Deacon King Kong(30)

“Who?”

“Sister Pauletta Chicksaw.”

“I remember Sister Paul,” Sportcoat said brightly. “Edie Chicksaw’s momma? She still living? She got to be well over a hundred if she is. Edie’s long been dead.”

“Long dead, but Sister Paul’s yet living to my knowledge,” Rufus said. “She and Hettie was friends. Hettie used to go out and visit her at the old folks’ home out in Bensonhurst.”

“Hettie never told me nothing about it,” Sportcoat said, sounding hurt.

“A wife never tells her husband everything,” Rufus said. “That’s why I never got married.”

“Sister Paul don’t know nothing about church business. Hettie done all that.”

“You don’t know what Sister Paul knows or don’t know. She’s the seniorest member of Five Ends. She was there when the church was built.”

“So was I.”

“No, old man, Hettie was there. You was still back home getting your toes sawed off. You come a year later, after the foundation was dug. Hettie was there when the church was built. I mean the building itself. When the foundation was dug out.”

“I was there for some of it.”

“Not when they was digging the foundation and doing the brickwork, son.”

“What’s that prove?”

“It proves you don’t remember nothing, for in them early days, Sister Paul collected the Christmas Club money. She done that before Hettie’s time. And I do believe she might know something about where that money might be now.”

“How you know? You quit Five Ends fourteen years ago.”

“Just ’cause a man ain’t sanctified no more don’t mean he’s missing his marbles. Sister Paul lived in this building, Sport. Right here in the Watch Houses. In fact, I seen that Christmas box.”

“If you was a child, Rufus, I’d pull my switch out and send you hooting and hollering down the road for lying. You ain’t seen no Christmas box.”

“I walked Sister Paul to and from church many a day. When things got bad around here, she was afraid someone would knock her over the head for it, so she’d ask me to walk her to service from time to time.”

“She ain’t supposed to walk around with the Christmas box.”

“She had to hide it someplace after she collected for it. Normally she hid it at church. But she didn’t always have time to wait for church to empty out. Sometimes folks would linger eating fish dinners or the pastor would preach overtime or some such thing and she had to go home, so she brung it home with her.”

“Why didn’t she lock it in the pastor’s office?”

“What fool would keep money ’round a pastor?” Rufus replied.

Sportcoat nodded knowingly.

“Sister Paul told me once she had a good hiding place for that box in the church,” Rufus said. “I don’t know where. But if she couldn’t keep it there, she’d bring it home till the following Sunday. That’s how I know she had it. ’Cause she’d come down and ask me to walk her over. And of course I was happy to do it. She’d say, ‘Rufus Harley, you’re a man and a half, that’s what you are. Whyn’t you come back to church again? You’re a man and a half, Rufus Harley. Come back to church.’ But I ain’t a church man no more.”

Sportcoat considered this. “That was years ago, Rufus. Sister Paul got nothing to help me now.”

“You don’t know what she got. She and her husband was the first coloreds to come to these projects, Sport. They come back in the forties, when the Irish and Italians ’round these parts was beating coloreds’ brains out for moving into the Cause. Sister Paul and her husband started the church in their living room. In fact, I was there when Five Ends was digging out its foundation for the building. Weren’t but four of us doing all that digging: me, her daughter Edie, your Hettie, and this crippled Eye-talian man from ’round these parts.”

“What cripple?”

“I done forgot his name. He’s long dead. He done a lot of the work on Five Ends. I can’t recall his name, but it was an Italian name: Ely or some such thing. Ending with an ‘i.’ You know how them Italians’ names go. Odd man. A cripple, that fella. Only had one good leg. Never said a mumbling word to me nor nobody else. Wouldn’t give a Negro the time of day. But he was all for Five Ends Baptist. He had some money, too, I reckon, because he had a backhoe and hired a bunch of Eye-talians who didn’t speak a lick of English, and they finished the job of digging out the foundations and painting the back wall with a picture of Jesus that’s there. That picture of Jesus out back? That Jesus was painted by Eye-talians. Every speck of him.”

“No wonder he was white,” Sportcoat said. “Pastor Gee had me and Sausage help Sr. Bibb’s son Zeke color him up.”

“That was stupid. That was a good picture.”

“He’s still there. But he’s colored now.”

“Well, you shoulda left it like it was, on account of the man who brung his front loader and all them Eye-talians. I wish I could remember his name. Sister Paul would remember. Them two got along good. He liked her. She was quite the beauty in them days, y’know. She was well up in age, had to be north of seventy-five, I reckon, but Lord, she was . . . I wouldn’t throw her outta bed for eating crackers, that’s for sure. Not back then. She was well upholstered.”