House of Blues (31 page)

Skip couldn't say when she'd last been to church on
Sunday. She didn't know what to wear. Pants were just about all she
had, so they'd have to be okay. Maybe with a silk blouse and some
nice earrings. Showing respect was the thing. As if she'd taken care.
She was puttering around looking for something suitable when she
heard Steve sit up in bed and stretch. He was a slow starter in the
morning.

She said, "You like a little investigative
jaunt. How about church?"

"I think I'll pass. I went once."

She had occasion later to wish he'd gone, so she'd
have a reality check on what happened. She'd been a lot more than
once, and it was always the same, except that day.

The church, in a part of the Ninth Ward to which not
even she had ever been, was surprisingly affluent—meaning it was a
small neat wooden building capable of holding about a hundred people,
instead of a garage or someone's living room, which was what she'd
imagined.

The neighborhood was one of tiny houses,
quiet-looking, not slummy at all, but there were no sidewalks.
Probably the families who lived here had been around for more than a
generation.

The church was dim. After Skip's eyes had grown
accustomed, she saw that it had two altars, one in front and one in
back, each holding so many statues of saints she wondered how anyone
dusted them all. If there were copies of the original St. Expedite,
no doubt one was here.

Though the service had started, there were only a few
people in the pews, fifteen or sixteen, she thought; mostly women. It
looked like a poor black neighborhood church in the nineties,
struggling to keep even a few old women in the congregation, not the
sort that Evie would ever even find, let alone be persuaded to join.
Skip thought of leaving, but didn't for two reasons.

One was that a woman turned around, saw her, and
beamed.

"Welcome," she whispered, and her face was
so warm, so gentle, that it would have been churlish to leave after
that.

The other was that there were three white people in a
back pew, all young, and even though scrubbed-up for church, a little
on the scruffy side. The sort of people she could picture Evie
hanging with.

In fact, the one woman among them might almost have
been Evie—she was blond and very pretty, but too thin, too pale, a
little druggy-looking. But she was younger than Evie by five or ten
years, Skip guessed.

Still. Perhaps there was something here—some
ministry to addicts; free food after the service.

Something.

She sat down and looked around.

She needn't have worried about getting the uniform
right. One woman—though not in the choir, which consisted of five
or six people in street clothes—wore what appeared to be a pink
choir robe.

Others had on respectable dresses with nylons and
heels; generic church clothes. Two or three wore pantsuits.

Another, an older woman with huge dark-rimmed
glasses, wore a long white robe and matching wrapped head garment.
She was tall and looked like some elegant African elder, perhaps
dressed for a party at the consulate of a struggling nation.

The men wore carefully pressed shirts tucked into
clean dark pants, collars open; the building wasn't air-conditioned.

The clergyman who delivered the sermon—Skip never
did catch his title—wore an elaborate robe, blue satin lined with
pink, and a hat like a bishop's miter. She thought of an essay she
had once read by Zora Neale Hurston praising black people, her own
people, for their exuberance, and Skip would have been happy to
praise the minister's outfit instead of the Lord.

She wasn't sure what denomination she'd wandered
into, but she was pretty sure it wasn't Lutheran or Presbyterian.
Though the congregation was tiny, there was not only a pianist, but a
drummer, and the minuscule choir could rock out as if it were a
hundred strong.

There was quite a lot of music and some readings,
done by different church members, and there were a number of small
rituals that Skip had never seen before. At one point the entire
congregation got up and walked in a circle. Why, she couldn't have
said.

There were anointings, with perfume, apparently. Once
again she wasn't sure why.

People were given an opportunity to testify about the
way their spiritual lives were shaping up. One woman got on a roll,
speaking in a kind of rhythmic way, about the unfortunate way her
husband had treated her and how Jesus had gotten her through it. She
started to sway as she talked, and Skip had a premonition about what
was going to happen: She's going to flip out in some way and they're
going to say she's "in the spirit" or some such.

But she didn't. She cried through the last third of
her testimony, which sounded as if it had been written and rehearsed,
but she didn't flip out.

Most of the other testimony was a great deal more
informal, involving thanks for simple things, mostly: good weather
and a good night's sleep; food; family.

Skip wasn't too sure what moved people to get up and
talk, if they had nothing more important to impart than that—the
desire to participate, she thought, the need not to be left out.

One of the white people spoke. He said he had a plant
that was growing well and he was enjoying the way God was tending it.
Marijuana was Skip's guess.

At one point there was something called a "hand
blessing," in which people lined up to put a hand on the Bible,
it looked like, and say a private prayer. You put down a dollar bill
at the time, if you wanted to be so blessed, which struck Skip as at
least as good a deal as playing Lotto. She did it herself, praying
for enlightenment on the subject of Evie, figuring it couldn't hurt.

Back in her seat, she thought: What did I do that
for?

The service was long, but it built. Skip tried to
explain it later, to Steve, but she couldn't. What she noticed about
halfway through was that her hands tingled and her ears rang a little
bit.

When the congregation was invited up to the altar to
pray, in some sort of ritual that looked like communion without the
bread and wine, she found herself going, though she knew she didn't
have to, that it would have been perfectly acceptable to stay where
she was.

She didn't especially believe in God, at least not
this one, or at least didn't want any contact with him, after the way
he ordered all that slaughter in the Old Testament and the way
everyone spoiling to get in a war used his name as a rallying cry.
But there she was, kneeling in some unknown and probably unheard—of
neighborhood in the middle of nowhere that probably wasn't even on a
map, with fifteen or sixteen strangers whose lives she probably
couldn't begin to fathom if they spent the next three weeks telling
her their family histories.

And something odd happened to her. Something came up
through her bent knees—or perhaps it started in her feet, she
couldn't be sure—and coursed through her body. It couldn't have
been the famous "spirit" because surely that came down
instead of up; but it was something. She felt an odd peace afterward,
a curious fulfillment.

Holy shit. Maybe that was a religious experience.

Of course it was, stupid. You're in a church.
Anything that happens here is one by definition.

Uh-uh. What about that woman with the little boy?

At the beginning of the service, a little boy had
started to cry and his mother had hit him with a belt in the pew
beside her, apparently brought especially for the purpose.

Watching her wasn't a religious experience.

But what the odd occurrence was, she couldn't decide.
Perhaps because it was a small, very focused group, something was
unleashed that she hadn't experienced before—some kind of directed
energy.

This was why she thought later that she needed Steve
for a reality check. She couldn't even really describe the thing,
much less be sure it was real.

Afterward, she was about to go talk to the minister
when a small woman tapped her on the back. "Aren't you Skip
Langdon?"

She turned around, amazed. New Orleans was tiny in
some ways—you always knew someone wherever you went—but this time
it was not only unlikely, it was impossible. This neighborhood was
probably unknown even to the census takers.

"
I'm Emmaleen Boucree. Tyrone's mother? I saw
you at a concert once, and Joel showed you to me."

She was from the family of musicians that had
produced Darryl. Skip blurted, "What on earth are you doing
here?"

Emmaleen smiled. "This my old church. I went to
this church years ago. My mama still live in the neighborhood, but
she gettin' on now. Really gettin' on. She ain' really well enough to
come to church. I just come over and bring her something to eat on
Sundays and I drop in for services when I have time. We all go to
Spiritual churches, all us Boucrees—didn't you know that?"

"
Spiritual churches?" Weren't all churches
spiritual?

"
Oh, yeah. We kind of different." She
cackled.

"It was—um, a beautiful service."

"
Was, wasn't it? But kind of tame. You should
see it when folks really get goin'—come sometime to the Friday
evenin' healin' service; then you really see something. Now how can
we help you?"

Well, I had this funny feeling when I was supposed to
be praying, and I was just wondering—was that God or anything?

"
You didn't come here to get touched by the
spirit, did you? Miss Langdon, you with me?"

"Sorry, I guess I spaced out. I'm trying to find
someone named Evelyne Hebert. Everyone calls her Evie. Do you know if
she goes to this church?"

"
Don' ring a bell. Which I think prob'ly means
no." She waved an arm. "You can see it's kind of a
shrinking deal anymore—Sunday mornin's at least. I think the Friday
night healin's go a little better, probably. L'es go ask somebody who
knows."

She took Skip to the fancifully dressed clergyman,
who confirmed that no Evelyne or Evie Hebert, or anyone answering her
description, was a member of the church or had been. But he said Skip
was invited to come back any time she wanted to and bring all her
friends.

"We glad to have you any time," he said. He
shook her hand.

"
We glad to have you," he repeated. And he
smiled so benignly that it made her wonder why smiles like that were
missing from her life most of the time.

She had time to go home for lunch before her second
appointment, and when she arrived, the kids were in the courtyard
with Angel, Steve, Jimmy Dee, and Darryl Boucree, the men drinking
coffee at a table under an umbrella. The smaller animals frolicked in
the sun, and the day was so perfect it was as if Arthur Hebert were
alive again and Sally was home with her parents, and Jim had never
gone on that stakeout with her.

"Darryl. What are you doing here?"

He got up to kiss her, and she felt the current that
was always there. She wondered if it was visible to the naked eye;
Steve knew she'd been interested in someone last year, but he didn't
know it was Darryl.

"I came to bring the new baby a toy." She
saw that Angel had some kind of chew—thing, which the kids kept
snatching and throwing.

"I saw your Aunt Emmaleen this morning. At least
I guess Tyrone's mother's your aunt."

"Great-aunt, I think. Even I get it mixed up."

Steve said, "Where'd you see her?"

"
Church. There were less than twenty people
there and one of them was Emmaleen Boucree."

"Well, if it was church, that makes sense,"
said Darryl. "The Boucrees are very large on religion. That's
why there's so much good music in those churches out there."

"
What's a spiritual church?"

"You mean you just went to one and you don't
know? Well, I been in 'em all my life—not sure I do either. We're
big on statues, I'll tell you that. And you should see it when
somebody gets baptized?

Skip was silent for a minute.

"What is it?" Steve put a hand over hers.
Faintly embarrassed at the gesture, she glanced at Darryl out of the
corner of her eye.

"I don't know. I was just feeling left out, I
guess."

"
Left out of what?"

"Oh, a culture worth having."

Darryl said, "You one of those white people
wants to be black?"

Skip couldn't think of an answer.

"Quit looking sheepish," said Jimmy Dee.

"
Well, if you are, I don't blame you," said
Darryl, and he leaned over to tweak her cheek, with Steve sitting
right there. Absolutely undaunted, Steve kept beaming, still covering
her hand with his.

I wonder what it would be like to trust somebody like
that? Why can't I be like Steve?

From the first moment they'd met, Steve had never
given her the slightest reason to think him other than utterly
devoted to her, and more than once she'd nearly destroyed the
relationship with her doubts.