The ground had dried enough since last night’s rain that Aileen’s size five white heels didn’t sink into the topsoil as she stood back and surveyed the churchyard. Forty years ago, when death had seemed as distant as heaven, she had had the idea to plant a tree each time someone in their congregation passed, but now the yard was overrun with trees as one congregant died after another. Her husband, the late preacher, Benjamin Swift Ashinhurst’s tree was the newest to be planted: a mature pin oak hauled up from McMinnville whose leafy branches offered shade to the dogwood saplings representing the octogenarian sisters Magnolia and Clementine Wells who had died last summer. Lord knows Ben hadn’t been a very romantic husband—it’d been years since he had bought her flowers or taken her out for a meal that didn’t include an all you can eat buffet—but he had always left her notes on the mornings his needy parishioners made him leave before she woke up: Roses are red, violets are blue, I thought I would let you get your beauty sleep because I love you! She had kept every note he had cut into a heart. Ben had had such big, work-hardened hands from all the years he’d spent as a coal miner that she had smiled while imagining him sitting at their kitchen table with scissors, concentrating on following the lines he had made like he were back in kindergarten.
A terrible scraping sound interrupted Aileen’s nostalgia. Turning from the gate, she watched the new preacher’s dusty black minivan all but leap over the curb and aim right for the spot Aileen herself had taken—first, out of habit from all the years she and Ben had parked there and then out of defiance. Did serving this congregation for four decades mean nothing? Did they expect Aileen to just move on to another parking spot and on to another church when she had been everything from Rush Creek Baptist Church’s pianist to its Sunday school teacher to its reluctant janitor and cook? She glanced at the hand-painted church sign and saw Travis Coleman’s shingle now hung below it from little silver hooks where her husband’s shingle had been. It made her wonder if the board did that so the preacher would know he could be so easily replaced, they wouldn’t even have to change the main sign. The preacher in question cruised past the line of vehicles representing the board—meeting early for their monthly meeting—and parked beside Aileen’s waxed Buick LeSabre. Some nerve, she thought. The gravel parking lot wasn’t marked, but only one car parked between the church and the church’s propane tank, and that car had always been Preacher Ben’s. But the new preacher didn’t get out. It was the new preacher’s wife, Holly, who clambered out and yanked open the van’s left sliding door.
Dumping teething toys to the floorboard, she unbuckled the baby from her car seat while the older children bailed from the van’s right sliding door like the whole thing was about to catch fire. Overseeing Vacation Bible School for twenty summers straight had made Aileen believe that having one mild-mannered child, Cara, was a blessing rather than the curse she had thought it had been. Still, she had to admit that the four Coleman kids were quite cute with their smattering of freckles and feathered towhead hair. However, they always looked unkempt—the whole lot of them. Aileen was pretty sure Holly didn’t own an iron or, for that matter, a lint brush. One of the six were bound to be wearing wrinkled clothes covered in white cat hair, which then transferred to the padded pews Aileen herself had reupholstered in the nineties with a plush green velvet that offset her eyes.
Holly approached now (Aileen still couldn’t get over women wearing dress pants to church!) and breathlessly said, “How’re you doing, Miss Aileen?”
Aileen had been asked that question so many times over the past six months and, if truth be told, over the past two years as black lung disease slowly, mercilessly, colored her husband’s breath that she rarely heard it anymore and definitely didn’t respond. However, looking into Holly’s eyes—large and dark brown, like her children’s—Aileen could see that she wasn’t just asking to fill the silence but that she truly cared.
“It’s too quiet,” she admitted and suddenly found herself so close to tears that she had to swallow and stare out at the yard.
Holly jiggled her chubby baby girl who babbled and smacked her mama’s chest with an open hand. “Well,” she laughed, “you’re always welcome at our house.”
But in a month’s time, the house where Aileen lived would become Holly’s—the upstairs playroom a frilly pink time capsule from Cara’s childhood; the yard filled with the pollinator perennials Aileen had planted back when it didn’t hurt to be on her knees; the woods between the house and the church festooned with the bird houses she had painted red, yellow, and blue and had Ben hang, though Aileen had been so afraid he would fall to his death completing her “Honey Do List” that she had held the ladder the entire time he worked. Sometimes she still felt like she was holding her breath while holding that ladder steady, and then she would remind herself that he was no longer here.
Reaching out, Holly laid a hand on one of Aileen’s forearms, crossed like bars over her chest. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was a stupid thing to say. Please take all the time you need. Our family’s quite comfortable where we’re staying in town.”
Aileen thought preachers’ wives weren’t supposed to lie, though she had certainly told her share back in the day. She had driven by the tiny house the Colemans were renting. Wedged like a brick between Wilson’s Co-op and Mounty Station’s train tracks, it didn’t have one blade of grass to its name, but $500 a month wouldn’t get you much, and that was all the church could afford to pay until Aileen moved out of the parsonage.
She shrugged off the new preacher’s wife’s touch. “The board was kind enough to let my husband die there. Can’t expect them to extend the same courtesy to me.”
“Well,” Holly said, and lifted her chin. “They should.”
The two women turned and looked at the little white church with its dainty belfry and steeple perched on a stained, swaybacked roof. Converted from a schoolhouse in the fifties—once the road became passable enough for county school buses to take the mountain kids to town—Rush Creek Baptist Church was about five or so years from needing either a complete demolition or a remodel. At seventy-one, Aileen could relate.
Holly whispered, “I don’t think they like us.”
“Who?”
“The board.” She kissed between the folds of her daughter’s neck and breathed in like the scent of Cheerios and diaper cream soothed her. “They’re meeting with Travis right now. Mister Jim was kind enough to pick him up since our truck’s in the shop.”
Taken aback, Aileen looked at the yard, where the older Coleman children were playing some complicated game of hide and seek among the trees. For so long, she had thought of those trees as memorials to the dead rather than any source of joy to the living. But watching the children now—their laughter unspooling behind them as morning sunlight dappled their wild, unbrushed hair—she understood that the world would go on and that she, Aileen Ashinhurst, might still have a place in it.
Facing Holly, she reached for her baby—although she wasn’t even particularly fond of babies—and said, “Honey, the board didn’t like me neither when I came, but guess who outlasted them all.” Holly’s eyes widened as Aileen gestured to the true church graveyard beyond the trees. The baby jerked hard on Aileen’s pearls, nearly strangling her, and then contentedly started sucking the strand. “You just stick with me,” Aileen said, and straightened her shoulders. “I’ll show you how it’s done.” ◆
Jolina Petersheim is a best-selling author pursuing beauty and truth, one word at a time. Her five published novels have received wide critcal acclaim as well as numerous accolades including wins and nominations for prestigious industry awards, starred reviews, spots on year-end “Best Of” and on seasonal “Top 10” lists. In addition, her non-fiction writing has been featured by many print and online outlets. Jolina and her husband’s unique Amish and Mennonite heritage originated in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but they now hobby homestead in the mountains of Tennessee with their four young daughters.
Pensworth 