really am not. This is bad what we’re doing. I’m not making excuses for what I did. I was flattered by your attentions. I wanted you to like me. I should have known better. You’re young. Are you still there?
I’m here.
I just want you to understand me, is all. Who I really am. I’m listening, he said. He was still on his knees.
I’m a mountain girl, she said. I come from a PO Box settlement about seven miles outside of Asheville, North Carolina. We didn’t go to church when I was growing up. My father didn’t allow it. We didn’t go to school either. We were homeschooled. But my mother was a very religious woman. Some kind of Pentecostal, I believe. We read the Bible every morning when we got up and every night before we went to bed. My mother brought me and my little brother up believing that there was a God in heaven who loved us. She told us we must be good if we wanted to meet her in heaven. She was much older than my father and sickly. She knew she wouldn’t live to see us grow up. She died when I was fourteen.
She paused for a long moment and then he heard her cough and do something else that sounded like clearing her throat before she continued. She was so much older than him, twenty-six years, which made her older than his mother.
His room was dark now because his blinds were drawn and he hadn’t turned on the lights. Outside his room he could hear his parents talking with Deacon Miron and his wife, who was pregnant, and he heard them say his name occasionally, not calling him, but mentioning it as they often did because they were proud of him and remembered him every time the words child or son or young people today were mentioned. He was the perfect example of a good Christian son. Oh, if every child could be like Elwyn, they would say.
What I’m saying, Elwyn, is that I grew up without my mother, so I had but a skewed understanding of how a woman is supposed to behave. My mother had three sisters who would come up the mountain and visit us. Maybe I could be like them; these were wild, beautiful women. Mulattos, every one of them, just like my mother, their sickly baby sister, who would die and leave her children to an uncertain fate in this dark and sinful world.
She paused again, but this time he believed she might be crying. He could not hear her crying. There was something covering the phone, perhaps her hand.
From elsewhere in the house there came the sound of piano music.
It was Deacon Miron’s wife playing “I Need Thee Every Hour” with that heavy left hand of hers. Elwyn suspected she had the book propped open in front of her. Sister Miron was good when she had a book open in front of her, but she could not play by ear no matter how hard he tried to teach her. Sister Miron was a very fat, very pretty girl only about three years older than Elwyn. He used to call her Ginny Parker before she got married. Now she insisted that everyone call her Sister Miron, even Elwyn, who was her first cousin. Deacon Miron, a widower, was in his forties. He was Elwyn’s godfather. He heard them say they would name the baby Elwyn if it were a boy because Elwyn was such a model Christian. He could not hear what they would name the baby if it were a girl because Sister Miron was putting that heavy left hand into her music and Sister Morrisohn was speaking again.
You asked me once what kind of sins I committed before I met Buford. I tried to be a mother to my brother in my mother’s absence—cooking, cleaning, keeping the house for my lazy father—but once my innocence was lost, it became easier to behave like my aunts, who were a very bad example. Drinking. Smoking. Riding into town every Friday night in some strange man’s pickup truck. Not coming back till Sunday morning. I was a woman, but I didn’t really know what a woman was.
I understood sex, but I hated the man I was sleeping with. He was the worst brute. At eighteen, I became pregnant. I lost the baby, which was probably the best thing—God forgive me for saying that—but now I could not live at home anymore. I had to leave. I tried to take my brother with me, but my father would not let me.
Someone out there said, Where is Elwyn?
It was Ginny—Sister Miron.
Someone answered, He’s still on the phone with Sister Morrisohn, I think.
It was his mother.
Elwyn got up from his knees and went to the door and closed it. Then he went back to his bed and lay crossways on it with his legs hanging over the side.
Sister Morrisohn said, I came down and lived with my cousin and her husband until that became a problem. He made me feel I owed something more than the $35-a-month rent I was paying. When I wouldn’t give him what he wanted, he got rough. When I told my cousin, she believed her husband. Never mind that I had a torn dress and a busted lip. I was out on the streets. I got fired from my counter job at Woolworth’s. For the first time in my life, I lost contact with my little brother Harrison. I hooked up with an ugly crowd. Sex, drugs, stealing to eat. I smoked marijuana. I shoplifted. I had lots of boyfriends, though I hated and feared men … Then I met Buford and Mother Glovine. They were ministering at the Dade County jail, where I was being held.
The church was bailing everyone out who would allow Buford and Mother Glovine to preach to them. Buford was such a good man. Not only did he bail us out, he also acted as our legal counsel pro bono. He seemed to be very impressed with me. I guess because I was articulate and perhaps pretty. We debated often, with me usually getting the better of him. He found me a job at the library downtown. He helped me get a little apartment in Overtown. Most importantly, he helped me get my brother away from my father. Brought him down to Miami and then paid for him to go to college up at Tuskegee when he finished high school. Harrison is now an accountant up in Boston.
Elwyn said to her: When I was a kid, I think I remember he used to sit with you and Brother Morrisohn and Beverly.
Beverly never sat with us. She absolutely refused.
I was too young. I remember it wrong.
Yes, you do. You were too young … you are too young. You are a child.
I didn’t mean to make you … mad, Sister Morrisohn.
I am mad. I am nutso.
I need Thee, O I need Thee, he heard his mother singing to Sister Miron’s accompaniment. It sounded good—it would sound better if Ginny would ease up on the bass.
Sister Morrisohn said, I fell in love with Buford immediately. How could I not? He was such a good man. Intelligent. Handsome too. Though nothing happened between us while Mother Glovine was alive. Buford wouldn’t allow it. But she was gravely ill. We married a month after she passed. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe that’s what started the gossip. But we were in love. What did they expect us to do? This caused the rift between me and Beverly, my loving stepdaughter, who is actually older than me, ha-ha-ha. She’s become a real problem for me with Buford’s inheritance. There were vicious rumors about me tricking a senile old man into marriage to get his money. Your grandmother, Elwyn, I’m sorry to inform you, was chief among my accusers. But I loved Glovine … Mother Glovine. She was a mother to me … Our love overcame it all. I had found what I wanted in Buford, a man who would love me in spite of my past. A man who would not abuse me. A man who looked at me every day and said, I am so glad I met you. My life is complete.
She continued through sobs, Isn’t that what we all want? Not once while I was with Buford did I ever think of any other man. Not once while I was with him did he ever remind me of my past.
Elwyn said, Sister Morrisohn, don’t cry.
I loved him at first sight. And you remind me of him so much! It’s just that our situation—our ages, I
