Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

Heights? The highest shutter was eight feet off the ground. But Ian didn’t point that out.

Eli raised one arm to wipe his forehead, waving the screwdriver dangerously close to Ian’s face. “At my church, we don’t mess with such as this,” he said. “We visit door to door instead.”

“What church is that?”

“Holy House of the Gospel.”

“I guess I never heard of it.”

“We’re much stricter than you-all are,” Eli said. “We would never for instance let our women wear the raiment of men.”

Ian glanced at Eli’s wife. Sure enough, she wore a dress — a rosebudded, country-looking dress that was interfering seriously with her attempts to mount a step stool.

“We don’t play cards neither, nor dance, and we’re more mindful of the appearance of evil,” Eli said. “Why, yesterday my mother-in-law got a prescription filled at a pharmacy that sells liquor! Walked right into a place that sells liquor without a thought for how it might look! And you don’t have no missionary outreach, neither.”

Ian was starting to feel defensive. He said, “We believe our lives are our missionary outreach.”

“Now, that’s just selfish,” Eli said. “To look at someone living in the shadow of eternal damnation and not try and change his ways: that’s selfish.”

Ian spun on his heel and went to fetch another shutter.

When he came back, though, Eli resumed where he had left off. “And if we did mess with house painting, we’d have prayed beforehand,” he said. His screwdriver slashed uselessly across a screw. “We pray before each task. We believe that whatever work we undertake is God’s work; I am an arrow shot by God to do His handiwork.”

He did look something like an arrow: straight and smooth, a sharp cowlick sticking up on the crown of his head.

“What exactly is your work?” Ian asked him, hoping to change the subject.

“I’m a private detective.”

This was so unexpected that Ian laughed. Eli scowled. “What’s funny about that?” he said.

“Detective?” Ian said. “You mean, like solving murders and mysteries and such?”

“Well, it’s more like tailing husbands to motel rooms. But that’s the Lord’s business too! Believe me.”

“If you say so,” Ian told him.

“What do you do, brother?”

“I’m a carpenter,” Ian said.

“Our Savior was a carpenter.”

“Well, yes.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Who said I was ashamed?”

“Those your kids you came with?”

“Yes.”

“You look kind of young to have kids that old.”

“Really I’m just their uncle,” Ian said. “My parents and I take care of them.”

“I would’ve thought you were nothing but a college boy.”

“No, no.”

“You married?”

“No.”

“A bachelor.”

“Well, yes. A … bachelor,” Ian said.

Eli bent over a hinge again. Ian watched for a minute and then turned back to his ladder.

But the next time he brought down a shutter, he said, “So you’ve never found a missing person, or anything like that.”

“Depends on what you call missing,” Eli said. “Sure, I’ve found a few husbands here and there. Usually they’re just staying with a girlfriend, though, that everybody except their wives knows the name and address of.”

“I see,” Ian said.

He leaned the shutter against a sawhorse. He studied it. Not looking at Eli, he said, “Say a person had been missing a long time. Five or six years, say. Maybe seven or eight. Would the trail be too cold for you to follow?”

“What? Naw,” Eli said. “Bound to be something he left behind. People are so messy. That’s been my experience. People leave so much litter wherever they go to.”

He rotated one forearm and examined the inside of his wrist. A dribble of dusty blood ran downward from his palm. “Somebody special you had in mind?” he asked.

“Not really,” Ian said.

He brushed a dead leaf from a louver. He cleared his throat. He said, “Those kids I’m taking care of: their father is missing, I guess you could say. The father of the older two.”

“Is that so,” Eli said. “Ducking his child support, huh?”

“Child support? Oh. Right,” Ian said.

“Boy, I hate those child-support guys,” Eli said. “Or, no, not hate. Forget hate. The Bible cautions us not to hate. But I … pity them, yes, I surely do pity those child-support guys. You’d never get me to raise one of them’s kids.”

“Oh, they’re really like my own now,” Ian said.

“Even so! Here you are sitting home with three young ones and he’s off enjoying his self.”

“I don’t mind,” Ian said.

He didn’t want to go into the whole story. In fact, he couldn’t remember now why he’d brought it up in the first place.

He was supervising the children’s homework at the kitchen table when he heard a wailing sound outdoors. He said, “Was that a baby?”

No one answered. They were too busy arguing. Thomas was telling Daphne that when he was in third grade, a plain old wooden pencil had been good enough for him. Daphne had no business, he said, swiping his personal ballpoint pen. Daphne said, “Maybe what you wrote in third grade wasn’t worth a pen.” Then Agatha complained they’d made her lose her train of thought. Thanks to them, she would have to start this whole equation over again.

“Was that a baby crying?” Ian asked.

They barely paused.

“Hey,” Thomas said to the others. “Want to hear something disgusting?”

“No, what?”

Ian crossed the kitchen and opened the screen door. It was light enough still so he could make out the clothesline poles and the azalea bushes, and the stockade fence that separated the backyard from the alley.

“In science class, my teacher? Mr. Pratt?” Thomas said. “He stands at the blackboard, he tells us, ‘By the time I’ve finished teaching this lesson, microscopic portions of my mouth will be all over this room. ’ ”

“Eeuw!” Daphne and Agatha said.

Just inside the gate, which had not been completely closed in years, sat a minuscule patch of darkness, a denser black than the fence posts. This patch stirred and glinted in some way and uttered another thin wail.

“Kitty-kitty?” Ian called.

He stepped outside, shutting the screen door behind him. Yes, it was definitely a cat. When he approached, it teetered on the brink of leaving but finally stood its ground. He bent to pat its head. He could feel the narrow skull beneath fur so soft that it made almost no impression on his fingertips.

“Where’s your owner, little cat?” he asked.

But he thought he knew the answer to that. There wasn’t any tag or collar, and when he ran a hand down its body he could count the ribs. It staggered weakly beneath his touch, then braced itself and started purring in a rusty, unpracticed way, pressing its small face into the cup of his palm.

As it happened, the Bedloes had no pets at that particular moment. They had never replaced Beastie, and the latest of their cats had disappeared a few months ago. So this new little cat had come to the right people. Ian let it spend a few minutes getting used to him, and then he picked it up and carried it back inside the house. It clung to him with needle claws, tense but still conscientiously purring. “See what I found in the alley,” he told the children.

“Oh, look!” Daphne cried, slipping out of her chair. “Can I hold it, Ian? Can I keep it?”

“If no one comes to claim it,” Ian said, handing it over.

In the light he saw that the cat was black from head to foot, and not much more than half grown. Its eyes had changed to green already but its face was still the triangular, top-heavy face of a kitten. Thomas was lifting its spindly tail to see what sex it was, but the cat objected to that and climbed higher on Daphne’s shoulder. “Ouch!” Daphne squawked. “Thomas, quit! See what you made it do?”