Dad shook me awake at eight o’clock Sunday morning and told me to get ready for church. I knew right away he was still suffering over Miriam Deets. She’d called him a brute and for some reason he believed her.
Guilt had driven Father to church as long as I could remember. Grandmother Macon stared at him from a sepia-toned photograph on his dresser. I imagine she was the first thing he saw when he woke that day. She reminded him. Her lips were drawn into a tight line as if she were ready to scold her son for taking money from other men. Her own husband had lost a thousand dollars during the long month before he dropped dead of a heart attack. She believed God struck him down to spare her family more suffering.
She did suffer, though, dying slowly from a cancer of the stomach. Her three daughters all married young to escape her house, but her only son stayed to the end, enduring her scorn. She fumed when he drank and refused to eat if he came home late with a pocketful of money. She berated him even as he carried her to the toilet.
In the photograph she is young and gaunt with lank hair and bony, unforgiving shoulders. Alive or dead, it did not matter. My father faced her daily judgment.
I groped down the hall, eyes half shut. Daddy was already in the bathroom. The door was wide open. He leaned over the sink, his face inches from the mirror while he shaved. He pulled the razor down one side and then the other, his stroke quick and long. He rinsed his face, dabbed at the bloody spots with toilet paper, then went after his head with a pair of scissors. He lifted one clump of hair at a time, snipping close to the scalp. His hair was coarse, the scissors dulclass="underline" he had to work them hard, and I saw the back of his neck turning redder and redder.
Nobody looked as if he belonged in church less than my father did. His good suit was worn to a shine at the elbows and the knees, and was too small besides. He kept squirming to find a comfortable way to sit in his pants. Even when he managed to sit still, there was something awkward about the way his big hands fell across his lap and dangled between his knees.
Reverend Piggott rose in his pulpit. His body was little more than a rack to hang his robes, but he had a face full of fire when he said, “Each time a child of God falls away, we all suffer. The day Freda Graves left this church, I felt as if one of my limbs had been torn from my body, as if my own child had been ripped from my womb. Yes, I tell you truly, that is how deeply I grieved. A great fever raged in her for days. I thought, surely this will show her the folly of her ways, but it did not, and she cursed the good doctor and sent him from her house with foul words and accusations.” I spotted Dr. Ben four rows in front of us; his thin white hair curled over the collar of his black jacket. I imagined his clean, soap-smelling hands on Freda Graves’s burning forehead. He watched her as he had watched me while I tossed in the heat of a fever: his gray eyes watery and strangely opaque, his head shaking in a way that made you wonder if you were doomed to pass from this world to the next before the day was done.
“I prayed for two days and two nights, did not sleep or eat or speak to anyone save God. Our sister is possessed of an evil delusion; I hoped our Lord would show me how to carry this lamb back to the fold.” The idea of Reverend Piggott, that rail in the wind, trying to shoulder the massive weight of Freda Graves made me cover my mouth. “Freda Graves is practicing a dangerous kind of worship right here in this town.”
The reverend scanned the congregation. We held our breath; a single thought pulsed down the pews: What kind of worship?
“What kind of worship, you ask? The most tempting of all evils, an evil that wears a holy mask. Freda Graves believes she is a prophet; she has opened the doors of her own house as a church. Every Tuesday night she commits heresy just a few blocks from this hallowed ground. She has lured away the weakest among us; now she will seduce the strong. Her followers claim to speak in tongues. They lay hands on one another. Oh, my friends, I am afraid, for the devil speaks in his own tongue.”
Reverend Piggott’s bald scalp glistened. He raised his fists to Heaven, and his fragile body stiffened beneath his heavy robes.
“Do not venture near this woman. Even the blessed are not immune to trickery. She preys on the needy; she snatches tired souls. Oh, we cannot afford to rest. Do not stop by the side of the road though your feet are weary. Do not think that you can save her; she is beyond reason. Professionals must handle this matter.”
I wondered what he meant by professionals. I pictured all the officers of the church dressed in red robes, led by Reverend Piggott in his violet frock. I saw them marching down Main Street, a band on parade without their instruments. They’d cut down Fifth Avenue and stride along Wyoming Way, straight to the steps of Freda Graves’s front porch. Those good men of Willis would batter down her door and drag her off to a tower where they could torture her with talk and rebuke her into reason.
But from what I’d seen of Freda Graves, it would take more than human force to stop her. She was the kind of woman who could walk across a flooding river, a child on each shoulder, a newborn calf cradled in her arms. She would be the last person to flee a burning house, and the first to brave a blizzard to search for children who hadn’t found their way home.
As we left church I caught sight of Miriam Deets walking arm in arm with her husband, Lanfear. He was a heavy man, soft and thick, with rounded shoulders and stubby hands. He had a simple look: his features small and unfinished, his mouth and eyes like slats in his fleshy face, his nose a mere bump. His hair had no particular color at all, like sand or dust. But Miriam gazed into that face with adoration.
Father watched them, seeing Miriam’s simple love for a foolish man. He grabbed Mother’s arm roughly. He couldn’t get away fast enough.
The town buzzed with tales of Freda Graves. Reverend Piggott’s sermon stirred up a frenzy of curiosity: he won her more converts in a day than she would have been able to snare in a month. Even so, people were afraid. With all that speaking in tongues and laying on of hands, Freda Graves would have as many followers possessed as she had saved.
We heard of candles and wailing, chalices of wine dark as the blood of a lamb. We didn’t know what to believe, but one thing was sure: we knew exactly who attended these prayer meetings. A woman doesn’t have neighbors for nothing.
Joanna Foot was one of the faithful. Elliot had returned from Arizona. Olivia Jeanne Woodruff rolled her dusty Winnebago into his driveway one day and gave him a boot in the butt. Joanna took him back — on a trial basis. He had to prove he’d mended his wicked ways before he got any idea about slipping his shoes under her bed. She told Elliot he’d have to show her and the Lord and “that holy woman” that he could live as a righteous man. Public humiliation demanded public repentance. She promised that if he could do right by her for a full year, she might consider letting him sleep somewhere other than the couch.
Minnie Hathaway belonged body and soul to Freda Graves. Over the years Minnie had lived up to Freda’s expectations, trotting across the street after church to wait for Elliot to open the doors of the Last Chance. Once when Elliot dawdled too long, she pounded on the glass so hard it shattered, and Dr. Ben had to put eight stitches in her hand. Now she was on the wagon and drinking down the preaching of Freda Graves for courage.
“That’ll never last,” Arlen said. And Mother answered, “Give the woman a chance.”
Minnie had even talked one of the other boarders at the rooming house into attending the meetings. Lyla Leona, the Fat Lady of Willis, was shaking and praying. For the time being, she was out of business and living on her savings, which accounted for the unusual hostility a certain group of men harbored toward Mrs. Graves.