Marilyn Pappano - Copper Lake Encounter

Rain drenches me, unloosing the curls in my own hair, soaking my clothes, making my feet slip within the delicate straps of my shoes. I fall, struggle back up, fall again, but my gaze remains fixed on the lights up ahead. House lights, I realize: a yellow glow above a door, cooler incandescent glows from all the windows. Home.

The place is home, and I need to get there, but something’s stopping me. Rain, thunder that vibrates the very ground, lightning so brilliant I have to close my eyes. It strikes a nearby tree, the dead wood flaming before the rain extinguishes it, and the trunk splits in two, half of it landing mere feet in front of me. There’s no path around, I can’t climb over it, and I’m too big to wiggle through the narrow space beneath it.

I turn to go back, fear heavy in my chest. I take a few steps, and the rain stops. The wind stops. The sun reappears in the bright blue sky with the fat white clouds. The air is warm and muggy, and ahead of me, so close I could reach out my fingers and touch it, is the other tree, half in the water, half in the air. Its limbs are still and dry. I’m still and dry.

There’s no storm. No gale-force wind. No deluge. No lights. No house. No little girl. No one calling. Just the dead tree and me.

* * *

Church had been a part of Ty’s life ever since he’d come to Copper Lake to live with Granddad. Back in the beginning, he’d been okay with the going-to-church part. He’d just had trouble with the church-clothes part: black or gray pants, white button-down shirt and tie, no matter how hot and miserable the weather was. Despite the fact that his father had run off before Ty was old enough to remember him or that his mother had died long before her time and he’d been uprooted from his home in Macon, he was thankful. He just didn’t see that it made much difference to God whether he was thankful in church clothes or shorts and a T-shirt.

It was all about respect, Granddad said, and there’d been no arguing with Obadiah Gadney. Still wasn’t. Eighty years of getting what he wanted meant he expected to continue getting what he wanted. What he’d wanted was for his grandson to be a God-loving, God-fearing, responsible and honorable young man.

As he straightened his tie and then left his house for Granddad’s down the street, Ty hoped he’d lived up to Obadiah’s expectations. He was pretty sure he had, except maybe when it came to women. No maybe about it when it came to Kiki Isaacs in particular. Granddad didn’t have anything against mixed-race relationships. He’d always said a person’s outside wasn’t important. It was the inside that mattered. He just didn’t think Kiki’s inside was very pretty. He couldn’t see her settling down, being happy, having babies or going to church. She’d never set foot in church yet, she had once proudly told Obadiah, and she wasn’t about to change.

The disappointment in Granddad’s face before he’d no doubt said a silent prayer for her had stayed with Ty.

Jingling his keys in his pocket, he walked the half block to the house where he’d grown up. It was nothing fancy. None of the houses on Easy Street were. It was a black neighborhood, its residents mostly hardworking and underpaid, spending too much energy and money on the necessities of living to have either left over to spend on their houses. Back in the day, when the neighborhood was new, practically every soul there had worked for the rich white families in town. All of them had traced their family history back to before the Civil War and ancestors who’d been owned by the rich white families in town.

In the past six months, though, two new families had moved in: a physician’s assistant and her husband, an accountant and his schoolteacher wife, both with kids. Ty had been living there a year in his own house, bought from Anamaria Duquesne Calloway. It was good to hear kids playing in the yards again, to see care taken with the properties. Someday he planned to expand his house and raise his own kids there.

Easy Street was getting gentrified, Obadiah said with a great satisfied laugh. Who would have believed it?

Ty didn’t think Obadiah was as surprised by it as he pretended. His family wasn’t the only group of people Granddad had high hopes for.

The front door of Granddad’s house closed as Ty turned into the driveway. Despite the heat, the old man wore a pale gray suit, a white shirt and a deep red striped tie, and his hat, a shade darker than the suit, was settled on his head. He held a cane in one hand and carried his Bible in the other. Ignoring the ramp Ty and his buddies had built a few years earlier, he took the steps with a slow, measured step and then started along the sidewalk.

“Mornin’, son.”

“Good morning.”

“You have breakfast?”

“Now, why would I do that when I know you’ve got pot roast with all the trimmings in the slow cooker?”

Obadiah grinned. “And pecan and sweet potato pie for dessert.” He pronounced it pee-can, with equal emphasis on both syllables. “Anamaria delivered ’em this morning, hot from the oven. She’s a sweet girl. I sure wish you’d met her before that Calloway boy did.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered. Once she saw Robbie, she would have forgotten all about me.”

His grandfather nodded in agreement. “The girl’s got the sight. She knew.”

A lot of people Ty knew, especially within the department, didn’t believe in the sight or any other psychic abilities. But Granddad knew there was plenty more to the world than people could see and touch, and he’d taught his kids the same.

Ty opened the passenger door of the 1963 Mercury, helped his grandfather inside and then went to the driver’s seat. “One of these days, you’re gonna have to ride to church in my truck,” he teased as he strapped the seat belt over his hips and then turned the key. “This old barge doesn’t do much for my reputation.”

Obadiah snorted. “I don’t think I can climb high enough to get into that truck of yours. It’d take you and two of the deacons to get me out when we get there.”

“There’d be plenty of volunteers to catch you when I push. Miz Hopkins, Miz Rutledge, Miz Mattie...”

A grin split Granddad’s face. “I’ve still got my own hair and my own teeth, and all the parts God sent me into the world with still work. Can you blame them for likin’ me?”

There was some truth to what he said. He was eighty, breathing, living on his own, and he didn’t require medication for every little thing. He probably was a prize to the elderly widows at the church.

Not that he’d ever looked twice at any of them. Ty’s grandmother, Genevieve, had been the one love of his life. They’d both been forty when she died—of cancer, like Ty’s mother—and it had broken Obadiah’s heart. He’d never shown any interest in another woman. He fully believed he was going to be reunited with his precious Genevieve in heaven, and that promise was enough to keep him going here on earth.

They were met in the parking lot by a dozen kids, most of them Ty’s cousins two or three times removed and all of them eager to be the one to help Obadiah inside. They were scrubbed clean, the girls in summer dresses and sandals, the boys in trousers, white shirts and ties. Had a Gadney female ever attended a church service in pants, a Gadney male without a tie? Not in Granddad’s life, he was sure.

Ty was halfway across the parking lot when he passed Cherina’s and Shiraz’s teenage boys leaning against the oak tree in the center of the yard, looking off in the direction from which he’d just come.

Roland gave a low whistle. “She got some curves on her.”

“She don’t look bad in that pink dress, neither,” David agreed.

Since he couldn’t remember the last time a girl had caught their attention so thoroughly, Ty turned to see whom they were talking about. He totally got the sense of wonder in their voices as he watched Nev Wilson make her way carefully across the parking lot. In her snug-fitting dress and ridiculously high heels, she should have looked at least a bit comical, taking small, cautious steps to avoid twisting an ankle on a loose piece of gravel, but she didn’t. She looked graceful and womanly and...damn, was it a sin to think sexy in the churchyard?