World Famous Love Acts

When those African hands appeared in front of me about a week ago, you might think I would’ve been scared. But I wasn’t, not for a second. I woke up that morning and there they were above my bed kind of prayerlike and attached to nothing but air. They were sugary brown and waxy like they’d worked hard for a lot of years. And when they opened, the palms were pinkish tan and dark brown in all the creases. I reached up to touch them but it was like there was nothing to touch, so I left my hand there for a second to compare. Mine are ivory-gray, and practically the only thing that was the same were our white, beveled fingernails. So far they haven’t done much except follow me around but I know they’ll do something. I have this meeting here at my diner and people expect me to talk and I don’t have any idea what I can do to convince them. Maybe they’ll be the most important words I’ll ever speak, so I figure those hands will pitch in somehow. But like I say, they haven’t done anything for a week but float. Right now it feels pretty much like I’m alone in all this. Then again, I’ve gotten kind of used to that over the years. Not that I wouldn’t prefer someone at my side now and then.

I can’t be worrying about having some company or what those hands are going to do, especially when this whole place is about to be packed with people wanting free biscuits. It isn’t as easy as it used to be either. I make them from scratch and that means the mixing and kneading and rolling out. And these knotty old hands of mine have just about given out for that kind of work. Which is why I’m nearly covered in flour. But this morning’s meeting is very important. I can’t recall a time when Blue Falls was in more of a fix than right now. All my boys who eat here are mostly loggers or truckers or some such and Washington state just isn’t making those jobs the way they used to. And the rest of us make our living serving them, so it’s like what they say about falling dominos. And now we have Straymark & Sons who want to come in and buy up the whole street above the river and put in a fancy new hotel. Just wipe out Blue Falls all together.

So that’s what I figure those hands came around for. They’ve been following me since the moment I got out of bed a week ago and they haven’t stopped. Even this morning when I was showering. But they never steamed up or got wet. Just sat over my shoulder, and I can barely reach around to wash my own back anymore and maybe could have used some help but I didn’t say anything. Then like every morning for the last week, they followed me to work all the way down Sturgeon Road even though sometimes it was hard to tell. There isn’t much light at three A.M. except maybe the moon. But they were there the whole time, moving and praying. I started to think it was an angel, but if God sent me one of those, why didn’t he send me something that talked? Though I suppose a pair of floating hands is a lot easier to take than a floating pair of lips.

Coming to work so early every morning has been a blessing whether I have a pair of hands praying over me or not. This little town means everything to me and walking through it while everything’s so quiet is a special thing. Though I don’t have children, I imagine it’s like watching your own baby sleeping. It isn’t such a sad little place at night because you can’t tell the difference between what’s closed till morning and what’s closed for good. Night time kind of makes it all the same and you can imagine in the morning every store is going to open. It’s a sad thing half won’t. The last time anything new opened up was a pottery shop. But that guy was crazy. Gil, and he took off after not too long. I think people gave up too early and now they see the boarded-up windows and they want to give up some more. But what they don’t get is that they’re giving up on each other. This morning is my last chance to help them understand.

It’s easy to figure out that these floating hands have come to help me convince everyone not to give up the town. Lord knows the hands haven’t done anything else. Though I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. They were an answer to my prayers just like Momma promised me when I was a little girl. She was as Missouri Irish as you get, but when I was ten and Desdemona turned eight, she sat us down and told about how she thought Jesus might have been black. “I just want you girls to know the world takes some figuring out and I got one thing figured. Those people that lived where Jesus did all got dark skin. It goes that he must’ve been dark-skinned too.” Desdemona and I didn’t know what to think until Momma smiled and told us it was a good thing she was telling us.

She took a folded-up map out of her pocket that she probably got from the library where she volunteered twice a month. She spread the map on the kitchen table. The whole world lay flat right there in front of us and Momma pointed out Jerusalem and traced her cracked finger with its dirty nail down to Egypt and kept going through some words that said Darkest Africa until she got to the Atlantic. “This side’s where they caught slaves,” she said. I looked at Desdemona and then up at Momma with that long strand of red hair that always got loose over her right eye. She was smiling but kind of unsure, like a baby taking its first step. “I’m telling you girls this because there’s some hateful things going on and I don’t want you to take part.” We didn’t know what she meant. This was before Daddy moved us all up to Washington, so we didn’t have TV and our electricity up there in the hills worked only half the time. Any radio we heard was a lucky thing. But Momma went to town nearly every other day and she talked with the other ladies and got news about what was going on down there in Alabama and Mississippi. I guess that’s what set her off, though neither Desdemona or I ever asked.

Momma’s dried up little finger rested on Africa all carved up in yellows, greens, and oranges. “This is the mother country,” she said. “This is where we all come from.” After she said this, Momma ran her finger to every spot where white people like us lived and showed us how it was likely everyone started out in Africa and migrated up to the other countries, getting whiter as they went along. I imagined people’s skin actually changing color as they traveled across the land. For a few weeks after we had that talk, Desdemona and I watched each other’s skin as we walked up to the schoolhouse. But we always stayed pale little redheads. We figured it was only a couple miles, so that’s why our skin wouldn’t change. Momma’s point, with the three of us stooped over that map, was that we were all from the same place. “No matter what you hear,” she told us, “don’t you never talk down to colored folks. You never know if you might be talking down your own blood.” Then Momma said the thing that’s always stuck with me. She took down our family Bible, which I always liked because it was covered in blue velveteen, and she set it right next to Africa. “You girls will have trouble in your life and when you do, pray to God and Africa.”

That’s a lot to think about for a ten-year-old girl but it sure makes a lot of sense now, seeing how I’ve been visited by these hands that won’t even let me go to the bathroom alone, and that’s one area where I don’t need God to send me any assistance. I suppose it doesn’t amount to much if they help something good happen. At least maybe point me in the direction of what I can say to everyone that will change their minds. I even thought that maybe they were going to make these biscuits I’m rolling out even better than usual or maybe I’d just have to fix up one batch. Then the hands would pray over those and they’d divide up to as many as I needed. I came to my senses, and I’m sure my old Sunday-school teachers would be surprised I actually listened to their stories about miracles.

But I was talking about Momma. There’s a lot about a person that just isn’t anyone else’s business and I don’t plan to make a secret about the fact that I have that trouble Momma talked about all those years ago. When she was dying, I took care of her. Doctors said her insides were eaten up with cancer. On the outside, Momma got tireder and tireder until one day she gave out and lay down and went to sleep. I stayed next to her bed all afternoon singing songs and stroking her thin hair. My hands hadn’t quite swollen up then and I kept my nails a bit longer. Her hair was white as can be and soft as running your fingers through flour. And that’s what I did. I kept running my fingers through it. Sometime late she opened her eyes and said to me very softly, “Madeleine, I’m going home.” The nurse was there too and she told me not to worry, Momma was delirious. But I knew she wasn’t and I knew what she meant by home. “Sing me my song,” she said, and then she closed her eyes and I sang “In the Garden.” And I couldn’t help but cry when I got to the part that says “he bids me go thro’ the voice of woe, his voice to me is calling.” And that’s what I remember, Momma suddenly breathing soft and my hand running through her thin hair as I stopped singing and everything was absolutely quiet.

I’m as old as Momma was when she went and I haven’t been to a doctor, but one of these days not too far off I guess I’m going to go home and lay down and just go to sleep like she did. Only, I won’t have anyone stroking my hair when I go. Certainly not Desdemona. She went off to all sorts of countries where she digs up bones and pottery and hasn’t been home since even before Momma died, and if you asked me a couple days ago I would have said I just as soon she never came home.

But that isn’t my trouble. That isn’t why my prayers brought those African hands. It’s all about Blue Falls losing itself to these developers. They like to say “redevelopment” but in my mind it isn’t that way if you come in and tear out every little building and put up your own. My diner is one of the places they want. It isn’t much, but practically everyone in town comes in at least once a week for breakfast. It’s the biscuits they like, and they’re always asking for my recipe. All I know is I can charge next to nothing for the eggs and bacon and ask an arm and a leg for the biscuits and they still have to have those. I took this place over from Jacob Velk nearly twenty years ago. He was the happiest old man I ever met and I found out why but I’m too polite to say how many half-empty whisky bottles I came across stuck here and there. I have a real good business and I plan to leave it to my little friend Patrick. I stay quiet about it, but he must be in his thirties. He came back to Blue Falls and started working here, kind of landed in my lap after he broke up. He says “partner” like that hides what he means but I don’t think it would matter much around here. Still, we don’t bring it up. The funny thing is when he was a boy he stole money right out of the charity box I still keep next to the register—and one day I’ll be giving him the place. I’m giving it, that is, if everyone doesn’t sell out.

Maybe I’m soft, but this town means just about everything to me. When Daddy moved us here he somehow fixed us up in a pretty nice house. Nicer than the one we had in Missouri anyhow. When we first rode up the house looked so tall and white and the apple orchard was full of small green apples. That was how he planned to make a living, growing apples. Of course, it never worked out that way. Daddy went to work at the dam and it wasn’t too many years before he died and the orchard never really produced enough for us to do much with. But Momma worked here and there and somehow we got by. Then Desdemona got the scholarship to go off to college and it was just me and Momma and Blue Falls.

I’m not dumb enough to think that everything will ever be as good as it was when I was a little girl, but it can be better than it is and that doesn’t include this company with plans for a big hotel and strip mall Straymark & Sons wants to call Blue Falls Riverside. They passed out plenty of attractive color drawings, too. Passed those out as if they were Santa Claus. The pictures showed the hotel with its big blue windows and log siding and the next-door mall, everything bright and clean and the Columbia shimmering on the other side. All anyone could think of was how many jobs they were promising. Before those hands came, floating above me like an angel that was too good to see all of, I figured it was going to happen whether I wanted it to or not. So many of the businesses have shut down anyway. Everyone is saying those buildings are just property waiting to be sold. But even though I may not be around much longer, I’d like to leave a Blue Falls worth living in. I have to find the right words for this meeting and if those hands are going to do something there isn’t much time left.

I thought the hands helped when they first came because I got the idea for these free biscuits. I was praying before I went to sleep, praying like I have all these years, just as Momma told me, and this time when I woke up there was Africa ready to help. So after I got over the surprise of it, I sat up and said another prayer and those hands closed up in front of me like they were praying too. I sat for quite a while trying to figure out what to do and those hands kept praying right in front of me. There wasn’t much I’d ever done besides the diner, no kids, no men in my life to speak of, but I know how to cook breakfast and lunch. I figured I’d put up a big sign that said Free Biscuits Monday 6-8 A.M. Even when I came up with the idea, the hands stayed around. So then I guessed they were here for some other reason and ever since they’ve stayed right in view off to the left a bit. Even now when I have flour going every which way they’re floating there pretty as a picture.

I wanted something nice for the sign, not some chicken-scratch like I normally do when I run a special. One thing Momma was always sad about was how Desdemona got into college and I got the backbone for restaurant work. I went up to Fole’s Electrical and Sign because Clarence owed me a basket-full of biscuit favors. Clarence is an old-timer around Blue Falls, too. But he hasn’t lost his stamina. He keeps up and ahead of his son, rewiring houses and painting signs. The only thing now is that he wears jump suits on account of his surgery. Still stands tall as ever, though. And his eyelids droop down slightly and so sweetly over his eyes. I told him to fix up a nice sign on a sandwich board that I could set out on the sidewalk. I asked him if he could do that and he just said “Yep.” I thanked him and he walked me to the door. “Real nice day,” he said.

“I guess so,” I said back. I had so much on my mind that I hadn’t even taken notice. We had one of those cool, cloudless days you get only up here. The kind where the sun seems like a bright thumbtack holding up the whole sky. Then I noticed those hands pressed tightly together. I wondered if Clarence saw them, but he never said anything and I was afraid they’d poof away if I said a word so I just shut up.

You have to understand this came out of nowhere, this asking me to go off to Bonneville which is just down the road a bit, but still. Clarence has been widowed nearly four years. Connie was a sweet woman. About as thin as I am filled out. And her hands were tiny as a squirrel’s. But she could sew up a storm. Made quilts and sold them out of Clarence’s shop. Now and then Blue Falls gets a tourist that wants to go out to the bridge, and if they stopped in town when Connie was alive, sure enough they’d leave with one of those quilts. But in all this time Clarence hasn’t asked me to do a thing. Come to think of it, it isn’t too often that I see him when he isn’t having breakfast on my counter. So I kind of glanced over my shoulder to see if those hands were going to be any help, and of course they weren’t. They just stayed there praying. So I said yes and we set a time.

Right about now is when I wish those hands would pitch in. Rolling out biscuit dough you can’t be too rough and you can’t throw too much flour on to keep it from sticking to your board or rolling pin. Better to have a bit of sticking than dry old dough. And I’m taking care of everything myself. All these years I’ve been saying I could use an extra pair of hands and here they are and they don’t do anything but float and pray. They don’t show much use for what I thought they came for either, which was to get this meeting off right.

One thing’s for sure, even after all these years, I like the diner best early in the morning. I have just enough light to see by and everything’s calm and kind of dark yellow. Maybe these empty seats remind me that I’m all alone, but I also try to tell myself about how good I’ve done since Daddy died, since Desdemona left, since Momma died. And I got the oven warming up beside me and I know people are coming in a few hours. So I go about getting my potatoes and onions chopped if I haven’t done it the day before. Put on some coffee and make sure all the syrups, sugar, salt and pepper, and ketchup are filled. And all these things start mixing together in some kind of sweet smell and I get to feeling hopeful and anxious to see who’ll be in.

This morning I mostly have to tend to the biscuits. Patrick set up everything else yesterday. But the biscuits are enough to take care of because I’ll be giving those away for free. Free for the price of listening to what I have to say about this company coming in and leveling Blue Falls. They figure in a year they can have most of town torn away and replaced. It makes me miserable thinking about it. Maybe that’s why I went ahead and spent the day with Clarence last week. Just to take some time not thinking about it. Because I know that whatever I come up with to say isn’t going to make much difference if people see dollar signs in their heads.

Clarence was very sweet. He brought me the signboard for the meeting, all done in big blue letters, clear as a dime in a water pail. He set it up right in front of the diner and stood back with his hands perched on the hips of his gray jump suit. “What do you think?” he said. I smiled and told him it looked very nice. Better than I could’ve imagined. Then we were off to Bonneville in his pickup to look at the dam. And those hands were there too. Except, instead of sitting over my shoulder they were right in the middle of the dashboard next to the plastic Jesus. If you don’t think there’s something uncomfortable about seeing a pair of praying hands right next to a statue of Jesus while you’re going down the road, then I don’t know what.

We were pretty much quiet the rest of the way, which isn’t too far. Of course it was the best part of the year. Halfway between spring and summer, so everything’s about as new green as it can get. And if you stand and be quiet you can hear the air. I’m not talking about the wind. I’m saying if it’s perfectly still, the air makes a real tiny sound like someone whispering, only you can’t make out words, but you understand anyway. Of course, in the truck we were whizzing by everything. There isn’t a person in town that doesn’t watch out for Clarence’s driving. Of course, he isn’t ever late either.

He’s a good man. A worker. You can see it in his hands. He doesn’t even have to grip the steering wheel tight at all because they’re so strong. The only thing is the nails are bitten back to the nub. And the strange part is he suddenly doesn’t wear his wedding ring anymore. I saw that right off when we got in the truck. That’s another thing I’m not going to talk about. But it doesn’t take much to figure out I’ve thought Clarence was very handsome right from the time I met him all those years back. I never said a word because he had just gotten married when Daddy moved us here and then Connie and I ended up friends. But Clarence is the only man in Blue Falls I’ve ever given a second thought to in that way.

As much as I care for Clarence, I didn’t need to hear him tell me about my own sister and I said so. Desdemona left us and I hardly hear from her except maybe once a year. She’s always off to one country or another, doesn’t even have a home address that I know of. I write her at the university if I want to get ahold of her. Whatever ties we had she gave up as far as I’m concerned. That may sound rock-ribbed, but I don’t mean to. I know Momma never gave up on her. And when we were girls you couldn’t fit a toothpick between us, we were so close. I remember around the time Desdemona started to develop the Turner boys were giving her a hard time every day after school. We figured out a way for her to lead them through our orchard so I could ambush them with some green apples to the head. The older one, Jacob, walked around for days with a big pink welt square in the middle of his forehead. He told everyone it was from playing baseball. Of course, Desdemona and I straightened that out real quick.

But things changed between me and Desdemona when she found those bones of that surveyor from the 1800s. It was an accident, but the newspapers made a big deal of it and she had that scholarship waiting for her when she graduated high school. After that she was pretty much not my sister anymore. She got lost in her books and in that National Geographic subscription Momma bought her. Then she went to college and that’s about it. I told Clarence all that and added that I didn’t need him to remind me I wasn’t getting any younger. “I have a mirror that tells me the same thing every morning,” I said.

The whole ride those hands sat on the dashboard praying and I can’t say I wasn’t getting a little irritated with the whole thing. What were they praying for anyway? I’m not one to look back and regret too much, but right then I was thinking about how maybe my life would have turned out different. If I was to do it all over again, maybe I might’ve married and had some kids. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to work so hard with the diner and taking care of Momma. Right about now I’d be having little ones calling me Grandma and that wouldn’t be too bad. And I might have made sure I knew where Desdemona was all the time. I guess right then I was wishing I could wipe the whole slate clean. Level it all and start over. I didn’t turn out bad, perhaps, just not as good as I could have.

But I can’t be dwelling on all that again even if it’s true. There’s too much to get done yet. The oven should be ready about now. Most people have sloppy ovens and that won’t do if you have something to bake. I don’t mean dirty, either. A little grease here and there never hurt a soul. But you have to watch the temperature. Momma used to cook on a wood stove back in Missouri and she’d watch the thermometer very carefully. She knew how to add a stick or two to raise the temperature and everything always came out perfect. She made a gooseberry cobbler that I haven’t tasted better of since.

So in ovens like we have now, you’d figure people would pay attention, but I can’t say how many burned cakes or doughy muffins I eat and I just shake my head. This morning I have my ovens set right at 425 and they run right to the degree, too. People always complain they can’t make biscuits like me, but truth be told, I bet they haven’t bothered to check their ovens. Carpenters don’t work with broken hammers. Preachers don’t preach without the Bible. But everyone sure expects to bake with sloppy ovens.

It’ll be light pretty soon and Patrick’ll be in and I haven’t figured out what to say. I look at those hands but they aren’t any help. “What are you doing here anyway?” I ask, but nothing comes back. You’d think they’d know sign language or something. But I guess that wouldn’t do much good either because I wouldn’t understand what they were saying anyway. It would be nice to know what they were praying on though. It’s like having someone knock on your door one day and you invite them in and they don’t say a word. Just stare at you. But I know they’re up to something. They have to be. Maybe when people come in and I’m talking they’ll turn into a whole body and say that they came to save Blue Falls. But when I think about that, I can’t make my mind up whether it’d be a man or a woman standing there. You can’t tell from looking, but I haven’t ever seen a man pray as much as those hands.

Now that I think of it, I suppose I have seen a praying man. Clarence used to be religious before his wife died. He even substituted a couple times when the preacher went to Seattle to take care of his folks. But Clarence doesn’t do much praying now. I don’t know that he turned away from God so much as he just doesn’t make a big show of it anymore. But he’s still sweet. I can’t think of a better day I’ve spent than when the two of us and those hands went to the dam. I had no idea Daddy worked in such a big place. And they let us walk the whole place by ourselves. Waved at us, and all of them knew Clarence by name. First he took me down underneath until he said we were below water level and I could barely hear him above the sound of the turbines. And all they got for light are ordinary old bulbs. If anything ever looked like it was about to spring a leak, it was all that concrete around us. There wasn’t a bolted place that wasn’t crusted up with lime.

I felt a lot better up top. They have a man-made salmon run but the salmon don’t come upstream this time of year so Clarence took me over to the locks and we saw the Kelsons in their boat going downriver. They’ve lived in Blue Falls about fifteen years. Good folks even if they are from California. They’ve done a lot for the town, that’s for sure. Got the county to fix the roads. Dick can talk your ear off and I suppose he jaw-boned the county until they got tired of hearing him complain and gave up and put in some new asphalt. The Kelsons got a very pretty daughter too, Jordan. One time she came into the restaurant and I was shorthanded and she stayed the whole morning busing tables.

So Clarence and I watched those heavy gates open up and the Kelsons boat slip in and the gate close behind them. I called down as loud as I could when the water was lowering and asked if they were coming to the meeting. “Wouldn’t miss it, Madeleine,” Dick said. “We’re going down with the ship, too, Captain.” He gave me a kind of salute. Then they were out the other gate and Clarence brought me over to the side of the dam and, darned if right in one of the intakes there wasn’t the biggest log I ever seen. It was about as wide across as a man from head to foot. Clarence called it a rogue. Said that happens once in a while and he had a few unrepeatable words for how much trouble it was to get those pulled out. Right then a breeze came up and I noticed something. My hair went every which way but those hands stayed right in one place in front of me. So I reached out again like when I first saw them and I didn’t feel a thing. Then I ran my hand between them and the sun and my shadow didn’t hit them. They stayed that same bright brown. Clarence asked me if something was wrong. I suppose I looked like a crazy woman. “Nothing,” I told him and I tried to smile.

Clarence and I had a fine day. We had a bite to eat in Bonneville and then we drove up to Pewter Lake so Clarence could catch a few squawfish to bury in his garden. He had two poles and some red wigglers in the back of the pickup, so I felt good knowing he planned to spend the whole day with me.

It was near dark when we got to the lake, which is high this time of year. We sat up on the rocks and cast our lines. Then Clarence took out a couple beers and we settled into catching some fish. But I guess I wasn’t paying too much attention to the fishing. Looking out across the lake I saw the house lights coming on all over the hillsides just as pretty as Christmas trees. I was looking at practically all the families left in Blue Falls. So many people have gone off. Lots of those to Los Angeles for some reason. But I was thinking about the families that stuck it out. How they’d be having dinner and then doing the dishes. Maybe they’d watch the TV. Maybe their kids would be doing homework on the kitchen table. It’s the kind of thinking that makes you feel happy and alone at the same time. I looked at those hands next to me hoping they understood what I did and that all that praying they were doing would come to some good. And I came to my own decision that when I got back I’d write Desdemona and say I needed her home for a bit. Looking out at Blue Falls made me realize I should see her before we both got too old to appreciate each other.

Maybe it was the beer or maybe I just felt comfortable, but I stood up with my pole in my hand like Charlton Heston in that movie. “Let my people stay,” I said and Clarence started laughing again. Then I raised my arms and told him I was going to part the waters of Pewter Lake and we had a good laugh over that too. We were having a nice time. Then squawfish started finding our bait, so we were busy pulling in fish and drinking beer and I forgot every worry I had.

I guess that day with Clarence was one of the best I ever spent in all the years I’ve lived here. I know some people can go a whole lifetime and never make a friend like him. So now that I think of it, maybe I wouldn’t want to start my life over from scratch. I suppose you couldn’t do that anyway and what good would come of it? Even if things are downright awful, there isn’t any such thing as really starting over. You just have to look around and make what you have the best you can. Maybe what I have to say this morning to folks is as simple as that. If they think things are going to be better after those bulldozers come in and flatten everything down for a hotel they’re mistaken. There’s plenty good about Blue Falls, mostly the people, and a lot of us have forgotten that. It isn’t an inspirational speech but I can’t think of a truer thing I might say.

So I finally come up with some words and none-too-soon because my hands are about give out and the door’ll be open soon. But I’ll keep going. I always do. I have a lot of biscuitmaking days ahead of me but like I said before, it isn’t too hard a thing to imagine I might walk back home one of these times and lay my head down just like Momma did when she took ill. And maybe there won’t be anyone to sit by me and run their fingers through my hair but that won’t mean it wasn’t a good life.

Now I look at those hands floating as steady and prayerful as always and I think I have them figured out. They were praying all this time for me to find the right words to tell Blue Falls and I guess I have. Seems like now they might disappear or something but they’re still here, maybe just for companionship, even as I’m cutting out the last of the biscuits, and all of it feels right. We spend so much of our lives stiff-arming the world until we realize that what a person needs is a feeling there’s someone or something watching out for them. And that’s just where I have to start today when I give my talk. At the same time I’m going to say that maybe we don’t examine ourselves in the mirror enough and ask Who am I looking out for? I guess my answer’s walking through the door this morning—times a couple dozen people. And just thinking about that is enough to keep a body from feeling alone. But before all that, before the clacking of plates and silverware, before all the commotion, it’s just me and those hands and the diner and everything’s perfectly quiet.