Down the road apiece, we stopped to get us a slice of pie and a cup of black coffee for Grandpa. Hursey was the one that spotted him sitting next to a woman in the back booth of the diner and elbowed Grandpa, who nudged Grandma to look.
“Why, that’s Merle Hobart,” Grandma said.
I could tell something didn’t set too well with her.
Merle Hobart brushed a stray lock of the woman’s hair back from her face, his wedding band glinting under the fluorescent tube. I didn’t recognize him at first—he looked so ordinary without that golden halo of light shining down on him. But it was him all right, sitting all cozied up to that redheaded woman who said she fell down her cellar stairs and couldn’t walk a step until she got healed and started running back and forth on the stage shouting glory hallelujah.
Grandma remarked that she had lost her appetite, but Hursey and I each had a slice of warm crabapple pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream oozing down the sides. After we finished eating, Grandpa poured a second cup of coffee into the beat-up thermos he’d used in the mines, and we got back on the road.
Feeling the hum of the tires on the blacktop, Hursey soon fell asleep, his legs sprawled halfway over my side of the seat. I thought about poking him to make him move over, but I never did. It wasn’t like me to be that considerate. But I expected my brother was all worn out from one more disappointment in his life, although he never told me so and I never asked. Grandma began singing about how we’d understand it all by and by, her voice floating thin and warbly in the dark.
“Amen and amen,” my grandpa said.
“Clev,” Grandma said, “I’d just as soon you didn’t start that.”
Grandma picked up her darning needle and one of Grandpa’s socks just like usual. Today she tuned the radio to Deke Godby’s Gospel Hour. And just like usual, we never talked about our visit to Merle Hobart.
17
Ladies Don’t Sweat
Taking advantage of the last hot days of summer, Grandpa held a revival where he’d preach every night for two weeks straight, begging and pleading with sinners to come forward and get saved so they wouldn’t burn in an everlasting Hell. The meeting got pretty heated up, what with all the shouting and praying and preaching, and there was no breeze to damper down all those flame-filled words.
I started looking around for my favorite fan.
The only one left in the pew rack in front of me advertised Sunset Memorial Park Cemetery. Although the cemetery part appealed to me, somebody had scribbled all over the back. Grandma offered to trade me her Trublood Insurance Company fan, but I wasn’t interested. I thought it said Troubled Insurance Company. Besides, I had my heart set on a fan two pews in front of us, the one with a blue-eyed Jesus in a royal blue robe, kneeling and looking up to a sky-blue Heaven.
Grandma said she wasn’t putting up with my nonsense because all those fans worked the same and there wasn’t one iota of difference and that I was just being picky for no good reason and she wasn’t having me call unnecessary attention by traipsing all over the church because of some silly notion I had when there was a perfectly good fan right there. No sirree, she was not going to have it.
She knew I’d mind her, no question about it, but she also knew I’d pout all night. What would the church ladies think? She couldn’t risk it.
“I guess you can this time, but you best get the one you want right off next time because there’s just no sense in . . .”
She trailed off quick when Sister Wood came by with a question about the Home Missionary Society meeting at our house next week. Grandma was in charge of the missionary work and Grandpa was in charge of preaching, but in everything else he followed Grandma’s lead like the faithful second-in-command he knew himself to be.
I smiled and said a big hello to Sister Wood to show Grandma I was over my pouting, then I hurried to get the Jesus fan.
The ladies fanned, swishing the cardboard back and forth in front of glistening faces. They dabbed runs of sweat from powdered necks with soft blue or peach or lilac handkerchiefs decorated with crocheted lace edges or embroidered flowers or maybe initials and birds.
“Ladies don’t sweat,” Grandma reminded me. “Horses sweat, men perspire, ladies glow.”
Grandma had a natural dignity in how she carried herself, how she presented herself to the world. She said she didn’t want the Lord catching her doing anything that didn’t glorify His name. She didn’t want anybody else to catch her either. She must have thought all the neighbors had a spy glass trained right on Grandpa as he went to feed the chickens and on her as she took the clothes off the line and even on me as I trudged up our red dog road to Sylvia Elementary School.
I wasn’t supposed to kick too high or turn cartwheels or cross my legs when I sat down, and my scratchy wool skirt should always cover my knobby knees. I couldn’t say heck or dang or anything else she thought substituted for a bad word.
Grandma didn’t like for me to whistle either.
“A whistling girl or a crowing hen is neither fit for God nor men,” she’d say.
Grandma put a lot of stock in what other people thought of us.
She said a preacher’s family should always be above reproach.
And that was especially true for me and Vonnie.
Hursey, home for the summer, was threatening to tear a page out of the Bobbsey Twins book I was reading because he claimed I’d lost a piece of his jigsaw puzzle, while I tried to
