Deacon King Kong(117)
“Hmm. Nothing somebody doing day’s work would find on her job, I reckon.”
“Very funny.”
He thought for a minute. “That do seem strange,” he admitted. “What else did Sister Paul say?”
“She said she was there when old Guido Elefante stuck it in the wall and was glad to live long enough to know the son got hold of it. I didn’t ask the son no questions. You seen what Mr. Elefante done for the church, didn’t ya? He asked me how much was in Hettie’s missing Christmas money box. I told him what I thought it was—four thousand dollars. I told him that figure includes some liars who said they put money in there and likely didn’t. He said it don’t matter and gived me that much anyway. Plus he redid the pulpit. Rebuilt the whole back wall after he tore it open. Put a whole new garden in. Got someone to fix that foolish painting y’all did and make it a regular black Jesus. And redid the slogan about man being in the palm of God’s hand. Never did figure out why that slogan was there. But it’s a good one, and we’re keeping it.”
“What about the cheese?” Sausage asked.
“That was the Elephant’s daddy who did that.”
“His daddy’s been dead longer than Moses. It’s been twenty years, at least.”
“Honest to God, Sausage, I don’t know where it came from,” Sister Gee said. “Sportcoat knew. When I asked him where the cheese was from, all he said was, ‘Jesus sent it,’ and not a word more.”
Sausage nodded thoughtfully, and Sister Gee continued. “The only other time he ever referred to it was when the Elephant drove me and Sportcoat to visit Sister Paul out in the old folks’ home in Bensonhurst that time. Turns out Sister Paul and the Elephant’s daddy was old friends, was all I could make of it. How that happened, I don’t know. What the Elephant and Sister Paul spoke about, well, that too was private. I wasn’t in the room. I did overhear Sister Paul say something to the Elephant about a hundred dollars and driving a truck. I overheard ’em laughing about it. But I didn’t see no money change hands. And I seen them shake hands. Sportcoat and the Elephant.”
“Bless me! The Elephant and Sportcoat shook hands?” Hot Sausage said.
“Hand to God,” Sister Gee said. “They shook hands. And when the Elephant was digging out the back of the church in the dead of the night without our permission—though you and I know he had plenty permission, in fact he had all the permission he wanted—Sportcoat was the only one from our congregation he’d let help him. I seen it, too, of course. Wasn’t supposed to. But Deacon told me they was coming, so I hid behind the choir pew and saw the whole thing. They was together on it, them two. But after they lifted that little doll thing from the wall, I never saw ’em together again.”
“Then what?”
“Then Sportcoat dropped clean out of sight. And I didn’t see him no more. Ever more. Now you tell me the rest, Sausage, for I done told you everything I know.”
Sausage nodded. “Okay.”
And then he told it. Told what he knew and what he’d seen. And when he was done, Sister Gee stared at him in awe, then reached over her chair and hugged him where he sat.
“Hot Sausage,” she said softly. “You’re a man and a half.”
* * *
The Staten Island Ferry docked lazily into Whitehall Terminal at South Ferry and the riders clambered aboard. Among them was a dark, handsome woman in a bowknot bowler cloche hat tied with a ribbon atop her neatly combed hair who stood at the railing, her hand covering half her face. Not that Sister Gee thought that she’d be recognized. Who from the Cause Houses ever took the Staten Island Ferry? Nobody she knew. But you never know. Half the people in the Cause, she remembered, seemed to work for Transit. If anybody saw her, she’d have a hard time explaining why she was on the boat. You can’t be too careful.
She was dressed for summer pleasure, clad in a cool blue dress, with azaleas stitched across the side and hips and with a casual open back, revealing brown, slender arms. She had turned fifty the day before. She had lived in New York for thirty-three of her fifty years, yet had not once ridden the Staten Island Ferry.
As the ferry pulled away from the dock and arced into New York Harbor, heading due southwest, it offered her a clear view of the redbrick Cause housing projects on one side, and the Statue of Liberty and Staten Island on the other. One side represented the certainty of the past. The other side the uncertainty of the future. She felt suddenly nervous. All she had was an address. And a letter. And a promise. From a newly retired, newly divorced sixty-one-year-old white man who had spent most of his life, like her, cleaning up the mess of others and doing for everyone but himself. I don’t even have a phone number for him, she thought anxiously. It was just as well, she decided. If she wanted to back out, it would be easy.
As the weather-beaten boat eased across the harbor, she stood on the deck, glancing at the Cause Houses disappearing in the distance, and at the Statue of Liberty floating by on the right, then mused as a seagull rode the wind near her, skimming the water at eye height, gliding effortlessly alongside the deck before pulling away and rising. She watched it pump its wings and move higher into the air, then turn back toward the Cause Houses. Only then did her mind click back over the past week to Sportcoat, and the conversation she’d had with Hot Sausage. As Sausage recounted it in the basement that night, it was as if her own future were being revealed, unrolling itself before her like a carpet, one whose design and weave changed as it stretched out ahead. She recalled every word he said clearly: