The April Tree by Judith Arnold

Author:Judith Arnold
Language: ara, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BelleBooks, Inc.
Published: 2013-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

FLORIE’S LITERATURE class—English Epic Tradition—would be meeting in ten minutes. She was going to miss it.

The kitchen in the Jubilee Christian Center had been left a mess after last night’s revelation supper. Whoever had prepared the fried chicken had left spatters of grease all over the stove. The oven was caked with so many layers of crud an archeological examination would probably unearth a year’s worth of baking and roasting spills, layered like the earth’s strata, so each relic of crusty food could be linked to a specific date and meal. The counters were blotched with spills that had dried before they’d been wiped, and the sink’s drain cover was clogged with bits of old food. It was Florie’s job to clean the room, and so she would.

English Epic Tradition wasn’t the course she’d hoped it would be, anyway. She’d thought they would be reading books about King Arthur. Ivanhoe. A Tale of Two Cities. Maybe even Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. When she’d skimmed the syllabus and discovered T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land on it, she’d given serious consideration to dropping the course. But she needed one more 300-level course for her major, and anyway she’d survived The Waste Land once before. In fact, she’d received an A-minus on the paper she’d written about it back in Mr. Schenk’s high school class: The Waste Land as a Meditation on Death.

Mr. Schenk probably hadn’t even read her essay. She’d dug it out of the bottom drawer of her desk at home when she’d decided not to drop English Epic Tradition, and perused it to see if it might be of use in her current seminar. She’d found all sorts of errors in it—misspellings, dangling participles, a pathetic over-reliance on semicolons. But still, it had that large red A-minus scrawled across the title page.

Cutting class wasn’t her choice. But Father Joe always said that good Christians allowed God to make their choices for them. If God wanted her to scrub the kitchen, she would scrub it, knowing it was God’s will that she miss today’s session of English Epic Tradition.

The kitchen was old, not surprising given that the building itself dated back a good eighty years. The floor was a scuffed checkerboard of linoleum tiles, the refrigerator white enamel and nowhere near large enough, the cooking range at least a decade past its warranty date. There was nothing pretty or homey about the room, which was bathed in yellow light from buzzing fluorescent ceiling fixtures, augmented by the thin daylight filtering through the window. The kitchen actually had two windows, but one had been fitted with a venting fan that blocked off half the frame.

Not that she was complaining about the light. Not that she would dare. Father Joe had asked her to clean the kitchen, and she was glad of the opportunity to serve him and their entire community. Serving the community was the same thing as serving God, Father Joe always said.

This afternoon, serving God meant scrubbing the gummy skim of grease that coated the stove top.

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