by Amy Sorrells
“Noble, please, call me Cass. And you’re welcome. It’s not often I see such natural talent as yours.”
“Thank you.”
He ended the call and jumped as high as he could off the front porch and hollered until Mama ran outside, followed by the familiar creak of the screen door behind her. He’d be sure to add oiling the door to his list of things to do before he left.
“What is it? What’s happened?”
“They wanna hear me play! They’re bringing me to Nashville to hear me play!”
She cocked her head, clearly confused.
In that instant Noble remembered he hadn’t told her anything about Cass Dinsmore. There was no getting around it now. “Last week, there was a scouter from Nashville at the Onion.”
“Yeah?” Mama said, looking skeptical. She shifted her weight and crossed her arms. Never a good sign.
“He told me to call him. I just got off the phone with him.”
“Nashville? As in Tennessee? You want to go play in Nashville?”
Worry rose in her voice, the sort Noble had found in the past was difficult to calm. “It’s only for a visit for me to see what it’s like and for a couple of his friends to hear me play.”
“Noble—”
“Mama. It’s my dream. You know I love the guitar. You said yourself you wished I didn’t have to stay around here. ’Sides, what if Nashville has something for all of us?”
“Me and Eustace in Nashville? You gotta be kiddin’.” She laughed, a high-pitched sound that meant anything else Noble said would be counted as ridiculous.
“They say I have talent.”
“I know you have talent. The whole town and half this side of Indiana knows that. I don’t know what’s so wrong with you using it here.”
“Really, Mama? Here? You don’t know what’s wrong with just here?”
“Here works, Noble. Works for me. Works for Eustace. Works for you, too, if you’d learn to accept the fact we can’t leave.”
“And you know that for sure?”
“What?”
“That we can’t leave? You know that’s not ever gonna be possible? How do you know that, Mama, if you ain’t never left here yourself?”
She stepped back and tensed. He knew he’d crossed the line, and while she never had struck either of her sons, he could tell she was fixing for this to be the first time. Still, he couldn’t help himself.
“If we don’t have to scoop manure the rest of our lives, wouldn’t you like to know that? At least know it for sure?”
18
Sometimes James ran into his congregants by happenstance, like Tom Lawson at the park. Others sought him out as the day neared for the church to close.
Stephen and Olive Lee lived out on the two-lane highway in a ranch home, their front yard filled with every sort of concrete sculpture and yard ornament imaginable. James knew this because he and Molly and Shelby had been out there for dinner years back. The displays were such a spectacle that cars rear-ended each other regularly as drivers rubbernecked or took photos with their cell phones. James ran into Olive at the dentist’s office, where she’d peered at him uncomfortably for some time over the top of a People magazine. When the hygienist called her name, she’d paused before going back and said in front of the half a dozen others in the waiting room, “It was the music, you know.”
“Pardon me?” he’d said.
“The day you let that boy onstage with the guitar was the day Stephen and I knew the devil had arrived. It’s a good thing that church is closing. Ain’t no room in Sycamore for a church of the devil.”
George and Clara Bogan, whom he only vaguely remembered because Clara had been one of Shelby’s teachers in grade school, wrote him a letter telling him they’d left a long time ago when James had decided to quit wearing the heavy black robe and began wearing khaki pants and a sport coat. “We couldn’t bring ourselves to stay in a place where the pastor is so egotistical he feels he can disrobe in front of his congregants,” they’d said.
Frank and Viola Dean had stopped James in the condiment aisle of the IGA to explain why they’d left. Frank occupied himself studying the various brands of pickles while Viola, dressed in a purple housecoat with a single pink foam curler on the front of her head, had leaned in close to him, patted his hand, and whispered, “There’s always been too many old people in the church. We couldn’t stand being around all those old people. They’re all sitting there waiting to die. The church was dying with ’em. We needed some pep, didn’t we, Frank?”
Frank had placed a jar of kosher pickles in the cart and rolled his eyes apologetically at James after Viola continued on toward the mayonnaise.
Others, like Jack McGee, gave James hope that not all his years at Sycamore Community Church had been in vain.
Jack McGee had invited James out to his trailer to talk about the church closing over some apple pie, to which James had happily agreed. Truth be told, McGee’s church attendance tenure had peaked on three consecutive Sundays: the one when he got saved, the next week when he got baptized, and the following week, as Jack had said, “to seal the deal.” After that, Jack came sporadically and then hardly at all, although the two of them met regularly at the Percolator or the Onion or the TA out by the interstate. Jack was only an honorary elder, the others agreeing to the status after James had convinced them it’d do them good to have a unique, outside perspective.
James stepped up the ramp to his old friend’s trailer home. Far enough from town that it wouldn’t be an eyesore, but close enough to walk to, Jack’s trailer was one of about a dozen set up on blocks and divided into two sections by a gravel drive running through the middle. The piece of land the trailer park occupied was admittedly pretty, set in a shady dell with giant oaks and cottonwoods creating a shelter overarching them. It was almost as if nature somehow figured if life wouldn’t give the folks there the solid shelter they needed, maybe it could. He noticed the sound of a stray cicada, a couple of feral cats wrapping themselves seductively around the cinder blocks beneath the trailers, and birds flitting and chirping in the branches above. Thistles, tall with full purple blooms, and fat, fuzzy carpenter bees buzzing and pausing occasionally to sip nectar, framed the sides of the trailer.
James felt sweat run down his back, the sun and humidity already sweltering even before noon. Rust stains resembling the path of tears down a ragged face striped the sides of all the trailers and Jack’s in particular. The whole trailer rattled as he knocked on the door and more so when he heard the uneven thump of Jack’s gait moving toward the door.
“Morning, Rev.”
Years before he’d tried insisting Jack call him James, but he never had. He followed Jack into the hole of a home, which reminded him of a Hobbit’s without the charm—low ceilings, cramped and dark. One couch, a crooked bookshelf, and a TV on a metal stand that appeared to have been acquired from a 1980s high school audio-visual department were smashed against two of the walls. Veterans’ magazines and Louis L’Amour novels lined the shelves, along with a few others by Brad Thor and the worn copy of Mere Christianity James had given him at one of their coffee shop meetings. He was happy to see that the book was thick around the edges from frequent flipping.
James sat on the ragged couch and rubbed his knees as Jack rifled around in the kitchenette. When he returned, he handed James a mason jar, and James realized that the apple pie McGee was referring to was homemade moonshine. He should have known.
“Just for you, Rev. Take a nip. It’ll take the edge off all this talk of the church dying.” He sat next to James and took a long sip from the liquid in a faded NAPA Auto Parts store mug. “I’m real sorry ’bout the church.”
James thought about replying with what had become his standard, “Yeah, me too,” but the words didn’t come. He felt the moonshine warming his head already.
“You’re prob’ly wonderin’ why I asked to see you.”
“I am.” James tried to smile as he took another sip and winced as the liqui
d burned his throat.
“Fresh from the oven, that apple pie.” Jack laughed. “Well, Rev, it’s simple. All these years you been preaching to me, albeit a bit unconventionally, kept me from whackin’ myself. Led me to Jesus. I figured I could at least try to give a bit of that back to you. See, the way I see it, now anyway, is the spot you’re in, bein’ a preacher, it’s a lot like bein’ a soldier.”
“Oh?” James considered Frank Whitmore’s plight again, how faced with losing his best milkers and watching them die, he shot them and then himself instead. He thought about the recent attention in the news given to preventing suicide in soldiers, a horror all too common among them.
“Yes sir. Preachin’s got to be a lot like war. You fight for those people, you see the enemy take some down, you watch some of ’em die, help some of ’em live. You lose a part of yourself in that war, you know, the fight between the angels and demons and all they talk about in the Bible that we can’t see but that are all around us fighting all the same.” Jack rubbed the stump of his leg. “Aches like the devil when part of yourself goes missing. It’s tough learning to find a way to live without it. . . . I’m lucky I just lost this here. Preachers lose a part of their hearts.”
“I don’t know that I’d compare it to all that—”
Jack held up his hand to stop him. “Now wait and hear me out. I know you’re too humble a man to think preacherin’ and pastorin’ could be compared to a war wound. But the way I see it, it sure is.”
James settled back into the couch and rested the jar of moonshine on his knee. The room seemed to tilt slightly.
“Did I tell you ’bout how I got this or rather, lost this leg?” Jack stood and hobbled on his cane to the window facing the woods behind his trailer.
“Stepped on a land mine, if I remember correctly.”
“That’s right. But did I tell you where I was goin’ when that happened?”
“You and the other guys in your platoon were headed back to base and it was nighttime so you didn’t see the mine.”
Jack kept his back to James. “We were headed back to the base eventually. But we were . . . well, we were takin’ a detour, you might say. We’d seen ’em that morning, on our way out to scout for the ’Cong, but we was too busy to stop then, and besides, they couldn’t have gone where we were goin’. There were three of ’em, little girls, T-shirts for dresses, faces stained from dirt. Their eyes, big and brown like baby deer caught in a thicket. As scared and starved-lookin’ as they was, we knew their mama or daddy were sure to be dead, so we made a pact to bring ’em back to base. Couldn’t help all the kids but we figured we’d help these ones. So after we was done with the scoutin’, my buddy Dave and I, we separated from the group and set out to come back the same way, which we wasn’t supposed to do. The ’Cong, they’d be waiting for us to do that. We were always s’posed to take a different route. And sure ’nuf, I could see the hut when I stepped on it. ’Cong planted it.” He cursed.
“What happened to the girls?”
“Dave, he went to check for them in the hut . . . we told him not to, but he wouldn’t listen . . . he was careful, but mines don’t care ’bout careful. He got to the threshold and the whole place blew. A piece of one of the girls’ shirts landed right next to me. Pieces of them . . . The ’Cong used them to trick us. Place was so messed up.” He kicked the wall next to the sliding-glass door and the whole trailer shook. He turned on his cane and faced James, and his face was red and soaked with tears. “I wanted to save them girls. If I’d done nothin’ else over there all those years, I wanted to at least save what kids I could. I don’t care about losing this leg. It’s the girls I dream about at night.”
“You couldn’t have—”
“Oh, don’t give me that pastor bull. I beat myself up for years over it and still do. You can’t convince me I couldn’ta done somethin’. No one can. I’ll only rest when I see their little faces on the other side. That’s the only thing gets me through the days. That I’ll see them girls healthy and smiling when I get to heaven.”
“I’m sorry, Jack. I had no idea.”
“No one does. You’re the first person I ever told. Dragged myself back to the base with Dave’s tags around my neck.” He lurched closer to James. “So I got a question for you, Rev.”
“I’m listening.” James tried not to react to the smell of Jack’s teeth, which were in desperate need of a cleaning, or his body, which was in desperate need of a bath and a clean set of clothes.
“What are you gonna do to heal your wound?”
James felt Jack’s eyes bore into him. He was right, if he allowed himself to think about it. He was exhausted. As if he wasn’t still in pieces from losing Molly, he felt like a whole part of himself had been blown off the day George Kernodle came and delivered the news of the closing and auction. “I don’t know, Jack.”
“Rev, you got a bad case of combat fatigue if I ever saw it. Best cure is to get off the front lines for while. Rest up. Take some time to do somethin’ you like or to do nothin’ at all.”
“I won’t have a choice but to do nothing in two weeks.” James twirled the glass of moonshine in his hands. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure. Ask whatcha like.”
“Why did you stop coming to church?”
Jack thought a bit and put his hands through his long, peppery hair. “Look, Rev. I’m not a churched man. You know I found the Lord late in life. Don’t mean I don’t believe in going to church, just means that’s probably the area I need to work on in my life. Humans are hard for me, Rev.”
“I can understand that.”
Jack pivoted on his cane and headed toward his bedroom. “Be right back,” he said.
James studied the Marine Corps flag hanging above the couch, a framed picture of a group of war buddies on some unknown battlefield hanging crooked above the TV, and a couple of shotguns in their cloth cases propped in the corner of the room.
“Who’s that?” James asked, pointing to the photograph.
“That’s my platoon.” Jack shifted his weight and took the picture off the wall, then pointed to a clean-shaven young man kneeling with his rifle in the front row. “Would you believe that’s me?”
“Hardly!” James laughed.
“And that one there—” Jack pointed to the young man standing behind him—“that’s Dave.”
They were both silent for a moment, James not wanting to break the silence that seemed appropriate at the mention of the deceased soldier’s name. “‘There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’”
“John 15:13,” Jack whispered.
“You know, God meant for us to have fellowship, to suffer alongside one another. I’m sure it’s hard for you to go to church, but we need the church. That’s one of the hardest things about all this for me. If God designed us for fellowship, then why would he allow one of his churches to close?”
Jack chuckled. “I don’t think I’m the one you want to ask such serious theological questions. But if I had to say, we probably won’t get an answer from the good Lord about any of this. And if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that we can’t hold on to the whys. The whys are what made me want to put a bullet in my brain. We have to keep moving on, with or without the limbs we’ve lost.”
“That was a better sermon than I’ve preached in months. Maybe years.” James laughed. But it wasn’t far from the truth.
Jack put a box in James’s hand and covered it with both of his. “I want you to have this. Don’t argue with me about it. Just take it.”
James turned it over and read the words on the top. Purple Heart.
“I can’t—”
“You can and you will. Can’t take it with me and got no descendants to give it to. Be honored to give it to another soldier.”
“I’m not—”
“You are to me, Rev. Saved my life. You give up a part of yourself for a brother in combat, you get a Heart.”
James could
n’t keep the tears from coming.
“Take it. The stuff that makes someone worthy of a Purple Heart needs to be passed on.”
James’s hands trembled as they held the box, and he ran his fingers across the raised relief of the image of George Washington, the etched words on the back, For Military Merit. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face. “If I can’t argue with you, then I guess all I can say is thank you.” He stood and threw his arms around his friend, and the two embraced in the hazy room broken up by shafts of light gleaming through the dingy windows.
19
“Ceeeee-ow! Here, ceee-ow!” Noble stood at the door of the barn where the herd entered, eight at a time, for milking. Most of the cows lined up on their own, but there were a few who lollygagged out in the pasture and always had to be called. The sun rose over the far hill and the ripples on the creek glimmered as the cows who’d been lying on the ground rose slow onto their sleep-stiffened haunches. As he waited for them to file in, he shooed a couple of flies away from his face and watched a monarch butterfly flitting around the milkweed growing against the corner of the barn. George Strait crooned from the radio in the milking parlor.
A few hundred yards out in the pasture, Eustace meandered in the Gator with a couple bales of alfalfa in the back, bringing up the rest of the herd lumbering toward the barn, their enormous, swollen udders swaying between the angled bones of their hind legs. That dingy white hat was perched too high on his head, and the grin on his face—same no matter how many times Eustace drove the Gator—made it look like he was a grade-schooler given permission to drive it for the first time.
A grade-schooler. That’s what Eustace was. A big, giant grade-schooler. Aside from the time he asked Mama what was wrong with him, Noble couldn’t remember when he first realized he would be the caretaker of a big brother that should’ve been able to take care of him. It probably wasn’t a moment, just a slow happening like everything else at the Burden Dairy. More likely, he realized it when he was the only one—since God hadn’t seemed to have been there then either—who actually tried to defend himself when their father came around wanting to beat on them. Dad beat them when he was sober; he beat them when he was drunk. He just liked beatin’ people. Including Mama. The worst was when they were younger and someone’d come around when they weren’t expecting it, like the milk truck or Molly Horton, the days when he and Eustace were still young and before Dad realized he’d have to be more careful about when—and where—he used his fists.