Sister Audrey offered the closing sentence. “Dear God,” she said, “look down upon us and understand us, we humbly beg in Jesus’ name. Amen.”
Some of the boys nudged each other at that, because she probably meant He should understand about the Dempster Dumpster. But then they caught Sister Myra’s frown and so they put on their blankest faces and started gazing around the room and humming.
After Devotions came Sharing Hour. In school they called it Show and Tell. You didn’t have to bring anything to Sharing Hour if you didn’t want to, and most of the boys didn’t. Also what you brought didn’t have to be religious, although of course it was always nice if it was. It could be just some belonging you’d been blessed with that you wanted others to share the joy of. Sister Myra’s daughter Beth, for instance, brought a beautiful silver whistle that used to be her cousin Rob’s from Boy Scout camp. But when it came time to let others share the joy of it, she refused. She said she didn’t want people blowing it and passing on their germs. “Well, honestly, Beth,” Sister Myra said, looking cross, but Beth said, “I got a right! I don’t have to put up with all and sundry’s summer colds!” She was a skinny stick of a girl who never seemed that healthy anyway. Her nose was always red, and her braids were the pale, pinkish color of transparent eyeglass frames. Sister Myra sighed and said, “Anybody else?”
Daphne stood up so hard that her chair fell over backward. (You were supposed to raise your hand.) “Well, I have this,” she announced, and she held the toy lawn mower over her head. All the girls said, “Aw!” They thought she was cute. Then the boys, Dermott and the nine-year-olds, said, “Awww,” making fun of the girls, but you could tell they didn’t mean any harm. They were smiling, and Daphne smiled back at them. Then she showed how the colored balls popped up when she pushed the lawn mower across the carpet. She was cute, Thomas realized. She was darling, with her springy black curls as thick as the wig on a doll and her face very small and lively. He felt suddenly proud of her, and also, for some reason, a little bit sad.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” Sister Myra said. “Any other sharers?”
Agatha raised her hand. Thomas looked over at her; she hadn’t mentioned she was bringing something. She stood up and rooted through her front pocket, knotting her mouth because she was kind of fat for her shorts and it was hard to get her fist around whatever it was. Finally she pulled out something round and clear. “A mustard seed,” she said.
Sister Myra said, “A what, hon?”
“A mustard seed in a plastic ball, like what Reverend Emmett talked about yesterday at Juice Time.”
“Oh, yes: ‘If ye have faith as a grain of mustard …’ ” Sister Myra said. She held out her hand, and Agatha let the object drop into her palm. “Why, I remember these! We wore them on chains back in high school. We bought them at Woolworth’s jewelry counter.”
“It used to be my mother’s,” Agatha said.
Thomas’s mouth fell open.
“My mother’s dead now, and I don’t know what church she belonged to. But when Reverend Emmett showed us those mustard seeds at Juice Time I thought, ‘That’s what that is! That round ball in my mother’s box.’ ”
Their mother’s jewelry box, she meant, the cloth-covered box Agatha kept her barrettes in; and she was evil, evil to show other people something from the mysterious bottom drawer. Hadn’t she made Thomas cross his heart and hope to die if he told anyone their mother’s things were hidden there? She wouldn’t even let him tell Daphne, because Daphne might tell the grownups and then the grownups would go through their mother’s papers and figure out a way to ship Thomas and Agatha off to strangers, keeping Daphne for themselves since Daphne was the only true Bedloe. Agatha had warned him a dozen times, and now look: here she was, speaking of “my” mother, of how “I” don’t know what church she belonged to, while their mother’s private mustard seed traveled from hand to hand like something ordinary. From Sister Myra’s cushiony palm to Beth’s wiry, freckled claw to Dermott Kyle’s not-very-clean fist, and by the time it reached Thomas he believed he caught the smell of sweat. He held it up by its tiny gold ring and studied it at eye level. (He was no more familiar with it than the others were, since Agatha guarded that box so jealously.) Had the plastic been this scratched and clouded even before the others handled it? If so, then it was because of his mother’s touch; her actual fingers had rubbed off the shine. Her actual eyes had looked upon that white glint of a seed.
He didn’t really remember their mother, to tell the truth. When he tried to picture her, he had the vaguest recollection of following some red high-heeled shoes down a sidewalk and then looking up to discover they belonged to the wrong lady. “Mama!” he had cried in a panic, and there’d been a flurry of footsteps, a low, soft laugh … but he couldn’t put together what she’d looked like. It seemed that whenever he tried he came up with a sort of general mother, the kind you imagine when someone reads out the word “mother” in a storybook. He’d asked Agatha once, “Did she used to have a station wagon, maybe? I think I remember a car pool, a lady in the car pool at my nursery school—”
But Agatha said, “What are you talking about? She didn’t even know how to drive!”
“I must’ve mixed her up with someone else,” he said.
But the car-pool lady stayed on in his mind — someone like other children had, waiting for him in a brown station wagon with wood-grained panels on the sides and a rear compartment full of tennis-ball cans and lacrosse sticks.
“The best thing is, Agatha’s brought us something having to do with our faith,” Sister Myra said. “She listened to what Reverend Emmett talked about at Juice Time and then she brought something related to that. Very nice, Agatha.”
Agatha nodded and sat down in her chair. When Thomas passed the mustard seed to Jason, he felt he was parting with a piece of himself, like an arm.
* * *
The Bible verse for the day came from the Forty-second Psalm: As the hart panteth after the water brooks … First Sister Myra explained what it meant. “Does everyone know what a hart is? Anyone? Anyone at all?” Then she helped them memorize it, breaking the verse into phrases that they repeated after her. This was all in preparation for the Bible Bee, which was a kind of spelldown that happened every Friday. Sometimes they competed against other camps — last week, Lamb of God from Cockeysville. Lamb of God had won.
After Bible Verse it was time for Morning Swim. The girls changed upstairs in Beth’s room and the boys changed in the workshop off the rec room. They met in the backyard. At first the sun felt wonderful, soaking into Thomas’s chilled skin, and then all at once it felt too hot, way too hot, so that he was glad to race the others to the pool and clamber up the three wooden steps and drop into the lukewarm water. Sister Myra was the lifeguard. She stood hip-deep with her swimsuit skirt floating out around her and tried to make the boys stop splashing the girls. Sister Audrey watched the baby pool, which was an inflatable rubber dish nearby. She wore her same tank top and cutoffs and didn’t even remove her flip-flops but sat high and dry in a folding chair she’d dragged out, smiling or else squinting at the little ones as they sailed their toy boats and poured water from their tin buckets.