for that dark patch of gray hairs between its ears, it was all white, and its black eyes gleamed with intelligence whenever she spoke.
“I’d already locked up for the night.” Mrs. Avery wore a fresh, pale blue shirtwaist and her gray hair was neat and tidy in its usual bun, but the lines in her face and her red-rimmed, puffy eyes attested to a stressful night without sleep.
“Smudge just wouldn’t settle down. He kept acting as if somebody were prowling around down by the barn, so I turned on all the outside lights and that’s when I heard a car start up across the branch and drive away. A minute later, the whole back of the church seemed to go up in flames. It was just sheer luck that I was watching.”
“Not luck, honey,” insisted the Reverend Williams, who looked larger than life-size in a capacious cotton robe splashed with bright red and orange flowers. “God was directing your eye last night. His eye is on the sparrow and He put your eye on me.”
Once again she launched into the story of how she’d gone to bed at nine-thirty last night and was already sound asleep when she heard Mrs. Avery banging on the door of her little trailer. “She was yelling Fire, Fire! and said I had to get out. Well, I couldn’t find Puffcake and—”
We had already seen Channel 17’s interview with these two women and heard Sister Williams’s tale of rounding up her various cats, so Uncle Ash set down his coffee cup and flipped to Channel 11 where Miriam Thomas in the studio was adding a question of her own to the remote interview with my ATF friend Ed Gardner and the resident FBI agent who’d hastily flown over from Charlotte. More racial epithets had been found on one of Mount Olive’s unburned walls.
“—so yes, Miriam, although it’s much too early to say with complete certainty, our preliminary investigations show enough similarities to make us think that these two fires may indeed be linked to Wednesday night’s burning.”
Miriam Thomas and her partner, Larry Stogner, reminded viewers that Wednesday night was when Balm of Gilead burned.
Every local news channel alternated between the smoldering remains of the two churches. At Burning Heart of God, the only visible signs left behind the yellow police cordon were sheets of twisted tin from the roof and the burned-out hulk of Sister Williams’s metal mobile home.
The cameras caught the fire chief shaking his head woefully.
“We’re just too short of equipment,” he said. “Way this part of the county’s growing, we need at least a substation and another truck.”
Standing behind him, Donny Turner nodded his head in strong agreement.
At Mount Olive, the damage looked awful, but much had been spared. The whole north end of the church was black and charred where only yesterday had been bright Sunday School classrooms, a robing room and the choir stall itself. Flames had destroyed the mural of Jesus with John the Baptist and had licked up against the ecclesiastical chairs before they were brought under control, but the fellowship hall next to the church looked like a total write-off. The fire had started there before jumping to the main building. The roof still stood, and so did an exterior wall with its crudely printed words in green spray paint—“Niggers back to Africa”—but the whole interior was a slurry of waterlogged charcoal.
“This is bad,” said Aunt Zell, who was too distracted to fix anything more complicated than toast for our breakfast. “This is really just too bad.”
Uncle Ash shook his head as he pulled a burned slice from the toaster and handed it to me.
I put it on the plate in front of me and tried again to call Andrew and April, but once again the operator came on the line: “We’re sorry. All our circuits are currently busy. Please hang up and try your call again later.”
It was the same when I tried Seth’s number, Daddy’s and Haywood’s. Nothing was getting through to their exchange.
I left the toast on my plate and headed for Cotton Grove. If I didn’t get caught behind any tractors, there was just enough time to make it there and back to Dobbs before court convened.
I may have pushed the speed limit a little as I drove west in the early morning sunlight. Traffic didn’t seem much heavier than usual, but then I was zipping through back roads and shortcuts. I took the homemade bridge across Possum Creek so fast that for a minute I thought I’d busted one of my shocks.
When I pulled up to the back porch of Andrew’s house, Dwight Bryant was standing by his departmental car there in the yard and Daddy was leaning against his pickup. A.K. and Andrew were on their tractors, ready to head out to the field as if nothing had happened, and April’s smile was serene and unworried.
No one seemed surprised to see me.
“I figgered you’d be out here once you seen the phones was all tied up,” Daddy said.
“We’ll go on then, Dwight,” Andrew said, giving me a wave before he cranked his tractor and trailed A.K. down past the barns. Time and tobacco wait for no man.
“Everything’s okay, then?” I asked inanely.
April’s smile widened. “If you’d gone to church last night, you’d have known.”
“Huh?”
“New Deliverance opened their revival last night.”
Enlightenment dawned. New Deliverance is the borderline charismatic church over in Black Creek with a borderline Ayatollah for a preacher. Not my favorite place to worship by a long shot. But that’s where my brother Herman and his wife go—Nadine’s one of those strait-laced Blalocks from Black Creek—and she’s always badgering different ones of us to come fellowship with them. To keep family peace, we occasionally do.
“Andrew went and promised Nadine we’d come,” April said with a wicked grin, “and we decided it wouldn’t hurt for A.K. to sit through one of their preacher’s hellfire and brimstone sermons either.”
“Ain’t that cruel and unusual punishment?” Daddy asked me with a wink.
“And guess who was sitting in the row behind A.K. till almost ten o’clock?” asked Dwight.
