Orchard of Hope

by Ann H. Gabhart

  Jocie’s father started frowning when he saw her. “I told you to go back to the newspaper office.”

  “I know, but this is important. The Klan’s coming up the street.”

  32

  Beside Jocie’s father, Myra Hearndon pulled in a quick breath, then shut her eyes for a moment before she opened them again slowly, but she didn’t move. She sat just as straight, her face forward, and didn’t take the first look over her shoulder. Everyone else looked out at the street.

  Grover Flinn was almost yelling at the police chief. “See what’s happening? You should have gone on and run her out of here like I told you to do.”

  “Now, Grover, she’s just sitting there. There’s no law against that,” Chief Simmons said.

  “You could’ve arrested her for disturbing the peace.”

  “I haven’t seen any peace being disturbed except maybe by you. And you surely couldn’t expect me to arrest Brother Boyer or Miss Alice or David here, now could I? What would I charge them with? Being thirsty?”

  “Well, somebody ought to have done something. I don’t want any trouble with the Klan,” Grover said.

  Outside the men in the white robes had come to a halt in the street in front of the Grill. The people clustered around the Grill’s door began easing away as if they were afraid of being caught in the middle of whatever trouble might come.

  Suddenly Mary Jo slammed down the towel she’d been using to rub a hole in the counter. “Enough is enough!” she said, glaring at Grover. She walked around the counter past him and Chief Simmons straight to the door. She pulled it shut and turned the lock just as two of the men in white robes started walking toward the Grill.

  “We’re closed,” she shouted through the glass door as she flipped the paper sign hanging on the door over from OPEN to CLOSED.

  The two men stared at her through the door. She didn’t pay them any attention as she stalked back past her boss and behind the counter again. She went straight over to Myra Hearndon, pulled out her order pad, and said, “Now what was it you wanted, ma’am?”

  “What do you think you’re doing, Mary Jo?” The words squeaked out of Grover Flinn as if somebody was choking him.

  Mary Jo looked over at him. “I’m taking orders from these customers who got in the door before closing time. I’m hoping they won’t want anything that Willanna will have to cook, but if they do, we’ll stay here and cook it if the storm don’t knock out the electricity.”

  “I haven’t said you could serve them.” Beads of sweat popped out on Grover’s head.

  “You hired me to serve customers that come in this place. Now I never gave it a whole lot of thought before where anybody sat, but I’ve had plenty of time to think the last couple of hours. The truth is, me and Willanna have been working here together for over ten years.” Mary Jo glanced over at Willanna, who was still standing in the door to the kitchen. “We’ve rubbed shoulders, drank out of the same cups, sweated together over that stove back there, and she ain’t never caught the white disease and I ain’t never caught the black disease.”

  “She’s telling the truth,” Willanna said, lifting her eyebrows up and nodding a little.

  “So I don’t think it much matters where anybody sits.” Mary Jo looked back at Myra, her pen poised over her order pad. “Now that was a soft drink you wanted, wasn’t it?” She totally ignored Grover Flinn, who was staring at her as if she’d sprouted horns and a tail.

  “Yes, thank you,” Myra said. “With plenty of ice, please.”

  “The same for us,” Brother Boyer said. “And we appreciate it, Mary Jo.”

  “Just doing my job while I still have one.”

  “Nobody’s going to fire you,” David said with a look over at Grover Flinn. “Grover couldn’t get by without you to wait on people, could you, Grover?”

  “If he thinks he can, he’ll have to get by without my cooking too,” Willanna said.

  “I never said anything about firing anybody,” Grover said as he sank down in a chair beside one of the tables out in the middle of the restaurant.

  “That’s good to hear. Now you take some deep breaths, Grover, before you have a coronary,” Mary Jo told him. “And Chief, you go on and make those peeping toms in sheets get away from my door. They’re the ones that ought to be arrested, coming in here from who knows where trying to scare folks. And I done told them we’re closed.”

  “We may be worse than closed before they’re through,” Grover said, but his nose was fading from bright red back to a more normal pink.

  Jocie looked at her camera. One picture left. She thought about taking a picture of Grover slumped at the table or Chief Simmons heading toward the front door, but instead she raised the camera up and turned it toward Mary Jo putting ice in the glasses. Mary Jo looked over at her. “You take a picture of me, Jocie Brooke, and I’ll take that camera away from you and stomp it flat.”

  Willanna laughed. “Don’t you be messing with Mary Jo today, child. She means what she says.” She shook her head as she went back into the kitchen.

  “We’ve probably got enough pictures for this week’s issue, Jocie,” her father said as he stood up. “We’d better get back to the office and work on getting them ready to print.”

  Noah’s mother took a long drink of the cola Mary Jo set in front of her and then said, “I’ll walk along with you, Brother Brooke.” She slid gracefully off the stool. She lightly touched Brother Boyer’s shoulder as she looked at him and his wife. “I do thank you both for coming to have a drink with me.” She glanced out toward the street where there was no longer any sign of men in white robes. “Please pray for peace and cool heads.”

  “We had peace before you came in here. If it’s gone now, you can take the blame,” Grover said.

  Myra ignored him as she turned to Mary Jo and said, “That was one of the most courageous things I’ve ever seen anybody do.”

  Mary Jo looked as if she’d just been awarded a medal. Her cheeks turned rosy as she said, “It wasn’t all that much. I should have waited on you way back when, and then we wouldn’t have had to worry about those yahoos out on the street.”

  When they left the Grill, there was no sign of the Klansmen. Jocie wondered if the ground had swallowed them up, or if they had stepped back into the storm cloud the way it had looked as if they had come. The clouds weren’t quite as dark as they had been and the thunder sounded more distant. Even so, as she and her father and Noah’s mother started down the street toward the newspaper office, raindrops began splattering on the sidewalk.

  “It looks as if we may get wet,” Noah’s mother said.

  “We can hope.” Jocie’s father held out his hand to catch a raindrop.

  “And pray,” Noah’s mother said. “Alex’s apple trees need a good rain.”

  “Everything could use a good rain,” Jocie’s father peered up at the clouds. “But it looks like the storm is moving away from us.”

  “Do you think the storm, this other storm that Mr. Flinn says I’ve started, will move away from us too? Is the . . .” She hesitated as if even saying the word was painful, but she went on, making herself say it. “Is the Klan very active in Holly County?”

  “Not that I’ve ever known. Those men, the ones I got a good look at, I’ve never seen them before.”

  “I watched them coming up the street down in front of the ten cent store,” Jocie said. “I didn’t recognize any of them. Of course I couldn’t get a good look at some of them with those hoods up around their faces.” She looked over at her father. “Why were they here? They couldn’t have known what was going on at the Grill, could they?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Jocie’s father said. “That was just coincidence.”

  “It wasn’t coincidence that they were here,” Noah’s mother said. “They may not have come because I was staging a sit-in up there, but you can be assured they were here because of us. Because we bought that land from Mr. Harvey. Poor Alex. He just wanted a farm. We didn’t think we�
�d be challenging or breaking any barriers here just buying a piece of land. While I’m quite willing to make personal sacrifices to work toward true equality in our country, I don’t want my children to be in danger.”

  “No good mother wants her children to be in danger,” Jocie’s father said.

  Jocie waited for her father to say more, to assure Noah’s mother that her family was safe in Holly County, that nothing bad would happen, but he was silent as they hurried on toward the newspaper office. Jocie told herself it was just because the raindrops were hitting harder. He couldn’t stop and talk with the rain coming down. But even after they went inside and Cassidy was hugging her mother and Noah looked about ready to pass out with relief, Jocie’s father didn’t say anything to reassure Noah’s mother that things were going to be all right. Jocie waved at Noah and Cassidy as they followed their mother out the back door and dashed across the street through the rain to their car. Jocie’s father watched too, but he still didn’t say what she was wanting to hear.

  Finally Jocie asked him straight out. “They’ll be okay? Nobody will bother them out on their farm, will they?”

  Her father put both his hands on her shoulders, turned her toward him, and looked straight into her eyes. “I wish I could promise you that, Jocie, but I can’t. All I can promise you is that we will pray that nothing bad will happen and that Mr. Hearndon’s apple trees will grow tall and bear much fruit. It would be good to have an apple orchard in Holly County.”

  “But bad things do sometimes happen even when we pray that they won’t.”

  “They do,” her father admitted.

  “Even when people aren’t doing anything wrong?”

  “Even then.” Her father’s fingers tightened on Jocie’s shoulders. “But remember, the Lord never leaves us even when those bad things happen. He’s there right beside us to help us make it through whatever life throws at us. You know that firsthand after the Lord took care of you in the tornado.”

  “But I caused that. Well, not the tornado, but being in its path. If I’d done the right thing and not run away, me and Wes wouldn’t have been there.”

  “You’re going to have to forgive yourself for that, Jocie. Nobody else has ever blamed you for what happened to Wes.”

  “That doesn’t change it being my fault,” Jocie said matter-of-factly. “But Noah and his family aren’t doing anything wrong. They ought to be able to live anywhere they want.”

  “Yes, they should.”

  “Then it doesn’t seem fair that they have to worry about bad things happening if they haven’t done anything to deserve it.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  Jocie didn’t want her father to agree with her. She didn’t know what she wanted him to say, but something to take away the echo of the sound of boots hitting on Hollyhill’s Main Street. She concentrated on the rain hitting the front windows, an answer to prayer.

  “Maybe we should thank God for the rain,” she said after a minute.

  “We should,” he said. “And we can pray for the Hearndons, that the Lord will protect them and keep them safe.”

  “Can we do it right now?”

  Jocie wanted to pray for the Hearndons now. Not wait till Sunday or bedtime. The bad things might not wait that long.

  “We certainly can.” Jocie’s father kept his hands on her shoulders as he looked up at the ceiling and shut his eyes.

  “Dear Lord, thank you for the blessings of the rain. You are a great and mighty God, and we look to you for all our needs. Help us to know your will and to follow your leadership. Watch over Noah and Myra and Cassidy and Alex and Elise and Eli this day and every day. Keep them safe in your mighty hands.” Jocie’s father’s hands tightened again on her shoulders. “And thank you for this child you have given me to love and call my own. Amen.”

  33

  Tuesday morning Zella left her house even earlier than usual to walk the five blocks to the Banner offices. She’d always been an early riser. The best time to work on her roses was in the morning as the sun was coming up. Not that there’d been much she could do with them lately except watch them dry up. In spite of all the thunder and lightning, the rain the night before had come and gone too quickly. Her rain gauge only showed two-tenths of an inch. Not enough to give a dandelion a good drink.

  Of course, Zella’s father used to say that once any kind of rain broke the drought, it was easier for the next rain to come. And thunderclouds had been building in the west nearly every evening for the last couple of weeks. Last night’s was the first shower from any of the thunder, but maybe the next thunder would bring some real rain.

  That was what the preachers needed to pray for. Not just a rain that wet the sidewalk and was nothing but a misty memory as soon as the sun came back out. A real rain. The kind that set in and stayed awhile. Though now the preachers might better spend their time praying away the other storm that was trying to settle over their town. That storm had nothing to do with the weather, but it was lying there on the horizon, dark and threatening.

  Zella didn’t understand why David was being so blind about it all. It was one thing to be in the middle of the storm just because that’s where you happened to be when the storm hit. It was a whole different matter walking right out into the dark cloud and standing there daring the lightning to strike you.

  She’d told him hiring that boy was a mistake. Not that she saw anything all that wrong with the boy other than being a bit disrespectful at times, but that probably had more to do with him being around Jocelyn than what color his skin was. And that other girl who had been coming in to see Jocelyn after school every once in while, that Rev. Boyer’s daughter. She was nice as can be. Zella could only hope some of that girl’s good manners would rub off on Jocelyn. She’d told Jocelyn as much just last week.

  But not everybody in Holly County was as forward thinking as Zella was. A lot of people were just out-and-out prejudiced against colored people. That was simply the way they’d been brought up, and they hadn’t ever seen any reason to change. Not Zella. She thought it was fine that the schools had been desegregated. It was high time. The state was going to make them do it anyhow. And she had no idea why three people had canceled their subscriptions because David put the story about Francine Rowlett on the front page. It wasn’t like he put the colored teacher’s picture on the top fold.

  David said that surely wasn’t the real reason they canceled, even after he read their letters saying it was. He said they must have already had some kind of problem with the paper or him. Sometimes David just closed his eyes and wouldn’t look to keep from seeing the bad in people. That’s why he’d never known what was going on with Adrienne. The day she drove out of town was everybody’s lucky day.

  But praise the Lord, David had opened his eyes and seen Leigh Jacobson at last. Zella had been pushing the girl in front of him for months. And now he was not only seeing Leigh, he was calling her, finding reasons to walk down to the courthouse to talk to her, taking her to dinner—even if it was just to the Family Diner here in town. The man surely lacked any romantic instincts. And after Zella had told him he needed a restaurant with candles on the tables.

  Still, things were progressing. Zella could tell that by the way Leigh’s face colored up when she asked her straight out if David had given her a good-night kiss after they went out to eat. And if they’d kissed, David was definitely serious. He wasn’t the type of man who would casually throw his kisses around without caring who he might hurt.

  Of course the two of them still had plenty of obstacles in their road to romance. Jocelyn for one. Jocelyn always wanted to be right in the middle of everything. She’d been right in the middle of what went on the day before up at the Grill.

  Leigh had called last night and filled her in on what had happened, since Zella walked on home after she’d found David at the courthouse. She wasn’t about to stick around town and watch everybody make fools of themselves, swinging their partner and doing some sort of do-si-do dancing out in
the middle of Main Street. Besides, the storm was coming up.

  She hadn’t realized the other storm was coming. She heard rumors about the Klan, but she never thought they’d just put on their sheets and march right down the middle of Main Street. Where in the world was the sheriff? She knew where the chief of police was. He was up at the Grill trying to get that Myra Hearndon to quit sitting where Grover Flinn didn’t want her to sit while she tried to order a soft drink. And Zella could still hardly believe what Mary Jo had done. People could surprise you sometimes.

  But somebody, and not just Mary Jo, should have been out there telling that bunch of hoodlums to take their sheets elsewhere. From what Leigh had told her, the men weren’t even from Hollyhill. Not that there weren’t men in Hollyhill who might be in the Klan. Zella knew a few who liked to get in your face and spit all over you while they told you giving coloreds the same rights as whites would be the downfall of the country. Some men could be such idiots. Thank the heavens above she didn’t have to look at one of them over the breakfast table every morning.

  As she passed by the Christian Church, the bells began ringing out the hour. The hymn wouldn’t play until eight o’clock. Tuesday. That was “The Lily of the Valley.” Or maybe that was on Wednesday and today was “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” She heard them every livelong day, whether she was at the newspaper or at home. Even down at the Baptist church where she went, those songs started playing, she heard them. She ought to know them all by heart, but the songs didn’t sound right being bonged out the top of a church. It would have been plenty good enough to just let the clock chime out the hours.

  Zella picked up her pace. She was a block away. She didn’t really think Wesley would beat her into the office. It would take him awhile to get up and going with that big cast on his leg, but he’d always been an early riser too. She didn’t want to take the chance he might clump down the steps and be in the office before she was.