Boys Life

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    On the following day the rain fell harder, and thunderclouds rolled over Zephyr. The Merchants Street Easter parade was canceled, much to the dismay of the Arts Council and the Commerce Club. Mr. Vandercamp Junior, whose family owned the hardware and feeds store, had been dressing up as the Easter bunny and riding in the parade’s last car for six years, having inherited the task from Mr. Vandercamp Senior, who got too old to hop. This Easter the rain doused all hopes of catching candy eggs thrown by the various merchants and their families from their cars, the ladies of the Sunshine Club couldn’t show off their Easter dresses, husbands, and children, the members of Zephyr’s VFW unit couldn’t march behind the flag, and the Confederate Sweethearts-girls who attended Adams Valley High School-couldn’t wear their hoop skirts and spin their parasols.
    Easter morning arrived, cloaked in gloom. My dad and I were compatriots in grousing about getting slicked up, putting on starched white shirts, suits, and polished shoes. Mom had an all-purpose answer to our grumbles, much the same as Dad’s “Right as rain.” She said, “It’s only one day,” as if this made the stiff collar and the necktie knot more comfortable. Easter was a family day, and Mom phoned Grand Austin and Nana Alice and then Dad picked up the telephone to call Granddaddy Jaybird and Grandmomma Sarah. We would all, as we did every Easter, converge on the Zephyr First Methodist church to hear about the empty tomb.
    The white church on Cedarvine Street, between Bonner and Shantuck, was filling up by the time we parked our pickup truck. We walked through the sloppy mist toward the light that streamed through the church’s stained-glass windows, all the polish getting soaked off our shoes. People were shedding their raincoats and closing their umbrellas at the front door, beneath the overhanging eaves. It was an old church, built in 1939, the whitewash coming off and leaving gray patches. Usually the church was primed to its finest on Easter day, but this year the rain had defeated the paintbrush and lawn mower so weeds were winning in the front yard.
    “Come in, Handsome! Come in, Flowers! Watch your step there, Noodles! Good Easter morning to you, Sunshine!” That was Dr. Lezander, who served as the church’s greeter. He had never missed a Sunday, as far as I knew. Dr. Frans Lezander was the veterinarian in Zephyr, and it was he who had cured Rebel of the worms last year. He was a Dutchman, and though he still had a heavy accent he and his wife Veronica, Dad had told me, had come from Holland long before I was born. He was in his mid-fifties, stood about five eight, was broad-shouldered and baldheaded and had a neatly trimmed gray beard. He wore natty three-piece suits, always with a bow tie and a lapel carnation, and he made up names for people as they entered the church. “Good morning, Peach Pie!” he said to my smiling mother. To my father, with a knuckle-popping handshake: “Raining hard enough for you, Thunderbird?” And to me, with a squeeze of the shoulder and a grin that shot light off a silver front tooth: “Step right in, Bronco!”
    “Hear what Dr. Lezander called me?” I asked Dad once we were inside. “Bronco!” Getting a new christening for a day was always a highlight of church.
    The sanctuary was steamy, though the wooden ceiling fans revolved. The Glass sisters were up front, playing a piano and organ duet. They were the perfect definition of the word strange. While not identical twins, the two spinster sisters were close enough to be slightly skewed mirrors. They were both long and bony, Sonia with piled-high whitish-blond hair and Katharina with piled-high blondish-white hair. They both wore thick black-framed glasses. Sonia played the piano and not the organ, while Katharina did vice versa. Depending on who you asked, the Glass sisters-who seemed to always be nagging each other but lived together on Shantuck Street in a house that looked like gingerbread-were either fifty-eight, sixty-two, or sixty-five. The strangeness was completed by their wardrobes: Sonia wore only blue in all its varying shades, while Katharina was a slave to green. Which brought about the inevitable. Sonia was referred to by us kids as Miss Blue Glass, and Katharina was called… you guessed it. But, strange or not, they sure could play up a storm.
    The pews were packed almost solid. The place looked and felt like a hothouse where