The Scent of Lilacs

by Ann H. Gabhart

“You’re always saying the Bible says to ask, and I’ve been asking. So maybe God sent him to me,” Jocie said.

  That night at supper, David tried to summon up a thankful heart to add to Jocie’s as she said grace. The Bible taught to be thankful in all things, and he supposed that could apply to what was surely the ugliest stray dog in the county, maybe the state. The dog had latched onto Jocie as if she’d raised him from a pup instead of just finding him in the woods a few hours ago. Even now he had his nose up against the screen on the back door, his eyes locked on Jocie and his ears cocked almost as if he knew what she was saying. David wouldn’t have been surprised to hear an amen woof.

  Jocie asked the usual blessings on the food before saying, “Thank you, Lord, for Zebedee. I’d begun to worry you didn’t mean for me to have a dog, but Aunt Love says the Bible says to keep asking, so that’s what I did. And I thank you that you let Zebedee find me.”

  David heard Aunt Love pull in a little puff of breath and knew her heart wasn’t feeling a bit thankful. She’d hardly been able to put supper on the table for worrying about her cat. After the confrontation on the porch, Sugar had ensconced herself on the top shelf of the bookcase in the living room and had snarled at anyone who came close, even Aunt Love.

  Jocie was still praying. “I promise to take good care of him. And, Lord, please give Daddy a good message for the people at Mt. Pleasant in the morning, and watch over Tabitha wherever she is. Amen.”

  “Amen,” David repeated after her.

  Aunt Love unfolded her napkin and spread it across her lap. No amen passed her lips. Aunt Love had been living with them ever since his mother had died four years ago—another time Jocie had been on the front lines for heartbreak. One late fall day he’d come home from the paper to find Jocie sitting beside his mother’s body in the freshly dug tulip bed. Tears were making dirty tracks down Jocie’s cheeks and dropping on her grandmother’s hands.

  David had dropped down beside them in the dirt and cried like a baby. That had scared Jocie more than finding her grandmother dead among the tulip bulbs, but he couldn’t help it. He’d felt as if God had reached down and poked him right in the nose to see if he could get up off the ground one more time. And he’d wanted to stay down.

  Jocie had hugged and patted him, but that had made him wail louder. Finally she’d jumped on her bike and pedaled the two miles to town to get Wes out of the pressroom. Wes, who had never darkened the door of a Hollyhill church in the ten years he’d known him, had gotten David back on his feet that night before darkness fell over the farm and his soul.

  Wes had listened to his story and then said, “It ain’t God knocking you down, son. It’s life. God’s right here beside us, taking hold of your hand to pull you up.” Wes had leaned down close to his face and almost whispered, “You take a look at this child here and tell me that ain’t so.”

  David had listened to Wes, because if anybody knew about life knocking a person flat, it was Wes. David had let Wes and Jocie pull him up and had gone about doing what had to be done. By the time the funeral was over three days later, he’d even been able to tell Jocie God must have needed help with the tulip planting in heaven.

  But they’d needed help too. At the time, he’d thought Aunt Love would be able to step in where his mother had stepped out and help him make a home for Jocie. But Aunt Love had never had children, never been married. Sometimes he wondered if she could even remember being a child. She could cook, or at least she had been able to when she first came to live with them. Now she tended to let things burn or to forget whether she’d already added salt to the stew. Still, he didn’t regret giving her a home. She’d needed a place, and they’d needed family.

  Aunt Love smoothed down the lace collar on her dark purple dress and passed David the new potatoes boiled in their skins, a gift from Matt McDermott, one of the deacons at Mt. Pleasant. He figured he had the McDermott family’s vote on the interim job even before they heard his sermon in the morning. Last week they had brought him cabbage and broccoli. He wondered when their tomatoes would start getting ripe. Even Jocie liked tomatoes.

  “What are you preaching on tomorrow morning?” Aunt Love asked him.

  “The Lord hasn’t laid a sure message on my heart as yet.”

  “Well, don’t you think it’s high time he did? The vote’s tomorrow night.”

  “I’m not worrying about the vote.” David felt guilty as the lie passed his lips, so he added, “Well, not overly much anyway. If the Lord wants me to serve there, he’ll give me the vote.”

  “If they had any sense, they’d offer you the job full-time,” Aunt Love said.

  Jocie looked up from her potatoes. “Why don’t they call you as their regular pastor, Daddy? I hear them telling you they like your sermon on the way out every week. That must mean they like you.”

  David put his fork down. “Church people think they have to say that to preachers. Even when they sleep through the sermon. But even if they really do like my sermons, there’s more to leading a church than preaching, Jocie.”

  “You mean visiting the sick and keeping folks from fussing? You do all that too.” Jocie spooned three or four potatoes out on her plate. “Except, of course, at Brown’s Chapel, and nobody could have made those people happy.”

  “That’s God’s own truth,” Aunt Love muttered. “Those people would fight over what color the pulpit Bible should be.”

  “They had some issues to deal with,” David said with a smile.

  “When anybody with any sense knows it should be black,” Aunt Love went on. “But why don’t you tell the child the truth? The reason they won’t ask you full-time is because of Adrienne.”

  “Mother?” Jocie said. “What’s she got to do with Dad preaching? She’s been gone forever.”

  “Baptists like their preachers to be married,” Aunt Love said. “Catholics won’t let their men of the cloth marry, but Baptists figure they need a preacher’s wife to cook for church dinners, teach Sunday school, call people, whatever needs doing that the preacher can’t get done.”

  David stared at the potatoes in the middle of a little pool of butter on his plate. He wished Aunt Love hadn’t brought up Adrienne, but that was another thing about Aunt Love. She never sugarcoated anything. He decided to be as honest. “Not having a wife isn’t exactly the problem. Once having a wife and then not having her anymore is. I’m lucky any of the churches in the county ever let me stand behind their pulpits.”

  “Luck has nothing to do with it,” Aunt Love said. “You’re a fine preacher. The best I ever heard, and I’ve heard plenty.”

  “And how many would that be?” David asked, trying to shift the talk away from wives, or the lack of them.

  “Way more than I could put a name to.”

  “I’ll bet you could count the Sundays you’ve missed church on one hand.” David began eating his potatoes.

  “Actually, it would take quite a few hands,” Aunt Love said. “When I was a child, we generally had to share a preacher with another congregation, so sometimes we didn’t have services every Sunday, unless my father, who was strong on church attendance, led the services when the preacher couldn’t be there.” Aunt Love frowned a little as she added, “He was a very religious man.”

  “Mother always said he should have been a preacher. That maybe that’s where I got my calling.”

  “Nonsense,” Aunt Love said sharply. “Your calling came from God. Father never had any kind of calling. He just liked to expound on the Scriptures.”

  “He knew the Bible well.”

  “So do I, but that doesn’t make me a preacher,” Aunt Love said.

  Jocie’s head came up at that remark, but her father gave her a look that made her clamp her lips shut. She couldn’t take a chance on getting in trouble until Zeb was a permanent member of the family. Besides, she wasn’t all that interested in how much Aunt Love had gone to church anyway. It was obvious she’d gone way too much. And here Jocie was following right in her footsteps, b
ut most of the time she didn’t mind.

  Church wasn’t so bad. The pews got hard sometimes, but she liked the singing and the Bible stories. Miss McMurtry, who taught the intermediate Sunday school class at Mt. Pleasant, was nice enough. She was always giving them chewing gum to give their mouths something to do besides yawn.

  Of course, going off to church tomorrow might be hard, what with having to leave Zeb and not being sure if he’d still be on the porch when they finally got to come home after the night service. They always went to somebody’s house for Sunday dinner after the morning service. Jocie hoped they had something besides cabbage ready in their garden. Even peas might taste good after all the cabbage.

  Then her father would have to go work the church field in the afternoon. Pastors, even the fill-in kind, had to pray over sick church members. It was expected. She wouldn’t have a chance of talking her dad out of doing the visits this week. Not with the vote looming. Maybe she could pretend to be sick in the morning, but she’d have to be really throwing up before Aunt Love would fall for that. Maybe she could lock Zeb in the garage while they were gone.

  Jocie dipped a couple more potatoes out of the bowl and wondered if she could smuggle them out to Zeb. Aunt Love would never notice. She was still wandering around in the past as she said, “But I can’t claim to having gone to church every time the doors were open. Fact is, there was a time I fell away completely, thought I might never pass through a church door again.”

  “That’s hard to believe,” David said. “Are you telling us you were a rebellious teenager?”

  “I was well past my teen years.” Aunt Love pushed her still full plate of food away from her. “A lot of bad things were happening. The First World War. Mother was sick and then passed on. It was a dry year, and the crops just withered in the field. Our old workhorse went lame. Other things. Just didn’t have the heart to go to church.”

  “Did Grandfather quit going too?” David asked.

  “Oh, no. Father went.” Aunt Love got up from the table and went into the living room to stand at the shelves full of pictures and books. This time the cat gingerly climbed down low enough for Aunt Love to scoop her up. Aunt Love carried the cat down the hall into her room and shut the door.

  Jocie looked at her father. “You think she’s still that upset about something that happened fifty years ago?”

  “It appears so.”

  “Then she’ll never get over Zeb punching Jezzie.”

  “I don’t think Zeb and Jez—I mean Sugar—fighting can compare to the times she’s remembering. Your Mama Mae told me one of their brothers died in World War I. That may have been what she was thinking about.”

  “I guess people never get over losing somebody in their family.” Jocie’s eyes strayed to a picture of her mother and Tabitha on top of the old upright piano in the living room, but she didn’t let her gaze linger there. She felt disloyal to her father when she let herself think about her mother, so she quickly said, “I still miss Mama Mae.”

  “Of course you do.” David’s eyes were steady on Jocie. “The same as you miss your mother and Tabitha.”

  “But they wanted to leave. That’s different than Mama Mae. She would have asked God to let her stay with us a few more years like he did Hezekiah in the Bible if she’d had the chance.”

  “You could be right,” David said.

  “She probably would even know how to cheer up Aunt Love.”

  “You might be able to do that yourself.”

  “Me?” Jocie said. And then she grinned. “Well, I could let Zeb in so she could yell at me and think up some Bible verses. Do you think there’s anything in there about dogs? Oh no.” Jocie’s eyes got big. “What if she remembers about God telling Jezebel the dogs would lick up her blood?”

  David laughed. “I think you’re safe there. Her cat’s name is Sugar. Something it might be well for you to remember for a few weeks so that particular passage won’t come to mind.”

  “You don’t think God will want you to preach on that tomorrow, do you?”

  “No. I’m leaning toward Jesus feeding the five thousand.”

  “Oh, that’s good. That should be a vote getter.”

  “I’m not running for preacher, Jocie.”

  “Same thing as. You have to get the votes.”

  “Well, we can hope for divine guidance rather than politics when the votes are cast.”

  “I don’t get to vote, do I?”

  “Of course not. You’re not a member of Mt. Pleasant Church.”

  “But I am a member of the church, and if they call you there, we’ll be changing our memberships, won’t we? I could change it tomorrow morning and slip in under the wire in time to vote.”

  “You don’t get to vote.” David took hold of Jocie’s arm as she began gathering up the plates to carry to the sink. “You don’t even get to say anything. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Dad. I know. Nobody wants to hear what a kid thinks.” Jocie had gotten into trouble at one of the churches where her father had filled in for the regular pastor who’d had the flu. They’d had this meeting and were discussing ways to get young people interested in church. All she’d done was suggest having a dance. And then after the chairman of the deacons had turned beet red and begun sputtering, you’d have thought she’d thrown gasoline on the flames when she pointed out that King David had danced all the way to Jerusalem in front of the ark of the covenant.

  Her father pulled her closer and kissed her cheek. “Well, not exactly nobody. I do. You can tell me what you think anytime. If it’s good enough I might even put it in the paper. Or who knows? In a sermon.”

  Jocie leaned her head on her father’s shoulder. “How old is Tabitha now, Daddy?”

  “She was thirteen when she left.”

  “My age.”

  “That’s right. Your age. That means she’d be nineteen now. Twenty on her birthday in July.”

  “Wouldn’t it be fun if she came home for her birthday this year?”

  Her father’s arm tightened around her waist as he said, “Maybe we could have a party for her whether she’s here or not, and then you could write her about it. I’ll bet she’d like that.”

  “What was her favorite kind of cake?”

  “Chocolate. Your grandmother always made her a chocolate cake with chocolate icing and pink and white candles.”

  “Uh-oh. The last time I made a chocolate cake it turned out like rubber.”

  “Practice makes perfect.”

  “We’d better buy a mix,” Jocie said. “Maybe you could write to her and tell her about the party. Maybe send her some money. I mean, when you get this preaching job at Mt. Pleasant, we’ll have some extra coming in, and we won’t have to buy hardly any groceries all summer with the way the people out there like to grow vegetables. She sometimes asks you for money to come home to visit when she writes, doesn’t she?”

  “But she never comes,” her father pointed out. “I think it’s just their way of getting a little extra money.”

  “But you always send the money just in case.” Jocie watched her father nod his head. “Has she written lately?”

  “Not for months. My last letter came back, so they must have moved again.”

  “Where was she?”

  “Los Angeles the last time she wrote. She had a boyfriend.”

  “Like Mama.”

  “I don’t want to talk about your mother’s boyfriend.”

  “Sorry.” Jocie straightened up and began to stack the dishes again. “What’s it like in California? Were you ever there?”

  “Once, when I was in the navy headed toward the Philippines. It rained the whole time I was there, but it was warm. They said it was really sunny and nice to the south. The whole place was sort of crazy then with the war and everything. Everybody was in a frenzy thinking the Japanese might invade any day. It was a lot different from here.”

  “Did you wish you could stay?”

  “Never. From the day I went into the navy al
l I wanted was to get back home. I joined the navy to see the world, but I never saw a place I liked better than here. Of course, most of the time I was down below in a submarine and not seeing much of anything.”

  “Do you think Tabitha likes it out there?”

  “She said she did when she wrote last time.”

  “Wes says it’s still sort of crazy out there. With hippies and everything. Do you think Tabitha’s a hippie?”

  “I hope not.”

  Her father frowned, and Jocie remembered Wes saying no father would want his daughter to be a hippie. “Still, no matter if she did like it there, she might come for a visit.” Jocie scraped the leftovers out into an old pan. She could see Zeb at the door, his tongue hanging out at the smell of the food. “I mean, I’ve been praying about Tabitha coming home even longer than I’ve been praying for a dog, and the Lord sent Zebedee.”

  “We’re not all that sure that Zebedee doesn’t belong to somebody else.”

  “I’m sure,” Jocie said. “Do you think I should put him in the garage when we go to church tomorrow?”

  “No. If he’s going to be your dog, he’ll stay.”

  “But what if he doesn’t?”

  “Then we’ll find you another dog if you want one so bad.”

  “I don’t want any dog now. I want Zebedee.”

  “Then maybe he’ll stay. He’s been sitting at the door waiting for you to get through with supper for about an hour now. Go on and take him for a walk or something.” Her father gave her a little push. “You can wash the dishes later.”

  Jocie dumped the scraps out on the wide, flat rock that served as a bottom step off the back porch. Zeb ate them all, even the stinky cabbage, and then licked the rock until not even smell of food could have remained.

  Before supper, the dog had endured a dunking in the old washtub as if he knew there was a price to pay for the biscuits she’d given him. The soap and water had lightened the gray of his coat, but the dirty-looking spots hadn’t disappeared even though she’d scrubbed until Zeb had yelped and poked her hand with his nose.