“I was passin,” she said with effort to Carmena, “and I saw your door was open.” Leaning against the doorjamb, she blinked in an effort to adjust to a room that was lit by only a forty-watt bulb, another concession to the voice of God. Several times, she shifted the scarred cane from the good hand to the bad, and just when the bad hand seemed about to drop it, she would take it back. “I was passin and saw your door was open, Boone….”
She continued to repeat herself until Carmena stood and went to her, reassured Mrs. Garrett with a light touch of the hand. “You know you always welcome here, Miss Garrett.” She took the woman’s elbow and led her to a chair at the dining table. “I was thinkin bout you, me and the Fraziers, but somebody said you’d been under the weather, so I thought I shouldn’t bother you.”
It began to rain, no more than a soft tapping at the window.
“I’m fine, by the help of the Lord,” Mrs. Garrett said, sitting. She settled herself, patting her wig and making sure her dress was well down over her knees. Her movements seemed practiced, like those of someone who did everything according to the way it was set out in some book. She placed her cane across her lap and leisurely began to pick pieces of lint off her dress, a silklike, polka-dotted thing that shimmered with what seemed huge green eyes. Then, with a flash of lightning and burst of thunder, she jerked her head up, as if the whole thing had been directed at her personally, the thunder an inch from her ear and the lightning just in front of her eyes. She waited, and when there was quiet for several minutes, she sighed, then began to take note of the four other women. They had been watching her intently, but when she looked at them, they nodded and lowered their eyes or deftly turned their heads away. Only when they were addressed by name did the women look at her, smile, ask how she was keeping. Beatrice, knitting on the couch between the Frazier sisters, did not look up.
“I’m surprised to see you here,” Mrs. Garrett said to her. “I thought you might be home.” There was a bit of hurt to the last words.
“No,” Beatrice said happily. “I’m here. I’m right here.” It seemed to give her so much pleasure to say these words that she repeated them again and again until she raised a thread to her mouth and bit it in two. “I’ve come for the prayer meetin.”
“So thas what all yall hens here for?” Mrs. Garrett said and turned to Carmena at the other end of the table. Carmena nodded with a smile. “Oh, but I hope yall ain’t gonna have that Reverend Sawyer again. He ain’t nothin but jackleg, Boone. I could tell the first time I laid eyes on him. ‘Jackleg,’ I said to myself. ‘As jackleg as they come.’”
Carmena, seeking support, glanced at the others. “It’s him. But he got a church of his own now, Miss Garrett. Out in Northwest, just off Rhode Island Avenue.”
“Havin a church, Boone, don’t mount to a hill of beans,” Mrs. Garrett said with exasperation. “It don’t make a man a preacher, called by God. Even I”—she put her good hand over her heart—“could say I’m a man a God, but that don’t make it so. All havin a church means is you got a little money to rent a hole in the wall and a few fools to come to the hole and give you their pennies.”
“Well, I ain’t a member of his church,” Carmena said defensively, “and don’t plan to be a member. And I ain’t never give him money to come here to pray with us.” Mrs. Garrett smiled knowingly. “I do have some food for us all when he get here. But thas a everyday normal courtesy. Some sandwiches…some cake and punch…just things I picked up round the corner…whatn’t no trouble….”
Mrs. Garrett looked askance at the food displayed on the table. “He’ll fill hisself up off that, belch once, and look for more,” she said. She leaned down and placed her cane on the floor beside her. “And what time is this man a God spected on the premises?”
“He said three thirty,” Carmena said.
“Three thirty, huh? And all the clocks in the world now sayin it’s way past four.”
Carmena shut the window just as the rain began to come in. With only the forty-watt burning in the lamp on the table, the room was on the verge of darkness. But each flash of lightning would give a ghastly brightness to the place and for those moments everything in the room could be clearly seen.
“And what you doin over there, Atwell, workin away like a tiny little mouse?” Mrs. Garrett said.
“Sewin,” Beatrice said. “Makin somethin for my new grandchild.”
“Oh, Lani dropped another one, huh? You didn’t even tell me.”
“A girl. A little over a month ago.” The two Frazier sisters on either side of Beatrice were tall women, each weighing about 200 pounds, and they seemed to spread out much more than when they were standing. Beatrice weighed little more than 110 pounds, and if there had been no words from her, she might well have gone unnoticed.
“And you never told me,” Mrs. Garrett said. “Tsk tsk tsk. I always thought well of Lani.” She turned slowly to Carmena, and as she turned, her smiled widened. “But that husband of Lani’s keeps her havin babies. Who can keep up with how many they have? She’s the babiest-havin woman I ever knowed of. One after the other after the other….”
Silent and still except for the motions of her hands, Beatrice never looked up.
Carmena prayed for the Reverend Sawyer to turn up. If nothing stopped her, Mrs. Garrett would sit in that chair and rain down devilment all day and all night and all day some more. Carmena thought it had to do with her being ninety-one years old and thinking she was closer to God than any human being in the world. Mrs. Garrett and Beatrice had once been so close that people joked they would be buried together in the same casket. Now Mrs. Garrett was forever after Beatrice as if the final task standing between her and the key to heaven was to make Beatrice suffer. Beatrice, however, treated Mrs. Garrett as she would a child who didn’t know any better.
Toward five thirty, not long after Mrs. Garrett had asked again what time the Reverend Doctor Sawyer was supposed to arrive, the telephone rang. Carmena answered and spoke but a few words before hanging up. She announced that it had been Reverend Sawyer’s wife, that his car would not start and that he apologized to everyone for not being able to make the prayer meeting. Waving her hand over the table, she told her guests that there was no need to let the food go to waste, and one by one the women got up and helped themselves. The storm, the thunder and lightning, had stopped, but there was still the rain, a nuisance scratching at the window.
Once the women were seated again, the conversation took varied turns, and the autumn evening wore away. Mrs. Garrett, perhaps dulled by the food, had less to say than anyone. At one point, the Frazier sister nearest the window commented on how particularly bad the weather had been lately. They all agreed, and Mrs. Garrett, capping one hand over her knee, said that she could not remember when Old Man Arthur and the Ritis boys had caused her so much pain, that sometimes she felt she would never walk again. The other women gave sympathetic nods, one or two mentioning their own aches and pains, and then they all began to exchange remedies. Beatrice stuck her needle with finality into the piece she was working on and put it in a cloth bag at her feet. Looking about the room, she said quietly, “It all reminds me of one summer back home. It was kinda like it is now, day after day.”
“Oh, now, Atwell, we ain’t gonna have one a your down-home, way-back-when stories, are we?” Mrs. Garrett said. “We ain’t had a evenin of prayer, but we been tryin to keep it as close to that as we can.”