The service finally ended, and I walked home alone. I didn’t know why since everything was over and there were no more hymns to plan. The boys were asleep, but Mrs. Sanders waited until I slipped on my pajamas. I crawled into bed but couldn’t sleep. A storm was brewing. I’d noticed on the way home the way the leaves rustled, the smell in the air. I was worried about my mother. She didn’t have an umbrella or a raincoat. I lifted my window and eased out the partial screen. I scooted my half bed flush against the wall, then got back in, hanging my arm over the sill. If I went to sleep and if the rain started before Mother got home, the first raindrop would wake me. Then I could grab an umbrella and run the four blocks to the church. The mantel clock in the living room chimed ten.
I waited for Mother, rain, sleep, but none came. The mantel clock chimed ten-thirty and I went to the kitchen to fix a bottle of Ovaltine. The whiskey bottle had disappeared.
I went back to bed. No mother, no sleep. I grew angry and worried. When the clock struck eleven, the last chime struck my arm like a raindrop and I jumped out of bed. I ran the four blocks to the church in the rising wind, barefoot and in my loose-fitting summer pajamas. The short sleeves and legs, held in place by elastic, puffed out like balloons. I wasn’t scared one bit. I knew every house, every tree, every possible bump and crack in the sidewalk. Besides, the wind that was pushing the arrow of our weathervane was pushing me as well, as surely as Mother’s music had pushed others to the altar. In no time, I was at the front doors.
They were locked. Which surprised me because our church was known for never locking them. The doors were to stay open because someone, moved by the spirit, might want to come in at any hour and pray. There was no crime in our town, no mad dogs, no scandalous women or bad men — just crazy Lena who no longer shocked anyone with her mutterings and eye rolls.
I was locked out, but I knew a way in.
The side entrance was never locked; there hadn’t been a lock on that door for years. Even during the remodeling, the carpenters had been instructed to leave it alone because it led into a coatroom, which had been used for storage ever since the church was built. I crawled through the bottom shelf of a book cart, knocking half a dozen of the old hymnbooks on the floor, and rose, dusting myself off. I opened the door, which led into the vestibule and tiptoed into the sanctuary. There, seated at the front on two folding chairs, were my mother and Reverend Fisher. They were facing each other, and he had both of her hands in one of his. The arch of candles on the communion table was flaring, and the shadows from her head bobbed up and down on the clean drywall like a flirtatious Sunbeam girl.
I stood at the back, watching. Reverend Fisher also had a silver bottle, which he drew from his pocket. He handed it to my mother; she put it to her lips, drank, and then handed it to him. I crawled on my hands and knees to the fifth pew from the front, lay flat, and tried to hear.
They were talking low, and the shadows made by the candles licked the ceiling and walls. After the sermons I’d heard, it was easy to imagine this a shadowy hell. I was watching more than listening, trying to count the flames, when the timbre of their conversation changed.
I sat up, alert.
I could have, should have, stopped things sooner. I should have popped up and screamed against indecent suggestions, imbibing of spirits, all of the sins the Reverend Fisher had ranted about during the past two weeks. I just lay there, quiet as a mouse, caught in the same spell as my mother.
