Wrapped in Rain(31)

Jason smiled and tipped his baseball cap.

"Tomorrow, maybe we'll take some more pictures." He smiled more widely and Katie looked confused. "It's a long story. Tomorrow."

I opened the door and stepped underneath the front porch. Katie followed me, her face a collage of fear, anxiety, and relief.

I walked across the porch, wet and creaking under my weight, and Katie stood in the doorway, searching for the words. Swirling with questions myself, I turned around and said, "Why here? After all this time?"

She shrugged and shook her head. "I don't know. But every time I flipped my blinker or looked at the map, Clopton looked like it was lit with a spotlight or yellow highlighter."

I walked out into the rain, too tired to make sense of the whole thing. I wanted a soft bed, silence, and about ten hours of sleep.



Whenever I got tired, when my eyes almost shut themselves, I'd remember Miss Ella lying up in the bed with Mutt and me and reading to us out of her Bible. One night when we were still young enough to wear pajamas with feet on them, I was tired and just didn't feel like listening, so I said, "Miss Ella, why do you read to us? I don't understand half that stuff."

She squinted one eye like she was thinking about her response. She walked over to the window where you could see most of Waverly and the accompanying grounds. It was a good perch. She said, "You boys come here." We slid off the bed and walked to the window while she waved her hand across the landscape. "You see all that?"

We nodded.

"All that, everything you see, looks orderly. The walls are straight, the corners are square, the buildings and terraces are level, and everything around here has an order to it. You see that?"

We nodded again, more confused than ever.

"That's because it was built in relation to a plumb line." She reached into her pocket and pulled out a brass engineer's plumb. "See, the engineers take this, hang it from a string, and that point, that place on the earth where it hangs, becomes the plumb from which everything else is built or measured. Without that point, that place, there's no order to nothing. It's just chaos. The plumb"-she waved it in front of our faces-"is the starting point, the beginning and the end, the ..."

Mutt broke in. "The alpha and omega?"

Miss Ella smiled. "Yes, honey." We jumped back in bed and she patted her Bible. "I'm trying to build you boys up straight ..." She paused, thinking for a minute. "With strong walls, square corners, and able to stand when the storms come. But I can't do it without a plumb line. So"she patted the pages again gingerly-"this is it. Our reading at night is so that-"



I interrupted her. "So we end up like you and not like Rex."

She shook her head. "No, child. So you end up like the men in this book. I ain't fit to be included in these pages. Ain't fit to untie the laces of their sandals."

Walking across the backyard through the rain, I remembered Miss Ella patting the pages and whispering, "Ain't fit at all."

I grabbed Whitey's two jugs, walked in the back door of Waverly, and went down the spiral staircase into the basement. I had no intention of getting tanked, but I didn't want them to spontaneously combust and blow up my truck. A good truck is hard to find. On the other hand, if they blew up the house, I'd pull up a chair and watch. Maybe even sell tickets.

When Rex built the house, he sunk the spiral staircase into the basement to allow quick kitchen access to storage, kindling wood, kerosene, and certainly, booze. Whenever he gave a tour of the house, he started in the basement next to his two-hundred-bottle dust collector. I landed in the basement and let my eyes adjust to the dark. Then I skirted the wine cellar and shuffled over to my bed, sliding Whitey's jugs beneath it.

On my bedside table, I kept three things: a picture of Miss Ella sitting on a bucket next to the barn which I had taken before she got sick; her Bible-tattered, dusty, and imprinted with the foreheads she had thumped with it; and that brass plumb.

"No ma'am," I said out loud. "I don't know what they're doing or why." I pulled the ceiling fan cord, setting it to "cyclone," and fell onto the pillow. "You know everything I do. Probably more." I pulled the cold sheets up around my neck and closed my eyes. "I'm just glad she can't shoot."



Despite her sermonizing, Miss Ella never took us to church. Not really. Not with a building, choir, pews, and a pastor. Rex would have beaten her silly. I remember I was still in kindergarten the first time she got her nerve up and tried to take us to church. He spotted us in the car from a second-story window. We were dressed up and buckled in with excitement and curiosity pasted across our faces. It was almost like an adventure. In truth, and given the fact that it was a black Cadillac, we probably looked like we were going to a funeral. Rex ran outside in his robe, hair sticking up, face bloated, eyes bloodshot, screaming as she backed out the drive. She stopped, rolled down the window, and said, "Yes sir, Mr. Rex? You want to go with us?"

He almost yanked her out of the front seat. "Woman, where do you think you're going?"

"Mr. Rex, why, don't you know what day it is?" Rex was still foggy, and even though it was close to eleven in the morning, he probably couldn't have passed a Breathalyzer test. He held on to the side of the car, steadying himself while perspiration began beading across his forehead. "Mr. Rex, it's Easter." Miss Ella pointed to the yard. "Can't you see all the lilies?" Months ago, Mose had given Miss Ella some of his own money to plant rows of lily bulbs in the front yard. He'd even spent part of a Sunday afternoon with us putting them in the ground. That morning they had opened and looked like a hundred tiny bugles all blowing toward heaven.