Adelaide Piper (19 page)

Dizzy stormed past them into the house, ran up to her room, and turned on her Cure CD full blast. I heard her screaming the lyrics to “Just Like Heaven”: “You-oo-oo, lost and lonely . . .”

“So you still back me up on some things?” Daddy said to Mama as he pulled her close and rocked her back and forth, keeping time with the churning of the steel-mill furnace blasts beyond Main Street.

She nuzzled beneath the crook of his shoulder, kissed his chest, and said, “I want what's best for our family, Zane.”

“I know you do.”

Two nights later, Shannon and I made our way into the gravelly parking lot of Harvest Time Assembly Church. The cinder-block sanctuary was a former barbecue joint on Route 39 (as I had suspected), and it was run by some “church planters” by the names of Dale and Darla Pelzer. Shannon had taken great pains to explain to me the Pelzers' mission and how she had come to know them. She had met them once at the Young Life camp where she gave her soul away and then again at a Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting at the University of South Carolina last semester, where they shared their vision for starting churches in poor communities all over the South. Williamstown was their first stop, and their plan was to share the gospel with the migrant workers and the leftover families from the mill villages.

A church with a social conscience,
I thought as we made our way to the outskirts of town, and I pictured the sullen girl staring back at me from the old mill home the day I went to NBU. I felt a twinge of guilt as I recalled the poem I wrote in response to that exchange. Had I ever made an effort to reach out to anyone in the struggling section of my hometown? Nope. All I ever wanted to do was get away from them.

“Now, it's a covered-dish dinner,” Shannon had told me when we stopped at the Piggly Wiggly on the way to pick up two gallons of sweet tea. “After we eat, we'll hear the testimony, and that's all there is to it.”

“Sounds pretty painless,” I had said, “and a far cry from St. Anne's.”

We had both laughed as we envisioned the pristine Tudor-style Episcopal church where I was baptized and confirmed, with its sterling silver chalices and ornate stained-glass windows.

“It's a bit earthier than St. Anne's.”

“‘Earthier' is putting it mildly,” I now joked as I read the letters on the marquee outside the crude sanctuary: “Exposure to the Son can prevent burning.”

Shannon handed me a gallon of tea and prodded me out of the car. “Sometimes it's necessary to get right to the point. Now, keep an open mind, O Enlightened One.”

When we entered the cinder-block building set on its thin concrete slab, I felt a kind of energy envelop me. Then my mouth began to water as I scanned the wobbly card tables filled with fried flounder and tamales and banana pudding.
This sure beats country-club chicken salad,
I thought to myself as a large lady named Charlie Farley greeted me with a soft, warm hug that smelled like sugar and baby powder. She was the female version of the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

“Shannon told me you were coming, and I'm so happy to meet you, Adelaide.”

“Thanks,” I said hesitantly as I flashed Shannon an inquisitive look, but before my friend could respond, a young Mexican lady pulled her away for counsel.

“I'm the parish greeter,” Charlie Farley said, “and I've got a place set for you right by me so that I can introduce you around.” Then she whispered into my ear, “The Lord is
moving
in this place, and your presence here is another great blessing He's given us tonight.”

Before I could say, “I think you've confused me with someone else,” Charlie Farley had gathered a group of five middle-aged ladies, who encircled me as they spouted out their questions: How did I know Shannon? What part of town was I from? What did I like to eat? After one lady offered to fix me a plate, a couple of college students from neighboring small towns came over and introduced themselves. Teddy Mee was enrolled at Columbia Bible College, while Sarah Spicer and Rob Marjenhoff were upperclassmen at the University of South Carolina. They were all helping the Pelzers get this church going, and Teddy was already planning the next mission field in the little towns of Mullins and Greeleyville.

“You'd think we wouldn't need churches in the Bible Belt, Adelaide,”

Teddy explained, “but there's a lot of poor folks who are displaced and haven't ever heard the gospel before. Take the migrant workers, for instance. They have been right under our noses every harvest season, but nobody has taken the time to share the Word with them.”

“Dale and Darla have a heart for these folks,” Sarah Spicer added.

“This is their calling.”

“And we're just trying to do our part in carrying out the Great Commission,” Rob Marjenhoff said, and they all nodded in unison.

The Word? The Great Commission? Having a calling?
I had no idea exactly what they were talking about, but I was curiously drawn to their fervor for what they were doing
. I sure would like to know what the heck my calling is!

Shannon, who had made an attempt to make her way back to me, was now off in a corner, praying for the young Mexican lady, who was wiping her wet eyes with the heels of her hands.

“Sit right over here by me,” Charlie Farley called. An older woman had piled my plate high with food and set it in the center of the table.

As Dale Pelzer got up to say the blessing, everyone took their seats, and I scanned the rest of the room to get my bearings.

There was a group of migrant workers who could barely speak English in the front corner. Shannon had told me that the church was partnering with Habitat for Humanity to help construct permanent homes for them so that the wives and children could put down roots and get a steady education. And Dale and Darla were taking Spanish lessons from my high school Spanish teacher, Señora Barker, so that they could better communicate with them.

The Mexican man with the mullet from the Kmart line was there, and he was sitting next to a woman who was likely his wife, holding her hand.
Am I paranoid or what?
I thought as I recalled grabbing Willa out of my cart and running away after he tried to speak to us.

Ashamed, I vowed to take Willa back to the store the next day to ride the scuffed-up rocking horse.

What struck me as I passed the biscuits and butter around my table and explained who I was and who had brought me were the vigor and exuberance that each person seemed to share, from the college student to the migrant worker. They all had some remarkable source of power that they seemed to be mutually tapped into, and I caught glimpses of it in the gleams of their eyes. I had never known people like this, who had fire in their gazes and I hoped that the explanation of it would be given in the talk we were about to hear.
Keep an open mind, sister
.

When Darla Pelzer got up to give her testimony, I was mesmerized. Though she had poor grammar, an accent as thick as syrup, and an unsightly outfit with sequined butterflies that made her look like a beauty pageant contestant who was past her prime, her story gripped my heart. She had grown up in an alcoholic home. At the age of eight, a teacher had told her that she was unsightly and dense, and those words broke her heart and destroyed her sense of self-worth. Her stepfather had raped her at the age of thirteen, and when she told her mother what had happened, she was promptly thrown out of the house. She left town and married at seventeen, and that ended in divorce less than two years later. She contracted herpes from her first husband, which invaded her body monthly and destroyed whatever shred of self-respect she had left.

Then she “met Christ” in a women's shelter outside Atlanta when an evangelist couple named Boochie and Laura Beth Day came through with a message about forgiveness, mercy, and being washed clean in the blood of the Lamb. After her baptism, she enrolled in secretarial school and took a job as a receptionist for a construction company, and that was where she met Dale. He was working on the site to put himself through Bible school, and he married her knowing that her disease could infect him and the children who might come from their union. He prayed over her body on their wedding night, and she had not had any herpes symptoms since that prayer seven years ago, but they had never been able to conceive a child.

She said that we all have a God-sized void in our hearts and that we try to fill it with all kinds of things—money, alcohol, infidelities, you name it—but that only one thing can fit there: God.

This hit a nerve.

“The itch of the soul,” I wrote down on the paper napkin in front of me. Could Darla be suggesting that
God
was the remedy for this longing? Surely the
cure
for the emptiness I felt could not actually be found in a cinder-block church on Route 39 in the trashiest part of Williams-town, South Carolina. I had made my pilgrimage to NBU to fill the void, and I would be furious if it had been under my nose all along.

Still, I kept listening.

Next Darla said that God had a life purpose for each person in the room. That He had created them and bestowed upon them gifts they were to use for His glory and that worshipping Him and putting those gifts to use for Him were our chief reasons for existing.

Then she warned that we couldn't act upon our purposes without understanding the price that Christ paid on the cross for our lives and accepting this as the payment for the debt of our sins. Once we realized this, we were set free from the pasts that bound us and transformed into children of the Light, who would have abundant life in the here and now and eternal life with Christ in heaven. That is, we would rise from the dead the way He did.

She said that God had been speaking to people in the room in all kinds of ways all of their lives. She described a double rainbow she saw in the Blue Ridge Mountains when she didn't have two pennies to rub together and had nowhere to lay her head. She mentioned a kind word at just the right time from a social worker who encouraged her to go hear what Boochie and Laura Beth Day had to say. And just last year she had seen a beautiful baby girl in a vivid dream, and she believed God was giving her hope that she would one day be a mother.

I thought about the wonder that I had been in pursuit of. That I had written about in my poetry and dissected in the works of Marianne Moore and William Blake. Could the One on the shoulder of St. Christopher scratch the itch of my soul? Could He have been talking to me in all those moments of splendor that I could recall: the Pawleys Island sunsets, the adopted kitten, and the well water that took the swelling out of my throat?

These thoughts were quickly overshadowed by a concern related to my rape that I had buried during the last few months. Darla had forced me to remember again.

“What a story,” I said as we closed the car door and pulled onto the dark road.

“What'd you think?” Shannon asked eagerly.

“I was blown away,” I said. “She seemed sincere, and her life has been so hard.”

Shannon seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. “I hoped it wouldn't shock you. I mean, she has had a pretty tough road.”

Shannon swerved ever so slightly to miss a possum and asked, “Did her message
speak
to you?”

“I don't know. I'm a little curious about it all, I have to admit. I even wrote some questions down the other night that I'd like to talk over with you. But something else is on my mind now.”

“Okay. Tell me.”

“Darla's talk opened up the one fear that I'd managed to keep at bay since what happened to me a few months ago.”

“What's that?” Shannon asked in a gentle tone.

“Sexually transmitted disease. I mean, with what happened to me at NBU, don't you think I should get checked out?” My voice cracked on the last two words. I could be carrying who-knew-what awful disease in my body, and I was beginning to brace myself for another painful blow.

Shannon thought for a moment; then the light flashed across her eyes.

“Let's go see my aunt Bernise in north Charleston. She works in women's health at Trident, and she can run all of the tests to make sure you're okay.”

“That would be great,” I said, exhaling deeper than I had in months. As frightening as it was, it felt right to finally address, head-on, another source of anxiety that had been secretly weighing on me.

Shannon's friendship truly touched me, and I wanted to give her something in return.

“Maybe after we get through this, we can sit down with some people at Harvest Time and just go through some of my questions about this whole Christianity thing.”

“I'd love that,” Shannon said. “I can set it all up just as soon as you're ready.”

When we reached the driveway, she asked, “Can I pray for you now?”

“Why not?”

Shannon gripped the steering wheel and asked God for peace and a total healing for my mind, body, and hurting heart. When she reached out to touch my shoulder at the end of the prayer, I was surprised at the emotions that churned inside me at just the momentary thought of being made well again, and I wept for many minutes while Shannon fished for Kleenex and continued to pat my back.

Entering my quiet home, I was not surprised to find Dizzy and Lou asleep in front of the
Father of the Bride
movie in the den. I tapped little Lou on the shoulder and walked her to her bedroom.

When I returned to do the same for Dizzy, I paused to smile down at my younger sister, who was curled up on one end of the sofa, still in her grave clothes and makeup from her night on the town. She had two round crystals around her neck—both with a tarnished silver claw that held them in place—and her fingernails were painted black.

The fading white powder on her face revealed the rose tint of her freckled cheeks. Dizzy looked as though she were a grade-school girl dressed up for Halloween. It was only a few years earlier that she had worn the pink-and-purple floral pajamas that Lou now sported.