SIGNS AND WONDERS

(Lights come up on Shelby Jean, d.s.c.  She is sitting in an ornate chair.
She is dressed in a gold and purple choir robe that shimmers in the light.
Shelby Jean’s head is bowed.  As she begins to sing, she lifts her head and rises.)

Shelby Jean
(Singing a haunting melody that suggests awe and fear)

 “I believe in being ready, I believe in being ready
I believe in being ready, when this world comes to an end.....”

(Stops singing and removes a wad of chewing gun from her mouth and sticks it on the back of the chair. Then, she looks at the audience and speaks in a casual, confiding voice.)  “Harvey Melton, our choir director, he tried to tell me that I needed backup for this song, like maybe a few organ chords.”  (Shakes her head emphatically).  No way. This song just begs to be sung a cappella, you know?  If the choir sang in the background, that would ruin it... make it all warm and chummy.  This song is meant, now excuse my French, but it is meant to scare the shit out of you.  I’m going to sing it Sunday when Reverend Staffleback does his big “Rapture” sermon, and I’m going to do it like Elvis said - my way.  Even the good Reverend tried to tell me that he thought that me and Frankie Sue Revis ought to sing it as a duet.”  (Shakes her head)  “No sireee, bob.  I’m going to sing this one alone.”  (Removes the chewing gum from the chair and sticks it back in her mouth.)   “Listen to this.” (Shelby Jean sings again, her voice sounding eerily triumphant.)

 "Oh the sun she will be darkened, yes the moon she will be bleeding
Oh the stars they'll all be falling..... "

(Stops singing and looks at the audience.)  “Do you believe that?  That the stars will fall and the moon will turn to blood?  I do.  And it is going to happen soon.  Maybe this year.” 
(Chews her gum thoughtfully.)   “Reverend Staffleback says that people will be running around trying to hide... that they will “seek refuge” and there won’t be any. ‘Hide me,’ they will say to the trees and the rocks and the ocean.  But it won’t do them any good.”  (Shakes her head.)  “No place to hide.  Money won’t do them any good.  Uhhh, uh.  Power won’t help.  Beauty won’t manner.  People like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield will be running and screaming!”  (Laughs.)  I’m looking forward to seeing that.  Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor begging and crying!”  (Shelby Jean abruptly stops laughing, uncomfortable with her behavior.  She smiles apologetically at the audience, struggling to regain her composure.)  “Oh, hey, listen, I’m sorry.  Sounds like I’m lacking Christian charity, huh?  Here I am laughing at other people’s misfortune ...” (pauses) ... “but to tell you the truth, I feel like they are getting their just deserts, you know?  I mean, that is what the Rapture is all about.  Justice.  Everybody gets what is coming to them.  Reverend Staffleback says that those of us who are washed in the blood of the lamb will be able to sit at the feet of Jesus when the Rapture comes.  We’ll have a front-row seat.  The way he describes it, we will all be up in the sky, and we can look down at the damned on the earth and hear them cry and scream.

   The way I figure it, sitting at the feet of Jesus must be kind of like a trip I made when I was twelve years old and I got to go to Rock City, Tennessee with my 7th grade class.  You ever been there?  You can see for miles and miles, like I think you can see seven states from there.
	Well, that is what it will be like when the Rapture comes.  We can look over the edge of Heaven and see the earth.”  (Becoming excited, Shelby Jean moves to the edge of the stage and peers over.)  “Fire will be raining from heaven.  Volcanoes erupting and cities on fire, and everywhere, people crying, burning and screaming.” (Shelby Jean begins to sing.)

  “Oh sinners do get ready, yes sinners do get ready...”

 (Stops and speaks in a matter-of-fact tone to the audience.)  “The Book of Revelations says that a star will fall to the earth and from it will come a plague that will kill one-third of the world.  Reverend Staffleback says that the plague is already here.  Look what the atomic bomb did to those people in Japan and those plagues down in Africa.  And he says that if you don’t believe the final days are near, then look at the news.  Turn on the TV and there it is:  Fire from heaven falling in Iran and Iraq; volcanoes in Hawaii, earthquakes in California, famine and death everywhere.  Murdered children, drugs, devastating storms and a poisoned ocean.  I think it has already started and that the four horsemen are already riding.”  (laughs.)  “Scary, huh?

   (Laughs as she remembers)  “Oh, I gotta tell you this.  I was down at Walmart last week and they had these really cute blouses that looked like big sunflowers, and I was thinking about getting one to wear to Myrtle Beach next summer, and here I am checking it out in the mirror and looking at these white denim shorts to go with it, you know, and then, I remembered!  Hell, I don’t need that blouse, I’m  probably going to get Raptured this summer!  So, I tell the clerk how I had forgot about how the end of time was probably coming.  You know what she said?  She said, ‘But don’t you want to look nice when that happens?’  Yeah, like the Rapture was sort of like the Senior Prom, you know.  So I tell her that Reverend Jerry Farwell said that we are all    
going to be naked when we get Raptured,  so I don’t need any new clothes.  Yeah, according to him, we will just rise up out of our clothes.  ‘Nothing will be hidden,’ he says. ‘All will be revealed.’  It doesn’t matter where you are, at work, in the bed or sitting on the john, if you have been washed in the blood of the lamb, you will just (make a rising gesture) rise up like one of those helium balloons, leaving your clothe and shoes, monogrammed panties and Fruit of the Looms behind.  See, that is how the unsaved will know what happened.  Kids will come home from school and find Mom’s empty clothes on the kitchen floor.  Reverend Staffleback says that we should warn people.  I guess he means that parents should tell the kids that if they come home and there is a pile of empty clothes in front of the TV, that they should ......what?  Do their homework and be in the bed by 10:00?  (laughs, but struggles to become serious.)  People who are likely to be raptured shouldn’t be doing things like driving cars.  Wouldn’t that be something?  Riding to work with your commuter friends, and you look over and ... there’s the driver’s clothes on the seat, and maybe you glimpse his or her bare bottom ascending just before the car goes out of control and crashes!  (Claps her hands, enjoying herself.)  “Or say, whaaaat if ... what if you were in a romantic situation, like maybe you were with your husband and the two of you were .... well, what my Sunday school teacher called ‘locked in nuptial bliss,’ and it happened to him!  I mean the guy gets raptured and you are still there with maybe this empty condom ... and the smell of Old Spice.”  (Laughs and pretends to look for the missing lover.)  “John?” (looks under the chair.)  “John?”

   (Shelby Jean peers at the audience, realizing that perhaps she has gone too far.)  “Oh, I’m sorry.  What you must think!  I mean here I am talking about the end of time and the destruction of the earth, and the death of millions, and I’m being....frivolous?  Is that the word?  That is what Darcy used to say I was.  Frivolous.

   “I have trouble being serious.  Always have.  Like, I know it is going to happen.  I mean, well, it has to happen, but it is just more than I can handle, and so I get ... silly.  The Tribulations are upon us, and I am making jokes.  I apologize. 
(Pauses and then sings.)

 “Oh fathers do get ready/
yes mothers do get ready.” 

(Pauses again, and then, speaks softly.)  “The first time I ever heard about the Rapture ... I mean, really heard about how it would happen, Darcy told me.  We used to meet almost every afternoon at this motel out on the Interstate.  It was called, ‘The Joy.’  I guess it had to be a shack-up motel with a name like that.  I would ride my bicycle out and leave it behind the motel.  It was a real dump, but I loved it.  No air conditioning, so we would raise all the windows and let a nice breeze blow through.  (Jazz version of “For All We Know” begins to play softly.)  That summer, Darcy was doing what he called “outreach” from Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina - the place where he had learned all that there was to know about the Rapture.  July, it was.  We were lying buck naked, plugging quarters into the Magic Fingers, and he got to talking about how Jesus was going to come in the sky, and all those with the mark of the ‘Chosen’ which must be sort of like a tattoo, I guess, they would rise up and rush to meet him.  He said that there, united with Jesus, the Chosen would feel a bliss beyond all knowing,  .....  and then, I said something that upset him.  Something like, ‘Hey, Darcy, this is all the rapture that i need.’  That is when he used that word.  Frivolous.  ‘Don’t be frivolous,’ he said.

   I meant it though.  Lying in bed with Darcy Montgomery with a cool breeze blowing through an open window, I didn’t give a damn about eternal bliss or resting in the bosom of Abraham.  All I wanted was NOW with Darcy in the Joy Motel.  No ten thousand years of singing!
I would trade all of that for one night of Magic Fingers, maybe a little saxophone music and Darcy Montgomery at the Joy Motel.  But, I go along with Darcy’s Bob Jones message.  What’s it going to hurt, huh?
So, I got all serious and attentive while Darcy explained the Rapture, and the 144,000 who would be saved and how we would all carry the mark.  When Darcy asked me to pray, I did, there in that dark little room, naked and sweating, and when I figured it was safe to talk about something else, I said, ‘Come here, Darcy.  I’ve got a different kind of revelation for you.’  He laughed and shook his head, ‘Shelby Jean, you are so frivolous.”  (laughs.)

   “Don’t get me wrong.  It may not sound like it, but I have always been religious.  I mean, hey, you can’t grow up in Doby, Georgia in a three-room shack with a dying Momma, a preacher Daddy and a retarded sister named June and not be religious.  My daddy picked cotton six days a week, and he preached in an abandoned tobacco barn Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings.  (Sound of gospel singing in the background.)  He had a pretty simple message:  the more miserable this life becomes, the greater the joy in heaven.  He would tell his congregation that they should not only accept their miserable lot in life, but to glory in it.  Hell, they were lucky.  They were being given an opportunity that was denied the rich and privileged.  Every heartbreak, every broken bone, every lost limb and cancerous growth would simply magnify the joy to come for all eternity.

   “Did I believe it?”  (shrugs)  “I guess.  I wanted life to make sense, and I wanted the scales to balance.  I wanted a reason for why things were they way they were.  Daddy’s “suffer gladly” attitude did that.  I
was baptized at the age of nine in a muddy creek below the tobacco barn that Daddy had named The Kingdom to Come Church.  I remember that we all huddled on a big rock at the edge of the creek, all of us wrapped in bed sheet gowns, and Daddy took us, one at a time, to the center of the creek in the deepest part, and then he dunked us three times as he said, ‘The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.’  There were six besides me: two kids, a pregnant woman, two old maid sisters and an old drunk named Arlie Pitts.  There were water moccasins in the creek, and that worried me, but after Daddy flogged the water with a birch tree limb, they all left.

   ‘You’re washed in the blood, now,’ he told us, and being a little kid, I took that literally and I tried to see that muddy water dripping off of all of us out there on that rock, ... tried to see it as blood.  That night, I dreamed of water moccasins and blood.

   “Then, there was the mourner’s bench at the yearly revivals.  That was my social life when I was a teenagers ... going to revivals.  Folks that don’t know any better think that you only go one time to the mourner’s bench and give your life to Jesus.”  (Shakes her head.)  “That  isn’t the way it was in Doby, Georgia.  Most of us went again every year or two.  It was sort of like getting your drivers’ license renewed.  When I was in high school, I went every summer.  That is where I met Darcy.

   “That night, a Sunday, I was with Momma and my sister, June, sitting in the back pew of the Church of the Kingdom to Come and Daddy was standing behind the pulpit making announcements about covered dish suppers and fish fries when Darcy showed up.  He wore a sports coat and a red tie and” (laughs) “he had on Ray-bans!  Came strolling down the aisle like he owned the place and sat on the front pew.  Oh, my.  Darcy, sitting there with all those farmers in overalls and kids in tee-shirts!

   “Well, it turned out that Daddy knew who he was and introduced him.  ‘We have an honored guest,’ he said.  ‘All the way from Greenville, South Carolina, Darcy Montgomery!’  Darcy  stands, takes off his Ray-bans and smiles for all of us.  Then, he makes an announcement in this proper, educated voice.  He says he is ‘on loan’ from Bob Jones where he is studying to be a minister and that during his final semester, he is required to go somewhere and preach.  After church, I saw his car parked out under the big water oaks behind the Kingdom to Come.  A black and white ’57 Chevrolet with big tail fins.”
(laughs)  “Well,it didn’t look like a young preacher’s car to me!  Setting there among all those rusty pick-ups and junkers like a swan in the chicken lot.  There were some serious looking loud  speakers tied on the roof and some kind of huge, folding screen.  Well, this was definitely something different for Doby, Georgia.

   “Darcy came to our house for supper that night, and Daddy told us that Darcy would be conducting a revival.  He said that he had got a letter from Bob Jones himself, who introduced Darcy as “one of God’s soldiers,” and that he was being sent to Doby, provided that Daddy was willing.  He would conduct a month-long revival, using his God-given talents, to win souls to Jesus.  Oh, my.  Well, I looked at Darcy sitting there in his clean shirt, dress pants and sports coat; and Darcy looked at me.  I guess something happened then; something that would change my life forever.

  “ Momma coughed a bit, and then asked him where he came from, and Darcy said, ‘New York City, m’am.’  Said it with a kind of reverence.  Then, she asked him where he was staying, and he said, ‘the Joy Motel.”  June asked if he knew Perry Como and Darcy took her hand and sang, “Moon River, wider than a mile ....”  June got so excited, she spilled her ice tea and Momma had to take her in the kitchen till she settled down.  Daddy said, ‘Be careful out at the motel, boy.  You are staying in a den of inequity.’  Darcy smiled and nodded.  Right then, I decided it was time for me to go back to the mourner’s bench.

  “ All that stuff in Darcy’s car and on the roof?  The loud speakers and that big folding screen?  Well, it turned out that Darcy had brought what he called his ‘props’ and his ‘set.’  Being a native of Doby, Georgia, the nearest thing I had ever seen to a play was a Christmas pageant at school with everybody wearing bathrobes with towels wound around their heads. But the first night I went to the big revival at the Church of the Kingdom to Come and sat down on the front row, close to the action, it was pretty obvious that this revival was going to be ‘different.’

   “First off, that big screen had been unfolded and was stretched across the back of that tobacco barn with Darcy standing in front of it in black slacks, a blue, short-sleeved shirt and that red tie.  He had them speakers hanging in the rafters, and there was some kind of control box on the floor that he kept fiddling with, filling the barn with electronic whines and whistles.  There was a big microphone on a stand like the one the Blackwood Brothers had on TV, and when Darcy said ‘Testing, testing,’ his voice boomed and echoed through that barn, flushing a flock of pigeons from the rafters.  That is when I began to feel it .... something like electricity in the air.

  “ When I looked up into the rafters, there were some things that were not normally there.  There were lots of strange lights in black boxes that had little black snouts that were aimed down at Darcy’s big screen and they had wires that ran down the walls and over to Darcy’s control box.  Later, Darcy explained it to me... how those lights would gradually dim as he talked about Bob Jones University, a school where ‘Jesus was still in education.’  He told us how he had found Jesus at Bob Jones and then he began to talk about the lost and the unsaved.  By the time he got around to telling us that there were many lost souls sitting here tonight, we were in a dim twilight.  When I looked around, I saw my neighbors staring at Darcy Montgomery, hanging on every word he said.

   “Then, Darcy opened the lid of a big box and took out a handful of chalk, big bars of chalk that glowed in the dark ... red, blue, yellow, green.  Then, he began to draw on that screen, and he worked so rapidly, I knew that he had rehearsed this sermon many times, because the faces that he drew just jumped from the screen ...terrified faces wrapped in flames.  There seemed to be hundreds of people trapped in rivers of fire; others crawling right out of the screen, their hair ablaze like torches, their charred hands reaching towards us.

   Somewhere in the rafters above me a new set of lights came on - lights that changed colors, sweeping across that screen in waves.  Darcy later told me that those lights had a revolving wheel of colored ‘gels’ and when they touched Darcy’s painting, the colors glowed with a  greater intensity.  As the lights heated up, the wheel turned faster.  Eventually, the spinning colors - red, blue, yellow, green seemed to merge as Darcy described hell’s unending pain and suffering.  I could hear people moaning and crying in the audience, and just when I thought I couldn’t stand anymore, it ended.  The lights abruptly came on - warm, everyday lights and Darcy’s painting seemed to fade.  Myrtle Elmore, the woman who played our tired old piano, managed to  bang out a slow, recognizable version of “Just As I Am,” and Darcy Montgomery shifted from a shout about eternal suffering to a soft murmur of assurance and welcome.  Holding out his hands, he said, ‘Will you come?  Now, tonight, before it is too late?’  And I went.

“I was the first one to the bench, of course, and as I knelt there like a badly frightened stray dog who has been allowed inside to escape a thunderstorm. I trembled, when Darcy’s hands settled on my head.
Gradually, I became aware Myrtle Elmore singing in a quavering falsetto, 

"Just as I am, without one plea
But that thy blood was shed for me
And that thou bidd’st me come to thee
O Lamb of God, I come, I come."

I smelled sweat, damp denim, talcum and chewing tobacco, but cutting through it all was the tang of lemon ... Darcy’s aftershave
lotion.  I struggled to keep my balance in all of those shifting bodies,
and when I looked up at Darcy’s face, he  smiled and winked at me.  Holy shit!  Where did that come from?  ‘Welcome home,’ he said.

   “I remembered that sly wink for weeks, and even today, I still wonder what it meant.  Was Darcy Montgomery truly a soldier of God, or was he like the man who had sold my daddy a truck with a cracked motor block ... a slick shyster?

 “ One thing for sure, Doby was not the same after that night.  Word spread about the young preacher at the Church of the Kingdom to Come.  Suddenly, Daddy’s old pews and benches were packed from folks from other churches.  Half the teachers at the local school accepted Christ, and one night, the entire football team from Doby High School found Jesus.    (laughs)  All of those overgrown, sweaty boys, whimpering as they knelt at Darcy’s feet! A week later busses started arriving from other communities.  A TV station from Greenville showed up and after that, the mail began to arrive.  In the third week of the revival, Darcy was invited to preach in Gaffney, and when he returned, he told us that he had been offered the pastorship of the Balm of Gilead Holiness Church, and that the offer included a house and a modest salary.

   “I still spent a lot of time at the Joy Motel (rode my bicycle out almost every afternoon), but each night Darcy  ate supper at my house.  My sister June sat by Darcy at the table, with her right hand resting on his arm.  She said his name a lot.  ‘Darcy,’ she would say in a soft whisper, and then she would laugh.

 “ I think that my sweet Momma knew that something was going on with Darcy and me, but Daddy, who now saw himself as Darcy’s sponsor, didn’t have a clue.  Every night, he and Darcy talked for hours about the Book of Revelations, the ‘end times’ and the coming Apocalypse.  Daddy took an uncommon interest in Darcy’s glow-in-the-dark chalk and began to help Darcy sketch those burning sinners on the big screen. 

   “Before Darcy, the Church of the Kingdom to Come had never even had a collection plate, but it had one now!  Suddenly, there was a new piano for Myrtle Elmore and Bob Jones had sent a box of hymnals, and most wondrous of all, a church bell, purchased from a  preacher with a burned church in south Georgia.  For the time being, there was no steeple, but Daddy mounted the bell on a platform near the door, and rang it every Wednesday night and Sunday morning.  (Sound of bell tolling.)

  “ Darcy and me, we talked a lot now in the warm darkness of the Joy Motel ... especially after he asked me if I thought I might like to be the wife of a successful minister. ‘I want you on the front row every time I preach,’he said.  He told me what my duties would be.  I would take pamphlets to orphanages and nursing homes and carry copies of the Sunday sermon to the sick. I said, ‘I’m not sure I can do that, Dorsey. You know it isn’t my nature.’  He laughed, and said ‘You can still be frivolous, Shelby Jean, when there is just you and me.’”  (Laughs) 

   “Suddenly, my life unrolled like a great carpet, and I saw years and years of happiness ahead of us like bus stops on the road of life.

  “ I really believed it, you know ... believed that I would be Mrs. Darcy Montgomery.

   “When the revival was over, I helped Darcy load his car.  The speakers, the folding screen and all of those lights.  I noticed that all of the props and stuff was battered and beat up, and I said, ‘You’ve done this a lot, haven’t you?’”
“ He nodded.  ‘Maybe a dozen towns in Florida and twice that many in north Georgia.’
 And I said, ‘That’s why you are so good at it now,’ and he nodded.
 ‘Is it ... right, to trick people?’
   ‘You mean, using deception? ..... what some folks call “smoke and mirrors’?
   ‘I guess.’
‘How can it be wrong, if the end result is a soul’s salvation?’ he said.
“It was then that I told him.  ‘Darcy, I need to tell you something.’
He laughed and said, ‘Let me guess.  You’re pregnant!’  He gathered me to him then, just like he did that night at the mourner’s bench and said, ‘That’s great.’

 “ When he drove away, he winked again.  ‘You’re be hearing from me, Mrs. Montgomery.  Watch the mail.’  June and I watched that black and white Chevrolet vanish beyond the big water oaks and then reappear at the foot of the hill where the Doby exit joined the Interstate.  ‘Gone,’ said June and looked at me.

   “He’ll be back,” I said.  I took June’s hand. ‘Things are just beginning.’

   “Three hours later, Darcy Montgomery died on  Interstate 85 near the Gaffney exit.  A tanker loaded with ten thousand gallons of gasoline, crossed the divide and jack-knifed into Darcy’s lane.  According to Channel 4 news out of Greenville, the tanker exploded on impact and Darcy’s car was engulfed in a fireball that could be seen five miles away.  If it had not been for the license plate which was blown away in the explosion and recovered in a nearby ditch, no one would have known the identity of the driver.  Once the highway patrol verified that the driver was ‘a young minister, Darcy Montgomery, who had recently graduated from Bob Jones University,’ the Channel 4 newscaster noted that both Darcy and his car had been literally “vaporized” in the fire, and that a fifteen-feet-long stretch of Interstate asphalt had melted.

  “ I remember that I was on the porch when Momma called me.  She was standing behind Daddy’s chair watching the newscast.  Daddy was already on his knees, praying in front of the TV.  When I understood what had happened, I just wasn’t there anymore ... and I stayed away for a long time....slipped back into the dark of the Joy Motel with saxophone music and the smell of fresh lemon.  Two weeks later, when I finally woke up in the Buford County hospital with Momma and June by the bed, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be back. 

  “ Momma said that I had been ‘out of my head,’ and that among all of the things I had revealed, one was the fact that I was pregnant.  Then, my Momma broke down and said, ‘Shelby Jean, I’m sorry.  Your Daddy is going to preach a sermon about “your fall from grace,” and you have to be there.’  Then, she took my hand and said, ‘Honey, you’re going to be churched.’

   (Laughs and then begins to sing again.)

Oh sinners do get ready/
yes sinners do get ready/
Oh sinners do get ready/
for the time is drawing near.

  “ I guess a lot of you are from a different world than mine.  A kinder, saner world.  Maybe you have never heard of ‘being churched.’  Growing up in Doby, Georgia in my daddy’s church, I had seen it a couple of times.  Two of the people who were baptized with me got churched:  that pregnant woman, her name was Joannie Conners, and that drunk, Arlie Pitts.  I guess my daddy felt that the baptism didn’t take on them because no sooner had Joannie had one baby, but she was pregnant again and she took to hanging out in the juke joints out on the interstate.  Arlie couldn’t quit drinking, and not long after he was washed in the blood of the lamb, he started drinking anything he could get his hands on ... wood alcohol, shoe polish and Scalf’s Indian River Medicine.

  “ Daddy made Arlie and Joannie stand up in church and then he read their sins aloud.  Drunkenness and fornication.  They stood there while Daddy read what he called ‘a list of shame,’ and then they were asked to speak.  Arlie didn’t have anything to say, but Joannie begged.  ‘Please,’ she said.  ‘You’re my only friends.’

 “To cast them out of the church and deny them membership, all the congregation had to do was to stand up, and they did.  Daddy ‘cast them out’ telling them to leave and they walked up the aisle and out of the Kingdom to Come.  Both were dead within a year.  Arlie was found under the Locust Creek bridge after a big snow and Joannie drank a bottle of lysol.

   “Being the preacher’s daughter didn’t work to my advantage.  In fact, it just seemed to make Daddy madder.  ‘Whore!’ he said again and again.  He left the pulpit and came down to where I stood.  He walked around me like I was something diseased and contaminated, and then he gave a rant...a long account of how Darcy, the ‘false prophet,’ had corrupted me and had betrayed the church.  He said that God had struck Darcy down on hell’s highway and had cast him into a fire like the one he had described in his revival.  When he was through, he rushed to the church doors, opened them and ordered me out to find my way to either Sodom or Babylon.  I knew, of course, that he meant Atlanta, Georgia.  It was quite a performance.  Daddy had learned a lot about theater from Darcy.

   “I found a little cardboard suitcase that belonged to Momma, packed my pitiful belongings and I rode my bicycle down to the Ramp Cafe where the Atlanta bus stopped every evening. Sitting inside, I tried to put together a plan.  That’s where Momma found me.  She gave me $112.42 - her life savings from selling eggs and butter and made me promise to write her.  I caught the bus to Atlanta that evening .... a city that Daddy had often described as a place of ‘lechery and whoredom.’

   “I found the Langren Hotel a block from the Atlanta Bus Station.  It was  full of desperate people, and a lot of them had got off the bus just like I did.  Most of them were sick, drunk or crazy.  The rooms all had steel-plated doors, a bed tick, a lavatory that leaked rust-colored water and a commode.  The nights were filled with weeping, wild, senseless laughter and the shuffle of many feet.  I learned to carry a piece of lead pipe with me when I left my room.  I saw things in the halls of the Langren that made me wonder if God existed ... One night I heard someone singing a lullabye in the hall outside.

Lullabye and goodnight,
You’re your mother’s delight ...

  Finally, I got my lead pipe and opened the door and watched a drunk woman crawl through the beer cans and broken bottles.  It was only after she got to her feet that I realized that she was dragging something ... a little bloody bundle that bounced along like a kid’s toy car.  It was an aborted child.  People in the hall were laughing and the drunken woman laughed too.

The night was filled with sirens and  people pleading in the darkness...‘Help, me. help, me,’ bug I learned a terrible lesson in the Langren that kept me alive:
Mind... your... own... business.  Keep moving.  Mind your own business.

   “Some nights in the Langren, I  dreamed about Daddy.  In the dream, Daddy was always beating on the doors and when the people came out, he grabbed them and took out a piece of glow-in-the-dark chalk and drew a circle on their foreheads.  ‘You are the chosen,’ he would say, ‘Get ready to rise up.’
(Sings.)

Oh the moon she will be bleeding/
Oh the stars they'll all be falling

   “I was in Atlanta for three years.  When I remember that time now, it is like recalling a long illness.  I was in the Langren Hotel for six months.  Then, I went to a Georgia Home for Unwed Mothers, and after that I got a one-room apartment , put Darcy Jr. in daycare and worked where I could. From the Waffle House to the S & W Cafeteria where I made friends with a whole platoon of ‘unwed mothers’ from little towns in Georgia and South Carolina.  After work, we would sit in a back booth at the S&W and compare lives:  Amanda had gotten pregnant by her step-father; Shirley was a checker in a Piggy-Wiggly and the father of her baby was the manager who was married.  Jackie had an affair with her driver’s ed teacher in high school, but I was the only one with a young minister who had been vaporized.

   “Sometimes on Sundays, we would spend the day together.  We would wander up and down Peachtree.  None of us had any money, so we hung out in Piedmont Park, the library or the big art museum which really blew my mind.  Once they had an exhibit called ‘Bosch: Damnation and Hell’ and some of it was like Darcy’s glow-in-the-dark paintings.  There was one called ‘Last Judgment’ and there it was just the way that Darcy described it ... Jesus and the Chosen up in the sky looking down on the torments of the damned.  In the middle of all that fire were the lost souls, each in their own cell, just like the people in the Langren Hotel ... people weeping, begging, trying to hide.  That painting scared us.  Finally, Jackie said, ‘I’ve had enough of this.  Let’s go hang out in a White Castle and drink coffee,” and we did that.

   “It was spring of my fourth year in Atlanta when Momma came to see me.  My poor Momma with a terrible racking cough and a bloody mouth.  She sat in my little apartment that I shared with Jackie from the S&W; sat with Darcy Jr. in her lap and told me that Daddy was gone.  She said he sold the piano and the church bell; got enough to buy one of them revival tents, and that the last she had heard, he was somewhere in south Georgia with a box of glow-in-the-dark chalk, a big screen and a bunch of lights.
   ‘He can’t draw as well as Darcy could, but he is getting better,’ she said.  ‘When he puts himself to it, he can scare the hell out of anybody.’

   “She finally got around to why she came, and by that time I had figured it out.

   ‘I need you to come home, honey.  I’m dying, and somebody has got to take care of June.’  Afterwards, I walked her to the bus station, and went on to work at the S&W.  A week later, I went home.

   “It was tough for a while, but it didn’t hold a candle to Atlanta, Georgia and the Langren Hotel.  Eventually, I got a job waiting tables at the Ramp Cafe.  After Momma died, I enrolled June in a sheltered workshop where she learned to assemble mousetraps.  She is good at it and has been ‘Employee of the Month,” twice.  I put Darcy Jr. in the local daycare and started taking night classes at the local community college.  I’ll have my GED next year, and after Darcy Jr. is in school,
I hope to get a nurse’s intern position at the local hospital.

   The Church of the Kingdom to Come is boarded up now, and most of the old congregation is scattered through a half-dozen Pentecostal churches in this county.  Me, I belong to the Church of the Redeemer With Signs Following.  I got shunned for a while and spent a lot of Sundays sitting alone on a back pew.  Things did get better though,especially after I joined the choir.  Now, every Sunday, I sit with the Redeemer Choir behind Rev. Staffleback.  We are pretty good, and sometimes, we are invited to sing at other churches and at the Home, Sweet Home Nursing Home on Sunday nights.

  “ I like singing in the choir.  Redeemer With Signs Following is a big church with a hugh pipe organ, and the choir is seated in a loft above
the congregation.  Lots of times, my mind wanders while Rev. Staffleback preaches and I catch myself looking at the congregation.
Fat bankers and businessmen that doze off while their over-dressed wives smile vacantly at us.  Lots of teenagers that can’t keep their hands off each other.  I wonder how many have been to the Joy Motel.
 “But, there is something else that I’ve noticed about most of them.  They look smug and self-satisfied and many of them are what Darcy called ‘privileged.’  Big houses, expensive cars, safe lives.  I would be willing to bet that no one in this church has spent a night at the Langern.  I think about my daddy’s message:  suffer gladly, he said.  I don’t see much suffering out there.  Not yet.  So, I’m ready.  I’ve paid my dues and I want to see justice.  I want to see the scales balance. I can wait.  It’s bound to happen soon.

(Singing)  Oh there'll be signs and wonders/
yes there'll be signs and wonders/
Oh there'll be signs and wonders/
when this world comes to an end !

(Lights fade to darkness.)