Beauty Queen

hemlocks and cedars shaded it. One of the newer shiny gravestones belonged to Jeannie's mother.
    As usual, she detoured to the cemetery, picked her way among the graves, and stood looking down at the dark granite plaque. Cora Swan Laird, born August 3, 1922, Died January 28,1977. As usual, the fist of deep regret clenched in her stomach. Her mother had insisted on being buried unembalmed, in a plain pine coffin. By now she must be moldering hideously there, the earth caving in through the rotting coffin, onto her skeleton and rotted clothes, the earthworms playing hide and seek in her hair. Jeannie shuddered at the thought—her mother had always been so fussy about cleanliness, always smelling faintly of lavender sachet, never a drop of coffee on her kitchen cupboards, never a speck of dust on her shoes. Death is such an unclean thing, she thought. Fit punishment for sinful humanity.
    How much she regretted that she had deceived her mother all those years, making her think that she was more devout than she really was. How much she wished that she could pour the news of her salvation into her mother's ears, which were now a hiding place for worms.
    Jeannie turned around and looked at the church. Usually the sight of it gave her a lift, no matter how low she felt. Today, however, the church didn't raise up her soul so much.
    Here, during the depths of her breakdown period, was where the grace of Jesus had finally touched her heart. Here, with the help of the Reverend Irving, Jesus had made her see how she had been cutting corners all those years, thinking that she could be a good Christian and a glamour woman too, trying to combine prayer and church attendance with social drinking and putting herself up on a pedestal in flattering clothes for men to admire and possibly lust after. Here, she had finally understood her mother's grief and heartbreak at seeing her cutting comers on the Lord. Her mother had never cut a comer in her life, and she had died, praise God, despite thirty-two years of marriage and children and some very hard times in the city, with a soul as clean and innocent as a little child's.
    The tragedy was that her mother had died just a little too soon, and had never seen the miracle of Jeannie's repentance and salvation. Of course, her mother could see it now, from her place among the angels. But still... Her mother's death, was God's punishment for Jeannie's sins, she was sure.
    A gulp of tears came up in her throat, and she choked it back down, and walked hastily out of the cemetery. She would have to start visiting the cemetery after dark again, so fewer people would see her. Otherwise the word might get around in political circles that Jeannie Colter was a little mental.
    The tall church doors stood open to the breeze, and she walked in.
    The sunlight poured through the tall windows of plain old glass, across the scuffed oak pews, across the simple pulpit where the Bible and a hymnal lay. On the white wall in back, Worship Ye In Good Faith was painted in black antique letters. The church echoed with gentle swishing sounds—Sister May was up there in the gallery sweeping, an apron tied around her bulk.
    Not seeing Reverend Irving, Jeannie went out again. Along the side of the church, Brother Allan was on his knees, clipping along the bed of orange day-lilies, which bloomed beside the lichened stone foundations. Brother Morris was pushing the hand lawn-mower.
    Beyond, in the sunny field, a couple of cars were parked by the new clapboard activity hall that the congregation had funded and built ten years ago, matching its style carefully to the church. Some young people were just going in for a meeting.
    Near it was the little white house where the pastor always lived. Seeing a movement through the window, she headed over there and peered in the screen door.
    Reverend Irving was at the oak rolltop desk in his small living room, which also doubled as office and library. His skinny frame sat bolt upright in the big oak armchair as he pecked with his two knotted forefingers at the ancient green Remington Office-Riter. A pile of letters lay by him—he must be writing his column for Christian Home.
    Reverend Irving liked to call himself the Baptist Ann Landers, and he was no less blunt than the famed woman syndicated columnist, telling his readers how the Word of God applied to their urgent problems of business, love, marriage and bringing up children. Reverend Irving was to the Northern Baptists what John