to marry you, Barbara Jean. I’ve loved you since I first laid eyes on you, and that hasn’t changed. We can get married tomorrow, if you want.”
She waited for Lester to think about what he had just said and return to his senses. But he just stood there. She could only think of one thing to say. She asked the question her mother would have wanted her to ask. “Lester, can you look me in the eye and swear that you’ll forever be my man and that you’ll always do right by me and my baby?”
Lester stepped up onto the porch beside her and placed a warm hand on her stomach. “I swear,” he said.
So Barbara Jean married Lester, the man who had the right answer to her mother’s question.
Chapter 28
Each spring, Calvary Baptist Church held a tent revival. It was a tradition that Richmond’s father started during his years as the pastor of the church, and it continued after he moved on. The revival was famous in Baptist circles throughout the Midwest. It attracted a huge crowd of the faithful every year and provided a boost to the church coffers during the long drought between Easter and Christmas. Clarice couldn’t remember a year of her life that she didn’t attend.
The revival always began on a Friday night with the raising of the tent. A makeshift stage was set up for the choir. Hundreds of folding chairs—ancient, splintering, torturously uncomfortable things Clarice believed had been designed to remind the congregation of the suffering of Christ—were brought in. Then there was a prayer service to get everyone worked up for the thirty-six straight hours of preaching, singing, and soul-saving that would follow. The revival culminated in a mile-long procession from the tent site on the edge of town back to Calvary.
Richmond’s status as both a church deacon and the son of the revival’s founder guaranteed that he and Clarice always had good seats. On opening night that year they sat in the front row. Richmond was in a snit that day over Clarice’s continued refusal to come back home, so Clarice sat between Odette and Barbara Jean and gave James the honor of sitting next to Richmond. The arrangement had the effect of further worsening Richmond’s mood. He sat with his lower lip poked out and only looked in Clarice’s direction to scowl at her.
Clarice still saw plenty of Richmond now that she had moved out. He stopped by the house in Leaning Tree a few times a week. “Where’s my orange tie?” “How does the oven timer work?” “Where do I take the dry cleaning?” He always seemed to need something.
If he was on good behavior—not too whiny or argumentative—Clarice would invite him in. Richmond was good company. And she loved him. She had never loved any man except Richmond. Well, there was also Beethoven, but he didn’t really count. The problem was, just as soon as Clarice started to think about Richmond’s good points—how charming he could be, how he made her laugh—he would switch into seduction mode. His midnight eyes would flicker on and his voice would take on a quality that made her imagine that she smelled brandy and felt the heat of a roaring wood fire.
But whenever Clarice thought about having Richmond stay the night—a pleasurable thought—an image came into her mind that made her push him out of the door. It was that picture in her head of James trying, and failing, to style Odette’s hair. That image just wouldn’t allow her to step back into the life she had lived for so many years.
It was nearly midnight that first night of the revival and Reverend Peterson was wrapping up his sermon. Reverend Peterson always spoke first on opening night before handing off the podium to visiting preachers. His sermon that night was a good one. He told the terrifying story of the Great Flood from the perspective of one of Noah’s nonbelieving neighbors. The speech climaxed with a vivid description of the doomed neighbor, knee-deep in swirling, filthy water, banging on the side of the ark and begging Noah to let him in. Reverend Peterson added color to the story by imitating the squawks, neighs, and moos of the animals. Of course, Noah could do nothing but wave goodbye to the terrified sinner as he sailed away with the righteous and the noisy animals.
The Noah’s Ark sermon was typical of the Calvary Baptist experience. It was not a gray-area kind of church. Every Sunday,