had been reupholstered, at frightful expense, with burgundy crushed-velvet fabric adorned with a fleur-de-lis pattern that matched the design of the library’s hand-painted wallpaper. Every spring at the Plainview Home and Garden Walk, people made a big fuss over those chairs, and Barbara Jean loved them. But they were hell on her lower back if she sat in them for too long a time.
Barbara Jean and Lester’s house stood at the intersection of Plainview Avenue and Main Street. A three-story Queen Anne giant with a turret at its northeast corner and six separate porches, it had once been called Ballard House, and still was by most of the inhabitants of Plainview over the age of fifty. It was built in 1870 by a local thief named Alfred Ballard who looted some of the best homes in the vanquished South during the Civil War and returned to Plainview a rich man. Mr. Ballard’s descendants lacked his business sense and his ruthlessness. They failed to add to their fortune, wasted the money Ballard had left them, and eventually lost the house to the tax man. In 1969, after he expanded his lawn care business to Kentucky and got a contract to tend all of the state-owned properties in the northern half of the state, Lester bought Ballard House for his young wife and their son, Adam. It was a gutted, falling-down mess at the time, and although she loved the house, Barbara Jean had no clue what needed to be done to put it back together. Clarice, though, had been raised by her mother with the assumption that she would one day oversee a grand home. So Barbara Jean turned every decision in the renovation process over to her friend. Barbara Jean stood back and watched as Clarice transformed her massive shell of a house into the kind of showplace Clarice would have lived in if fate, in the form of a three-hundred-pound, corn-fed Wisconsin linebacker with blood in his eye, hadn’t stepped in and transformed Richmond from a potential NFL legend into a recruiter at a university whose football glory days were long past. Out of respect for her friend, Clarice never accepted a bit of credit for her hard work. Instead, she patiently tutored Barbara Jean, teaching her everything she knew about art, antiques, and architecture. Between the practical experience Barbara Jean gained from tending to the needs of her extravagant old home and from Clarice’s guidance, she eventually surpassed her instructor’s level of expertise.
When she stood from the antique chair to stretch her lower back, Barbara Jean’s Bible tumbled to the floor. After she’d had dinner with Lester, counted out his pills, and put him to bed, the evening had become a blur. She didn’t recall that she’d been reading the Bible before she fell asleep. It made sense, though. She tended to drag out the Good Book when she was in a dark mood, and the shadows had closed in around her that night, for sure.
Clarice had given Barbara Jean that Bible in 1977, just after Adam died. Lester had become frightened when his wife stopped speaking and eating and then refused to come out of Adam’s room, so he called in Odette and Clarice. They got right to work, each of her friends administering the cures they trusted most. Odette mothered her, cooking wonderful-smelling meals which she fed to her by hand on the worst days. And, during the long hours she spent sitting in bed beside Barbara Jean while her friend cried onto her broad bosom, brave Odette whispered into Barbara Jean’s ear that now was the time to be fearless.
Clarice came brandishing a brown suede-covered Bible. It was embossed with Barbara Jean’s name in gold letters on its front cover and had “Salvation = Calvary Baptist Church” printed on the back. For weeks, Clarice read to her about the trials of Job and reminded her that the fifth chapter of Matthew promised “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
But both of Barbara Jean’s friends had come bearing medicine for the wrong illness. More than courage or piety, what she needed, what she would scour Clarice’s Bible forwards and backwards searching for over the many years that followed, was a clue as to how to get out from under the boulder of guilt that rested on her chest and forced the breath out of her. Well intentioned as it was, Clarice’s gift just armed Barbara Jean with a long list of good reasons