The Community of God was a small, unsteepled church of yellow brick, originally built by Germans, with a tar-roofed community center attached to one side. Its congregation, mostly female, was led by a middle-aged pastor, Theo Crenshaw, who did the circle the favor of accepting its suburban charity without thanks. Every second Tuesday, Theo simply presented Russ and Kitty with a prioritized to-do list; they came not to minister but to serve. Kitty had marched with Russ for civil rights, but Russ had had to counsel other women in the circle, explaining that just because they struggled to understand “urban” English it didn’t mean they had to speak loudly and slowly to make themselves understood. For the women who got it, and learned to overcome their fear of walking on the 6700 block of South Morgan Street, the circle had been a powerful experience. On the women who didn’t get it—some of whom had joined the circle for competitive reasons, not wanting to be left out—he’d been obliged to inflict the same humiliation he’d suffered at the hands of Rick Ambrose and ask them not to come again.
Because Kitty had kept her glued to her side, Frances hadn’t been tested yet. When they arrived on Morgan Street, she left the car reluctantly and waited to be asked before helping Russ and the other widows carry toolboxes and bags of cast-off winter clothes into the community center. Her hesitancy set off a flurry of misgivings in Russ—that he’d mistaken style for substance, a hat for an adventurous spirit—but they were melted by a gust of compassion when Theo Crenshaw, ignoring Frances, directed the two older widows to catalogue a shipment of secondhand books for the Sunday school. The two men were going to install a new water heater in the basement.
“And Frances,” Russ said.
She was hovering by the street door. Theo sized her up coolly. “There’s a whole lot of books.”
“Why don’t you help Theo and me,” Russ said.
The eagerness of her nod confirmed his compassionate instinct, dispelling the suspicion that what he really wanted was to show off how strong he was, how skilled with tools. In the basement, he stripped down to his undershirt and applied a bear hug to the nasty, asbestos-clad old heater and lifted it off its seat. At forty-seven, he was no longer a tall sapling; he’d broadened in the chest and shoulders like an oak tree. But there wasn’t much for Frances to do but watch, and when the intake pipe snapped off flush with the wall, necessitating work with a stone chisel and a pipe die, he was slow to notice that she’d left the basement.
What Russ most liked about Theo was his reticence, which spared Russ from the vanity of imagining that the two of them could be interracial buddies. Theo knew the essential facts about Russ—that he didn’t shy from hard work, that he’d never lived far from poverty, that he believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ—and he neither asked nor welcomed more open-ended questions. About, for example, the retarded neighborhood boy Ronnie, who wandered in and out of the church in all seasons, sometimes stopping to do a peculiar swaying dance with his eyes closed, or to cadge a quarter from a First Reformed lady, Theo would only say, “Best leave that boy alone.” When Russ had tried to engage with Ronnie anyway, asking him where he lived, who his mother was, Ronnie had responded, “Can I have a quarter?” and Theo had said to Russ, more sharply, “Best just leave him be.”
It was an instruction Frances hadn’t received. Upstairs, at lunchtime, they found her and Ronnie on the floor of the community room with a box of crayons. Ronnie was wearing a cast-off parka recognizably from New Prospect, swaying on his knees while Frances drew an orange sun on a sheet of newsprint. Theo stopped dead, began to say something, and shook his head. Frances offered Ronnie her crayon and looked up at Russ happily. She’d found her own way to serve and to give of herself, and he was happy for her, too.
Theo, following him into the sanctuary, was not. “You need to speak to her. Tell her Ronnie is off-limits.”
“I really don’t see the harm.”
“Isn’t a matter of harm.”
Theo went home to his wife for a hot meal, and Russ, not wanting to discourage Frances’s act of charity, took his sack lunch up to the Sunday-school room, where the older widows had undertaken a wholesale reorganization. When you were sick in the body, you surrendered it to the touch of strangers, and when you were sick with poverty you surrendered your environment. Without asking permission, the widows had sorted all of the children’s books and created bright, enticing labels for them. When you were poor, it could be hard to see what needed doing until someone showed you by doing it. Not asking permission hadn’t come naturally to Russ, but it was the counterpart of not expecting to be thanked. Venturing into a back yard of bramble and shoulder-high ragweed, he didn’t ask the old lady who owned it which bushes and which pieces of rusting junk weren’t worth saving, and when the job was done, more often than not, the old lady didn’t thank him. She said, “Now doesn’t that look better.”