“I’ll be there for you.”
“I’ll be there for you, Barry.” He took her in his arms.
She said, “These are real vows this time.”
“I was ashamed.”
“I had no bridesmaids.”
“Your dress was ugly. I hated it.”
“It didn’t hide my stomach at all. I never want to see those ugly old pictures.”
“One day, after you have the baby, we’ll have another ceremony and we’ll take better pictures,” he said, passing his hand through the arm holes of her full slip. He caressed her fat breasts, which used to be such little things. “You will wear white,” he said, moving his hand down over the rise of her abdomen and into her panties.
“Only virgins wear white.”
“You’ll always be a virgin to me.”
“Mmmm. It feels good in there, baby. You always know how to make me feel good.”
“Shhh, baby. Don’t talk dirty.”
“It is such a pleasure to be married to you. It is like the Song of Solomon being with you.”
Peachie shifted out of her clothes. They made sweet love this time and Peachie slept contentedly.
In the morning, as soon as Sister McGowan could get Barry alone, she scolded, “You’d better watch that girl, you hear me? I don’t know why you took up with her in the first place. I don’t trust her one bit. She’s a skinny, little nothing.”
Barry nodded.
He read from the Book of Daniel, then got down on his knees to pray, but there was a knock on his bedroom door and he looked up as his mother stuck her head in: Sister Morrisohn’s on the line.
Elwyn unclasped his hands and picked up the phone. He took a deep breath. He was still kneeling.
Sister Morrisohn said, Can you talk? No, he answered.
Can you listen? You can at least listen.
He rested his head on the bed and said to himself, Heavenly Father, what did I get myself into?
You missed church. You never miss church, she said. I’m putting myself in your place now. I see that you’re not ready for this.
He said: I’m not ready. I really am not. This is bad what we’re doing. I’m not making excuses for what I did. I was flattered by your attentions. I wanted you to like me. I should have known better. You’re young. Are you still there?
I’m here.
I just want you to understand me, is all. Who I really am. I’m listening, he said. He was still on his knees.
I’m a mountain girl, she said. I come from a PO Box settlement about seven miles outside of Asheville, North Carolina. We didn’t go to church when I was growing up. My father didn’t allow it. We didn’t go to school either. We were homeschooled. But my mother was a very religious woman. Some kind of Pentecostal, I believe. We read the Bible every morning when we got up and every night before we went to bed. My mother brought me and my little brother up believing that there was a God in heaven who loved us. She told us we must be good if we wanted to meet her in heaven. She was much older than my father and sickly. She knew she wouldn’t live to see us grow up. She died when I was fourteen.
She paused for a long moment and then he heard her cough and do something else that sounded like clearing her throat before she continued. She was so much older than him, twenty-six years, which made her older than his mother.
His room was dark now because his blinds were drawn and he hadn’t turned on the lights. Outside his room he could hear his parents talking with Deacon Miron and his wife, who was pregnant, and he heard them say his name occasionally, not calling him, but mentioning it as they often did because they were proud of him and remembered him every time the words child or son or young people today were mentioned. He was the perfect example of a good Christian son. Oh, if every child could be like Elwyn, they would say.
What I’m saying, Elwyn, is that I grew up without my mother, so I had but a skewed understanding of how a woman is supposed to behave. My mother had three sisters who would come up the mountain and visit us. Maybe I could be like them; these were wild, beautiful women. Mulattos, every one of them, just like my mother, their sickly baby sister, who would die and leave her children to an uncertain fate in this dark and sinful world.
She paused again, but this time he believed she might be crying. He could not hear her crying. There was something covering the phone, perhaps her hand.
From elsewhere in the house there came the sound of piano music.
It was Deacon Miron’s wife playing “I Need Thee Every Hour” with that heavy left hand of hers. Elwyn suspected she had the book propped open in front of her. Sister Miron was good when she had a book open in front of her, but she could not play by ear no matter how hard he tried to teach her. Sister Miron was a very fat, very pretty girl only about three years older than Elwyn. He used to call her Ginny Parker before she got married. Now she insisted that everyone call her Sister Miron, even Elwyn, who was her first cousin. Deacon Miron, a widower, was in his forties. He was Elwyn’s godfather. He heard them say they would name the baby Elwyn if it were a boy because Elwyn was such a model Christian. He could not hear what they would name the baby if it were a girl because Sister Miron was putting that heavy left hand into her music and Sister Morrisohn was speaking again.
You asked me once what kind of sins I committed before I met Buford. I tried to be a mother to my brother in my mother’s absence—cooking, cleaning, keeping the house for my lazy father—but once my innocence was lost, it became easier to behave like my aunts, who were a very bad example. Drinking. Smoking. Riding into town every Friday night in some strange man’s pickup truck. Not coming back till Sunday morning. I was a woman, but I didn’t really know what a woman was.
I understood sex, but I hated the man I was sleeping with. He was the worst brute. At eighteen, I became pregnant. I lost the baby, which was probably the best thing—God forgive me for saying that—but now I could not live at home anymore. I had to leave. I tried to take my brother with me, but my father would not let me.
Someone out there said, Where is Elwyn?
It was Ginny—Sister Miron.
Someone answered, He’s still on the phone with Sister Morrisohn, I think.
It was his mother.
Elwyn got up from his knees and went to the door and closed it. Then he went back to his bed and lay crossways on it with his legs hanging over the side.
Sister Morrisohn said, I came down and lived with my cousin and her husband until that became a problem. He made me feel I owed something more than the $35-a-month rent I was paying. When I wouldn’t give him what he wanted, he got rough. When I told my cousin, she believed her husband. Never mind that I had a torn dress and a busted lip. I was out on the streets. I got fired from my counter job at Woolworth’s. For the first time in my life, I lost contact with my little brother Harrison. I hooked up with an ugly crowd. Sex, drugs, stealing to eat. I smoked marijuana. I shoplifted. I had lots of boyfriends, though I hated and feared men … Then I met Buford and Mother Glovine. They were ministering at the Dade County jail, where I was being held.
The church was bailing everyone out who would allow Buford and Mother Glovine to preach to them. Buford was such a good man. Not only did he bail us out, he also acted as our legal counsel pro bono. He seemed to be very impressed