Thrown-away Child

The congregants held their breath.
    Finally, Sister rose from the bench, her body moving as smoothly as water. Calla lilies slid down her thighs, scattering at her sandaled feet in two abstract yellow bouquets. Her eyes, shiny as brown creek pebbles, fluttered open. But she saw nothing of the people in front of her, for she had been trained by a master.
    She snapped her neck left and right, tossing back beaded plaits of black hair. Her face glistened.
    Sister raised her hands to shoulder level, ivory palms turned outward to the agitated congregation.
    Her eyes dropped shut again behind heavy lids. And she chanted, in français africaine:
     
“Danse Calinda, boudoum, boudoum
Danse Calinda, boudoum, boudoum...!”
     
    Lights burst full from circular fixtures in the floor and ceiling, forming a white-hot column of illumination at the center of the altar. Then, in great bursts of silver gray mist shooting up from steam jets built into the floorboards for just such very moments of high religious drama, Minister Zebediah Tilton made his entrance.
    Ascending on a hydraulic lift from a pit below the raised altar stage, he was resplendent in a black satin robe, trimmed at the neck and sleeves in sable and covered with gris-gris—tiny dolls made of feathers and wax and kinky human hair, pigs’ ears, snakeskins, withered crab legs, dried-up rooster hearts. Beaming at the fevered assembly below him, Minister Tilton turned and knelt before the altar table as Sister’s chanting grew in volume and urgency.
    He crossed himself, in the Catholic fashion, then stood and again faced his flock. He rapped the floor with a gold-topped ebony cane. And when the worshipers hushed, he reached into his pocket for a silver Tiffany lighter. He fired the wick of a single candle on the table. The candle was huge, shaped like a crucifix, black as Minister Tilton’s robe.
    This ceremonial task complete, Minister Tilton joined now in Sister’s chant. He tossed back his Jheri-curled head and sang the old words. As he sang, in a voice that clapped like thunder, the dark wattles below his neck quivered to the stamping feet of the worshipers.
    After a few minutes, Minister Tilton’s forehead was beaded in sweat. He stopped and raised up his arms, heavy as a pair of hams. He commanded his people, “Ladies and gentleman, at this hear- uh church of ours... this glow -ree-us Land of Dreams Tabernacle... we show an open door to everybody! Yes sir, yes ma’am—yeah, you right. I’m talking about everybody/ Doubters and pouters, shouters and shiners…”
    A-men!
    “But whosoever shall be- uh with us upon this beauty-ful morning... Oh La, please—you must understand!”
    Understand!
    “You all got one big dew- tee in common today, don’t you know.”
    That’s right... Tell it, brother... !
    “You all got to join me, hear-uh? We must lift up our voices all together-uh ... in a mighty, mighty call—to those whose spirits... whose spirits... !”
    Yes, Lord!
    “Whose spirits live with the Lord- uh!”
    Yeah, you right!
    Bodies swayed in time with the cadence of Minister Tilton’s beseechings, and the oaken pews of the Land of Dreams Tabernacle groaned. And then the mass chanting began again, rolling and rolling in throaty waves, pulsating the liquid air of a warm, dank November morning.
    “Danse Calinda, boudoum, boudoum...!”
    Three hundred pairs of black hands clapped in syncopation. Three hundred pairs of shoes pounded out the downbeat.
    Violet Flagg’s eyes surged with tears. Reluctantly, then helplessly, she slapped her hands together along with three hundred of her friends, and stamped her feet, too.
    She was so tired, so tired.
    None of it was real. Violet knew that. Anybody in the church could recite Violet’s sentiments down through the years on the subject of Zebediah Tilton. That low-down greasy-headed black-assed humbug — he ain’t nothing but a big old flabby pile of jiggery-pokery.
    But in the long nights preceding Ruby’s arrival— her “prodigal daughter,” she would say—Violet had not slept well. And in these past long years, she had grown lonesome in all the ways a widow knows how to be lonesome.
    And so on this stifling, exhausting Sunday morning Violet Flagg gave way to the strength of a believing crowd of friends who were so powerfully sure.
    She would hear her man. She would believe! And maybe somewhere in all that silvery steam up on the altar Violet would see Willis, at least in the prism of her tears.
    Did