Fallen Angels

by Patricia Hickman

  ”I say skip the whole communion idea and go for the throat, Jeb. Before you forget what it was you wanted to say?” Angel knelt next to the parson's chair on the church platform. She murmured, “Fern Coulter don't have no right telling you your business. Do it your way and she'll have her old communion when we say it's time.”

  “So I just take the grape juice, say a prayer, give us a sip. Everybody else just does what I do? That's the way it goes?” Jeb felt small inside the coat jacket, less at home than in the shabby jacket that had accompanied him out of Texarkana. He shut his eyes and rehearsed communion once more.

  A woman with a purse that looked like a doctor's bag seated herself at the organ bench.

  “That's Doris Jolly, the momma to Josie, the lady who come over with Fern Coulter on Friday night,” said Angel.

  “I need to know this or something?” Jeb asked.

  “Sure. That's part of what a preacher does, know who is who and which person is another person's momma. I'm going to go and sit down with Willie and Ida May. You screw up and we'll stand right up and holler that you made us do what you wanted.”

  “I appreciate your honesty, Angel. Like I appreciate a burr in my saddle. Beat it, will you?”

  She drew her bottom lip into her mouth. “Remember, the organist is Doris Jolly, but you call her Sister. Sister Jolly.” She alighted from the platform.

  Doris peered out from behind the sheet music at Jeb. “I picked a favorite of mine and thought you would like it, Reverend.” She played several chords and then opened her mouth to sing. Her voice squealed, squeezing up through her spacious nostrils before flushing wide into a maddening, shaky tone.

  Jeb rose. “Everybody stand up. We're going to sing here with Sister.” He leaned against the lectern, his crutch.

  “Sister Jol-eee,” is what Angel tried to mouth, but Jeb felt his mouth go instantly dry. When he'd come to his feet, his right hand had lifted. The congregation had responded. Every person had joined him and came upright. The idea that he had brought them out of their chairs with a feeble hand gesture unsettled him. The room tilted. His fingers, white at the joints, trembled so much that he turned his hands palms up on top of his open Bible.

  Doris gave the chorus her utter attention and played it twice. That relieved Jeb since it gave him another chance to mouth the words more convincingly the second time through. But when she sang the third verse of “Shall We Gather at the River” he finally lifted his face as though deep in meditation. He stood frozen, wanting the song to end so that he could speedily dispense with the blood and body of Christ, go straight for the throat of his sermon, so to speak, and then end with a benediction. But Doris found a fourth verse and the organ pedal seemed to be stuck in a hellish song gear, driving Doris to repeat the chorus several times.

  His memory ebbed and all at once he could see his brother's face Charlie had a patched-together look, a wide jaw with a sort of egg-shaped forehead that fit down into the broad bottom of his face. He smiled at Jeb while Doris filled the rafters with squawking. Then, as suddenly as if Jeb had told him a joke, Charlie laughed. Jeb's fingers went to his mouth and all at once all he could remember was a dirty joke he had told his brother late one night as they lay upon their bunk.

  Doris finished all at once and the organ keys dwindled to a soft gurgle, a funeral processional. Every eye returned to Jeb. A few church members placed their hymnals in the pew backs while others waited to see if Doris might perchance take them off into the next song. Jeb turned to Doris and gave her a nod that she responded to better than he expected. She lifted her doctor's bag and joined her daughter, Josie, on the third pew to the right from the front.

  The silence gave him no cues, nothing but the sound of an old man's cough. He closed his eyes and when he opened them, everyone in the room had bowed their head.

  He found his cue. “Heavenly Father, bless this grape juice which we are about to partake, and know that it is a symbol of your Son's blood. But we promise you, it is not wine, which is evil.”

  An older woman with a neckless head fitted into her body said, “Amen!”

  Several other women agreed by a nod. A flock of pillbox hats were in sudden motion, an ebbing tide from front to back.

  “Is someone supposed to pass this communion business around to the people?” Jeb asked of no one in particular.

  Several faces stared back at him stunned. Angel closed her eyes and looked down as though she could hear nothing at all that he said.

  Jeb saw the trays of broken crackers and cups of juice on the table just below where he stood. “They's plenty for all. God wants all of you to know that this is for every one of you, and He has plenty in His heavenly pantry. There's no Depression on in heaven.”

  Everyone laughed and made shifting sounds. The neckless woman lifted her hands and applauded silently but observably as a sign of approval for Jeb. Finally, two men came to their feet and marched forward. Doris hustled back over to the organ. She played another wheezing hymn while the ushers doled out the communion emblems.

  Angel leaned over Willie and said something to Ida May, her posture suddenly relaxed.

  Jeb held up a cracker crumb between his thumb and forefinger. The church members parroted him. He closed his eyes but before he did, he saw Angel slip her emblem representing the body of Christ into her mouth as though she had done it many times before. She held her hand to her lips to hide her chewing.

  Jeb completed communion. The funny joke he had told Charlie came back to him and the Scripture he had memorized just as quickly vanished from his thoughts, It occurred to him that Fern Coulter was searching through her handbag, although she would give him a glance and then return to rummaging. Other eyes started to wander. Willie, who had a talent for having the best face for a boy with not a thought in his head, drew up all at once and lifted his brows, his expectation infused with anxiety.

  Jeb said, “God was just the finest kind of feller about agriculture. As a matter of fact, he invented farming.” Jeb saw Angel sit up and wondered if she knew that this was his way of merely stalling, waiting for the Scripture to slip back in under the door of his blocked mind. He stared down at the open Bible to the place where Angel had read to him just a few moments before the first family traipsed inside. The lettering might have been Egyptian, a series of dots and dashes, spaces, rounded formations possessing the mysteries of the planet, of God. All at once, he recognized the first letter in the very spot that Angel had underlined. The crossbow shape of the letter made a ta sound, he thought. His eyes lifted enough to see Angel mouthing the first word while Fern looked on, curious.

  The.

  “The Lord God planted a garden eastward,” he said.

  Angel leaned her head back against the pew, the top of her mouth folding over her bottom lip.

  Jeb finished the Scripture satisfied that all eyes had returned to the written text that lay in their laps. “Adam had it made, a garden that watered itself, no lack of food, plenty of livestock, the sky for his roof. He didn't have no Depression breathing down his neck. None of it was good enough for him.”

  Doris fanned her face and nodded. She conveyed the contented look of a woman not to blame for the fall of the whole human race.

  The words from Jeb's sermon, which was really more of a sermonette, according to a redheaded bag of a woman, felt like a cold coming into his chest, the kind that starts as a cough and ends in bed with a fever of a hundred-and-two. Jeb had imagined himself differently. The least he could do if he were going to act as minister—or lie as minister—would be to churn out a pew scorcher of a message. But the comments afterward made him feel more like he did when his older brother had coaxed him into taking, a turn at hitting the baseball one afternoon when a few farm boys played ball in a cow pasture. Charlie had all the luck with athletics and women. That was how he got engaged to a girl from Oklahoma.

  Jeb had squeezed the bat, really a broom handle Charlie had filched from his mother's kitchen, thought hard about Babe Ruth, then wh
acked at the air. The broom handle catapulted across the field and clouted Guy Bonet, a boy who waited his turn up next at bat.

  Jeb's discourse on Adam and the creation story affected no one but himself and, he thought, perhaps Fern, if only because she gave off the impression that she rooted for him. The last radio address Hoover gave, awful and stinking with worthless words, had contained nothing useable to anyone. Jeb thought his sermon was on par with Hoover's last radio message.

  Angel collected funeral fans left behind on the pews into a neat stack in her left hand. Jeb ignored the fact that she was ignoring him, most likely because the only thing that had kept her from standing up and sereaming fraud in the middle of the morning message was the fact that Ida May's sudden infatuation with Fern Coulter distracted her. Two women now surrounded her, taking turns touching her hair and asking her if she looked like her mother, to which she replied, “Most likely.”

  Fern finished up a conversation with a mother worried about her boy's arithmetic skills and approached Jeb. “We picnic on the east side since the west is full of ancestors:”

  Jeb could not stop the dark thoughts battering him. He tried to look at Fern, but only succeeded in looking through her.

  “Ancestors, as in cemetery. You know, that's where all the families here bury their departed kin.” Fern explained it very well but kept looking at Jeb's eyes, as though she examined him for bad eyesight. “I see that lost look again. You did fine today, you know. I had an uncle who preached and my aunt said he spent every Sunday afternoon beating himself up over his morning sermon. Really, you got everyone's attention and in Nazareth that is a real accomplishment.”

  “I preached fine?” Jeb kept his arms crossed, his hands fingering his forearms agitatedly.

  “Better than fine, then,” said Fern.

  “I stunk up the place.” Jeb saw how Ida May held so tightly to Fern's dress hem, she twisted it into a knot. “Let go of Miss Coulter, Ida May!”

  “She's fine, really. A little insecure, but maybe that's normal considering all of the change that's come into her life,” Fern pried the floral fabric out of Ida May's grasp and slipped a pencil in its place. “Draw me a picture, why don't you?” She pulled out an old grocery store receipt and showed her the blank back of it.

  When Jeb moved away, Fern followed him. “You might want to move on out to the church grounds for the festivities. The minister always starts off the three-legged races.”

  “That would be me,” said Jeb.

  Fern meandered toward the front doorway. “If you stand out there on the steps and shake hands, people really like it. But don't stay long. Meet me in five minutes out on the lawn and I'll hand you the whistle for the races.” She walked away, a strange laugh fluttering out of her.

  Jeb watched her make her way through the hungry people. He followed the blue dress until it disappeared.

  A group of white-hairs parted to allow Jeb through as though instinctively aware that the minister should already be at the entry shaking hands. He strode nonchalant to the double doors that were flung wide open, the saw-dust floor ripe in the summer sunlight. Several men tipped their hats and shook hands with Jeb while the wives proceeded to the automobiles to retrieve baskets and dishtowel-covered bowls.

  Angel stationed herself across from him, her back against the doorjamb. All morning she had walked around with her arms folded against her chest and this was how she now stood, watching Jeb, his every word spoken to each church member. At times her gaze wandered out to watch the locals’ children. She watched them as an observer, distant and detached, as though she had lived two decades longer than those children her own age.

  A woman, familiar to Jeb, extended her hand. “I met you the other day downtown. I'm a friend of Josie's. My name is Florence Bernard. I lead a boys and girls Bible class at the schoolhouse on Saturdays. Some of them I teach reading as well.” She had a habit of lifting her handkerchief to her mouth after every sentence, touching the cloth to the right corner of her mouth.

  “Oh, I remember. I met you outside Fidel's Drugstore the other day. Nice to see you again, Mrs. Bernard,” said Jeb.

  “Reverend Gracie, I'm pleased and delighted to know we have a new minister. But you know, I should tell you something.” She lowered her tone as though she spoke in complete confidence. “Adam really did not eat an apple.” She dabbed her mouth again. “You know the Scriptures don't really say what kind of fruit.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Bernard. Is there a Mr. Bernard?” He used the grip on her wrist to pull her gently past, aiming her toward the open churchyard where she could roam freely.

  “Mr. Bernard got up in the night to visit the out building not eighteen months ago. He never came back.” She lifted the handkerchief and dabbed her eyes.

  Jeb saw the flicker of pain in her eyes, a dour light that diminished when her thoughts retreated to Mr. Bernard. “I'm sorry for your troubles. You got means, I hope?” He found he meant it.

  “I teach a music class, piano, at the house I was born in. My daddy left it to me. I give permanents and manicures down at Faith Bottoms Beauty Shop. The Lord helps me make do.”

  “That and tutor children?” asked Jeb.

  “I'd never charge for that. I try and give back to God rather than take.” She excused herself to go and fetch an apple pie.

  Will Honeysack stepped up and cupped Jeb under the elbow. “Brother Gracie, we best move you on out to start the relays.”

  “I'll be right there.” Jeb stooped to pick up the Bible he had preached from but could not read. He wanted to throw it at Angel for the way she stared at him. “What are you looking at?”

  “I'm just keeping my eye on things.” Angel, with her hands behind her, pushed herself away from the doorway and followed the remaining people out into the sunlight:

  “Oh, and one more thing,” he said.

  She turned back around again.

  The last family joined the picnic and he said, “That Mrs. Bernard, she knows a lot about Bible things, You got to tell me details of the matter, like Adam didn't eat no apple. Important things like that.”

  “I thought he ate it.” She was indifferent about the whole apple thing.

  “We got to get things straight, watch them little details like that or women like Bernard will go sniffing around in places we don't want them to go.”

  “You got a whole nuther Sunday to worry about it. I'm hungry. You preached past dinner almost, rambling around trying to talk about things you don't know nothing about. If anybody thinks you're a fake, it's your own fault for talking too much. Like you talk too much to Fern Coulter. She was asking us questions after you left this morning.”

  He pretended not to hear.

  “What our momma was like. Stuff like that. I just talked about our real momma and Ida May started babbling like someone had opened the lid on her mouth. I had to do some explaining and saying how Ida May gets her thoughts mixed up. Then Miss Coulter wanted us to go and visit the schoolhouse on Monday. I don't know what to tell her. How long are we staying anyway?”

  “You go along with her. If she wants to tour you through the Governor's Mansion, what harm is it?” Jeb heard the whistle blow. Fern had pulled her hair back in a scarf and changed her shoes. She bent over a group of boys, her arms stretched out lean and athletic as she explained the rules of the relay. “Nothing wrong with letting Miss Coulter help you kids out with things. Maybe that's just part of my plan.” The need to join her, take the whistle from her hand, and exercise a dash of preacherly influence over her surpassed his desire to stand on the steps arguing with Angel. He waved at Fern. “Let's get this show on the road.”

  8

  Divining was of the devil, plain and simple. Whether or not the Mississippi flood of 1927 had sloshed into eastern Arkansas as far as Nazareth was unknown to Angel. But when the banks had emptied into the rivulet, some high waters at one point had deposited an old table along the shallow embankments. The table had no sign of any paint or stain to its finish, but ha
d the textured feel of weathered wood that had somehow preserved its integrity. Having seen the value of a quiet place to lunch, someone had left a straw-bottomed chair beside it. Scattered around it were wood shavings, curled remains of a whittler's happy hour.

  The sun obverted its five o'clock face enough to darken the hardwood shadow of pine and oak along the creek and caused to arise the notion that spirits dwelled along the fringes of the cemetery. Angel gathered three customers under her seer's wing, including two younger girls dressed in store-bought linens—Bea and her cousin, Winnie. Their presence attracted three more. Angel's pack was growing nicely. “I'll show that Jeb how it's done,” she muttered under her breath. Ida May, who feared her sister's hushed tone and squinty eyes, returned to the adults situated on blankets on the safe side of the church and far away from the ancestors. Willie, never far from Angel's lead, posted himself next to her, holy man number two. Twin girls from a large sharecropper's family, Marcella and Johnna Lundy, looked on, one girl with a shriveled profile that appeared cut from newspaper, the other, less loved and overfed, moved side-to-side in the shape of a tomato. They kept a safe distance.

  “Levitation is a gift from God,” Angel said. “Superfied, mystical, and beyond human imagination, levitation takes a lot of practice, to get things just so objects obey your words.”

  Arnell Ketcherside, sack-race winner, sniffed. “Words. Like you know any words.”

  “Words is power. Power is words. All of you, come and lay your hands on this table and I'll give you a taste of my powers.” Angel seated herself in the straw chair with the seat bottom scarcely attached by rope.

  The smell of rain, long dried up along the creek bank, was a rotting mash of dead tadpoles and sucked-dry algae. The riverbed's decay, along with the retreating light, conjoined with Angel's spell.

  She coaxed the Lundy sisters back to the table. “Everyone put your hands on the tabletop, pinkies touching.” When all of the children complied, Angel told them, “It doesn't work right unless someone has gotten a sign from the spirits.”