Suncatchers by Jamie Langston Turner Page A

schoolhouse and the farms and so forth, and he just kept driving so slow and easy, not in any hurry at all, and the lady started getting cold because she wasn’t wearing proper clothing, only a thin little gown. He’d come a-callin’ when she wasn’t expecting him, see, and she didn’t have time to change into something sensible. And when they finally stopped at the end of their ride, guess where it was? It was a graveyard.”
    No one had spoken for a moment as the four of them crunched their way across the gravel.
    â€œSo, see,” Eldeen said, “if Flo doesn’t go on and get saved, she’s going to find herself in a buggy with Mr. Death before she’s ready. She’s always saying she’s too busy for church, that Sunday’s one of her main crocheting days. But I keep telling her, ‘You got to stop and get yourself set to die before it sneaks up on you.’” Eldeen clucked her tongue and shook her head. “‘Jesus might come back,’ I tell her, ‘and you sure as sure can’t wear a crocheted place mat to heaven. No, sir, you got to be dressed in a robe of pure righteousness,’ I tell her.”
    â€œBecause I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me”—Perry heard the words again now, as clearly as if Eldeen were walking right beside him. He never would have expected her to read Emily Dickinson, much less quote her. It was funny how Eldeen’s voice, deep and muffled, sounded almost normal to him now after having heard it so much. It had seemed so odd only a few days ago.
    The poem was one Perry had known since high school. And liked, too. Dickinson had always been a favorite of his. He liked her elegant phrasing, her tight metaphors, her breezy dashes, her slant way of looking at things. In fact, it was largely because of Dickinson that he had started out as a literature major in college before switching to sociology.
    Other lines from the poem came back to him: “The carriage held but just ourselves / And Immortality.” The word civility was in there somewhere and something about “fields of gazing grain.” And later on, “For only gossamer, my gown / My tippet—only tulle.” Interesting. He didn’t know that he had ever connected that line with being unprepared for death the way Eldeen had. True, he had always had a clear visual picture of the lady in the carriage wearing a delicate gauzy gown and a filmy shawl, but he had never seen it as a lack of foresight on her part, and he’d never really felt the chill of being on such a journey so ill clothed. Probably a teacher somewhere along the line had pointed it out, but it had not taken hold. He had always been better at forming mental images than at feeling.
    But that wasn’t right either. He did feel, he knew he did, despite Dinah’s arguments to the contrary. But what he felt was so confusing and required so much work to figure out, and then even more to get it to the surface and express it, that it was easier to keep quiet and concentrate on pictures, something he could see. He used to wonder if he could have become a painter or sculptor instead of a writer. Cal always told him that his descriptive passages knocked editors dead. If he could describe things with words, couldn’t he probably do the same with paints and clay? It came to him now that all the scenes he pictured in his idle moments were like silent movies. He imagined people doing things, but rarely were there any sound effects and never any talking. In his novels, though, he had been shocked to discover that he could invent dialogue—lots of it—quite easily. The repartee between two characters in his most recent book had been so brisk and witty, in fact, that Cal had asked him if he was sure it wasn’t from an old Cary Grant movie.
    The church door was unlocked, as Brother Hawthorne had said it would be, and a door labeled “Pastor’s