“I'll fix Ida May's hair,” said Fern. “I'm glad she is realizing you can read, Reverend. It helps their eagerness for reading if they feel they are emulating a parent.”
Jeb held the open Bible against his torso until Fern hauled Ida May inside to finish the bread.
Florence Bernard's remark followed the closing prayer. However shortened with brevity, the comment worked into him like a splinter and ate at him until it broadened as wide as Ivey's barn. “I stunk today,” he said to Fern.
Several men—Horace Mills, Luke Hipps, and Daniel Bottoms—stood and formed an are around the small sign in front of the church. Mills had hired a painter to paint the name “Reverend Philemon Gracie” in graceful lettering beneath the name “Church in the Dell.” Mills made everyone who passed by look at it.
“Reverend Gracie, your slang is comical, but don't let the others hear.” Fern drew him outside, her hands laced with crocheted gloves that scalloped right above her palms.
“Florence Bernard told me I sounded off my feed. Nice way of saying I smelled up the joint” said Jeb.
Fern's faint hint of toilet water made her smell clean, crisp, with an aroma that reminded him of the flowering vines that coiled around his mother's porch rail. She greeted the Lundy sisters and guided Jeb away from the after-church millers as though she steered him in all of his blindness through a heckling mob of rebels.
“Everybody just stared like I needed a bath.”
Fern shushed him lightly, her lips puckering slowly as if she did not know how to silence a minister without summoning up disrespect.
Jeb let out a breath, like be wanted to air out everything inside of him. Those church people had laughed at him behind their hands and funeral fans. He had a feeling about such things. Not a pew sitter in sight had affirmed him, especially Angel. She's been looking at me like I don't have sense to pull off nothing, he thought.
He would have liked to have taken off a shoe and thrown it at her. Fern might consider him out of line.
“Reverend, you had a good message. I got it and if I got it, everyone did,” said Fern. She led him beneath the elm where they had lunched weeks ago over dried-out shoo-fly pie.
He inspected the circle of privacy. “This is as good a place as any. Away from anyone else who wants to take a stab at why my sermon ought to be cut up and fed to the fish.” He preached it back at the Florence Bernards and every do-gooder who might rail against him for trying to give the religious a genuine taste of what they wanted.
“You are kind of hard on yourself, aren't you?”
“I think I need glasses.”
“Not that I know anything about preaching, but on Saturday I could find some time and let you try it out on me. Kind of a practice preach.” She must have read more into his expression than he intended. “It's a stupid idea.”
“None of your ideas are stupid. Do you mean that I could read to you?” She could help him with some of the more lofty, nobler passages than Angel wanted to show him.
“Not that you aren't a good reader, Reverend. I remember your letters. You know some of the greatest minds write down their thoughts better than they say them. Moses, for one.”
“I knew it. I stunk.”
“Most of the men sitting out in those pews, they never opened a book in their whole life, surely never opened the Bible. You think they know you missed a word or two? They don't.”
“Florence knows.” Worse than that, he thought, Fern knew.
In the quiet pause between them, Clovis Wolverton counted children to make sure all the chicks were in order. He turned and held up a plucked rooster. “I give the Lord the best I got, Reverend.” Clovis bagged the bird and tossed it onto Jeb's wagon seat.
“Those Wolverton children told me what you did,” Fern said. “If I had to choose between good preaching or a charitable heart, I'd take the latter.”
“Now I know I smelled up the joint.” It came to him that she never wore dresses made from feed sacks. “Fern, that hat of yours is the finest I've seen. Have I told you that?”
Fern poked a stray curl back under the flap, the wild piece of cowlick bangs she frequently swept off her face. “Most men don't notice ladies’ hats. I've always said we women wear them for one another.”
“I want to take you to a place you've never been.” He could not say Canada, “Marvelous Crossing.”
“Everybody's been there, Reverend.”
“Not to this place. But when we get there, I want you to call me—”
She turned her face until the shine appeared from under the coating of powder on her nose. “Philemon?”
The name had escaped him. He might have said Jeb.
“I will. I like that name. You look like a Philemon and I never met anyone else who did.” Fern pulled out her keys. “I'll drive if you want. You just tell me where we're going … Philemon.”
Jeb asked Evelene Whittington to keep an eye on the children and she was more than happy to oblige. Probably thought their new preacher was all tuckered out and needed some rejuvenation.
He repeated the name “Philemon” to make it sound right in his mind. Only it sounded more foreign, a sham painted in giant letters as big as the bank president's name on the plate-glass window of Nazareth Bank and Trust; a lie springing off the lips of a guileless teacher. He should have asked Mills to paint Philemon across his forehead—like on the church sign—to help him remember the con that seemed sweet until people recognized him for something he was not. He knew better than any that they only looked into the soul of the moon to see the light that belonged to the sun.
The canoe bumped against the underpinnings of the bridge, just where Jeb had tied it. He'd found it unmanned after a storm one morning and paddled it a good distance from where it had run aground. After he and Fern had taken their float around the lake, he'd release it again so the owner could have a chance of finding it.
Fern asked him to go ahead of her so that she could change but of the floral dress into a pair of trousers more suitable for leisure. No other woman in town wore them. Just Fern, and even then only when confident of as little scrutiny as possible. She undressed in the back seat while Jeb fetched the canoe. Her wardrobe assortment reminded Jeb of the Gabby sisters—four daughters of a Dallas lawyer who changed outfits according to the time of day. Morning dresses, bridge frocks, afternoon skirts, riding habits.
Jeb gazed only once toward the Coup, a pleasant instant as Fern unceremoniously tossed her garter into the backseat, rolled up, he imagined, to conceal the brown stockings. When she stepped down the bill in rubber-soled shoes with laces, she emerged in the sunlight in brown trousers and another one of those helmet hats. This one he wanted her to lose.
“You're right. I've never seen Marvelous Crossing from a canoe,” she said before she climbed into the boat and picked up a paddle.
Jeb thought of telling her she looked manly paddling. She seemed to like not being told she had to be like the other women. It didn't sound right when he ran it through his thoughts. Instead he picked up the other paddle and pushed away from the bank. “You ever go canoeing in Oklahoma?”
“With my brothers in Ardmore.”
Of course she had. What were his chances of being the first with Fern at anything? “I think you told me you grew up with brothers. Maybe press your paddle to the right so we can turn.” He thought she might like to see the flowers along the banks.
“I have three brothers. Two sisters. Mother called it quits after my youngest sister, Faye.”
Jeb tried to picture Fern matching wits with three brothers. “What did you do for fun in Ardmore?”
“Sometimes I played golf with my father.”
“Women play golf?”
“Daddy invested in Dornick Hills. Sometimes I joined a mixed foursome, sometimes I joined Daddy.”
“You never told me what your father did. I thought you might come from a family of teachers.” His insight at least made her smile.
“Mother taught until Daddy's pract
ice took off. He's a doctor. Both of my sisters teach. Didn't you say you went to school in Texas?”
“Grammar school.”
“Oh. I thought you attended college there. Look at this place. I've never seen this part of the lake before.” Fern laid her paddle across her lap.
“I'd say someone has a liking for—what do you call those flowers?”
“Lilies. I'll bet it took that lady years to plant them all.”
Whole swathes of yellow and orange dyed the petal-strewn hillside, two happy acres behind a house cloaked by a century's growth of trees. Nothing showed of the house except the peeping roof. Below, dipping like clumsy maids, a cloud of Monarchs swarmed, attracted to clusters of purple. Their wings touched and opened like so many conversations at once, rippling in and out of the field.
The canoe came to rest beneath the shade of several oaks that soaked in the cool, lapping waters of Marvelous Crossing. The lake water smelled of leaves, brown and green, like the smell of fresh-turned soil. “Touch right there,” said Fern.
Her sudden comment startled him. He saw how she pointed to the corner of her mouth, but he did not get up. Common sense told him he had conjured a daydream, that Fern would want him to touch her mouth.
“On the corner of your mouth. You have something stuck there,” she said.
He brushed away whatever it was, a thread from the rope, or a piece of splintered nothing that had stuck to him. “You a pretty good golfer?”
“Not as good as my father.” She leaned back, elbows resting on the old paint of the canoe. He wished he had stolen a shorter boat, something with closer seating.
“Maybe I'd like to try golf sometime.”
“I wish you could know my father. He is the best golfer in Ardmore. I should take you there. But someone like you can never get away from Nazareth, not the Church in the Dell minister.”
He would like to have said that he was not the minister. It would sound clean and right. But then she would ask him to take her back to the bank and as she slogged back up the hill in her flannel trousers, she would hate him every step of the way. The police would make their appearance shortly thereafter.
“You're right. I can never seem to find the time to get away.” He asked her more about herself. The less he talked about himself, the more at ease he felt around her.
“Back in Ardmore, I was Dr. Coulter's daughter. Here in Nazareth, I'm just Fern, the schoolteacher. I like the plain sound of it.”
“You like Oklahoma better than Nazareth?”
“In some ways. I mean, I guess it all depends upon where you live. Times are tough all over. People here seem so lost. I keep hoping I can help them pick up, start over. Daddy wants me to come home.”
“Must be hard to leave a good home.”
“Nazareth is needy, though. You know that already. That's why you came, I'll bet.” She helped row the canoe again, enough to ease them back into the oak shade.
Jeb could not remember the place from which the Gracies had relocated.
“Take the Wolvertons. Everyone has known for some time that family needs help. But Clovis, he's got some pride. Maybe everyone thought if they helped, he'd be too ashamed to show his face. But here they all marched into church, spit-shined like the dew, new shoes to boot, and a chicken for the preacher.”
Jeb felt a keening need to confess. “I want you to know I didn't pay for those shoes out of my own pocket.”
“I heard. Ida May tells all. Funny girl, isn't she? You made her think you're learning to read right along with her. Not many fathers would sacrifice their image to encourage a child to read. Most ministers I know are kind of hard, like they think they have to set an example. You're not like other clergymen, are you, Philemon?”
“Ida May's a pistol.” It was true, he realized, the way she always shot off her mouth.
“I just wish I had half of your intelligence. Once you wrote a letter—I still have it. Somewhere. I made Will Honeysack give it to me. He couldn't have appreciated it, no offense to the man. But his idea of literature is the farmer's almanac.”
“What letter, Fern?”
“The one you wrote about the Civil War and correlated it to climbing out of the dust of failure. You were trying to encourage our people. Everybody felt so downtrodden having gone for two years without a minister. If you had not agreed to come for such a low salary, we would still be without a preacher. Not many men will work for chickens, although I'll bet we'll see more of such things as this Depression winds on.”
Jeb imagined Philemon Gracie, the admirable fool. “You want to return to Ardmore?”
“Some nights I sit out on the porch and I can smell my mother's spaghetti. She grew her own tomatoes and made the best sauce out of all the mothers where we lived. I miss that smell, the smell of her cooking. I don't miss Ardmore.”
“You miss golf.”
“That I miss.”
“Don't have much golf around here.”
She shook her head to agree with him.
Jeb's face lifted. “You taking a box lunch to the raffle on Wednesday?”
She answered him, “Why? You plan on bidding?”
“The holder of the box lunch gets to join the girl for a meal that made it. I'd hate to see you sitting all by your lonesome.”
“Maybe you won't be the only man bidding, you ever think about that? Some people like my shoo-fly pie.” She straightened and it made her look tall on the canoe seat.
“I got nothing against your shoo-fly pie. Much prefer your biscuits, though,” he said.
“Church in the Dell's been holding box lunches for years. People come from all over just to meet new faces. You'd be surprised what those men will bid on.” That made her laugh. Jeb pictured her sitting around a clubhouse laughing out loud with all the men.
“Maybe I should get a loan from Nazareth Bank and Trust,” Jeb said.
“I'd do that if I were you.”
“Naw, first I think I'll buy me one of those Packards. This year, a Packard. Box lunch maybe next year.”
She wet the paddle, flipped it over, and turned the boat back toward the bridge. “We better get you back to the children. This is a nice place. I'm glad you showed it to me.”
He tried to think of the best way to get her to stay.
“Something on your mind, Philemon?”
He ran some words through his mind again, trying them out.
“My oldest brother says that I intimidate some people. I don't think I intimidate you, though,” she said.
He shook his head. “Fern, you got to understand, I have things I want to tell you. But it never come out like I want.”
She brought the paddle up and the boat slowed. “I think I understand.”
“You really don't.”
“It's your wife. You could never replace her. You think I got designs on you, but I really just enjoy talking to you.”
“It's not that.”
“It is. I'm not trying to take Mrs. Gracie's place. What was her name, anyway?”
Jeb said, “Verna.” It sounded like a preacher's wife.
“I'll bet she was a lovely person.”
“I didn't intend to take the conversation in this direction.” He felt just as trapped as when Hank Hampton had found him locking lips with Myrna Hoop.
“Maybe it is the best starting place.” She poised her face teacherly again. “Tell me where you met Verna.”
He could pick any place he wanted, he realized. But it should be someplace besides Oklahoma. He'd grown up in the next state, one year not far from the Oklahoma border, never realizing those Okies let angels play in foursomes and girls dress in trousers. Their paths never could have crossed. If they had, at any rate, she would have tossed a coin into the tin cup of his station and joined the College Joes for tea. “We met in Tennessee.” He knew he would never remember it again. “No, we met in Texas. Verna used to say I get my facts confused.”
“Tell me what you remember about Verna and Texas, then. I really want to
know,” she said.
He wet his paddle too, needing to deliver her back to the bridge before his story liquefied into the lake. In that case he could just walk back on dry land the same way he walked into town, a bum and a liar.
15
Twenty thousand Americans committed suicide in 1931. Angel knew that and the thought of her mother's mind drying up and blowing away with the rest of the country troubled her. She had convinced Val Rodwyn at Honeysack's that an infirm woman by the name of Hildy Gardner lived on the edge of town, reliant on the goodness of neighbors to bring her mail. Finally, the day before the New York Yankees played the Chicago Cubs in the third game of the World Series, Angel got a letter from Aunt Kate, her mother's sister in Little Rock. Kate had addressed the envelope to Mrs. Hildy Gardner just as Angel had instructed. “My daddy will see this gets to Mrs. Gardner, Mr. Rodwyn,” she told him. She tugged her ear and left the store. She read Kate's letter out on the sidewalk, three blocks away from Honeysack's Store.
Dear Angel,
I was surprised to hear you are living with a stranger, but glad she is taking care of you all until you can get kot up with Claudia. We have not heard front Claudia since she had that baby girl, we thot, down where you are. I believe it was a little girl. Your mother is still not well. I know she wants to be her very best when she sees you all again. We do not have much here, so if you could get that daddy of yours to telegram mony, your mother and I could use the hep. How is it this Mrs. Gardner came to hep you all out? They is still Christian peple in the world and it makes me glad to know that.
Much love, Aunt Kate
Willie read over her shoulder. “You didn't tell her about Daddy. Why didn't you?”
“I didn't want to worry Momma. Sounds like they don't have nothing to live on.”
“She doesn't say anything at all about Momma, like is she living with her or is she in the hospital?”
“All she says is that Momma is not well. What am I supposed to make of it? Is she in the sanatorium like Lana said?” Angel stuffed the letter into her bag and waved down Mellie Fogarty to ask for a ride home. “Get your books and things, Willie. Jeb will be wondering why we're so late coming home from school.”
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