Vacation Bible School
Dot Knight is about to backslide, and here she's been saved for less than a
year.
"Help me, Jesus. Help me, Jesus." She has been praying the same prayer since
summer started, and so far it hasn't took.
First, it was the summer reading program at the new Echols County Public
Library, where she is a member in good standing on the library board. Her goal had
been to get rid of all those nasty books (she did advise keeping the historical
romances because those writers know how to write about sex in such a way that half
the time even Dot, who is 55 and been married over half her life, doesn't know what
is going on). And now, vacation bible school at her little country church, in the
northwest section of the county.
For both programs it has been Dot's cross to bear to have to pick up the
Odums children, on the southernmost city limits of the little town of Statenville, in
her new 1996 white Bonneville with the pale blue plush interior. How she got into it
this time was, her preacher had heard about her success with getting children
involved in the reading program (really just crafts)and asked her to pick up the same
children for bible school.
Of course, she couldn't very well tell Brother Rauls that she'd as soon
go to hell as have those little devils in her new car again, and she could just
imagine how this sort of thing could go on and on: some other organization,
say, the Scouts, for instance, might hear of her success with getting the
Odums to the library and the church and she could be bussing them all over
creation in her new car which they've about wrecked and she might kill them
and wind up in hell for real.
She presses the springy horn on the padded navy panel of the steering wheel
and watches through the blue-tinted windshield for Sister and the baby and the twins
to show on the trash-strewn porch of the longish brown house set sideways at the
end of the lane. The yard is covered in leather-brown leaves, years of accumulated
leaves from the clustered oaks and blackgums. Junked cars squat low on their
rims--a car for every tree.
Sounds like a fight is going on inside, and a radio is wide open on a
country music station. Dot turns the air conditioning knob to number 1 and
lowers the window about an inch. She can feel the concentrated evening heat
and hear a man and a woman yelling at one another--Sade and Marnie, not
even married. They have opened the old cafe in Statenville where, according
to rumor, they are selling more than just hamburgers. Some say he is a pimp
and she is a prostitute, some say they are into the Numbers Racket.
"Help me, Jesus."
Sister, the oldest, steps out to the porch. Could be ten, could
be thirteen--that kind of girl. She is lugging that filthy, white-headed
baby on her hip. Sister looks Chinese, has a flat square face, smooth
black hair, is jaundiced-looking with dark slit eyes. With a mama
like Marnie, who can tell? The baby looks like a regular American
with that pale skin and blue eyes, though a mite on the sickly side.
So far, the twin boys haven't come out, and Dot says, "Thank you,
Jesus." She smiles and places the box of white Kleenex under her seat, and
her triangular navy pocketbook on the floor underneath her knees, to keep
Sister from stealing them. She slips the black bible with her name inscribed
in gold closer to her stout thigh.
Sister opens the door on the other side and gets in and sets the baby on
her lap, and Dot says to Sister in a bubbly happy drawl, "I hope we've got on a
clean diady this time, humm," then to the baby, "Hey, Pretty."
She is the ugliest, skinniest baby Dot has ever seen. All dolled up in
pink: a milk-spotted dress with a tucked yoke, which Dot can tell anybody is the
only dress that baby owns. A filthy pink ribbon is tied around a sprig of
yanked-up hair on her crown like a torture device.
"Sounds like y'all got a big party going on in there, humm." Dot shifts the gear
stick to R, quick to make her getaway before the twins, who are out on the porch
now, can catch a ride with her.
"Marnie and Sade fighting," says Sister. "They're busting up."
"Well, bless your heart, humm," says Dot. What kind of girl calls her mother
by her first name? As far as that goes, what kind of name is "Sister?"
Dot has to back and pull up and back and pull up, to keep from scrubbing her
front bumper on the myrtle bushes and briars bordering the narrow dirt lane. One of
the twins dodges around the rear bumper of the car, snatches open the left rear door
and dives in, the other boy right in behind him. They are wearing brown shorts with
brown-striped knit shirts that ride up on their ribby sides. Smells of sweat and
pencil lead cancel the new car smell that Dot so loves.
She smiles and purrs like a satisfied old cat, drives up the lane to the highway
and motors north, past the small frame houses fronting 129, past the red brick
courthouse on the right and Mr. King's blue cement-block service station on the left,
then on through the blinking red light. Down the dip at Troublesome Creek and up,
and on past the disbanded Samson Camp: ten or twelve acres of gapped row
houses, scrub palmetto palms and sand. Used to, the men who lived there would dig
fat lighterd stumps from the Echols County woods to be rendered into dynamite.
Now many of the houses have been moved to other locations and painted pink or
green, so that even the old-timers can't tell that they were once the white houses with
Samson-signature red trim. Used to, the native Negroes lived in the quarters behind
the white school, southwest of Statenville. Now, they have taken over the Samson
Camp, just as they have taken over the white school. So far, praise the Lord, the
county churches have been spared.
From there on to Mayday and Dot's little country church and bible school are
only a few scattered houses, then straight open road through the pinewoods. The
longest ten miles since the Trail of Tears with the Odums in her car. Dot is a sixth-
grade teachers' aid and knows her history.
In the rearview mirror, she can see the identical twin boys with sandy crew-
cut hair and freckles trying to hang themselves with her seat belts.
"You boys settle down back there now," she says. "You know, Jesus was a
little boy just like y'all once upon a time, and he did everything his mama told him
to."
"You're not our mama," says one, and then the other, "And we ain't Jesus."
Amen to that!
Last evening they had scaled up a tree and walked the shake roof of the
old church house to its peak, where below the adult bible school class was going
on. To keep Brother Rauls from thinking she was slack, Dot had tiptoed out and
tried to sweet-talk them down. Not her nature to be sweet. What she'd like to do
is slap the shit out of them for spilling grape Kool-aid on the back seat of her
car. Took an hour this morning to scrub that purple splash from her seat, and
about two dollars worth of upholstery cleaner. Frankly, she doesn't know whether
she can afford to be a Christian.
"You boys, see if y'all can't finish your Kool-aid before you get in the
car to go home tonight, humm." She will lock the car from now on and pat
them down for anything that might rub off on her upholstery or carpet before
unlocking the door. She has no proof, but her nose tells her that they've never
been taught to properly wipe after using the toilet.
One is untwisting the pink and blue wrapper on a block of pink
bubblegum, then pops it into his mouth. And guess where the paper ends up?
So help me, Jesus.
The baby fidgets, whines, and Sister turns her on the lap of her blue-striped
gathered skirt with the deep hem; a six-inch section has been ripped loose and the
rest of the hem looks weighted with sand. She cradles the baby close and pokes the
nipple of a stained plastic bottle into her mouth. The baby's dirty bare soles push
against the edge of Dot's seat. Her doll-thin legs are spotted with oozy sores, like
leprosy.
Three more days of bible school. Can Dot last?
Sister's canted black eyes are fixed on Dot's face, as if she can tell what she is
thinking. Or as if she wants to ask her a hard question and is trying to get up the
nerve.
One of the twins is flipping an ashtray lid in the back--CLICK CLICK,
CLICK CLICK...
Dot drives faster--70 MPH--fifteen miles over the speed limit.
Something she has never ever done before, except for last autumn when
her husband Heyward got his left hand caught in the combine while gathering
corn for Dot's old-timey, fresh-ground meal and grits, and she'd had to rush him to
the hospital in Valdosta, twenty miles away. The smell of blood and the brownish
stains stayed in that car, and he lost all five fingers anyway. To shut her up about
the blood, he had bought her this new car.
She is about halfway between Statenville and the church when she feels the
steering wheel seizing up and hears the engine whining down and the right wheels of
the car coasting, thank you, Jesus, onto the right shoulder.
"Don't tell me, don't tell me," she says, trying to steady the car over the bumpy
grassed shoulders and hold to the steering wheel to keep from being knocked about.
The baby pops up, squalls, and Sister grabs her around the waist while holding
to the dash. The twins latch onto the top of the front seat and whoop as if they are on
a roller coaster ride.
Dot brakes, her pocketbook slides to the heels of her navy pumps. She steps
on it. Switches off the ignition.
"Lady," says one of the twins, "looks like you got car trouble."
"Tell me something I don't know," she says and opens the door to the swell of
heat. DING, DING, DING...
She has to heave left to get out, and her panty girdle and panty hose combined
pinch the folded flesh of her slashed stomach--hysterectomy several years ago left
her stomach looking like a spare set of butt cheeks. She stands on the highway in her
navy rayon skirt and cream shirt with navy piping on the sailor collar and gazes
north then south, hoping for another automobile, and yet terrified of who might stop.
The twins bail out the other side and lope down the ditch to a lazy stream of
black water and tromp right in.
"Hey," she yells, "you boys is gone get on a snake."
They either don't hear her, or don't want to hear her; one and the same.
Sister gets out too, with the baby straddled her cocked right hip. "Miss Dot,
you got a book tells all about this car in your glove box," she says across the car
hood.
Well, well, well. Dot twitches back to the car, gets her pocketbook out and
hooks it on one thick wrist, then goes around the hot ticking car hood, nylons
rasping together with enough friction to set her thighs on fire. Stepping high in the
grass that is deeper than it looks, she trots right past Sister to the open door and
pulls the latch on the glove compartment and reaches inside for the blue manual
with white script on front. Nothing missing only because nothing else was in there.
She sits on the passenger seat, crossing her legs with her feet out the door, and
begins reading and blowing at gnats. Her blunt kneecaps look white with her tan
stockings mashing them flat. Her broad face juts from her jointed neck; she has
pink clamped lips with rouge to match, and gray-brown hair teased into a bubble
with webby side bangs over the right eye.
The boys head south along the ditch, as if they are going home.
Well, let them.
Sister yells out, "Mickey, hey Mickey, y'all get back here." She wanders
toward the rear of the car. "I mean it." She shifts the baby to her other hip.
No sounds, save for the boys splashing in the water, the crickets
clicking in the spit-tipped smut grass and the katydids sawing in the pines each side
of the gravel road. The sun is wallowing like a cloud of fire in the treetops.
Like thunder, a green semi comes rolling out of the south. Level with the car,
the driver jake-brakes and trumpets the horn. Hot wind rocks the car parked with
both left wheels on the edge of the highway. The truck goes on.
"Miss Dot, it'd been good if you could've pulled off the road a little more,"
says Sister, appearing before her again.
"Huh," says Dot, reading, "don't make a dab of sense." She rises from the seat
and teeters around the door to the car hood, places the manual open on top and
starts to prop on her elbows. Hot.
"Sade could fix it, I bet," says Sister. "You want me to walk back after him?"
"I don't."
"Miss Dot," says Sister, slapping at a mosquito on the baby's arm. "I want to
ask you something."
"What, child?" Dot is gnawing her pink lips, reading--trying to read--about the
Bonneville's computerized fuel system.
"I been thinking about you saying how you always hang out your clothes—
you know, towels with towels and then wash cloths and then..."
"Humm." Dot is still blowing at gnats and reading.
Sister jiggles the baby higher on her hip. "When I grow up I want to be just
like you."
"Humm. That's sweet. So what's the question?"
"Since Sade and Marnie are busting up, and you don't have no children of
your own, I was wondering if you'd take the twins to raise."
Dot's head shoots up, her gray eyes bulge. "Take the twins?
“Well, I...I doubt Mr. Heyward would let me. And besides, you know how
busy I am, and the way I figure it, if God had wanted me to have children, I'd of had
children of my own." And then to the boys about a quarter of a mile south of the car,
"You heathen, y'all get on back here!"
Sister lopes off down the ditch with the baby and shouts at her brothers, "Y'all
get on back here like she says." They keep trucking till they get to a branch, climb
up the ditch and stand on the culvert pitching gravel at passing cars and trucks.
###
A sporty red Mercedes spirits through the wavery heat north of Miss Dot’s car
where the sun slants across a corn field.
Sister steps to the edge of the road and holds out one hand for it to stop. The
baby on her hip is hugging the empty bottle and crying.
The car slows, passes. Two men, one black and tall with a shaved head and a
frayed white cap, and the other brown and short with hair so black and curly it
looked scribbled in ink.
Dot on the far side of the car says, "Lord don't let them stop!" and smashes a
yellow-fly on her fleshy arm.
About twenty-five yards south of the Bonneville, where the twins
are standing ready with hands full of gravel, the Mercedes brakes, backs, brakes
again, even with the white car. The tall black man, who is driving, glides his
window down. "You ladies having car problems?" His voice is so rich and deep that
his full lips seem to form the words two beats before they rise.
"Yessir," says Sister at the same time Dot says, "No."
To cover for Sister's error, Dot says, "We just stopped for a little break," in
that bubbly happy drawl.
The short brown man, on the other side, starts fiddling with the radio. The tall
black man stares at the radio with downcast black eyes and the longest, curliest
lashes Sister has ever seen. The brown man turns off the radio. He has a gold earring
in his right ear.
"Car quit on us," says Sister. The baby is crying, crying, too tired to go on, too
miserable to quit. Her sheer skin is welted with mosquito and yellow-fly bites.
"Those your children, lady?" The black man is smiling with thick white teeth,
nodding ahead at the boys--squatting, watching, waiting for the red car.
Dot looks away, fans with the manual. "I'm just driving them to bible school's
all." Nerved-up laughter. In profile, her small nose tips up, and the fading light
makes her fair skin look purple. Her lipstick is gnawed off, her tan makeup and pink
rouge have melted and run down to the cream sailor collar.
"Well, ma'am," says the man, in that pointedly polite voice, "if I were you I'd
get them off that highway before somebody runs over them."
Sister yells, "Mickey, y'all come on back here."
The black man shifts the slooped red car to reverse, then pulls over on the
shoulder, bumper to bumper with the Bonneville.
"Help me, Jesus," Dot says and slides the handle of her navy triangular
pocketbook up to her right shoulder and clamps it tight with her arm. She fans,
gazing off at the woods as if looking for an escape route.
The driver gets out, taller than he had looked inside the low red car, and strolls
to the front of the Bonneville. "Lady, you want to pull the hood latch for me?" he
says to Dot.
She toddles around the rear of the car and cuts her gray frog eyes at Sister in
passing. "N-I-G-G-E-R-S," she whispers.
The other man gets out of the red car and leans lazily against the door. Both
are wearing white T-shirts and blue jeans.
Dot opens the door of the Bonneville--DING DING DING--and reaches under
the dash and lifts up on the hood latch, then stands again fanning with her manual.
Dot has told Heyward about the little Mexican-migrant heathens she now has
to teach and how she is hoarse from shouting to make them understand her, and he
said, Well at least you're giving the niggers a rest, and she told him for the millionth
time how saying that N-word at school, if she dared, could cost her her job.
The twins gawp back toward the cars, muddy from their chins to their bare
toes.
"Don't even think about crawling into my car like that," says Dot and walks
around the rear of the car again and slams the right rear door.
Sister follows, carrying the crying baby and the box of Kleenex.
Mickey pulls one, squinting up at Dot with his speckled eyes, too-big teeth and
freckles, then another and another, till both boys are standing in a tissue heap like
muddy snow. Still their scrawny arms and legs are mud-streaked and their matching
brown shorts and striped shirts are crusty with dried mud.
"Now, don't y'all go off and get in that mud again, you hear?" says Sister.
"You ain't our Mama," says Mickey. "So don't go bossing boss us around."
"I'm telling Marnie if y'all get in that mud again."
"Tattletale," says Paul.
"Marnie ain't studying us," says Mickey. "Probably done took off and ain't
never coming back."
"Shut up," Sister says and slaps his right cheek. He slaps her back, on her right
cheek--an eye for an eye and so forth. Straight from the bible. Or had Miss Dot said
to turn the other cheek? The baby cries, clings to Sister.
Mickey says, "I thought we was going to bible school; let's go if we're going,"
and stalks off toward the front of the car where the tall man is tinkering under the
Bonneville's hood.
Sister follows. "All y'all go for is the refreshments," she says, and Paul says he
is thirsty, and if Sister doesn't get him something to drink he is going to drink pure
ole poison branch-water.
The short man leaning on the red car, reaches through the open window and
hauls out a bottle of water and a box of wheat crackers and hands the water to Paul
and the crackers to Mickey.
Sister takes a cracker for the baby and walks around the rear of the car and
stares south as if to see Marnie leaving. Then stares at the two men, while the baby
sniffles, shudders, nibbles on the cracker in her moist hand.
Dot is leaning against the trunk of the car, clutching her pocketbook to her
chest with both hands. "Don't gaze," she whispers. "Just get ready to run. I'm pretty
sure that short one was on `Unsolved Mysteries' the other night. Wanted for rape."
"Ma'am," says the tall man, "you want to get in and try it?"
She wheels in her navy pumps, steps to the car with measured heel clicks on
the gravel, opens the door--DING, DING, DING--gets in and turns the key in the
ignition. A mute snicking sound, then nothing but dinging.
She gets out, slams the door, fans. Pocketbook handle on her shoulder again.
"Ma 'am, I'm sorry," says the man working on the Bonneville. "I thought you
might have problems with the alternator, but these computerized systems are a bit
much for me."
"I imagine," Dot says and laughs and hangs to the door. If she can't figure it
out, she's quite sure a black person can't. She feels the car spring and looks through
the window and the two boys are perched on her back seat. She sticks her right hand
inside, feeling for her bible on the front seat, finds it, lifts and swings it back and
aside, aiming for the nearest Odums' head.
"Okay, you old biddie," says the boy and slaps the bible from her hand. She is
still standing, smiling at the man as she twists the boy's hot ear.
He walks toward her, long legs making short strides, wiping his huge tawny
hands on a white handkerchief. "My friend and I are on our way from Atlanta to an
art show in Orlando," he says. "But we'll be glad to give you and the children a ride
to the closest place with a phone."
Sister starts toward the red car.
"NO, NO, NO," says Dot and laughs. "We couldn't do that. Not and have
these muddy boys here mess up your fine car, humm."
"No problem," he says and smiles.
"NO, NO, NO." Dot's flushed fat face looks as if it might pop.
"Y'all go on; somebody else'll be along any minute, humm." She peers up and
down the highway as if to dismiss them.
Sister starts back toward the Bonneville with the baby on her hip. In her tiny
tight fist are the slobbery remains of the cracker.
The short man gets into the red car and sits watching through the windshield.
"Well," says the tall man," I hate to leave you folks stranded out here like
this."
"I'll go," says Sister. "I'll go to Statenville and get Mr. King at the service
station to come with his tow truck."
The boys slide out the other side of the Bonneville and make a beeline for the
red Mercedes.
Dot takes a white tissue from her pocketbook, snaps it shut, and blots orangy
makeup and sweat from her raddled face and neck. God forgive her for what she is
thinking, but if Marnie has left, Dot can very well imagine herself ending up with
the Odums children to keep Brother Rauls from thinking she is heartless. "Okay,
okay, you younguns go ahead," she says. "No need in all of us getting eat up by
these mosquitoes." Fey laugh.
Sister goes to the red car and crawls in the back with the baby and the boys,
and Dot feels in her soul that she will never see any of them again. Not only are
these fellows black--and everybody knows what that means--but they are from
Atlanta, which means they are the worst kind of blacks.
Dot sits inside the sweltering car with her pocketbook and the black bible with
her name inscribed in gold letters and watches the red Mercedes pull out, brattling
gravel, and tool south. She watches in the rearview mirror till the red car is just a dot
and then not even that. She watches the sun guttering out behind the wall of pines
and tells herself it is just as well--children like that never amount to anything
anyway.
But what will she say when everybody--Brother Rauls especially--asks why
she let the children get into the car with strangers. N-I-G--G-E-R strangers, at that.
Suddenly it comes to her, as if straight from the Holy Ghost, what she will
say: the car broke down, and then these two black men stopped and acted like they
were going to help, and didn't you yourself, Brother Rauls, say that you never know
how Jesus might manifest himself? Then the men grabbed Sister and forced her into
their car, and the boys--well, those sweet boys tried to save her, so the men took
them too. Of course the baby was attached to Sister's hip. You know what a fool
Sister is about that baby.
What about you, Sister Dot?--God or Brother Rauls speaking? Where were
you, Sister Dot?
Well, they pushed me down into the ditch and I couldn't get up to save the
children before they drove off.
Suffer the little children to come unto me--Jesus speaking. Of course, in Jesus'
days there were no Odums to suffer.
With the sun gone, the heat seems to bear down and with it the back and forth
shrilling of katydids. A blue semi passes. Goes on.
For courage and comfort, she prays, she sings--"Give me that old time
religion..." Tapping on the steering wheel. She stops tapping, she stops singing.
Clear as if he were sitting in the humming quiet car with her, she hears Brother
Rauls repeat what he said to the congregation at spring revival: Not a thing wrong
with old-time religion, folks, as long as that religion is based on love as Christ
loves and not on fear of change. She was not quite sure what he meant, but she
sensed that knowing meant changing and she was not yet ready for that. She's still
not ready.
###
Dusk, and Dot kicks off her shoes and gets out of the car and wades through
the high grass along the shoulder, then drops to her knees, sucks in for courage, and
lies flat, then rolls down the ditch to the edge of the black stream. If her story is
going to stick, she has to look like she's been shoved down the ditch, much as it
disgusts her to get all muddy. Of course, she won't be able to sit in her car now,
while waiting for somebody to come along. Surely, under the circumstances,
whoever rescues her won't mind that she is muddy.
Is she muddy enough?
She has to wiggle her body to start rolling again, all the way into the water-
mushy bottom and prickly stubble, a rooty smell, but cool and wet, soothing to her
insect-bitten arms, legs and neck. She is so thirsty, she scoops water in her hands
and drinks.
Expecting a long wait, she rises. Arms out from her body and thatch around
her mouth, she starts out and up the ditch and hears another truck rumbling and
rattling out of the south. She will flag the driver down and tell him to call the state
patrol or the sheriff and go after the kidnappers in the red car.
Gazing down the dusky gravel road, she sees the sluggish twin headlights
of the slow truck. So slow in fact that it is almost dark before it gets to the car, and
the beams appear stronger and flare open the sealed road where Dot is standing in
the middle, waving both arms and looking like a Halloween spook--poufy brown
hair smashed flat, muddy cream shirt, navy skirt and stockings, no shoes. Closer,
and she recognizes the old yellow tow truck with Mr. King driving and the four
Odums children packed in the cab, waving back.