The Scent of Lilacs

by Ann H. Gabhart

  Jocie shook her head. This was stupid. Ronnie Martin could say whatever he wanted. She knew who her father was. There was no need for her heart to start beating funny inside her. No need at all. Nothing he’d said had been true. Nothing.

  She could ask Wes. She could ask Wes anything. He’d tell her she was being stupid, but at least he’d tell her. His words would push Ronnie Martin’s words right out of her ears, and then everything would be okay. She’d tell Wes what Ronnie had said, and Wes would say Ronnie should be sent to Neptune, and they’d laugh and figure out how to get him there.

  But when she got back to the Banner offices, Wes was still gone. Tabitha and Aunt Love were in the chairs in front of Zella’s desk waiting for her father to get back from picking Leigh up at the courthouse so they could leave for Grundy. Zella was smiling too big and sneaking peeks at Tabitha’s waistline.

  Jocie set the sack with the coffee in it down on Zella’s desk.

  “Where’s the change?” Zella asked.

  “I gave it to old Sallie. He was hungry.”

  “Hungry, my foot. He probably has hundreds of dollars stuffed in his mattress at the county poorhouse,” Zella said.

  “He didn’t say anything about me, did he?” Tabitha asked a bit uneasily.

  “Nope. He just sang. Ronnie Martin wasn’t as nice. He called me a bastard,” Jocie said.

  Zella sucked in her breath at the word, and Aunt Love frowned as she said, “Put off the filthy communication out of your mouth.”

  “I didn’t say it. He did.” Once Jocie started talking she didn’t seem to be able to stop. “He said my mother broke up his aunt’s marriage.”

  Zella looked down at her desk, and Aunt Love seemed to be thumbing through her mind to come up with another Bible verse. Only Tabitha looked her straight in the eye. “She probably did, Jocie. DeeDee never worried much about who was married to who.”

  Jocie didn’t want to keep looking at Tabitha. She didn’t want to keep talking to her. She wanted Wes to be there. She wanted to talk to Wes about sending Ronnie Martin to Neptune. Jocie swallowed and licked her lips. Finally she said, “But it isn’t true what he said.”

  “He shouldn’t have called you a bastard,” Tabitha said.

  “But it isn’t true what he said,” Jocie said again.

  Tabitha didn’t say anything. She just looked at Jocie. She had tears in her eyes.

  “Tell me it isn’t true what he said,” Jocie said again.

  “Do you want the truth?” Tabitha asked softly.

  “No!” Jocie screamed.

  She didn’t know how she got out of the building and on her bike. She spotted her father coming up the street with Leigh and spun her bike around the other direction. He yelled at her, but she just pedaled harder. She couldn’t see him now. She couldn’t hear him telling her the truth. She couldn’t hear the truth. How could that be the truth?

  She pedaled faster. Once out of town, she swerved across the road. Two cars honked at her and the third almost hit her, but she made it onto the side street. She didn’t even know what street she’d turned on. She just wanted to get away from the cars, away from Hollyhill, away from her father.

  He was her father. He had to be her father. But then why was she running away? Why hadn’t she stopped and asked him? Why was she afraid of the truth?

  What seemed like hours later, she had no idea where she was as she rode along a narrow, winding strip of blacktop between grass and weeds as high as the fence tops on the side of the road. No cars had passed her for a good while, and she hadn’t even seen a house for what must have been a couple of miles. She did pass a field where a farmer was mowing hay, but he was watching his mower and didn’t notice her. She didn’t recognize him.

  She was glad it was hot. Glad she was thirsty. Glad the muscles in her legs were burning. That gave her something to think about. She felt a little dizzy, but she kept pedaling. Her shadow was behind her. That must mean she was going west now, but who knew what direction she’d started out. North out of Hollyhill, she supposed, since she’d turned off North Main, but she had no idea how many times she’d turned since then. It didn’t matter. She didn’t want to go back. Not yet, anyway. Maybe never.

  So she just kept riding, coasting down a steep road carved into the side of a rocky, tree-covered slope. There was no sign of people. She stopped at the bottom of the hill and heard water running in a creek not far from the road. Birds were singing their summer songs. A bee buzzed by her ear. She didn’t hear the faintest sound of traffic or the faraway whistle of a train or even the drone of an airplane overhead. She was totally alone. Lost and alone. And very thirsty.

  She pushed her bike off the road in behind a thick growth of stinkweed, careful not to touch the weeds. She pulled her shirt up over her nose and held her breath to block out the sickening odor of the white blooms and hurried along a faint path that led through the bushes to the creek. There were probably snakes, but she didn’t care. She didn’t even care if the water made her puke. She cupped her hand under a rivulet flowing over some limestone rocks and took a drink. Then she sat down in the middle of the creek and watched the water run over her tennis shoes. She wished Zeb was with her. Then maybe she wouldn’t feel so alone.

  The limestone rock was flat and smooth under her bottom. The water swirling gently past her was clear and cool. Tree limbs hung down over the creek, but here and there the sun pushed through to spark off the water. Up ahead of her the creek curved to the right, which would take it closer to the road. She wondered if this was the creek where they’d washed the car a few summers ago. A gravel road had passed right through the water. Her father had turned off the road and stopped the car in the middle of the creek. They’d scooped water up in buckets to throw over the car. Her father had slipped on the mossy rocks and fallen in. Then since he’d fallen down, she had too, on purpose. Their laughter echoed in her head until she wanted to put her hands over her ears, but that wouldn’t stop what was inside her head. No more than she could block out the awful things Ronnie Martin had said or the shine of tears in Tabitha’s eyes when she couldn’t say it wasn’t true.

  But how could it be true? How could her father not be her father?

  She ran her fingers through the water. Maybe she ought to pray, but what good would it do? Whatever the truth was, she couldn’t change it. She supposed God could, because nothing was impossible with God. A camel could go through the eye of a needle. A virgin could have a baby. Lazarus could come out of the grave. But she’d never heard of God changing who anybody’s father was. She splashed some water on her face and let it drip off.

  Maybe it wasn’t true. People liked to start stories in Hollyhill. Her father had always said she shouldn’t listen to gossip. And now she had and here she was in the middle of a creek, her shorts soaking wet, with not the first idea of where she was. Or who she was.

  She looked down at the water. A crawdad poked his head out from under a rock. Jocie sat very still as the crawdad came toward her with his claws raised. She wasn’t sure if he thought she was just a big rock or supper. She stuck her finger slowly down in the water in front of him. He stopped and then hightailed it back under his rock. She picked the rock up, and he disappeared under another rock. She started to follow him, to keep picking up his hiding places and make him keep running, but then she put the first rock back in the same place.

  The sunlight faded. Jocie thought it was just getting late until thunder sounded in the distance and black clouds rolled in above the treetops. She remembered another story when a flash flood had ripped down the very same creek where they’d washed their car and taken out trees and barns along the creek. They’d put pictures in the Banner. Wes had said it was almost as newsy as the ’59 tornado. It was hard to believe that such a gentle creek could turn into something that could uproot trees.

  She stayed in the middle of the creek. The clouds overhead were getting blacker by the second. The thunder boomed louder. She imagined a wall of water coming around the c
urve in the creek toward her, washing away her hiding place.

  And her with it. She imagined herself bouncing in the flood water, being thrown against rocks and trees. The storm swept closer. Lightning lit up the sky. She counted one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand. The thunder sounded. The tree limbs began dipping down into the water and then up toward the sky as if they could shake free of the wind ripping through them.

  Jocie stood up. Water dripped out of her shorts. She might want to keep hiding, but she didn’t want to just sit there and wash away downstream.

  “Good-bye, little crawdad,” she said before sloshing out of the creek and back out to where her bike was hidden.

  She pushed her bike up the hill. The whole sky was black now with a layer of gray clouds racing around under the heavy storm clouds as if trying to find a place to jump in and join the game. A streak of lightning popped down toward the ground in front of her.

  If Jocie had been home, she’d have been out on the porch, watching the lightning and counting the seconds till the thunder sounded. She liked the way the wind threw raindrops under the porch roof into her face. She liked how the rain pounding down on the tin roof of their house shut out every other noise. If Aunt Love came to the door to yell at her to get in the house, she’d go inside and pretend to go up to her room before she sneaked back out the side door under the eave. But she’d never been totally out in the open in the middle of a storm. And wasn’t there something about metal drawing lightning? She started to ditch her bicycle, but she was almost to the top of the hill. She’d make better time to shelter on her bike. There was nothing but trees here.

  She couldn’t take shelter under a tree. Just last summer the Banner had run a picture of Mr. Anderson’s cows after lightning had struck the tree they were under. Five big black-and-white cows in a circle around the tree. Five big dead cows.

  All at once rain came down in a sheet. She wished a car would come by. Somebody who would give her a ride somewhere. But no car appeared out of the rain, so she kept pushing her bike on up the road against the wind. The lightning flashed so close she saw spots. She didn’t have time for even one one thousand before the thunder crashed. Surely there was a barn around here where she could wait out the storm.

  That was something she could pray for. A barn. Dear Lord, you know everything. You know I’m not usually afraid of storms, but this one’s different. I mean, I know I ran from the truth, but it just doesn’t seem right that lightning might strike me without me finding out. Anyway, I’m not asking for much. Just any kind of old barn, and I’ll try not to complain if it has snakes.

  She stood still a moment and waited for the Lord to answer some way she could see, like a fork of lightning pointing to the left or right, but nothing happened except more thunder and lightning and the rain pounding down harder. She was at the top of the hill now, and the road leveled out. So she got on her bike. She was riding straight into the rain and could hardly see five feet in front of her. She tried not to think of anything except pushing the pedals on her bike. There had to be a house or a barn somewhere.

  She was about ready to just plop down in the ditch beside the road when a flash of light lit up a building up ahead. Not a barn. A church. The sign out front said Clay’s Creek Baptist Church. Wasn’t her father always saying that the Lord sometimes answered your prayers better than you expected?

  The front door was locked. Jocie was pushing on the side door when lightning flashed so close she could smell it. She screamed, but the sound was lost in the boom that shook the ground. With her eyes shut against the blinding light, she shoved hard against the door. It popped open. She slammed it shut behind her. The wind pushing against the building sounded even louder than it had while she was outside in the middle of it.

  It was dark inside the church. Jocie flipped one of the switches in the narrow hallway, but nothing happened. The storm must have knocked out the electricity. Slowly her eyes adjusted to the dim light between lightning flashes.

  She’d been in a lot of churches but never all by herself. Her father had always been there with her. In spite of the storm still raging outside, it felt almost too quiet inside. Ghosts were watching her.

  Church ghosts, she told herself firmly. They couldn’t be too mean. Just curious, maybe. Church people were always curious. Especially about the preacher’s family. How old are you? What’s your name? Are you your daddy’s little helper? Do you like Sunday school? Can you sing “Jesus Loves Me”? Where’s your mother? Do you make good grades in school? What do you want to be when you grow up? A preacher’s wife?

  Right now she just wanted to be the preacher’s daughter.

  Dear Lord, help me know which way she went,” David prayed as he drove. He knew she’d gone north out of town. Jeffrey Wilkerson had waved him down on Court Street to tell him he’d almost hit Jocie when she’d swerved right out in front of him onto Bale Street. Jeffrey had been red in the face, and his hands had been shaking. “You need to tell your girl to pay attention when she’s on that bike. I could have killed her,” he’d said.

  David hadn’t had time to appease him. He’d just hoped Jocie’s guardian angels were still keeping up with her as he headed toward Bale. A dozen other streets turned off it and wound around every direction, so he’d had no idea which way to go from there. The others were out searching too. Wes on his motorcycle. Leigh with Tabitha riding shotgun. Even Zella was helping. She’d taken Aunt Love home in case Jocie showed up there or called, and then she’d gone back to the office to call everybody she could think of to see if anybody else had spotted Jocie on her bike so they could narrow down the search area.

  He hadn’t called the sheriff. He thought he’d find her and talk to her and everything would be okay. At least as okay as it could be after what the Martin boy had told her. Why had she believed it? Why hadn’t she asked him what the truth was?

  She was his daughter. Had always been his daughter from the first day he knew she was growing in Adrienne’s womb. It didn’t matter what Adrienne said. What she’d obviously told Tabitha. Jocie was his daughter.

  He’d known about the man in Grundy, but he’d never known his name. Hadn’t wanted to know his name. What good would it have done? He didn’t plan to ever confront the man, accuse him of destroying his marriage. It wouldn’t have been true anyway. His marriage had gone belly-up long before that. There were times when he doubted if he and Adrienne had ever had a marriage, just the illusion of one that he’d held in his mind through the end of the war before he came home and they tried to live together.

  So he’d known but he hadn’t known. He’d thought it was better that way. He’d never wanted the other man to have a face in case someday the man was in a church where he was preaching. He’d never given the first thought to the other man’s family. The pain and betrayal they might have felt. He supposed now, when he thought about it, that he assumed the other man’s family wouldn’t know. Of course, he should have known better. Adrienne had probably found a way to tell the man’s wife herself just as she had told David the day he’d caught her concocting the poison she hoped would end the pregnancy. “What do you care?” she’d screamed at him after he’d knocked the stuff out of her hand. “It’s not even yours.”

  She’d told him again the day she’d handed the baby to him to raise. “Now we’ll see if you can live what you preach. You wanted her, so you can have her. But she’s not yours. Some other seed made her.”

  But Adrienne was wrong. Jocie was his in every way that mattered. Even if she wasn’t the seed of his loins, she was the seed of his heart. He’d never thought once that she was not his. Never once. Maybe he should have. Maybe if he had, he would have been able to prepare her. He should have known that nothing stayed secret in Hollyhill forever. Not if more than one person knew about it.

  He was driving aimlessly, turning down one road and then another with not the least idea of whether he was going in the right direction or in circles. Of course, Jocie could
be going in circles too. He knew her mind must be.

  Why hadn’t it been Wes or him she’d seen first? Why did it have to be Tabitha?

  Tabitha had been crying when he’d gone in the Banner offices to see why Jocie had taken off on her bike like a swarm of bees was after her. Aunt Love had been patting Tabitha’s hand murmuring something that could have been Bible verses. He wasn’t sure. Zella had practically attacked him as soon as he’d come through the door.

  “You should have already told the poor child. You had to know she’d find out sooner or later,” she’d said.

  “Told who what?” David had asked.

  “That you aren’t really her father,” Zella had said.

  “Not really whose father?”

  “Honestly, David, sometimes you keep your head too far up in the clouds.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He really hadn’t.

  Zella had rolled her eyes and sighed heavily. “I really believe you don’t. Jocelyn! I’m talking about Jocelyn.”

  “What about Jocie? What’s wrong with her? She took off on her bike like she’d heard the school was on fire or something.”

  “She saw that horrid Martin boy up in town, and he called her a bastard. Told her you weren’t her father. I wouldn’t have even thought she knew what that meant, but she reads everything she can get her hands on. No telling where . . .”

  Zella had kept talking, but David had stopped listening. He’d gone cold all over. “Jocie is my daughter,” he’d said quietly.

  Zella had looked at him. “Well, I know she is in every way that really counts. She couldn’t have a better father, but everybody knows that Adrienne was messing around with Ogden Martin’s sister’s husband over in Grundy before she was born. And Adrienne told me herself there was a good reason Jocelyn didn’t look like you. I remember the very day. Jocelyn was asleep in the playpen beside your desk, but you had gone up the street to the fiscal court meeting. I don’t know where Tabitha was. Anyway, Adrienne had come in to get some money. That’s the only reason she ever came in—to see if I had any money in the petty cash drawer. I always gave it to her to get rid of her. I figured I could buy a can of coffee out of my own pocket easier than I could put up with her.”