The Summer We Got Free (23 page)

George sat down on the cushioned deacon’s pew, in the
same spot where he had sat when he was the youngest deacon in the church, and
stared up at the empty pulpit, over which hung the statue of Christ on the
cross. He stared at the place where Pastor Goode always stood. He was not one
of those preachers who moved around during the sermon, pacing the pulpit like a
lion in a den. He stood behind a podium, like a lecturer, a teacher, commanding
all eyes to one spot. George had loved Pastor Goode’s sermons, he had been
riveted by the rising and falling cadence of his voice and comforted by the way
the word of God filled the chapel like a warm breeze, and even envious of the
Pastor because God had chosen him to spread his gospel.
Even
when the sermon mentioned things that made George cringe inside, full of shame
and secret pain, especially then, he had felt safe in the blanket of his voice
and the shelter of this holy place.

He wanted to feel that again and he closed his eyes
and asked the Lord to reach out and touch him, to help him feel connected. But
no feeling of safety came. He opened his eyes. Staring up at the empty pulpit,
he felt empty, too. Lost. Abandoned.

George got angry and was filled with the need to
strike out, to smash something, to break every window and crush every
tambourine. But he knew he could not. So he sat there and waited for Chuck.

When Chuck came
and sat down beside him on the deacon’s pew, he asked. “George, are you
alright?”

He wasn’t. But
he didn’t know how to begin to say all the ways he wasn’t. And anyway it seemed
pointless to try. Because he did not believe there was anything he could say,
or anything that could be said to him, that would make him
alright
.
He believed he would always be this way, always tortured, always afraid, always
lonely and ashamed. And he believed, too, that he deserved to be.

“I haven’t
prayed once since I was made to leave this church,” he said.

“Why?” Chuck
asked.

He didn’t
answer.

“Come on. Let’s
get out of here,” Chuck said, taking George’s hand.

“No,” he said.
“Let’s stay.”

“Stay?”

He nodded.
“Whatever we gone do, let’s do right here.”

Chuck shook his
head. “No. I can’t.”

George folded
his arms, and sat back on the pew. “
It’s
here or nowhere.”

***

Sarah had made great progress turning her lie into the
truth, but she still needed the fire-eating man to ask her to come back again.
She returned to Penn’s Landing, this time later in the day, right after his
performance ended, thinking she would catch him packing up, but instead she
found him on a nearby bench, eating his lunch.

He smiled when he saw her approaching and said, “Sarah
the Brave! You missed the whole show!” He stood and gestured towards the seat beside
him. “Join me,” he said,
then
waited until she was
seated before he sat down again.

She had no idea what to say. She had spent the whole
day at work trying to come up with something, some topic of conversation that
might interest him, but she had no clue what a fire-eater might be interested
in besides eating fire. He was sitting there staring at her, though, smiling
and looking like he was waiting for her to say something.

She swallowed hard and said, “Hello.”

He seemed to like that. His smile turned into a grin.
“Hello, yourself.” He held out his sandwich to her. “You hungry? It’s not
anything but peanut butter, but you welcome to share it.”

“I’m allergic.”

“To peanut butter?”

She nodded. “To peanuts altogether.”

“Oh, that’s a shame,” he said. “A real shame. I love
peanut butter myself. What if we
was
to get married?
Would I have to give it up? I mean, I like my ladies dying for my kisses, but
not literally.”

She figured he was trying to be funny, but she did not
believe in laughing at people’s jokes just to make them feel good, so she
didn’t.

He laughed to himself a little, and sighed, and took a
bite of his sandwich. He looked out over the water and didn’t say anything
else.

She wanted to run away. She was embarrassing herself
and she knew it. Still, she was determined to turn her lie into the truth,
determined to fix what she had broken so that Helena would see her again.

“How long have you been doing this?” she asked him.

He looked at her, blankly. “What? Eating lunch? About
ten minutes.” He grinned.

He was corny. Silly. But suddenly she felt the corners
of her mouth pull the other way around and she smiled, too, surprising herself.

“I been eating fire for dimes and quarters for twelve
years,” he told her.

“Do you have a real job?” she asked.

He laughed. “A real job, huh?”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

He waved a forgiving hand. “Aw, it’s okay. I’m used to
it. I aint met a woman yet who thought juggling fire on the sidewalk was a real
job. Considering how much I like doing it, it probably aint. But, yeah, I got a
real job. Working security down in south Philly. What about you? Where you
work? Close by?”

“I’m a teller,” she said, “at the Bell Savings on
Chestnut.”

“You like it there?”

She nodded.

“You live in West Philly?”

“Yes,” she said. “How did you know that?”

“’Cause South Philly’s full of Italians, and North
Philly makes ‘
em
a lot rougher than you. West Philly
ladies are always the nicest. You grow up there?”

She nodded. “We
lived in southwest when I was real small, then we moved when I was six.”

“Oh, yeah? I live in southwest. Over on
Kingsessing
.” He raised his arm and pointed southwest. “I
grew up in Boston.
 
I guess you can
hear my accent. I’ve lived here a dozen years, though. You
ever
been
to Boston?”

She shook her head. “I never
really
been
anywhere.”

“Well, when we’re married, I’ll take you there,” he
said, and grinned again.

She looked at him, searched his face for
the disconnect
, the distracted glance out at the water, or
at some passersby, that would confirm for her that he was just going through
the motions, humoring her. She searched for it, but she could not see it. All
she saw was his crooked grin and a warm glint in his eyes.

“You a pretty girl,” he said.

She looked away from him, down at her hands.

“I guess men tell you that all the time, huh?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “But I don’t believe them, and
I sure don’t believe you.”

“You don’t believe me?” He sounded taken aback. “Why
not? You don’t think you pretty?”

“I do think I’m pretty,” she said. “I just don’t
believe you can see it.”

“Why not?” he asked, sounding half amused and half put
off. “I got eyes, don’t I?”

“Everybody got eyes. That don’t mean everybody sees.”

He shrugged. “Well, why would I say it, then, if I
didn’t see it?”

“Habit,” she said. “To be nice. Because you think
that’s what I want to hear.”

“Oh,” he said, scratching his beard. “So, you got me
all figured out, huh?”

She nodded.

He stared at
her, his brow squeezed into a tight frown. “Lord, girl. What in the world
happened to you to make you think like that?”

She didn’t answer.
She looked out at the water. After a moment, she felt him move closer to her on
the bench.

“Look here,” he
said, and when she didn’t turn her head, he put his hand on her cheek and
turned her face toward himself. “I don’t say a whole lot that I don’t mean.”

He was looking
into her eyes and, again, she searched for
the disconnect
,
for the lie in what he was saying.

He tilted his head and leaned in to kiss her.

She got up from the bench and walked quickly away. She
heard him behind her, scrambling to follow, stumbling over the case that held
his batons, the change inside of it jingling loudly.

“Wait a minute!”
he called, hurrying up to her and taking hold of her arm, carefully, gently.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was just trying to show you I meant what I said, and I
got carried away. Seen too many movies, I guess. Women in movies seem to like
being kissed by strange men a lot more than they do in real life. You ever
notice that?”

“I have to go,”
Sarah said. “Really. I can’t be late back to work.”

“Okay,” he said.
“Okay. But look here. Sunday is my last day out here. I’m not gone be eating
fire for change no more. I got a promotion at work. Assistant Security Manager.
It’s full time. And they don’t want me out here doing this. It don’t look good,
you know?” He looked sad, and Sarah felt a little sad for him. “Come back
again, will you?
To see my last show?
We can go get
something to eat together after.”

Come back again, will you?
It was what
she had gone there to hear him say.

He was looking
at her, waiting. She searched his eyes a last time, and though she saw no
distance in them, no hint that he did not mean every word he had said to her,
she still could not believe him.

“Will you?” he
asked her again, hopeful.

“Alright,” she said.

He beamed. “On Sundays, I usually finish up around
four.”

 
“I’ll be
here,” she said, and she turned and walked back to the bus stop.

When Ava got off the bus at her stop, Helena was there
at the corner, holding a paper sack. She waved at Ava, and said, “I went out
and got some food for dinner, and I saw your bus coming up the block, so I
stopped to wait for you.” She smiled and Ava felt happy. After the bus went
past, they crossed the street together and walked up Fifty-Ninth.

“I wonder,” Ava said, “what you must think of all this
craziness.”

“To be honest, I’m
not sure I know what to think,” Helena said. Then, after a moment, “Do you
really believe your mother saw a ghost the other night? And that you saw one?”

Ava nodded.
“Yes.”

Helena looked
skeptical.

“Let me ask you
something,”
Ava
said.

“Why am I still
here?”

She nodded. “Yes.
With everything that’s happened. Why are you?”

“Because I came
to Philadelphia for a reason,” she said, “and I haven’t done what I came to do
yet.”

“You came to see
Paul.”

“Not just to see
him,” Helena told her. “To tell him something. Something I haven’t managed to
tell him yet.”

“What?” Ava
asked.

Helena looked
surprised. For a moment, she seemed to be thinking about it, considering
whether she should tell Ava. Then she said, “I think I’d better tell Paul
first.”

They were coming around the corner onto Radnor just
then, and they saw a small crowd of people standing on the church steps, Doris
Liddy
, Hattie Mitchell, and Clarence Nelson among them, all
of them surrounding Pastor Goode, who, from the looks of it, was leading a
prayer. Ava couldn’t hear what he was saying until they got closer. “Lord, we
need your help. We need your guidance. Show us how to do what must be done in
your name. We believe in you, Lord, and we ask that you show us the way to cast
out these evil people, as we have been trying to do for all these years.”

“Oh, wonderful,”
Ava said.

When Goode saw
her, his eyes narrowed, and he pointed at her with a shaking finger. “Lord,
strike down this evil woman before me. This non-believer. This blasphemer!”

Helena stopped
at the corner, and before Ava could stop her, and tell her there was no use, she
yelled back at Pastor Goode, “Did you ever stop to think that if God wanted
them gone, he’d have made it happen by now? It’s been seventeen years, for
Christ’s sake. What’s he waiting for?”

Goode’s eyes,
and the eyes of everyone standing on the steps, fixed on Helena. A hush fell
over them, a strange sudden-silence, as if a television set had been turned
off.

Ava put her hand on Helena’s arm and they continued
down the street.

“You don’t know,”
they heard Goode calling out behind them, “who you keeping company with.
And if you do, then you just as bad as they are.
And the
Lord
will
punish you.”

1958

W
hen
Maddy’s
mother died expectedly in the spring of 1958, Maddy
asked Regina and George if they would allow Ava to attend the funeral. “Y’all
know my mother loved that child,” she told them. “She said whenever Ava was
around her she felt good. You know, her father was a sharecropper, and lots of
times, when she was a child, she would go with him out into the fields, and
whenever they could take a little break, they would lay on the ground side by
side and look up at the sky, and her father would tell her that his own father,
my mother’s grandfather, had been a slave, but that his daughter, my mother,
was free, and there wasn’t nothing so humbling to her as that. Because it made
her understand that her own freedom wasn’t nothing but chance, and having the
good fortune to be born when she was. Anyway, she used to say that Ava reminded
her of those times, laying there watching the sky with her father, and feeling
free. I know she just a child, but I think it would mean something to my mother
if she was there when she’s laid to rest.”

Ava had never
attended a funeral. She was twelve and no one she knew had ever died, at least
no one she knew well enough to mourn. Once, the summer before, she had slipped
into the church during the funeral of Mother Somebody-or-Other, just to get a
glimpse of the body in the casket, because she felt she was an artist and that
an artist needed to see things like that. Hidden in the pastor’s nook, she had
been able to view the corpse from just fifteen feet away. It had looked bloated
and strange, with skin the color of nothing she could recall ever having seen
in the living world.
Oatmeal, maybe.
Oatmeal with too much milk.
Gray and just
wrong.
But seeing the body had inspired her, and she had drawn dead
people for a week after, much to her parents’ extreme chagrin.

“You don’t have
to go,” Regina told her now. “If you don’t want to. I don’t much like the idea
of you going to a funeral. Death shouldn’t be invited into a child’s life.”

Ava had liked Miss
Henrietta, who had once given her a book of art, full of glossy photographs of
famous paintings and sculptures. Unlike the books she checked out from the
school library, this one was new, and its crisp pages smelled of ink and color.

She did attend
the funeral, and sat at the back of the church, in the last pew, with her
drawing pad. All during the viewing, and then the service, she sketched the
scene in the church, the flowers, which were all shades of yellow; the mourners
with their heads bowed, gloved hands reaching out to touch the shiny wood, or
the pearl-colored satin lining of the casket; the stiff-shoulders of Miss
Henrietta’s relatives, the dragging of their feet on the plush red carpet of
the sanctuary, which, Ava thought, showed their discomfort with death, their
resistance to the ceremony of it; Sister Hattie at