Free The Devil in Pew Number Seven by Rebecca Nichols Alonzo Page B

said my prayers, I settled in for the night, pulling my blanket to the base of my neck.
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    During August 1974, I was too young to recognize anything different about my mother. Unlike Daddy, I wouldn’t have noticed the sunlike glow on her face, the added bounce in her step as if walking happily on spring-loaded shoes, or on occasion, the need for a midafternoon nap. Any change in her diet, any odd cravings, would have been missed by me, who, most of the time, was happy with a peanut butter and grape-jelly sandwich. Day or night, this was the preferred food of young princesses.
    Had I been aware of the secret she carried within her, I’m not sure what difference that would have made to me. Children at that age are typically absorbed in their own universe. I was not an exception to the rule. You could have offered me a million dollars, and still I couldn’t have told you that my momma, at age thirty-nine, was three months pregnant. Nor could I have known that she had, once again, defied the odds for a woman with endometriosis. To be three months pregnant was, in itself, a miracle.
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    When I say that I had a charmed childhood, I believe that’s largely a function of what my parents did and didn’t do for me. While they immersed me in love, laughter, and yes, discipline as needed, they also kept me in the dark when it came to the heated debate over the building expansion, the mysterious letters, and the late-night phone calls. In true princess fashion, I had been spared such unhappy details. Even the home invasion went over my head. About all that registered was the fact that there was something wrong with the heater and water and phone—the kind of stuff best left for grown-ups to sort out.
    And when our home had been burglarized a second time in May of 1973, I knew something was wrong, but was again spared the details. While I was unsettled by this invasion and suspected my parents had been, too, they did a remarkable job not allowing the fear they may have been experiencing to dominate their lives. That time, the intruder had stolen both of my daddy’s hunting rifles, most likely to disarm us.
    Though it wasn’t as frightening as break-ins, my parents also had to deal with the antics of Mr. Watts in pew number seven. 12 Yet even when Mr. Watts did his best to disrupt the worship service, my parents didn’t allow him to define their joy or cast a cloud over the mood in the church or our home. For instance, Mr. Watts had a deep bag of dirty tricks designed to fluster Daddy while he preached. Like some sort of clown with a bad sense of timing, Mr. Watts made obnoxious faces in the middle of the service. Bringing hand to mouth, he’d clear his throat with gasps, coughs, and grunts as if he had swallowed dry bread, and for variety, he’d suck his teeth and smack his lips as if savoring the last morsels of a steak dinner.
    Toward the end of the sermon, Mr. Watts pointed at his watch, arm raised, signaling that Daddy had preached too long—at least too long in Mr. Watts’s view. And if that grand display didn’t prompt Daddy to wrap things up, Mr. Watts would rise from his pew and make a sudden, noisy exit, slamming the front doors so hard the frame rattled.
    To lighten the atmosphere whenever Mr. Watts pulled one of these door-banging stunts, Momma, with a smile and a wave of her hand, would say, “Well, Amen !” or “Praise the Lord.” If she and Daddy had been unsettled, which would be understandable, they didn’t show it. Daddy would finish his sermon, and Momma would play her heart out at the organ. After the service, standing at the back, shaking hands with the departing worshipers, they had the wisdom to be discreet rather than comment on Mr. Watts’s weekly misbehavior.
    They did, however, have a plan to minimize the racket over at least one of Mr. Watts’s tactics. Daddy had the front doors of the church changed from thick, solid wood doors to glass doors that, being lighter, didn’t shake the