Works and Days

Grits

Concluded

There were a few kids playing on Curtain Street at this hour, a little past eight o’clock, and the sky was a rich blue. A sliver of new moon was appearing high in the west. Chayne could smell the flowers of late summer, their scent baked and diffused by the heat of the day though now it was only warm enough to walk without a coat.

A small breeze picked up as they crossed Reynold and kept on going down the cobbled road until they reached More Street and Saint Adjeanet’s school, the rectory and then the church, facing Kirkland.

“It’s so cold and empty looking,” Russell said as they went to the side door, near the little chapel.

“And it’s locked,” Chayne swore.

“Oh, well—” Russell began.

“No, oh well,” Chayne shook his head. “Enough oh well’s.”

He went down the steps and marched next door to the brick rectory where he knocked on the door.

A few minutes later a small, badly formed woman with slightly crossed eyes and scraggly hair answered.

“Chayne,” said Ann Ford. “Why, hello! And Russell! Come in. Come in!”

They did. The rectory hadn’t been refurbished since the nineteen seventies and harvest gold was everywhere along with orange carpet and wood paneling. In its own ugly way it was quite pleasant, Russell thought.

“Geoff! Geoff!” Ann shouted for her brother.

Soon the priest was down.

“Chayne! Russell!”

Chayne had gone to college with Geoff Ford and noted that his old colleague was still round, his butt too big. Oh, well, he was celibate so it didn’t really matter.

“We need the keys to the church.”

“But it’s locked.”

“Yes, Geoff,” Chayne answered, “which is why we need the keys. We need to go pray. The church shouldn’t be locked anyway.”

Geoff shrugged, reached into his pocket and gave Chayne the keys. “Just bring them back before the night’s over.”

It was completely dark inside of Saint Adjeanet’s. Russell and Chayne moved along the walls, bumping into statues, hitting knees on pews, searching for the lights and when they had found the switches to light the small chapel with the piano, decided that was enough.

Chayne disappeared into the dark to pray before the Blessed Virgin while Russell sat at the piano, plucking out tunes. His mother had insisted he take piano lessons and he had been disastrous, then, when Chayne had come home from school and his parents still lived in the house on Curtain and owned a piano, he had heard Chayne playing and had learned from him, more from watching than formal instruction. Now, somehow, he could place all of his emotion into the music flowing from the wooden machine. Somehow it served for voice when his human voice didn’t do it, played all of his pain and all of his joy though, for some time, it had mostly been pain.

Russell was so into the music that Chayne’s return from across the church startled him. Chayne had a song book with him, and he placed it in front of Russell, who looked up at Chayne in bemusement, and then, in understanding.

The first notes began to pour out, firm drops of music in the darkness of the church. Russell did not launch into the song immediately. He played at the melody for a while, falling in love with it before singing.

I want to walk

as a child of the light

I want to fol-low Je-sus

God made the stars to give light to the world

the star of my life is Je-sus

in him there is no darkness at all

the night and the day are both alike

the lamb is the light in the city of God

shine in my heart

Lord Jesus

Russell’s voice was at first small and shaky as much with emotion as with the newness of this song. He began to pick up volume and confidence, and Chayne went to the tabernacle and lit first one candle and then another and more and more in a wild joy, filling the church with light. It should have been filled with light. The once darkened tabernacle was bright and the gold glinted over the altar. Still, Chayne lit more and more candles and while the music played, stars budded in the dark and in the darkness Russell knew he couldn’t do everything, but he could do some things, and he could not deliver himself from school or from his family, but Chayne had delivered him and maybe, when he left Chayne for a bit, he could find a way to deliver his friend too.

As Sharon Kandzierski stirred her grits she smiled meditatively. This was the first time she’d made grits in twenty years because Graham didn’t like them. Graham didn’t really like anything, and for some reason just his not liking grits kept her from eating her own. But this morning, on her way back, her heart feeling lighter, she had picked them up from the A&P.

Patti Lewis was getting divorced. That’s what Felice said, and Felice was really the way Sharon knew Patti best. Tom and Patti were her friends and Chayne’s. They’d all gone to school together, and the little boy Russell she hardly knew at all. This is why she’d been so surprised and a little convicted when he’d shown up last night simply saying, “You need to give that seventy five thousand dollars back.”

Russell had gone on in a bristling rage the two aging Black people had never seen about how when you have one child who struggles, and you haven’t done a thing to support them, not pay a penny for college, not offer a graduation car or trip, you owed a little something. You owed some money back. And there was the embarrassment factor, that all of these white people knew Sharon and Graham had done so little, that it was talked about, that this boy knew. And Graham always had such a difficult relationship with white people, his father having been one back in the time when you didn’t talk about such things.

They had fought and Sharon, who had never thought much of white people, thought Patti Lewis might have had the right idea regarding divorce and, in the end, she had taken that check that weighed heavy on her, that she’d left sitting under a glass paperweight shaped like an iceberg, and having left it at her son’s house with the deed and bill for ten dollars to make the exchange of a house legal, then bought those grits at the A&P, Sharon felt lighter than she’d been in twenty years.