.”

Now Susan and I, neither one of us are idiots. We both knew “following God’s lead” in this case probably meant “was doing exactly what he’s been accused of”. I sighed deeply on the edge of telling her no. Then Susan pulled out the big guns.

“Do it for me, Keziah. If you can’t bring yourself to do it for him, do it for me.”

I sighed again. “I’m on my way.”

“Hurry,” she said.

I hung up the phone and turned to Linus and Dory. “I have to go to Kentucky. Dad’s been arrested.”

“You don’t have to go,” Dory protested.

Linus simply nodded.

*

Of course, there
is
some question about why I would head off to Kentucky on Susan’s request. The fact of the matter was that I owed Susan.

Susan Kline was the best friend my father chose for me by default. She was the only other member of our church who was female, and close to my age. Therefore, she was the only suitable friend for me. It wasn’t her fault or mine that we did not get along. The strange roundabout of our friendship only ever led us back to the beginning again. I hated her because I thought my father liked her better than me. She hated me because I liked Ivy better than her. Round and round we went, both of us forever in second place to the person in the equation that we wanted to please. Eventually — I’m not proud to admit — it was Susan who found the way to take us out of our endless orbit. Our freshman year of high school she stopped tattling on me to my father. My shock at this was second only to the shock I received when I found out why. Susan had found her first friend outside the Unbridled Holiness Church. Not only was this friend Catholic, this friend was a boy a year older than us, named David Sexton.

I only barely contained my prodigious glee when I found out. I was smart enough not to run to my father and tattle on her. Instead, Susan and I started to cover for each other. If Ivy and I wanted to see a movie, or sneak off and gossip, there was Susan to swear she’d been studying with me at the library. If Susan wanted to spend time making out with David under the bleachers at a football game, there I was to swear we’d sat together for the whole game, and eaten some popcorn. At first we traded shamelessly on my father’s trust of Susan, as by then he had come to question my honesty, but eventually my father came to trust me again as well. A mistake. Susan’s mother, who had been widowed when Susan was ten, trusted that her minister trusted us, and so everything was alright.

Yea, verily, when there are two or more teenage girls gathered together, there is a lie among them.

Susan taught me to please my father publicly. Ivy and I taught Susan how to wear lipstick. In a town the size of Charity, we should have been busted right away. However, the neighbor network that would have worked for any other parent, excluded my father and his parishioners. Eventually David went off to college, and Susan I were left with a quiet sort of friendship. Not the deep and communicative relationship that Ivy and I have enjoyed. Instead Susan and I were compatriots in a battle. Closer for knowing each others’ weakness and vices, but never wholly understanding each other.

Susan knew that last summer before I decamped with my lover, mainstream sectarian religion, that I was planning to run. She knew that college had been forbidden me, even as it had been forbidden her. She knew that I had rejected my assigned role in my father’s realm, and she begged me to stay anyway. She promised me that if I waited a year we’d go to college together, but she was not ready to abandon her mother just yet. I was not willing to risk my scholarships for Susan’s sake. So I bolted, and she stayed, and filled her role as a woman of virtue in my father’s congregation. David Sexton married a girl he met at the U of I. Where Susan’s full ride of scholarships would have taken her if she’d left with me.

The only person who could ever have gotten me to Kentucky to try and help my father was Susan. I’m sure she knew it when she called. I’m sure that‘s why she was the one that called. My father had nothing to do with that call. That was all her, and I knew it when I headed south out of Charity. My guilt at leaving her behind for college guaranteed my cooperation. I didn’t even mind that she was trading on my remorse, although I had no idea what she thought I could do about the situation.

In fact, I was just as likely to make the situation worse. Susan and I both knew that. Riding to his rescue was the not my proper place in my father’s world. He was the one who was to save me, not the other way around. Who did I think I was anyway? God? I always was arrogant and unbending. Willful. Shameless. One day I would come to know my place; I would come to see the depravity of my life, and the depth of the hell I had led myself to, and I would wail for my father’s help. Would he help me? Perhaps, perhaps not.

Behind me that day in Charity I left Ivy’s towering rage. She would not believe that I could walk out on her in her hour of need. John chided Ivy gently, and so had Linus, when she yelled at me for going to see my father. They did not understand her apparently excessive reaction to my news. Soon though, they would understand her reaction, and at least Linus would wish he didn’t, I think.

John offered to come with me. I turned him down. I simply couldn’t imagine dragging John into the middle of my personal life. Even as I couldn’t really imagine being there when Ivy finally talked with Dory about Dylan Morris. I wasn’t family. No matter what they would have said. It wasn’t about me, and I surely did not need to be there.

Besides, showing up to see my father in jail with a young man more or less unknown to him was just asking for yet another layer of sermon. It would simply seem to confirm what my father would claim he had always known was true of me: I was a fallen woman.

So I set out alone, my little brown hatchback humming over the miles that stretched out in front of me. Soon the hypnotic sameness of rolling cornfields soothed me. Out on the road, under miles of sky, they couldn’t touch me. My smallness was safety, my unimportance sanity. I almost allowed the serenity to sweep me right past the Dresden, Kentucky turnoff. But only almost.

Dresden, Kentucky was high on the rustic and low on the charm. The buildings were mostly grey; large and square, the rawboned remains of a building boom in the sixties. Low slung and brown, the police station wasn’t hard to find. There were only two major roads in town; the station stood on the northeast corner of their intersection.

As I pulled into the parking lot I glanced down at the jeans and t-shirt I had changed into before leaving Charity. They would be high on my father’s disapproval scale. I almost hadn’t worn them. But a survey of my available wardrobe quickly convinced me they were the least offensive. Better to take the hit for wearing men’s clothing and immodesty, than to take the hit for immodesty, vanity, and tempting men. My dresses were too short, and too pretty to wear in front of my father. Shorts were out of the question.

I don’t know anymore entirely what I was expecting when I got out of my car and headed into the station. I would find no respect there. Even if I was able to pay the fines and defray the damages, my money would not buy me respect. They’d take it. They’d use it. My money was tainted by my unbelief. I was simply a means to an end. A person God had put in their path and under their influence to make their work possible. Perhaps I was hoping for some warmth. They would be running short on that, too.

Behind the front desk in the station a large black man dressed in a uniform was sitting and growling at his computer screen. His name tag said “Cortland”.

“Excuse me. I’m looking for Walton Taylor, or Susan Kline. I’m Reverend Taylor’s daughter Keziah.”

The officer took looked at me with eyes that read pleased and surprised. Then a toothy grin blossomed across his face. “I take it you are not one of the faithful.”

“I’m not even one of the unfaithful.”

“Bless you. I’ve been prayed and preached at so much today, I was about to convert just to shut them up.”

“No need to get dramatic.”

Cortland chuckled. “You want to see him?”

“Could you tell me what happened first? Susan wasn’t specific when she called.”

“The right Reverend walked right in to St. Mark’s during the service this morning and took over. Started preaching right over the service. Tossed some candle stands and things around. Wrestled a bit with Father Felix. When they couldn’t get him to stop they called us in. I wasn’t there. I understand it was quite a scene. One of our guys broke his jaw falling down some marble steps. Eventually they arrested him for trespassing and disturbing the peace. Five thousand dollars, and three months probation.”

Five thousand dollars.
I felt my heart sink. “How bad were the damages at the church?”

“Don’t rightly know. You’d have to talk to the Father about it.”

“Wait, it’s Sunday. He’s been sentenced already?”

“Judge Herndon is a member at St. Mark’s; so is the County Attorney. They grabbed a public defender from across the street at First Baptist. Had him sentenced before they put him in the car. Lucky it was a first offense.”

“Is that legal?”

Cortland shrugged. “Guess it is around here.”

“The man who broke his jaw, was it because my father pushed him, or something?”

“Naw, Pitney’s just graceless. Fell down the steps all on his own well after the tussle was broken up, I understand.”

A sort of relief flooded me. At least he hadn’t hurt anyone. Before I could delve farther into the story, a door opened halfway down the hallway that ran away from the front desk to my right. Susan emerged into the hallway wearing the grey shapeless ankle length dress that my father felt was appropriate for unmarried women of a marriageable age. For girls the color was navy blue; for married women it was dark grey; for widows it was black. But it was always the same dress. I’d sewn dozens of them over the years. Cotton in the summer, wool in the winter, and every single one just as ugly and shapeless as the last. Susan pulled it off better than any of the rest of us. Grey made her big grey eyes look more prominent, and the severely pulled back and bunned hair showed off her long neck and pretty face.

Behind Susan a man stepped out into the hallway. He was dressed in a pilling brown polyester suit, peach shirt, and a lime and baby blue stripped tie. I’d never seen him before. Apparently, number nineteen had been saved.

“I thought I heard your voice,” said Susan as she hugged me briefly. Then, “You had to wear jeans?” as she pulled back and looked me over.

“It was what I had with me,” I told her.

“I’ve got an extra dress in my case. You can use the break room to change.”

“Sus, you’re six inches taller than me. How will that work exactly?”

“It will be better than what you are in now. You can’t see him looking like...”

“Like what?” I asked her knowing full well what the rest of that statement was, but determined to make her say it to my face instead of just letting it hang between us unspoken.

“Like that,” said Susan lamely.

“Like a whore,” said the man in the brown suit, his watery blue eyes hard and cool when I met them.

“And this would be?” I asked Susan.

“This is Porter, your... That is, he and your father are jointly leading the ministry now. He came up from Louisiana a few months ago. We all met him last summer during the crusade.”

Porter and I did not shake hands, we did not smile at each other. He was tallish, and slimish, with brownish hair, and thirtyish. I would not have remarked on him if we’d passed each other on the street. Still, he had a presence about him, and a certain attractive lilt in his speech. I could sense in him the qualities of an old-fashioned fire and brimstone preacher, even if they were not apparent on the surface. Surely my father had noted the same quality in this man.

The first thought I had was that Susan had finally succeeded where I had failed for years. She had brought another to my father’s flock. Perhaps her fiancé. I could certainly see her as willing to marry a man such as this one. Especially if my father had designated him heir-apparent. How I hated her for an instant. To have succeeded where I had tried so hard and failed.

Then I calmed. This Porter person was not a kind or generous man, I could tell by his eyes. It would only be worse for Susan if she were to marry him. Secretly I prayed he was just my father’s successor, and nothing more.

As if he had read my thoughts, Porter’s jaw clenched a little. I broke eye contact with him and turned back to Cortland. “How do I find this Father Felix?”

Cortland reached into the desk and pulled out a thin yellow pages. “I’ll just look up his number for you, I’m sure he’ll be pleased to speak with you. Nice man, Father Felix.”

“What are you doing, Keziah?” asked Susan.

“I need to find out what damages were done to the church.”

“You are here to bail out the Elder, and take us to Owenton, nothing more,” said Porter sternly.

“I’m driving to Owenton, too?” I asked Susan.

She shrugged. “The others went on already. It would be a blessing if you would take us on to catch up with them. Your father didn’t want them to miss any services.”

Cortland handed me a yellow piece of paper with a phone number scribbled on it in green ink with a look that said he’d been wanting to beat down Porter most of the day. I couldn’t blame him, and I’d just met the man.

“Is there a pay phone?” I asked.

“Down in the break room,” said Cortland.

I left Porter and Susan standing in the lobby while I made that call. Sure enough, Father Felix was on the other end of the number. Where it rang exactly I didn’t know. He agreed to meet me at the church, and then I hung up.

Back in the lobby, I addressed Susan again. “I’m going to talk with Father Felix. You hang here a little longer. I’ll come back and pick you up, we’ll go find dinner and a room for the night.”

“What are you up to, Keziah?” asked Susan firmly, while casting a quelling glance at Porter.

“I’m going to see if I can make this right with the church so that there are no future legal issues, and then I’m going to have a good dinner and a good sleep. I’ll bail him out in the morning if I have enough money. Then I’ll take you on to catch up with the group.”

“You are here to bail him out, and then take us on. Nothing more, nothing less. Keziah, you are not to take any other maters upon yourself,” said Porter, this time
very
sternly.

“If I don’t take this matter upon myself, and they sue him, then that’s just more legal trouble for all of you. I can’t bail him out right now, anyway, because I’ll have to call my bank and get them to transfer money to the right account. It’s Sunday. They aren’t open right now. With any luck you’ll be in Owenton tomorrow for lunch. That’s my best offer.”

“Thank you, we’ll wait here,” said Susan. It was her turn to be looked at sternly by Porter.

“You overstep yourself, Sister Klein. We should speak with the Elder before we proceed.”

“Go on then, speak with him,” I said.

Cortland called another officer forward, and had Porter taken to see my father. After Porter left us, I handed a twenty to Susan.

“What is this for?”

“Lunch. I’m willing to bet neither of you has eaten since early this morning,” I said.

“Thank you for coming, Keziah. I know it’s a lot to deal with,” she said as she slipped the twenty safely into the black, leather-bound Bible she always carried.

“I’m going now. I hope he won’t be too upset.” It was a lie, I didn’t care how upset Porter was.

Susan smiled, the first real smile she’d given me in a long time. “He might not be back first,” she said.

I smiled at her and headed for the door. I was about to step outside when something occurred to me. “First Timothy, Six Ten?” I asked her, nodding at her Bible.

“No, of course not, Keziah. Matthew, Five Sixteen. ”

“
Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify you Father which is in heaven.
” I nodded and left, not sure if I had been reprimanded, or not.

*

It wasn’t long before I found myself running my fingers appreciatively over the buttery granite walls of St. Mark’s. This congregation, these people, had built a gem of a church. Not that it was ornate; St. Mark’s wasn’t. Instead, they had built a place with meaning, and with such care and workmanship in every line as to make me wonder if they had built it themselves.

Much has been said about what architecture says about us, and how we use our space. But what do our spaces say about our faith? St. Mark’s was a church built in the round. An unusual thing to see in itself. It was an arrangement that let the people sit around the center, in a circle, so they can see each other as a family does sitting around a dinner table. In the center was a raised area, with a communion rail encircling a simple altar. I could easily see how someone could fall and break bones on the marble floors and steps.

Almost everything in the sanctuary was neutral. Warm, sandy colored walls and floors, maple pews, kneelers, altar and woodwork, dark cranberry cushions both before the wrought-iron Communion rail and in the pew seats. The eye could not help but be drawn to the brightly-colored crucifix over the altar, then up to the skylight above, spilling daylight over the scene. The ceiling, where there could have been frescos, was instead a restful cobalt blue.

My father had always preached against such church buildings. A tent had been good enough for the Israelites in the desert; it was good enough for a modern people in exile from heaven. Or — in my father’s case — a plain old one-car garage was good enough for a people in exile. Church buildings actually intended, and decorated for worship, were vain, pretentious, and ostentatious, and at least one of those things was a sin. Later, much, much later, after I had actually read the Old Testament, I would come to find this insistence of my father’s a little funny. It had apparently slipped his notice that the desert tabernacle was made of goat hair, linen, brass, and acacia wood, before it was more or less covered in gold and silver. As the years have gone by, I have come to consider that it is probable my father held this view so that his poor congregation would not feel the need to build a church they could not afford, could never hope to afford.

As for me, I’ve always felt oddly safe in churches, especially buildings as lovely as St. Mark’s. The thick stone walls give me the feeling that they could stand against armies. As if I had asked for sanctuary, it was, effectively, granted. The cool quiet helps me focus and calm myself, a great gift to a resident of chaos.

After I had admired the walls, and the pews, I moved forward, quietly and slowly taking in the rest of the furnishings. The table of flickering votives, each representing a prayer. The banners, the hymnals, the candlesticks. When I reached the front, I realized I was not alone. There was a man; the priest, it had to be, although he was dressed in grey slacks, and a white dress shirt. He was sitting in the front pew, on the far side of the altar, watching my progress toward him.

“It’s a beautiful church. Precise workmanship. Was it built by the members?” I asked quietly, as the heat rose in my face and neck. It was the only thing I could think to say after he had watched me fondle his church.

He smiled kindly from behind silver-rimmed glasses, and nodded a mostly-bald head. “Much of it was. Although the walls you were admiring were done by professionals.” He stood, and came to meet me on my side of the altar. His handshake was firm, but a bit clammy, as if he was also nervous to meet me.

“Father Felix?”

“Yes, Miss Taylor. It’s a very great pleasure to meet you. Forgive me. You are not quite what I was expecting.”

“I’m my father’s daughter, not one of his flock. I don’t blame you for being surprised.”

“Ah,” he said, before studying my face with unusual intensity. He seemed sad, and at once expectant. Which unsettled me. So I returned to the only subject I had on hand.

“In the round. You don’t see many churches built like this. Not at all what I was expecting to find in a small town in Kentucky.”

“It is unusual. The priest who oversaw the construction was a very devout and traditional man. There wasn’t really room on the lot for the more traditional cruciform configuration. So this is what they landed on.”