When Sparrows Fall

by Meg Moseley

  “Because she’s quiet and gentle,” Martha said. “Like ladies are supposed to be.”

  Jack smiled. Quiet and gentle, maybe, but sometimes, Miranda was a mama bear who would savage anybody stupid enough to mess with her kids. He liked that. He liked it a lot.

  “So, how does she keep y’all in line?” he asked.

  Michael shrugged. “Mostly, she takes away privileges or makes us do extra chores.”

  “Seems to be working,” Jack said. “I’ve never seen such a bunch of good eggs.”

  Martha let out a shout of laughter. “We’re not eggs!”

  “No, but you are definitely a literalist.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Ah … somebody who adheres to the explicit substance of an expression.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind, sweetie, but rest assured that you’re a very good one.”

  Content with that, she resumed singing the lullaby to her phantom baby, then switched to a Scripture song. “Rejoice in the Lord, O ye righteous,” she piped, off-key.

  She was perfectly normal. Too young to have been warped. Timothy, the oldest, showed the most signs of having been affected by the legalism and the isolation. Jack had a feeling, though, that Timothy was a good, solid boy who happened to be going through a rough time.

  Jack prodded the fire with his stick. Bright orange motes flew skyward and faded into ashes that continued rising. Gray snowflakes, they defied gravity.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. He remembered his mother’s cremation, hastily arranged by the husband who’d just dumped her. Roger Hanford’s first ex-wife had turned religious. His second turned to pills.

  Jack remembered his dad as a good-time Charlie. When in doubt, sing, he’d always said. He’d often grabbed his wife for an impromptu dance around the living room, and Jack had laughed with them, thinking he had the best dad in the world. Roger Hanford was a great guy except for his unfortunate habit of chasing anything in skirts.

  There were no perfect fathers. No perfect sons.

  Pulling in a breath of smoky air, Jack counted the years since he’d lost his mother. And he’d lost her, all right. Like losing a library book. He’d been irresponsible. Careless. So busy with his all-important eighth-grade pursuits that he hadn’t bothered to make a phone call.

  The dancing flames cast a spell of silence over Martha and the archangels. They didn’t volunteer any more information, and Jack didn’t ask any more questions. He had plenty to think about.

  fifteen

  Jack downed the last of his morning coffee, set the mug in the sink, and turned to find Martha scooting into the kitchen on her rump, backward, for no discernible reason.

  “Uncle Jack, is Mama still mad at you?”

  “No, I think we’ve cleared the air.”

  Abandoning her unladylike locomotion, Martha sniffed. “What was wrong with the air?”

  “That’s a figure of speech. It means talking things over. Or clearing things up.”

  “Oh.” Martha stood and reached into a big, square pocket on the front of her denim skirt. She pulled out a delicate glass snowflake that shot rainbows of color as the sun hit it.

  “Is that a Christmas ornament, young lady?”

  “Yes sir, but I’m not playing with it. I’m just looking at it.”

  “And touching it and hauling it around with you. Breaking your mom’s rule. Hand it over.”

  “But it’s so beautiful.”

  “It is. Show me where you found it, please.”

  Martha stuck out her lower lip but relinquished her treasure. She led him into the living room, opened a tall pinewood cabinet that stood near the wood stove, and pointed to a shoe box on one of the middle shelves. She must have dragged a chair over to reach so high.

  Jack deposited the snowflake amid ten or twelve similar ones, each one in its own nest of white tissue paper. Every shelf in the cabinet was loaded with decorations. Coils of lights and old-fashioned bead garlands. Candles. A red and green plaid tablecloth. A glittery silver star for the top of the tree. It did his heart good to see that Mason hadn’t banned Christmas celebrations.

  “Looks like your mom goes all-out when Christmas rolls around.”

  “Mama loves Christmas. She bought these angels last year.” Martha pointed to a row of porcelain angels like the one he’d found in the kitchen. “Aren’t they pretty?”

  “Very,” he said, annoyed with himself for automatically counting the angels on the shelf. Six, all alike. “But stay out of the Christmas cupboard or you’ll be in deep trouble.”

  “Yes sir.”

  The impeccable politeness of the well-brought-up southern child. Yes sir. No sir. Please, thank you, you’re welcome. Such beautiful manners, mixed with sly disobedience. He understood completely; he had been a well-brought-up southern child as well.

  “Find something else to do for a few minutes,” he said. “We’ll start school soon.”

  “Yes sir.” She ran off, apparently holding no grudges against him.

  Miranda entered the room a few minutes later, and Jack helped her round up her students. They sailed through their daily preliminaries and got on with the lessons.

  Martha and the archangels engaged in a three-way squabble about something as they opened their books. Jonah meticulously stuck tiny balls of Play-Doh on his shirt. Rebekah was distraught because she’d made an ink smudge on a fresh page of her journal. And Miranda struggled to open a gigantic paperback textbook one-handed.

  Jack stopped beside the highchair to have a quiet word with Jonah about the proper uses of Play-Doh, then reached around Miranda to open the textbook. It was a reprint of an exhaustive nature guide from 1905. Jack swallowed a remark about the veracity of scientific findings in 1905.

  “Which page do you need?”

  “Chapter 11.” She sounded weary already.

  He found the right page. The entire chapter was devoted to earthworms. He scanned the first paragraph and shook his head. “When there are so many simple ways to construct a sentence, why did these old geezers love their pedantic, convoluted sentences and polysyllabic words?”

  “Like the words that just came out of your mouth, professor?”

  He smiled down at the neat part in her hair. “Touché.”

  She slid the book across the table to Gabriel, who bent over the dictionary and scratched his pencil across a sheet of paper. “When you’re done with your vocabulary words, please read chapter 11 and answer the study questions.”

  Gabriel nodded and continued writing.

  Jack bent over to put his lips close to her ear. “A six-year-old can’t read that.”

  She pulled away from him. “Gabriel can. And he does.”

  Jack straightened and took a respectful step backward. “I’m impressed.”

  “It’s about time.”

  “It’s a shame that such a good reader is limited to nonfiction.”

  She snapped her pencil’s lead against the table and the tip flew across the room. “Children, take a break.”

  Michael grinned. “Already? Wahoo!”

  Pencils rolled across the table, chairs scraped back, and feet hit the floor. The boys grabbed jackets and the girls donned their capes. Except for Jonah, still in the highchair, the kids abandoned the kitchen in record time and fled to the great outdoors.

  Jack strolled around the table to view Miranda from a safe distance. “I’m sorry, but I can’t reconcile myself to the idea that you’ve outlawed fiction.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Is that so? Yet you don’t provide it, and your children can’t provide it for themselves unless they make up their own like Martha does.”

  “She does not.”

  “She pretends to have tea parties. She sings lullabies to an imaginary baby. If we wrote down those scenarios for her, they would be a form of fiction, would they not?”

  “So to speak.”

  “And you don’t mind that, yet you’re opposed to letting the children rea
d fiction?”

  “That was Carl’s rule, not mine.”

  “Why do you stick with his rule? Do you think fiction is sinful? Dangerous? It’s more dangerous to try to raise your children in a sinless bubble. Why won’t you let them live in the real world?”

  Her cheeks were pink, the tips of her ears were red, and she’d pressed her lips tightly together as if to keep them from spewing naughty words. “Stop lecturing me.”

  “I’m trying to be helpful.”

  She whispered two syllables that sounded remarkably like an unladylike word that cast aspersions on his ancestry. “Helpful? Helpful? You think it’s helpful to keep pointing out that I don’t meet your standards for homeschooling? You think it’s helpful to threaten to take my children? Next thing I know, you’ll be reporting me to DFCS!”

  She hurled her pencil. It caught his left shoulder with surprising force and bounced to the floor.

  Jack blinked at the mama grizzly. “I never said … I said … I don’t recall exactly what I said, Miranda.”

  “I do, and it gives me nightmares.”

  He racked his memory but drew a blank. “Whatever I said, I’m sorry. I want the best for you and the children. That includes covering all necessary subjects and arranging for standardized tests and so forth. In short, I need your schooling to comply with the law.”

  “The law, yes, that’s fine, but DFCS is above the law. Have you ever seen them go after a family? They snatch the children first and ask questions later. They take the word of an anonymous caller as the gospel truth, and the parents are presumed guilty.”

  “Sometimes, parents are guilty, and children’s lives depend on intervention from social workers.”

  “Social workers don’t always rescue children from abusive homes. Sometimes, they steal children from good homes and put them in abusive homes.”

  “That must happen only in a minute percentage of cases. Nonetheless, please believe me, Miranda. You’re doing a wonderful job, in general, and I would never report you.”

  “A week from now, you’ll say it again.”

  “Say what again?”

  She arched her eyebrows. “Ah don’t recall exactly what Ah said, M’randa.”

  Jack winced. The spot-on mimicry made him painfully aware of his country-boy twang.

  He took a piece of notebook paper, leaned over the table, and scrawled: I, R. Jackson Hanford, will not take Miranda Hanford’s children from her, nor will I report her to DFCS or to any other governmental agency. After a moment’s thought, he made the period a comma and added: for anything, so help me God.

  He signed it, dated it, and slid it across the table. “There you are, and I’ll trust you to be a law-abiding homeschooler so you won’t ask me to violate my conscience.”

  “Two more copies, please.”

  He complied, wondering what she intended to do with them. Once all three copies were in her custody, her shoulders sagged as if she’d dropped a heavy burden to the floor.

  She handed one copy back to him. “Keep it. To remind you to keep your promise.”

  “I don’t forget my promises. But I do apologize for worrying you.” He shook his head. “I’m always apologizing for something.”

  “Hmm. I wonder why.”

  He chose to ignore that. “About Carl’s rule. Do you think he was right to ban all fiction?”

  “I believe I should be careful about what my children read.” She stopped, biting her lip and staring into the distance. “But honestly, I don’t know how to choose good books. I … I don’t have any experience. My mom wasn’t much of a reader, and I only had one year of college.”

  He felt as if she’d opened a massive door, just a crack, and might open it further if he didn’t growl like a pit bull and scare her into slamming it shut again.

  “Would you like some help with that?” he asked cautiously.

  After a moment, she nodded.

  “I’d be happy to run them to the library and supervise their choices. It would give you a break. And I’ll be careful about what I expose them to.”

  She started rounding up crayons, awkwardly, with her left hand. “If they come home with godless trash in their hands—”

  “They won’t.”

  “If they do, I’ll never trust you again.”

  “You can trust me,” he said. “Like you trusted me when you named me as the guardian.”

  She stuffed crayons into the box, every which way. A red one snapped in half. She crammed the broken pieces in and mashed the lid down. She looked up but didn’t speak.

  “On my honor,” he said, “I will keep godless trash out of their hands. Would you like that in writing? in triplicate?”

  “No. Go ahead. Take them to the library and use your best judgment.”

  “All right, then.” In a hurry to escape with the kids before she changed her mind, Jack took his copy of his pledge into the living room. The girls and the archangels were nowhere in sight, but Timothy was prone on the couch. Book in hand, but not reading it.

  Jack cleared his throat. “You overheard that bit of unpleasantness, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” Timothy rolled over and met Jack’s eyes. “When are you leaving?” he asked quietly.

  “For Chattanooga?”

  “No.” Timothy darted a glance at Miranda. “For the library.”

  “This afternoon, unless your mother kills me first. And that’s a distinct possibility.”

  Jack tucked the paper into his briefcase. When he looked up, Timothy was smiling. Whether it was a sign of camaraderie or that the kid liked the idea of losing his uncle to murder, it was a nice change.

  Miranda lowered herself gently onto the couch and savored the quiet. It had been years since she’d been completely alone on her property. Even now, she wasn’t truly alone; Jonah was napping in her bed. But, until he woke or Jack brought the others home, she would enjoy her solitude and relish her victory.

  No doubt Jack thought he’d won because she’d let him take the children to the library, but she was the victor. He’d promised, in writing, that he would never report her.

  He lived in a different world though, with different standards. There was no telling what kind of garbage he would allow the children to bring home.

  “God, please protect them from evil,” she said. “Give Jack some common sense. Remind him to respect my wishes. And help me recover quickly, so everything can go back to normal.” Her voice cracked. “And please, please, make Mason leave me alone.”

  There. She had prayed; God either heard her or didn’t. Would answer or wouldn’t. These days, that was about as far as her faith could stretch.

  She leaned toward the coffee table. Some of Jack’s papers lay under a scattering of Martha’s hearts. Miranda brushed a few of the hearts away. Her vision still swam sometimes, and Jack’s ragged penmanship didn’t help, but she could read his notes on the top paper. Some hapless student was coming under fire.

  Why? Back up opinion w/facts.

  That sounded exactly like Jack. His own opinions, of course, he regarded as absolute truth. She tried to decipher another scrawled line but could make out only two words, Not true.

  The handwriting in his letters had always been messy and cramped, as if he’d been in a hurry to jot down a thought and fly to the next one. Dear Carl and Miranda, he’d always written, his salutation wisely including both of them even in birthday cards for one or the other. Jack must have sensed that Carl’s jealous streak hadn’t left room even for brotherly friendship.

  Exploring further in the paper, she found more of Jack’s pithy comments and questions, demanding facts, logic, references. Dig deeper, he exhorted in bright red ink. Define terms!

  Straightening the papers into a neat pile, she glanced at the author’s name. It was Jack’s paper? He’d directed his critique, not toward a student, but toward himself.

  Smiling at her new perspective on him, she retrieved one of the women’s magazines she’d hidden under the couch. This time, she’d
avoid any articles that might threaten her peace of mind.

  Again, she found a perfume sample. She ran one finger over the white matte surface of the fragrance strip, then rubbed it over her left wrist. The scent was light and sweet, like violets. Like springtime without sorrow. It made her feel starved for sunshine.

  She wrapped herself in her cape and took the magazine outside. With the bedroom window cracked open, she would hear Jonah when he woke.

  Jack’s shiny black car stood uselessly in the drive. He had taken the van. She didn’t have keys to his car, nor did she have two good hands at the moment, nor did she know how to drive a stick shift. Carl had believed that was an unwomanly skill. Even if she didn’t have a child sleeping in the house, she couldn’t have escaped.

  Tired of the porch, she proceeded to one of the two white Adirondack chairs that sat on the grass, their paint peeling. Above her, a hawk cried. Dark against the sky, the bird dipped and wavered, and the sun shone through its tail feathers, making them brick red. The hawk looped and circled over the woods and finally soared out of sight. Free to choose its own course. Free to make choices, bad or good.

  Sometimes she wasn’t even sure she wanted freedom. Freedom wasn’t safe.

  She opened the magazine—to a two-page ad for lingerie. It reminded her of Jack’s comment about pink lace. He hadn’t said anything racy, yet his wink and the twinkle in his eye had made her blush.

  At least she hadn’t rebuked him. If she had, and he hadn’t meant a thing by it, then they both would have known that she, not Jack, was entertaining impure thoughts about lacy lingerie.

  She closed the magazine. She should have brought her Bible outside instead, to cleanse her mind.

  Jack probably had a girlfriend back in Chattanooga, anyway. A polished, professional woman. The kind who paid for real manicures and real haircuts in real salons. She would shop at department stores with her own money. She would make her own decisions about jeans and red sweaters and big, shiny earrings. She wouldn’t be a frumpy housewife who wore home-sewn clothes and hand-me-downs.