Saint Maybe (18 page)

4

H
oly Roller, their grandma called it. Holy Roller Bible Camp. She shut a cupboard door and told Thomas, “If you all went to
real
camp instead of Holy Roller, you wouldn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn every day. And I wouldn’t be standing here half asleep trying to fix you some breakfast.”

But it wasn’t the crack of dawn. Hot yellow bands of sunshine stretched across the linoleum. And she didn’t look half asleep, either. She already had her hair combed, fluffed around her face in a curly gray shower-cap shape. She was wearing the blouse Thomas liked best, the one printed like a newspaper page, and brown knit slacks stretched out in front by the cozy ball of her stomach.

One of the words on her blouse was
VICTORY
. Another was
DISASTER
. Thomas hadn’t even started second grade yet but he was able to read nearly every word you showed him.

“If you all went to Camp Cottontail like the Parker children you wouldn’t have to leave till nine
A.M
.,” his grandma said, inching around the table with a stack of cereal bowls. “An air-conditioned bus would pick you up at the doorstep. But oh, no.
Oh
, no. That’s too simple for your uncle Ian. Let’s not do it the easy way, your uncle Ian says.”

What Ian had really said was, “Camp Cottontail costs
eighty dollars for a two-week session.” Thomas had heard the whole argument. “Eighty dollars per child! Do you realize what that comes to?”

“Maybe Dad could make a bit extra teaching summer school,” their grandma had told him.

“Dream on, Mom. You really think I’d let him do that? Also, Camp Cottontail doesn’t take three-year-olds. Daphne would be home all day with little old
you.
”

That was what had settled it. Their grandma had the arthritis in her knees and hips and sometimes now in her hands, and chasing after Daphne was too much for her. Daphne just did her in, Grandma always said. Dearly though she loved her.

She shook Cheerios into Thomas’s bowl and then turned toward the stairs. “Agatha!” she called. “Agatha, are you up?”

No answer. She sighed and poured milk on top of the Cheerios. “You get started on these and I’ll go give her a nudge,” she told Thomas. She walked stiffly out of the kitchen, calling, “Rise and shine, Agatha!”

Thomas laid his spoon fiat on top of his cereal and watched it fill with milk and then sink.

Now here came his grandpa and Ian, with Daphne just behind. Ian wore his work clothes—faded jeans and a T-shirt, his white cloth carpenter cap turned around backward like a baseball catcher’s. (Grandma just despaired when her men kept their hats on in the house.) He’d dressed Daphne in her new pink shorts set, and she was pulling the toy plastic lawn mower that made colored balls pop up when the wheels turned.

“The way I figure it,” Ian was saying, “we’d be better off moving the whole operation to someplace where the lumber could be stored in the same building. But Mr. Brant likes the shop where it is. So I’m going to need the car all day unless you …”

Thomas stopped listening and took a mouthful of cereal. He watched Daphne walk around and around Ian’s legs, with the lawn mower bobbling behind her. “This is what I’m bringing to Sharing Hour,” she announced, but Thomas was the only one who heard her. “Ian? This is what I’m—”

“You should bring something fancier,” Thomas told her.

“No! I’m bringing this!”

“Remember yesterday, what Mindy brought?”

Mindy had brought an Egyptian beetle from about a million years ago, pale blue-green like old rain spouts. But Daphne said, “I don’t care.”

“
Lots
of people have plastic lawn mowers,” Thomas told her.

She pretended not to hear and walked in tighter and tighter circles around Ian’s blue denim legs.

Once Daphne had her mind made up, nothing could change it. Everyone always joked about that. But Thomas worried she would look dumb in front of Bible camp. It was such a small camp that all the children were jumbled together, the three-year-olds in with the seven-year-olds like Thomas and even Agatha’s age, the ten-year-olds; even ten-year-old Dermott Kyle. Dermott Kyle would be sure to laugh at her. Thomas watched her round-nosed white sandals taking tiny steps and he started getting angry at her just thinking about it.

Then Ian bent over and scooped her up, lawn mower and all. He said, “What’s your breakfast order, Miss Daph?” and she giggled and told him, “Cinnamon toast.”

That Daphne was too ignorant to worry.

When Agatha came downstairs she looked puffy-eyed and dazed. She never woke up easily. Their grandma hobbled around her, trying to get her going—pushing the Cheerios box across the table to her and offering
other kinds when Agatha shook her head. “Cornflakes? Raisin bran?” she said. Agatha rested her chin on her fist and her eyes started slowly, slowly drooping shut. “Agatha,
don’t
go back to sleep.”

“She’ll be fine once she hits fresh air,” Ian said. He was standing by the toaster, waiting for Daphne’s toast to pop up. He’d set Daphne on the counter next to him where she swung her feet and banged her heels against the cupboard doors beneath her.

“She’d be even finer if she could sleep till a decent hour,” their grandma told him. “Why, they’re having to get up earlier in summer than in winter! Poor child can barely keep her eyes propped open.”

“She ought to be in Camp Cottontail,” their grandpa said suddenly. Everyone had forgotten about him. He was scrambling himself some eggs at the stove. “Camp Cottontail comes to the house for them about nine o’clock or so; I’ve seen the bus in the neighborhood.”

“Wasn’t I just saying that? While Holy Roller, on the other hand—”

“It’s not Holy Roller, Mom. Please,” Ian told her. “It’s Camp Second Chance. And it’s sponsored by my church and it’s free of charge. Not to mention it offers the kids a little grounding for their lives.”

Their grandma looked up at the ceiling and let out a long, noisy breath.

“When I was seventeen,” their grandpa said from the stove, “I volunteered to be a counselor at my church’s camp out in western Maryland. That’s because I was in love with this girl who taught archery there. Marie, her name was. I can see her still. She wore this leather cuff on her wrist so the bowstring wouldn’t thwack her. Every night I prayed and prayed for her to love me back. I said, ‘God, if you’ll do this one thing for me I’ll believe in you forever and I’ll never ask another favor.’ But she preferred the lifeguard and they
started going out together. After that, why, me and God just never have been that chummy.”

“God and I,” Grandma murmured automatically.

“I mean I still go to church on holidays and such, but I don’t feel quite the same way about it.”

Ian said, “Well, what does that prove? Good grief! You act as if it proves something. But all it proves is, you didn’t know what was best for you. You were asking for a girl who wasn’t right for you.”

Their grandpa just shrugged, but their grandma said, “Oh, Lord, it’s too early in the day for this,” and she dropped heavily into a chair.

Agatha’s eyes were closed now and Daphne had stopped swinging her feet. The dog lay next to the sink like a rumpled floor mat. Only Ian seemed to have any pep. He plucked the toast from the toaster, flipping it a couple of times so it wouldn’t burn his fingers. As he turned to bring it to the breakfast table, he gave Thomas a quick little wink and a smile.

While Ian was driving them to camp he said, “You mustn’t take it too seriously when your grandma and grandpa talk that way. They’ve had some disappointments in their lives. It doesn’t mean they don’t believe deep down.”

“I know that,” Thomas said, but Agatha just stared out the side window. She always got grumpy and embarrassed when talk of religion came up. Thomas suspected she was not a true Christian. He knew for a fact that she hated going to Camp Second Chance. Even the name, she said, made it seem they were settling for something; and what sort of camp has just a backyard, above-ground, corrugated plastic pool you have to fill with a garden hose? But she said this privately, only to Thomas. Neither one of them would have hurt Ian’s feelings for the world.

Ian dropped them off at Sister Myra’s house in a rush; he was running late. “Morning, Brother Ian!” Sister Myra called from her front door, and he said, “Morning, Sister Myra. Sorry I can’t stop to talk.” Then he drove away, leaving them on the sidewalk. Sister Myra lived in a development called Lullaby Acres where no trees grew, and it was hotter than at home. Thomas could feel a trickle of sweat starting down between his shoulder blades.

“My, don’t you three look spiffy,” Sister Myra said, opening the screen door for them. She was a plump, smiley-faced woman with a frizz of sand-colored curls. “What’s that you got with you, sweetheart?” she asked Daphne.

“This here is my lawn mower.”

“Well, bring it on in where it’s cool.”

It wasn’t just cool; it was cold. Sister Myra’s house was air-conditioned. Thomas thought air-conditioning was wonderful, even if it did mean they tended to stay inside as much as possible. Today, for instance, no one at all was playing in the brownish backyard around the swimming pool. Everybody was down in the basement rec room, which felt like a huge refrigerator. Dermott Kyle and Jason were lining up dinky plastic Bible figures in two rows across the indoor-outdoor carpet, making believe one row was ranchers and the other was cattle rustlers. Three girls were dressing dolls in a corner, and the Nielsen twins were helping Sister Myra’s daughter Beth put today’s memory verse on the flannelboard:
As the hart
 … and then a word that Thomas couldn’t figure out. He hoped the verse was a short one. Dermott Kyle had asked yesterday for
Jesus wept
, and it made the other campers laugh till Sister Myra pointed out how sad He must have been for our sins.

“We have three more people to wait for,” Sister Myra said. “Mindy and the Larsons. Then we can begin.
You all stay here with Sister Audrey while I go up and watch for the others.”

Sister Audrey was sitting on a child’s stool way too small for her. She was a big, soft, pale teenager in tight cutoffs and a tank top that showed her bra straps. When she heard her name she smiled around the room and hugged her potato-looking bare knees, but nobody smiled back. They were scared to death of Sister Audrey. She was helping out at Bible camp because she’d had a baby when she wasn’t married and put it in a Dempster Dumpster and now she was atoning for her sin. They weren’t supposed to know that, but they did. They discussed the details amongst themselves in whispers: how the baby had been wrapped in a towel (or Dermott said a grocery bag), how a janitor heard it peeping, how a police car took it where somebody grown could adopt it. Sister Audrey smiled at them hopefully while they clustered in the doll corner and rehashed this information. “Doesn’t anybody want me to read them a story?” she called, but they weren’t about to get that close to her; no, sirree.

Sister Myra came back downstairs with Mindy and one of the Larsons, Johnny. Kenny was home with the earache, she said. “Something for us to mention in our prayers,” she told them, and she clapped her hands. “All right, campers! Gather round! Everybody pull up a chair!”

Some of the chairs were little wooden ones, painted in nursery-school colors. Others were regular folding chairs, and all the boys fought for those so they wouldn’t look sissy. Especially Thomas. He couldn’t bear to have Dermott Kyle mistake him for one of the babies.

“Our Lord in Heaven,” Sister Myra said, “we thank You for another beautiful day. We thank You for these innocent, unsullied souls gathered in Your name, and we ask for Kenny Larson’s recovery if it be Thy will.
Now we’re going to offer up our sentence prayers as we do every morning at this time.”

That last part was spoken more to the campers than to God, Thomas felt. Surely God knew by now they offered up sentence prayers every morning. He must know what they were going to say, even, since most of them just repeated what they’d said on other mornings. The girls said thank-yous—“Thank You for the trees and flowers,” and such. (With Agatha, it was, “Thanks for the family,” in a mumbling, furry tone of voice.) The boys were more likely to make requests. “Let the Orioles win tonight” was commonest. (“If it be Thy will,” Sister Myra always added in a hurry.) The only exception was Dermott Kyle, who said, “Thank You for air-conditioning.” That always got a laugh. Thomas usually asked for good swimming weather, but today he prayed for Kenny Larson’s earache to go away. For one thing, Kenny was his best friend. Also Thomas liked to come up with some different sentence now and then, and this one made Sister Myra nod approvingly.

Sister Audrey offered the closing sentence. “Dear God,” she said, “look down upon us and understand us, we humbly beg in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

Some of the boys nudged each other at that, because she probably meant He should understand about the Dempster Dumpster. But then they caught Sister Myra’s frown and so they put on their blankest faces and started gazing around the room and humming.