A young man with a guitar stood in front of the congregation tuning his instrument. Janie Collins sat beside him sorting through a red plastic box containing transparencies. A portable screen was set up behind a black music stand. When Janie saw Kay, her face lit up, and she almost ran to the back of the room.
“Mrs. Wilson! Thanks for coming. Do you want to sit with my mom and brothers?”
“Sure.”
After introducing Kay to her mother, Janie returned to her seat by the box of transparencies. Kay sat by the smaller of the two boys. He had a dimple in the same spot as his sister.
A few people were talking, but everyone grew quiet when Janie turned on the overhead projector and displayed the words to a song on the white screen. Without any introduction or comment, the guitarist began to vigorously strum his instrument. Everyone stood and started clapping. Janie's brother began clapping and looked questioningly at Kay until she joined in. After finishing his musical introduction, the leader started to sing and even though the gym was a large room, the group's voices made a valiant effort to fill the void.
One song led to another in a seamless flow. It reminded Kay of a camp for teenagers she attended one summer after moving to California. She closed her eyes and could almost smell the woods that surrounded the open-air pavilion where they held their twilight meetings. Most of the speakers at the camp shared from personal experience, and Kay had listened. She'd liked it better than the dry sermons she heard when her family occasionally went to church.
The words to the last song faded, and Kay felt more refreshed than after her morning shower. A chubby, older man with a thin rim of white hair surrounding his bald head came forward from his seat in the front row. He was wearing a short-sleeve shirt, khaki pants, and brown cowboy boots.
“Good morning,” he said. “Welcome to Catawba Community Church. I'm Ben Whitmire. If this is your first time, please raise your hand so that we can give you some information about the church.”
Kay was the only newcomer, and the guitar player handed her a brochure. On the back was a picture of Reverend Whitmire and a brief bio. He was a retired minister who had served several churches in North Carolina for more than forty years. He'd grown up in west Texas and attended Howard Payne University in Brownwood. That explained the presence of the boots.
Reverend Whitmire opened a big, black Bible that rested on the music stand and began speaking. The minister had an open-hearted style of speaking and self-deprecating sense of humor that surfaced in the sto- ries he told as illustrations to his sermon. By the end of the message, Kay felt as though she was beginning to know him as a person, not just watching him perform as a preacher.
After the benediction, Janie introduced Kay to Linda Whitmire, a slender, white-haired lady with deep wrinkles around the kindest eyes Kay had ever seen. They were eyes you could talk to. Eyes you could trust. But eyes that saw beneath the surface.
“Come meet Ben,” Mrs. Whitmire said.
Kay followed her to the front.
“Ben, this is Kay Wilson. She's a teacher at the high school.”
The minister turned and greeted her. “Thanks for coming.”
“I enjoyed the service, especially the singing,” Kay said. Then suddenly realizing that she'd elevated the worship over the minister's preaching, she added, “I mean, the sermon was good, too.”
Ben laughed. “Don't apologize. I like the worship better myself.”
“Could you join us for lunch?” Linda asked. “We're going to the Eagle.”
Kay glanced over her shoulder. She'd thought about inviting Janie and her family out to eat, but they had already left the building.
“Okay, that sounds great.”
“Meet us there,” Ben said. “We'll be finished here in a few minutes.”
The biggest meal of the week at the Eagle was the Sunday buffet dinner. The congregations of the two large downtown churches converged on the restaurant immediately after the eleven o'clock church service. The Methodists arrived first. Their minister said the benediction precisely at 11:59 A.M., and everyone's wristwatches chirped the top of the hour as they stood to leave the service and move down the street to the restaurant. The Methodists had time to make it once through the buffet line before the Baptists rolled in at 12:30 P.M. The Baptist service usually ran past noon either because the preacher waxed eloquent on point three of his sermon or gave an extra altar call. But there was no anxiety about a lack of food among the Baptist rank and file. Bea Dempsey planned for the flow of traffic as skillfully as a military mess sergeant.
As soon as the Baptists started trickling through the door, Bea pushed back a flimsy brown sliding partition and opened up the overflow room. It was a good system and kept the peace between the two main branches of Christendom in town. After a couple of trips down the buffet line, the two groups met in sweet harmony around the dessert table.
Kay and the Whitmires arrived after the main wave of Methodists but before the Baptists crested through the door.
Bea bustled by to take care of the cash register. “Hello, Kay,” she called out. “Hope you all enjoy the buffet today.”
“Do you eat here often?” Linda asked.
“Only one time. I'm surprised she remembered my name.”
“Bea's great with names,” Ben said. “It's good for business. Makes you feel like family.”
“I don't have the gift,” Kay said. “It took me weeks to learn my students' names.”
The buffet line was set up at the back of the main dining room so that the food could be brought out fresh and hot from the kitchen. Kay and the Whitmires zigzagged through the tables and each picked up a heavy, white china plate. Sunday dinner featured every vegetable grown in the local area by the small farmers who sold fresh produce to Bea from June to November. Corn on the cob, green beans, sliced tomatoes, fried okra, mashed potatoes, beets, boiled cabbage, turnip greens, lima beans, and peas with onions sat in stainless-steel serving pans. Everyone ate at least one piece of fried chicken, but for variety there was spiral sliced ham glazed with brown sugar. Rolls and corn bread rested on two large pans.
“This looks especially good today,” Ben said three times as they made their way down the serving line.
By the end, his plate was piled high, and he carefully crowned it with a thin slice of ham. A waitress put three glasses of tea on the table without asking what they wanted to drink and hurried back to the kitchen. The Baptists were beginning to come through the door and that meant more of everything.
Ben prayed a blessing on the food and took a bite of fried chicken. “Preacher food,” he said. “In forty years of ministry I've eaten enough fried chicken to feed a small city.”
“Enjoy yourself, but remember you're not a one-man city,” Linda said. Turning to Kay, she asked, “What brought you to Catawba?”
Kay told her story in between bites. Linda's interest was genuine, and Kay was at ease. When Linda asked about her husband, Kay's eyes watered before she could stop them. She needed a surrogate mother and white-haired Linda Whitmire filled the bill. It took three borrowed tissues, but she told the story of her relationship with Jake. Neither woman ate very much. Ben slowed down and listened.
Kay sniffled and glanced around the room. “This is embarrassing.”
“That's okay,” Linda reached forward and squeezed Kay's hand.
“Unless something happens, the divorce will be final in a few weeks,” Kay continued. “For the past year I've been in limbo, bouncing back and forth between anger and sadness.”
“What do you want?” Linda asked.
“It depends on when you ask me. I meant what I said on my wedding day, and right now I would like to see a miracle. Tomorrow, I might feel differently. My world has been turned upside down, and I haven't found a place where I feel safe and secure.”
Ben leaned back in his chair. “The need for safety and security reminds me of a verse I memorized when I was a little boy in Vacation Bible School. âThe eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.'”
Kay dabbed her eye with a tissue. “That's a beautiful image, but I don't know where God lives on earth, and I can't say that his arms are underneath me.”
“I understand. Are you up for a true story to illustrate my point?”
Ben asked.
Kay nodded. “Yes.”
Ben pushed away his empty plate. “Try to eat while I talk. Many years ago, Linda and I served a church in Hendersonville, North Carolina. One spring weekend we took a group of young people camping in the Smoky Mountains near the Virginia border. We arrived Friday evening and spent the night huddled in our tents because it rained and rained and rained. In the morning the clouds began to break up, and after breakfast, we took the kids for a walk through the woods above a waterfall. Linda and I had a new beagle puppy, and I was carrying the little fellow to keep him out of mischief. We came to a spot where a large log spanned the stream and decided to cross to the other side.
“Because it had rained all night, the water was rushing along at a rapid clip, and I decided to make sure the log was stable before letting anyone else try to walk across. Holding the puppy, I stepped out on the log. It was broad, but after taking a few steps, I realized it was too slippery to be safe. When I turned around toward the bank, my right foot slipped off the log. Crazy as it sounds, my first thought was about the puppy, and I threw him toward Linda who was standing at the edge of the bank. He landed safely at her feet about the time I hit the water.
“The water was freezing cold, and although it wasn't over my head, the power of the current began pushing me downstream. I tried to stand up, but the rocks on the bottom were slick, and I couldn't get my footing. I kept falling down. It was like a log flume, and I was a log rushing toward the sawmill.”
Kay's sniffles had stopped.
“I remembered from previous trips to the area that there was a bend in the stream ahead of me, and I decided to position myself in the current so that the force of the water would push me toward the bank as the stream swept around to the right. Linda and the kids were running along the path yelling and asking me what they should do. It was all I could do to keep my head above water. I kept trying to stand up, but the water knocked me down and spun me around several times. When the bend came into view, I was able to turn myself in the water so that the force of the stream pushed me into the bank. I reached out and grabbed some limbs that extended over the water, but everything broke off in my hand. The current swept me around the bend, and I twisted sideways. My face hit a rock that was jutting out of the water, and I broke my nose.”
Ben rubbed his nose. “I still have a dip caused by the breakâit helps keep my glasses from falling onto the floor. But anyway, at the time I was getting more and more desperate. I tried to grab onto anything I could. I tore off several fingernails as I clawed at rocks.” He held up his right hand. “Several of them have never grown back straight since that day.”
Kay looked at the slightly misshapen fingernails on the minister's right hand and winced.
Linda spoke. “I was running down the path trying to help, but after Ben went around the bend in the stream, he was out of sight. The kids were screaming. I was screaming. It was chaos.”
Ben continued, “I was now moving so fast in the water that nothing was slowing me down. All of a sudden, I became very calm, and everything began to happen in slow motion. I began to think in a deliberate, logical manner. I remembered that at the top of the waterfall there was a rock shelf that extended three or four feet out from the cliff. Beyond this shelf was a clear drop of sixty or seventy feet to some more rocks and a deep pool at the bottom of the falls. I realized what I needed to do.”
Kay had taken a few bites while Ben talked, but she now held her fork without moving it.
“You stopped eating,” Ben said.
Kay glanced at the fork and put it down beside her plate. “I'm not too hungry. Don't leave me at the top of the waterfall.”
Ben smiled and shifted in his chair. “Okay. I was able to turn my body so that my legs were straight out in front of me with my feet facing downstream. I came around a bend and saw that the stream disappeared from view about a hundred feet ahead of me. It was the top of the falls. I reached the edge of the cliff and pushed off with my hands, hoping to clear the shelf at the top and the rocks below. As I flew out into the air, the verse I memorized as a little boy in west Texas flashed through my mind as if written with flames of fire. âThe eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.' Then I blacked out.
“When I came to, I was floating in the water at the base of the falls. The sound of the water crashing down behind my head was deafening. I moved my legs and arms, and everything seemed to be working. I'd cleared the rocks and landed in the deep pool. My face was covered with blood from the broken nose and my hands were bleeding and banged up. But I was alive.”
“That is incredible,” Kay said.
Ben nodded. “At the base of the falls there was a young couple sitting on a blanket having a picnic. The young man was more interested in the girl than the food, and he was giving her a big kiss when I called out for help. They looked around in surprise and came running to the edge of the pool. I paddled over to them, and they helped me out of the water. I sat on their blanket, shivering with cold and shock, until Linda and the kids came running down the trail. In a few minutes I was able to walk up to the campground. I was taking a hot shower in a cabin when the local rescue squad arrived to search for the body.”
“The body?”
“Yes. Someone had called the sheriff 's department and reported the accident. They assumed I was dead. One of the rescue workers told me seven people had gone over the falls: five died, one suffered serious, paralyzing injuries, and meâkept safe by the everlasting arms.”