Deacon King Kong(67)

The three chair haulers at the side door saw him first and quickly moved inside, unstacking the chairs one by one and marching them down the basement stairs without a word. Potts parked the squad car, emerged, and walked past the side door to Sister Gee, standing in the weeded field out back.

She saw him coming, the harbor water sparkling behind him, and stopped swinging, leaning on the weed cutter with her hand on her hip as he came. She was clad in a spring dress covered with azaleas, not ordinary garden clothing, he thought as he approached. Then again she’d said she was a country woman, and country women, as he knew from his mother and grandmother, didn’t dress for success. They dressed up and worked in the clothing they had. He walked straight into the weeds to her. When he reached her she smiled, a small one that bore, he hoped, just a hint of eagerness, then nodded at his patrol car, where his young partner, Mitch, sat in the passenger seat. “Why don’t he come?” she asked.

“You scared him off,” he said.

“We don’t bite here.”

“Tell him that. You scared the Jesus out of him last time.”

She laughed. “We supposed to run Jesus into souls here, not out.”

“Come to think of it, he was an angel till you laid boots on him and sent him the other direction.”

The sight of her lovely brown face breaking into laughter and focusing tightly on him, as she stood in the dress of azaleas in the sunlit yard of weeds, made him feel light again. In that moment he realized that all the experience of thirty-two years on the NYPD and all the formal police training in the world was useless when the smile of someone you suddenly care about finds the bow that wraps your heart and undoes it. He wondered when he’d last had that feeling—indeed if he’d ever had it at all. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember. Standing there in knee-high weeds behind an old black church that he’d passed by a hundred times over the last two decades without so much as a glance, he wondered if he had ever actually been in love or if love was, as his grandmother used to say, a kind of discovery of magic. He loved the stories she read to him when he was a boy, of kings and seafaring maidens and sailors gone awry and monsters slain, all for the sake of love. “Who is it who throws the light into the meeting on the mountain?” It was a poem she loved. He tried to recall the poet’s name. Was it Yeats maybe?

He saw her staring at him and realized she was waiting for him to say something.

“I think Mitch has lost interest in this case,” he managed to say.

“Who?”

“Mitch. The other officer. My partner.”

“Good. So have I,” she said. She shifted the weed cutter to the other side and leaned on it again, one smooth hip thrust outward. “Or I’m trying to. We truck on here despite it all. Look at all these weeds.”

“You do this often?”

She smiled. “Not enough. You cut ’em down. They come right back. You cut ’em again. They come back again. That’s their purpose. To keep coming. Everything under God’s sun got a purpose in this world. Everything wants to live. Everything deserves life, really.”

“If everything deserves to live, why kill a weed?”

She chuckled. She loved this kind of talk. How was it that he could draw this foolish chatter out of her? Her discourse with her husband, what little conversation they had, was made up of stunted, dry, matter-of-fact grunts about bills paid, church business, the affairs of their three grown children, who were, thankfully, living away from the Cause Houses. At forty-eight, most days she awakened feeling like there was nothing left to live for other than her church and her children. She had been seventeen when she wed a man twelve years older than her. He had seemed to have purpose but turned out to have none, other than an affinity for football games and the ability to pretend to be what he was not, to pretend to feel things that he did not feel, to make jokes out of things that did not work for him, and like too many men she knew, daydream about meeting some lovely young thing from the choir, preferably at three a.m., in the choir pew. She didn’t hate her husband. She just didn’t know him.

“Well, I could let the weeds grow,” she said. “But I’m not a person who knows enough about what should or should not be to leave things as they are when they got no purpose that I can understand. My purpose is to keep this church open long enough to save somebody. That’s all I know. If I was a book-learned person, somebody who could use thirty-four words instead of three words to say what I mean, I might know the full answer to your question. But I’m a simple woman, Officer. These weeds is a blight to this house of worship, so I goes at ’em. The truth is, they do me no harm. They’re unsightly to me but sightly to God. And still I cuts at ’em. I reckon I’m like most folks. Most times I don’t know what I’m doing. Sometimes I feel like I don’t hardly know enough to tie my own shoes.”

“I can tie your shoes for you,” he said, his eyes twinkling, “if you can’t manage.”

The comment, offered in the lilt of his Irish brogue, brought her to a blush, and she noticed Miss Izi standing by the church door, staring in their direction. “What brings you around?” she said quickly. She glanced at Miss Izi again, who thankfully was called away by Dominic at the basement door. “Better hurry and tell it. My friend Izi there,” she said, nodding at Miss Izi’s back, “is what they call the walking news.”