Hidden Riches Read online

  Coughing broke out on the dais.

  He glanced up. The pastor of Ana Mae’s church and about a dozen other clergy members were giving him what could best be described as the evil eye. Definitely a thou shalt not look.

  Unsure, Clayton paused on the step.

  “Brother Futrell,” someone said behind him. “There’s a microphone for you right here.”

  Suddenly furious and feeling tenfold the slights he’d endured his entire life in Drapersville and Ahoskie, Clayton refused to let them intimidate him.

  “It’s all right,” he said, stepping up to the pulpit. “I’ll just stand here.”

  Gasps erupted from both the mourners and the preachers, mostly Baptists, with a few Pentecostals and Evangelicals also in the mix.

  Three on the dais rose, as if to block the sacrilegious from their holy ground.

  “It’s all right,” Reverend Toussaint le Baptiste said. “Let the boy go on.”

  Clayton, not knowing that he’d broken a cardinal rule of the black church—thou shalt not step into the pulpit unless ordained—nodded his thanks to the minister and patiently waited for the sputtering from the three and the murmuring from the assembly to quiet down. He glanced at Archer, who smiled at him.

  Clayton’s mouth dropped open.

  It was the first true smile he’d seen from his partner in a long time. A long, long time.

  They’d been going through a rough patch lately. Well, he conceded, it was more than a patch. They were just about splitsville. This trip to the East Coast, to bury the sister Clayton never took time to get to know, was probably their last as a couple. So to see Archer smile, to get that silent encouragement from him meant more than words could ever say.

  Tears welled in his eyes. He tried to blink them back, but to no avail.

  “That’s all right, brother. We understand,” someone called from the audience.

  Clayton wiped his eyes, wondering for a moment what the person was talking about and when in the history of the church it became acceptable for people to holler at the person standing at the lectern.

  Then he remembered.

  Ana Mae.

  They thought he was crying about the death of Ana Mae.

  He took a deep breath, sent a tremulous smile toward Archer, and pulled out the note cards he’d tucked in his pocket.

  “First, my sisters and I would like to thank all of you for your prayers and expressions of sympathy. As some of you know, all three of us left Drapersville many years ago. We didn’t stay in touch with each other or with Ana Mae as often as we should have.”

  He paused for a moment and the amen corner encouraged him to “Take your time, son.”

  Clayton glanced in that direction, saw someone he remembered from a long time ago, and lost his train of thought for a moment. Reginald Crispin, an old lover, apparently remained so deep in the closet that he felt safe masquerading as a deacon in the church.

  The hypocrisy galled Clayton. Then the anger started bubbling up again.

  In truth, he didn’t have that much to say about Ana Mae, but he could and would give these people a piece of his mind for his own peace of mind. He opened his mouth to lambaste the hypocrites.

  A throat cleared in the congregation.

  Clayton recognized that particular sound. Archer.

  He met his partner’s gaze for barely a second, and in it he saw what mattered most to him. Clayton smiled, took another moment to compose himself. And with a roll of his shoulders, he let the injustices go. This was about Ana Mae, not about the painful prejudices of his past.

  “Yes,” he then said, “Ana Mae was the only one of us who stayed. As the presence of each and every one of you here today indicates, that choice she made to stay made this church and this community richer.”

  Clayton talked for five more minutes about Ana Mae, relating a story about the four of them one summer.

  From the pulpit, he glanced down at JoJo and Delcine, then smiled. “I hope my sisters don’t mind me telling you all this,” he said, “but it really illustrates the type of big sister Ana Mae was to us. There used to be a fair that came through town every year. They’d set up in that field on the other side of the old mill.”

  “Still do,” someone in the congregation yelled out.

  JoJo and Delcine, both remembering, sat there smiling and shaking their heads at Clayton.

  “One summer, Mama was working and said she would take us over there on Saturday right after she got paid. Well, JoJo and I wanted to go that first night, Wednesday.”

  “When they give away the free ice cream,” another mourner hollered up.

  Clayton laughed. “Exactly. Since the ice cream was free, we figured all we needed was bus fare or jitney fare to get over there, since it was too far for us to walk.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Delcine said, to the amusement of the people across the aisle from her.

  “Ana Mae was where she usually was on Wednesday nights,” Clayton said.

  “At church,” half the congregation said.

  Nodding, Clayton, a natural storyteller, continued. “JoJo and I enlisted Delcine in the plan.”

  “You mean you co-opted me,” she said.

  That earned a laugh from the congregation.

  “She was supposed to be babysitting until Ana Mae got home from prayer meeting. We, er, well, to put it delicately, we liberated some change from ajar Mama kept on the kitchen counter.”

  “Oh, Lord have mercy,” one of the amen corner residents intoned.

  “You’ve got that right, deacon,” Clayton said.

  “We took what we thought we would need and headed out and over to the Day-Ree Mart to catch a jitney to the fair. Somebody—and to this day I don’t know who—but somebody must have seen us and hightailed it over to the church to report that them three little Futrell kids were running away from home,” he said, his voice taking on the Southern drawl of a town tattletale.

  “Well, it took Ana Mae maybe all of three seconds to figure out where we were headed.

  “No sooner had we paid the jitney and got in the line than we heard a horn blowing and some yelling behind us. It was Ana Mae. With a switch. Waving it out the car window and hollering.”

  The mourners gathered for Ana Mae’s homegoing roared with laughter. They knew what was coming next.

  “We were this close,” Clayton said, holding his hands about a foot apart, “to claiming that free ice cream when a car screeched to a halt, tires kicking up dust and gravel, and Ana Mae jumped out.”

  Behind Clayton, Reverend Toussaint was wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. “That was me,” he said between guffaws. “Lord, I haven’t thought about that in years.”

  Clayton turned and grinned. “That was you?”

  Reverend Toussaint nodded and got a few jabs from the ministers sitting next to him.

  “All we knew,” Clayton told the congregation, “was that Ana Mae had commandeered somebody’s car. She came out of that front seat yelling, ‘No ice cream for those three!’ and waving that switch like she was gonna give a whupping to every kid standing in that line. The poor carnival man probably thought she was our mother, the way she was carrying on. But we were wrong and all three of us knew it. I was crying by then and JoJo over there,” he said, with a nod toward her, “she was whining about the ice cream. And Delcine was saying, ‘They made me do it. They made me do it.’ ”

  The sisters were falling over their husbands and Archer, laughing in the pews.

  “We piled into the backseat of that car and got a sermon and a half about lying, stealing, leaving the house, and disobeying Mama, who’d said no carnival until Saturday. Frankly, we knew we were dead. But you know what,” Clayton said, his voice lowering as he leaned into the microphone.

  Folks sat forward in their seats to hear what happened.

  Clayton closed his eyes for a moment even as the laughter died down. “Ana Mae never told on us. Not a peep.

  “Of course, we didn’t know that,” he said, stan
ding straight again and chuckling to himself. “We were scared . . .”

  “Terrified,” Delcine called out to renewed laughter.

  “. . . about what Mama was gonna do to us. Delcine told us Mama was just biding her time, waiting to punish us. It never came, though, and we learned a valuable lesson that day and week about the love of an older sister.”

  As he left the pulpit to thunderous applause, the congregants were still chuckling. When he took his seat, Archer beamed at him.

  More than an hour and a half later, after the mourners listened to and hollered back at Reverend Toussaint’s sermon about the virtuous woman, an altar call—“That we would be dishonoring God and Sister Ana Mae if we didn’t have”—and another protracted song about flying away to glory, Ana Mae Futrell’s funeral finally came to a close.

  Afterward, no one would recall just how the receiving line came to be, but the Futrell family stood in a line in the vestibule getting condolences and healthy doses of “I’m gonna keep y’all all in my prayers.”

  A brief lull in the line, which had to be at least four miles long, had Archer leaning over. “Does that mean because we’re sinners?”

  Clayton tried not to crack a smile. He failed.

  “That’s all right, Brother Futrell. Let it out. Sister Ana Mae enjoyed a good laugh too.”

  Clayton looked up to see the Reverend le Baptiste. But the reverend’s eyes were on Archer. Really on Archer.

  Remembering what Archer had said about the preacher, Clayton studied the older man. Well, he guessed he was older. The Reverend Toussaint le Baptiste could have been anywhere from forty to sixty years old. His slicked-back hair—today either straightened with a hot comb or relaxed—was long enough to be in a ponytail. But the look suited him. He was tall, at least a head taller than both Clayton and Archer.

  If he ain’t now, he used to be.

  Clayton couldn’t see it. But Archer’s gaydar was usually pretty accurate. This time, though, he was wrong. Drapersville didn’t suffer homosexuals lightly, and there was no way a gay preacher, no matter how deep on the down-low, could survive if the culture in the black community was the same as it had been when Clayton was coming along . . . and coming out.

  His suit, the blue so dark it was almost black, was a throwback to an earlier age. Clayton pegged it as ’60s vintage and liked it a lot. What he didn’t like was the way the man’s gaze seemed to gobble up Archer. Almost as if Clayton wasn’t standing right there.

  “Reverend!” Rosalee bustled over, breaking both the growing green settling somewhere in Clayton’s midsection and the minister’s intense perusal.

  Clayton looked at Archer, who winked at him.

  The playful gesture confused Clayton.

  “Be right with you, Sister Jenkins,” Reverend Toussaint called. “I am truly sorry for your loss,” he said, directing his comment toward Clayton. “Ana Mae was a special woman. We’re all going to miss her dearly.”

  “Would you just look at that?”

  “What?”

  Bertie and Eula Lee, two of Drapersville’s busiest busybodies, had a view of all the goings-on. Their attention at the moment zeroed in on the area where the Futrells greeted the mourners a few feet away. Their lasers trained on the three couples.

  Eula Lee looked at Bertie. “You sure he’s a little . . .” She waggled her wrist to make her point.

  “Oh, yeah. Everybody knew when he was growing up.”

  “Not him,” Eula Lee said. “The other one, the good-looking white boy with him.”

  “He’s the one who was named in the paper. The partner,” Bertie said, with emphasis on the word as if it didn’t quite sit well with her. “I thought all those sissy boys were, well, you know, sissy-like. But he’s looks regular. Real easy on the eyes too.”

  “Where do you think she got that dress?”

  “Who, Delcine? I don’t know, but did you notice how fragile she looks? She needs some of them pounds Josephine done picked up.”

  “Bertie, the woman’s sister just died. Don’t you reckon she ought to be looking at least a little bit fragile?”

  Bertie snorted. “Nary a one of them Futrells ever gave a rat’s ass about Ana Mae. Now they’re all here, pretending like they cared. If they cared, they would’ve kept track of their sister.”

  “How do you know they didn’t?”

  “Ana Mae told me,” Bertie said, her puffed-out chest and chin indicating she had some status with the recently deceased. “Said she hadn’t seen that Las Vegas one since their mama died. The fancy one from up north would send a hoity-toity Christmas card every year, sometimes from places like England and Zimbabwe.”

  “Zem Bob who?”

  “Zimbabwe. It’s a country over in Russia or something,” Bertie added, clarifying for her less-informed friend.

  “Actually,” Archer said, sidling up and interrupting the ladies. “Zimbabwe is in Africa. The country borders South Africa and Mozambique. It used to be called Rhodesia. Its people are the Shona. And if you don’t mind my saying so, I believe the two of you would be treated as queens there.”

  Eula Lee pursed her lips, distaste marring her red-rimmed mouth. “You’re the partner.”

  Archer nodded. “That’s correct. I’m a partner in the law firm of Matthews, Dodson, and Dahlgren. I’m Dahlgren.”

  Bertie chuckled and nudged Eula Lee. “I like him.”

  That made Archer smile. He winked at her. “I like you too.”

  Eula Lee wasn’t so convinced, but Bertie had a question that couldn’t wait.

  “Would you tell me something? I’ve always wanted to know, you know, if it hurts. Back there. When you . . .” Her words trailed off, but she continued to look him in the eye.

  Eula Lee gasped, jabbed Bertie hard with her elbow. But then looked at Archer expectantly. She too wanted to know the answer.

  Archer remained nonplussed. His gaze shifted from one woman to the other, then a slow smile started at his mouth. He waggled a finger toward Bertie, indicating for her to come closer.

  She leaned forward. Archer cupped a hand over her ear and whispered something.

  Bertie guffawed. Loud. So loud, heads turned toward them.

  “What?” Eula Mae demanded. “What’d he say?”

  “I’m gonna have to try that,” Bertie said.

  Archer winked at her and walked away.

  Eula Lee grabbed her friend’s arm. “What’d he say? What are you gonna try?”

  But Bertie’s only answer was a lingering chuckle and a self-satisfied smile.

  Hours later, long after the funeral and the meeting with Everett Rollings, instead of anticipating their imminent departures from Drapersville, the Futrells and their spouses sat around Ana Mae’s house, looking glum.

  From among Ana Mae’s five hundred plus TV channels Lester found an ESPN network he didn’t know existed. Archer and Winslow—two men with less than zero in common professionally, culturally, or socially beyond their relationships with a Futrell sibling—tried to find something to talk about.

  Archer eventually gave up.

  “I’m going to go make some tea. Would you like some?”

  “Tea?” Winslow asked, as if Archer had offered him crack cocaine. “No, thank you. But I’ll bet there’s some coffee going.”

  He, clearly, also wanted to escape Lester’s play-by-play and dismal company.

  “Hey, Archie, will ya grab me a beer while you’re up?” Lester called.

  Archer didn’t deign to reply but made his way to the kitchen where JoJo, Delcine, and Clayton sat at the table, grumbling.

  “We’re stuck for days in this backwater swamp. Kill me now,” Delcine said.

  “I thought I’d be halfway back home by then,” JoJo said.

  “Hey, guys,” Archer said in greeting to all of them. “Lester wants a beer,” he told JoJo.

  “He can get it himself,” she said.

  “My sentiments exactly,” Archer said, heading to the kitchen counter to survey the cakes an
d rolls and casserole dishes in an array of plastic containers and Pyrex bowls.

  Not seeing what he was looking for, he started opening cabinets. A few moments later, “Ah, here we go.”

  After filling a kettle from the tap and turning on a burner, he leaned against the counter.

  “So, what’s the plan?” he asked.

  Winslow, who had apparently grown weary of Lester’s running commentary on NFL game highlights, appeared at the kitchen doorway. “I was wondering the same thing,” he said, then to Marguerite, “We’re on a timetable.”

  “I know that,” she snapped.

  “We have open tickets,” Archer said.

  “But I hadn’t planned to be here for more than three days,” Clayton said.

  They all grumbled for a few minutes, speculating on how much lottery money might be left for them to split.

  When the kettle whistled, Archer made tea. “Anyone want a cup?”

  “I’ll take one,” JoJo said.

  “Honey or sugar for sweetener?”

  “Whatever you’re having,” she said.

  “Well, the service was nice,” Winslow said. “You did a nice job, Clayton.”

  JoJo playfully hit Clayton in the arm. “I cannot believe you told them about that carnival day.”

  Clayton got more compliments about his storytelling, and in the way of families across the world, they spent the better part of the next hour or so reminiscing and laughing together, enjoying each other’s company while under the surface remained the reason they’d all been brought together: the death of a loved one.

  “Hey, Archie,” Lester said, appearing in the kitchen doorway. “I thought you were bringing me a beer. What’s everybody laughing about?”

  The life went out of the party.

  Delcine stood up. “Let’s head back to the hotel, Win.”

  “It is late,” her husband said.

  To Lester, Archer said, “My name is Archer, not Archie. And you can find your beer in the refrigerator.”

  Muttering under his breath, Lester stomped to the fridge for his long-awaited brew. “If we have to be in this hellhole of a town for two more days, I’m gonna need to find a liquor store.”