Night fell and I awoke to find it unwanted and all over me. I once again recalled the song “Stars Fell on Alabama” and again thought that was never true. This night was even darker than the last one. I moved to start my engine and then I heard it — singing or chanting. I reached up and removed the cover from my dome light, then removed the bulb. I opened the door and felt my way about twenty yards to the edge of a clearing. As if waiting for me to arrive, a torch was put to a tall cross, and it lit up darkness some two football fields from me. I watched the hooded heads walk around doing hooded things and making hooded speeches that I could not hear. The only thing that was certain was that I wasn’t going anywhere at that moment. The white-clad idiots hadn’t spotted me, and unless I decided to do something stupid like light a cigarette or shout out to them, they weren’t going to. They prayed and sang and yakked, and then some two hours later they began to clear out in a single-file queue of glowing headlights. I waited until the last pickup was gone, and, not until I thought the cross was cold and only then, did I go back to my car, start it, and leave.
CHAPTER 6
It was just before daybreak when I pulled into the yard of the sisters. There was no one up, not even the chickens. I waited in my car, put my head back, and drifted off to sleep. I dreamed I died. I didn’t know how, but I was dead and yet I was staring down at my dead face on the ground. I awoke to see my face in the outside rearview mirror. I looked dead enough. I glanced over the yard and saw a blue pickup truck that I hadn’t seen in the darkness. The house door opened, and Sister Irenaeus emerged smiling and clapping her hands. She called back for the others, and they came out equally full of glee and good cheer. They must have smelled the cash. They danced around my car chanting some nonsense or other; two of them were lost in tongues. It all made for awful music as I worked my stiff limbs free of the car.
“Do you have our money?” Sister Irenaeus asked.
I didn’t like the way she said our money, but I responded, “Yes.”
Just then a man walked out of their quarters. A short, wide-shouldered man with a matching broad face and a shag of stringy white-blond hair. He had bad skin that somehow looked okay on him.
“This is Thornton Scrunchy,” Sister Irenaeus said.
Well, of course he is, I thought, and nodded hello.
“He is our architect,” she said.
“I didn’t know you had an architect.” There was something different about Sister Irenaeus. The other sisters were still prancing around like loons. But Sister Irenaeus was standing near me, with Thornton Scrunchy. Scrunchy’s blue eyes were piercing, but only because of their color, I thought. In fact, he seemed to have the glassy-eyed look of an alcoholic or at least of someone who was drunk. There was a toothpick sticking out the corner of his mouth.
He shook my hand. “So, you’re Mr. Poitier. Mr. Poitier. Mr. Poitier. The sisters have told me all about you.”
“You’re an architect here in the town of Smuteye?” I asked. “Smuteye, Alabama?”
“Well, that’s a yes and a no,” he said, “Mr. Poitier.” He seemed to like saying my name. “You see, I’m a man of many professions. It’s so kind of you to help the sisters out. They’re such good souls.” He turned to Sister Irenaeus. “We’re going to build us a church, ain’t we, Sister?”
“Praise the lord,” she said.
Scrunchy stared at my face. “You look just like that Sidney Poitier, the Hollywood actor.”
“I know,” I said.
“But you’re not Sidney Poitier.”
“I am.”
He moved the flat toothpick from the left side of his twisted lips to the right side of his twisted lips.
Remembering the Scrunchy from the bank in Montgomery, I asked, “Are there a lot of Scrunchys in Alabama?”
“Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi. There are Scrunchys all over, Mr. Poitier. Whether we’re related, I can’t tell you, but there’s a mess of us. We Scrunchys have been around forever. I heard tell we was on the Mayweather.”
“Mayflower,” I said.
“You have our money,” Sister Irenaeus said.
“Some of it,” I lied.
“How much?” Scrunchy asked.
I looked at him.
“Well, we need to get moving on this thing.”
“So, do you have some plans drawn up?” I asked.
“I do,” he said. “Been working on them all night. They’re right here inside on the big table.”
I followed him to the door. I looked to Sister Irenaeus, but could not read her face. It was no surprise; I didn’t know her well enough to read the most obvious expressions. “Sister, when did you find this guy? Where did you find this guy? Why did you find this guy?”
“You said we needed plans. He has drawn the plans,” she said. “He made the blueprints so that we can build our church.”
Inside the house country music was playing. I looked to the corner and saw a stack of 45s on an old turntable. Patsy Cline was singing. I recognized her voice, but the song I did not know. It was a lament, or so I thought, but with all the dancing and howling in tongues, I couldn’t really hear. On the table was a rolled-up sheet of white paper, about two feet long. Scrunchy unfurled and held it open with his soft-looking and meaty hands.
“Well, here it is,” he said.
I looked. The drawing was just slightly more detailed and skilled than the little piece of paper I had been shown earlier. It was a crude pencil sketch of a rectangular building with a pitched roof and a steeple on one end, and beside it was a floor plan that showed there was nothing to it but four exterior walls. There were no measurements or marks indicating windows or doors or any other architectural symbols. I looked at them in turn.
“These aren’t blueprints,” I said. “They’re not even blue. This is a sketch and a bad one at that.”
“Well, son, this is just a start. I just got hired yesterday. The sisters have been asking me to help all along, but they didn’t have any money.”
“And now we do,” Sister Irenaeus said.
“Not yet,” I said.
“You know how it is,” Scrunchy said. He nodded to me as if I knew what he was talking about. “People are always coming to me and asking for plans, then they look at them and go build it themselves.”
“Do you have a state license?” I asked.
“I’m not a contractor,” he said. “Ain’t that something, the way them gals blather on like that?”
“God has sent you with our money,” Sister Irenaeus said.
“Well, he sent me with some of it,” I said. “He sent me with a thousand dollars to get Mr. Scrunchy here going on the blueprints.”
“That is all?” she asked.
“For right now,” I said. I watched her shoulders sag and observed the disappointment on her face. “I’ll get it.”