Deckerville and Other Stories

Antique Roadshow Rose Marie Hicks powdered her cheeks as though she were donning armor for a battle. She stood at the bedroom mirror, all eighty-three pounds of her, wearing a strict blue dress with a long row of pearly white buttons down its front. Her thinning gray hair had been rinsed and neatly permed, and her lips were drawn so tightly together that they still looked white even under a coat of tawny rose lipstick. Oh, he would get his comeuppance today! She gave herself a last satisfied look in the glass, primped her hair with bony, arthritic fingers, and settled a small blue hat atop her head. With its sprig of wooden cherries, it looked like someone had overturned a nearly empty bowl of fruit there. Prepared now, she flung open the door. There he sat like a lump at the kitchen table, Darwin Levi Hicks, her husband of fifty-three years. He was reading the newspaper, as if he could get something out of it. It was a ruse, his wife knew, for after all those years she was all too painfully aware that he lacked the sense God gave a goose. “Well, are you just going to sit there?” Darwin Hicks was a big, raw-boned block of a man who had gained weight and lost weight so many times over the years that the skin hung off his frame like an over-large potato sack with underweight measure. It was as plain as the nose on your face that both God and gravity had let him down. “Sit here? Why, I’ve been ready,” he glanced at his watch, “for twenty-three minutes! You in there primping and painting yourself like you’re going off on a date.” Rose Marie scowled. She went to the table and seized his half-full coffee cup and carried it to the sink. “Date, date—that’s just what you’d like, isn’t it?” He shifted his bulk up out of the chair. “Bah! Are you finally coming, or ain’t you?” Her gaze shifted about their tiny kitchen. “Well, where is it?” He waddled to the counter, the exertion causing him to puff and hold his chest. He picked up a wrinkled, much folded, brown paper sack. She let out a screech. She crossed the room and buzzed around him like a fruit fly on an over-ripe melon. “You put it in there! You stuffed it in a ratty old grocery sack!” She tore it from his hands. She opened the bag and carefully withdrew the single book it contained. She stared down at the ancient Bible. “This is how you treat God’s word?” She shook her head in disdain. “Darwin Levi Hicks, you never did believe. Your only son, Johnny, a priest—and you the world’s worst sinner!” Darwin shook his head so hard his jowls flapped. “Oh, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny. That’s all I ever hear. The boy’s been dead for twenty years. Died of that, of that…curse.” “Don’t you, don’t you…!” She brandished the Bible at him. “That boy was a saint. A saint, do you hear! Why, someday the Pope himself is going to come here to visit. Sit right down at the table, there. Why, why…he got one promotion right after another until….” “The curse.” “Pneumonia. Says it right there on his death certificate. Died of pneumonia.” Darwin shook his head. It was like trying to argue with a chair, a piece of furniture. “Are you just gonna carry it like that?” He stabbed a finger at the book in her hands. “No, no.” She glanced around. Her eyes came to rest on the wicker basket filled with magazines and catalogs that sat beside the lumpy couch in the living room. She seized it and dumped out its contents. She flitted back into the kitchen and from a bottom drawer produced a bit of lace saved all these years from her trousseau. She spread the lace carefully in the basket and lay the old Bible atop the lace. Darwin scowled. He hiked up his pants and with both hands caressed his massive belly. He glanced again at his watch. “Well, are we gonna go any time today? You through worrying that book like it’s some sort of relic of the Holy Cross?” She looked scandalized. She shook her head. “I give up on you. I give up on you, Darwin Hicks. You’ll get yours the day you cross over. God will be waiting for you, and then won’t you moan and groan.” “I’ll moan and groan, all right.” He jammed a rumpled brown Fedora onto his glistening bald head. “But then I’ll be thankin’ Jesus, if he’s there, for getting me away from….” Her eyes pierced his. She slipped her arm through the handle of the wicker basket. “You make jokes, now,” she hissed. She patted the cover of the Bible. “You just make jokes now.” * * * Rose Marie led the way out the door of the second floor apartment. Darwin, his face florid and his breath coming in short, sharp gasps, followed in her wake. They negotiated the steeply descending stairs, opened the street door and stepped out into the sunlight. They almost bumped into Ola Kilgore who was hurrying down the street in the direction of the Wayside Tavern. “Oh, excuse me, Mr. and Mrs. Hicks.” The younger woman was wearing a tight pink sweater that left nothing to the imagination. She was wearing blue pants that looked painted on. She had taken up, Rose Marie knew from her recent trip to the beauty shop, with Norm Oberlin, the owner of the only bar in Deckerville. The old woman clutched the basket as if to protect the Bible from such a sinner. “Well, you might be more careful, my dear,” she said, sourly. “You’re not the only one uses this sidewalk.” Ola smiled brightly, the look of a woman with a new man in her life. She gave Darwin a mischievous wink. “My fault, my fault, Mrs. Hicks. I’m supposed to open up this morning. And I got to going on errands…and, well, you know how that goes.” Rose Marie laid her hand atop the Bible. She glanced at her husband and saw that he was eyeing the younger, well-constructed woman, with an appreciative eye. Sex! That’s all a man ever wanted. Long ago, she had put her foot down. On her 45th birthday, when he reached for her in bed as he was wont to do, she had in no uncertain terms let him know that a woman of her age, and station, would no longer be answering to that insistent thing he was forever poking at her. “Again, my apologies, Mrs. Hicks,” said Ola. “Have a nice day.” And with that, she hurried off down the street. Rose Marie again caught Darwin staring at the young woman’s retreating backside. She slapped his arm. “You just mind your eyes there, you dirty thing. A man your age! The good book tells us how our senses can lead us to sin.” Darwin gave her a grim and telling look. “I was just being friendly,” he tried. But she would have none of it. He hitched up his pants over the lower half of his huge belly. He looked a little like an enormous egg wearing a white shirt and brown slacks. His gleaming head—for the slightest exertion caused him to sweat—sat perched atop the egg, the flesh on the bones cross-hatched with wrinkles. He reached down into his front pocket and fished out his car keys. She thrust her right arm under his left and together the old couple strolled around the back of the building to the dark blue 1986 Chrysler New Yorker parked there. She waited while he opened her door, and then she slipped inside. She cradled the basket on her bony, drawn-together knees. He went around and worked himself into the driver’s seat, his enormous bulk, when he sat down, causing the car to sag precipitously. They drove slowly up Main Street through town, passing the garage, the hardware store, the beauty shop, and on past the stone facade of Saint Cecilia’s church. Rose Marie looked down at the leather cover of the Bible in her lap. It was ornately decorated, with gold leaf scrolls and curlicues. She felt a sudden ache in her heart. Her lips tightened as if she tasted something awful. Her dream, it had always been her dream—her son Johnny becoming the pastor of Saint Cecilia’s. Instead, they had that wishy-washy priest, Father Gregory. Been there forever. Weak as wash water. Why, he needed a committee to tell him the time of day. Johnny had been the sweetest, dearest boy. Sickly, he had spent hours in her lap. He would sit at the kitchen table and color, while she made dinner for—she cast a c