Suncatchers Read online

  Suncatchers

  Jamie Langston Turner

  © 1995, 2000 by Jamie Langston Turner

  Suncatchers is a revision of The Suncatchers published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson, Inc., Publishers, 1995.

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  Ebook edition created 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-6264-6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  Unless otherwise identified, Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.

  Cover design by Lookout Design, Inc.

  TO DANIEL

  As the apple tree among

  the trees of the wood, so

  is my beloved among the sons.

  SONG OF SOLOMON 2:3

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  Candlelight

  1. A Cold, Dark Place

  2. Little Brick Boxes

  3. Decorative Trinkets

  4. Leftover Puritans

  5. A Painted Still Life

  6. A Heart Problem

  7. A Buggy Ride

  8. Kitchen Work

  9. The Middle of a Lake

  10. A Slow Procession

  11. The Sounds of Supper

  12. Her Small White Face

  13. Unique Angles

  Part Two

  Firelight

  14. Charred Remains

  15. A Beam of Light

  16. Bursts of Color

  17. The Mercy of Women

  18. The Hourglass of Time

  19. Fractured Blues and Purples

  20. A Broader Picture

  21. A Mirror of Heaven

  22. The Fifth Day of Creation

  23. One of the Best Gifts

  Part Three

  Starlight

  24. Early Afternoon

  25. Dividing Lines

  26. All Kinds of Wonders

  27. A Voice Clear and True

  28. Cloudy Nights

  29. The Corners of His Memory

  30. An Open Door

  31. A Prayer Circle

  32. The Same Stars

  Part Four

  Sunlight

  33. Another Lesson

  34. One Happy Wife

  35. Some Kind of Trouble

  36. Shining Trophies

  37. A Real Eye for Quality

  38. The Pale Glow of Sunrise

  39. A Man of Sorrows

  40. The New Year

  Group Discussion Questions

  About the Author

  Other Books by Author

  Back Cover

  Part One

  Candlelight

  When his candle shined upon my head, and when by his light I walked through darkness.

  Job 29:3

  1

  A Cold, Dark Place

  Perry had opened a dozen boxes hoping they’d be this one. He didn’t know why he should feel so relieved, but he did. He knew he should have labeled all the boxes on the outside: Office Supplies, Glassware, Linens, etc. That’s what Dinah would have recommended if she’d been supervising the packing. But she hadn’t been. She had sorted through everything in the other house, though, and stacked his allotment against a wall. She’d even gotten empty boxes from somewhere and set them along the same wall. Dinah could be very efficient when she had something she wanted badly enough. Then she had taken Troy and gone to her mother’s while Perry cleared out.

  He couldn’t remember much about the actual packing except for the thoughts that kept whirling around inside his head each time he folded down the four flaps of another box top. This can’t be happening to me. I’m not really leaving. It’s all a dream. But when the dream ended, he woke up and found it was all true. And now here he was hundreds of miles from home, unpacking those same boxes, and still numb from the shock of it all.

  He reached down inside the box and carefully lifted an object wrapped in a blue-flowered pillowcase. He could feel the heavy, hard roundness of the glass globe and sense the gentle sloshing of water inside. He unwrapped it and spread his palm over the smooth dome. He had always called it a music box, but Dinah had always said no, that a box was square or rectangular, so this was a musical snow globe. Anyway, it played a tune when the knob was wound and created a snowstorm when turned upside down. It hadn’t been in the pile of things Dinah had set aside for him, but he had taken it anyway. It wasn’t hard to imagine how furious she had been when she noticed it missing.

  He was still holding the music box when he heard the soft, regular swish of sweeping next door. He walked to the kitchen window and looked out. That must be the woman his sister Beth had talked so much about—Jewel Blanchard. Taller than he had imagined and a little younger. Or younger-looking. But it was hard to tell from this distance.

  He knew for a fact she was forty-five. That’s what Beth had told him. He realized now that he had already given her a face and a size and even a personality over the past month or so, and it startled him somewhat that he had been so far off in her looks. He wondered what she’d do if he opened the window and yelled, “Hey, you’re not supposed to look like that!” Perry couldn’t remember when he had started doing this—wondering how people would respond to startling statements. It had become so much a habit with him that sometimes he had to stop and think very hard to remember if he had only imagined saying something or if perhaps he really had. One of his worst fears was that someday he was actually going to carry through and humiliate himself.

  Sometimes in a concert or a crowded store, he would get a panicky feeling imagining the shocked expressions, the sharp intakes of breath if he were to suddenly stand on a chair and shout something crazy. He found himself more and more wanting to know if the responses would be as dramatic as he imagined. Maybe everybody would simply look straight past him as if nothing had happened. Or maybe his outburst would trigger a whole series of similar responses from those around him. Maybe everybody was just waiting for someone else to start it all. Maybe now if he yanked open the window and told Jewel she wasn’t supposed to look like that, she’d just holler back, “Yeah, well, the world is hanging in space by a single cat whisker!” and calmly go on sweeping.

  He wished she would lift her head so he could see her better. She had her hood up, but the hair he could see looked dark, almost black. He had pictured it as lighter, a sandy brown going to gray.

  He watched her make her way slowly down the driveway. The broom was a sorry excuse, with only a short stubble of straw left on it. She needed a new one. Maybe he should get her one after his year here was up, as a parting gift when he was ready to move on. But by then she would know what he had been up to, and she might not want a broom or anything else from him. She might do like Dinah and bring over a load of empty boxes, then order him to pack up and leave the neighborhood.

  But he had nothing to worry about, he told himself again. He had kept reminding himself of that as he drove all day yesterday. What he was doing wasn’t wrong. Not at all. He was going to study these people and then write about them, s
imple as that. He’d done it before and had never suffered any pangs of conscience. That’s what research was all about, and that’s what writers all over the world did. They studied people just as investors studied the stock market. Anyway, he would tell these people sooner or later what he was doing, but not right off. He wanted them to act natural as long as possible.

  He used to envy writers, like Charles Kuralt, who were always aboveboard with the people they interviewed. Whenever somebody like Kuralt sat and chatted with, say, a country fiddler in Galax, Virginia, or ate hot tamales with the cook at Bigger’s in Imogene, Mississippi, or toured Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with a man who used to make bricks by hand, six at a time, he always told them up front about the book he was writing. He didn’t go around on false pretenses, encouraging people to talk freely, casually, innocently, then spring the news on them later, after he had his story.

  But, of course, that was a different kind of book altogether—a collection of journalistic human-interest stories, not at all on the same level with true sociological research. Whereas Kuralt was selecting his data and rearranging it to tell a story, almost picaresque-style, a sociologist had to collect and organize all the facts, regardless of whether the subjects or the readers liked the picture that resulted. What would it be like, Perry had wondered more than once during his early days of research, to be able to relax and just write whatever struck his fancy?

  The woman outside stooped to pick up something in the driveway, turned it over in her hand, then slipped it inside her coat pocket and resumed her sweeping. Watching her from behind the curtain, Perry couldn’t help wondering how she would fit into the book he was going to write. For the first time he felt the faintest stirring of interest in the project—the moment he used to call “the spark,” a moment that had always happened much earlier during the research for his other books.

  But he was rusty at all this. It had been eight years since he had last done this kind of writing, although at one time he had intended to make it his life’s work. “A brilliant ethnographer, all the more phenomenal for his youth,” he’d been praised on the dust jacket of his third book, the one titled New Verena, in which he had revealed the inner workings of a tiny community of Lithuanians in central Illinois. “Scholarly yet delightfully readable,” another critic had written of the book. He clearly remembered Dinah holding the first copy of the book reverently in her hands when they received it from the publisher. “Book number three,” she had said, leafing through its pages. “What does it feel like,” she had asked him, “to be successful?” The question had embarrassed him, but she had kept pressing it. “No, come on, now, tell me. How does it feel to be a big hit?”

  A big hit? His books maybe, not him. It was funny—he never associated his writing with himself, which he realized in the split second before he opened his mouth to answer Dinah would be impossible to explain. When he wrote, he wasn’t Perry Warren. Perry Warren was a quiet, tongue-tied, nondescript sort of person you wouldn’t even notice if you passed on the street. Perry Warren was not a big hit. But there stood Dinah, sincerely believing she was married to someone famous, someone from whom she expected a breezy, pithy answer to her question.

  So he had taken refuge in comedy, the kind of impromptu bluster he could pull off only with Dinah. “It feels, my dear, as if you’re dangling helplessly at the end of a fraying rope above raging waters teeming with starving crocodiles. If it’s real, you face the burden of being expected to do something heroic, and if you discover it’s all a dream, you drive yourself insane wondering what you would do if it really were true.” And Dinah had laughed as always, then set about cutting the celebration cake, which she had made and decorated to look like a large open book, topped with small white candles arranged to form the numeral 3.

  But a few days after the last piece of cake had been eaten, he woke up and realized he had lost the thrill of it all. How it had happened he had no idea. He could well remember his first book—waking early every morning, skipping meals, walking through rain and snow, worrying Dinah sick with his single-mindedness, all for the joy of recording every observable detail at Lifegate, a private preschool for children with orthopedic disabilities. Then the second book published three years later—a study of an artists’ colony outside Beloit called The Lemon Grove—had absorbed his interest just as much. Then New Verena two years later. Then it was over. If it had been a telegram, his research career would have read Lifegate, The Lemon Grove, New Verena, STOP.

  In less time than it takes to blow out a candle, the desire was gone. His work began to seem inconsequential. Not that the lives of the children, the artists, or the Lithuanians seemed trivial, but his writing about them had lost its purpose. What difference was he making going about observing these subcultures and reporting on everything from toilet schedules to spices used in cooking to experimental sculptures made out of things like the pull-tabs of soda cans? He saw himself as sneaky and nosy—a busybody peering over people’s shoulders, slinking around corners, eavesdropping, yet unable to answer the most elemental of questions: Why?

  Shortly after his third book, he had been approached about coauthoring a textbook for college sociology and had, in fact, sat in on a preliminary meeting before he bowed out, unable to tolerate the thought of systematizing all that information. As the other sociologist—a small, intense, bespectacled woman in her late fifties named Natalie Reinhardt—had sat across the table from him excitedly laying out a chapter outline for the textbook, Perry had been overcome with boredom. Why would he want to spend two years of his life working on a book to introduce students to a field of study with which he himself was so thoroughly disenchanted?

  He had let Natalie get all the way to chapter nine before he said anything. She was just saying, “And then that chapter will lead very naturally into the next one on ethnic relations, and I do feel it needs to be a separate chapter, not just an addendum to the one on social strata” when Perry had politely interrupted. “Excuse me,” he had said, “I don’t believe I can do this,” and he had simply gotten up and left the room. Natalie had gone on to write the book alone, and he had heard that it was very good. He had even looked through it once—had felt almost ill scanning the glossary of terms: anticipatory socialization, ethnocentrism, gemeinschaft, primary deviance, rate of natural increase, utilitarian authority. On and on they went, all the way to zero population growth. He could have rattled off definitions for them all, would have even suggested rewording several of Natalie’s had he stuck with the project, but all he felt as he closed the book was extreme relief that he had escaped.

  His agent had tried to interest him in a new book about a highly respected adoption agency near Chicago, but Perry had declined, and eventually he had done what any weary researcher would do—simply quit. Trying his hand at fiction writing, he found he could do it, and for the past eight years he had been writing stories. At least he saw a purpose in what he was doing, even if it was the dubious one of entertainment. Most of his novels so far—dozens of short mysteries and adventures targeted mainly at adolescents—had been set in Indiana and Illinois, regions as familiar to him as the letters of the alphabet.

  Then there were his more recent science-fiction fantasies set in outer space, which Dinah had begun saying was a place he knew well. It was sometime during this last series of books that Dinah had changed. One day she was leaning over him from behind with her arms clasped over his heart, her own heartbeat steady in his ear, reading and proclaiming what he had just written to be witty and imaginative, and the next day she was on the telephone in the adjacent room telling her newest friend in his hearing that “My husband, yes, Perry Warren—Ph.D., sociologist, and novelist—is as out of touch with life on the planet Earth as he is with how to make a woman happy.”

  A few months ago—had it really been so recently?—Dinah had calmly announced to him one morning at breakfast that their marriage was choking the breath out of her and she wanted out, or rather she wanted him out. Dinah never was one t
o work up to something gradually. He had been so stunned he hadn’t even replied, and she had left for work, taking Troy with her to drop off at school.

  He had hoped she’d forget about it, but when she returned that afternoon, she came into his study and said briefly, “I meant it, Perry, every word of it.” He had stayed in the house another two months, avoiding her by holing up in his study and trying to pretend nothing had happened. He continued to look over Troy’s homework papers and start the dishwasher when it was full and bring in the newspaper, but nothing worked. He couldn’t ignore the chill in the house. Troy sensed it, too, and started waking them up with nightmares.

  Dinah had known Perry wouldn’t fight back, and she was right. He would rather die than go through what he had often heard referred to as a “messy divorce.” She had filed the papers, and he had signed them. And he had finally packed up his boxes and left. So now he was here, bag and baggage, as they said in the South. The divorce would be final after the required separation period, so all he had to do was wait for it to “go through,” as if it were a loan for some major purchase. And in the meantime, he had to try to figure out how he was going to make it through each day without Dinah and Troy, how he was going to bear the dull weight of his heart.

  Things had happened fast once they got underway. His sister, Beth, had offered him her house for a year, and his agent and good friend, Cal, had contracted him for a new book, though one Perry still wasn’t sure he wanted to do. In the wake of several widely publicized scandals among so-called fundamentalist Christian leaders, the publisher Cal had bargained with wanted a writer who would go to one of these churches for an extended period of time, become involved, observe the members, and then write a full-length book about his experience. The publisher particularly wanted an established professional writer, but one who could tell a good story, not just an academic. “So, see, you’re perfect,” Cal had told him on the phone. “This guy’s getting them both, a researcher and a storyteller. He’s read your stuff. He knows what a deal he’s got.”