Deacon King Kong(109)
“What was it?” Sportcoat asked.
“It wasn’t nothing,” Sister Paul said. “It looked like a piece of soap shaped like a fat girl. ’Bout the color of an old trumpet. A little colored lady, is what it looked like. He closed that soap thing in the metal box, set that box inside the hollow part of a cinder block, put his concrete and mortar on it, done something to the bottom so it could set in there good, and set another cinder block over it. You couldn’t tell one from the other.
“Then he says to me, ‘You the only one that knows. Even my wife don’t know.’
“I said, ‘Why you trust me?’
“He said, ‘A person who trusts can be trusted.’
“I said, ‘Well, I ain’t got nothing to do with where you puts your soap, Mr. Guido. I keeps my soap in the bathroom. But you a grown man, and it’s your soap. It ain’t gonna do you no good where it’s at, but I reckon you got more soap at home.’
“I do believe that’s one of the few times I seen that man laugh. He was a serious man, see.
“When his men come back, they built that wall up before the day was done. The next day he had another Italian feller came by with a black-and-white picture of a painting. He called it a Jell-O or some kind of painting. That feller copied that painting exactly as it was, right to the back wall of the church. It took him two days. The first day he drawed a big circle and colored it in some. Framed it out some, I guess. The second day he drawed Jesus in his robes right in the middle circle—with Jesus’s hands outspread. Them hands touch the outside of that circle he drawed. One of them hands, Jesus’s left hand, is right on the cinder block where that soap is. Right on top of it.”
She paused and nodded.
“And that thing is in there yet today.”
“You sure?” Sportcoat asked.
“Sure as I’m sitting here. Unless the building fell down to dust. Then they finished bricking the other walls, helped us finish the inside, do the floors and such. And at the end, that same painter came back and put up the lettering on the back wall over Jesus’s head that says ‘May God Hold You in the Palm of His Hand.’ It was the prettiest thing.”
She yawned, her story finished.
“That’s how the church come to have that motto.”
Sportcoat scratched his jaw, perplexed. “But you didn’t tell me about the cheese,” he said.
“What about it? I done told you,” she said.
“No you didn’t.”
“I told you about the truck, didn’t I?”
“What do a truck got to do with it?”
She shook her old head. “Son, you so old your mind has shrunk to the size of a full-grown pea. What do a truck carry? The truck I drove for Mr. Guido was full of cheese. Stolen cheese, I reckon. Old Guido started sending me that cheese five minutes after we opened the church doors. After I let him stick that good-luck soap box with the colored doll in it or whatever it was in that wall, I could do no wrong for him. I asked him many a day to stop sending that cheese, for it was good cheese. Expensive cheese. Too much for our little church. But he said, ‘I wanna send it. People need food.’ So after a while I told him to send it to Building Seventeen in the Cause, for Hot Sausage come to run that building after a time, and Sausage is honest, and I knowed he’d give it out in the Cause to them who could use it. Mr. Guido sent that cheese for years and years. After he died, it still come. When I come here to this old folks’ home, it was yet coming. It comes to this day.”
“So who’s sending it now?”
“Jesus,” she said.
“Oh hush!” Sportcoat hissed. “You sound like Hettie. That cheese got to come from someplace!”
Sister Paul shrugged. “Genesis twenty-seven twenty-eight says, ‘May God give you heaven’s dew and earth’s richness—an abundance of grain and new wine.’”
“This is cheese.”
“Son, a blessing favors them that needs it. Don’t matter how it comes. It just matters that it does.”
25
DO
It was a dream so alive—and so many of them seemed dead before they started—that at times Elefante felt he had to keep himself from levitating when he thought about it. He gripped the steering wheel of his Lincoln tightly as he considered it. Melissa, the Governor’s daughter, rode beside him in silence. It was four a.m. He was happy. It wasn’t so much that Melissa had accepted his invitation to “look into her father’s affairs,” but rather the way she handled her own affairs—and his.
He’d never met anyone like her before. She was, as they say in Italian, a stellina, a star, a most beautiful one. From the first, she was shy and reticent, as he’d seen. But beneath the reserve was a sureness of manner, a certainty that belied deep confidence and engendered trust. Over the weeks as they courted, he saw how she was with her employees at her bagel shop and factory, the way she figured out important problems for them without making them feel stupid, the politeness she showed them, her respect and deference for older people in general, including the old deacon, the rummy who’d worked for his mother, whom she’d finally met just a month ago. She didn’t refer to him as “colored,” or “Negro.” She called him “Mister” and referred to him as “Afro-American,” which, to Elefante, sounded dangerous, odd, and foreign. That was hippie talk. It reminded him of Bunch Moon, the colored bastard. He’d heard through the grapevine that Peck had dispatched Bunch—badly. There was danger everywhere now, full-out shooting coming because of the whites, the blacks, the Spanish, the Irish cops, the Italian families, the drug wars. It wouldn’t stop. Yet despite the dark days ahead he felt himself moving into a light of a different kind. The wonderful, bursting, gorgeous, eye-opening panorama of light that love can bring into a lonely man’s life.