Fallen Angels (7 page)
“Who cares about your stupid hat? What about the food? How we going to get into town now? How'd those boys take your truck, anyway? I'll bet you left the keys in it,” said Angel.
“Hush it or I'll hush you with my bare hands.” The wind hit Jeb smack in the face. “This is a bad one. Feels like the skirts of a Oklahoma sooner.” He did not know if the Welby children heard him or not. The rain and wind howled, the ghost of wood and earth aroused by the tempest.
“Let's get back to Claudia's old house. At least inside her place we got a dry floor to sleep on until morning.”
“You go back, take these two with you,” said Jeb. “I'm going ahead. I'll find those two drunks plowing through the mud down one of these old roads and I'll nab them. Probably from around here, looking for trouble.”
“We're going with you,” said Angel. “You know how far we run after you? I'll never lead us back by myself.”
Jeb wanted them to lose their way. But Ida May set to wailing. He heard his baby sister's cry again. “Foller me through the woods, if you have to. But I won't wait a step for any of you so you better move it like ducks behind they momma. We'll take the higher ground but foller the road alongside it. Maybe the woods will keep back some of the rain.”
Rain plummeted to the leafy forest bed, still rotting the leaves from the past autumn. The woods smelled green to Jeb, like the marsh was given its daily drink offering from the sky. But the thunder and the jagged knives of lightning pounded the winds from the tattered sky. The pines in the forest bent to the flouncing skirts of the storm. A seventy-year-old oak snapped off at the top about fifty feet from where they stood.
Angel shouted for Ida May to keep up.
Jeb slowed down in such away to allow the vagabond trio to keep up but not in a way to make them think he cared a hill of beans about them. He didn't.
Blackness enveloped the last of the day. He had to rely on the sporadic lightning bolts to illuminate the road. The sodden trunks, black and dripping wet all the way through the backside of the bark, disappeared into the velvet black backdrop of stormy evening. Twice Jeb missed hurling himself straight into a thick trunk. The wind swirled freely and dogged them whenever they hit a clearing. Jeb thought he smelled a tornado. When three large oaks dominoed one against the other, he knew he'd surely seen the tail winds of a bad one.
Lightning spit across the wall of rain and reflected against glass—two windows staring, blinking. “I don't know what I see. Maybe it's a house. Foller me this way.”
As he led them toward nothingness, a bell sounded, tolling in the wind. He knew the sound and said, “It's a church!” The rainy twinkle of skylights illuminated the steeple, a white spire that glowed under the arc of lightning then fell gray again. Jeb ran up the front steps. Two doors hinged on each side and met in the middle, a heavy offering of hand-hewn timber locked on the inside with something as unmovable as a squared timber against iron holdings. “They bolted this door but good. Ain't no use trying to get inside.”
“Let's try a window. Anything!” Out front, Angel made Willie bend over and give her a foot up. She pushed against the glass. “It's hard to open, but I swear it ain't locked.”
“Out of the way then!” Jeb pushed against the window frame, joggled it back and forth until it slid an inch. He repeated the motion until the window opened. He grabbed the boy. “You're going in first. I'll hand you the littlest and you help her over the windowsill.” He pushed Willie through the opening, rump, last. He and the boy helped Ida May through the open window.
“Just a foot up, then,” said Angel, who stood away from him.
“We're out in a tornado! Get yourself over here.” He grabbed her and lifted her through the opening. She was lighter than he assessed and she went through too fast and thudded onto the floor. He ignored the way she screeched and with one arm pulled himself inside.
“You know you won't never find a woman treating them bad like you do!” Angel lifted her skirt and examined the yellowing bruise on her shin. “Not a good woman, not one that wants to do for you and bless your house.”
Jeb lit the two lanterns with matches left on the windowsill by some blessed soul. “I don't know what you're jawing about, Biggest. Crawl up off that old dusty floor onto that pew by your brother and Littlest and get some rest. I need some time to myself.” His eyes ran past the bruise again. “Did that happen when you came through yonder winder?”
Angel inhaled and blew put an impetuous little huff like a mare he once had that never took to its breaking. Her face turned to one side and she nodded obliquely.
“Look, I'm, sorry. You satisfied? I don't think about being all polite and ‘scuse, me, ma'am’ and ‘may I help you here through yon winder’ when I'm about to get sucked away by a tornado.”
“I never saw no tornado.”
“You ever been to Oklahoma?”
Angel shook her head again, still showing the narrowed eyes that said she mistrusted him.
“In Oklahoma you know they's a tornado before it's upon you if you use your God-given horse sense. The whole air around you changes and you can feel something invisible pressing against the insides of your ears. That tells you, ‘Hey, fool! Get yourself under the bed or down in the cellar.’ I'm telling you I know a tornado. I once had a uncle lived in Oklahoma.”
“They probably want you up in Oklahoma and Texas too, for killing somebody.” She had lost all of her fight and sat down on the pew.
“What about you, Biggest? You on the run? You a runaway?”
“Stop calling me that.”
“It fits. You got the biggest everything—mouth, eyes, big ears.” He saw that got to her.
Angel touched both earlobes. “My granny says I got blessed ears. I can hear every little thing. Things that other people miss, I hear.”
Jeb thumped the pew wood. “This'll be hard sleeping.”
“Granny always talked about God and things being blessed. I didn't mind it. Daddy minded it some. Momma plain old made fun. But Momma is wise, too. They just had differences, my momma and Daddy's momma.”
“Your granny a Bible thumper?”
“In a big way, big-time way. She could out-quote the preacher from Snow Hill and he is the biggest Bible thumper I know of.”
“I think you should stay with your granny. Sounds like she could teach you a thing or two.”
“She died. Last year.”
“I'm sorry about it.”
“Before she left us, she told me privately that heaven was just another country and that we would all be together again some day. So we visit when I sleep and she sees me when I dream. Granny's not gone.”
“Where'd you say your ma is?”
“Little Rock. I think she wants to be a nurse. They make good money. When she gets everything lined out, I'll go back with her. Daddy's got some confusion.”
“If your ma up and left, she must have some confusion herself.”
“Don't say that! Lana said trash about her and it weren't true.”
“Lana is?” He had already forgotten.
“The tramp that was ‘posed to take us to Claudia's but left us and run oft. I don't know where. Once she talked about a place called Kennicut. I'm glad she's gone. Now she won't be sniffing around our place trying to steal Daddy's heart. That was all that was wrong with my momma. It was all Lana.”
The wind outside the church squealed and whistled like a kettle going off.
“Biggest, you do a lot of blame-laying. I guess nobody ever told you that. Sounds like nobody's been tending to your upbringing. But you got all your family's troubles tied up in all the wrong boxes, every one of them labeled with the wrong name.”
“Maybe no one told you nothing, neither. You don't know how to stay out of other folk's business, Jeb Nubey.”
Littlest raised up. Her eyelids tucked slightly up from the centers, enough to show her irises fallen into the bottom lids, unable to focus. She fell back asleep. Willie snored in soft purrs that blew the smallest dark tendrils around his little sister's ear, making a sleeper's smile across her face. His stomach made slight fighting noises, like bats in a cave.
Jeb remembered his momma as one who saw good in him when nobody did. “My folks stayed together but I got notions sometimes that my daddy weren't easy to live with. I think when Momma died of a fever, she was just sort of willing herself on to the next place.” Jeb removed his boots and set them right under the place he planned to sleep. “Maybe she knows your granny now. I don't know. Never understand things like that, don't pertend to. I do know Daddy never acted like he loved her until five minutes after she passed. Nobody ever put up such a racket as Daddy when Pearl Nubey left him all alone.” His daddy had cried out in the yard like crying in front of his boys shamed them.
“Why is it men can't be good to women?” Angel asked. Her face appeared gold in the lantern light. Gold and soft instead of hard and insulting.
“Not all of us are bad. Maybe we just need a good woman.”
“I knew you'd say that. I'll bet my daddy would say the same thing. But my momma, she's good. Every night when he came home from the coal mine in Paris, Momma had his supper fixed, waiting on him, everything just right so he'd not gripe and go on about his supper being too this or too that. She'd have it all just perfect for him. Momma read him stories out of the newspaper. He always wanted to know about the ballgames. He'd be real happy when she told him what he wanted to know. I think sometimes she just made up stories about who won and who lost so he'd go to bed happy.”
“Maybe it's easier for women to be good.”
“Stuff and nonsense! You think I want to be good? I never cared diddley about quoting the Scriptures or going off to tent meeting. I hated when the preacher came to Sunday dinner. Granny made me sit up and act right. If I didn't, she said she'd box my ears. Men don't have it no worse than us. They just never get away from needing their mommas. That's the way I see it.”
“If you can't go live with your momma or your daddy, what you going to do?” Jeb asked.
“I just know I won't live off of no man. My sister Claudia wouldn't have it any other way. The only use she imagined for herself was in being married. I'm going to find my own way. Then, once I make my first million—I got Rockefeller whispering things to me about what do I think of this or that—then, if I feel like it, maybe I'll let a man marry me. But if he so much as lifts an eyebrow to me, out the door he goes, right on his sorry old keester.”
“Saying you going to be kingpin and doing are two different things entirely.”
“If I say it, I do it.” She tried to suppress a yawn. “I am the queen pin, the bona fide belle. One day, no one will mess with Angel Welby. No one like my daddy, who tormented my mother, and no one like you.” And then she said to herself, “Especially that.”
This biggest girl had lived too long with her dreams, Jeb realized. No one to tell her right from wrong. No one around to shake the folly from between her ears. “How you going to work out your living just tomorrow then?”
“I'll figure it out. I'll rest on it and then when I get up, I'll know. I always know come sun-up.”
“Well, I'll look forward to sun-up then. You take the pew behind your brother and sister. I'll sleep here in the back of the church.”
Jeb watched out the window until he heard Biggest's steady breathing. The rain battered every windowpane on the east side of the church. Leaves torn from the limb slapped against the glass and stuck. He watched dolefully through the drenching showers, hoping a truck would drive by loaded down with supplies from Camden. But no one drove down the roads of Nazareth on such a night—night of gloom, of empty pockets and growling bellies.
“Could you sleep behind us, Jeb?”
He did not try to hide his surprise. So she wasn't asleep. “I thought you wanted no help from a man.”
“Not for me, silly. If Ida May wakes up, it will make her feel safe.”
Jeb believed her like he believed she would wake up with all her answers. He stretched out one pew behind Angel. He turned his face several ways until the wood seemed to soften and allow him to close out the thundering drifts of rain and a single tolling church bell.
T
he pin light of sun streamed across the sawdust floor and straight into Jeb's eyes. Jeb never slept past dawn so the sunlight startled him first. The smiling faces peering all around him startled him next.
“You slept past your morning prayers, Reverend.” The woman who spoke to him had a yellow pallor. Her dried-apple face and small, brown, seed eyes peered at him from a bonnet like his grandmother had worn years past.
“Wake up, Daddy. These folks has brought us food.” Angel stood at the end of the pew where Jeb slept. She winked and that caused him to bolt upright.
Willie smiled so wide, Jeb noticed for the first time he had a front tooth missing. “That's right …
Daddy.
” He giggled and Ida May giggled next to him.
Jeb counted seven faces besides the Welbys smiling back at him. Each person held a basket of goods wrapped in cloths or newspaper.
A man wearing overalls with a stain of tobacco in the right corner of his mouth said, “We got all your letters and read every single one to the congregation on Sundays. We all been praying you could get free from your itinerating so you could join us. Nazareth is growing fast and we been needing a man in our pulpit that can stay with us.”
“Your children are just as precious as you said they was, Reverend Gracie. What is it the little girl calls you—Dud?”
“It's her way of saying ‘Daddy.’” Angel inserted herself into the conversation.
Jeb smelled fried chicken and started salivating. “Someone got something to eat? Two thieves run oft with my truck and everything I owned was in it.”
“I told them we had everything stole, Daddy. This nice man here, Mr. Honeysack, he said they'll all fix us up with a place to stay here in the, what you call it?”
Mr. Honeysack filled in for Angel, “The parsonage, child. We built it with a room for you, Reverend, and a nice place with three little beds for your youngens.”
“Fairly good-sized kitchen, too,” said the apple-faced woman. “I'm Evelene Whittington. This is my husband, Floyd. He runs the Woolworth's downtown.” Floyd had a bashful smile that made the center of his bottom lip jut out. He shook Jeb's hand while Evelene continued to make introductions. “Mr. Will Honeysack and his wife, Freda, run the dry goods store in Nazareth. She's down there now or she would have been here to meet you. Freda's the best baker in our town.” Evelene stood with her hands clasped in front of her. “Here's her pie.” She looked at Mr. Honeysack.