Nothing mattered but the way their words and laughter seemed to reach across the divide between their souls and embrace. Sometimes the Lord surprised a person with the most unexpected of blessings.
27
The first Sunday in September when Cassidy Hearndon’s mama got her up and said they were going to the white people’s church, Cassidy thought about sticking her finger down her throat and making herself throw up. She’d done it back in Chicago a time or two so she wouldn’t have to go to school. It had worked then. It might work now, but then her mother would make her stay inside and it was way too hot to be stuck in the house all day shut up in the back bedroom to make sure she didn’t share her sickness with none of the rest of the family. Not that the scaredy-cat sickness was catching or anything.
Cassidy picked up the dress her mother had laid out for her to wear. It was the white one with red tulips growing all over the skirt, her very favorite, but she didn’t want to put it on. Not till she had to. It was cooler just standing there in her slip and underpants.
“What in the world is wrong with you, Cassidy Marie?” her mama asked. “Stop moping around and get dressed.”
“It’s too hot to get all dressed up and go to church,” Cassidy complained.
“The good Lord didn’t say it was too hot when he paid the price for our sins, young missy.”
“Then why can’t we go up to the church in town? They like us up there.”
“Now listen to you. We aren’t going to church to make people like us,” her mama said. “We’re going to church to worship, and the good Lord has put a church right down at the end of our road for us to do that. We don’t have to spend a half hour and gasoline we can’t afford driving to town.”
“But they look at me funny.” Cassidy traced one of the tulips on the skirt of the dress with her finger. She loved tulips. They’d had tulips in their yard in Chicago. Red and yellow and purple tulips.
“Probably not a bit funnier than you look at them. And Miss Sally will be there. She thinks you’re the sweetest little thing. And that preacher’s daughter. What did Noah say her name was?”
“Jocie.”
“That’s right. Jocie. She’s nice as she can be. And friendly to boot.”
“She just wants to play with the twins.”
“So play with the twins with her,” Cassidy’s mama said. “Now get your dress on so you can hold Elise while I fix her hair. That child has a positive aversion to combs.”
“I could stay here and help Daddy haul rocks.” Cassidy didn’t know why she said it. Her mama would never let her miss church to haul rocks. Her mother didn’t even think her daddy should miss church to haul rocks, but sometimes her mama didn’t get her way when it came to Cassidy’s daddy.
“Stop talking nonsense and get dressed. Now!”
Cassidy turned away from her to pull her dress over her head so that her mama wouldn’t see the tears sneaking out the sides of her eyes. Her mama couldn’t understand about the scaredy-cat sickness. She was beautiful and brave and not afraid of anything. Not even of the police down in Alabama when they’d put her in jail last summer. Cassidy had been scared. She’d thought she might never see her mama again the way they said she’d never see Uncle Darnell again. Even her daddy had been scared. He’d tried to hide it by acting mad and yelling in the phone, but Cassidy had known. When a person was scared herself, she could almost smell the same thing on somebody else.
Cassidy rubbed the front of her dress close against her face as she pulled it down to wipe the tears away, but her mama saw them anyway. She came over and buttoned up the back of Cassidy’s dress. Then she turned Cassidy around to face her. She put her hand under Cassidy’s chin and tipped her face up. “Now, honey, you dry up those tears, because your mama isn’t going to ever let anybody hurt you. Not ever.”
“Yes, Mama,” Cassidy said as she wiped the last of the tears off her cheeks. She wanted to believe her. She used to believe her. Now she just pretended to believe her.
Noah said that was a sign she was growing up. He said that for sure their mama wanted to protect them, but that sometimes she got carried away making the world better for everybody, and she couldn’t always keep her promises because of what he called her commitment to “the greater good.” When Cassidy had asked Noah what “the greater good” was, he said it was too hard to explain, but that it had to do with how people like them got treated because of the color of their skin and how they might get treated on down the road years from now. He said if she kept her eyes and ears open, she might understand it better someday.
So she had listened when her mama was talking to her daddy or on the telephone, and she had watched what was going on around her and in the papers her mama got in the mail. That’s how come she knew about those girls down south who weren’t much older than her getting killed in church, and they were at their own black church, not some white church.
She sometimes thought about asking Noah about the three girls, if he knew whether they’d been scared like her, but some things were too scary to talk about. And he might not be able to tell her nothing like that would ever happen to her. He’d told her once he’d do his best to never tell her something he didn’t know for absolutely sure was true. That’s why he told her nobody could protect somebody else all the time no matter how much they might want to, but that he was getting big enough to protect her most of the time, and for sure he’d never let what happened to her on that march in Birmingham last year ever happen again.
For a minute the memory slipped to the front of Cassidy’s mind—the thick slobber dripping off that big dog’s teeth right in front of her face and the sight of Noah getting knocked clear off the street by the firemen shooting their water hoses at them. But she blocked out the thoughts. There were some things a person couldn’t think about, or she’d just crawl in some dark cave somewhere and never come out. Besides, she knew Noah meant it. He wouldn’t let anything like that happen again. He’d promised, and Noah didn’t make promises unless he was positive certain he could keep them.
Still, she didn’t think he could keep the people out there at the church at the end of the road from looking at her like she had two heads or something. Especially since they were looking at him the same way. Except for Miss Sally and Mr. Harvey and the preacher’s family. And there was that little girl with pigtails who had grinned at her the last time they were there a couple of weeks ago. The little girl had pointed at her own pigtails and then at Cassidy’s. And at least Cassidy’s mama wasn’t making them go to Sunday school. She said the white church folks needed time to get used to them being there.
Cassidy wrapped her arms around Elise and held her tight while her mama made tiny braids in her hair. Elise kicked her feet and screamed, but both Cassidy and her mama just ignored her. They could talk to Elise till they didn’t have any words left, and she’d still scream and fight when they did her hair. So it was better to just hold her down and get it over with.
“I wish we were still in Chicago,” Cassidy said when Elise stopped screaming for a minute to catch her breath.
“Chicago, Chicago,” her mama said. “You and Noah both. Always talking about Chicago. What was so great about Chicago?”
“Saundra,” Cassidy said. Saundra had lived next door, and they’d played paper dolls together every day. Now she had to play paper dolls by herself. She’d tried playing with Elise, but Elise had torn the head off her favorite girl doll, Sue Ellen. Not on purpose, but Sue Ellen lost her head anyway. Her mama taped it back on for Cassidy, but now the doll’s head fell over frontwards all the time like she was praying. And a person got tired of playing her paper dolls were in church praying all the time.
“Saundra was a sweet little friend for you. Why don’t you write her a letter and see how she’s doing?” Cassidy’s mama said. “But you’ll make friends here. You’ve been going to school a couple of weeks. I’ll bet you’ve already met some nice girls. Maybe we could invite one of them over sometime.”
“None of them live close like Saundra did,” Cassidy said. School actually hadn’t been all that bad. She liked school, sitting in her own desk, filling up the lines on her notebook paper. The work had been easy. She’d done most of it already last year in Chicago, and her mama said they’d move on to some new things soon. But she hadn’t really made any friends.
“That might be a problem,” Cassidy’s mama said as she fastened another braid on Elise’s head.
“It is,” Cassidy said as she loosened her hold on Elise just a smidgen. Elise had given up on screaming and was just snuffling a little now. She whispered in the little girl’s ear. “Mama’s almost through and you’re going to look so cute.”
“Don’t wanna look cute.” Elise stuck her lip out in a pout.
“But you can’t help yourself. You just are. Cute as a bug,” her mama said as she touched Elise’s nose with the comb before she picked up another bit of hair. Her fingers worked fast as she braided the strands of hair even as she returned to Cassidy’s problem of having somebody to play paper dolls with. “Miss Sally lives just over the hill. While she’s not a little girl or anything, it’s good to have friends of all ages. She told me she was coming over this afternoon with last year’s Sears Roebuck catalogue so the two of you could cut out some of the models and glue them on cardboard to make you some new paper dolls.”
“There aren’t any black people in the Sears Roebuck catalogue,” Cassidy said.
“True enough.” Her mama sounded put out, but Cassidy wasn’t sure whether it was at her or at the Sears Roebuck catalogue. “But if Miss Sally’s nice enough to come help you make some paper dolls, you’d better be nice enough to play with them. You hear me, missy?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Cassidy said. She didn’t mind playing with Miss Sally. Miss Sally was extra nice. She smelled like spearmint chewing gum, and she was always smiling. Best of all, she didn’t just look right past Cassidy and start talking about how cute the twins were the way most people did. Cassidy loved Elise and Eli, but them being born had made her almost disappear in front of most people’s eyes, so it was good having somebody that thought she, Cassidy Marie Hearndon, was special all by herself. Even if she was a scaredy-cat.
28
Jocie was up early on Monday even though there was no school. It was Labor Day. A holiday. Jocie had never quite figured out why people got off work on Labor Day. It seemed to be the one day all year a person should have to work.
Wes told her she could labor for him since he was moving out of their living room and back into his apartment. He’d gone back to the Lexington doctor the week before and had a new lighter cast with no rods sticking out to worry about.
“You should’ve seen my poor old scrawny leg when they cut that old cast off it. I was almost glad when they slapped more plaster on the shriveled-up thing so I couldn’t see it no more,” Wes had told her Sunday afternoon as they sat on the porch and watched the clouds piling up in the west, teasing them with the idea of rain. Once or twice they even caught a whiff of the scent of rain in the air.
Zeb kept his nose on Jocie’s knee. The dog didn’t like storms, but the rumbling clouds only flashed a little lightning before drifting on to tease somebody over in the next county. Or perhaps the clouds watered the earth there. One of Aunt Love’s oft-quoted verses was about how it rained on the just and the unjust, which Jocie’s father said meant that the Lord let it rain on everybody.
“What’d the doctor say about you trimming a few inches off the cast yourself?” Jocie asked Wes as she rubbed Zeb’s ears.
“Said it saved considerable wear and tear on his saw blade. Said he might start handing out pocketknives with all his casts,” Wes said.
“Oh, he did not.” Jocie laughed.
“And how would you know? I don’t recall you being anywhere in the room when he was sawing on me.”
Jocie’s father had let her stay home even though Wes didn’t really need a baby-sitter anymore, but it was the Martins’ time to have the preacher over for Sunday dinner. Her father said she could wait till next time the Martins’ turn came up to go along. He said that would give her some time to work on forgiving and then forgetting what Ronnie Martin had done, so obviously she hadn’t fooled her father all that much with her pretend-like forgiving act at the big church apology scene.
She told her father she would work on the forgiving bit, but she didn’t see how she could forget. Ever. Of course, her father took that opportunity to remind her of how the Lord forgave and forgot sins and to suggest she spend some time praying about what the Lord would want her to do. So Jocie supposed she’d have to start saying a forgiving heart prayer.
Still, Jocie was glad enough to stay home with Wes even if she had missed seeing Noah and his little sister and the twins who had shown up for church Sunday morning. She didn’t miss sitting across a dinner table from Ronnie Martin.
It might have been hard to keep him invisible at that close range. It was bad enough at school. It seemed as if he was always hanging around every time she and Paulette were at their lockers. Paulette and Jocie had been excited when they found out their lockers were side by side so they got to meet between classes and talk about what was going on while they got their books. They didn’t have but a couple of classes together, which was probably just as well. Paulette was still acting funny whenever Jocie talked to Charissa, who was in all Jocie’s classes.
Jocie didn’t know what Paulette’s problem was. Charissa was great fun. They’d been eating lunch together, and even though they’d only been going to school a couple of weeks, already it was as if she and Charissa had known each other for years. Charissa said it was because of the preachers’ kids thing, that nobody who wasn’t a preacher’s kid could really understand. Jocie had written that down in her journal under her section on Charissa.
It had felt funny being at the house on Sunday. The afternoon hours had seemed to linger like a visitor who got up to leave, then stretched and sat back down to stay a little longer. She and Wes went through a whole pitcher of lemonade as they whiled away the time on the porch, talking and reading. When she told Wes how her father thought she needed to work on having a forgiving heart, Wes laid his new science fiction novel facedown on the porch floor while he helped her look up some forgiveness verses in the Bible. They found more about how the Lord had forgiven them than about how they should forgive one another, but then they came across Ephesians 4:32.
Jocie leaned over to read the verse aloud out of the Bible Wes had open in his lap. “‘And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.’ Do you think it would help if I memorized that and said it over in my head every time I saw Ronnie Martin instead of pretending he was on Neptune or somewhere?” she asked Wes.
“It might. It seems a powerful verse.”
“Yeah, I think I remember Daddy preaching on it or one like it sometime or other.” She looked at Wes who was tracing the verse on the page as if he was memorizing it by touch. Then she looked at his leg in the cast propped up on a stool in front of the rocking chair. “But have you forgiven him? I mean, we wouldn’t have been out in that tornado if it hadn’t been for Ronnie Martin and what he said.”
“But they were just words, Jo. Mean words, but words.” Wes looked over at her. “He didn’t make you run away and not talk to your daddy about what he said.”
Jocie hung her head. “I know. It was my fault. Your leg getting hurt and everything.”
“The tornado wasn’t your fault.” Wes reached over and touched her cheek. “Look at me, Jo. Do you know who the hardest person in the world is to forgive?”
She looked up at him and asked, “Who?”
“Your very own self.”
Tears jumped up into her eyes. “But I feel so guilty. You almost died, Wes. I almost caused you to die.”
“That ain’t true. The tree falling on me almost caused me to die.”
“But—”
“No buts about
it. And I didn’t die. I’m right here, and even if there was some reason for you to feel bad about my leg getting banged up, I’d forgive you for it. And your daddy would forgive you for it. And the Lord would forgive you for it.” Wes tapped his finger on the Bible again. “It says so right here.”
“Do you really forgive me, Wes?” Jocie tried to blink back her tears, but a couple of them slid out and down her cheeks. “I mean, you can’t ride your motorcycle or anything.”
“I don’t have no reason to forgive you, Jo, but if I did, I would.” He reached over and touched her face. “In a Jupiter heartbeat.” He pulled his hand back, reached into his pocket for a handkerchief, and handed it to Jocie.
“Is that fast?” Jocie asked as she wiped away her tears.
“That’s so fast no mere earth doctor can even hear it,” Wes said. “So get that journal of yours out and write this down on one of the pages so you won’t be forgetting it. ‘If Wes ever needs to forgive me, he’ll do it in a Jupiter heartbeat.’ You got that? You give me the pen, and I’ll write it out for you if you need me to.”
Jocie smiled. “No, I think I’ve got it.” She gave Wes a hug and then did just what he said. She wrote the words down in her journal along with a lot more words since sometimes, once she got started writing in her journal, her pen didn’t seem to have brakes.
While she was writing, Wes kept leafing through the Bible.
“Here’s one I’ll bet you’ve heard Lovella quote out of Psalms,” he said after a while. “‘For thou, Lord, art good, and ready to forgive; and plenteous in mercy unto all them that call upon thee.’”
“Yeah, Aunt Love likes that one,” Jocie agreed without looking up from her journal.
“What’s not to like? Even I can see that’s a good one. ‘Ready to forgive and plenteous in mercy.’”
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