A typical church day looks like this for me: doughnuts, Sunday school, church service, lunch, homework, youth group. A typical church day for Dad looks like this: work, work, extra meetings, work, more work. Today, there are two extra meetings: one with the deacons, one with the youth group parents.
I offer to attend the parents’ meeting, to apologize. Thankfully, he declines. “At the end of the day, I’m the one responsible. It happened on my watch,” he says.
The parsonage phone has rung off the hook all week. The other deacons are churning milk into cream. I overheard the words “fired” and “Brother Scott” and they were not in reference to flames. Two parishioners stopped me at the BI-LO this week—one sympathetic, one gossipy. I was buying broccoli for Mom. “Bless your heart. I’ll bet it’s hard to be at the center of things.” And in the frozen foods aisle. “That article in the paper true?”
Then, when I was bent over, running my thumb over a Hershey’s bar to check for maximum almonds, two plump ladies had a conversation at my expense. “We’ll just see how Brother Scott disciplines his daughter this time,” they said. “That Miller girl’s involved too,” they hinted. “Those two are up to no good,” they speculated.
As if Janie Lee and I were alone in that youth room with a blowtorch.
I expect more of the same today.
Sunday School is held in the basement fellowship hall instead of the youth room. The youth could stomach the destruction—big fans have been drying the water damage all week. Right after the opening prayer, Dad said, “Everyone better be here tonight. After I talk to your parents, we’re discussing the incident. In detail.”
Janie Lee turns a wicked shade of green at his sternness, which makes me want to Bubble Wrap her. My dad’s the closest thing to a father figure she has. She’s been partially grounded all week, logging hours at Bleach because of the newspaper article. Attention means skittish customers, and skittish customers make for an unhappy Mrs. Miller. The rest of the Hexagon looks equally uncomfortable.
But by Sunday night, Janie Lee isn’t the only one who could use some Bubble Wrap. I make the mistake of sitting outside the meeting room and listening to the deacons whale on Dad, skittering around the corner only just before the first wave of them pours from the room, mouths still foaming with verbal rabies. I count to one hundred, slow my heartbeat, and take the back stairs to Youth Suite 201.
The fans are still blowing. Teens mill about, heading in and out of the suite, trying to sneak food before dinnertime. Woods Carrington hangs from the doorframe of 201, blocking anyone who wants to enter. He winks at me. I wink back. And there we are caught up in a moment of closeness even though we are fifteen feet apart.
“Billie, Woods, time to start,” Dad yells.
Let Come-to-Jesus-Scott-McCaffrey time commence. Youth Suite 201 used to be swathed in mauve, cheap Ten Commandments posters, and four billion copies of a mini-magazine called The Upper Room. Dad caused quite a stir when he gifted the room to teenagers; he practically split the church when he allowed us to decorate it during a lock-in. It was Big T who wrote that check and patted the cheeks of enough deacons so that they finally shut their grumbling faces.
It’s currently a livable dwelling for people my age, i.e., Xbox, Ping-Pong table, snacks.
Dad’s currently livid. He’s retrieving a stack of Bibles from the window ledge. “You all better buckle up.” He has erased THINGS TO DO WITH A CHURCH MICROWAVE and written a scripture reference.
Einstein bears two gray battle smudges on its otherwise white surface. The right side of the frame is melted. There in the bottom corner, the stick drawing of me holding the Corn Dolly has survived explosions, sprinklers, and Scott McCaffrey. You can just make out Harvest Festival Forever.
Dad sets Bibles at our feet and taps the board. Tap. Tap. Tap. Woods squirms—the desire to wrestle the marker from Dad nearly consumes him.
“He really has no idea what he has,” Woods whispers to me.
“Clearly,” I say, because this power struggle delights me.
Dad underlines the scripture, a cue for everyone to thumb to the address. My Bible is propped unopened on my lap. I have no room to hear the book of Hebrews because Woods says, “Did I tell you Wilma Frist confirmed this year’s the last Harvest Festival? No more speculation.”
I shake my head, disturbed by this information on a gut level. Woods is moving a Blow Pop from one side of his mouth to the other. He looks as if he’s considering Hebrews instead of this terrible news.
No Harvest Festival means no Corn Dolly. For a town that has a forty-foot-tall roadside attraction—one that comes up on the home page when you google Kentucky—the idea of discontinuing the Harvest Festival, and the Corn Dolly celebration, sounds preposterous.
The Corn Dolly may sound like a joke, but at its heart, it’s nothing to snicker at. My Grandy was the Corn Dolly winner of 1979, and how she won is a story that my father has recounted more times than he’s told the resurrection of Jesus. (It kills him that my mom has never been nominated.) The story begins, “1979 was the year of the flood,” and ends with “And that’s how Grandy changed everything.”
Otters Holt is on a verdant strip of land between Lake Barkley and Kentucky Lake. Both lakes are man-made, fed by the Tennessee River, and gorgeous. When I was a kid I combined robin’s-egg and cornflower blue, attempting to color the exact shade of Kentucky Lake. “You’re missing the magic,” Mom had said over my shoulder. And I was. Nothing in robin’s-egg or cornflower spoke to the true beauty of water and sky and brown, crag-filled shoreline.
All that enchantment is fine and good if it doesn’t rain too much. Spring of 1979 it rained more than too much.
Grandy said school let out so kids could sandbag houses. She’s also fond of exaggerating: “The only thing we had more of than sandbags were Road Closed signs. Borrowed them from six other counties to have enough.” The campgrounds closed; the bison had to be moved to another park. And there was Grandy, bagging, baking, and bed-and-breakfasting ten extra people whose homes were afloat on the Tennessee. (No exaggeration there.) That wasn’t what clenched the Corn Dolly of 1979, though. Everyone helped everyone. As we do. Grandy went above and beyond.
The kid of one of her friends got caught in some quicksand and died. After the water receded, Grandy raised five thousand dollars so her friend could put a down payment on a home miles away from the waterfront. “These lakes are beautiful, but water will turn on you, Billie, and when it does, beauty ain’t what you see anymore.” I must have heard Grandy tell that story three hundred times. I never get tired of it.
That kind of stellar living and giving awards you a Corn Dolly. Every year, there is a story just like this one.
I think about Grandy. I think about Harvest Festival Forever. I think about Big T. I think about Molly the Corn Dolly. I think: No. No, I will not let this be the end of a good thing.
“Can you believe that phrase Harvest Festival Forever survived?” I’m whispering at Woods, but Dad sets his laser eyes upon us, and taps his Bible to remind us of the task.
I flick my finger at the speech bubble.
Woods cocks his head, stares at Einstein, sees the meaning I intend. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asks.
I pretend to check a page in Woods’s Bible, but really, I’m baiting him. “You could keep it going.”
“Without Tyson?” he asks.
Good question. The Harvest Festival, the Corn Dolly, and the Sadie Hawkins dance—the hat trick of Otters Holt—have always been funded and largely spearheaded by Tyson Vilmer.
“Are you or are you not Woods Carrington, future mayor of Otters Holt?”
He’s unconvinced but intrigued. I’m determined.
“You two have something more interesting to contribute than the Apostle Paul?” Dad asks.
Preacher’s-kid fast, I answer, “I was thinking about Queen Esther.” Dad doesn’t believe me, so while I’m staring at Woods, I quote rather convincingly, “‘I’ve come into the kingdom for such a time as this.’”
Woods hears the message loud and clear. I get a pat on the knee. With Woods on task, the festival is as good as saved.
Still, there’s a reckoning to come. Everyone in the room is parked in Hebrews and waiting for the smackdown except me, so Dad asks, “Billie, you want to read for us?”
“I will, Brother Scott,” Janie Lee volunteers.
Bless her. He allows her rescue mission, but not without passing judgment that would make a Pharisee proud. Janie Lee begins to read. The paraphrase: Discipline is painful in the moment, but it helps people—the “us” is implied—grow into decent human beings. The translation: We are not yet decent human beings, but we will be when Dad finishes with our punishment.
“Do you know what that means?” asks Brother Scott.
Fifty answers, “It means you’re pissed.”
“Decent guess.” Dad goes on to explain that in his “cool-down period” he concluded there’s not enough yelling in the universe to repair the church. I was unaware of this cool-down period.
“Here’s what you’re going to do,” he instructs. “There are elderly people in our church who need help with things. You are going to do all those things. Construction for destruction. Help in exchange for harm. There will be no argument. No attitude.” He eye-checks the two he expects to be rebels, Fifty and me. “And when things square with the insurance people, we’ll reassess whether I need to take another section of your hindquarters. Capisce?”
I’m rendered speechless. Manual labor is a step down from Filet o’ Billie. This actually makes sense.
“What about those of us who weren’t in the youth room when the fire started?” asks a freshman. The dude’s best friend parrots, “Yeah. What about us?”
Fifty digs into the couch cushions, finds a yellow crayon, and hurls it at them. “Then you missed out.”
“Seriously?” the boy asks. “Why should the rest of us do nice things for old people?”
“Rewind that question and ask it again in slow motion,” I say.
Dad can’t decide whether he’s proud of me or aggravated. In the end, he skips my comment and says, “You’re a group. That’s how we’re doing this.”
God’s servant has spoken, and I agree with the commandment. I never meant to hurt the church in the first place. Bring on the gerontological penance. Brother Scott tells us we’ll receive our assignments in the mail after he has consulted the elderly.
With that handled, we have a typical Sunday night. Bible is studied. Games are played. Ice cream is consumed straight from the carton.
Dad can be tough, but he really does love us enough to buy mint chocolate chip.