Nazareth's Song

by Patricia Hickman

  Jeb remembered how Horace had not given him much of a look after Gracie told him the news about his leaving. “The one thing I don’t want you to do is sit up in Cincinnati worrying about Church in the Dell.”

  “I believe you can do it, Jeb.” Philemon’s smile made him look more hopeful, even though his peaked stare gave away his illness. “I heard you had coffee with Miss Coulter today. Tell me about that.”

  Angel had Willie in a chair outside trimming the hair around his ears and across his forehead. Until the cold weather blew in with frost and ice, haircuts were best done outside where the breeze would carry the errant tufts into the woods.

  “Jeb, tell Angel I don’t need no haircut,” said Willie.

  “If you keep on wiggling like that, I’ll nip your ear. Stay still, Willie.” With a comb handle, Angel measured the hair above each ear and found one side higher than the other. “You been needing it shorter anyway.”

  Ida May played with a hand-carved doll that was fashioned to dance atop a board. When she yanked the wire, the jointed doll’s limbs flailed all over the wooden porch, making it look like a wild dance. “Dub, my doll’s a-dancing like a tap dancer,” she said, using her pet name for him.

  Jeb said to Angel, “Come inside when you finish with Willie.” He entered the near-empty rented house. It only had three rooms—two for sleeping and a big room with a stove for cooking, although the stovepipe spewed smoke. The parsonage had a lot of comforts, including an outhouse with a shorter walk. Gracie and several men had even dug and fitted pipes to bring running water to the kitchen.

  None of them had many belongings, making things simple for a move back to the parsonage when the time came. The first time Jeb had slept at the parsonage had been as a fraud and a charlatan. He had slept with one eye open, knowing his con as a preacher would some day be found out. The day the real Reverend Gracie had shown up was the day Jeb had the realization that good preaching with a bad heart equals rotten fruit.

  He rummaged through his belongings, which he kept in a weathered steamer trunk. A good pair of trousers were hard to come by, but he needed a pair for pulpit duty. Once he had a sack of groceries in the pantry, he’d ask Floyd Whittington at the Woolworth’s to let him work for a good pair of worsteds. Gracie had always maintained two good suits for Sunday. Jeb’s old blue jacket and brown trousers would have to do for this Sunday.

  He thumbed through the Bible he’d rooked his way into owning. The Bible showed wear and contained Jeb’s marks—the earlier ones from his life as a charlatan and the more recent scribblings supervised by Gracie. Those were the ones he cherished. While the legitimate move back would give the Welbys a better home and him a better place to lay his head at night, he’d pass it all up for the sake of being genuine, respectable.

  Angel came in with the scissors and comb. “You needing a haircut, Jeb?” She had trimmed his hair once, boxing the edges around the back of his head.

  “Not today, Angel.” He led her to a chair and then sat down across from her. “It’s time to tell you a few things,” he said.

  “See, I said you were acting funny. You’ve heard from my daddy,” she said, expectant.

  Many a night he had lain awake wishing Angel would get a glimmer of hope through a letter or anything that would tell her her daddy had been looking for her. “Not your daddy, I’m afraid. This is something that could change everything for us. But for it all to take place, we’ll have to swallow some bad news. Reverend Gracie has to go to Cincinnati for his health. He’s asked me to take his place as the minister of Church in the Dell.”

  “Emily and Agatha are leaving too?”

  “All the Gracies are leaving. They’re going to stay with his family so that he can see a good doctor.”

  Her face did not contort as it often did when something new on the horizon set her off. She folded her hands over the comb and scissors in her lap and, in the afternoon light trickling into the kitchen, her eyes softened to china blue. The curls she had tried to press into her hair had fallen into straight-as-a-board crimped wisps around her shoulders. For once, Angel did not harden and stonewall him with her opinions.

  “That’s why Emily barely even said hello to me in the school hall. I figured she just had her nose out of joint about that boy she says loves her.” She looked straight at Jeb. “He don’t though. Hate to tell her, but it’s true.”

  Jeb decided not to lecture Angel again on the pain the Gracie children had endured since their momma’s death. Angel had experienced enough of her own to fill a library.

  “Do the people at church know?”

  “We have to let Reverend Gracie tell everyone. That’s not our place.”

  Angel wiped tiny hairs from the scissor blades and then slid them onto the small table where they all had eaten beans for three months. “I won’t tell a soul. I swear, Jeb. But you been such a mess lately, what with Miss Coulter ditching you and all. You sure you’re ready to do some preacherin’ again?”

  He did not feel like debating again with Angel over his lost love, but he did not know how to answer. So he fell quiet and ignored her.

  “I guess that’s the way it’ll be, then. It don’t matter what nobody says about you downtown, neither. Not that I pay any attention.” She sucked her bottom lip into her mouth and then said, “Maybe I ought not say.”

  “May as well spit it out, Angel. You don’t let nothing else stop you, once you get it in your head to talk. But tell me first if this is woman stuff.”

  “Not woman stuff. Not so much in the way you mean woman stuff, if you know what I mean. What with your woman troubles and all, I know better than to hit you with something like that.” She clasped her hands in her lap as though she were practicing some poise. “If it got out, someone might not ever talk to me again,” she said.

  Jeb liked her better sarcastic. “Swear on my own heart,” he said, already cynical about the matter.

  “There’s this boy, my age. You might have seen him once or twice at church with his momma. They don’t come much. His name is Beck.”

  “Seems like I should know him.”

  “Beck’s family is on hard times, same as everyone else. But they’re about to lose all they got. So his daddy took everything not nailed down to sell it in Hot Springs. Only it didn’t bring in what he needed to pay off the bank.”

  “Nazareth Bank and Trust?”

  Angel nodded. “Beck made me swear not to tell anyone this. They haven’t eaten anything, not nary a bite of so much as cold corn bread in two days. I shared my bacon and biscuit with him at lunch today. When he ate it down like he’d been living along the railroad tracks, I just gave him the rest of it. Told him I wasn’t hungry anyway. If I could slip some food to Beck, he’d sneak it to his momma and then his daddy wouldn’t find out he’d gone begging.” She paused and frowned. “Not that he has, actually. That didn’t come out like I meant it. Don’t tell anyone I said that Beck’s gone begging.”

  “We’ll give what we can,” said Jeb. His mind wandered back to his last conversation with Gracie.

  “His daddy would beat him if he knew.”

  Jeb cocked his head to one side, trying to read how much of what she said was exaggeration and how much was truth.

  Angel added, “I wasn’t supposed to say that, neither.”

  Jeb pulled out two jars of beans given to him by Freda Honeysack. Her garden had come in good in the summer and she had put up more beans than Roosevelt’s maid. An old flour sack lay empty by the broom. He slipped the beans into the sack along with a half loaf of bread. “I don’t believe I know this boy’s daddy and momma too awfully well. How many youngens they have to feed, all told?”

  “Five. Three boys and two girls. Beck’s the youngest boy. His daddy is Asa Hopper. You know Mr. Hopper?” Angel looked into a single cabinet near the stove and found it nearly empty. She pulled out an apple and tucked it inside the sack.

  Jeb remembered the farmer storming mad as a bull out of the bank. “Yes, I know him. You take t
his to Beck, and don’t tell him where it came from. They live pretty far out, away from town. Will you give this to him at school in the morning?”

  Angel nodded. “I got some tomatoes to mix in with our beans tonight and a little pepper. When we get some money, I want spaghetti.”

  Jeb had not noticed the small brown bag on the table until this moment. He pulled it open with one finger and saw the produce. “Someone must have given that to you.”

  “Miss Coulter. She brought them by while you were gone.”

  “Fern Coulter came to this house?”

  Angel seemed to enjoy his surprise, like she had something on him. “Not for any reason other than Willie ran off and left his jacket on the back of his chair at school. She was afraid it’d turn off cool tonight and he’d need it.”

  “Beans and tomatoes it is, then.” Jeb picked up the late summer tomatoes and peppers and laid them out on the table to chop into small pieces. “So, Fern didn’t mention my name, did she?”

  “Just to ask where you were. I’ll make the beans. You don’t salt them good as me.” She took the tomatoes to the sink to give them a rinsing and then sighed. “I’d give away my best pair of shoes for spaghetti.” Before Jeb could lecture her on appreciating what little they had, she cut him off. “I’ll stop talking about it.” She chopped the peppers like she had to kill them before they up and ran off. “Nothing wrong with beans.”

  “We’ll have spaghetti as soon as I can get a job to take the place of the lumbermill job, Angel. Here, give the Hoppers half of this cornmeal. They can’t have beans without corn bread.”

  5

  The corn rows in tassel by early September rose empty in the husk not many days before October, languishing under the sky’s stingy refusal of rain. Farmers complained about the gray sky on Sunday—good-for-nothing blinders for the sun, they called it. Jeb’s truck bumped along the snaking road from the log shack to the main road, past the fields that didn’t bless Nazareth with even a sister’s kiss of autumnal bounty.

  In front of the gearshift, his Bible lay thick with so many tucked notes sticking out between the pages it looked as cluttered as his thoughts. Angel stared out at the fields with Ida May on her lap rummaging through a tin box. Angel had clambered from the cot of a bed she shared with Ida May to turn the last handful of pulverized meal into corn cakes. Jeb had eaten his cakes alone while Angel dismissed herself to awaken first Willie and then Ida May. She had been silent as snow since Friday, saying only that Beck had taken the food, but not another word beyond that speck of news. He thought that if he asked her what had been going through her thoughts, she’d only say her usual “Nothing.” So he said, “After we get moved back into the parsonage, we won’t have this long a drive every Sunday.”

  She pulled one of her braids from Ida May’s hands and tossed it behind her.

  Willie had stretched out in the truck bed to chew sassafras, sitting on an old quilt so he could turn up at church in something clean.

  “When we goin’ to move, Dub?” asked Ida May. She had somehow picked up on a change in the wind, but had not yet pieced all of it together. Jeb knew how fast news would travel if Ida May got hold of it. Neither he nor Angel answered her, so she unknotted the thread from inside her tin box and looped it for a cat’s cradle.

  Angel made wide eyes at Jeb behind Ida May. Then she laughed. It was the first laugh she’d had in several days. It was the kind of laugh that made her notorious among the boys at school for being the kind of girl that turned to mayhem. By the time they reached the sparsely grassed front lawn of Church in the Dell, Angel was jabbering again like she always had before Jeb told her about Gracie’s leaving. Her silence since then had troubled Jeb, especially since Fern had told him of her change in attitude.

  Instead of leaping out of the truck to meet the girls she sat with every Sunday, Angel rested her hand on the door handle as she studied the families gathered out on the lawn. It made Jeb look too. Several groups milled around, bunched up like hungry hens in front of the church steps, some women with a posture that lent itself to wagging tongues. The men were all hats and coats in a circle. “Something’s up,” said Jeb.

  “I haven’t told a thing to anyone, so don’t blame me,” said Angel.

  Jeb could only remember the talk he’d had with Fern at Beulah’s. From that little get-together, a barrel’s worth of stories could spread, Thursday to Sunday. He searched Fern out. She stood talking with a few of the single college girls, not much older than one herself. If she had shared Jeb’s news with anyone, she did not show it on her face. Jeb walked past her without looking at her or her latest annoying hat.

  Willie ran and blended into the group of boys that looked cut out from the same family tree—thrice-mended shirts tucked into pants, kitchen-cut hair, and shoes either too tight or loose as their momma’s tongues.

  Jeb joined Gracie on the church steps while a third cousin of Mr. Plummer, the tailor, rang the church bell. Plummer, who normally rang the bell, had stayed home three Sundays in a row to tend to Mrs. Plummer’s gout.

  Gracie touched Jeb’s arm and led him through the doors ahead of the crowd.

  “More people here than usual,” said Jeb.

  “Our secret sprung a leak,” Gracie whispered. He had never whispered in the whole year and a half Jeb had known him.

  “Will Honeysack placed an extra chair behind the pulpit for you, Jeb. You ought to take a seat right now and stay there until after I make the announcement. Otherwise, you might have too many questions to answer.” Gracie stopped in the middle of the aisle as though he could plug the leak while Jeb made for the chair. The minister didn’t act aware of the few ladies who dabbed their eyes in plain sight of him.

  Jeb could not remember why he had taken so many notes or if it was humanly possible to tie the scrawled jumble into a steady stream of thought. A familiar jumpiness worked its way up his arms to his neck, like the day he had first taken the pulpit as a fake, not knowing Adam from Job’s pig. Gracie took a seat beside Jeb and smiled his encouragement before bowing his head in prayer. Jeb was not reassured. It would satisfy him to no end if Gracie would stretch his prayers into the noon hour and then call off his morning in the pulpit until a day that Jeb might feel legitimate. As Gracie prayed for the message soon to be delivered, Jeb reasoned it would be good for God to strike him dead. It was the fastest cure to drum up when his good sense took wing. His thoughts tangled like kites.

  He had not felt this sick since the time his momma had taken him and his brother to church against their will. Jeb being so young, it was his first recollection of the little church cradled between a cotton field and downtown Temple. Laurel trees had scented the churchyard that day, and he remembered it like he remembered triangles of cold corn bread on the stovetop left out for midnight hunger pangs.

  Once inside the small building, a church lady who taught the children and was therefore duty-bound to the whole bunch of them had taken Charlie and Jeb by their elbows and said, “All of the child-ern are going to say a Bible verse in front of the church this morning. You may as well join them.” She had not sounded the least bit enthused nor told them her name or asked them theirs. She’d pressed a piece of paper with a Scripture scribbled on it into Jeb’s hand, his fingers still sticky with breakfast jelly.

  Jeb’s abrupt onset of paralysis of the mouth had not allowed him to tell the churchwoman he could not read—not at age five or ever. By the time twenty or so girls and boys had popped off their verses followed by a sigh of relief, Charlie had taken a step back and hidden behind a tall youth who stood bowed in front of him as though ashamed of his height, leaving Jeb out front. The old woman, who sat with her long dress falling between her knees, pointed at Jeb like she expected a recitation out of Shakespeare’s works. All Jeb could see was his momma lowering her eyes. Her cheeks blushed like summer apples on the bough. Charlie gave him a poke and with a loud suck of breath, Jeb blurted out the only thing he had ever memorized by heart.

  A lot of pe
ople had cordially flattered his mother afterward for the fine way her boy gave the Pledge of Allegiance. Jeb had run all the way out to the wagon with Charlie running behind him calling him things like idjut and ignert fool.

  Gracie brought Jeb back to the present. He must have noticed Jeb’s blank stare. “Good crowd this morning. The rumor mill is in our favor this go-around.” He read Jeb’s anxiety. “This kind of thing always leaks out, Jeb. Best to take it in stride.”

  Jeb read over again the first of sixty-seven note cards in his Bible.

  “I’m going to let you preach, and then I’ll announce that you’ll preach again in two weeks. I’d like them to warm up to you.”

  Jeb decided he would step outside when Gracie announced his revisit to the pulpit. The best image he could conjure was of himself running away from Church in the Dell before the town decided to roast him. It had a familiar smack to it.

  At the other end of the church, the banker, Horace Mills, waited outside the doorway until his wife, Amy, entered ahead of him. She spoke to two women as she gestured behind her. A young woman with Amy’s round eyes followed her into the room. The older women greeted the younger as if they already knew her. She turned and swayed back onto her heels to Doris Jolly’s organ playing, a little of the jitterbug in her steps. Jeb thought, This must be Horace’s daughter, Winona.

  Amy included the girl in all the female banter, but some of the older women’s discussion must have bored her because she soon turned away to shop around the sanctuary for a diversion. Her eyes fell on Jeb. He swallowed, too aware of the way she noticed him. He wondered if he looked as awkward as he felt. Nothing about her should have caught him off guard. Any local girl around town who had given him a look always got at least a smile back, even with, as Gracie called it, his best minister’s decorum on hand. The girl’s face relaxed. She hooked her arm into her father’s and said something privately to him. Horace glanced at Jeb, shook his head, and escorted his daughter to their customary pew.