Saint Maybe (25 page)

The best thing about the foreigners, he decided, was how they thought living in America was a story they were reading, or a movie they were watching. It was happening to someone else; it wasn’t theirs. Good Lord, not even their names were theirs. Here they spoke lines invented by other people, not genuine language—not the language that simply
is
, with no need for translation. Here they wore blue denim costumes and inhabited a Hollywood set complete with make-believe furniture. But when they went back home, there they’d behave as seriously as anyone. They would fall in love and marry and have children and they’d agonize over their children’s problems, and struggle to get ahead, and practice their professions soberly and efficiently. What Doug was witnessing was only a brief holiday from their real lives.

He was pleased by this notion. He thought he’d examine it further later on—consider, say, what happened
to those foreigners who ended up
not
going home. The holiday couldn’t last forever, could it? Was there a certain moment when the movie set turned solid? But for now, he didn’t bother himself with all that. He was happy just to sit here, letting some of their Time Out rub off on him.

Then Ollie turned toward the house and called, “Come see!” and for courtesy’s sake, Doug rose and followed Ray and John One to the yard. Other neighbors were here too, he realized. It looked like a party. He joined them and stood squinting in the sunshine, smiling at the foreigners’ car which sat half inside the garage and half out like a crumpled beer can, with the door bisecting it neatly across the middle.

6

E
very Saturday morning, the Church of the Second Chance gathered to perform good works. Sometimes they went to an ailing member’s place and helped with the cleaning or the fixing up. Sometimes they went to some stranger. Today—a warm, sunny day in early September—they met at the little house where Reverend Emmett lived with his widowed mother. Reverend Emmett was not a salaried minister. His sole means of support was a part-time counseling job at a private girls’ school. So when his house needed painting (as it sorely did now, with the old paint hanging in ribbons off the clapboards), all his flock pitched in to take care of it.

Ian brought the three children, dressed in their oldest clothes. Thomas and Daphne loved Good Works but Agatha had to be talked into coming. At fifteen she was balky and resentful, given to fits of moody despair. Ian never could decide: should he force her to participate for her own good? Or would that just alienate her further? This morning, though, he’d had an easier time than usual. He suspected her of harboring a certain furtive interest in the details of Reverend Emmett’s private life.

The house was a one-story cottage, more gray than white, lying in a modest neighborhood east of York Road. By the time Ian and the children arrived, several members of the congregation were already setting out
paint cans and brushes. Mrs. Jordan (Sister Jessie now, but Ian found it hard to switch) was spreading a drop-cloth over the boxwoods, and Reverend Emmett was perched on a ladder wire-brushing the porch overhang. Ian grabbed a ladder of his own and went to take the shutters down. Reverend Emmett’s mother came out in high heels and an aqua knit dress and asked if there was any little thing she could do, but they all said no. (What
could
they say? Her cardigan draped her shoulders so genteelly, with the sleeves turned back a precise two inches.)

Partway through the job, someone Ian didn’t know was sent to assist him. This was a cadaverously thin man in his thirties with a narrow ribbon of beard like Abraham Lincoln’s. Ian glanced at him curiously (their church didn’t see many guests), and the man said, “I’m Eli Everjohn. Bertha King’s son-in-law; we’re visiting from over Caro Mill.”

“Ian Bedloe,” Ian said.

He could see now who the man’s wife must be—the strawberry blonde who did resemble Sister Bertha, come to think of it, scraping clapboards with the children. She seemed much too pretty for such a knobby, gangling husband. This Eli handled tools at a remove. He handled his own
hands
at a remove, as if operating one of those claw arrangements where you try to scoop up prizes. His task was to take the hinges off the shutters and stow them in a bucket, which should have been easy enough; but the screwdriver seemed to confound him and he let it slip so many times that the screw heads were getting mangled. “Tell you what,” Ian said, setting down a shutter. “I’ll see to this and you can have my job.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that!” the man said. “I’m scared of heights.”

Heights? The highest shutter was eight feet off the ground. But Ian didn’t point that out.

Eli raised one arm to wipe his forehead, waving the screwdriver dangerously close to Ian’s face. “At
my
church, we don’t mess with such as this,” he said. “We visit door to door instead.”

“What church is that?”

“Holy House of the Gospel.”

“I guess I never heard of it.”

“We’re much stricter than you-all are,” Eli said. “We would never for instance let our women wear the raiment of men.”

Ian glanced at Eli’s wife. Sure enough, she wore a dress—a rosebudded, country-looking dress that was interfering seriously with her attempts to mount a step stool.

“We don’t play cards neither, nor dance, and we’re more mindful of the appearance of evil,” Eli said. “Why, yesterday my mother-in-law got a prescription filled at a pharmacy that sells liquor! Walked right into a place that sells liquor without a thought for how it might look! And you don’t have no missionary outreach, neither.”

Ian was starting to feel defensive. He said, “We believe our
lives
are our missionary outreach.”

“Now, that’s just selfish,” Eli said. “To look at someone living in the shadow of eternal damnation and not try and change his ways: that’s selfish.”

Ian spun on his heel and went to fetch another shutter.

When he came back, though, Eli resumed where he had left off. “And if we did mess with house painting, we’d have prayed beforehand,” he said. His screwdriver slashed uselessly across a screw. “We pray before each task. We believe that whatever work we undertake is
God’s work; I am an arrow shot by God to do His handiwork.”

He did look something like an arrow: straight and smooth, a sharp cowlick sticking up on the crown of his head.

“What exactly
is
your work?” Ian asked him, hoping to change the subject.

“I’m a private detective.”

This was so unexpected that Ian laughed. Eli scowled. “What’s funny about that?” he said.

“Detective?” Ian said. “You mean, like solving murders and mysteries and such?”

“Well, it’s more like tailing husbands to motel rooms. But that’s the Lord’s business too! Believe me.”

“If you say so,” Ian told him.

“What do you do, brother?”

“I’m a carpenter,” Ian said.

“Our Savior was a carpenter.”

“Well, yes.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Who said I was ashamed?”

“Those your kids you came with?”

“Yes.”

“You look kind of young to have kids that old.”

“Really I’m just their uncle,” Ian said. “My parents and I take care of them.”

“I would’ve thought you were nothing but a college boy.”

“No, no.”

“You married?”

“No.”

“A bachelor.”

“Well, yes. A … bachelor,” Ian said.

Eli bent over a hinge again. Ian watched for a minute and then turned back to his ladder.

But the next time he brought down a shutter, he said,
“So you’ve never found a missing person, or anything like that.”

“Depends on what you call missing,” Eli said. “Sure, I’ve found a few husbands here and there. Usually they’re just staying with a girlfriend, though, that everybody except their wives knows the name and address of.”

“I see,” Ian said.

He leaned the shutter against a sawhorse. He studied it. Not looking at Eli, he said, “Say a person had been missing a long time. Five or six years, say. Maybe seven or eight. Would the trail be too cold for you to follow?”

“What? Naw,” Eli said. “Bound to be
something
he left behind. People are so messy. That’s been my experience. People leave so much litter wherever they go to.”

He rotated one forearm and examined the inside of his wrist. A dribble of dusty blood ran downward from his palm. “Somebody special you had in mind?” he asked.

“Not really,” Ian said.

He brushed a dead leaf from a louver. He cleared his throat. He said, “Those kids I’m taking care of: their father is missing, I guess you could say. The father of the older two.”

“Is that so,” Eli said. “Ducking his child support, huh?”

“Child support? Oh. Right,” Ian said.

“Boy, I hate those child-support guys,” Eli said. “Or, no, not hate. Forget hate. The Bible cautions us not to hate. But I … pity them, yes, I surely do pity those child-support guys. You’d never get
me
to raise one of them’s kids.”

“Oh, they’re really like my own now,” Ian said.

“Even so! Here you are sitting home with three young ones and he’s off enjoying his self.”

“I don’t mind,” Ian said.

He didn’t want to go into the whole story. In fact, he couldn’t remember now why he’d brought it up in the first place.

He was supervising the children’s homework at the kitchen table when he heard a wailing sound outdoors. He said, “Was that a baby?”

No one answered. They were too busy arguing. Thomas was telling Daphne that when
he
was in third grade, a plain old wooden pencil had been good enough for him. Daphne had no business, he said, swiping his personal ballpoint pen. Daphne said, “Maybe what
you
wrote in third grade wasn’t worth a pen.” Then Agatha complained they’d made her lose her train of thought. Thanks to them, she would have to start this whole equation over again.

“Was that a baby crying?” Ian asked.

They barely paused.

“Hey,” Thomas said to the others. “Want to hear something disgusting?”

“No, what?”

Ian crossed the kitchen and opened the screen door. It was light enough still so he could make out the clothesline poles and the azalea bushes, and the stockade fence that separated the backyard from the alley.

“In science class, my teacher? Mr. Pratt?” Thomas said. “He stands at the blackboard, he tells us, ‘By the time I’ve finished teaching this lesson, microscopic portions of my mouth will be
all over this room.
’ ”

“Eeuw!” Daphne and Agatha said.

Just inside the gate, which had not been completely closed in years, sat a minuscule patch of darkness, a denser black than the fence posts. This patch stirred and glinted in some way and uttered another thin wail.

“Kitty-kitty?” Ian called.

He stepped outside, shutting the screen door behind him. Yes, it was definitely a cat. When he approached, it teetered on the brink of leaving but finally stood its ground. He bent to pat its head. He could feel the narrow skull beneath fur so soft that it made almost no impression on his fingertips.

“Where’s your owner, little cat?” he asked.

But he thought he knew the answer to that. There wasn’t any tag or collar, and when he ran a hand down its body he could count the ribs. It staggered weakly beneath his touch, then braced itself and started purring in a rusty, unpracticed way, pressing its small face into the cup of his palm.

As it happened, the Bedloes had no pets at that particular moment. They had never replaced Beastie, and the latest of their cats had disappeared a few months ago. So this new little cat had come to the right people. Ian let it spend a few minutes getting used to him, and then he picked it up and carried it back inside the house. It clung to him with needle claws, tense but still conscientiously purring. “See what I found in the alley,” he told the children.

“Oh, look!” Daphne cried, slipping out of her chair. “Can I hold it, Ian? Can I keep it?”

“If no one comes to claim it,” Ian said, handing it over.

In the light he saw that the cat was black from head to foot, and not much more than half grown. Its eyes had changed to green already but its face was still the triangular, top-heavy face of a kitten. Thomas was lifting its spindly tail to see what sex it was, but the cat objected to that and climbed higher on Daphne’s shoulder. “Ouch!” Daphne squawked. “Thomas, quit! See what you made it do?”

“It’s a girl, I think,” Thomas announced.

“Leave her alone, Thomas!”

“She’s not just yours, Daphne,” Agatha said. She had risen too and was scratching the cat behind its ears.

“She is so mine! Ian said so! You’re mine, mine, mine, you little sweetums,” Daphne said, nuzzling the cat’s nose with her own. “Oh, what kind of monstrous, mean person would just ditch you and drive off?”

All of a sudden Ian had an image of Agatha, Thomas, and Daphne huddled in a ditch by the side of a road. They were hanging onto each other and their eyes were wide and fearful. And far in the distance, almost out of sight, Ian’s car was vanishing around a curve.

But then immediately afterward, he felt such a deep sense of loss that it made his breath catch.