The twin babies (the reason they’d had to get married) in the two big laundry baskets in the kitchen were testing out the idea of crying. One would go “ant ant” and the other’d go “Ant ant ant.” But they weren’t into it wholeheartedly yet.
“Do you know the preacher Little Lion, Sydney?” Laura Gwen asked me.
“He’s a midget, too,” Digger said.
“I call myself a dwarf,” I said. “What about him?”
“He’s coming to La Belle this Sunday,” said Laura Gwen. “One of the reasons we brought the trailer over is to stay so we can see him.”
“One of the reasons you decided we’d bring the trailer is to stay and see him,” Digger said. He took a swallow of beer.
“You like him, too, Digger. Tell Sydney about the time we saw him on The Powerful Hour on TV.”
“He was testifying on The Powerful Hour,” said Digger. “That’s all.”
“Which is one of my favorite TV shows,” said Laura Gwen. “I had an aunt who got cured of carbuncles watching that show. She turned it on with them, and turned it off without them.”
“Your Aunt Mildred is a hypochondriac, is what she is,” said Digger.
While they argued back and forth about Laura Gwen’s aunt, I remembered a time this evangelist came to a park outside Wilton, and some of us from Mistakes went to see him. Wheels Potter was with us, and he pushed himself on his board down to the front so he could see.
The evangelist was asking people to testify as to what the Lord had done for them. People began getting up and shouting out they’d been changed or cured or transformed overnight. Then there was a lull in the proceedings … then Wheels’s voice. He raised himself as high as he could on his board, and he yelled, “You was asking what the Lord done for me! So I’ll tell you! He just blamed near ruint me!”
I wasn’t religious, though I’d been known to pray in times of crisis. Once, at a Fourth of July parade when I was dressed as a Revolutionary soldier, carrying a ten-inch rubber sword, a bulldog, who’d decided I was a walking Gaines-burger, tackled me during a rousing rendition of “Halls of Montezuma.” While the bulldog chewed his way through my sword, toward me, I prayed and prayed. But prayer was not a regular part of my routine.
The twins were working up their act while Digger and Laura Gwen argued about her Aunt Mildred. They were taking turns going “Unt ant waaa unt.”
There was a tire commercial on TV, no sign of Dora yet.
“We should have some soy sauce for this stuff,” Laura Gwen said.
“Well, we don’t have no soy sauce,” said Digger.
“It goes good with it.”
“There’s too much salt in soy sauce,” said Digger.
The babies were ant-anting in unison.
“Chop suey without soy sauce is like french fries without ketchup,” said Laura Gwen, yelling over the anting.
“Then get some soy sauce next time!” Digger shouted back.
“You do the shopping, Digger!”
“I get what’s on the list!”
“You get a lot that’s not on the list, too, like beer!”
I decided to get out of their way and carried my plate to the kitchen. I stood on tiptoe to place it on the counter.
“See if they’ve got their pacifiers, Sydney,” Laura Gwen shouted at me.
I leaned down and tried to get them to take the rubber doughnuts in their baskets and the babies let go piercing screams, their little faces the color of lobsters. I jumped back.
“I scared them, I guess,” I said.
No one could hear me above their wailing. They looked like their little blue veins were going to pop through their skin.
Laura Gwen came strolling into the kitchen.
“I scared them, I guess,” I said.
“They don’t know the difference,” she said.
But I was always wary of kids, even that little. Kids were always trouble. I would rather pass a barking dog on a street than little kids. In any town, little kids were the ones who knew who was off, who was crazy or different or bad, and liked to follow behind you in a line saying mean things.
I’d been followed by these little monsters my own size crying, “Bump back humpback!”—marching to it, bumpety bump back, bumpety humpback, holding their knuckles to their mouths to imitate horns, parading behind me like the circus had come to town.
I pulled the chair over to the sink, ready to get up on it and help with the dinner dishes, but Laura Gwen said never mind, there wasn’t room.
“Just rinse your plate, Sydney.”
Digger was in there with his eyes glued to a rerun of The Odd Couple.
Laura Gwen was bent over the baskets calming her daughters.
It was then that I saw the poster propped behind the kitchen faucets.
THE LION IS COME UP FROM HIS THICKET
Jeremiah 4:7
LITTLE LION
appearing
Sunday, September 27, 9 A.M.
First Presbyterian Church
La Belle, New York
“Walk with me.”—Little Lion
Smiling down at me from the center of the poster, in a white suit with a tiny Bible open in the palm of one hand, was Opportunity Knox!
6: Little Little La Belle
WHAT I DO AFTER school and on weekends is drive around in my car.
It was my sixteenth-birthday present, ordered for me by my father, equipped with extension pedals.
My father says his first car was blue, too, an English Ford he called The Love Bug. My mother says oh yes and wouldn’t you still like to drive around in it with Lana Waite, and watch the tires pop, she’s such an elephant.
My mother’s always teasing him about his high school sweetheart, whom we see waddling around Cayuta, her pudgy hands feeding herself maple creams from Fanny Farmer while she does her errands.
Before my father met my mother in college, he was the Golden Boy of La Belle, New York, voted “most handsome” in his class and “most likely to succeed.” He has a thick scrapbook bulging with snapshots of himself. There he is in his green-and-white football uniform running for a touchdown, and there he is on the steps of
