I got down to the church early that next Sunday morning, the week after Molly Jameson was killed, and I pulled up just as Chambliss and Deacon Ponder unloaded the last of the crates out of the back of Ponder’s pickup truck. I got out of my car and stood there watching them. Chambliss must’ve had some kind of premonition about my business because when he saw me he stopped what he was doing and looked at me, and then he handed his crate over to Ponder.
“Would you carry this inside for me, Phil?” he asked. “I’m going to stay out here and visit with Sister Adelaide for a bit.” He slammed the gate on the truck bed, and Ponder nodded his head and smiled at me and walked on inside the church. Chambliss dusted off his hands and walked over to where I was standing by my car. “You’re here awfully early,” he said. His eyes narrowed to keep out the sun, and then he lifted his good hand to shield them from the light. His face was ruddy and weathered like most men’s faces up here who’ve spent too much time working in the sun or smoking too many cigarettes, or maybe both.
“I wanted to get here early because I need to talk to you about some things,” I said.
“What things?”
“About what all has happened,” I said. My voice was shaking, but I tried my best to hide it because I didn’t want him knowing I was scared of crossing him. “I want to talk to you about what happened to Molly last Sunday.”
“What do you need to talk about?” he asked me. “You were there. You saw it. She stepped out in faith, and the Lord took her home.”
“But it ain’t right,” I said. “It ain’t right what y’all did to her.”
“What do you mean, ‘It ain’t right’?”
“It ain’t right what you done with her after church,” I said. “Taking her home and laying her out there in the yard and just leaving her, hoping somebody would find her before the animals started eating at her. People got a right to know about these things.”
“What people?” he said. “Everybody who really loved her, everybody she loved, they all know what happened.” He pointed at the church. “They were all right inside this church when it happened. Nobody else deserves to know anything more than that. Besides us, nobody in this world needs to know anything at all. It ain’t going to do her a lick of good, and trouble is all it’s going to bring us.” He dropped his hand from his eyes and squinted against the sun.
“Folks talk,” I said. “Especially in a town like Marshall, especially about a church like this. Putting up newspaper so they can’t see inside ain’t going to keep them from talking.”
“Well,” he said, “I trust the folks of my congregation to know who needs talking to and who don’t. But if you got any ideas about taking our business outside this church, then I think you’d better tell me now. I need to know that I can trust members of my congregation with the Lord’s work.”
“That’s fine,” I said, “because I can’t be a part of this no more.”
“What do you plan on doing?” he asked.
“I can’t be a part of this no more,” I said again. “I’m leaving the church, and I want to take the children with me.”
He smiled and just stood there looking at me like he was going to laugh in my face.
“Is that right,” he said. “You’re just going to take the children out of my church and teach them in your own way, teach them your own beliefs. What do you think gives you the right to do that?”
“Before the hospital got built I delivered just about every child that ever stepped foot inside this church,” I said. “And I delivered just about all their mamas and daddies, too. I ain’t claiming to be in charge of their spirits, but I have a job to see them safely through this world after bringing them into it. And I can tell you this ain’t no place for children to be,” I said. “It just ain’t safe.”
“Sister Adelaide,” he said, “I’ve been pastoring this church long enough for you to know that we protect our children, and I can tell you that I wouldn’t never let a youngster take up no snake or drink no poison or nothing like that. But you’ve been here long enough to know that what we do here is the Truth and our children need to see it. Our children need to be raised up in it.”
“And you should know that children can’t keep no secrets about what they see either,” I said.
He folded his arms across his chest and kind of rocked back on the heels of his boots. He turned his head and looked out over the river toward downtown Marshall like he was thinking about what I’d said. Then he turned his head and looked back at me.
“Can you, Sister Adelaide? Can you keep a secret?”
“I can,” I said. “But I’d rather not know any secrets that need keeping, and I won’t know them if I stay out of your church. A church ain’t no place to hide the truth, and a church that does ain’t no place for me. Ain’t no place for children neither.”
CHAMBLISS NEVER FORGAVE ME FOR TAKING THE CHILDREN OUT OF that church. He warned me then that in leaving the church I was leaving my life as I’d known it, and that those folks wouldn’t ever accept me the way they once had and that I’d always be an outsider. I told him I wasn’t leaving the church, I was just leaving him, but I knew he was right. I lost friendships I’d had just about my whole life, and it hurt me. It still does. But for ten years I kept those children out, kept them safe. Once the service started, I’d take them across the road and down to the river when it was nice and warm, or folks would just drop them off at my house in the wintertime or if it was raining. We’d have us a little Sunday school lesson, then they’d play outside. Sometimes we’d make things, color pictures, and sing songs. But I didn’t step another foot inside that church for ten years, and I hardly said more than a “hello” to Carson Chambliss in all that time. And for a while there it was real nice, that little truce. I had my little congregation and he had his, and we didn’t have hardly anything to do with each other. I felt like I was doing what the Lord wanted me to do with those children.
But I should’ve known it couldn’t have gone on like that, and I should’ve known that something terrible was going to happen again. But there was just no way I could have guessed it would happen to one of mine. I tried to keep them children out of that church, and for ten years I did, but that ten years didn’t do nothing for Carson Chambliss but make him ten years older and braver and ten years more reckless too. And here I was on a Thursday afternoon, sitting outside a church I thought I’d never see the insides of again, waiting to talk to a man I was afraid of being alone with. It was the only time in my life I’d ever gone to church out of fear.
I sat out there in my car with the windows rolled down and my keys still swinging from the ignition, and I stared at the church through all that bright heat and thought about him sitting in there in all that dark and waiting. The sound of that gravel dust getting blown through the parking lot could’ve been bare feet shuffling across the hallway the night before, when Julie was standing in the doorway watching me hunched over the bed in my funeral clothes. I finished folding the covers down, then I turned around and settled myself by the quilt that was slung over the footboard, and I smoothed out my dress and looked up at her. She didn’t have a black dress to wear because she’d had to leave so many things behind right after it happened, and I ended up giving her one of mine. It hadn’t been worn for years, and I reckon it had fell out of fashion well before I’d come to own it, but she seemed glad to have it and it looked just fine on her. She almost looked like a young girl, even though she was a woman a couple years past thirty who’d just buried her son. When we’d come in from the funeral, she’d gone into the bedroom across the hall and closed the door. I heard the old springs on the bed give a creak when she laid down on it. I imagined her in there on that bed with her eyes wide open staring at the ceiling until the room got too dark to see it. Then she’d opened the door and come across the hall with her hair let down just as long and pretty as it could be. About the color of sweet corn. I could see she’d done a little more crying.