Melanie Thon - Meteors in August

I longed to see for myself what went on at these meetings, but Mother forbade it. Knowing how little she admired Reverend Piggott, I thought she’d be glad to try something else. My mother’s father was a minister, and she never forgave him for hearing a call that made him desert his wife and child. I began to suspect she had little use for religion of any kind.

I remembered the time when Nina was chosen to play Mary in the Christmas story. For three days before the performance Nina moved as if in a trance, smiled as if her knowledge and her pain were too great to bear. She barely ate and refused to dirty her hands scrubbing dishes. I did her chores gladly, satisfied with my small sacrifice.

The night of the play, Daddy was so proud he could hardly sit still. He wanted to jump to his feet and applaud till his palms burned. Reverend Piggott laid one hand on Nina’s golden hair. “Like an angel,” he said, “the vision of the Virgin herself.”

Nina was still glowing the morning after her debut, but Mother told her those pious ways didn’t wash at home. She made Nina eat her bacon and fried eggs, made her scrape the plates and scour the grease out of the pans.

Later I found my sister thrown across her bed. She sobbed so hard I thought her bones would shatter. “I hate her,” she said. “I hate her.”

I believed my mother was as good as anyone I knew, better than most, fair and forgiving. I didn’t think people could be good unless they feared God — or at least their parents. My mother’s folks were dead. If she wasn’t afraid of the Lord’s retribution, what kept her on the right path? Sometimes I doubted I had the proper respect for God, but I dreaded the punishment of my father and tried to do the right thing most of the time. Trying to understand all of this only made me more curious about Tuesday nights at Freda Graves’s. Sooner or later, I knew I had to worship in that house. I thought of myself speaking in tongues, having a private language just between me and God, having a voice so sweet He’d hear every word. My soul billowed up with the joy of it. My heart beat too fast, a flutter like wings in my tight chest.

“WELL, I hope this is the end of it,” Mom said. It was a Tuesday night, and she was referring to the cherry pie Miriam Deets had just delivered, warm from the oven, to show her appreciation to my father. Miriam had appeared at our back door with her gift just as we finished our supper. Two of her tow-headed toddlers clung to her skirt, bunching the material in their sticky fists, hiding behind her and peeking at us with wide animal eyes.

“The end of what?” Dad said.

“Don’t play the fool with me, Dean. I know all about that chicken.” We’d already been to church three weeks in a row.

Daddy didn’t look at me straight, but caught me with the edge of one eye, a glance that said he’d just as soon rip out my tongue as see my face. “This pie has nothing to do with any damn chicken,” he said.

“Then to what, pray tell, do we owe Mrs . Deets’s gratitude?”

“I got her husband, Lanfear, moved from pulp to planing — another buck an hour.” Mother had to ask him to repeat the words, and even then she looked as if she couldn’t believe it. “He’s been at the mill six years,” Dad said, “can’t keep a man in one place forever. Anyway, Josh Holler is the one who deserves this pie. He handles all the union business; he arranged everything.”

“You talked Josh Holler into this.”

“We do agree sometimes.”

“I’ve never heard of a time until this.”

“Josh thought it was long overdue.”

“How many times have I heard you say Lanfear Deets was the stupidest man you’d ever met? Lazier than an Indian, you said, and as long as you were foreman he wasn’t moving up a single rung.”

“Changed my mind.”

“Why?”

“His work improved.”

“When? A couple weeks ago? A Friday night?”

The legs of my father’s chair scraped backward across the floor. “I don’t have to listen to this,” he said. Daddy won every fight because he never stuck around for the end. He barged through the living room. The screen door popped shut with a snap, loud as a firecracker exploding at dusk.

I hoped this was the end of it too, just as Mother said. Surely my father had more than made amends for twisting Lanfear’s arm over that twelve-dollar debt.

I had no trouble sneaking out of the house that night. Mom thought I was going to Gwen’s. She was too preoccupied to demand more than a white lie. I hopped on my bike and sped toward the west side of town. Here the houses were low to the ground. Shingles peeled off the roofs. The smaller the house, the brighter the paint. These shacks were built quickly to accommodate the modest boom of the lumber business. There wasn’t time or money enough to dig foundations or pour concrete. Houses were raised on slabs of rock or piles of brick. Some were slapped together in early spring, with nothing but the frozen earth to support them. Now the homes sank and slipped. Porches leaned, windows sagged, roofs sloped in threatening ways.

Haverton Grosswilder built these houses and sold most of them to his employees. He started the mill but never worked there. He was an old man now, though his daughter, Marlene, was my age, and his son, Drew, was just two years older. People said his young wife was pretty, but she never left the house. She had some kind of terror of the outside world. I thought this was justified. If she walked through the west side of town, her husband’s slums, folks might knock her down and steal her shoes.

I ditched my bike in the bushes about a block from Freda Graves’s. I didn’t aim to go to the front door — I wasn’t ready for that.

Her house had been painted white years ago; now the paint blistered, revealing a layer of dirty red. Her backyard was overgrown with dying duck grass and dandelions gone to seed. I crept around one side of the house and then the other, but all the shades were down. Mrs. Graves would have to be an idiot to leave her windows exposed, so anyone who just happened to be passing could get an eyeful of salvation. I was about to give up when I saw she’d been careless after all. I spotted a bright slat. The window was shut, but the blind was a good inch from the sill.

I peered into the room. Freda Graves stood in the center of her flock, head thrown back, eyes closed, arms flung wide to embrace a vision of the Lord only the blind or the blessed could see. She wore a long dark skirt and a gray blouse with a high collar. Her congregation clustered at her feet, open-eyed as children, rocking and swaying to the beat of her words, shouting the word Amen in unison whenever there was a pause in her preaching. Amen . Mouths opened wide; I saw the word hover in the stale air, but I heard nothing.

The size of Freda Graves amazed me: the sweep of her arms describing Heaven and earth, the mass of gray curls grown full and tangled, the legs so solid that each step looked final, rooted for a thousand years. She seemed too big for her own house. The ceiling hung low, too close to that furious head. Unlike other adults in my world, she did not loom large in memory as she shrank in real life. She was great in the mind and in the flesh.

When she ceased her praying, the crowd stilled. They barely seemed to breathe. Slowly, Freda Graves began to speak again, a pantomime of passion, waving her hands, staring at first one follower and then another. The words came faster and faster. At last her gaze rested on one man. She pointed and said nothing.

She’d chosen Bo Effinger. He stretched out on the floor and the others gathered around him, laying their hands on his thighs and belly, his neck and chest. Bo was six and a half feet tall, with white hair, no eyebrows, and the biggest feet I have ever seen on a human being.