When I was just a little kid, we’d go out to Sandfly to buy boiled peanuts from the peanut man. Back then, Sandfly was just a barely paved crossroads, with the peanut stand and a gas station and lots of little children playing ball in the middle of the sandy road. Sandfly had been like that just about forever, according to my daddy, who said he understood the neighborhood was started by freed slaves who moved off Beaulieu and Wymberly and Wormsloe, the big plantations on Isle of Hope, which was just up the marsh road from Sandfly.
Today though, there’s an honest-to-goodness shopping center, and a couple of gas stations, and even a four-way traffic signal, and most traces of the old-timey black community have vanished—although the peanut man is still there. The Little Sisters of Charity school was slated to be the next to go.
A neatly lettered banner was strung across the squat two-story brick schoolhouse on Skidaway Road. “Sale Today,” it said.
I pulled the truck into the crushed-shell parking lot, alongside a lot of trucks and vans. “What time does the sale start?” I asked BeBe.
“Not ’til noon, according to the paper,” she said.
“Looks like they might have opened their doors early,” I said, gathering my largest tote bag, the one with wheels and a pop-up handle.
I was hustling toward the school’s entrance when BeBe stopped cold in front of a four-foot-tall statue of a nun that had been placed in a sheltered corner of the parking lot.
“Look,” she squealed, pointing at it. “Fabulous. I love it.”
“That?” I said doubtfully. It was a plain concrete statue, painted many times over, of one of the early Little Sisters of Charity, or the gray nuns, as everybody in Savannah called them. This one wore the old-fashioned white wimple and long gray habit. Her hands were clasped together, a rosary clutched between the broken concrete fingertips. She’d been installed in a shell-shaped grotto that had been covered with a tile mosaic, and a concrete pot held a faded plastic philodendron and some washed-out yellow plastic chrysanthemums.
“Do you think they’ll sell it to me?” BeBe asked, kneeling down beside it to get a better look.
“What would you do with a statue of a nun? You’re not even Catholic.”
“Put it in the restaurant,” BeBe said, her eyes sparkling with excitement. “Did I tell you? That hideous tattoo parlor next door is closing at the end of the week. The landlord is dying to unload the building. I’ll knock through our adjoining wall and double my space. Finally have a real lounge. Hey, what if I called it Little Sisters Lounge? Wouldn’t that be wild? I could fill it with all this funky Catholic stuff. You know, statues, candelabras, the whole deal. And the waitresses could wear short little nun’s outfits, but like, with fishnet stockings.”
“Sort of the neonun hooker look?” I asked.
“Exactly,” she said. “I’ve gotta have this statue.”
Something in the parking lot caught her eye. “Look,” she said, pointing at a big black pickup truck parked in the row nearest the door. It had a Marine Corps bumper sticker. “Look who’s here. Daniel.”
I turned on my heel and started marching toward my own truck.
“Weezie,” she ran after me. “What’s wrong?”
“If this is your idea of a fix-up, you truly do have the worst sense of timing in the world,” I said, feeling my face get red.
“What?” She seemed offended by the suggestion. “I swear to God. I had no idea Daniel would be here today. It’s Monday, Weeze. His only day off. He probably read the paper, saw the story about the convent closing, and decided to come over here and check it out—just like we did.”
I was not in the mood to deal with Daniel Stipanek.
Still, this was not a sale I wanted to miss. All my life I’d heard my mother tell stories about the little gray nuns. They’d come to Savannah from their mother house in Philadelphia shortly after the Civil War, to minister to the South’s underprivileged black children. The convent and the school had been built in the 1930s, with money donated by a wealthy Pennsylvania industrialist.
It stood to reason that the place should be full of good old stuff. And I had never been one to let a mere man—even an annoying man like Daniel Stipanek—stand between me and my junk.
“All right,” I relented. “We’ll go in. If we see him, we’ll be polite. But in no way will you give him any idea that I might be interested in him. Understand?”
“Understood,” BeBe said.
We pushed open the heavy carved-oak front door and I was instantly transported back to my own parochial-school days. Institutional green linoleum lined the floors of the hall, and the walls were dotted with faded pictures of saints and popes. The smell of disinfectant mingled with the smell of crayons and chalk dust, mixed with that peculiarly Catholic smell—was it the candles and the incense? Or maybe just eau de holy water?
The hallway itself was lined with scarred old oak pews, each one four feet long. The backs were carved with scrollwork, each side held a slot for hymnals. The sign on the wall said “Pews. $25. As Is.”
I felt my neck tingle. This was very, very good junk.
“I’m buying four of these,” I said quickly, digging in my tote bag for the roll of masking tape with the “Sold—Foley” lettering. “And if you really are going to do a lounge in the restaurant, wouldn’t these make great booths, facing each other with a table in between?”
“Great,” BeBe said. “Now what?”
“I’ll put the sold stickers on ’em. You go inside and find the cash register. Tell the person in charge you want to start a tab for Weezie Foley. Tell them you’ve already marked the pews. How many do you want?”
She did some quick math. “Six booths, down the wall opposite the bar. Make it twelve pews.”
I gave them a cursory glance. “Better get some spares,” I said. “The sign says ‘as is,’ so some of them probably have broken seats or something.”
“Sure, fine,” she said.
“And ask them if they have somebody who can start loading them for us.”
“Already? We haven’t even started really looking around yet.”
“I recognize a lot of dealers I know here,” I said, lowering my voice. “That big panel truck outside, that’s Zeke Payne. He’s a great big fat guy, always wears red sweats, summer and winter. He’d steal the gold fillings off his grandma’s corpse. Last year, at the church bazaar at Isle of Hope Methodist church? I’d found a stack of old Limoges plates, marked two bucks apiece. I’d stashed them in a laundry basket full of smalls. I put the basket down to look at something, and when I turned back around, Zeke was walking away with my stack of dishes. I went after him and told him he’d taken the dishes out of my basket, but he just ignored me. Finally, one of the church ladies saw what was going on, and made him give ’em back. He’s been pissed at me ever since.”
“Geez,” BeBe said. “You could get hurt doing this.”
“Don’t remind me,” I said.
I was putting the last of the sold stickers on the pews when BeBe raced back. “It’s taken care of,” she said. “Give me the keys to the truck so I can back it up to the front of the school. I paid a kid ten bucks to load us up.”
“Excellent,” I said, handing her the keys. “How’s the sale look?”
“Pretty good,” she said, holding up a beautifully filigreed silver orb hanging from a long silver chain. “Look. Isn’t this a gorgeous lamp?”
“Gorgeous,” I agreed. “But it’s not a lamp. It’s a censer.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
I took the chain from her and held the censer with my right hand.
“You burn incense in it, and the priest walks up and down the aisles, swinging the censer and smoking the place up with it.”
She took the censer back. “For fifty dollars, it’s a hanging lamp. I’ll put it in the hallway between the bathrooms. It’ll be great.”
“According to the cashier, everything else for sale is all piled in the cafeteria,” BeBe said. “There’s a mob of people in there. And I saw your buddy Zeke. He was shoving a little old lady out of the way to get to a pile of folding wooden chairs.”
“That’s Zeke.”
The cafeteria, as promised, was packed. It had been a small room to start with. Little Sisters of Charity School had probably never had more than two hundred pupils. Now the lunchroom was serving as warehouse.
BeBe spied a group of statues up near the stage. “Look, Christ on a cross.”
I looked. “Those are stations of the cross,” I told her. “I really don’t think you want those in a restaurant.”
“Let’s split up,” she said. “I’ll meet you outside in an hour, all right?”
“Fine,” I told her.
One corner of the room was taken up with piles of scarred desks being sold for ten dollars apiece. I wasn’t interested in desks, but I did find a good-looking old solid brass gooseneck lamp with the original green glass shade. The thing weighed about ten pounds, but it had that great 1940s machine-age look young collectors are paying big money for. I put it in the bottom of my tote bag. Next I grabbed a tabletop-sized set of card catalogue drawers, priced at a buck apiece. Nobody uses card catalogues these days, now that everything’s inventoried on computers, but I estimated the drawers would make ideal CD holders. There were twelve of them, and I managed to fit ten in my wheeled bag.
A woman I knew slightly from Saturday-morning garage sales was reaching for the other two when she saw me. I had never known her name, just the nickname all the dealers knew her by: “Early Bird.” She drove a battered 1970s era brown Mercedes and was notorious for showing up at sales two hours early—even for Saturday-morning sales that started at 7 A.M.
Early Bird’s face got a little pale when she saw me. “Oh. Hello there. I didn’t know you were out of jail.”
I felt like I’d been slapped across the face.
“Yes,” I said. “It was all a misunderstanding.”
“Of course,” she said. She gestured at the card catalogue boxes. “You can take those two. I don’t really want them.”
I knew what she was thinking. There’s that Weezie Foley. She killed a woman. Don’t mess with her.
Early Bird scuttled away as fast as she could, glancing back over her shoulder to make sure I wasn’t following. I tried to shrug it off. Early Bird was a weirdo. Talked to herself, always bought canned goods at estate sales. Who buys dead people’s canned goods? I started flipping through the books. After some judicious digging, I found a nice reading primer from the 1950s. It was the same Dick and Jane series my mother had used in elementary school—the same one she had taught me to read out of before turning me over to Blessed Sacrament School. It had a price of fifty cents penciled on the inner cover.
I stashed it in my tote bag. One of the shops on Whitaker Street did a nice business in framed and matted pages from old books. I could get an easy thirty bucks for this one.
It was just past noon, and the lunchroom was really starting to get crowded. There was no air-conditioning, of course, just a series of ceiling fans trying ineffectively to move the stifling air around. I grabbed my tote bag and wheeled my way toward the checkout table.
An older black lady wearing a bib apron sat at the table, manning an adding machine like she meant it. I called out my purchases and she tallied them up. “I’ve got a tab started, with four pews at twenty-five dollars apiece,” I said. “The name’s Eloise Foley.”
She looked up, startled, with a wide smile. “I know you.”
“You do?”
“I seen you on the TV. In the paper too. You the gal killed her husband’s girlfriend. And I say, you go girl! Teach that woman to mess with another gal’s man.”
“I didn’t kill her,” I said quietly.
“Oughta give you a medal,” the woman said, shaking her head. Suddenly, I didn’t feel like junking anymore. Other people behind me in line were starting to whisper. I put my money on the table, then walked away, craning my neck to look for BeBe, but all I saw was a sea of sweaty faces.
The hallway was cooler, and blissfully empty. At the far end I saw a set of carved doors, opening inward. The school’s chapel. At one time, I remembered, there had been wonderful stained-glass windows in that chapel, salvaged out of an old church in Augusta that had burned down.
Most of the pews had already been removed from the simple white-painted chapel. I found an old metal folding chair over near the confessional box and sat down. The windows were there, hanging from hooks in front of simple white window frames.
My favorite one was shaped in a gothic arch, with a simple rose fashioned out of colored glass, inset with sparkling prisms that caught the afternoon sunlight and refracted it into a hundred shards of light on the worn wooden chapel floor.
I stood in front of the window and looked up at it. A piece of masking tape was stretched across the bottom of the window. It had writing on it, but it was just above my eye level. So I dragged the chair over to the window and climbed up to get a better look.
A hand touched the back of my knee.
“Christ!” I nearly fell off the chair, but then two hands circled my waist and steadied me.
“Haven’t you learned your lesson about crawling out of windows?” Daniel Stipanek was laughing up at me.
I scowled down into his smiling face. “You can let go of me now.”