Wiley Cash - A Land More Kind Than Home

“You fixing to turn in?” she asked me. I nodded my head and tried to smile at her.

“I was thinking about it,” I said. “You need anything before I do?”

“No, ma’am,” she said. “I think I’ll be all right. I just want to tell you again how much I appreciate you letting me stay here. Shouldn’t be but just a while. Just till I decide what I’m going to do.”

“Lord, girl,” I told her, “you can stay here just as long as you’re needing to. You don’t need to make no kinds of decisions, especially not tonight, especially after what all has happened.” She looked down at that pretty yellow hair where it draped over her shoulder and fell down to her chest, and she picked up the ends of it and swished it over her fingers like she was dusting something off her hands.

“Pastor told me he wants to see you,” she said. “Tomorrow afternoon, down at the church. He said about three o’clock.” She dropped her hair and used both her hands to move it back behind her shoulders, and then she raised her face and looked at me.

“I wish he could’ve told me himself,” I said. “And I wish he’d been out there today at Christopher’s funeral. Don’t seem right that he wasn’t.”

“He thought it’d be better if he didn’t come,” she said. “After all that’s happened, I mean.”

“Is that right?” I said. “A little boy dies during his church service, and he thinks that’s a reason to stay away. It don’t seem right to me.” I stood up from the bed and turned on the lamp on the bedside table and went to the closet where my nightgown hung on the back of the door. “I don’t reckon you want to go down there with me?”

“He said he wanted you to come alone,” she said.

“I can’t say I’m too surprised by that,” I said.

THERE WASN’T A SINGLE CAR OUT THERE IN THE PARKING LOT BESIDES mine and Chambliss’s old Buick. I opened the door and put my feet out on the blacktop and looked across the road where the land sloped down toward the riverbank. Downtown Marshall sat about a mile or so up the river, too far away to hear the sounds of cars or people’s voices or other things you might hear on a Thursday afternoon in a little town. It looked to be real still, like there wasn’t even anybody on the streets at all. I looked back toward the church and saw the green field spread out behind it, the trees rising up from the woods farther out at the field’s edge. There weren’t any sounds except for that little bit of breeze and the sound of the river running softly across the street. I climbed out of the car and closed the door and just stood there for what seemed like forever, trying to wrap my head around what might’ve happened up here on Sunday night, trying to imagine what was going to happen to me.

I can tell you that opening the door and stepping inside that church was like walking right into the dark of night. The newspaper over those windows blocked out the sun, and with that dark wood paneling on the walls it took a good while for my eyes to get used to all that blackness; I couldn’t hardly see a thing until they did. Once my eyes got fixed right, I could see where the broken linoleum tiles exposed the bare cement floors after those coolers had been yanked out. It hadn’t hardly changed a bit in ten years. I followed the floor tiles down the center of the room where the folding chairs parted to lead you down to the front of the church. I could just barely make out Chambliss sitting in a chair right up there on the first row. His back was to me, and he didn’t even turn around when the door closed behind me. He didn’t turn around when he spoke to me either; he just sat there looking straight ahead.

“Sister Adelaide,” he said. “I was hoping you’d decide to come in.”

“Julie said you wanted to see me,” I said. “And here I am.”

“And here you are,” he said. “I’m glad you came. It’s good to have you inside our church again.” He put his arm across the chair beside him and finally turned his head and looked at me. “Come on up here and have a seat by me.” I could see his face good now, and except for that silver hair around his temples, he hadn’t changed. His eyes looked just as cool and distant as they always had.

I walked down the center aisle past them rows of folding chairs. It was dead silent in there because he didn’t have that window air conditioner on or none of them floor fans running, and that hot, stifling air almost took my breath away. When I got down to the chairs in the front, I saw that he had one of them wooden crates sitting on the floor right by his feet. It had a little hinged trap on the top of it, and I could see that the clasp on the trap was undone. I stood there looking down at it, and then I looked over at Chambliss. He was staring up at me and smiling like he’d just thought of something funny to tell me. His left arm was still across the back of the chair beside him. He took it off the chair and patted the seat.

“Sit down,” he said. I didn’t want to sit that close to him, so I walked in front of him and took a seat a few chairs over to his right. When I did, he moved his arm and covered his right hand with his left, like he didn’t want me staring at just how awful that burned-up right hand looked. We both sat there real quiet for a bit. I crossed my ankles and leaned forward just a little until my back wasn’t touching the chair, and he just sat there with his feet flat on the floor, his hands in his lap, the left one covering up the right so I couldn’t hardly see it.

Somebody’d hung all kinds of pictures and calendars on the front wall behind the stage, and just about every one of them had a picture of Jesus Christ on it: Jesus praying in Gethsemane; Jesus at the Pentecost; Jesus holding out his hands to Doubting Thomas to show him the places where those nails had gone right through. From where I was sitting I could see there was an old calendar from Samuels’ Funeral Home and some other ones from a couple of stores in Marshall and Hot Springs and one from the old bank. Some of them calendars were so old you could only look at the pictures because you couldn’t hardly read the lettering on them. In between all those calendars and all those pictures, right there in the middle of the wall, was a big framed painting of Moses taking up a serpent in front of the burning bush. I sat there and looked at that picture of Moses and thought about how he watched that staff come alive right there in the dirt, and I wondered how he must’ve felt when the voice of the Lord commanded him to pick it up by its tail. I looked from that painting to the crate where it sat on the floor in front of Chambliss.

“I know the sheriff’s been out to see you,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “He has. A couple days ago.”

“And I reckon he had him a few questions about what happened up here on Sunday.”

“He had some questions,” I said. “But I didn’t have any answers for him. I told him I couldn’t speak for what y’all do up here in this church. This ain’t my place anymore, even though I’ve been a member of this church for fifty-something years, it ain’t been my place for a very long time. That’s what I told him.”

“What is your place, Sister Adelaide?” he asked me. He turned his head and looked at me with just about the most blank expression I’ve ever seen on a man’s face. I stared right back at him too, and then something caught my eye, and when I looked down I seen that that awful hand had made a fist and he was using his left hand to try and cover it up, but it was almost like he couldn’t do it, so instead he took to rubbing his fingers back and forth across the back of that hand, and I just sat there and stared at them fingers and I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

“What is your place?” he asked me again. His fingers stopped moving, and he opened his fist and laid both his hands flat on his thighs. I looked up at him.