Nazareth's Song (11 page)

Jeb sat at the desk and unlocked the drawer. He counted the money from the envelope marked Church in the Dell. It came to fifty dollars. He weighted this contribution against the less than charitable words Mills had spoken about the Hoppers. The thought of Hopper’s wife and children being run out of town affected him worse than seeing drunken Asa hurl a brick through the bank window. He remembered all Gracie’s speeches, but now he felt conflicted about how he was supposed to feel about a man who had almost burned down Nazareth.

He opened the thicker parcel. Someone, maybe Amy Mills, had written his name across the front in elegant script. He counted the money twice. It came to one hundred dollars. He held the cash—the most he had ever seen at one time—in his hands. His fingers felt cool and wet around the bills, clammy, like he had just taken a bootlegger’s money. He remembered how Gracie had told him to keep away from town politics. By one measly act of charity, it seemed he might be neck-deep in it.

Something shuffled in the sawdust floor outside the door. When he turned the swivel chair around, he saw Fern watching him count the money. He dropped the cash onto the desktop, a hot potato. “Been here long?” he asked.

She could not take her eyes off the wad of money. She stammered out, “I had a break and thought I should drop by and tell you . . .” She continued to stammer until Jeb started trying to fill in the words for her. Finally she said, “You did a good thing on Saturday.” Except she did not beam like Freda Honeysack had beamed at him from her pew left and center on Sunday. Her countenance dimmed and she kept inching backward.

Jeb stared down at the money. When he looked up again, she was gone. He could not pull himself from his spot on the sawdust floor. Fern was thinking things about him again that would cast him in a less than perfect light. He should be used to that by now.

Beck looked like a boy who had lived on maple syrup and corn bread for too long—skinny as noodles. But brown eyed and tanned too, giving him texture like a boy cut from burlap. His arms were sinewy, hard from keeping wood stacked for his momma’s stove.

He always made straight for the woods behind the school at the last bell.

Angel told Willie, “I’ll meet you and Ida May out front. Wait for me by the drive.” She didn’t want Willie telling Jeb that she had met Beck after school, so she went up the school steps, through the building, and then out the back way.

Beck had deposited his books next to the fence post. Angel left hers next to his and climbed over the fence. “You taking a smoke?”

Beck held out his cigarette. “Want to try it?”

Angel said, “I’ve tried them but they burn my throat. You look good with a smoke, though. Kind of like Clark Gable, only a different haircut.” Beck’s hair had been snipped around the top in an uneven ridge, most likely cut by one of his sisters.

“Yore old man don’t like my daddy now, I guess. Daddy wouldn’t have hauled off and started that mess if he hadn’t been drinking so much. If they knew that about him, maybe they’d not send him off to prison.”

“You really think they’ll send him to prison?”

“Whole town’s mad at him. Momma’s afraid to show her face downtown. That banker’ll take away what we got left now for sure. We won’t have no choice then but to move on.”

“Wives always take the punishment for their husbands’ sins. My granny told me that once. My momma was the same way about my daddy, taking all the guff for what he caused. She used to be anyway.” Angel took the cigarette out of his mouth and put it to her lips. “Why these things make you look so good anyway? Something about them.” She coughed and then held the cigarette next to her face, posing. “I hear that boys wonder things about girls that smoke.”

“Wonder if you’re loosey-goosey is all.” He took it away from her. “You don’t need it, Angel. If Reverend Nubey smells it on you, he’ll know you been around me. You don’t need my kind of trouble follering you home.”

“We got some groceries give to us. I brought you something.” She ran for the sack she had left beside their books.

“I don’t need charity, Angel.”

“We take it all the time. May as well take a little of what’s been give to us, Beck. If your momma’s afraid to go downtown, maybe this’ll help her out.”

Beck looked into the bag as though something might jump out. “Your daddy know you bringing us this good grub?”

“Jeb’s not my father. He’s my keeper.”

“He keeps an eye on you. I know when he’s giving me the eye, like ‘Keep away from Angel, or else.’ I think he’d like it better if me and my family’d just stop coming to that church altogether.”

“I never known Jeb to give anyone the eye. Except me. But he can’t tell me what to do and he knows that. I do for myself.”

“Why you live with him, then?”

Angel sighed and it quieted him.

“You ever been kissed?”

“Why you asking me that?”

“Ever been parking?”

“You think I’m afraid of boys, Beck Hopper. I’m not.”

“Want to take a walk, back in the woods?” Beck walked backward with his arms spread open.

Angel leaned sideways to see if Willie had rounded the corner of the schoolhouse. She didn’t see him, or any of the schoolkids, for that matter. “We can take a walk.” She followed him around the oaks and past the evergreens that completely hid them from sight.

8

B
eulah had placed two chairs and a small table on the walk outside the café. Jeb had spent the afternoon with some of the men downtown, framing out the barbershop front for Lincoln. Before heading back to the parsonage, he stopped for coffee and took Beulah’s outdoor seating as a sign that he needed a break. Beulah appeared at once with the coffeepot and a cup, pleased that someone had noticed her new seating. “Coffee, black, Reverend. About time for school to be out.”

“Angel’s walking them home today.”

“I guess you’re not too happy with her seeing that boy of Asa Hopper’s.”

“Beulah, how’s the pie today?”

“I’ll mind my own potaters, Reverend, but my oldest girl followed after the wrong boy once and it liked to have killed us all in the long run. It’s one thing to pet a stray. But quite another to let it in the house. You wont peach or lemon? That’s all we got left after the lunch hour today.”

“Peach is fine.” Before she could disappear inside, Jeb said, “Beulah, Angel’s only fourteen. And I’m not her real daddy. I do best I can by her, but after all, what harm could a girl as young as her get into?”

Beulah gave him a look like one who felt the worst pity for him. “Peach pie is on the way. I’ll warm it up for you.”

“Mind if I take this other chair, Reverend? Sky’s too blue to stay indoors.” Winona Mills toted three shopping bags, one bundled under one arm and the other two hanging off her slender arms like saddlebags.

Jeb came to his feet. “You need some help with your things, Miss Mills?”

“Just a place to drop all this before my arms fall off. Momma’s got it in her head to have a party before the weather turns completely cold. Then in eight weeks she’ll have another just because it turned cold.” She took the chair next to Jeb. “Last thing I want to do is try and find good linens in this town. I knew that if I took time off from school, I’d turn into her errand boy again. I told her we’d do better to shop in Hot Springs. At least there you got the bathhouses and a decent massage. But with her it’s always now or never.”

“I’ve heard your momma gives the best parties in town, though. I never grew up with such goings-on. You ought to be thankful you got a momma that can bring folks together during times like this.”

Winona was writing on an envelope the whole time he talked. She slid it over to him and left it under his hand. “Here’s your invitation, then. Wear something like what you wear to church and you’ll be fine.”

“Miss Mills, I’m sorry, but I wasn’t inviting myself to your momma’s party.”

“I invited you myself.”

Jeb pushed back against his chair and then said, “Maybe first you should run that past your folks.”

“Horsefeathers. My daddy thinks you’re the best thing since sliced bread, Reverend. They don’t care who I ask. They don’t put on airs, anyway, and if they did, inviting the minister in town would still work. I want you to come. You’ll give me someone to talk to.”

Jeb assumed she had plenty of attentive acquaintances hovering around waiting to catch her eye, but all he could think to say was, “I’ll see if I can come.”

He noticed a shadow had fallen across the table. Winona glanced up and shaded her eyes. “Fern, how are you? They must have let school out already.”

Fern acknowledged Winona, but only in a brief greeting. “I’m glad I saw you here,” she said to Jeb. “Willie and Ida May walked on home without Angel. They were hoping she had just gone on ahead without them. So I told them I thought it would be fine. But it’s not like Angel not to walk them both home. I thought maybe you’d know something that I didn’t know.” She allowed her eyes to veer left as she took one more look at Winona and then said, “Not that it’s any of my business.”

Beulah stood behind both women, holding the peach pie slice on a plate. She looked troubled, and managed to do that with hardly a trace of expression. She handed Jeb the pie. More silent than usual, she placed a fork on the table, filled up his cup again, and then went back inside.

“I’d better head back home, then,” said Jeb, directly uneasy and conjuring ideas about Angel and Beck Hopper.

“I wish you wouldn’t go. You’re the only entertainment I’ve had all day,” said Winona with a laugh.

Fern pretended she didn’t hear Winona. “Maybe going home is best. I can see how all this would have you more than a little worried.”

Jeb slid aside the coffee and pie and tossed some change onto the table. He gestured toward the pie. “May as well eat this, Miss Mills, or have it wrapped up to take home to your daddy. Hate to see it go to waste.”

He said his good-byes to both women and started to excuse himself. But Winona stopped him, holding out the envelope she’d given to him earlier. “Don’t forget your invitation, Reverend. It’s this Friday night at our home.” She gathered up her sacks to leave. “And Winona’s fine with me, Reverend, if you aren’t breaking any minister’s rules by calling me by my given name.”

He appeased her in the manner she wanted before he ran to the truck. Whether or not he should head straight home or proceed down the road that led to the school, he would decide along the way.

He had driven less than a rock’s throw when he realized he had neglected to say much of anything at all to Fern. But surely she understood that he could forget all his manners when he got his head caught up in matters about Angel. A quick glance back at Beulah’s showed him Fern was no longer standing out on the walk; Winona had disappeared too.

He sighed. Encountering the two of them at the same time had left him with a peculiar feeling, as though the three of them had met at a crossroads somewhere and then passed without incident. Yet it seemed like an incident had taken place, like a train wreck that he had driven by, looked at but not seen.

But women could make you feel like that without cause.

Angel was nowhere in sight. Jeb drove from the road that led to the school and then traced Angel’s route all the way back to Church in the Dell. The weather had turned cold and the landscape had faded to match the color of earth. The summer drought had dulled any hope for a multihued autumn. He imagined Angel’s thin body camouflaged by the browning leaves, tucked into some unseen hideaway with a boy too old for his years.

He pulled into the drive and parked just beyond the porch to keep the dust from coating Ida May, who sat on the front steps. She did not have a look about her that said she’d been abandoned after school; she was not mad or huffing like she did when Angel wanted to walk alone with the older girls. An oversized green sweater draped her like a woman’s coat and she’d buttoned it from the neck all the way to the knees. She looked less thin, as though she’d gone off and stayed with someone who knew how to better care for her. Her eyes were deepening in color and Jeb hated that he could not tell her she looked more and more like her mother every day.

She sipped something hot from a cup. When Jeb approached her she offered him a sip. “Angel gave me coffee, Jeb. I kind of like it.”

Jeb knew Angel was not likely to pour coffee for her sister. He asked, “What made her give you that, Ida May?”

She shrugged. “Ask her, I guess. She’s in the kitchen.” When Ida May had been bribed she was obviously evasive.

“She’s making coffee kind of late. I guess because she just got home herself,” said Jeb.

Ida May pressed her lips together and wouldn’t look at him.

“Miss Coulter already told me you and Willie walked home without her,” said Jeb.

“She gets in our business a lot, Angel says.”

Jeb stepped around her and went inside. The parlor light had been left on and the radio blared loudly with band music. He shut off the radio and the lamp. A pounding hammer of a sound broke the quiet, like the thump of knife through a potato.

Jeb entered the kitchen. He said nothing to Angel at first. Instead, he poured a glass of milk as though it were the only thing on his mind.

“Willie ought to be in here peeling potatoes. I’ll go and find him. I think he’s out by the creek, even though I told him the water’s getting too cold for wading.” Her voice held a charm that made her sound almost compliant.

“I smell a cigarette,” said Jeb.

“Maybe just coffee is all you smell. I tossed some grounds out while ago. I just made a fresh pot. Want a cup?” She peeled another potato and kept her back to him. The kitchen window faced away from the sunset, so only a trickle of light as pale as peaches colored her shape. “I’m tired of potatoes. Maybe I’ll just mash these for potato cakes in the morning.” She talked as though Jeb were not in the room, as though she talked to no one but herself.

“Willie and Ida May walked home without you.”

She huffed, “Ida May’s not telling it right, Jeb. I came home right afterward, right behind them. I like to walk with my friends, you know, have someone to talk to besides babies.”