Deacon King Kong(33)

“Ohlord!” came a hushed laugh from someone in the choir. The two words mashed together like two coins: ohlord! This thing had gotten delicious. The choir laughed. Now it was Sister Gee’s turn to blush.

“I don’t go to no bars,” Sister Gee said hurriedly. “I does day’s work straight across the street from Rattigan’s.”

“Day’s work?”

“Housework. I clean that big brownstone house there. Been cleaning for that family fourteen years. If I had a nickel for every bottle I pick up on the curb from Rattigan’s on Mondays, I’d have me something.”

“I keep my bottles inside the bar,” Potts said in an offhand way.

“It ain’t a bother to me where your bottles goes,” Sister Gee said. “My job is to clean. It don’t matter what I clean. Dirt’s the same wherever it goes.”

Potts nodded. “Some kind of dirt’s harder to clean than others.”

“Well, that do depend,” she said.

The lightness in the room seemed to be leaving, and Potts felt some resistance coming. They both did. Potts glanced at the choir. “Can I have a private word?”

“Surely.”

“Maybe in the basement?”

“It’s too cold down there,” Sister Gee said. “They can rehearse down there. There’s a piano.”

The choir, relieved, quickly got up and filed out toward the back door of the sanctuary. As Nanette passed, Sister Gee grabbed her wrist and said softly, “Take Pudgy Fingers.”

The remark was casual, but Potts saw the glance between the two women. There was something about it.

When the door closed, she turned to him and said, “We was talking about something before, now?”

“Dirt,” Potts said.

“Oh yes,” she said, sitting down again. He saw now she was not just handsome, but rather had a quiet, cumulative beauty. She was a tall woman, middle-aged, whose face was not etched with the stern lines of church folks who’ve seen too much and done little about it other than pray. Her face was firm and decisive, with smooth milky brown skin; the thick hair with a bit of gray, neatly parted; her slender, proud frame clad in a modest flower-print dress. She sat erect in the pew; her poise was that of a straight-backed ballet dancer, yet with her slim elbows dangling on the rail in front of her, jingling her keys lazily in one hand, eyeing the white cop, she had an ease and confidence he found slightly unsettling. After a moment, she leaned back and placed a slender brown arm on the top edge of the pew, the small movement graceful and supple. She moved, Potts thought, like a gazelle. He suddenly found himself struggling to think clearly.

“You said some kind of dirt’s harder to clean than others,” she said. “Well, that’s my job, Officer. I’m a house cleaner, see. I work in dirt. I chase dirt all day. Dirt don’t like me. It don’t set there and say, ‘I’m hiding. Come get me.’ I got to go out and find it to clean it out. But I don’t hate dirt for being dirt. You can’t hate a thing for being what it is. Dirt makes me who I am. Wherever I try to rid the world of it, I’m making things a little better for somebody. Same with you. The fellers you seek, crooks and all, they ain’t saying ‘Here I am. Come get me.’ Most of ’em, you got to seek out, scoop up in some form or fashion. You brings justice to things, which makes the world a little nicer for somebody. Me and you has got the same job, in a way. We clean dirt. We clean up after people. We collects other people’s mess, though I reckon it’s not fair to call someone living a wrong life a problem, or a mess . . . or dirt.”

Potts found himself smiling. “You oughta be a lawyer,” he said.

Sister Gee crinkled her brow, looking suspicious. “You funning me?”

“No.” He laughed.

“You can tell by the way I talk I’m not a book-learned person. I’m a country woman. I wanted to go to school for something,” she said wistfully. “But that was long ago. Back when I was a child in North Carolina. Ever been to the South?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Where you from?”

“I told you. Here. The Cause District. Silver Street.”

She nodded. “Well how ’bout that.”

“But my folks were from Ireland.”

“Is that an island?”

“It’s a place where folks can stop and think. The ones with brains, anyway.”

She laughed, and as she did, Potts felt as if he were watching a dark, silent mountain suddenly blink to life, illuminated by a hundred lights from a small, quaint village that had lived on the mountainside for a hundred years, the village appearing out of nowhere, all the lights aglow at once. Every feature of her face glowed. He found himself wanting to tell her every sorrow he ever knew, including the knowledge that the Ireland of the vacation folders wasn’t Ireland, that the memory of his ancient grandmother from the old country walking down Silver Street holding his hand when he was eight, clasping her last nickel in her palm, biting her lip as she hummed a sad song from her childhood of poverty and privation, wandering the Irish countryside looking for home and food, would kick through his arteries and bust into his heart until he was a grown man:

    The grass waves green above them; soft sleep is theirs for aye;

The hunt is over, and the cold; the hunger passed away . . .