Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen Read online

  Looking

  for Salvation

  at the

  Dairy Queen

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  PART II

  PART III

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PART IV

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  For my family

  husband, daughters, mother, father, sisters, brother

  without you, there would be no story to tell

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the Beginning

  My daddy always said that if the good Lord can take the time to care for something as small as a baby sparrow nesting in a tree, then surely He could take the time to listen to a little girl in Ringgold, Georgia. So every night before I went to bed I got down on my knees and begged the Lord to find me a way out of this town. And every morning, I woke up in the same old place.

  It was a place that I, Catherine Grace Cline, never wanted to call home, even though I was born and raised here. It was a place where everybody knew everything about you, down to the color of underwear your mama bought you at the Dollar General Store. It was a place that just never felt right to me, like a sweater that fits too tight under your arms. It was a place where girls like me traded their dreams for a boy with a couple of acres of land and a wood-framed house with a new electric stove. It was a place I always planned on leaving.

  When I was no more than nine years old, a tornado tore right close to my house. I remember yelling at my little sister to run and hide in the basement. “Martha Ann,” I warned her, “if that twister hits this town, nobody's even going to notice it's gone.”

  She started crying for fear she was going to be swept up in the clouds and carried away, and nobody, not even our daddy, would be able to find her. Turned out the only thing of any importance swept up in the sky that day was Mr. Naylor's old hound dog. People said that Buster Black flew some fifteen miles, those long lonesome ears of his flapping like wings, before landing in the middle of some cornfield over in the next county.

  Mr. Naylor walked for miles looking for that dad-gum dog till finally my daddy and the sheriff had to go pick him up. And just when that poor man finished planting a wooden cross by Buster's little house, darn it, if that four-legged fool didn't come limping back home, wagging his tail and acting like he'd found the Promised Land. Mr. Naylor was crying, praising the Lord, holding Buster Black in his arms. The local newspaper ran a color picture of them both right on the front page, like that dog was some kind of prodigal son.

  “You know, Martha Ann,” I told her after reading about Buster's triumphant return, “a tornado like that just might be our ticket out of here, but unlike that stupid old hound dog, we are not going to limp back home.”

  My daddy said I was a little girl with a big imagination. Maybe. Or maybe I was a patient girl with a big dream, or a despairing girl waiting for her divine deliverance. But either way, I was going to hitch a ride out of Ringgold, whether it was on a fiery twister ripping a path through the Georgia sky or on a Greyhound bus rolling its way down Interstate 75.

  Truth be told, I never even liked the name Ringgold. I mean, there's nothing in these green rolling hills that even faintly resembles a ring of gold, a ring of anything for that matter. And believe me, me and Martha Ann looked, somehow figuring that if we could find a ring of trees or ancient rocks, then just maybe our living here would have some kind of meaning. But after years of searching, the best I could figure was that it was just these darn hills that I had stared at every morning from my bedroom window that formed the ring, the ring that had kept me hostage for the first eighteen years of my life.

  Nobody much ever bothers to visit this town except the truckers who stop to fill their fuel tanks because they can get some of the cheapest gas in the state here and Mrs. Gloria Jean Graves's second cousin, who has come up from Birmingham every year for the Thanksgiving holiday since before I was born. She always said it was refreshing to get away from the big city for a few days.

  One time the governor came by for about twenty-five minutes to cut a ribbon at the new elementary-school library. Everybody in town came out to see him. Daddy made me wear a dress and tie my hair back in a ribbon, just like I was going to church. Six days a week my daddy didn't care too much how I looked, but on Sunday mornings there was no negotiating the dress code. My sister and I wore our very best dresses with a fresh pair of cotton panties underneath, out of respect for the Lord, Daddy said.

  I really didn't think Jesus cared what I wore to Cedar Grove Baptist Church, or to see the governor for that matter, considering the fact that in every picture I ever saw of the King of Kings, He was wearing sandals and bundled up in nothing more than a big, baggy robe. But I figured this governor must be the most important person I was ever going to meet if Daddy was making me wear my navy blue Sunday dress with the white lacy collar and my patent-leather Mary Janes.

  Martha Ann pitched such a fit about wearing her Sunday clothes that Daddy ended up leaving her at home with a neighbor. My little sister is a couple of years younger than I am, but she has always been a couple of inches taller, my guess from the time she came into this world. She has thick, dark brown hair and deep brown eyes like our mama. I have blue eyes like my daddy and straight brown hair that looks more like the color of a field mouse.

  Martha Ann was a pretty baby and a pretty girl. Everything on her face just fits together so perfectly. When we were little, people said we looked just like twins for no better reason than we might have been wearing the same color shirt. You had to wonder if they were truly looking at us. But one thing was for certain, Martha Ann hated putting on her Sunday clothes even more than I did. She'd have much rather been in the library picking out a new book to read than waiting to look at some strange man cut a ribbon.

  I told her that if she didn't stop all that stomping and snorting, she was going to get left behind. And sure enough, she did. She had to spend the entire afternoon with Ida Belle Fletcher shucking eighty-four ears of corn for Wednesday-night supper over at the church.

  Ida Belle said she cooked for the Lord, but all I knew was that she smelled like an unsavory combination of leftover bacon grease and Palmolive soap. She kept her big, round tummy covered with a tattered, old apron permanently stained with the meals of another day. The only time I saw her without that apron was when she was sitting in church, and then she kept it folded in her pocketbook.

  My patent-leather shoe rubbed a blister on my big toe, but it was worth it. The governor turned out to be, if nothing else, the most handsome-looking man I'd ever seen. He wore a dark navy suit and a crisp white shirt that must have been starched so stiff, it could've stood up on its own. A red-and-blue-striped tie was pulled around his neck, and the tip of a white handkerchief was peeking out of his suit pocket. I had never seen a man dressed so fancy. He was in Ringgold for only a few minutes, and then he jumped in the back of a long, black car and sped off down Highway 151. I wanted to go with him so bad that for weeks after that, when I went to bed at night, I got down on my knees and begged the Lord to make me the governor's daughter.

  But He didn't bother to answer that prayer either, not that I really thought that He would. God put me
here for a reason, Daddy kept telling me; I just hadn't figured it out yet.

  Now I know my father was a certified man of God, but at a fairly young age, I decided that when it came to my destiny, he did not know what he was talking about. He certainly did not understand that there was nothing for me here in Ringgold, Georgia. Sometimes I wondered if he had noticed that this town had only one red light, one part-time sheriff, and one post office, which was nothing more than a gray metal trailer perched on a bunch of cinder blocks in the back of the Shop Rite parking lot.

  There was one losing high-school football team and one diner, which has been serving pork chops on Thursdays since 1962. There was one fire station, but it burned down five or six years ago when the entire fire department, which amounted to the sum total of Edward and Lankford Bostleman, were spending the night at their aunt's house over in LaFayette.

  And there was, thankfully, one Dairy Queen, where Martha Ann and I spent the better part of our childhood licking Dilly Bars and planning our escape. We spent every Saturday afternoon sitting on the DQ's only picnic table, sticky from the drippings of a thousand ice cream cones, thinking about a world the kids in the 4-H club couldn't even begin to imagine.

  I'm talking about a world with department stores and movie theaters and fancy restaurants that require a reservation and keep candles burning on the tables. A world with enough lights turned on at night that it makes it hard to see the stars. A world that for so many years seemed well beyond our reach. A world where girls like me and Martha Ann could dream of being more than country girls content to raise a family and grow a crop of tomatoes in the backyard.

  Martha Ann and I had visited this world a couple of times already. Daddy had taken us to Atlanta twice, once to see Santa Claus at the Lenox Square mall. Santa sat on his ruby red velvet throne at Davison's department store where hundreds of Barbie dolls and all her clothes were on display for every little girl to admire. I remember Martha Ann sitting on the floor of that toy department, for what seemed like an hour, just staring at the fancy gowns and plastic shoes in Barbie's endless wardrobe. Most of our doll clothes were homemade from pieces of dresses Martha Ann and I had outgrown. Our poor Barbies looked pretty pitiful compared to these big-city dolls waiting for a winter snow in their pink coats and slick white boots.

  The other time we went to Atlanta was to see Daddy's beloved Georgia Bulldogs play in the Peach Bowl. Daddy said we were watching history being made when the Dawgs squeaked by with a one-point victory over the University of Maryland. But as soon as the final second ticked off the clock, Daddy was herding us back to the car. We begged him to take us to the Varsity so we could get a chili dog and a chocolate milk shake. We could see it from the highway, but Daddy said we needed to hurry on home.

  We weren't in Atlanta long either time, but it was sure long enough for Martha Ann and me to figure out that the world we kept dreaming about was no more than a hundred miles from our front door.

  Daddy, on the other hand, couldn't see the good in leaving Ringgold. He was born and raised there, and he couldn't imagine being happy any place else. Ringgold, he always told me, had everything a man needed, and what it didn't have, a man didn't need.

  Truth be told, I think Daddy was a little bit scared of the world beyond the Catoosa County line. And I guess I can't blame him. Every night he would get comfortable in his reclining chair, turn on the television, and then let Walter Cronkite convince him that the world was much too dangerous for anyone he loved. Boys were getting themselves blown up every day in some country I knew nothing about. Grown women were pulling off their bras and burning them in broad daylight for everyone to see. And a man named Martin Luther King was telling the black people they deserved a better life, and everybody around town seemed afraid that they might actually get it.

  Daddy said the devil was sneaky, that he's been known to take the shape of ordinary-looking people. That's why, Daddy said, you always had to look someone in the eyes, because that's where you could see the greed and the hate and all the impure thoughts. But from where I was sitting on the brown braided rug on our living room floor, all I could see in my daddy's eyes was fear. I think he thought that here in Ringgold he could keep his babies safe, just like his daddy had done and his daddy's daddy.

  You see, three generations of Cline men had been known for three things—their love of the Lord, their devotion to their family, and their commitment to growing the perfect tomato. And even though this was not my life's ambition, unfortunately it was in my blood. I am convinced to this day that even my own mama considered the tomato a symbol of a person's God-fearing commitment to biblical and civic values. It may be hard to believe all that's wrapped up in one little, red tomato, but that's the gospel truth.

  Martha Ann and I weren't falling for it, though. We didn't care what Mrs. Gladys Gulbenk, our eighty-year-old home economics teacher, tried to tell us. There were not enough ways to prepare a tomato to keep us entertained for a lifetime.

  “Remember, guls,” preached Mrs. Gulbenk, always holding the most perfect red tomato in her hand for all of us to admire, “you can fry ’em, bake ’em, stew ’em, and congeal ’em. A good wife and mutha will always have a tomata on hand.”

  I can still hear those words rumbling around my head some nights when I'm lying in bed and can't sleep. And the worst part, the really tragic part of it all, is that now, all grown up, I always have a couple of tomatoes sitting on the kitchen counter. That's just how strong a hold the tomato can have over a Southern girl. But when I was little, perched on that picnic table at the Dairy Queen, with Martha Ann sitting right by my side, I never once dreamed of tomatoes, not for a single, solitary minute. No way. I spent my time thinking about being a Hollywood movie star or some famous doctor who cured hard-to-pronounce diseases.

  But one thing was for darn sure, after licking a thousand Dilly Bars, we had successfully traced the roots of our discontent to one man, our great-granddaddy William Floyd Cline. William Floyd is still considered a very important man in Ringgold, although he's been dead for a long, long time now. To this day, people talk about him as if they know him, kind of the same way they talk about somebody famous like Hank Aaron or Dolly Parton or Abraham Lincoln. The talk about him was always so big that sometimes Martha Ann and I wondered if he was still living, hidden somewhere up on Taylor's Ridge.

  William Floyd was one of the most prolific bootleggers the state of Georgia has ever known. He brewed and ran illegal moonshine throughout northern Georgia and Alabama and southeastern Tennessee. His whiskey was corn-based, bitter, and wickedly potent. Everybody knew his was the best, and his customers paid top dollar for one of his little brown jugs. Mr. Tucker, down at the Dollar General Store, said he heard that a man over in Bledsoe County, somewhere up in Tennessee, slept for three whole weeks after drinking some of our great-granddaddy's moonshine.

  Standing no more than five feet three inches tall, William Floyd weighed about a hundred and seventy pounds, but Daddy said it was all muscle. He said he had a barrel-shaped chest and arms as big and round as watermelons in July. He didn't have one single strand of hair on his head, and legend has it, his steely blue eyes could pierce through a man and see inside his soul. The shining business was a dangerous trade and William Floyd found himself hunted, chased, and shot at, but, fortunately, never caught.

  Then one sticky, Georgia afternoon in the middle of August, William Floyd made a spur-of-the-moment decision that changed his life and my family's fate forever. Smelling of corn mash and cigar smoke, he stumbled into a white tent propped up in the midst of some lonesome field next to some unmarked country road. And under that tent, with its canvas sides flapping in the gentle summer breeze, William Floyd found the Lord somewhere in the congregation's third singing of the fourth verse of “Just As I Am.”

  The preacher, who had found the Lord himself only the week before, took my great-granddaddy by the hand and led him down to the banks of the Tallapoosa River. And in the middle of that river on that hot August da
y with the cool water moving against their backs, the preacher lowered my great-granddaddy under the water a sinner and raised him up a man of God. Without much more than an “Amen,” newly found Brother William Floyd quit drinking, fighting, and cursing and dedicated his life to his Savior Jesus Christ.

  My great-granddaddy didn't remember much of the days following his salvation. Story has it he walked miles and miles in some sort of divine daze so high on the Lord that he glowed like the Angel Gabriel. When he finally stumbled into Ringgold, the townspeople took one look at him and figured he had been specially delivered by the Lord himself. They called him Preacher, and within days he was sermonizing from his own makeshift pulpit next to a grove of cedar trees. And during the course of the next forty years, he built a church and nurtured a flock, all the while delivering another type of libation just as intoxicating as his moonshine.

  When William Floyd passed on, Daddy said the townsfolk mourned for weeks. They had lost their spiritual leader, their confidant, and their friend. Their only comfort was knowing that his son, Floyd Marshall, would take over the pulpit at Cedar Grove Baptist Church. Floyd Marshall followed in his daddy's footsteps, all right, but I'm not sure it was as much a divine calling as it was a fear of breaking the Fifth Commandment, more loosely translated to mean Thou shalt do what your daddy tells you to do.

  People don't talk as much about Floyd Marshall. Even I know it would be kind of hard to follow in the footsteps of someone who's been divinely delivered. And I think my poor granddaddy struggled with his destiny long before Martha Ann and I ever sat down on that picnic table at the Dairy Queen. We never did get to meet him. He died shortly before I was born. But from the stories my daddy has told me about him, I always felt like he would have understood me. I always felt like he would have enjoyed a Dilly Bar of his own.

  Daddy said Floyd Marshall was a quiet man who loved to read books and work in his garden, the one he sowed directly behind the church. He planted squash, strawberries, okra, green beans, watermelons, and four different kinds of tomatoes. He grew some of the biggest, reddest tomatoes this town has ever seen, and he grew these little, yellow, pear-shaped tomatoes that Daddy said he could pop in his mouth and suck like a piece of hard candy. But best of all, he grew these deep purple ones that Daddy said came from the Cherokee Indians over in Tennessee. That's right, a real live Indian gave my granddaddy his first vine.