Why, honey, how good to see you this fine spring morning. Look at that old pear tree, just a-busting with blooms. But this wind’s right chilly—we best go in where it’s warm. Git you a chair and we can have a nice visit.
That sign or whatever it is down at the church? Now what about that! Spray painted right there on the bridge PLEASE GOD FORGIVE. Now there’s a right quare story about that. I first saw it a few days back when Dor’thy was carrying me to the store. I asked her if she knowed how it come to be there and she said, ‘Well, it happened after the revival preaching.’
‘Well,’ says I, ‘you uns have revivals several times a year, don’t you?’ and she said this time there was a new preacher from somewhere in Tennessee and he had brought the Word like one thing. She said that he was a lively somebody and he leaped and jumped about and flung his arms around and cried and sweated and got red-faced till she thought he was like to have a stroke.
‘But what about that sign? I asked her. ‘Did that preacher paint it?’
“Now, Birdie,’ says she, ‘I’m getting to that. The preacher’s text was something about how we are all sinners--cracked vessels, standing in need of redemption, and how our only hope is to ask the Lord’s forgiveness and mercy. And then he went on to tell of the fiery lake and everlasting torment waiting for them as weren’t saved.
‘By the time he was near done, most all of the church was crying and sweating and calling out to the Lord for mercy. And when church was over, we all went home, and I was the last one to leave because it was my month to tidy up and turn off lights and such. They wasn’t a soul left when I come out and I know those words weren’t painted then.’
‘But Dor’thy-’
‘Let me tell it, Birdie. I come back to the church early the next morning to sweep and run a mop and there were those words. So someone had come in the night and done them. I did my work, wondering all the time who would have done such. And when I got back home, I got on the phone.’
Dor’thy do go on, don’t she? But she was like a dog worrying a bone, trying to figure who it was wrote them words. She said it was because that person likely needed prayers and she would do her best in that line but, betwixt you and me, honey, Dor’thy’s a right quizzy somebody. She should have been one of them detectives on the TV.
Now the first person she called was Rhody Payne who said that she thought Hensley Phillips probably done it for he had looked right sick during the preaching, and everyone knows he’s been carrying on with that Roberts woman and his poor wife pretending ain’t nothing the matter.
But then, later on, Dor’thy got a call from Rhody’s sister who said she reckoned it was one of them Burtons for the spray- painted words was the same color as the spray-painted name on the Burton’s mailbox. And the Lord knows, them Burtons is cracked vessels, ever last one of them—cock-fighting and worse. But ain’t none of them ever set foot in the church, said Dorothy, so how would they have known about the preaching.
Ay, law, honey, folks is bad to gossip, ain’t they. By the time the day was out, most every woman in the church had called Dor’thy to say who it was they thought had painted the words. Everyone of them was sure it was a man, though Dor’thy said when Leota called, Dor’thy could hear Hobart in the background hollering that it was likely Almira for everyone knowed about her. But Leota reminded him that Almira hadn’t been in church that evening and that shut him up right quick.
By the time the week was out, Dor’thy weren’t no nearer to finding out the truth of thing. What she had found out, she told me, was that the church was plumb full of cracked vessels, every one of them standing in the need of prayer.
‘And Birdie, honey,’ she told me, ‘I reckon I’m one too—just a nosy old woman who could have prayed for that sinner ‘thout having to know their name. Now it looks like I got most the whole church to pray for. I'll likely have to give up watching my story, it's gonna take so much time.'
