Standing in the Rainbow (15 page)

Bobby swam as fast and as far away from him as he could but not far enough. Just as Bobby emerged at the surface, gasping for air, Luther was right behind him and rolled over on his back and kicked him as hard as he could and caught him right between his shoulder blades.

Bobby did not know what hit him. The powerful kick knocked the wind out of him and sent him flying toward the deep end of the pool. Luther swam away, laughing his head off, but Bobby did not come back up. Having seen Bobby drift around underwater all day, nobody paid much attention to him, even the lifeguard, who had his hands full with a pool crammed with excited kids.

It wasn’t until some minutes later that Macky Warren, who was standing around talking to Norma, looked over and noticed that Bobby was floating around on top of the water, facedown. He was not moving. Macky ran over to the side of the pool and reached in and jerked him up by his hair and pulled him out. Bobby was unconscious and had already started turning blue. A few minutes later, when Anna Lee and Patsy came strolling into the pool area, they noticed a group of people gathered around, looking at something on the side of the pool. Anna Lee wondered what it was but did not think much about it until she got closer and realized it was a person on the ground. Norma blurted out, “Oh, Anna Lee, I think he’s dead!”

Anna Lee walked over, still not knowing who it was. Suddenly everyone moved aside. When she looked down and saw Bobby’s lifeless body lying on the cement she almost fainted. The lifeguard was gasping, counting out loud, giving him artificial respiration, desperately trying to get him to breathe. Unable to move, Anna Lee screamed over and over, “That’s my brother!” In that minute before Bobby finally started to cough and spit up water, the thousands of irritating things he had ever done were forgotten. All Anna Lee wanted was for him to be alive.

When Bobby finally did come to and opened his eyes, he looked up and when he saw so many people peering down at him it scared him to death. He didn’t know where he was or what he was doing on the ground. When his eyes began to focus a little better, he suddenly recognized his sister’s face, as she knelt down beside him. He was so happy to see her that he threw his arms around her neck and wouldn’t let go.

Still in a state of shock, not really understanding what had happened, Bobby began to shiver and to cry. Anna Lee held him and said, “It’s all right, you’re all right, Bobby, I’m here.” Even when the lifeguard picked him up and carried him into the poolhouse and laid him down on the couch he would not let go of her hand. They covered him with a blanket and rubbed him all over to get his circulation back. After a while he sat up and had a Coke. He was a bit shaken by the ordeal but apparently none too worse for the wear. When he felt well enough Anna Lee got his clothes out of the locker and helped him dress and they walked home together, his arm around her waist, her arm around his shoulder. As they got closer to the house they saw their mother out standing on the sidewalk.

“I’ve been worried to death,” she said. “I was just about to go down there and find you. What were you doing all this time?”

Anna Lee squeezed his hand and said, “Nothing. I was just fooling around talking to some people, that’s all. It’s my fault.”

The next day Bobby decided it was in his own best interest and a matter of personal safety not to go back to the pool anytime soon. Particularly as long as Luther Griggs was still lurking around. So he stayed in his room and read comic books.

At about 12:30 that afternoon, Monroe came running through the side yard and knocked frantically on Bobby’s window, his eyes wide open as if he had just seen a Martian. “Let me in,” he said. Bobby opened the window all the way and Monroe climbed across the sill flush with excitement. “Whoa . . . wait till you hear what just happened to Luther!”

“What?”

Monroe put his hands on his head, walked around the room, and exclaimed, “Fantastic! . . . It was fantastic. . . . You should have seen her.
Wham,
a right cross right on the chin and then
bang
, she let him have it again with a left hook and another right. Oh, she was great.” Monroe danced around the room demonstrating the fight.
“
Wham . . . bam!”

“Who?” asked Bobby.

“Anna Lee!”

Bobby couldn’t believe it. “My
sister
Anna Lee?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not, I saw it. She came down to the pool a little while ago looking for him and she went over and jerked him up by his shirt and told him to pick on somebody his own size. Then she hauled off and knocked him flat on his back. When she got him on the ground she just about kicked the stuffing out of him. He was crying and everything. It was great. You should have seen it.”

“Anna Lee?”

“Yeah, and she told him if he ever bothered you again she’d get Billy Nobblitt on him.”

“My sister?”

Monroe flopped back on the bed. “Boy, are you lucky. I wish I had a sister like that.”

“He really cried?” Bobby smiled.

“Oh, yeah, she had him begging for mercy.”

That night at dinner Bobby looked across the table at his sister with new eyes, filled with awe and admiration. Although nothing was said, their relationship began to change after that day. Gradually, the thought of how wonderful it would have been to be an only child slowly faded away, and they finally quit tattletelling on each other every chance they got. They even began to share their own little secrets. It had only been a slight adjustment but it was to make all the difference in the world. As Dorothy remarked later, “It’s so pleasant not to have the children at each other’s throats night and day. I wonder what happened?”

Although Dorothy was relieved she no longer had to worry about her own children killing each other, from time to time she still worried about Betty Raye Oatman. She had never received a letter from her. Often, she wondered if the girl was all right. She even called the minister out at the Highway 78 Church of Christ, but he had no idea where the Oatmans were.

Betty Raye did not find the envelope that Neighbor Dorothy had slipped into the side of her suitcase until a few days after she had left Elmwood Springs. Inside was fifty dollars in cash and a short handwritten note.

Sweetheart,

Take this and buy yourself a little something special or just save it for a rainy day if you want. Please don’t forget us and come see us again.

Your friends,

Doc and Dorothy Smith

P.S. Drop me a note and let me know how you are doing from time to time, will you?

Betty Raye wanted to write but did not know what to say. But Dorothy need not have worried about Betty Raye ever forgetting them. Although she was being jerked from town to town, she often thought about her time in Elmwood Springs. On the road, she had only been able to go to school periodically and missed more days than she attended. She longed to be in one place, go to one school. She wished she could be like Anna Lee, have the same friends from year to year, and live in the same house. Often at night as they drove through small towns she would see the families on the porches or see them inside having dinner and it would remind her of her time with the Smiths. As unhappy as she was, she never told her mother. Minnie had her own problems.

The Prodigal Son

F
OR THE
O
ATMAN FAMILY
the summer had been extremely busy. Since May they had been from Nebraska to Arkansas, Oklahoma, Michigan, Louisiana, West Virginia, Kansas, and back again. After an all-night sing in Spartanburg, South Carolina, they finally had a day off from traveling. Ferris was staying at a farmhouse with Bervin and Vernon and Betty Raye was at another house staying with a family of seven. Minnie had spent the night with the Pike family, who were local gospel singers of some note. The next morning she was sitting outside in the backyard, visiting with Mrs. Opal Pike, whose husband was already at work. Besides being a gospel singer he was also a distant relative of the Pike’s Mentholated Salve family and handled all sales in the Carolinas. The two women were drinking iced tea and discussing the problems and pitfalls of being gospel wives. Minnie said, “It’s not always easy having everyone looking up to you.”

“No,” agreed Mrs. Pike.

“You know, Ferris has not always been the good strict Christian he is today. Most people don’t know but he’s had years of on-and-off bouts of drinking and running around, getting saved and then slipping back.”

“You don’t mean it?” said Mrs. Pike.

“Yes. But praise be to God, as of six weeks ago this Tuesday, he’s permanently saved and a new man, and what a blessing. A redheaded faith healer from Mississippi cured him of the arthritis and saved his soul at the same meeting.”

“You don’t mean it,” Mrs. Pike said again as she slapped a mosquito on her arm into oblivion.

Minnie nodded. “Up until that time he had been struggling with a serious crisis of faith. He’d been studying for his Church of Christ ministership certificate through the mail for about three months when he came in one morning after sitting up all night out in the car with his Bible and he just looked terrible. I said, ‘Ferris, what’s the matter?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Sit down, Minnie, I have something to tell you.’ He said, ‘Honey, I want you to know I have struggled and prayed a thousand hours over this thing but no help has come.’ Then he took my hand and held it and said, ‘We’ve got a serious problem. I might have to give up the ministry.’ Well, I got all shaken up inside when I heard that because up to this point it had been his whole life. And I said, ‘Ferris, what is it, is it another woman?’ And he said, ‘No, honey, it’s the prodigal son.’ He said, ‘As hard as I’ve tried to come to terms with it and be in agreement with the Word, I can’t.’ He’d lost his faith over a parable. He said, ‘If a man can go out and raise hell and spend all his money and live in sin and then comes back home and his father throws his arms around him and says welcome home, come on in, and acts like nothing happened, how does that make his other sons feel, the ones that stayed home and worked the farm, saved their money, and lived a Christian life? Why, it would make them feel like all those years of trying to be good didn’t mean a thing to their daddy. They might as well have gone out and had a good time themselves.’ He said, ‘Don’t you see, Minnie? Why should a man try and be good if in the end it don’t matter one way or the other to your daddy? Why be good if, like the prodigal son, you can do anything you want and get away with it?’

“Well, what could I say? I said, ‘Ferris, I see your point. You can’t very well sing and preach something you don’t see the point of yourself, it wouldn’t be right.’ But we had to go on because we was booked and I just kept praying the whole time. Then a few months later we was singing out at a big tent revival and camp meeting in Pelham, Alabama, and I’ll never forget that night. There wasn’t a star in the sky and it was as black as Egypt outside and Ferris is out wandering around and pretty soon he drifts over to this Harper woman’s tent. Now, mind you, he’s seen some of the best preachers and evangelists there is and was pretty much immune to any of them but he wasn’t in there no more than twenty minutes till she came off that stage and grabbed ahold of him and said something to him and he’s been saved ever since.”

“Thank the Lord,” said Mrs. Pike.

“The Lord and the Harper woman. Now, I don’t know what it was she said but it must have been good because he hadn’t had a pain in his knee since. No wonder she’s got a big following. They say up in Atlanta people come to see her in ambulances and go home on the streetcar. You go to one of those healing meetings and you’re gonna be cured of what ails you. We went one night up in Detroit and people was being healed left and right of back trouble, blindness, bunions, goiters, liver problems, ringworm, you name it. One woman came in with a crooked index finger and by the time the service was over it was as straight as a stick.”

“You don’t mean it!”

“I do. Honey, she turned around and pointed it right at me!”

Minnie stared off in the backyard. “I just hope Ferris will stay saved for a while, leastways till I get the boys raised. Both is at that age where they’s starting to act up, and between them and having to watch Uncle Floyd like a hawk night and day I’m wore out.”

The Princess Mary Margaret Fund

N
ot only did Dorothy care about people she thought needed help but she also had a soft spot for animals and everybody for miles around knew it. On July first she started her broadcast with yet another abandoned kitten in her lap that had been left at her back door the night before. After she opened the show and had done her first commercial she announced, “By the way, the noise you are hearing is not a motorboat. It is the sweetest little cat I have here, just purring away, and he is in need of a home. He is just a little orange angel and would make a wonderful companion for somebody out there, I just know it, so if anybody can take him, please give us a call.”