By Rita McInerney

When you get to Fairburn you take W. Broad Street to Cemetery Road. Once through the graveyard the road winds around to a short dead-end lane. Tom and Lizzie Easter’s ramshackle cottage is on the left, down a slight incline behind the small vegetable garden. The smell from the pigsty right below their privy is pungent.

The Easters are old and frail with no living children or any relatives who care about them. Lizzie will be 70 on Aug. 25 and Tom is 87. Married for 40 years, they have lived the last 17 on this small plot, their old house surrounded by dilapidated sheds, discarded tables and bureaus, a decrepit sofa and rusting chairs.

When Sister Marcella Meyer and Sister Roberta Joseph Sutton of Catholic Social Services arrive on this humid day in late June, Tom, tall and skinny, wearing a Turtles T-shirt, shuffles out of the house and greets them cheerfully. Lizzie, he says, has gone to the laundry in town with Viola Cotton, community worker with the Fulton County Department of Family and Children’s Services. The women are soon back.

Inside the house, Wiston Leverett, permanent deacon at St. Paul of the Cross Church in Atlanta, and his right hand man, Charlie Mosley, are putting down linoleum squares in the living room which holds “Mr. Tom’s” single bed. Earlier, they had to tear out the rotten floor boards and put down a new wooden floor. They’ve put new ceiling boards in both living room and kitchen and new cabinets in Lizzie’s kitchen. The little room is also brightened by a new sink and shiny black stove.

This is the morning the two tireless Sisters of Saint Joseph will be arranging the wooden cabinets for Lizzie. There are a lot of glasses and dishes given to her by “white folks” over the long years she tended babies and cleaned houses, beginning when she was a girl of 12 down in Manchester.

Back then her mother always told her she had to go and help the white ladies who had hurt their big toe. Young Lizzie couldn’t understand why so many of them had this problem so one day she asked her employer. “There’s the big toe,” the woman answered, pointing to the tiny infant on the bed. This is a story Lizzie tells her visitors with a big smile illuminating on her worn face.

Sisters Marcella and Roberta came out to the cottage with several volunteers from St. Matthew’s Church in Fairburn and from All Saints in Dunwoody, on Saturday June 22. The volunteers spent the entire day pulling off layer upon layer of old linoleum from the floor in the kitchen and living room. Later, Sister Marcella admitted she overdid it and had a backache for several days.

The little cottage has running water now, thanks to Sister Marcella’s decision to make the house more livable for her friends. The water runs cold; getting hot water is out of the question until the house’s old wiring can be replaced. But the inside cold water is a blessing to the Easters. Before, for cooking, bathing and washing clothes, Lizzie had to fetch water in plastic jugs from the spigot outside the cottage.

Considerable interior rehabilitation has been completed since Sister Marcella decided, back in April, to get help for the Easter project. And life has greatly improved for the couple through the generosity of the St. Vincent De Paul Society and private individuals contacted by Sister Marcella.

Wiston Leverett has been giving at least two days a week for the last five weeks. He did all the planning and ordering of supplies, Sister says, as well as doing the actual work. “I couldn’t have done it without him.” His labor is all voluntary but his helper, Mosley, is paid. He has a family to raise.

Along with the new flooring, ceiling, cabinets, the men have installed five sturdy wooden windows to replace the plastic which covered the old windows.

Several pieces of old furniture have been taken from the four-room house and deposited outside. The outside cleanup and carting away of the sagging, rusting furniture and accumulated junk was on the work schedule Sister Marcella had mapped out for the second “volunteer Saturday” on June 29. She was expecting, she said, more volunteers to show up as word of the good work spread around the parishes.

There is still a lot to be done. Gentle Lizzie sleeps on a twin-size mattress in a double bed. A larger mattress is needed to make her comfortable. That’s important to the two energetic sisters from Catholic Social Services.

“But the big item is getting enough money to install a septic tank and indoor toilet,” Sister Marcella stresses. “Then we can have someone come in and knock down the outhouse and old sheds.”

The new roof on the cottage is half-finished because there is an expensive $750 piece of equipment necessary to make the chimney cold-proof. White paint is needed for the exterior and new front and screen doors.

“So far we’ve kept out of the red,” Sister Marcella says. She firmly believes there are enough people in Atlanta with the means to “get together and help.”

Parishes already helping with money and/or volunteer laborers include: St. Jude’s, Sacred Heart, All Saints, Corpus Christi, Immaculate Heart of Mary, St. Andrew’s, St. Thomas More and Holy Trinity.

The two sisters first visited the Easters during the record-breaking hot summer of 1980. Catholic Social Services was giving electric fans to old people who had no air conditioning and someone called in on the Easters behalf. They took one out to them. After that, the sisters visited regularly, bringing food and clothing from St. Vincent de Paul.

“Mr. Tom was always outside. When he saw us pull up in the car he would call to Lizzie inside, ‘Come and see the sisters coming’.” Tom, who worked in the Atlanta area for many years as a school janitor and for contracting firms, spends most of his days sitting in his old chair beneath a shade tree. An old black dog is nearby.

Despite their lifetime history of hard work, the Easters’ old age income is below poverty level. Fortunately, along with the sisters from Catholic Social Services, they have other friends. Pastor M. E. Stevenson of the New Ground United Church of God in Christ in southwest Atlanta, planted the vegetable garden by the road and shares its harvest with them.

Recently, Lizzie received a $20 cash gift from the Methodist church she attended while she was still able to get about. Sister Marcella was touched when she wanted her to take the money. She wouldn’t but instead urged Lizzie to use the gift money to buy the fruit juices the doctor has told her to drink.

Sister Marcella is sure generous people will contribute the money, time and trucks to finish the job. She and Sister Roberta have made such miracles happen before. She needs “enough people to give one dollar each. We could get the work done. We’ll keep working on it. I have the faith.”