After the concert, crescendos of “Hallelujah” continue to resonate within her. She asks Nels for permission to walk the six blocks home rather than ride in the car.
Her shiny black shoes step lightly along the wet pavement, skirting narrow, hurrying rivers of melting snow. The exquisite melodies will soon vanish into the spring air, no matter how fervently she bids them stay. She walks the quiet Sunday streets, palm branch in hand, embracing the aura of the music, embracing the closeness of God.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
APRIL
Judy Bellingham’s light blue eyes are the oversized, pop-out kind that look like they might when she’s afraid.
“Saffee, why is your mother yelling so much?” Judy’s voice is muffled from under a pillow. “I want to go home!” She pulls up her head.
“You can’t,” Saffee says, watching Judy’s eyes. “Your parents are gone. Your mom wants you to stay here overnight.”
“I don’t care, I want to go!”
“Judy, I can’t sleep with the light on,” says April from the floor where she has made her bed, pretending she is venturing to the center of the earth.
“When I’m scared I gotta have the light on,” the guest whines.
The verbal altercation between Joann and Nels continues through the closed bedroom door.
The next day, Mrs. Bellingham retrieves Judy from the inhospitable home. When they are gone, Nels draws Saffee and April aside. “Don’t be bringin’ people in our house,” he says. “It’s not a good idea.”
“Look at me, I’m Queen Esther!” April sings, waltzing through the living room. A strap of Joann’s old pink nightgown clings to her small right shoulder; the other side has slipped to her elbow. A gauzy purple scarf flutters from her blond curls. “I’m Queen Esther, the most bea-oo-tiful woman in the whole Bible!” Joann and April share a love for theatricality.
“Oh brother, April.” Saffee sits on the living room floor braiding a bracelet of plastic gimp. She snaps the green-and-white laces in her sister’s direction as April lifts the nightgown high for a pirouette. “Get outta here! You’re acting dumb again. Mother!” Saffee yells. “April’s annoying me!” She often whines this refrain to no avail.
She knows rudeness toward April is not right, but it’s a habit she has little inclination to change, since it usually goes unnoticed by her parents. On that snowy afternoon last winter, Miss Eilert said that God’s love can change people’s hearts. Learning what this means is taking Saffee some time.
Nels is known in the coffee shops of Miller’s Ford for his jovial, jester-like personality. Yet at home, spontaneity in his daughters has never been appreciated. “Don’t make noise; don’t make a mess; don’t get your mother upset,” he warns. The last is the reason for the first two. Saffee long ago bought into his rules, even though it is obvious their mother is charmed, not disturbed, by her little sister’s antics. Antics that continue to befuddle Nels.
“Esther,” ignoring Saffee’s exasperation, prances out the door and across the porch to the front yard, in search of neighborhood children to join her fun.
Let chatterbox April be entertaining, enjoying quantities of attention and affection at home and elsewhere. Saffee needs none of it. She can’t control her unpredictable family environment, but to a certain extent, she can control April. When parents are elsewhere, Saffee is not beyond giving her sister a lecture and a shove. But each rejection only seems to encourage April to annoy the one who refuses to give her adulation.
On a serene, small-town evening in late summer, dark green maple leaves whisper and swish against the side porch screens as if to celebrate the orange and magenta sunset that stretches along the river beyond them. The sounds of baseball faintly ebb and flow from Nels’s radio in the kitchen. Saffee is curled up in a wicker porch chair with her current book, The Wizard of Oz. Books are her friends. She lives within their characters, looking for her own life. Such fantasy stays in her head and is not “performed” as April would.
From the corner of her eye Saffee sees shadowy movement. The bent form of Lena Bevins slowly climbs four steps and peers through the screen door. Saffee has never been near this woman who lives alone across the street. Both she and her tall, narrow house of weathered gray boards are easily ignored. In summer, if one would notice, Lena, day in and day out, pulls weeds and gathers produce in her half-acre garden of vegetables and flowers. Few know, or stop to wonder, what Lena does in winter.
“I come to take April for a walk,” Lena says through the screen. Her monotone is deep, her shy grin reveals gaps between teeth.