The good brother would fall to his knees right there in the pew or in the aisle and begin to pray. Soon all in the congregation were on their knees, and they joined right in, everyone praying out loud.
The Pentecostals believed you got saved, then sanctified, then filled with the Holy Ghost, which meant some would receive the gift of speaking in tongues. The Bible talks about speaking in tongues a good bit, but to tell the truth, it made most people uncomfortable. It didn’t seem a bit strange to me. But then, I knew the ones who did it. They were Grandma and Grandpa, and they were normal as the applesauce pie my grandma made for Sunday dinner.
“Clev, I do wish you’d mind the time when you’re up there preaching,” Grandma said. “The biggest part of us have our dinners in the oven and you going on until half past the noon hour means folks are going home to a meal that’s likely not fit to eat.”
Grandpa shook his head. “I hear what you’re saying, Rindy, but there’s no way for me to tell precisely when a sermon is going to end. Just no way.”
“Well, think of something. You can’t have all the womenfolk staying home because you don’t let out on time. And that’s exactly what they’re threatening. Sister Wood told me so. The men are affected too, you know, because it’s them that’s eating a dried-out roasting hen for Sunday dinner.”
They had this disagreement most Sundays on the way home from church. But Grandpa said there was no two ways about it; he had to preach until there was no more preaching in him.
Once we got home, Grandma hurried to put Easter dinner on the table while Grandpa stayed outside to see to it the animals were sheltered. The sky was gray, with snow still on the ground, not a lot, but enough that Grandpa hid the Easter eggs inside the house for me and Vonnie to hunt for after dinner. The day before, we’d spent all afternoon dying hard-boiled eggs with food coloring mixed with vinegar and boiling-hot water, first writing our initials on the eggshells with the wax of a used birthday candle. The dye didn’t color the wax, so our initials showed up plain as could be. We dipped the eggs in a cup of red or blue or yellow, then started mixing our own colors. Red with blue to make purple. Red and yellow for orange. Blue and yellow to make green. Finally, we dumped all the colors together and got a muddy shade of brown.
We’d been eating chocolate bunnies and jelly beans and marshmallow biddies from our Easter baskets since we got up before dawn to go to sunrise service. Grandma warned we’d spoil our appetites, but Mother said for goodness’ sake, it was Easter. She took our picture on the porch. We are dressed in our Easter garb, everything brand new from the skin out. Grinning from beneath our Easter bonnets, we are holding the baskets, the fingers of our white cotton gloves stained from handling the eggs.
Mother set the table in the dining room the way Aunt Lila always did, draping three lace tablecloths this way and that over a blue flowered cloth. Aunt Lila had first done that because our biggest lace cloth still wasn’t big enough if we had both leaves in the table. She got compliments, so she kept doing it. Now Mother had copied her. Mother used the best dishes—the white ones with blue windmills—and the silver-plated knives and forks she’d polished the day before with baking soda and vinegar.
Soon the table was loaded with baked ham and fried chicken, candied sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes and cream gravy, stewed rhubarb, green peas and pearl onions, corn custard, pickled beets, and deviled eggs, the whites dyed blue and green and lavender—all served up on big platters and in sparkling cut-glass dishes passed down from generations before. Mother made yeast rolls and warm wilted lettuce salad from the season’s first tender leaves of Bibb lettuce and green onion shoots.
She motioned me over. “Go get that blue vase you put in the sitting room.”
I’d forgotten all about it.
When I opened the door, a big bouquet of bright yellow flowers bloomed where there had been bare branches. I carried the vase to the dining room as careful as if the yellow flowers were real gold, placing it in the center of the table.
Outside big wet snowflakes mixed with icy drizzle, but inside it felt like spring. There were lace-trimmed anklets on my white patent-leather feet, “Sunday” embroidered in pink on my yellow underpants, bread pudding with warm raisin sauce to be spooned over it, and Easter eggs waiting to be found.
And Mother and I had forced the forsythia.
6
A Hobo’s Prayer
The Pentecostal Home Missionary Society believed in helping your neighbor. My grandma believed everybody was our neighbor, and that included the hobos who hopped on and off trains that coughed and belched through our town, oily plumes of smoke and a mile of coal cars trailing between the black engine and the bright red caboose. Grandpa said he’d heard tell hobos had a way of marking houses known to serve up a good meal. Ours must have had a sign pointing right at it because every hobo traveling north in the spring and south in the fall found his way to our back door.
No one was ever turned away.
Wild-eyed and bushy-headed, the man leaning against our gate wore a rumpled Sunday suit that harkened back to better times, a white shirt that was nearly clean, and a tie so stained the original color was anybody’s guess. Grandma went to the edge of the garden and hollered Grandpa’s name. He hurried over and introduced himself, shaking the hobo’s hand. He always found some chore for the hobo to do, even if it didn’t make sense to me.
This time, he led the hobo to a stack of kindling near
