Suncatchers (20 page)

No one else had said much, but Jewel's profile had looked calm in the faint glow of passing streetlights. The empty Hi-C jars made a hollow clanking sound as they bumped against each other inside the grocery bags at Joe Leonard's feet.

When they had turned onto Blossom Circle, Perry suddenly had an idea, and before he could reconsider, he had found himself talking.

“I'd like to invite you all out for dinner on Tuesday night,” he said. A moment of silence had fallen, and for a while Perry wondered again if he had really spoken or only thought he had.

But then Eldeen gasped and looked over at Jewel. “Out to dinner! Why, we haven't done that for—how long's it been, Jewel? I can't even remember.”

Jewel shook her head. “I don't know, Mama. I really don't. Of course, Perry had us over for pizza last week, don't forget.”

“Well, I should say not. We couldn't any of us forget
that!
”

They pulled into the driveway, and Jewel turned around to face Perry. She didn't speak right away but finally said, “That's awful nice, Perry, but please don't feel like you have to take us out for dinner.” Joe Leonard turned his head quickly and looked out his window.

“Have to?” Perry said. “Well, I know that. It's just that . . . it came to me that Tuesday's your real birthday and . . . well, I'd like to do it. If you want to, that is.”

“Well, yes,” Jewel said, “we'd like to.” She looked over at Eldeen. “Is that all right with you, Mama?”

“All right? Well, I guess that's one way of putting it!”

“Joe Leonard, does that suit you?” Jewel looked at her son through the rearview mirror.

“Sure,” Joe Leonard said. He shifted his feet nervously and accidentally kicked one of the bags. The glass jars clamored briefly.

“We'll plan on Tuesday then,” Perry said as he opened the car door.

“If it doesn't snow like they're predicting!” Eldeen called after him.

On Monday Perry had phoned around and finally settled on a place called the Purple Calliope. They didn't need reservations, the woman on the phone had said, but Perry told her anyway that a party of four would be arriving Tuesday night at six-thirty. “Call us tomorrow in case of bad weather,” the woman had said. “We might not be open if it threatens to snow.”

The weather forecast had been suggesting the possibility of snow for three days now, ever since Sunday morning, but Perry was skeptical. He had heard about the snow mania in the South. Cal had told him about schools being canceled at the sight of a single snowflake, about multicar pileups because of the ineptitude of Southern drivers on ice, about runs on bread and milk in all the grocery stores when the temperature dropped below freezing.

The computer was still on in the guest room. Perry started shuffling through several handwritten sheets, looking for the notes he had taken at prayer meeting the week before, then stopped suddenly and walked over to the window. The sky was a hazy white but brindled with low clouds. As far as snow skies went, it looked remotely possible but certainly not likely. Recalling the weather report on the local news the night before, Perry shook his head and smiled. The forecaster, a man with a rubbery face and a toupee, had sounded theatrical in his intensity. “A winter storm of historic proportion has spawned in the Gulf and appears to be headed full speed toward the coast of Louisiana, where it will collide with a cold air mass coming down from the Midwest and then rip across the Southeast, leaving a path of poorly equipped towns buried by snowfalls up to fifteen inches.” For South Carolina, it was hard to tell, the man said, exactly where the snow line would fall, but most likely at least half of the state, from Columbia southward, would be “crippled by the storm, with other regions getting significant flurries and high winds.” Perry had smiled at the dramatic word choices: “historic proportion,” “spawned,” “full speed,” “collide,” “rip,” “buried,” “crippled.” “Get a grip on yourself,” he had wanted to tell the man. “Let me tell you a thing or two about
real
winter storms.”

He turned back to the computer and once again searched through the papers spread out beside it. He had been to three complete rounds of Sunday activities at the Church of the Open Door now, including Sunday school, morning worship, Training Union, choir practice, and the evening service. Besides that, he'd attended prayer meeting for two Wednesdays. Last week instead of going with Eldeen, Jewel, and Joe Leonard to Peewee Powwow, he had stayed with the adults for their prayer session in the sanctuary. From the pile of notes, he at last pulled out four small sheets torn from his Day-Timer.

For now he was typing up his notes in chapters with unimaginative titles like “Sunday School” and “Choir Practice.” He opened a new file and named it “Adult Prayer Session.”

Once the children had left the auditorium, Brother Hawthorne had opened the floor for prayer requests and testimonies. Perry tried to get down as much in writing as he could. Almost everyone else was writing also, he noticed. It intrigued him as the request session wore on that these people were so unabashedly open and detailed with the personal information they shared. A woman named Nina said her sister in Birmingham had a cyst on one of her ovaries and would be having surgery on Friday, and a man named Bernie requested prayer for a brother-in-law who had lost his third job in a row because of his addiction to alcohol, which he still refused to admit. Hoyt Bagwell asked prayer for his granddaughter, who was attending Michigan State University, that she'd be able to “keep her testimony.”

An elderly woman named Marjorie stood and spoke in a whispery voice about her niece who had left her husband a week ago with their Pontiac and the thousand dollars they had in their savings account. The niece, whose name was Felicia, was seven months pregnant and didn't leave any word about where she was headed. Harvey Gill requested prayer for his unsaved son, who although financially prosperous, was “living a life of blatant sin far away from the Lord out in Los Angeles.”

Perry wrote them all down, a whole list of depressing human burdens. He wondered as he was writing down the one about Grady's medical insurance being canceled whether it ever disturbed anybody in this church that this God they claimed to be so loving and so powerful allowed their lives to be so fraught with problems. He wondered how Jewel dealt with that, how she could reconcile the idea of a loving God with a God who had permitted her husband to die—perhaps even
ordained
it, if he understood the theology of these Christians.

Maria Pyle spoke up and asked everyone to keep praying for Crystal Kahlstorf's husband, Lowell. He had pawned Crystal's sapphire ring, which had belonged to her grandmother, and then spent the money on whiskey. An audible murmur of sympathy swept across the assembly at this news, and Brother Hawthorne asked the deacons to stay for a short meeting after the service to discuss additional financial aid for Crystal and her children. Woody Farnsworth told about spraining his ankle falling off the ladder from the attic and asked for prayer that it would heal quickly because he needed to shingle his roof as soon as the weather warmed up a little more. He went on to say how thankful he was that he'd been able to break his fall with the bag of old baby clothes he was carrying or it could have been a lot worse.

Among the prayer requests were interspersed some happy stories that Brother Hawthorne called “praises.” Frankly, some of them sounded suspicious to Perry. A woman named Myrt claimed that her car's brakes had gone out on Monday and she'd had no idea how she was going to pay for the repairs. Then just today, Wednesday, before she had gone to get the car, she had found a letter in her mailbox from an aunt in Idaho she hadn't heard from in over three years, and in with the letter was a check for $300. The car repair bill had come to $282, and Myrt praised the Lord that she had eighteen dollars left over for a new pair of windshield wipers, which the mechanic had said she desperately needed and which cost $16.98. Myrt was crying by the time she finished, and so were others. Several people simultaneously declared “Amen!” or “Praise the Lord!” when she sat down.

Sid Puckett said his father had been diagnosed with prostate cancer two months ago, but last week his mystified doctor told him there was no sign of the cancer now.

Deus ex machina
—that was the term for it in fiction. A writer churned up some complex series of problems to grab the reader's interest and then simply wiped them all away with some contrived twist of plot, like a surprise inheritance or the winning number of a billion-dollar jackpot or—the most reprehensible—a sudden awakening to realize it had all been only a bad dream.

But Myrt's and Sid's stories weren't fiction. They were real life. So, Perry asked himself, how could the $300 check and the mysterious healing be explained? The answer came immediately. It was simple—it was all chance: lucky timing, honest mix-ups, the kinds of things that happened every day. These people just credited it all to the power of God, that's all. There was no such thing as “fate” in their way of thinking.

When prayer time actually started, people began standing to rehearse, with eyes closed, the inventory of needs. That was another thing Perry would like to ask somebody one day. If God was everywhere and knew everything and always opened the door when you knocked and filled your cup to overflowing as these people seemed to believe, then why did they think they had to
repeat
their needs over and over as if God were a slow learner or hard of hearing? Why did they even have to verbalize them for that matter?

He began listing phrases common to many of the prayers: “if it be thy will,” “unsaved loved ones,” “thy throne of grace,” “the privilege of prayer,” “the blessings bestowed upon us,” “strength and comfort,” “work in a special way,” “guide and direct us.” Perry wondered how many of the people praying were really thinking about what they were saying. Or had their prayers become rituals, comforting in their familiarity but devoid of meaning?

When Brother Hawthorne stood at last to end the prayer session, Perry listened carefully. The man fascinated him. Not one of the catch phrases Perry had copied down on his list was repeated in the pastor's prayer. Perry raised his head and looked up. Brother Hawthorne stood with his arms crossed in front of himself, as if trying to protect himself from arrows. His eyes were tightly closed, and his face looked pained as if the arrows were finding their mark. He held no script in his hands, but the words poured forth fluently, warmly, wrapping themselves easily around the thoughts and almost convincing even Perry that these things would indeed come to pass. How could God resist such a moving plea?

Perry stopped and glanced up from his computer. The wind had kicked up outside. He could hear its low whistle and the scratchy sound of dry leaves scuttling across the driveway. He turned off the computer and went to the window. The daffodils in the neighbors' yard across the street were standing sideways, leaning evenly like a row of chorus girls. A Bradford pear tree, already flecked with early white blossoms, was quivering like a pompon. It was almost three-thirty, he noticed on the clock. He saw two schoolchildren bending into the wind, slowly moving toward the house across from the Blanchards'. Some papers blew out of the hands of the smaller one and went whipping down the street behind her. Her brother took her hand and pulled her ahead, shouting something over his shoulder. The door of the house opened, and a woman came out, calling and beckoning to the children as she scanned the sky.

Perry was entranced. He couldn't remember ever watching a storm brew so rapidly—and ominously—as this one was doing. He saw Jewel's station wagon coming down the street at the same time he saw the first snowflake whirl past the window. They must have encouraged the teachers to get home early. He saw Joe Leonard jump out of the car before Jewel reached the house and stop a garbage can lid that was clattering down the driveway toward him. Thirty minutes later the sky was swirling with snow. It surprised Perry to see some of it begin almost immediately to whiten the ground. How could it stick, he wondered, with such powerful wind gusts? There was a steady roar like a powerful jet hovering overhead.

It was snowing thickly now, large flakes spiraling and lifting—a wild, confused type of storm unlike the slow, steady drifts that dropped straight down from the sky in pictures. Perry watched it blow off the eaves of the houses across the street, blurred wisps circling upward, then eerily flying apart like ghosts. Along the rooftops little whirlwinds of snow flew up in a rampage, blew sideways, and then disappeared swiftly like smoke.

It came to him again that he ought to study photography. There were prizewinning photographs out there on a day like today. A writer ought to make a good photographer, he had often told himself. The ability to see the world from unique angles, to capture details others overlooked, to create magic out of the mundane—he ought to be able to do that as well on film as on paper. But Dinah used to laugh over his shoulder as he studied with disappointment each new set of prints he had developed. It was always the same. By the time he found the background setting he wanted and positioned Troy and Dinah perfectly, their smiles would have congealed or the sun would have cast shadows over their faces. Troy had begun groaning every time he saw Perry unzipping the camera case. The best picture he had of the two of them was one Dinah's mother, who couldn't even see well enough to get her driver's license renewed, had snapped in her front yard with a Kodak Instamatic.

At 4:40, the electricity went off. The phone rang a few seconds later.

“It's a freak spring storm, that's what it is!” cried Eldeen. “And now we've gone and lost our power, haven't we? You doing all right over there all by your lonesome?”

“I'm fine,” he said, “but it doesn't look good for going out to eat.”