The church was a converted dwelling house, a white frame structure of two stories. Some of the windows had fixed wooden louvers and some had shutters that folded back. The roof was galvanized sheet iron. It was just the kind of old house that needed the Midgestone treatment.
A wooden sign beside the door said:
Unity Tabernacle
“Whosoever will”
The house was dark and I rapped on the door for a long time before I roused anyone. I heard them coming down the stairs very slowly. The door opened and two old ladies looked out at me. One was in a flannel bathrobe and the other one was wearing a red sweater. The one in the sweater had wisps of pink hair on her scalp. It was a bright chemical pink like that of a dyed Easter chick. I could see at once that the other one was Dr. Symes's mother. She had the same raccoon eyes. She used an aluminum walking stick but she didn't appear to be much more decrepit than the doctor himself.
“Mrs. Symes?”
“Yes?”
“I have your son out here in the car.”
“What's that you say?”
“Dr. Symes. He's out here in the car.”
“Reo. My word.”
“He's sick.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Ray Midge. He rode down from Mexico with me.”
“Are you with the postal authorities?”
“No, ma'am.”
“We weren't even thinking about Reo, were we, Melba?”
The other lady said, “
I
sure wasn't. I was thinking about a snack.”
Mrs. Symes turned back to me. “Has he got some old floozie with him?”
“No, ma'am, he's by himself.”
“You say he's in the car?”
“Yes.”
“Why is he staying in the car? Why doesn't he get out of the car?”
“He's sick.”
“Go see if it's really him, Melba.”
Melba came out to the car. I opened a door so the dome light would come on. She studied the rumpled figure in the back seat. “It's Reo all right,” she said. “He's asleep. He's lost weight. His clothes are smoking. He's wearing those same old white pants he had on last time. I didn't know pants lasted that long.”
Mrs. Symes said, “He may have several pair, all identical. Some men do that with socks.”
“I think these are the same pants.”
“What about his flashlight?”
“I don't see it.”
“It's in there somewhere,” I said.
Neither of the ladies was able to help me unload the doctor. I couldn't carry him but I managed to drag him inside, where I laid him out on a church pew. He was limp and his flesh was cool and his clothes were indeed steaming. Then I went back and got his grip. Mrs. Symes was not much concerned about his condition. She seemed to think he was drunk.
“That poison has to be metabolized,” she said. “You can't hurry it along.”
I said, “He's not drunk, ma'am, he's sick. I believe he needs a doctor.”
Melba said, “We don't use doctors.”
“You're lucky to have good health.”
“Our health is not particularly good. We just don't go to doctors.”
The downstairs part was a chapel and they lived upstairs. Mrs. Symes asked if I would like some supper. I don't like to eat or sleep or go to the bathroom in other people's homes but this was an emergency. I needed food and I kept hanging about in hopes of just such an invitation. I followed them up the stairs.
The electric lights flickered on and off and then failed altogether. I sat at the kitchen table in the soft yellow glow of a kerosene lamp. Mrs. Symes gave me some cold chicken and some warmed-over rice and gravy and biscuits. There was a bowl of stewed tomatoes too. What a meal! I was so hungry I was trembling and I made a pig of myself. Melba joined me and fell to on a second supper. She ate heartily for a crone, sighing and cooing between bites and jiggling one leg up and down, making the floor shake. She ate fast and her eyes bulged from inner pressures and delight. This remarkable lady had psychic gifts and she had not slept for three years, or so they told me. She sat up in a chair every night in the dark drinking coffee.
Mrs. Symes asked me a lot of personal questions. She and Melba, unlike the doctor, found my mission romantic, and they pressed for details. I was dizzy and tired and not at all in the mood for a truth session but I didn't see how I could leave abruptly after eating their food. Melba asked to see a picture of Norma. I didn't have one. Some detective! Some husband! They could tell me nothing about Mr. Dupree's farm. They had never heard the name. Their church work was concerned entirely with Negro children, they said, and I gathered that they had little to do with the other white people in the country. They did know some Mennonite farmers, from whom they bought milk, and they seemed to have an uneasy professional acquaintance with an Episcopal missionary whom they called “Father Jackie.” Mrs. Symes was suspicious of the doctor's unexpected arrival.
She said, “Do you know the purpose of his visit?”
“He said he was worried about your health.”
“What else did he say?”
“He said you had a church here.”
“What else?”
“That's about all.”
“How would you characterize his mood? Generally speaking.”
“I would say it varied according to circumstances. He was not in one mood the whole time.”
“I mean his feeling about coming here. Was it one of apprehension? Resignation?”
“I can't say it was either one of those. I don't really know him well enough to answer your question, Mrs. Symes. To say whether his mood departed from normal in any way.”
“Is that his automobile out there?”
“No, ma'am. He has a bus but it broke down on him in Mexico.”
“A bus?”
“It's an old school bus. It's fixed up so you can sleep in it and cook in it.”
“Did you hear that, Melba? Reo has been living in a school bus.”
“A school bus?”
“That's what Mr. Midge here says.”
“I didn't know you could do that.”
“I didn't either. I wonder how he gets his mail.”
“He doesn't live in the bus all the time,” I said. “It's the kind of thing you take trips in, like a trailer.”
“I'll bet Reo talked your head off.”
“Well, he didn't talk so much tonight. He's been feeling bad.”
“He didn't talk at all until he was six years old. He was a strange child. Otho thought he was simple. What did he tell you about Jean's Island?”
“He said he had some plans for developing it.”
“Did he say he owned it?”
“No, he didn't say that. He said you owned it.”
“That island was dedicated as a bird sanctuary years ago.”
“I see.”
“How can you
develop
a place, as you put it, if it's already been dedicated?”
“Well, I don't know. I guess you can't.”
“If I turned it over to Reo, the bulldozers would be there tomorrow morning. It would be the biggest mess you ever saw. Some people just love to cut trees and the poor whites are the worst about it. I don't know where Reo gets that streak. Man is the most destructive creature there is, Mr. Midge.”
Melba said, “Except for goats. Look at Greece.”
“I wouldn't mind letting Reo have the place if he would live on it and farm it and behave himself, but he won't do that. I know him too well. The first thing you know, Marvel Clark or some other floozie would get her hands on it. I know Marvel too well and she's got enough of my stuff as it is. But she will never get her hands on that land as long as I have anything to say about it.”
I said, “Do you think I should go downstairs and check on him?”
“He'll be all right. That poison has to be worked out through the breath. What did he tell you about his arthritis clinic in Ferriday?”
“I don't believe he mentioned that.”
“Did he tell you about his Gifts for Grads?”
“Gifts for Dads?”
“Gifts for
Grads
. It was a mail-order scheme. He was advertising expensive watches at bargain prices in all kinds of sleazy magazines. People would send him money but he wouldn't send them any watches. A postal inspector came all the way down here from Washington, D.C., looking for him. He said Reo was going all over the country making fraudulent representations and calling himself Ralph Moore and Newton Wilcox.”
“Dr. Symes didn't say anything about Gifts for Grads.”
“Is that woman Sybil still living with him?”
“I just don't know about that. He was by himself when I met him in Mexico.”
“Good riddance then. He brought an old hussy named Sybil with him the last time. She had great big bushy eyebrows like a man. She and Reo were trying to open up a restaurant somewhere in California and they wanted me to put up the money for it. As if I had any money. Reo tells everybody I have money.”
Melba said, “No, it was a singing school. Reo wanted to open a singing school.”
“The singing school was an entirely different thing, Melba. This was a restaurant they were talking about. Little Bit of Austria. Sybil was going to sing some kind of foreign songs to the customers while they were eating. She said she was a night-club singer, and a dancer too. She planned to dance all around people's tables while they were trying to eat. I thought these night clubs had beautiful young girls to do that kind of thing but Sybil was almost as old as Reo.”
“Older,” said Melba. “Don't you remember her arms?”
“They left in the middle of the night. I remember that. Just picked up and left without a word.”
“Sybil didn't know one end of a piano keyboard from the other.”
“She wore white shiny boots and backless dresses.”
“But she didn't wear a girdle.”
“She wore hardly anything when she was sunning herself back there in the yard.”
“Her shameful parts were covered.”
“That goes without saying, Melba. It wasn't necessary for you to say that and make us all think about it.”
“Dr. Symes didn't say anything about Sybil to me.”
“No, I don't suppose he did. Did he tell you about the hearing-aid frauds of 1949?”
“No, ma'am.”
“No, I don't suppose he did. The shame and scandal killed Otho just as sure as we're sitting here. Reo lost his medical license and he's been a sharper and a tramp ever since. My own son, who took an oath to do no harm.”
I didn't know who Otho was but it was hard to believe that any person in Louisiana had ever keeled over from fraud shock. I tried to think about that dramatic scene and then Melba put her face in mine and started talking to me. Both ladies were talking to me at the same time.
Melba said that her first husband had abandoned her in Ferriday and that her second husband, a handsome barber who didn't believe in life insurance, had dropped dead in New Orleans at the age of forty-four. After that, she made her own way, giving piano lessons and selling foundation garments. She now received a tiny green Social Security check and that was her entire income. Five dollars of it went each month to Gamma chapter of some music teachers' sorority. She didn't remember much about the first husband but she thought often of the opinionated barber husband, idle in his shop in the quiet 1940 New Orleans sunlight, watching the door for customers and searching through the
Times-Picayune
over and over again for unread morsels.
Mrs. Symes raised her voice. “I wish you would hush for a minute, Melba. I've heard all that stuff a thousand times. I'm trying to ask a question. It looks like I could ask one question in my own home.”
Melba didn't stop talking but I turned my head a bit toward Mrs. Symes.
She said, “What I'm trying to find out is this. When you are at your home in Arkansas, Mr. Midge, do you get much mail?”
“I don't follow.”
“Cards, letters. First-class matter.”
“Not much, no, ma'am.”
“Same here. I'm not counting all those absurd letters from Reo. Are you a witnessing Christian?”
“I attend church when I can.”
“Do you pray every night for all the little babies in Little Rock?”
“No, ma'am, I don't.”
“What kind of Christian do you call yourself?”
“I attend church when I can.”
“Cards on the table, Mr. Midge.”
“Well, I think I have a religious nature. I sometimes find it hard to determine God's will.”
“Inconvenient, you mean.”
“That too, yes.”
“What does it take to keep you from attending church?”
“I go when I can.”
“A light rain?”
“I go when I can.”
“This âreligious nature' business reminds me of Reo, your man of science. He'll try to tell you that God is out there in the trees and grass somewhere. Some kind of
force.
That's pretty thin stuff if you ask me. And Father Jackie is not much better. He says God is a perfect sphere. A ball, if you will.”
“There are many different opinions on the subject.”
“Did you suppose I didn't know that?”
“No, ma'am.”
“What about Heaven and Hell. Do you believe those places exist?”
“That's a hard one.”
“Not for me. How about you, Melba?”
“I would call it an easy one.”
“Well, I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised either way. I try not to think about it. It's just so odd to think that people are walking around in Heaven and Hell.”