Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [82]
The house was a one-story cottage, more gray than white, lying in a modest neighborhood east of York Road. By the time Ian and the children arrived, several members of the congregation were already setting out paint cans and brushes. Mrs. Jordan (Sister Jessie now, but Ian found it hard to switch) was spreading a drop-cloth over the boxwoods, and Reverend Emmett was perched on a ladder wire-brushing the porch overhang. Ian grabbed a ladder of his own and went to take the shutters down. Reverend Emmett’s mother came out in high heels and an aqua knit dress and asked if there was any little thing she could do, but they all said no. (What could they say? Her cardigan draped her shoulders so genteelly, with the sleeves turned back a precise two inches.)
Partway through the job, someone Ian didn’t know was sent to assist him. This was a cadaverously thin man in his thirties with a narrow ribbon of beard like Abraham Lincoln’s. Ian glanced at him curiously (their church didn’t see many guests), and the man said, “I’m Eli Everjohn. Bertha King’s son-in-law; we’re visiting from over Caro Mill.”
“Ian Bedloe,” Ian said.
He could see now who the man’s wife must be—the strawberry blonde who did resemble Sister Bertha, come to think of it, scraping clapboards with the children. She seemed much too pretty for such a knobby, gangling husband. This Eli handled tools at a remove. He handled his own hands at a remove, as if operating one of those claw arrangements where you try to scoop up prizes. His task was to take the hinges off the shutters and stow them in a bucket, which should have been easy enough; but the screwdriver seemed to confound him and he let it slip so many times that the screw heads were getting mangled. “Tell you what,” Ian said, setting down a shutter. “I’ll see to this and you can have my job.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that!” the man said. “I’m scared of heights.”
Heights? The highest shutter was eight feet off the ground. But Ian didn’t point that out.
Eli raised one arm to wipe his forehead, waving the screwdriver dangerously close to Ian’s face. “At my church, we don’t mess with such as this,” he said. “We visit door to door instead.”
“What church is that?”
“Holy House of the Gospel.”
“I guess I never heard of it.”
“We’re much stricter than you-all are,” Eli said. “We would never for instance let our women wear the raiment of men.”
Ian glanced at Eli’s wife. Sure enough, she wore a dress—a rosebudded, country-looking dress that was interfering seriously with her attempts to mount a step stool.
“We don’t play cards neither, nor dance, and we’re more mindful of the appearance of evil,” Eli said. “Why, yesterday my mother-in-law got a prescription filled at a pharmacy that sells liquor! Walked right into a place that sells liquor without a thought for how it might look! And you don’t have no missionary outreach, neither.”
Ian was starting to feel defensive. He said, “We believe our lives are our missionary outreach.”
“Now, that’s just selfish,” Eli said. “To look at someone living in the shadow of eternal damnation and not try and change his ways: that’s selfish.”
Ian spun on his heel and went to fetch another shutter.
When he came back, though, Eli resumed where he had left off. “And if we did mess with house painting, we’d have prayed beforehand,” he said. His screwdriver slashed uselessly across a screw. “We pray before each task. We believe that whatever work we undertake is God’s work; I am an arrow shot by God to do His handiwork.”
He did look something like an arrow: straight and smooth, a sharp cowlick sticking up on the