"Devlin told me about your back. I've got a chair here I think might suit you, a therapeutic recline-o-lounger." He pushed back a big leather chair. "Or there's the bed" – then ran his hand over a deep purple wool bedspread on a king-size bed fixed right into the back of the bus.
"Fiddlesticks," I says. "I hope it never gets to where I'm not capable of sitting in a chair like a human. I'll sit here awhile, then maybe I'll lay on that bed awhile, as my fancy takes me!" He took my arm and helped me into the chair, my face burning like a beet. I pulled my dress down over my legs and asked them what they were waiting on, anyhow. I could feel twenty stories of wrinkled old noses pressed to their windows as we drove out of the lot.
Me and my grandson gossiped a bit about what was happening with the family, especially Buddy, who seemed to be getting in two messes with his dairy business as quick as he got out of one. Up front, Otis had found a pint bottle of hooch from one of his big baggy pockets and was trying to share it with Mr. Keller-Brown at the wheel. Devlin saw the bottle and said maybe he'd better go up and make sure that addlehead doesn't direct us to Alaska or something. I told him, Phooey! I didn't care if they drunk the whole bottle and all three fell out the door; Toby and me could handle things! Devlin swayed away up to the front, and pretty soon the three men were talking a mile a minute.
The boy had his own little desk where he had been piddling with some Crayolas. When Devlin left he put the Crayolas back in the desk and eased out of the seat and sidled back to where I was. He took a National Geographic out of the bookcase and made like to read it on the floor beside my chair. I smiled and waited. Pretty quick sure enough his big blue eyes came up over the top of the book and I said peek-a-boo. Without another word he put the book down and crawled right up into my lap.
"Did Jesus do that to your face?" he asks.
"Why, don't tell me you're the only boy who never heard what Tricker the Squirrel done for the Toad?" I says and went into the tale about how Mr. Toad used to be very very beautiful in the olden times, with a face that shined like a green jewel. But his bright face kept showing the bugs where he was laid in wait for them. "He would have starved if it wasn't for Tricker camouflaging him with warts, don'cher see?"
He nodded, solemn but satisfied, and asks me to tell him another one. I started in about Tricker and the Bear and he went off to sleep with one hand holding mine and the other hanging onto my cameo pendant. Which was just as well because the therapeutic recline-o-lounger was about to kill me. I unclasped the gold chain and slipped out from under him and necklace both.
I backed over to the bed and sunk down into that purple wool very near out of sight. It was one of those waterbeds and it got me like quicksand, only my feet waggling up over the edge. Very unladylike. But wiggle and waggle as I might I could not get back up. Every time I got to an elbow the bus would turn and I would be washed down again. I reminded myself of a fat old ewe we used to have who would lose her balance grazing on a slope and roll over and have to lay there bleating with her feet in the air till somebody turned her right side up. I gave up floundering and let the water slosh to and fro under me while I looked over the selection in Mr. Keller-Brown's bookcase. Books on every crazy thing you ever heard of, religions and pyramids and mesmerism and the like, lots with foreign titles. Looking at the books made me someway uneasy. Actually, I was feeling fine. I could've peddled a thousand of these waterbeds on TV: "Feel twenty years younger! Like a new woman!" I had to giggle; all the driver would have to do was look in that mirror and see the New Woman's runny old nylons sticking spraddled into the air like the hindquarters of a stranded sheep.
And I swear, exactly while I was thinking about it, it seemed I felt sure enough a heavy dark look brush me, like an actual touch, Lord, like an actual physical presence.
The next I know we were pulling into the old Nebo place. Devlin was squeezing my foot. "Thought for a minute you'd passed on," he teased.
He took my arm to help me out of bed. I told him I'd thought so for a while, too, till I saw that familiar old barn go by the bus window. "Then I knew I wasn't in no Great Beyond."
The bus stopped and I sit down and put on my shoes. Mr. Keller-Brown came back and asked me how my nap was.
"I never had such a relaxing ride," I tell him. "Devlin, you put one of these waterbeds in your convertible and I just might go gallivantin'." Mr. Keller-Brown says, Well, they were going to drive to Los Angeles to sing Sunday morn and he would sure be proud to have me come along. I told him if things kept going my way like they had been I just might consider it. Little Toby says, "Oh, do, Grandma; do come with us." I promised all right I would consider it just as Mr. Keller-Brown scooped him up from the recline-o-lounger, swinging him high. I see he's still got a-holt of my pendant.
"What's this?" Mr. Keller-Brown asks. He has to pry it from the little tyke's fingers. "We better give this back to Mrs. Whittier, Tobe." He hands me the necklace but I go over and open the little, desk top and drop it in amongst the Crayolas.
"It's Toby's," I told them, "not mine." I said an angel came down and gave it to Toby in his dreams. Toby nods sober as an owl and says Yeah, Daddy, an angel, and adds – because of the cameo face on it was why, I guess – "A white angel."
Then Otis hollers, "Let's boogie for Jesus!" and we all go out.
We'd parked kind of on the road because the parking area (what used to be Emerson T's best permanent pasture) was full to overflowing – cars, buses, campers, and every sort of thing. The Worship Fair was going like a three-ring circus. There was people as thick as hair on a dog sitting around, strolling around, arguing, singing. A long-haired skinny young fellow without shoes or shirt was clamping a flyer under every windshield wiper, and a ways behind him another longhair was sticking christ's the one to the bumpers and sneaking off the flyers when the first kid wasn't looking. The first one caught the second and there then ensued a very hot denominational debate. Otis went over with his sword to straighten it all out and pass out some flyers of his own.
Across the orchard I could see they'd built a stage on the foundation where the house used to stand. At the microphone a girl was playing a zither and singing scripture in a nervous shaky voice. Devlin asked me if I knew the verse she was singing and playing. I says I thought the singing vas verse than the playing, but it vas a toss-up.
Back behind the stage we found Betsy and the kids. The kids wanted to give me my presents right off but Betsy told them to wait for the cake. The men went off to take care of getting the next act onstage and I went off with Betsy and the kids to look how their garden already was coming up. Caleb led Toby on ahead through the gate, hollering, "I'll show you something, Toby, that I bet you don't have in your garden." And Betsy told me that it was a mama Siamese, had her nest in the rhubarb.
"She just has one kitten. She had six hidden out in the hay barn but Devlin backed the tractor over five of them. She brought the last one into the garden. He's old enough to wean but that mama cat just won't let him out of the rhubarb."
We strolled along, looking how high the peas were and how the perennials had stood the big freeze. When we got to the rhubarb there was little Toby amongst the leaves hugging the kitten and grinning for all he was worth.
"That's the first time I seen the little scoot smile," I told Betsy.
"Toby can't have our kitten, can he, Mom?" Caleb asks. Betsy says if it's all right with his folks it was most decidedly all right with her. I said with all the traffic maybe we'd better leave the kitty in the garden until he asks his mama. The smile went away but he didn't turn loose. He stood there giving us a heart-tugging look. Betsy said he could carry it if he was careful. "We'll ask M'kehla," she says.