The Sweet By and By Read online

  Mother’s grief was a well that dried up so slowly that it eventually became useless to her, meaning that it had run its course and no longer had a purpose. With one of the first frosts of winter on the ground, she got up, bathed and dressed, went to the kitchen, and started cooking collards, the most pungent of greens. The whole house smelled horrible for days. The end of her sadness came because she willed it. She had taken a part of her heart and boxed it up for storage, sealed against damage or further wear, like a cherished bridal gown. The contents were still there, still took up space, but she would never open it again.

  I miss my sister. I miss her in the summer. There aren’t any more tobacco fields, at least none I can see. Farmers can’t make a living. The same fields I worked and played in are shiny neighborhoods with twenty or more houses on what amounts to no more than a postage stamp of land. I can’t catch up with all the change. I don’t want to catch up. When August comes, hot as it ever was, I would give anything to be hiding from Callie, sitting in the dirt, digging my bare feet in deep enough to find a place that’s cool and damp, eating candy as fast as I can so I won’t have any left when she finds me, hearing her rustling through rows of tall tobacco, mad as a wet hen, looking for me. I can feel my heart speeding up as she gets closer. I don’t move, don’t breathe, I keep chewing. I can’t wait to be found.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LORRAINE

  I get to church early when I can. April knows I like to have some time to myself before the service starts, so she don’t make me late when she’s home from school. If you’da told me I’d have a daughter in college one day, I would have said you’d lost your mind. Where was I gon find enough money for anybody to go to college and me working as a LPN? But the good Lord provides, because she didn’t need my money or anybody else’s. She got herself a scholarship and is sittin up there on her own in Raleigh at Shaw University. Says she’s gon be a doctor. I want to tell her, “Being a doctor is a long ways off, child,” but I don’t. I don’t want her to feel like whatever it’s good to want is always gon be slightly out of reach. It don’t matter that I’m tryin to protect her from being disappointed. Too many people think that way, and where in the world has it gotten them? So I want to say right here in the house of God, why not? Why not a doctor? Why not anything? If God ain’t a God of “why nots” then I say why bother? And I don’t think that’s taking His name in vain, I think it’s tellin the truth about what people need. We’re all people last time I looked.

  The choir’s in front now, behind the pulpit. I look over at April and she’s staring straight ahead. She loves a good choir. She always says the music is her favorite part of church. Mine too a lot of times, but I do like a good preacher when you can find one. They’re harder to come by than they used to be, seems like. I didn’t notice ’til now that April and I have both got on yellow. Hers is brighter than mine. I must look like a big old sunflower beside the first daffodil of spring.

  Our God is a migh-ty God!

  The choir sings the word “mighty” so short and loud it feels like something punching you in the stomach. That’s what “mighty” ought to sound like, powerful. Like it takes your breath away, which is exactly what I expect would happen if we could get that close to God, which we can’t. Thank God. I am in my usual place; all the regulars go to their own places. We’re in a pew on the right-hand side of the sanctuary, about halfway back. I crane my neck to both sides to look around. Everybody in here looks real good, as good as they can, and it makes me feel good to look at em. All these women in dresses and hats, some with a pair of gloves on and a nice pocketbook in their laps so ladylike. Old men sitting dignified, and little two-or three-year-old boys in coats and ties. I feel so proud I sit up straight and adjust my hat to make sure it’s on right. I’ve always believed in dressing to go to church, April can tell you. Workin at the rest home, I’ve been to too many churches and too many funerals with people wearing anything they want. My Mama taught me that when we dress up for church we set our hearts on things above, things greater than we can see. She said, “We’re singing ‘Glory Be to the Father’ and at least we can try to look like we mean it.” I love the word “glory” because as soon as you say it, you know it’s bigger than you are. It sounds exactly like what it’s s’posed to mean. Glory. You can’t say it in a whisper even if you wanted to, you’ve got to shout it out. I think it makes people hold their shoulders different when they hear that word. It don’t describe anything of this earth.

  Reverend Knowles stands up to pray. He’s seventy if he’s a day, but he looks good to have lived hard as he has. “Good morning, saints, we are blessed this morning to gather together in the house of God. We are blessed to walk in freedom and the love of Jesus Christ. We are blessed to come before the Lord in praise and thanksgiving.”

  The first prayer is long because he has to go over the list of everybody who’s sick. I swear that list never gets shorter, only longer, and when you notice that is when you best start kissin your youth good-bye, because it’s on its way out whether you know it or not. I take a Kleenex out of my pocketbook and a piece of hard candy that I will open as soon as there’s some noise to cover it up, not during the prayer. I’m usually praying too, but this morning I can’t set my mind on it. April is praying when I peep over at her, at least she looks like she is, but I probably look like I am too unless somebody sees me messin with this piece of candy. I’ve been looking for my friend Althea but she’s not in here. She might be feelin bad; she gets sour stomach a lot of times. I don’t know exactly what her sour stomach is, but I think it has a whole lot to do with her sour husband. Lazy and mean is what they say. I don’t know myself, the only time I see him is when I go pick up Althea if her car don’t start. All I know is he moves real slow for somebody strong as he is, and I ain’t got no use for a slow man.

  People have often told me I ought to sing in the choir, but I say “If I go up there, who’s gon sing out here with the rest of this sorry flock?” I’m joking, but I mean it too. There’s nothing more depressing than standing in a congregation where a bunch of tone-deaf people are halfway moving their mouths to some sad organ music. Margaret Clayton’s church is like that, she grew up Baptist like her daddy but changed over to Episcopal after she got married. She invited me to go with her one Sunday when she could still get somebody to pick her up and take her. I asked her about it after the service, and I didn’t say it mean either, more like “Y’all don’t like to sing too much do you?” but she fired back at me that anybody knows that’s the way Episcopalians are.

  “We are part of the Anglican choral tradition, Lorraine. The choir does the real singing. Haven’t you ever heard of that?” she said, and she turned on her heels on those stick legs of hers and clicked down the marble aisle. I don’t think she knows what she’s talkin about.

  Miss Margaret don’t care a thing about going to church service at the rest home. She said there’s too much Bible yelling for her taste, which is not the same thing as Bible reading. She said to me, “Lorraine, I don’t know why anybody thinks that something is more important by virtue of the fact that it’s screamed at the top of their lungs. You would think that God doesn’t have anything to say unless it’s hollered. Well I say no thank you, I’ll take my church right here in my room.” I don’t agree with a lot of what Miss Margaret says, and I don’t make it no secret either, but I don’t like that yelling part of church any more than she does. Now Reverend Knowles don’t do that, he can get fired up from time to time, but he don’t make a habit of bein mad up in the pulpit. Maybe he’s too old, but I like to think it’s that he knows better. You can scare somebody into something one time, but if you want them to stay scared, you got to keep findin things for them to be scared of. Eternal damnation works for a lot of folks. Looks to me like both good and bad things happen whether you’re scared or not. If you don’t think so, go work in a nursing home.

  Reverend Knowles asks if there are any prayer requests this morning, and I raise my hand without even
stopping to think. “Mrs. Bernice Stokes,” I say. “She’s having a real hard time. Her mind’s not good.” April looks at me like she’s shocked that I said somebody’s name out loud to pray for.

  “All right then. Thank you, Lorraine. Mrs. Bernice Stokes.” He goes on gathering up names until he probably has ten or so.

  “Who is that?” April whispers, sounding impatient.

  “I’ll tell you later. A lady at the nursing home.” I put my hand on her arm and pat it exactly like I used to when she was a little girl talking in church. I took her to services from the time she was born, and people said, “How come that baby don’t cry? It’s like she’s a grown up lady, minding her manners.” April used to lie there and smile and gurgle, and once she could talk, she always whispered. That child was born knowing how to act around people.

  The name of the sermon is printed in the bulletin: “Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit.” I don’t need to hear a sermon to know about that. I live with it every day I go to work. When you look at old people as much as I do, you can’t tell sometimes what’s gettin ready to die, the body or what’s inside the body. It’s a struggle to the end, which one’s gon go first. I myself believe God wants our spirits to live free, even when it looks like there ain’t that much left of them. That’s why I don’t say nothin when Bernice talks to a stuffed animal toy. Her daughter-in-law tries to snap her out of it sometimes, and none too nice, but I think, that’s where her spirit is, and who knows what’s in there with it, best leave her alone. Let her go, she’ll come back if and when she’s good and ready. I can’t say that to Ada Everett even though she’s my boss because she’d say mind my business and she’d be right, but when I’m by myself, I do what I think is the best thing for right then. That’s how I find my peace, it might not be the perfect way, but I do what I can do.

  Friday Miss Margaret wouldn’t eat any lunch. When I told her she ought to eat something or she’d get sick, she perked up and said, “Lorraine, you and I have both been to church all our lives. Now tell the truth, what do you believe happens when we leave this earth? And I don’t mean the Sunday school-approved version, so don’t give me any made-up preacher talk.”

  “You don’t have to worry cause I ain’t a preacher.”

  “Well good, because I don’t want the right answer. I want the honest one.”

  “I don’t know nothin about heaven that you don’t know.”

  “Tell me and I’ll decide the truth of that statement.”

  “All right then. I don’t know if it’s a reward, like something you get when you retire. I think it might be going back to the way things always were, the natural state of things.”

  “That doesn’t say much about saving souls, Lorraine.”

  “God knows who needs to be saved and from what. I don’t.”

  “You haven’t answered the question.”

  “When we die we’re in one place and we go to another place and that’s it. That’s all.”

  “That certainly doesn’t sound like what I hear preachers say on TV.”

  “I don’t get my religion from TV.”

  “Well thank God. You are one of the few people left in this world who actually thinks for herself, Lorraine, and I simply could not stand to have that ideal shattered.”

  “My friend Althea believes that when we pass on, the rules are all different all of a sudden. Everything we thought we knew is either a whole lot more or a whole lot less complicated. Up is down, and down is up. No rules that we can recognize.”

  “I like the sound of that. I’m tired of the rules. We live with ones we make and too many that are made for us, and I’m ready to do without. I think the trick is knowing when you’re where you’re supposed to be, and letting go of everything else long enough to be there.” Then she waved her hand in front of her face like she was erasing a chalkboard full of scribble. “Give me one of those Reese’s Cups, will you, honey?”

  I reached into the glass cookie jar that’s her goody stash. “What makes you want to talk about God and dying, in the morning of all times? You’ve heard as many preachers as I have.”

  “Because Lorraine,” she said, her mouth full of chocolate, “you’ve got faith.” She stuck out her hand with part of the candy still in it. “I don’t want the other one, it’s too much. That’s why I like the single Reese’s Cups better, but seems like you can’t get them anytime except at Halloween.”

  April is unwrapping my last piece of hard candy for me, I must have been rattling paper and didn’t know it. She taps my arm and reaches out to me with candy in her open palm. It’s about time the sermon’s finished; my left leg is asleep so I pull myself forward with my hand on the back of the pew in front of us and uncross it. I can’t tell you what Reverend Knowles talked about this morning, I’m thinkin too much. Mama used to tell me, “Lorraine, you think too much when you’re in church, that’s not the place to think, just listen and learn.” I disagreed with her then and I still do. I am proud to death to have April here. She looks so content and happy. I think she really is happy. I look at her hair, her hands folded in her lap, my heart feels like it’s gon bust open.

  “Sing, choir.” Reverend Knowles’s arms are raised, his robe draping down makes him look like an angel wearing purple.

  I don’t feel no ways tired…

  Everybody in the front is swaying to the music, some people in the congregation have got their hands up.

  I’ve come too far from where I started from…

  “Sing children, praise God.” Reverend Knowles keeps on talking over the choir.

  Nobody told me that the road would be easy…

  I don’t believe He brought me this far…

  I can’t believe He brought me this far…

  I won’t believe He brought me this far to leave me.

  “Oh no I won’t, no. I don’t feel no ways tired.” Reverend Knowles’s voice is like medicine. “We’ve all been through more than we ever thought we would. And some of us have suffered more than anybody ought to have to. I have seen my share of suffering in the faces of many I love, some of them sitting here this morning.”

  I spot Althea way in the back, I don’t have any idea when she came in. She points to her watch and makes a frown, mouthing “I’m sorry” real exaggerated so I can see her. That’s all right, she made it. Everybody in here this morning got up and made it.

  “Will you keep on walking, children?” Reverend Knowles has left the pulpit and is standing down front. “When your hope is gone, will you hold your head up and walk? When it’s time to move, my sisters and brothers, as long as we’ve got legs, then praise God let us learn to use them. One more step, one more day. Sing now, choir.”

  I don’t believe He brought me this far to leave me.

  I do love the sound of this song. Althea’s arms are up in the air over her head, swaying back and forth with everybody else, her gaze is lifted and eyes are closed. I reach over and put my hand on top of April’s and when she looks up, I stare straight out in front of me, smiling like I’m encouraging the choir. I am, I reckon, in my way.

  CHAPTER SIX

  MARGARET

  I have been sitting in the dining room cutting hearts out of pink paper and gluing them to squares of red construction paper for two hours. I’ve only done five. It takes me a long time to use scissors, my fingers don’t go into the handles the way they’re supposed to. I know how scissors are supposed to feel. Something’s wrong with these. It’s good for me to move my hands; if I don’t, arthritis is going to take over completely and then I won’t even be able to write my name. Bernice is making small hearts out of paper lace and gluing them onto flowerpots with tulips in them. I don’t know where they got tulips this time of year. They don’t look that healthy but any kind of fresh f lower is nice. I have never been someone who liked silk f lowers. Part of the whole reason for f lowers is not just the way they look, it’s bringing the outside inside, the smell, even the occasional bug that comes in with them. I’ve never seen Bernice so foc
used on anything, she is taking her time, cutting the shapes perfectly, putting just the right amount of glue on, and lining the hearts up evenly all around the outside of the pots. It makes me think that she must have kept a beautiful house when she was able. Her work is so neat it makes mine look like a five-year-old’s. Ada Everett asked me to help with the Valentine’s decorations and I said no, I was sure I didn’t have anything to offer, but she told me Bernice was helping, and I thought if Bernice is doing something then I have no excuse.

  Candy hearts on the table say things like “Be Mine” and “Hot Stuff.” Neither of these sayings speaks to me. I’m past both of them, for different reasons. There are also ones that say “Cutie-Pie” and “Kiss Me,” both of which are truly wishful thinking in this place. I would love to find one that said, “Massage My Feet” or “Hot Soup.” Those are some meaningful messages. I tried to eat one of them, but they’re too hard. They don’t taste good enough to suck on, and if you try to chew one you’ll break a tooth or a denture or make your gums bleed. Ada Everett ought to know better than to give us this kind of candy when we’d be better off with a coconut chew.

  Bernice has changed projects and is making a heart that has tiny cutouts in the shapes of diamonds, clubs, hearts, and spades. It’s like a Las Vegas valentine.

  “Why are you doing those shapes, honey?” I ask.