Suncatchers (32 page)

Secretly, Perry suspected Marty of manipulating the whole thing—of seeing Pat drop her pen and then quickly reaching down to place his own beside hers, then pretending to grope around in search for it. But to the church people, it was all a divinely orchestrated moment that had set in motion the romance that culminated now in this happy occasion.

Perry wondered if Pat had regrets about changing her last name from Tillman to Chest. Pat Chest was the kind of name people would make wisecracks about. Besides, how would anyone know from hearing their names—Marty and Pat—which one was the husband and which was the wife? He started thinking of humorous names Marty and Pat could choose for their children but could come up with only two: Harry Chest and Hope Chest. It struck him that Marty Chest would have been the perfect addition to his high school geometry class in Rockford. It had been the joke of the school. Four of the class members were Bob Hand, Phyllis Head, Larry Bone, and Kelly Foote. Everyone used to say it would have been perfect if only Candy Arms and Twan Wong Chin had taken geometry that year.

Now that he thought about it, though, he supposed it was no less a coincidence to think that Pat and Marty had both dropped their pens at the same time or that Myrt Silvester had received an unexpected check to pay for her car repair or that Bernie Paulson had run into his old army buddy at Six Flags than to believe that four students with body parts for last names had ended up in a single geometry class.

As they walked into the church, Perry was startled at the transformation. The pulpit was gone, and someone had draped the long choir panel with a filmy off-white fabric, over which garlands of dark green ivy were arranged. Large masses of roses in vases of various sizes flanked the platform—donated by church members especially for the wedding. For several weeks there had been an announcement in the bulletin asking for roses to be picked fresh and brought to the church by noon on July 10 for the wedding of Pat Tillman and Marty Chest at two o'clock.

Tall white candles surrounded by rose petals sat on the windowsills along both sides of the church. Big yellow bows were fastened onto the end of each pew along the center aisle, with a sprig of ivy tied into each knot. Birdie sat at the organ, softly playing “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us.” Perry saw Joe Leonard, looking neat and scrubbed after his morning's work outdoors, sitting beside Jewel in the front row. Surely Joe Leonard wasn't going to play his tuba for a wedding. He hadn't thought to ask any questions when Eldeen told him Jewel and Joe Leonard both had to go early. As they moved into the pew indicated by the usher, Perry began imagining Pat, who was quite a large girl, walking down the aisle to a tuba rendition of “Here Comes the Bride.”

As they sat down, Eldeen must have seen him smiling because she reached over and squeezed his arm. “It
is
pretty, isn't it?” she whispered. “They sure did some fancy decoratin' job! And it looks like there's going to be a real good turnout.” She craned her neck toward the back, where people were still filling the small vestibule.

Presently a quartet assembled around the microphone beside the piano—Joe Leonard, Sid Puckett, Edna Hawthorne, and Vonda Snyder. They sang a song with the repeated phrase “make of our home a mirror of heaven.” “A nice thought,” Perry wanted to tell Pat and Marty, “but don't get your hopes up, kids.” He felt a sudden stab of sorrow for the young couple, knowing that the realities of married life would eventually chip away at all that rosy idealism.

Just yesterday he had seen a large heart with two names spray-painted on a concrete balustrade outside the Derby Public Library: “Tyrone + Sheela.” He could tell it had been there a good while when he bent closer to examine it, and he had stood there for a while staring at it and wondering what had become of Tyrone and Sheela. Had they had an argument and broken up the day after they had sneaked down here with their can of red paint? Or had they gone on to marry and raise a family? Maybe they were divorced and remarried by now. He knew one thing—if they
had
married, they had no doubt learned the sad truth about love and marriage. But then, as he watched Edna Hawthorne's round, radiant face during the final stanza of the quartet's number, he wondered what
she
would say about love and marriage. Did she really consider it a “mirror of heaven”? She was singing as if she really meant it.

He thought back to an interchange he had observed between the Hawthornes several weeks ago. He had gone to Wal-Mart one Friday evening to buy washers for Beth's drippy bathroom faucets and had pulled into a parking space in front of an ice-cream shop next door called Darlene's Kreamy Kones. There at a booth beside the window, right under a large red sign announcing
KREAMY KONE'S NEW FLAVOR: KRANBERRY ALMOND KRUNCH
, sat Edna and Theodore Hawthorne facing each other. Edna was wearing a wide plaid headband in her red hair, and Brother Hawthorne had on a short-sleeved sport shirt. For several minutes Perry had sat in his car watching them.

Brother Hawthorne was licking his ice cream from a cone, and Edna was eating hers from a small cup with a plastic spoon. Then Brother Hawthorne must have asked Edna something because she tilted her head and bit her lip as if thinking of an answer. After she spoke, Brother Hawthorne laughed and shook his head, then reached over and patted her hand and said something in return. Edna lifted her eyes then and looked at her husband. Neither of them spoke for several long seconds but just sat and smiled at each other. Perry watched in amazement. Why didn't one of them
say
something? He couldn't imagine staring into someone's eyes for that long.

Finally Edna broke the spell and pointed to Brother Hawthorne's cone. He licked a neat ring around it. Perry got out of his car and closed the door softly, hoping not to attract the Hawthornes' attention. As he headed toward Wal-Mart, he wondered where Levi, Hannah, and Esther were. The Hawthornes had left Darlene's by the time he returned to his car, but all the way home he couldn't get the thought of that long intimate look out of his mind.

Birdie played another number on the organ, and then Fern Tucker recited a poem titled “A Wedding Rainbow,” in which a mother questioned why God had allowed it to rain on her daughter's wedding day. Then, as the mother complained, the storm passed and a rainbow spanned the sky, spreading its bright bands. As Perry could have predicted, the mother immediately turned to sentimental didacticism and joyfully proceeded to draw an application to marriage from each of the colors—blue speaking of the faithfulness of husband and wife to each other, green of the eternal youth of their love, yellow for the bright hope of tomorrow, and so forth.

Perry wished the poet had been scientifically correct and put the colors of the spectrum in the right order, starting with red and ending with purple, instead of mixing them all up, but he knew the order was probably determined by which words the poet could wrestle into rhyming. Anybody who ended two consecutive lines with
dearth
and
mirth
was obviously more concerned with rhyme than with optical physics. He saw Eldeen wiping at her eyes with a large man-sized handkerchief as Fern spoke the last lines of the poem: “‘No rain, no rainbow,' she said with a nod; ‘Yes, all things—e'en rainstorms—are presents from God.'”

The annoyingly cheery metrical platitude echoed in his mind as the mothers of the bride and groom were ushered in. How could Christians buy that? He still couldn't figure it out. He had heard that verse repeated over and over since he had been here—“All things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose”—and as far as he could tell, all these people really seemed to believe it. He heard the poem again in his mind: “‘No rain, no rainbow,' she said with a nod.” He imagined children chanting it as they jumped rope. He might have missed the solemn spectacle of Pat's maid of honor and the one bridesmaid moving down the aisle in pale yellow dresses carrying bouquets of multicolored roses if Eldeen hadn't poked him and whispered, “Oh, don't they look like precious little fairies?”

Perry intended to ask Brother Hawthorne sometime how he explained the verse in Romans in light of certain recent developments in the lives of church members. Marjorie Eckles's niece, for example, had had a baby with Down's syndrome a couple of months ago. She was the one, Perry recalled, who had run away from her husband. And Louise Farnsworth, who taught the junior girls' Sunday school class, had lost control of her car on the way home after visiting her sister in Columbia and had run into a highway worker mowing the median. The man, who had a wife and five children, was still in critical condition. Grady Ferguson didn't have medical insurance yet, and Denny and Maria Pyle's youngest son out in Texas had lost a foot in an explosion. How could anyone interpret these things as
good
?

On the other hand, Harvey Gill's reprobate son in California had recently landed a high-paying job as senior editor with a motion picture studio. It surely didn't sound to Perry as if all things worked together for good in the lives of Christians. But here they were, still smiling and reciting lines of poetry like “Yes, all things—e'en rainstorms—are presents from God.”

People were beginning to stand up now. Birdie had pulled out all the stops on the organ. Perry stood quickly and turned to watch Pat and her father walk down the aisle. Jarvis Tillman held out his arm stiffly. One side of his mouth twitched nervously. Beside him, Pat was smiling broadly as she clutched her father's arm and looked adoringly at Marty, who returned her gaze from the front of the auditorium. The firm, straight planes of her face were softened, and her skin was peachy pink behind the layers of white netting. Her dress was of a delicate, swishy material, and the lines were long and simple, not full and fussy. It looked to Perry like something Ginger Rogers would have worn in a ballroom scene with Fred Astaire, except Ginger Rogers's dress would have been a much smaller size.

“My, she does make a sweet little bride!” Eldeen whispered loud enough for several rows to hear. There were murmurs of agreement. Pat was an inch or two taller than her father and a solid, big-boned girl. Perry never would have used the words “sweet” or “little” to describe her, but she looked sturdy and healthy and even-tempered—and, he thought, Marty would most likely find those to be qualities that wore well over the long haul. Marty himself would win no prize for good looks. He reminded Perry a little of his elementary school principal, Mr. Hal Mack, whom the boys had called Halloween Mask behind his back.

Brother Hawthorne was asking, “Who giveth this woman to be married?” and Jarvis Tillman started to speak, then had to stop and clear his throat, then cough and try again before he got out “Her mother and I do.” Several people smiled sympathetically.

Perry remembered this exact moment in his own wedding, though he hadn't thought of it for years. Dinah's father, who had been twenty years older than her mother and who would die of a heart attack four months after the wedding, had answered loudly, “
I
do.” Dinah's mother had drilled him repeatedly at the rehearsal to say “Her mother and I do,” so whether he had forgotten or was simply testing his wife to see if she would correct him in public as usual, no one ever knew. Perry could still hear his mother-in-law's sharp inhalation as her husband spoke the words. During the reception afterward she had kept her back rigid and her lips pressed together in a thin frosty smile. Perry had never known whether it was because of her husband's mistake or because she felt Dinah was marrying beneath her.

Marty's face flushed as he stepped forward to take his place at Pat's side. He was built like a lumberjack but moved awkwardly. Perry could see him getting trapped beneath trees and toppling off logs. His whole face looked a little lopsided, and his nose was a large wedge slightly off-center, the kind that could become decidedly hooked the older he got. Still, his countenance glowed, as if he couldn't believe his good fortune in winning the hand of the winsome, robust Pat.

Brother Hawthorne was using an old-fashioned script for the ceremony. He even included the line inviting any man who knew any reason why these two should not be joined to speak up or “forever hold his peace.” Perry wished he knew how many times in the history of weddings someone had taken the preacher up on that offer.

As Marty and Pat repeated their vows, Perry felt a sense of panic on their behalf. Listening to the first few promises uttered so glibly by Pat, he began frantically working out a homily in his mind, admonishing Marty and Pat to reconsider it all. How could they know what they were saying, what enormous commitments they were making? When he heard Marty's husky voice declare, “Till death do us part,” he wanted to grip him by his massive shoulders and say, “How can you possibly stand there and promise all that to someone you barely know?”

Soon Marty and Pat were kneeling at a small white prayer bench, their heads touching as Brother Hawthorne blessed their union. The quartet stood again after the prayer and sang “Take My Life,” changing all the
my
's to
our
's. Then Marty and Pat rose, and Brother Hawthorne addressed them directly, looking up at them both but speaking earnestly and kindly as a father giving last-minute instructions. His final words were for Marty. “Pat is your treasure. Love and cherish her. Her happiness, the success of your marriage, the spiritual prosperity of the children God may choose to give you—all these lie at your feet, Marty. Consider your responsibility gravely and execute it faithfully.”

Perry hardly heard the rest. He was aware that Brother Hawthorne said something else that made everyone smile and laugh softly, and he knew that Marty and Pat turned around at some point to face the audience. He vaguely remembered Marty's fumbling at Pat's veil, then finally bending to kiss her—clumsily, as if he had never done it before. He saw them hurry down the aisle hand in hand while Birdie played “Praise Him, Praise Him.” He began filing out with everyone else, nodding mutely in response to Eldeen's enthusiastic summary of the ceremony's many charms. He even ate a piece of white wedding cake and drank a cup of lemony punch in Fellowship Hall, and he saw Marty and Pat emerge later from separate Sunday school rooms, Pat now wearing a soft blue dress and Marty a dark gray suit. He watched Pat throw her bridal bouquet and saw Mayme Snyder catch it and flourish it above her head victoriously.