Sunday mornings Aura rises early for the drive to Langston. She takes her time with it, rolling through the vacant Stillwater streets, dew runneling up the car’s hood. Skirt the university, over and across the railroad tracks, then right at Perkins Road, past the junkyard and the western dancehall, the tractor dealership and the high plains cemetery, its headstones leaden in the dawn. Another right at the T-junction onto Highway 33, the seedy roadhouse there looking like a cardboard cutout in the wind. Light poles fall away behind her into pink-bellied clouds.
Aura feels more substantial in the open, reassured by the widening horizon line, the fixed and rugged nature of the countryside spooling by. Her Sunday morning homecoming. Hints of new-turned earth and manure and fresh-cut alfalfa waft in through the open window and start her mouth watering. She dips her forearm into the slipstream breezing by outside and remembers schooling her little brother on the essentials of aerodynamics from the back seat of their grandmother Opal’s Chevy Nova, his little brown hands flailing.
“Watch me,” Aura had said over the windbluster, demonstrating a corkscrew roll with her hand. “This is flying.”
Aura was older than Carl by nearly seven years, and provided she could keep him in line the two of them were given free rein to roam.
“Look after your brother now,” Aura’s father would say. “You’re his keeper. Anything happens to that boy, it comes out of your hide.”
Sometimes they’d leave at sunup, take turns playing the good guy in Cowboys-and-Indians. Dry-gulching one another from the switchgrass with makeshift rifles or spears salvaged from the underbrush. They shared a tin-plated sheriff’s badge and when the day was done they’d trudge back home slathered head-to-toe in red clay war paint, ready for supper and bath time and the cool comfort of crisp bedsheets.
They outgrew the shoot-em-up games. And after Mom died, after their heartsore Dad had abandoned them to Grams, Aura embraced basketball. She was decent. Quick on her feet, quicker with her hands. Good enough to play point guard at Langston University for four years. She showed some of her moves to Carl and soon it was her little brother giving the flight lessons, tongue lolling from his head as the ball lifted him through the air for the basket. Like a puppet on kite strings. Carl stood six feet tall at the age of ten, and it was clear by then his future rested with the game. She’ll never forget the day he first beat her in a game of twenty-one. That grin high-beaming forth, as if from some radiant nuclear core of him.
Furrows of cotton flashing past the quarter glass. She crosses the rust-watered Cimarron River over a steel-truss bridge, the road curving down into Coyle, Langston’s sister city. Black clots of Angus are huddled amongst the scrub oak. Orderly columns of mature maple and twist-limbed elm overhang Main Street. Aura slows the car to a crawl and rolls up the window.
She drives two miles under the speed limit and counts three at the stop sign: one-Mississippi-two-Mississippi-three.
Sundown town, they’d called it. Block-lettered signage posted at the city limits here used to warn: NIGGER DON’T LET THE SUN COME DOWN ON YOUR HEAD IN COYLE. Aura’s father had still been in the picture. He’d huff and puff as they idled through Coyle, batten the car windows against the spittle that sometimes flew into the windshield with a viscid thook. And in college, when Aura and her teammates caravanned into Stillwater to watch the Oklahoma State basketball games, they’d detour all the way round to I-35 after sunset, loop into Langston from the west to avoid any trouble.
The day that sign came down—she must have been five years old at the time—Aura and her father sat watching from the Chevy’s hood as a lupine field hand uprooted the signpost with his winch. He’d pause once in every while to stare up-road and spit, pale hands fingering at a twist of chaw stashed in his bib pocket, mirrored sunglasses winking under a pale straw Stetson. Carl wouldn’t be born for two more years.
Leaving Coyle, Aura accelerates into the quarter-mile homestretch along Sammy Davis Junior Drive. The window cracked again, sunlight warming her face. A lone Hereford lows thickly at the thinning sky. She blows past the spot where that sign once stood. They’d parked, where was it, there, to watch it come down. Unremarkable little landmarks now, both smaller than she recalls. Aura sees them shrink, shrinking, shrunk into the cracked rearview.
The car rolls over the Indian Meridian and Aura is home.
Her brother’s been dead eleven Sundays.
• • •
“Tell me about the hairdo,” says Aura’s grandmother Opal.
“I’ll have to beat the widowers away with a stick.”
“Not too plain?”
“Not for where we’re going.”
“I can’t find the walker.”
“Next to the armchair,” Aura says. “Here.”
“Well.”
“Are you ready Grams?”
“Ready. Child. I’s born for Sunday mornings.”
“Let me help.”
“Don’t paw.”
• • •
The red oak pulpit of the Gracefield Baptist Church wasn’t constructed to contain pastor Nate Franklin, a man who routinely inspires visions of heavenly ascension in his congregation. The bachelor inspires even more romantic visions amongst Langston’s single women. Skylit by a polychrome stained glass window set back of the chancel, the pastor cuts a colorful figure behind the lectern, in chalk-stripe worsted wool and a bright orange bow tie, his shaved head buffed to a deep brown polish.
“People walk around, bellyache about tomorrow,” pastor Nate is saying this Sunday morning. “Fret over the rent. Wonder about the weather. Afraid of cancer. The days go by pretty quick, what with all that worrying. Pretty soon . . .” amplified crackle of the Bible thump-thump-thumping at the mike, “. . . BANG! You’ve up and died. Got so caught up worrying about the future, you done forgot to take time out for living.”
Pastor Nate sidesteps the pulpit. He rolls the broad beam of his shoulders and quick-skips down the steps after his words. He has an almost physical relationship with these sermons, these rhythmic syllables echoing above the packed pews. He’s left the microphone behind but still holds to his Bible. The preacher cradles its thumb-worn pages, parsing the phrases like a child working at a tongue-twister. Most everyone knows he can recite the scriptures from memory. But pastor Nate doesn’t like to preachify.
The good word can’t be heard from a soapbox, he likes to say.
“Psalms tells us ‘This is the day which the Lord hath made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.’”
We’ve got a go-ahead Amen! from Mrs. Thurston in the back corner.
Pastor Nate steps deeper into the aisle, paging to the New Testament.
“And Matthew says we needn’t worry about tomorrow.”
But Mr. Wilson, who can always be counted on to play devil’s advocate, blows out a Say-what? raspberry.
Pastor Nate retreats to the pulpit, taken aback.
“I hear you, Mr. Wilson,” the preacher says. “I do. ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ won’t pay the cable bill. Unless you’re Bobby McFerrin. Mr. McFerrin—are you sitting out there today? Raise your hand, please, if you’re with us.”
Wilson laughs.
Pastor Nate takes this as a good sign.
“Mr. McFerrin has left the building,” he says.
More laughter.
This new preacher won’t be bridled and this is why they love him.
Pastor Nate advances into the aisle, reclaiming lost ground.
“But I’m not so sure Matthew was telling us to be carefree. I think he’s saying: Be careful. Let’s read it: ‘Be not therefore anxious for the morrow. For the morrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’”
A sober-faced queue of Gracefield Chorale Singers stands crisply by in burgundy stoles, ready at the slightest signal to choir into ecstatic, four-part harmony.
“Matthew wasn’t saying let your guard down. No ma’am. Sit around in front of the television set all day. Nosirree. I believe he’s telling us: ‘You’ve got enough work cut out for you, just figuring how to get through this day.’ So don’t worry on tomorrow today. Worry on tomorrow tomorrow.” Pastor Nate advances further. “Worryin’ on a thing that’s out of your hands is a waste of your God-given time. And this is why I think forgiveness is so important.”
Pastor Nate treads ahead. He’s among them now, puzzling through the parable of the unforgiving servant. His free hand grips and lifts and dips, shaping the air there to a fuller articulation of God’s game plan.
“Peter asked Jesus, ‘Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Until seven times?’ And Jesus says: ‘not until seven times; but, until seventy times seven.’”
That’s right, says Mr. Harper.
The ayesayers grow louder as he reads, more sure of things. A restlessness is rolling through the pews.
The preacher says, “Jesus tells of the servant whose master forgave him a debt of talents. But then this selfsame servant runs out into the fields, demands payment from one of his coworkers. ‘He laid hold on him, and took him by the throat, saying, Pay what thou owest!’”
I can’t believe it, Miss Young says to her neighbor.
“Well now. As you can imagine the servant’s master wasn’t too pleased to hear about this development. ‘Shouldest not thou also have had mercy on thy fellow-servant, even as I had mercy on thee?’”
Say it one more time, son. Mr. Wilson says, back on the bandwagon.
If the Bible this man’s holding is a road map to their salvation, these sermons are the journey itself. Sure, the bright young preacherman can lose them at times. It happens. There are dead ends and detours aplenty on this trip. But with everyone pitching in to course-correct, sooner or later they’re holy-rolling down the highway once more. Bound for glory.
“Forgiveness is the flip side to God’s command not to fret over tomorrow,” pastor Nate says.
Another curtsy of approval, this time from Opal.
“It’s His way of saying: Save your energy for more pressing concerns.”
Pastor Nate claps the Bible closed, signaling Deacon Fanning and the Gracefield Chorale Singers to begin the hymn. Everyone stands, bodies and voices rising together into song.
What a Friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear!
Aura’s grandmother warbles at top volume. Opal’s holding her hymnal upside down but, no matter, eighty-odd years of repetition have burned the words onto the tip of her tongue.
O what peace we often forfeit, O what needless pain we bear, All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.
Aura can feel her own lips mimicking the music, the breath blowing in her hollowed cheeks. But the verses themselves fall to her feet, like stones in still water: Plunk. The hymns have been giving her trouble for some time. She keeps hoping, one of these Sundays, she’ll stray upon her old voice, somewhere here among the hymnals where she last left it. But it keeps not happening.
The Gracefield Chorale Singers stand down. Pastor Nate takes stock of the congregation one last time, making sure his message has sunk in, his eyes lingering for a moment upon Aura, who is studying her hands.
She’s forgotten how to sing.
“Let’s pray,” says Nate.