Grandma didn’t use perfume, but a time or two I saw her take the brown bottle of vanilla out of the cabinet and dab a drop behind her ears. Once I even saw her splash some on an old handkerchief and tuck it in the front of her dress. Some of the ladies wore Johnson’s Baby Powder and Evening in Paris or Blue Waltz perfume. The scents diffused into an invisible cloud that moved with them as they busybodied across the one-room church in twos and threes.
Grandma stood out among them. Although only average in size, she was an imposing woman, and the other church ladies followed her lead. I never heard her raise her voice in anger; she never needed to—her bearing carried a certain authority. She never sat down at home without her Bible or some piece of mending in her hand. Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop, she often said. Hardworking and soft-spoken, a leader—Grandma had the gift of grace.
She was of Scotch-Irish heritage, with fair skin, blue eyes, and dark hair that glinted with red in the sun. Like most Pentecostal women, my grandma’s hair had never been cut. Fashioned into braids wrapped around her head or wound into a bun at the nape of her neck, it fell past her knees when she took it down. Between washings she used a gold brush inlaid with mother-of-pearl to brush a mixture of lemon juice and water through her hair, and I sometimes caught the scent of lemonade as she passed. The brush belonged to a dresser set with a matching comb, hand mirror, and clothes brush, plus a jar she used to hold big fat hairpins. Before she went to bed, Grandma plaited her hair into one loose braid, then she brushed the tangles out of my blonde pigtails and plaited my hair into one long braid just like hers.
Saturday night was different. Grandma wound sections of my hair around strips of rags. The next morning, after I’d had my oatmeal and put on my Sunday-go-to-meeting dress, she unwound the rags from my head. Curls as tight as a screen-door spring spiraled down my back. When she plaited my pigtails for school, she’d dip her fingers into sugar water to stiffen the braids so they wouldn’t come undone.
Sometimes when I sweated, I got a little sticky behind the ears.
On the Sundays Grandpa didn’t preach at Cales Chapel, we went to the one-room Pentecostal Holiness Church in East Beckley for Sunday-morning services, and then back for more preaching Sunday night, and again on Wednesday night for prayer meeting. The children sat in the back pew and the adults met up front. Every week we were supposed to memorize a verse of Scripture. Most of the kids said, “Jesus wept.” After all, it was the shortest verse in the Bible. But Grandma saw to it I had a proper verse to recite every Sunday so the church ladies wouldn’t have cause to wag their heads about her.
“Let not your heart be troubled . . .”
“For God so loved the world . . .”
“And I say unto you, ask, and it shall be given you . . .”
I got to thinking. That last verse couldn’t be true. Grandpa and Grandma had more faith than anyone I knew, yet they didn’t seem to get much of anything they prayed for, even though they never asked for anything for themselves. It seemed to me if God made that great big promise, He should stick to it and not try to wiggle His way out of it because He thought you didn’t need it or it wouldn’t be good for you. When I asked Grandma, she said God answers all prayers, but He doesn’t always give you the answer you want.
Grandma always took up for God.
When Grandma’s best friend, a jolly roly-poly of a woman, helped her plan a Home Missionary Society meeting, they laughed and carried on worse than me and Sissy. Her first name was Clovis, but Grandma called her Sister Wood. I thought it was funny she didn’t call her by her first name, them being such good friends and all.
“Well, Clovis is a silly name,” I said.
“Clovis is a perfectly fine name. Not a thing wrong with it,” Grandma said. “You know,” she said, changing the conversation, “this would be a fine day for you and your grandpa to go find us a tree. The Lord’s birthday will be upon us before we know it.”
“I do believe your grandma wants me and you out of her way for a while,” Grandpa said.
“No such thing,” Grandma said. “If I wanted rid of you, I could put you to doing a dozen things that need attending to around here. I expect that’d make the both of you disappear fast as a magician’s rabbit. I’d let you pare these apples for me if I didn’t know what the outcome would be. We’d end up with half the apple wasting on the peel and one of you missing a piece of finger.”
“To my mind it’s a tad too soon to be cutting a tree, but if that’s what you want, no doubt we can find you one,” Grandpa said.
“Well, you could scout one out,” Grandma said, dumping the cut-up apples into a skillet sizzling with butter, brown sugar, vanilla, and cinnamon to make apple upside-down cake or apple pie filling, I wasn’t sure which.
I was hoping for fried apple pies. Grandma made them by rolling out six-inch pie crusts, putting a spoonful or so of the apple mixture on one side, then folding the crust over and crimping it with the tines of a dinner fork. She’d fry the little pies
