Cat's eye

Then there’s organ music and everyone stands up, and I become confused. I watch what Grace does, and stand up when she stands up, sit when she sits. During the songs she holds the hymnbook open and points, but I don’t know any of the tunes. After a while it’s time for us to go to Sunday school, and so we file out with the other children in a line and go down into the church basement. At the entrance to the Sunday school place there’s a blackboard, where someone has printed, in colored chalk: KILROY WAS HERE. Beside this is a drawing of a man’s eyes and nose, looking over a fence. Sunday school is in classes, like ordinary school. The teachers are younger though; ours is an older teenager with a light-blue hat and a veil. Our class is all girls. The teacher reads us a Bible story about Joseph and his coat of many colors. Then she listens as the girls recite things they’re supposed to have memorized. I sit on my chair, dangling my legs. I haven’t memorized anything. The teacher smiles at me and says she hopes I will come back every week.

After this all the different classes go into a large room with rows of gray wooden benches in it, like the benches we eat our lunches on at school. We sit on the benches, the lights are turned off, and colored slides are projected onto the bare wall at the far end of the room. The slides aren’t photographs but paintings. They look old-fashioned. The first one shows a knight riding through the forest, gazing upward to where a shaft of light streams down through the trees. The skin of this knight is very white, his eyes are large like a girl’s, and his hand is pressed to where his heart must be, under his armor, which looks like car fenders. Under his large, luminous face I can see the light switches and the top boards of the wainscoting, and the corner of the small piano, where it juts out.

The next picture has the same knight only smaller, and underneath him some words, which we sing to the heavy thumping of chords from the unseen piano:

I would be true, for there are those who trust me,

I would be pure, for there are those who care,

I would be strong, for there is much to suffer,

I would be brave, for there is much to dare.

Beside me, in the dark, I hear Grace’s voice going up and up, thin and reedy, like a bird’s. She knows all the words; she knew all the words to her memory passage from the Bible too. When we bend our heads to pray I reel suffused with goodness, I feel included, taken in. God loves me, whoever he is. After Sunday school we go back into the regular church for the last part, and I put my nickel on the collection plate. Then there is something called the Doxology. Then we walk out of the church and stuff back into the Smeaths’ car, and Grace says carefully, “Daddy, may we go and see the trains?” and the little girls, with a show of enthusiasm, say, “Yes, yes.”

Mr. Smeath says, “Have you been good?” and the little girls say, “Yes, yes” again. Mrs. Smeath makes an indeterminate sound. “Oh, all right,” says Mr. Smeath to the little girls. He drives the car south through the empty streets, along the streetcar tracks, past a single streetcar like a gliding island, until finally we see the flat gray lake in the distance, and below us, over the edge of a sort of low cliff, a flat gray plain covered with train tracks. On this metal-covered plain several trains are shunting slowly back and forth. Because it is Sunday, and because this is evidently a routine after-church Sunday event for the Smeaths, I have the idea that the train tracks and the lethargic, ponderous trains have something to do with God. It is also clear to me that the person who really wants to see the trains is not Grace, or any of the little girls, but Mr. Smeath himself.

We sit there in the parked car watching the trains until Mrs. Smeath says that the dinner will be ruined. After that we drive back to Grace’s house.

I am invited for Sunday dinner. It’s the first time I’ve ever stayed for dinner at Grace’s. Before dinner Grace takes me upstairs so we can wash our hands, and I learn a new thing about her house: you are only allowed four squares of toilet paper. The soap in the bathroom is black and rough. Grace says it’s tar soap.

The dinner is baked ham and baked beans and baked potatoes and mashed squash. Mr. Smeath carves the ham, Mrs. Smeath adds the vegetables, the plates get passed around. Grace’s little sisters look at me through their eyeglasses when I start to eat.