Not my problem. I’d have to leave it to Deacon Washington and the Shiffleys to handle.
Of course, I wasn’t good at delegating.
I went back to my post just outside the tent entrance. I wished I could kick back and enjoy the music, but I kept fretting about Denton. Should I go back and help the poker players keep the trapdoor hidden? Or would my implausible presence at the poker game only make it dangerously obvious that there was something to hide?
Then, during the final verse of “My Lord, What a Morning,” I saw the tent flap pop open. Denton hurried off in the direction away from the courthouse, looking anxiously over his shoulder as if expecting someone to give chase. I waved, in case he spotted me, but he didn’t seem to notice.
Was something wrong? My anxiety increased when, just as the organ played the first few notes of the next song, Deacon Washington and the other choir husbands burst out of the tent.
My heartbeat slowed a little when the choir launched into “Blessed Assurance” and I realized the men were only dashing to take their seats in the audience before the end of the concert.
Of course, that still didn’t explain why Denton had made such a hasty and anxious exit.
“What’s up with him?” I asked Deacon Washington, who had paused by my chair before dashing for the audience.
“Got a text message on his phone and said he had to run,” the deacon said. “And he threw in four of a kind with the pot up over a hundred dollars.”
He shook his head as if deeply troubled by this suspicious behavior, and then hurried after the others.
I fretted all through “Blessed Assurance” and the applause that followed it. But I refrained from dashing into the tent—the Shiffleys were still there, on guard. And what if Denton had merely faked a text message to see what we’d do when he left, and was observing from some nearby patch of shadow? On the off chance that was what was happening, I stayed put and tried to look absorbed in the concert.
An expectant silence fell over the crowd, and then a rich, mezzo-soprano voice rang out with familiar words:
“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.”
Althea, Deacon Washington’s wife, and probably my favorite singer in the New Life Baptist choir. She wasn’t singing full out, but deliberately holding back, making her voice sound soft and hushed. I found myself holding my breath to make sure I could hear every note, which was silly, because even when she was holding back you could hear Althea just fine from across the town square. The rest of the audience must have been holding their breath, too, because all you could hear between the notes were the frogs and crickets down in Pruitt Pond.
She sang the second verse the same way—a lot softer than we all knew she could, and with no frills or improvisations—just an achingly beautiful rendition of the familiar melody.
When she launched into “Through many dangers, toils and snares” at the beginning of the third verse, the choir began humming along—soft at first, so you almost thought you were imagining it, and then getting gradually louder and splitting off into harmonies.
By the time they got to “And Grace will Lead me home” at the end of that verse, the whole choir was singing full out in three- or four-part harmony, and the bandstand vibrated with the force of the music.
For the next two verses, the soprano section carried the tune while Althea and a soprano with almost as powerful a voice danced around and above the melody. And then for the final verse, they just sang the melody, unadorned, over a hundred voices in perfect unison.
It was so overwhelming that the entire audience was silent for a few moments, and then the applause started, all at once, like a crack of thunder. I joined in, clapping my hands together as hard as I could and shouting, “Encore! Encore!”
After the choir had taken a couple of bows, the organ struck up “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and the choir left the stage in groups of eight or ten, each group coming to the front in turn, performing a few stately yet surprisingly deft line dance steps, and then taking a final bow before sashaying offstage.
“We should do this every summer.”
The two Shiffleys from the poker game were standing in the doorway of the tent, clapping like the rest. They were both tall—one probably matched Michael’s six foot four, and the other was at least half a head taller than that.
“I hope we don’t have to every summer,” I said. “Good cover with that poker game.”
“We came over to do some prep work for the new trapdoor, and brought the poker fixings with us,” the very tall one said. “And it’s not a bad thing he showed up—not a bad thing if a rumor gets out we’re having a big poker game under the bandstand. Bunch of us are probably going to be coming and going over the next day or so, and if we carry our tools in beer coolers, it’ll just look like we’re dropping by for the game.”