Granny Atkins's Sermon

aka, Life is Short and That's a Fact | Another Breakfast with Billy Wayne and Joe Eddy

It is pouring outside and in.

Outside, it’s pouring rain. That is an East Texas thing—when it rains, it pours.

Inside, wearing her pink and white waitress dress with a lacy, white apron, white, sensible shoes, and pink lipstick, Lucille the Waitress pours coffee into the thick ceramic mugs she sets aside and forbids use for anyone but her two most regular customers, Billy Wayne and Joe Eddy.

Billy Wayne is reflective, and it shows in the furrow of his brow. Whatever Billy Wayne feels always shows, as he is not a stoic.

He says to Joe Eddy, who is folding the newspaper he has been scouring and resting it on the empty chair to his right, where also his fedora hangs on one of the posts of the chair’s back, “Do you remember Granny Atkins?”

“Of course I do! How could anyone forget her? She was sweet as the banana pudding she always made whenever a dinner on the grounds was announced.”

Lucille the Waitress jumps in.

“I am glad you said ‘grounds’ and not ‘ground.’ People used to say ‘dinner on the ground’, and I was always disappointed when they ate it at tables. Maybe I should take out these tables for a day and serve breakfast on the ground.”

“Not if you want me to order any,” quipped Joe Eddy.

“Anyhow, she musta been in her 80s in the 70s, when we were kids. She had that bent back and neck, and I guessed she never saw much of the world and mostly had to look at her shoes.”

“She always wore nice shoes,” says Joe Eddy.

“My Lord, but it takes a long time for you to get to a point, if there is one,” Lucille the Waitress complains, and walks away to attend to the half-dozen other occupied tables, a thing she does with incredible efficiency, grace, wit, and charm, but in a rough-edged East Texas way.

Billy Wayne waits while Joe Eddy takes a call about a used car he has on his lot. Soon enough, Lucille the Waitress has cleared all but two of the other tables, and with the downpour, no more customers are likely for a bit, so she returns with their breakfast plates neatly and expertly balances on one arm and the coffee pot in the opposite hand. She is like a circus juggler in pink and white.

“So, anyhow, I was thinking on the ride in about how the only thing besides her shoe Granny Atkins saw with little effort was the double keyboard on that old organ at church.”

Joe Eddie laughs.

“Every song sounded the same when Granny Atkins played that organ. Thank God for your mom on the piano, or we woulda never known which tune to put the words to.”

“You remember,” continues Billy Wayne, “How she would stop by the pulpit at the end of the song service, just as pastor Hendricks was about to sermonize, place her hand on the pulpit, and with great effort, peer out at us, and testify? She only did it every so often.”

Lucille the Waitress is satisfied that everything is in order and does a thing she never does. She removes Billy Wayne’s Stetson from the other empty chair and takes a seat, balancing the sweat-stained cowboy hat on her lap.

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“This better be good. I have taken a seat for it,” she warns.

Billy Wayne swallows hard, knowing the ante is upped.

Joe Eddy says, “Goshamighty, we kids hated seeing Granny okdo that because now the service would be even longer, and the fried chicken lunch even later.”

Billy Wayne chuckles.

“You got that right. But I am thinking about this one time. I remember it like it happened yesterday.”

Lucille the Waitress, “Well, if that is the case, you have likely forgotten it.”

“Anyhow,” he continues, “She says, ‘Life is short. It says so in the New Testament, in the book of James, but you don’t need James or me to tell you this, if you have lived any of it beyond your childhood. I know for you kids, it seems like it goes on forever. Believe me. It does not. It goes by in a flash. I wasn’t always bent like this. I didn’t always have arthritis or stay on a note too long. Yesterday, just yesterday, I was young and pretty like that curly-haired girl in the corner back there—and she pointed to Betty Sue—then I was in love, then I was married, then I had children. It all happened so fast. So…fast. Life is short.”

“Good Lord, but you memorized the entire speech!” exclaims Joe Eddy.

“It wrote itself in my brain. One of those things that I just never forgot. Do you remember what happened next?”

Lucille the Waitress, “For Pete’s sake! I am on pins and needles. Hold that thought…”

Off she flittered to do her rounds, ring up the other two remaining tables, bid the diners a good day, and look out the window at the passing storm.

“Quite a turd-floater,” pans Billy Wayne, watching her watch the weather.

But she comes back, takes her seat, and looks at him impatiently, like a mother looking at a child who is reluctant about eating the spinach she slaved over the oven to make.

Joe Eddy: “I think I do, now that you mention it. Wasn’t that the day Pastor Hendricks, who always had his Bible open to the left and a three-ring binder with his typed-out sermon on the right, said nothing for the longest time, just watched Granny Atkins walk to her front row seat, and then looked at the congregation. I swear, he was looking right at me, and I was doing inventory of the week, trying to remember which sins I was guilty of.”

Billy Wayne: “Yep! And then like an actor in a Shakespeare play, he dramatically ripped off the first page of his sermon, crumpled it, and tossed it over his shoulder.”

Joe Eddy: “Yes! You coulda heard a pin drop. I swear I heard that paper land like a rock. Not a person moved or even breathed. I know I didn’t.”

“Yeah, and then he ripped the second page, and did the same thing with it…”

“He musta had four or five of those pages, and each one was dispensed with solemnity.”

“That’s a good word for it,” nods Billy Wayne. “Solemnity.”

“What then???” asks Lucille the Waitress. “My Lord, Billy Wayne. What then?”

“Well…” Billy Wayne says nothing for nearly 30 seconds. “It was like that. Silence. Then the preacher says, ‘I planned a sermon for today, but I will not preach it. I am inspired to ask you to turn in your Bibles to James chapter four and verse 14, the verse Granny Atkins was referencing. “Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.’”

Lucille the Waitress: “Impressive that you can remember and quote that verse verbatim like that.”

Billy Wayne: “It is one of the ones I never forget. And, so he says, ‘I will title today’s impromptu sermon, 'Granny Atkins’ Message to the Church,' and it will be printed in next Sunday’s bulletin. You might ask her to sign it for you.’ I never saw him smile more kindly than he did right then, and he was looking directly at Granny.”

Lucille the Waitress: “The weather and I are impatient. Get on with your story.”

“I remember the points he made that day. He said life is short, so we need to choose well our people, our path, and to know our purpose.”

The other two have no wisecracks to make. It is clear to them that Billy Wayne is in a reverent and solemn mind.

“I have questioned my path many times, especially in the drought years when everything I sow dies and the weeds thrive, or when the price of beef goes too far one way or the other, or I have to put to pasture a piece of equipment that is no longer serviceable or useful.”

Still, they listen. No retort. No answer.

“I have spent many a sleepless night wondering about my purpose and whether I ever knew it or filled it.”

Silence.

“But I have never doubted or regretted my people—my family, or my friends. I coulda done better by my first wife, and maybe she woulda stayed. I coulda been better to my kids and taught them things with more patience and maybe learned a few things from them. But I could not have picked better people to live my life among, and that extends to this table. I have never wasted a single minute here.”

His eyes are misty. Lucille’s soft hand squeezes the back of his weathered farm hand, which is all leathery skin, bone, and gristle.

“Anyhow,” Billy Wayne continues, “Preacher Hendricks did post that sermon in the next week’s bulletin, but Granny Atkins wasn’t there to see it or to sign any copies. She had gone on to glory that very week.”

Joe Eddy wipes a tear because he remembers just then: “You have that thing at the hospital. What is it, Next week?”

“A week from tomorrow,” answers Billy Wayne and blows out a long sigh. “It’s nothing. They are just gonna go in there around my heart and check out the things and, if they find something, they’ll fix it. They do it every day.”

“It’s your heart,” says Lucille the Waitress while wiping her eyes with a napkin. “That is not nothing.”

Joe Eddy: “Well, it’s a good heart and no one better ever tell me different.”

Billy Wayne, uncomfortable with the emotions he has evoked, “Look at the time. The clouds are rolling by, and the ground will be good and soft for plowing.”

He scoots back his chair, takes the Stetson from Lucille’s lap, and stretches himself to the fullness of a six-foot, nine-inch frame.

Joe Eddy pats Lucille the Waitress’s hand, “We won’t fuss over whose turn it is to pay. Put it on my tab and give yourself a good tip.”

Lucille the Waitress: “Today is on the house.”

Billy Wayne doesn’t hear her. He is already standing in the rain, looking out, looking up, looking ahead, and looking behind, the way folks do when life is fragile.