Colors (24 page)

“…our little secret….”

I grab my left foot, bending my leg behind me. I pull, stretching my hamstring. Again, after a few reps, I repeat the movement with the other foot.

“…Scott called….”

With both arms reaching for the sky, I stretch my upper body.

But the tension lingers.

“…you like it….”

I run in place, feeling my heart rate rise. I feel for my pulse and, looking at my watch, count my heartbeats. I continue running, breathing deeply.

“…children are a gift from God….”

I splay myself on the weight bench below the bar. I lift the bar, doing five reps of ten lifts each.

“…ready to snatch our children….”

I repeat the reps, over and over, longing for that burn that tells me I am doing some good.

“…he didn’t want to miss your performance….”

I sit up. I reach for a dumbbell. I unscrew the safety screws, take off a two-and-half-pound weight from each end, and replace each with a five pounder. Tightening the screws once again, I steady my right elbow against my thigh and slowly do my arm curls.

“
…today’s youth are going to hell in a handbasket….”

I switch the dumbbell to my left hand. Again, I slowly do five reps of ten curls.

“Neil, go to bed,” I hear Aunt Jenny shout at the bottom of the stairs. But she does not take me out of my floating thoughts.

“…examining each of our students… for anything that could reflect badly on us….”

I return the dumbbell to its rack.

I stand and go to the bathroom to brush my teeth. A nine-year-old face looks back at me from the mirror, pleading with me.

You can’t let Brother Gramm get away with this, you know. He hasn’t changed. He hurt us, and he still hurts other little boys. Stop him, Neil. Stop him.

I turn on the shower full blast. The roar will block out the voice.

I squeeze my eyes shut. When I open them again, steamy fog obliterates the nine-year-old me in the mirror.

I strip and step into the shower. Hot—almost scalding—water inundates me. I want it to make me feel pain. Make me forget. Furiously lathering myself, I try to scrub away the day.
Zane. Sonny Broadnus. Scott Scheer. Brother Gramm.
I rinse and turn off the faucet.

I grab the towel and rub the water from my body. Rubbing. Rubbing. Almost raw.

I still feel dirty.

I return to my bedroom. Sitting on the bed, I reach over and switch off the bed lamp. Then I slide under the covers and pull them up to my chin, trying to make the safe cocoon that has protected me for years. The dark silence of the warm covers have always blocked out my torments.

But not tonight.

Sleep doesn’t come.

I stare at the ceiling, light from the window playing on it, forming ominous shapes.

I turn over on my side, pulling the heavy covers with me. I curl into a fetal position, longing for sleep.

The look on that little boy’s face. Obadiah Railston is going through the same hell I’ve gone through.

I kick at the covers, suddenly feeling stifled. I gasp for air. Choke. Gasp again.

Do I sacrifice all I’ve wanted, all I’ve worked for? How could I live with myself?

I stand, go to the chair by the window. I gaze at gray-streaked clouds as they race past a full moon.

How
can
I live with myself?

Drops of rain begin to pound the window.

I
STIR
sugar into my cup of coffee. Three spoonsful. I need the energy. I feel like hell. I didn’t sleep a wink. Or at least that’s how it feels. I know I did, though, because I dreamed. I watched myself, hovering overhead as Brother Gramm’s hands caressed my tiny body. I felt the spiders, crawling, creeping, and then my face changed. In its place was Obadiah Railston’s, a silent scream in his eyes. And I awoke from my restless slumber. I struggled with my waking thoughts, managed to go back to sleep, and the dream began again. Over and over and over and over.

“Coffee?” Aunt Jenny stands in the doorway, towel-drying her long hair. “You almost never drink coffee,” she says, shaking her hair to loosen the wet strands. “What’s up?”

This is all I need right now. Here I am, dying from lack of sleep and wishing I had any other place to go today but the rally, and now Aunt Jenny is giving me the third degree.

“Nothing,” I say, hoping she will take my one-word answer and leave with it. Like that’s going to happen.

“You didn’t hear a word I said last night? I’m not hearing ‘nothing’ in your voice. Still worried about the Melissa thing? Come on, spill it.”

“I promise you,” I insist, trying to sound light and carefree, “nothing is up. I just didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, so I thought I’d juice up on caffeine.”

“Yeah, right.” She eyes me. I know that look. “Why didn’t you sleep? Are you coming down with something?” She walks to me and puts her hand on my forehead.

I brush her hand away. A gesture I’ve made a thousand times. I hope she just takes it for what it was those other 999 times. An unconscious reflex. “I’m not sick. I guess I’m just excited about the rally and all.”
Please go away.
Or at least, let’s change the subject.

Aunt Jenny sits at the table, next to me. So much for going away.

She takes my cup and sips from it. “Yuk—you must need a pick me up. This is pure sugar.”

“Hey. Get your own. You think I want your cooties?” Maybe a little humor will distract her.

“You won’t catch anything from me, young man.” She bops me on the head. “And besides, cooties live in hair, not the mouth. And I don’t recall dredging my raven locks in your coffee cup.”

She stands, pours her own cup of coffee, then sits back down.

“Lord, son,” she laments, as she sips, “how I could use your help today. Maybe Kris can come help. This order is killing me… twenty bracelets, thirty pairs of earrings, and ten toe rings. It’s the biggest order I’ve ever put together. But thank God, we’re finally making some decent money off of this enterprise.”

Finally.
Talk about your jewelry.

“How do you do it?” I encourage her. “You come up with designs that are totally different. No one can think of what you think of. It’s no wonder your stuff sells.”

“Well, it wasn’t always that way.” She stares into space as if remembering.

Keep it coming… keep talking.

“Really? You mean there was a time when you had ‘artist’s block’?”

“No, no, no… I’ve never been at a loss for ideas.” She takes another drink of her coffee and swallows. “No, there was a time when my stuff wasn’t selling.”

“That had to have been before my time,” I say. “Even when you still had your teaching job and didn’t have some of these bigger jewelry contracts, your things sold out at every crafts show you dragged me to.”

She laughs at me. Oh God, I’d almost forgotten how her laughter could lift my spirits, make me forget my worries, my problems, even if just for a little while.

“Oh, my designs were selling, but technically, they weren’t
my stuff
.”

“What do you mean? If they were your designs, they were your stuff.”

“No, my boy, early on. Before you came into my life. I was a victim. I was busy with teaching, trying to put bread on the table. I did the jewelry designs, but I needed help with the execution. So another art teacher at the school where I taught offered to help. We were best friends at school, so I thought, ‘What fun… to have some help and work alongside your best friend.’

“Night after night, we’d be side by side, bringing my designs off the page and into reality. And it was so much fun. To have someone to work with, someone who shared my passion. I think what was most enjoyable was the conversation. We shared just about everything in our lives. And, no—I see that look—not in a sexual way. Kris is the only woman I’ve ever felt that way about.”

“TMI, Mom, TMI.”

She smiles, then continues her storytelling. “One night, we started talking about an upcoming craft show, the first she was going to go to with me. I said, ‘It will be so great, having you there in the booth alongside me. I get so bored, alone out there.’

“‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I can’t wait till Saturday. I’ll bring the sandwiches; you bring the cooler with plenty of cold drinks. They say it will be hot, hot this weekend. And, Jenny, just so you understand this, I’m just going to be there to help out, to hang with you. If anybody asks, these are your creations all the way. No one has to know I had anything at all to do with them. The fact I helped assemble them will be our little secret.’”

I feel my stomach lurch.
Concentrate on her story, Neil.

Aunt Jenny continues her tale. “So everything went on as usual. We’d work on the jewelry at night, then we’d go to shows a couple of times a month.

“One Saturday, I came down with the stomach flu. I was sick as a dog. She told me not to worry, she would ‘man’ the booth for me.

“I was so grateful to have such a good friend. She came over Sunday morning, bringing chicken soup and the proceeds from the sale. She handed over the money and said it had been a slow day. I didn’t think much about it at all. Some shows just didn’t do as well as others. I gave her her cut—she wouldn’t take any credit, but she had begun to take a quarter of our earnings, which I thought was only fair.

“By Monday, my fever had broken and I felt well enough to go to school. In the lounge that morning, one of the English teachers came in wearing a pair of my earrings. I overheard her tell someone who complimented her that her mother had bought them for her at a craft show the past weekend.

“I waited for her to say they were my design, but what she said instead threw me for a loop. She said, ‘Mom said the designer was one of our art teachers.’ I waited to hear my name, but instead, I heard my friend’s name.

“I thought I’d heard wrong, so I pretended I hadn’t heard any of the conversation. I walked up to the English teacher, praised her earrings and asked who had designed them. Again, she said my friend’s name.

“I went straight to my so-called friend’s classroom and confronted her. To her credit, she admitted everything. She’d not only taken credit for everything she’d sold that Saturday, but it seemed on weekends when I hadn’t scheduled shows, she had been going to shows in surrounding states, selling things she’d made from my designs.”

“So what did you do? I hope you had her locked up,” I said. Obadiah flashed through my mind.

“Well, sonny boy, the police are not interested a whole lot in craft show jewelry design theft. And if she stole any money from me, I could never prove it.

“But the whole experience taught me one thing: no one should violate you and get away with it. I went to our principal first, then to the school board. She lost her job over it. And I never looked back. I did the right thing. When someone has a position of responsibility over young people, he or she has a duty to lead by example. Above reproach.” She takes a gulp of coffee. “Above reproach.”

I
PLOW
my way through hundreds of families picnicking in the city park across from the civic center. On my way to the center that morning, Aunt Jenny’s story consumed me. Aunt Jenny was brave enough to expose her abuser. But I, I decided, didn’t have her kind of courage.

I gaze at a mass of screaming kids. They are having a ball. This is, as Miriam explained, an old Southern Christian tradition, “dinner on the ground.” The Sunday morning Family First service is finished, and now, the fun begins. Miriam and her musician friends will perform while the folks share their goodies.

I’d been looking forward to this since I’d first heard about it. But that was before yesterday. Before Brother Gramm and Obadiah. Before last night and my dreams. Before Aunt Jenny’s story. Before this morning’s service where I’d made my decision.

Now I knew I was going to do something. Forget the decision I’d made on the morning drive. If Aunt Jenny can do it, I can too. She sacrificed a lot for me. I can certainly keep my eye on Obadiah. Protect him. I still felt powerless to help myself, but there is a little boy right here who needs me. My mom may not have listened to me, but I’d heard Obadiah’s silent cries, and I can’t allow that poor little thing to slip further into the clutches of Melissa’s
loving
pastor.

Melissa’s family has staked out some tables, and I can see Mrs. Watt unpacking her picnic basket. Melissa, busily setting the table, looks up to see me approaching and smiles.

I’m glad she’s happy. Having her show up still in a forgiving mood made one less worry for me today. Now I just have to keep a lookout for Obadiah and make sure I stay close to him.

Smiling, I wave back. I stroll over to them. A newfound lightness in me. A weight lifted.

“Welcome, Neil,” Mrs. Watt says, taking the foil wrap from a plate of deviled eggs. “We’re so glad you could join us. You’re part of the family, now, you know.”

“Thank you for having me, ma’am,” I reply. I mentally brush off her last comment, although I’m not sure why. If Melissa and I are
together
, then I guess I am part of her family.

“Melissa, introduce Neil to everyone,” she instructs her daughter.

Melissa takes my hand and maneuvers me about, introducing me to a huge group, among them her aunt and uncle, their son and daughter, the Watts’ neighbors, an elderly woman from their church, and Melissa’s older brother, his wife, and three kids.

Then I see him. With Melissa’s nephews sits Obadiah.

“Obie’s become very good friends with my two nephews.” Obadiah ducks his head, keeping his eyes on the ground, as Melissa continues talking about him. “They’ve all been in Mom’s kids’ workshop here at the rally.”

I shake off the uneasiness I feel. I know that look I see in the boy. I’ve felt what he’s felt. I know what I have to do. And nothing is going to stop me.

We’re about to sit down to this feast of fried chicken, potato salad, deviled eggs, homemade bread, and apple brown betty. My stomach clenches. Rescuing Obadiah from the devil himself is not going to be easy.