Sunday Biscuits

By Scott Braswell and Michael Braswell

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Mildred Percy stood at her kitchen window – the one decorated with ceramic thimbles donated by her third-grade Sunday school class – and watched the parking lot lights across the street snuff out one by one.

It was getting late.

She walked to the kitchen screen door, one hand caked in Bisquick and the other holding a bottle of sorghum molasses she had removed from the antique cupboard. Her husband, Elmer, liked biscuits for supper on Sunday evenings. He would often joke to his six p.m. Sunday night congregation that the evening's sermon may be cut short because it was biscuit night.

Tonight, though, it was getting late; the clock was creeping past eight-thirty.

“Elmer! It’s close to suppertime,” Mildred shouted in a voice so loud it surprised her.

Five minutes ticked by and still no sign of her husband. She looked out at the old oak tree in the back yard, its branches lifted by a late summer breeze, as if it were shrugging its shoulders, saying, “I don’t know where he is either.” Mildred smiled at that thought for a quick moment and returned her attention to her missing husband. She knew he’d grunt and groan if the biscuits and sorghum weren’t on the table by the time her grandmother’s clock struck five o’clock. She didn’t mind it so much – the biscuits, that is, not the clock. She had always hated the sound that clock made.

Slamming the screen door behind her, Mildred hurried to the garden where she found Elmer, crumpled on the ground, his legs spread and his back against the old oak. He was holding the gold office pen he always had clipped to his shirt pocket, the one she got him for Christmas, with his name engraved on it. His thumb was nervously clicking the pen.

“Mr. Percy, what in the world is going on with you. Those biscuits are gonna crawl back in the can if you don’t come eat ‘em!”  Mildred arched her eyebrow in disapproval and placed her Bisquick-caked hand on her hip, just like her mother used to do. She hated when her mother did that.

“Something happened to me Milly,” Elmer said in a soft voice, wiping at eyes wet and raw with tears.

Mildred’s wrinkled brow softened, and she could feel her heartbeat begin to race. A warm breeze lifted the hair off her neck and carried with it the unmistakable scent of burning biscuits. She mourned them for a split second.

“Well Lord have mercy, do I need to call Dr. Elsey, or 911?” she asked her husband.

Elmer shook his head and ran his hand through the tall grass beside him. He bit his lower lip – a lifelong nervous habit of his – the words in his throat falling apart before making their way to his mouth. He breathed deeply and watched clouds move across the sky. He thought for a moment about how he had never noticed the sky before.

Mildred hesitantly took his hand. He could feel her worry moving over him.

“What’s going on with you, Elmer Percy?” she asked with soft urgency. “You want to come inside and talk about it? Those biscuits are…”

Elmer gave her hand a slight squeeze and looked up at her.

“I think I had a dream.”

“A dream? What kind of a dream?”

Elmer sighed and ran his hand through the grass again. He shook his head slowly, watching the sun drop a couple of rungs down the sky.

“Don’t know,” he answered. “I took a rest here at the oak for a spell after checking on the garden. Must’ve dozed off. Can’t say for sure what happened after that.”

He picked a hand full of grass and let it get swept up by a wisp of evening breeze.

Mildred breathed deep and picked at the dried biscuit mix on her hand. Some of it had gotten in her watch, and she drew her lips tight in mild frustration. She liked that watch.

“You want to tell me what you dreamed?” she asked, rubbing her forehead with her clean hand. A few moments passed without an answer, and Mildred sat down in a thatch of tall grass beside her husband. She could feel his hand shaking.

“I guess so,” he finally responded. “I’m not sure you’ll understand, and… well, it’s pretty crazy.   I’m not sure I understand it myself. Must have been asleep, but – can’t explain it – I felt …awake. More awake than usual. In the dream I was standing in this crowd of people – all kind of people, young, old, and folks our age. And they were laughing and carryin’ on – and dancing. They were dancing to that rock and roll fuss that I used to say was the devil’s dance and the reason deaf people never had it so good.”

Mildred let slip a slight smile.

“Well, you can bet your biscuits I wanted to leave that place as fast as I could,” Elmer continued.  “But even though I wanted to leave, my feet wouldn’t move.”

He reached down and touched his ankle. Mildred’s eyes followed his hand.

“The people looked so happy, and then I noticed they were all looking at one person who was dancing and laughing with them. Then the person they were looking at looked at me, and…”
Mildred reached to touch her husband’s temple, turned gray by two heart attacks, a wayward daughter and a few bad breaks that could have gone either way.

“Milly, this sounds awful crazy,” Elmer said, shaking his head. “I just…”

Elmer paused, his voice, the once-commanding baritone one would expect from a veteran preacher such as himself, disappearing into a hoarse, almost childlike whisper. It was a rare moment of vulnerability, and for Mildred, it did not go unnoticed.

She sat still in the tall grass that swayed side to side in the dying dusk light, holding her husband’s trembling hand. Her eyes traced the old wrinkled lines, and she thought about when those hands held their child for the first time, and how they helped bury her mother when she passed away from liver cancer, and how they could also be swift and fierce.

“Tell me what happened,” she said, watching tears streak her husband’s cheeks.

Elmer breathed deep and turned his head away from his wife, wiping his face. “Well, the person looking back at me was him.”

“Him who?”

Elmer’s voice softened.

“Jesus.”

Mildred stroked his thumb with her forefinger.

“At first I couldn’t believe it,” Elmer said, “but he was looking at me, drawing me into the laughter, even though I fought against it, at first. Then he walked over to me and spoke only once.”

“What did he say?” Mildred asked, her hand now resting still on top of her husband’s.

“He said, ‘Where’s Mildred?’”

Mildred withdrew her hand from his and slipped it into her pocket.

“Before I could say anything, he took my hand, and we began to dance.  I couldn’t believe it – I felt like a little boy, like when I used to dance with my mother in her kitchen. It’s like he reached in, dusted off that memory, and made it new again. There I was dancing with Jesus, and I found myself laughing and singing with him and the others.”

Elmer paused a moment, biting down softly on his lower lip. “Then Jesus stopped dancing even though the others continued.  Then he looked at me in a different way.”

Elmer’s words trailed off and a sudden, unfamiliar sadness overcame him.

Mildred patted his hand.

“His eyes changed. I became afraid. I didn’t want to look but knew I had to. Can’t explain why. I just knew.”

“What did they look like – his eyes,” Mildred asked.

Elmer’s face crinkled into a thinking mode, his thoughts on a quest to honor his wife’s question. 

“They were burning,” he said, “like the last embers of a fire, glowing around the edges but dark in the center – death’s eyes. Even though I looked away, his eyes looked into me, through me – probin’ around into places I had forgotten. Places safe from eyes. But there he was, lookin’ – his eyes were like searchlights, seeing everything. I couldn’t hide. I tell you, I’ve never been so ashamed and scared in my life. No matter how tight I held on, those eyes pulled every piece of darkness out of me and set it right down on the front row, then switched on the spotlight. Like the time my father beat me when I was twelve with a leather harness ‘cause I had lied to him.  He said he was beating the devil out of me, but it hurt so bad that ever since, I felt that anything good had to hurt, that sometimes you had to deny and even hurt the body to save the soul. Like the time I whipped Julie when she was fifteen after I caught her drinking beer with her friends.”

Elmer breathed deeply and wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve. Leaning his head back against the old oak tree, he continued.  “And there was the time after we were engaged, I sneaked over to Embreeville to see an old girlfriend.”

Elmer paused, anticipating a reaction, but was met with only silence.

“I never told you about that, and I’m sorry. I’m not that kind of man, and I know you know that.  But in that dream, I felt like death had a hold of my belt-loops.”

As his words burrowed through her ears, Mildred looked at the fading sun in the distance; her grief hung still in the air like stale laundry on a line.

They both fell silent for a while. An evening breeze picked up and rustled the leaves above them. The moon traded places with the sun.

Mildred put her hands in her pockets and stood up. The tall grass fell against her ankles.

“Mildred, I looked into his eyes, and my heart broke in two.” 

Tears rolled down Elmer’s cheeks as his voice cracked and dropped to a whisper.  “Then his eyes changed again.  I was bathed in the look of those eyes... like a newborn baby.”
           
The moon blinked in between clouds passing across the sky, and Mildred closed her eyes in its light. “Ovenlight,” she thought.

She looked at her hands. They were swollen and sore.

Putting her hands back in her pockets, Mildred started off through the tall grass back toward the kitchen door. Elmer turned to look in her direction. He counted silently each step she made.

She stopped and turned to look back at him.

“I’ll put some more biscuits in the oven,” she said. “Come help me set the table.”

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Michael Braswell is a retired university teacher and former prison psychologist. He has published books on ethics, peacemaking and the spiritual journey as well as several short story collections.

'Sunday Biscuits' was first published in Stray Dogs ​by Michael Braswell and Scott Braswell. It has been republished here with the author's permission.

Michael's other work on Foreshadow:
Peacemaking Boogie (Poetry, February 2024)