The Scent of Lilacs

by Ann H. Gabhart

  “I don’t care about coffee,” David had said.

  Zella had mashed her lips together for a second before she nodded and said, “I suppose not. Anyway, Adrienne wanted me to know you’d been cuckolded. Said I could put it in the paper if I wanted to. Of course, I didn’t want to. I was glad when she left Hollyhill.”

  “Jocie is my daughter,” David had repeated. “Adrienne may have never been my wife, but Tabitha and Jocie are my daughters.”

  Tabitha had looked up. “I’m sorry, Dad. I should have lied, but she asked me, and I only knew what DeeDee told me.”

  “Why would she tell you such a thing?” David had asked.

  “I don’t know. We’d get a letter from you asking us to come home, and she’d go berserk. She’d tear it up into little pieces and throw the pieces up in the air like confetti and do her freedom dance. She’d say that she didn’t even want to think about Hollyhill or you ever again.” Tabitha had peeked up at him as though worried that her words would upset him.

  He hadn’t been upset. Just impatient. She needed him to listen to her, but he needed to find Jocie, to put his words into her ears over top of the Martin boy’s words. “Go on.”

  “She said nobody could live with a man who didn’t even care who fathered his children. The first time she said that, I thought maybe she was talking about me, and I started crying. That made her even madder, but I couldn’t quit crying. I wanted you to be my daddy. Even if I had left with her. I wanted to know you were here in Hollyhill waiting to be my daddy if I ever found my way home.”

  David had felt divided. He needed to be out looking for Jocie, but this child needed him too. He knelt down and put his arms around her. “I always wanted to come after you, but I didn’t think you would come home with me.”

  “And I probably wouldn’t have.” Tabitha had wiped her eyes. “But anyway, it drove DeeDee crazy for me to cry, so after she smacked me and I still wouldn’t stop, she told me I didn’t have to worry. That she might have rushed you into marrying her thinking she could ride your soldier back out of Hollyhill when you went back to the war but that I was yours without the first doubt. An accident, but yours. That she’d been too stupid to know how to keep it from happening then. She said Jocie was an accident too. Something hadn’t worked the way it was supposed to. So she decided to use Jocie to get back at you for all those years you’d trapped her in Hollyhill. That it served you right having to raise some other man’s child for not letting her free.”

  “But did you ever think she might be lying?” David had said. “She lied about everything else. Why not that?”

  Tabitha had looked at him. “I never knew her to lie to me. Not even when I wished she would.”

  Maybe that had always been his problem, David thought as he turned down yet another road, that he’d always thought Adrienne was lying when she never had. He’d been the one who had pretended they had a marriage, who had pretended she could be a preacher’s wife, who had pretended that things would get better. He thought of Leigh’s face as he’d left the Banner to search for Jocie. The caring concern there, the truth of her feelings for him. Not the brutal truth Adrienne had always pushed at him, but a kind truth, a loving truth. He had stopped on the way out the door and let her hug him. It had surprised both of them, but it had felt right.

  It had never felt right with Adrienne. Heady, exciting, intoxicating, head spinning, and in the later years desperate, but never that comfortable right he’d just felt with Leigh. Maybe she wasn’t too young. Maybe the Lord’s hand was in this. He didn’t know where she was searching with Tabitha. He hadn’t crossed paths with her car. He and Wes had met at a crossroads earlier and had split the area.

  “She can’t have gone far,” Wes had said. “She’s a sensible girl, David. She’ll get her mind around this and come back to talk to you. Course, maybe not before this weather hits. They’re calling for bad storms. High winds. Hail. Lightning. The whole bit. I heard it on the radio over at the welding shop.” Wes had looked up at the clouds rolling in from the west.

  Until then David hadn’t even noticed that the sun had gone into hiding. He’d frowned up at the clouds and said, “Maybe you’d better park your motorcycle and ride with me, Wes.”

  “Nah, we can cover more ground separate. Besides, the storm’s a while away yet, and who knows? It might even blow over. Those weather guys miss more’n they hit. If it gets bad, I’ll take shelter in a barn or on somebody’s front porch.”

  “Not many houses out this way,” David had said. “We’re on Bohon Road, aren’t we?”

  “Beats the heck out of me. I’m from Jupiter, remember. You’re the one who grew up around here.” Wes had pointed down the road. “What’s that road that turns down there?”

  “That’s Whitson Road.”

  “I think I’ve been on that one. When I first came around here, I used to ride around just for the heck of it. There’s some kind of creek down in there, isn’t there?”

  “You go far enough and turn at the right place, you can get to Clay’s Creek,” David had said. “We should have brought maps and marked off the roads. But why would she be way out here anyway? Maybe she’s at home already.”

  “Could be. Why don’t you go find a house and call Zell or Lovella and see? Could be they’re hunting us now.”

  “You don’t believe that.” David had stated it as fact.

  “Nope.”

  “What do you think, Wes?”

  “I think she took off like a bat out of . . . well, you know where, and then when she went a ways she looked around and didn’t have the first idea how to get back to town. I think she’s lost with no idea how to get home.”

  “Maybe I should call the sheriff.”

  “Might not be a bad idea. He could recruit us some help.”

  The thunder that had been rumbling in the distance had sounded louder. “I hope she doesn’t get caught out in this on that bike.”

  “She’s no dummy, David. She knows about lightning storms.”

  “But she’s not afraid of them. Aunt Love’s always fussing about her going out on the porch when it’s lightning. She might think she can just stand out in it and let it pass. We’ve got to find her, Wes.”

  “We will.” Wes had started to kick his motorcycle back in gear, then put his foot back on the ground for a minute. “What do you want me to tell her if I find her first?”

  “The truth.”

  “Do I know the truth?” Wes had asked.

  “I’m her father.”

  “I ain’t never doubted that. Not for a minute.” Wes had revved his motor and swerved away from David’s car and made the turn onto Whitson Road toward Clay’s Creek.

  Now David prayed aloud as he drove the other direction. “Dear Lord, you gave me Jocie. Watch over her now in this storm, both the wind and lightning storm and the storm in her head. Help her to have faith in me as her father as you help me to lean on my faith in you.”

  The Lord would watch over her, David told himself, as lightning streaked down out of the sky to pop somewhere not that far away. Unbidden, the memory of little Carolyn Winthrop lying in her casket popped into his mind. A beautiful child with long curly brown hair and bright eyes. She’d been playing on an iced-over pond last winter. The ice had broken. They hadn’t been able to get her out in time. She’d been ten. He’d preached the funeral. Josephine and Harold Winthrop were fine Christian people. The Lord hadn’t reached down and pulled their little Carolyn off the ice. At the funeral David had told the tearful family that bad things just happened, and they did. But that was small comfort when the bad things happened to your child.

  Lightning popped in front of him again, and he prayed harder.

  Jocie moved along the narrow hallway past the Sunday school rooms, where coloring books and crayons lay scattered on child-size tables. She could smell paste. At the end of the hall a door opened into the small sanctuary, where two rows of eight pews lined the middle aisle. She didn’t need lights here. Outside, lightning
was popping like zillion-watt flashbulbs, making the reds and golds in the stained-glass windows flicker as if on fire.

  Thunder shook the building. The wind whistled down the chimney on the side of the church and rattled the windows. Rain banged against the glass. Jocie was grateful for the church walls around her. Even with the ghosts in the pews staring at her.

  Actually, it was easier thinking about the storm and the ghosts than about anything else. Still, she had to think about it. And about what she was going to do once the storm moved on. But then the wind pushed harder against the little church until Jocie worried the church wouldn’t be strong enough to stand against the storm. Maybe she should pray for the church. Not for herself so much as for the people who expected to come back there on Sunday and find a building to have church in.

  She slid through one of the pews to the center aisle and went down to the pulpit. She never knew why people were so timid about walking the aisle. It was just a stretch of floor between pews. Of course, her father had been the preacher waiting when she’d walked down the aisle.

  She imagined her father there now in front of the pulpit with his hands outstretched, welcoming her, telling her she belonged when maybe she never had. She couldn’t hold on to the picture of her father in her head. He faded back in with all the other ghosts. She sank down on her knees in front of the offering table. She’d never been on her knees in church before. She knelt by her bed at home to pray, but never in church. They always just bowed their heads. Sometimes her father got down on his knees beside the front pew to pray a special prayer with someone. She wished he was there to say a special prayer with her. She never doubted the Lord was listening when her father prayed.

  She looked down at the floor while she thought about what to pray. A puddle was forming around her as the water dripped from her drenched clothes. The deacons would be up on the roof looking for leaks next week. Maybe she should leave them a note. But she couldn’t worry about that right now. She cleared her throat and started praying. “Dear Lord, I don’t know whether you can hear me over the storm, but if you can, thank you for helping me find this church so I could get out of the rain, and forgive me for dripping all over everything.”

  “Of course he can hear you, child,” Aunt Love’s voice echoed in her head. “Nothing can separate you from God. ‘Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.’”

  Was a storm a creature? And what was a principality? She’d always aimed to ask her father that and had never remembered to. Jocie put her mind back to her prayer. “Anyway, God, I don’t know what to pray except maybe to keep me safe till the storm’s over and then for you to show me the way home. Not home to heaven. At least, not just yet. I mean to my house. Maybe you could send Zeb out to find me. I mean, I’m not telling you how to do it. I’m willing to take whatever help you send me.” Jocie was quiet as the storm kept going outside and inside her heart too. After a moment, she started talking out loud again but more softly, so she barely heard the words herself over the wind and rain. “And you know what else I want to know, but I’m afraid to pray about that, because you can’t lie and maybe I want to be lied to.”

  Had her father lied to her?

  She didn’t say amen. She wanted to keep the line open. She smelled something different when she stood up. A flowery scent. But the flowers on the offering table were plastic. She touched them to be sure. No smell there. Her heart crashed inside her as loud as the rain against the windows. Lilacs. Not locust blooms, but lilacs. The sweetest smell on earth. She looked up toward the ceiling as if she expected to see an angel there or flashing words or something. Nothing. Not even the peace that passeth understanding her father and Aunt Love had talked about.

  Definitely not that as a baseball-size hailstone crashed through a window in the back of the church and then the one closest to her. Glass shattered all over the floor. Wind roared into the church like a live thing. Jocie started to dive under one of the pews, but something propelled her down the aisle toward the front door. No hand on her shoulder. No nudge in the back, but still she couldn’t stop and cower under one of the pews the way she wanted. The hail was attacking the church with fists of ice, and more windows shattered. The noise was fearsome.

  She couldn’t go outside into that. But the lilac scent enveloped her, and she reached up to turn the dead-bolt lock. Once the lock sprung open, Jocie hesitated before she pulled open the door. “Are you sure about this, Lord?”

  “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way.” The hymn popped into her head, but she wasn’t sure who she was obeying. Maybe it was the devil pushing her out the door into the storm. Why would the Lord want her to go out there? But she had prayed, and her father was always preaching about how when you prayed you shouldn’t second-guess the Lord’s answer.

  She pulled open the door, and the hail stopped as if someone had turned off a switch in the sky. Baseball-size chunks of ice littered the front walkway amid leaves and broken branches from the big oak tree beside the walk. Jocie tried to remember exactly what she’d prayed. To be safe. To be home.

  She stepped out on the square concrete stoop. The scent of lilacs came at her from every direction as if it had been raining lilac blooms. The downpour changed to a gentle spray of water, and the lightning and thunder was moving away. But it was too still, and the clouds had a funny green tinge that bled out into the air. Suddenly the wind hissed like a huge snake in the sky and began swirling madly overhead.

  The lilac scent faded. “Wait, Lord,” Jocie said. “I’m scared. Show me what to do next.”

  She could hardly believe her ears when she heard the motorcycle. It had to be Wes. She ran toward the road waving her arms. The hiss of the wind turned into a roar. She looked up. The clouds had swirled into a funnel. It lifted two trees out of the ground like somebody plucking weeds. Wes tackled her and knocked her to the ground. He shielded her body with his as he yelled into her ear. “Hold on to the dirt for all you’re worth, Jo.”

  She tried to answer him, but it was like four freight trains at once passing over them. The wind was sucking the very breath out of her and lifting Wes away from her. Things popped and cracked as debris pelted them. A churchyard might be as good a place as you could find to pass over to the other side, but she dug her fingers into the ground to stay earthbound and clenched her eyes shut. Her father was there in her mind, praying and singing and preaching and pecking on his old typewriter and laughing. Oh, please, Lord. She wanted to laugh with him at least one more time.

  “Daddy,” she screamed, but who knew if any sound made it out into the bedlam of the wind.

  David didn’t like the looks of the sky. It had steadily grown more ominous ever since he and Wes had talked. Gertrude Wilson had just told him the radio was putting out storm warnings for the whole county. David had gone up to her house to call Aunt Love and Zella, but her phone was out. She said she lost service nearly every time it thundered.

  “You’d best stay here, Brother David, till the storm passes on,” Gertrude told him.

  Gertrude was in her seventies, widowed these many years, but her daughter couldn’t talk her into moving to town. Miss Gertrude said if she had to live in one of those little shoe-box houses where you could practically reach out the window and hold your neighbor’s hand, she would just die on the spot. Here she had everything she needed. A cow for milk. A few hens for eggs. A good garden spot. Trees all over with wood enough to keep her warm in the winter. She said now that they’d come out with those fancy chain saws, it wasn’t even much of a chore getting in the wood. Not like it had been when she and Wallace had first married.

  And she knew the weather from years of watching it. “We’re in for a humdinger, or I miss my guess. I was out a while ago to check on my old setting hen, and even that old rooster of mine who’s dumber than a bag of rocks was in the henhouse hiding out under th
e nests. Look around and see for yourself. You won’t see the first bird.”

  She’d walked out on the porch to talk to him. “ I haven’t been paying much attention to the birds,” David said.

  “I reckon not with your little girl lost out there somewhere, but it won’t do her a bit a good if you get blowed away in a storm. And birds always know.”

  “I’ll be in the car.”

  “I seen the wind pick up a tractor once and flip it end over end. That storm gets close, you get out of that car and find you a ditch.”

  “We don’t have tornadoes in July,” David said.

  She gave him a look up through her gray eyebrows. “You’re a preacher man, Brother David. Surely you know the Lord can send us whatever kind of weather he wants to whenever he wants to. Take it from me. Them clouds is promising us a twister a-coming.”

  David couldn’t say she was wrong. There was an odd cast to the sky. “You could be right, Miss Gertrude. And I’ll keep an eye out if the wind gets worse. Maybe you ought to go to the cellar.”

  “I will if it turns my way, but if it just passes by, I’ll be wanting to see it. It ain’t too often you get to see tractors flipping and trees yanked straight up out of the ground.”

  David could almost see her with a glass of lemonade and a bowl of popcorn in her rocker on the porch waiting for the show to begin. “I’m hoping you’re wrong.”

  “I could be, but them birds hardly ever are.” Miss Gertrude patted his arm. “But even if the twister does hit, it might not hit wherever your little girl is. I’ll say a prayer for her that the Lord will keep her safe. And you too.”

  “I appreciate that,” David said as he went down the porch steps. By the time he got to the end of Miss Gertrude’s driveway, the rain was peppering down. He’d planned to turn left and go on up to Liberty Road, but at the end of the driveway he turned right and went back the way he’d come.