The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver [37]
I remembered my gas-station travel brochures. “Sure,” I said. “It’s a place they set aside for birds, where nobody’s allowed to shoot them.”
“That’s right. They’ve got them for people too.” This was all she was inclined to say on the subject.
Usually the people were brought and taken away by the blue-jeans priest in the station wagon I’d seen that first day. He also wore an interesting belt buckle, not with a scorpion but with an engraving of a small stick figure lost in a kind of puzzle. Mattie said it was an Indian symbol of life: the man in the maze. The priest was short, with a muscular build and white-blond, unruly hair, not really my type but handsome in a just-rolled-out-of-bed kind of way, though I suppose that saying such things about a priest must be some special category of sin. His name was Father William.
When Mattie introduced us I said, “Pleased to meet you,” making an effort not to look at his belt buckle. What had popped into my head was “You are old, Father William.” Now where did that come from? He was hardly old, and even if he were, this isn’t something you’d say.
He and Mattie went to the back of the shop to discuss something over coffee and pie while I held down the fort. It came to me a little later while I was testing a stack of old whitewalls, dunking them in the water and marking a yellow chalk circle around each leak. I remembered three drawings of a little round man: first standing on his head, then balancing an eel straight up on his nose, then kicking a boy downstairs. “You Are Old, Father William” was a poem in a book I’d had as a child. It had crayon scribbles on some pages, so it must have been a donation from one of Mama’s people whose children had grown up. Only a rich child would be allowed to scribble in a hardback book.
I decided that after work I would go down to one of Sandi’s New To You toy stores and find a book for Turtle. New To You was just like Mama’s people, only you had more choice about what you got.
After I had marked all the tires I rolled them across the lot and stacked them into leaky and good piles. I congratulated myself on my steady hand, but later in the day Mattie saw me jump when some hotdog Chevy backfired out in the street. She was with a customer, but later she came over and said she’d been meaning to ask what I was always so jumpy about. I thought of that column in Reader’s Digest where you write in and tell your most embarrassing moment. Those were all cute: “The Day My Retriever Puppy Retrieved the Neighbor’s Lingerie Off the Clothes Line.” In real life, your most embarrassing moment is the last thing in the world you would want printed in Reader’s Digest.
“Nothing,” I said.
We stood for a minute with our hands folded into our armpits. Mattie’s gray bangs were more salt than they were pepper, cut high and straight across, and her skin always looked a little sunburned. The wrinkles around her eyes reminded me of her Tony Lama boots.
Mattie was like a rock in the road. You could stare at her till the cows came home, but it wouldn’t budge the fact of her one inch.
“Just don’t tell me you’re running from the law,” she said finally. “I’ve got enough of that on my hands.”
“No.” I wondered what exactly she meant by that. Out on the street a boy coasted by on a bicycle, his elbow clamped over a large framed picture of a sportscar. “I have a fear of exploding tires,” I said.
“Well, of all things,” she said.
“I know. I didn’t ever tell you because it sounds chickenshit.” I stopped to consider if you ought to say “chickenshit” in a place called Jesus Is Lord’s, but then the damage was done. “Really it’s not like it sounds. I don’t think there’s a thing you could name that I’m afraid of, other than that.”
“Of all things,” she said again. I imagined that she was looking at me the way you do when you first notice someone is deformed. In sixth grade we had a new teacher for three weeks before we realized his left hand was missing. He always kept his hanky over it. We’d just thought it was allergies.
“Come over here a minute,” Mattie said. “I’ll show you something.