Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [52]
There was a silence, during which she sat down. As soon as she left Ian’s line of vision, he realized the silence was part of the program. The minister stood with both palms raised, his face tipped skyward and his eyelids closed and gleaming. In his shirtsleeves, he seemed amateurish. His cuffs had slipped down his forearms, and his collar, Ian saw, was buttoned all the way to the neck, in the fashion of those misfits who used to walk around high school with slide rules dangling from their belts. He wasn’t so very old, either. His frame was lanky as a marionette’s and his wrist bones boyishly knobby.
Ian was the only one sitting erect. He bowed his head and squinted at the billow of sprigged skirt puffing out the back of the fat woman’s chair.
“For our sister Clarice,” the minister said finally.
“Amen,” the congregation murmured, and they straightened.
“Any other prayers, any other prayers,” the minister said. “No request is beyond Him.”
On the other side of Ian’s neighbor, a gray-haired woman rose and placed her purse on her seat. Then she faced forward, gripping the chair in front of her. “You all know my son Chuckie was fighting in Vietnam,” she said.
There were nods, and several people turned to look at her.
“Well, now they tell me he’s been killed,” she said.
Soft sounds of dismay traveled down the rows.
“Tell me he got killed jumping out of a plane,” she said. “You know he was a paratrooper.”
More nods.
“Monday night these two soldiers came, all dressed up.”
“Ah, no,” they said.
“I told them I had thought he’d be safe. I said he’d been jumping so long now, looked to me like he’d learned how to stay alive up there. Soldier says, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he says. ‘These things happen,’ he says. Says Chuckie was a, what do you call, fluke accident. Forgot to put his parachute on.”
Ian blinked.
“Forgot!” his neighbor marveled in a voice like a dove.
“ ‘Forgot!’ I said. ‘How could that be?’ This soldier tells me, it’s the army’s considered opinion that Chuckie had just jumped so often, he’d stopped thinking about it. So up he comes to that whatever, that door where they jump out of, the whole time making smart remarks so everybody’s laughing—you remember what a card he was—and gives a little kind of like salute and steps into empty air. It’s not till then the fellow behind him says, ‘Wait!’ Says, ‘Wait, you forgot your—’ ”
“Parachute,” Ian’s neighbor finished sadly.
“So I don’t ask your prayers for Chuckie after this; I ask for me,” the woman said. For the first time, her voice was unsteady. “I’m just about sick with grief, I tell you. Pray for me to find some deliverance.”
She sat down, fumbling behind her for her purse. The minister lifted his palms and the room fell silent.
Could you really forget your parachute?
Well, maybe so. Ian could see how it might have come about. A man to whom jumping was habit might imagine that floating in space was all his own doing, like flying. Maybe it had slipped his mind he couldn’t fly, so in the first startled instant of his descent he supposed he had simply forgotten how. He may have felt insulted, betrayed by all he’d taken for granted. What’s the big idea here? he must have asked.
Ian pictured one of those animated films where a character strolls off a cliff without noticing and continues strolling in midair, perfectly safe until he happens to look down and then his legs start wheeling madly and he plummets.
He gave a short bark of laughter.
The congregation swiveled and stared at him.
He bowed his head, cheeks burning. The minister said, “For our sister Lula.”
“Amen,” the others said, mercifully