Chapter Three
Your Sins Will Find You Out
There was no terminal. No sign of other buses coming or going. Only a wide spot in the road. On the gravel shoulder. Directly in front of the sign proclaiming Edenfield College.
“Where do I go from here?” I said.
“Beg pardon?”
“I mean, is there a station? Somewhere I can wait?”
“This is it.”
“What’s it?”
“The station. This is it!”
The bus driver was a man of few words, but professional to the end and unloaded my bags with lightning speed.
“What if it was raining?” I said.
“What’s that?”
“I was just wondering what I’d do if it was raining.”
“Do?”
“Yeah, you know, where would I go?”
He slid his hat to the back of his head and gave a quick suck to his front teeth. “Listen son.” He paused. “Do you think every fork in the road has a station?” He stared at me with raised eyebrows then added, “You know what I mean?” I wasn’t sure that I did but nodded anyway. I was half expecting a smile to creep into the corners of his mouth, but it didn’t.
After wrestling and rearranging a dozen or so bags in the cargo hold, he gave a shirtsleeve swipe at the beads of perspiration dotting his upper lip. “Somebody supposed to meet you?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, feeling a little unsure of my answer.
“Well, you needn’t worry. They’ll be here soon enough.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Well, the bus stopping here ain’t no little thing, that’s all. Half the people in town already know you’re here.” His eyes directed me toward the faces staring from Pauline’s Diner across the road. He smiled for the first time.
“It’s a small town, kid. Get used to it.” He paused long enough to wipe the sweatband in his cap, then added, “They’re all the same for the most part. Got all the same stuff, just rearranged a little different. Got everything you’ll need, though. You may have to look a little harder to find it, but it’s here. Trust me.” He returned his cap to his head, gave me a quick wink, then climbed back aboard.
He paused just before closing the big passenger doors and said, “If it rains--”
“WHAT?” I interrupted, holding my hand to my ear.
“I SAID IF IT RAINS, I GOT A FEELING YOU’LL KNOW WHAT TO DO!”
Before I could respond, he touched his fingers to the brim of his cap in a mock salute and inched the bus’s hulking frame back onto the two-lane. In less than a minute it had melded into Edenfield’s western horizon.
Edenfield College loomed to my right. Its huge lawn, thick and shaded with maples, spread a lush green welcoming. It left me with visions of young Reverend Mayfields everywhere, coming and going like monks, Bibles cradled in the crooks of their arms.
Despite the newness of everything around me, the image of my mother in her tattered nightgown kept coming to mind. Her running with such abandonment across the lawn was a vulnerability I had never seen in her. It was a display of love as frightening as it was powerful. She had, in her fashion, spawned my arrival in Edenfield, and had even arranged where I would stay. The only thing she hadn’t manipulated is where I would work. She didn’t have to. The mill was the only job in town. It was where everybody worked. There just weren’t any other alternatives.
It was only a matter of minutes before a red and white Volkswagen bus eased its way onto the shoulder of the road and stopped a few feet in front of my bags. A bald head, fortyish and wearing thick, black-rimmed glasses, leaned out the driver’s window.
“WELDON?”
“You’ll want to make a mental note. Everything closes at five thirty. Everyday. Except Sundays, of course. Nothing is open on Sundays.” Harmon Little’s lips were full and the color of raw liver. He spoke as he drove. “And over there is the church. Sunday School at nine-forty-five, Worship Service at eleven.”
Harmon was altogether matter of fact. In a span of seven seconds, he had extended his full greeting. It was a welcome of succinctness and formality, and without a smile.
“Sunday night service is at seven thirty,” he went on, “and Vespers is every Wednesday night from seven to whenever we let go of the Holy Spirit.”
Harmon was the financial administrator at the college and sole overseer of its multiple accounts and funds. Anything to do with money—past, present, and future—was Harmon’s to delineate. His take on himself was that he was an extraordinary investment strategist and tactician, but to students with outstanding tuition balances, he thought that he was seen more along the lines of an accountant with a black hat.
“Did Reverend Mayfield mention anything to you about tuition?” he asked, trying for nonchalance.
“No,” I said. “Just that I’d be contributing by working.”
“Yes, of course,” he said, his lips taking on a contemplative pucker. “And that’s the library. And over there is the Administration Building.” Harmon droned on about the sights of Edenfield while my mind drifted back to Reverend Mayfield and how pleased he was with himself that he had been able to secure a job for me at Edenfield’s Sawmill. It was his idea of financial assistance. Dad had been ecstatic. “Hot damn! Going to learn a trade on the side!” Dad was always at his best when preparing for the prospects of hard times.
“As you probably know,” Harmon labored on, “we offer no summer program at Edenfield, and the fall semester doesn’t begin for another nine weeks.” He glanced at me and added, “And that, as I see it, puts you in a most enviable position.” There was a long dead silence before he recognized the bewilderment behind my Sunday-school smile. “For RECREATIONAL READING,” he thundered, as if I had overlooked the most obvious of truths.
“How about girls?” I asked before I could catch myself. The slouch came out of his shoulders like he’d backed into a hot stove.
“Pardon?” he asked as if daring me to repeat myself.
“And guys … classmates.” I added quickly.
A look of disillusionment deadened his eyes. “Yes, we have both,” he said, a little nerved at my attempt to direct the conversation, “But then I suppose there is reason to tell you about Kellen Manly.” His voice was all at once weighted. “Kellen is one of our students who elected to stay in Edenfield for the summer. Feeds logs on the big saw at the mill. As it turns out, the two of you will be roommates in a manner of speaking.” He then stopped. Just brought the car to a dead stop in the middle of the road, then hunched his neck and back, making himself smaller as if what he was about to share could only be appreciated if we were hunkered down. Then there was a moment of silence, his face a study of lamentation. It wasn’t his intention for me to misinterpret its pain. “I’m sure you’ll appreciate me telling you this, Weldon,” pausing just long enough to focus over the top of his bifocals. “Kellen is challenged spiritually.” He pursed his lips and gave me a very slow but forceful nod to reaffirm his disclosure.
I sat expressionless, holding a look of bewilderment at bay. Harmon’s face grew ever ashen and solemn in the ensuing silence. I tried striking what I thought was my most noncommittal pose, hoping somehow to send a message that I was not the least bit interested in Kellen Manly’s spirituality and could we please move on to something less ethereal like coeds, like those in the image of Carol and Cheryl and Bonitasue.
In the next instant, Harmon un-hunched his back and drove off as if we hadn’t stopped in the first place. “Kellen is from Texas,” he continued, “and from what we can gather, his home life was rather disruptive. There’s question if it was even Christian.” On we went. In low gear. In the ninety-degree heat.
Whatever problem Harmon may have been having with Kellen Manly’s lack of spirituality was soon laid to rest when a crimson Cadillac convertible cruised past us in the opposite direction. It was an older model, and its paint a little faded, but with a vision of Jean Harlow sitting behind the wheel. It was all I could do to keep from turning around in my seat. But from the corner of my eye, I noticed the special attention Harmon gave to adjusting his rear-view mirror. “You know, Weldon,” he said, his gaze still fixed in the mirror, “we must always and forever be aware of the good we can do for others.”
“Well, here we are,” he announced. Harmon’s house was only about half a mile from campus.
It was an oversized bungalow covered with gray asbestos siding, and the place where Mother and Reverend Mayfield had arranged for me to stay.
“Right this way,” Harmon said, walking me around to the side where several old cellar doors lay splintered in a heap. They had been replaced with ones made of aluminum. It was right away evident that I would be living in the basement.
“We’ve tried to make it as comfortable as possible,” he said, but then lost me. The dank odor and the unpainted plywood partitions were anything but welcoming. Still, he smiled and pointed out the fresh layer of gray marine paint covering the concrete floor, and how his wife had taken it on herself to cut out and affix the semitransparent contact paper over the basement windows. It had taken her two full rolls and was a specially ordered stained-glass pattern.
“As you can see, it has been pretty well thought out,” he said, “Bedrooms on one side, kitchen on the other.”
I wondered for the first time if this was what Reverend Mayfield had in mind when he proclaimed Edenfield as a place where I could witness God’s work firsthand.
“…and behind this plastic curtain is the bathroom.”
“…and I’ll tell you the same thing I tell my children, ‘You don’t have to flush after each and every time.’”
“…and I’ve taken the liberty of posting the refrigerator door with what I think are the fifty most important statutes for your living here.”
I leaned in close. The first one swelled with huge capital letters. “BE SURE YOUR SINS WILL FIND YOU OUT,” it said. The look on Harmon’s face told me he knew it as biblical certainty.
“…and I want you to know that you’re welcome to join us each night at six for family devotions.”
“…and you shouldn’t ever have to worry about locking your door. This is Edenfield, after all.”
“ …and I hope you’re not squeamish about mice.”
Harmon left me without as much as a Goodbye or a See-you-later, without even a Good luck or I’ll be upstairs if you have any questions. Nothing. He simply walked out the door and sprung himself up the cellar steps. For some time, he stood surveying the sky, his pasty face squinting up at the sun. After several minutes he cupped his hands around his mouth and droned down to me, “By any chance, do you play the cello?”
With a degree of reluctance, I went through the initial laying-in of supplies. It was a fate-sealing gesture on my part, something that said, “Yes, I’m staying,” convinced that it would somehow be a growth experience. I was right. What I failed to consider, however, was that growth was not without sacrifice, and most never without pain. Harmon Little being a case in point, his basement being another. But with optimism, I would, for at least the next nine weeks, submit to its potentials. What I didn’t know was that I would come to know the sullen and joyless Harmony, Harmon’s fourteen-year-old daughter, and the unfamiliar sounds she scraped and scratched from the strings of a viola. And for hours on end, I would come to know Harmon’s violin and its errant sharps and flats, the false stops and starts, the uneven staccatos, and, at times, even the crash of his music stand. And I would come to know their duets, their sour and misgiven treatments of Mendelssohn and Stravinsky, and I would come to realize that there wasn’t enough time in Harmony’s life for her to reach her expectations. For her, wanting was not enough. Harmon, on the other hand, had arrived; had, over time, reached his potential, though it was the purest form of mediocrity. There had been too much time spent buried in ledger books, too much time debiting and crediting. But the two of them together were an inseparable force, one that would not be denied regardless of their suffering audiences.
On the other hand, I would come to know the countless strains of Protestant hymns played in a multitude of arrangements by Mrs. Little on her dark mahogany piano, the one that sat upright against the inside wall of her living room and directly above my bed. There were resounding hymns inspired by an elevated spirit; hymns that reverberated through the subflooring, so undulating they disturbed the fine network of rafter dust and caused it to drift soot-like and settle on my pillow and in my eyes. But there were simpler hymns as well, played as clear as crystal and as sharp and celestial as a first frost. From Just as I Am to Onward Christian Soldiers, she brought the right elements of time and tone to each note and each one thereafter. She was the perfect living-room concertmaster and the church’s principal pianist.
She was plain, Mrs. Little was. Trying to picture her as anything else would have taken a forgiving imagination. Her dresses were as drab as they were shapeless, and she never, but never, wore makeup of any kind. Her hair was straight and wispy, of a color somewhere between dust and wheat, and always held back off her face with clear plastic barrettes. And although her eyes were pale and her lips were turned down at the corners, there was a softness to her skin despite its somewhat bloodless color. On the surface, she was the source of Harmony’s every trait.
I would also come to know many things about myself that summer, what stimulated and what tormented, what drove me and what gave me cause to stay. And I would come to know some of the similarities that ran like smooth dark rivers through us all. And, too, I would come to realize how significant, even momentous, it was for those around me to lay claim to Jesus. But just as important, I would come to know the likes of Kellen Manly.