Whisper Town

by Patricia Hickman

  “Who is Reverend Williamson?” asked Fern.

  “He the preacher of Mount Zion in Hope. I wish I had him for a daddy. But he old. His wife is getting on in her years. His daughter lives with them and takes care of her six. They got too many in that house like we do here.”

  The snow finally came, but it was a thin, icy layer that sugared the lanes turning to slush in open roadways and forming slick patches in the shade. The frigid wind turned the temperature too cold for the children to want to remain outside. A wet snow is what Fern called it, when the mixture of sleet and snow had sent them running for coats and some borrowed blankets for the cold truck ride home.

  Jeb affixed new locks onto the church’s doors, both on the front and back exits, once he had considered the assault on the building.

  He could see Willie pass by the front parsonage window on occasion as if he hoped for the snow to turn into mounds of good sledding snow, which it didn’t.

  He yanked on the rear door’s padlock, careful for the sleet that had already iced the porch, and in the turning away, he saw a movement at the wood’s edge about sixty yards from the parsonage. The shadow might have been a dark bleeding of shade from woods to house with the hour of the day waning; but the movement, quick as a sprinter, left him with the impression of a man watching the house. Not wanting to start his quarry, Jeb made a casual move in the direction of the church’s west side and performed the utilitarian gesture of moving a shovel from the side of the church to the shed that sat out a good twenty-five feet from the corner. He fumbled with the shed door’s latch to stretch the task into a good two minutes of fiddling-around time. The metal had rusted and he took the time to closely examine the corresponding pieces that no longer snapped closed. He hammered the metal, causing orange dust particles to sprinkle the white ground with metal cinnamon. That chore gave him the slight view of the woods he needed.

  The man was standing in the shadow of a copse of pines, his back against the trunk of a fifty-year-old spruce, and now he was watching Jeb.

  Jeb turned and made a dash for the woods. The man ran too, and in the flurry his dark frame, like an eddy of night zigzagging over snowy hills, was palpably visible. Jeb slipped upon a shaded patch and slid into a bramble of naked azalea. Even if he had not fallen, the man would have outrun him. He was a savvy navigator owning the territory in front of him as though he had mapped it out in his sleep.

  “Did you fall or have you decided to nap in the snow?” asked Angel. She had watched Jeb through the window and then ran out in her thin slippers and a housecoat.

  “I thought I saw someone,” he said.

  “I saw him too, hiding behind that tree. He’s fast, ain’t he?”

  “I never saw him before.”

  “I didn’t tell Ida May or Willie. They won’t sleep tonight. Maybe he wrote those things on the church house, you think?” She kept staring into the woods. “Like when robbers return to the scene of the crime.”

  Jeb came to his feet, his knees muddied through. “Keep a watch. Let me know if you see him again. I’m catching whoever did it.”

  “Lucky saw him too. She ain’t afraid of anyone.” Angel shuddered.

  “Keep an eye on Lucky too.”

  “Don’t you trust her?”

  “The list of who I trust is growing thin.”

  “It’s snowing harder. Let’s go inside, Jeb. I feel like someone’s watching.”

  Lucky had set up a checkerboard for Willie. Her long fingers moved the checkers almost without any wrist movement. Her knuckles were inked with some sort of drawings, in the shapes of eyes and mouths. With every move of a checker medallion, the eyes and mouths appeared to converse. Ida May watched her fingers, fascinated, as though the Sunday funnies had come to life and walked around in the game of checkers.

  Jeb spied the woods through the window, reading a passage from a book, and then changing from the sofa to a chair to get a different view of the woods and to keep an eye on the front drive.

  Only Angel showed awareness of his watchfulness. Lucky and Willie advanced to the crowning of kings. Their only glance outside indicated their satisfaction with the blanketing of snow upon the windowsills.

  Jeb let out a long breath and asked Lucky, “Why did you draw on your hands?”

  “I made a puppet show for Ida May.” She jumped Willie and told him to king her again.

  The smudged ink discolored her fingertips. He imagined the ink staining everything she touched. She ate from a plate of cold fried potatoes, licking her fingertips between each bite and cleaning under her nails with her front teeth.

  “Lucky, go wash your hands,” he said.

  “After I finish eating, Reverend.” She advanced another checker into Willie’s territory.

  The first time Lucky had stepped out of Reverend Williamson’s car, she wore an ironed blouse, crisped at the sleeves and starched. The whiteness of the blouse and the smell of bleach defined her as fresh off the shelf, an unspoiled girl. Her first impression warranted the approval of anyone who looked at her. “Lucky, you need to keep yourself better,” he said.

  “I’ll be back,Willie.” She huffed, pushed away from the checkerboard, and sashayed into the kitchen, clanging around the kitchen sink, clattering and slapping her wet, soapy palms together. Before she walked into the parlor, she posed beneath the arched doorway, one foot in front of the other.

  Jeb kept his eyes on his reading.

  Lucky waltzed across the floor and then slumped belly first onto the rug near the checkerboard. “I clean enough for you, Reverend?”

  Jeb blew out a breath and turned the page of his book.

  “Maybe I won’t ever be,” she said. She picked up the plate of cold potatoes and ate until she emptied the dish.

  Myrtle cried long, screaming cries, more like bleating, like a lamb scrounging around in the dark for a slaughtered mother. Lucky rocked her in Jeb’s room, moving back and forth in the dark on one of the chairs brought in from the porch. She sang and her voice undulated, rhythmic and reaching into the snowy sky for an ancient choir. She would not sing for anyone, only for Myrtle. The door to Angel’s room creaked open; Lucky’s audience, now out of bed and sitting by the open door, listened without comment.

  The baby’s cry fell into a whimper and then silent.

  Jeb reached for the radio dial. A Saturday-night orchestra played “Girl of My Dreams.” Jeb turned down the sound to keep from disturbing Myrtle.

  His bedroom door squeaked open. Lucky tiptoed down the hallway to make up her bed, the one given her by Fern.

  “Lucky, mind coming in here?” he asked.

  “I finally got her asleep. Like wrestling with a baby pig. Don’t know if she’s ever going to get over not having Belinda’s teat to yank on nights.” She let out a breath. “I hate to move her. She fell asleep in the middle of your bed.”

  “Have a seat.”

  “I’m in trouble?” She took the sofa, a good distance from Jeb.

  “If I’ve been hard on you, I shouldn’t have been. You’re a fine young woman. You ever sing in church?”

  She laughed from the back of her throat. “You apologizing to me, Reverend?”

  “Not if you’re going to make a big deal out of it.”

  “I accept. We ain’t alike and it bothers you, I can tell.”

  “We’re alike, Lucky. That’s why we clash.”

  “What you want from me, Reverend?”

  “Not from you. More what I want from me. I had this big idea that if I marched you and Myrtle up the church aisle, it would change people. I had this big vision of peace for Church in the Dell.”

  “Funny ideas you got. They crucified the Lord for that kind of thing.”

  “What I’m doing, it’s not fair to you. If you want to stay home from church, I’ll not be mad.”

  “I’m sorry you lost your place at the parade ceremony. I wish those men had your kind of guts.”

  “I don’t have guts, or else I’d quit hiding behind my words. Like
anything I say carries any weight. It doesn’t, only in my imagination.”

  “Maybe I’ll think about whether or not I’ll go tomorrow. I don’t mind sitting in the back with a crying baby. That’s where all the mothers of little ones sit.”

  “It’s a shame not to share your voice with the church.”

  “You’re dreaming a big one now. Sweet dreams, Reverend.” She got up to head off to bed, then paused. “I’m going to tell you something, but if you get mad, it will be the last secret I tell.”

  Jeb set down his coffee.

  “That man you seen in the wood today, he’s my brother. He don’t agree with my father about kicking me out the house and all, so he looks after me. His name is Ruben.”

  “I’m glad you told me. Now I won’t have to shoot him.”

  “Ruben is not like my sister, Jewel. The last thing he wants is trouble, but when it comes to me, he’ll stand up, even if it means taking a lick for me.” She glanced toward the bedroom where Myrtle slept. She nodded good-night to Jeb and went to bed.

  Jeb turned up the radio dial. The dance music faded. A radio broadcaster announced the serial-styled news show The American Dream. The documentary dramatized real-life Americans who had risen above disaster or the crushing results of the Depression. Jeb dozed, half-thinking about the lost particles of his dream floating away, the tide of inequity running roughshod over reason.

  The broadcaster introduced a man whose voice held a distinct elocution similar to Philemon Gracie’s. The show’s sponsor had assembled a group of backers to support an essay contest named after the show—The American Dream.

  The winner would receive a modest prize and the chance to read the essay at a ceremony near the Lincoln monument.

  Fern would cinch up a contest like that. He took on the assignment only for a snowy night’s musing. He drew out a piece of paper and played with the theme of his loss, the reaching for things that cannot be, the hunger to break bread peaceably across the borders of Tempest’s Bog and Nazareth, or between Mt. Zion Church and Church in the Dell.

  He wrote until midnight. The snow finally ceased, fingerprinting the window glass with multifarious designs. He made his bed on the sofa. A child needed his pillow tonight. It was a small offering, but nothing big enough to matter. A better gift would reach further. Only heaven could see a pauper’s benevolence.

  15

  JEB WOKE UP ON WEDNESDAY, THE DAY BEFORE Thanksgiving, his face flushed. By Wednesday evening’s prayer service, which had dropped to twelve in attendance, his temples warmed hot to the touch and Fern told him she would come Thursday morning to the parsonage and prepare a Thanksgiving meal.

  Angel let Fern in on Thursday morning and the three women—Fern, Angel, and Lucky—set to work clanking a kind of kitchen music, stirring pots and skillets until the house smelled of gravy and green beans.

  For a week Willie manned a turkey blind, letting several birds pass as he waited for a fat wild turkey, its torn wattle hanging from its face, and that’s how he described the bird to Jeb every evening until he had sacked the thing. He took the bird’s head clean off with one shot.

  Angel and Lucky had groused over plucking feathers and especially gutting the bird and removing the stub of head and its yellow feet protruding like starfish. The snow had not entirely melted in the backyard, so the feathered tufts clumped in bloodied mounds around the remaining banks.

  Jeb curled on the sofa, fifteen again, Fern feeling his head and throwing another blanket over him. She fluffed the blanket out and it lighted on him and he liked the airy feeling as it settled over him. Her hand felt like she had warmed her skin first with lotion and then air-dried it, smooth with a hint of some summer flower, like something she grew on her kitchen sill. He wished that women had been trained to check fevers by lifting a shirt and touching the chest and he thought about that as she held her hand across his forehead and looked up as if the temperature of his skin were registering in her mind. She never saw the way he looked at her or if she did, she punished him by poking a glass thermometer into his mouth.

  His mouth was parched and he hankered for something like a hot toddy, but he would settle for well-sugared tea, but not hot like women drink it. Cold-from-the-icebox tea.

  “I want to get you something. Tell me what you want,” she said.

  He shook his head, forgetting what he wanted. Jeb felt bad for not asking Fern to marry him sooner. He kept projecting how it would happen and under better circumstances, when he had gotten rid of some of the baggage of so many children, when he had saved a little money in Mills’s bank, and when the church returned to its better condition. He had a picture of Fern and him that he pieced together, a tidy life of quiet ministration, a rocking couple on the porch, Sunday afternoons spent making love, and children who bore names like Elizabeth Cassandra and Thomas Aquinas. He knew she thought like that and it kept him from asking her to put on his ring. He pulled out the copy of Pensées Fern had given him several years back. It had slid between him and the couch. His head hurt too bad to read.

  “I think you might sleep better in your bedroom,” she said.

  Jeb thought of saying how he did not want to miss the way she walked into the room and the sight of her walking away. “I’m dozing, I think.”

  “You’re not worrying over the church, are you? Because you shouldn’t. They may not appreciate what you’re trying to do now, but they will.”

  Jeb decided she smelled like begonias, red velvet petals that tug at your fingertips when you run your hand across them. “Is Willie’s turkey fine?”

  “We had to prop the stove closed with a chair. It’s an ambitious feast. Your water glass is empty.” She took the glass and went into the kitchen before Jeb could touch her and ask her if she could smell the begonias.

  A song played on the radio and it sounded like a church choir. Jeb wanted to turn it off, to not think of religious singers and the way they frowned from hymnals when their minister had made them sad. But the fever made him close his eyes. When he opened them again, Fern had set up a table in front of him and the glass of water.

  She laughed from the kitchen. It made him smile.

  By early evening wild turkey took over everything, the roasting juices steaming and overtaking the onions and the dressing made of corn bread. Jeb sat up and his arms came out of the blanket. The air cooled his skin. He could feel his head clearing, and when Ida May talked to him, her voice did not come from a can.

  “Do you want to eat with us, Dub, or stay on the couch like a vegetable?”

  “Ida May, don’t wake him up,” said Fern.

  Jeb did not know what she saw when she looked at him, but when she smiled, her lips met on one side. “Ida May, get me my comb.”

  “We can bring the feast to you, Jeb,” said Fern.

  “That’s too much trouble,” he said. He imagined all of them sitting around the table, laughing, and he would miss the jokes and the chance that his knee might touch hers.

  Ida May handed him the comb. “Fern turned off the radio,” she said. “Can I turn it back on?”

  “Keep it low,” said Jeb.

  He tucked in his shirttail and combed the hair out of his eyes. He left the sofa and blankets and went into the kitchen. Someone had created a centerpiece, a flower arrangement from paper. Lucky set plates on the table. Angel went behind her, adding utensils and cloth napkins Fern had brought from her kitchen.

  “That’s a pretty song. You can turn that up, Ida May,” said Fern.

  The table leaf had been added. The center displayed several green foods, like green beans, which he expected, and a salad and some round things that he most likely wouldn’t try unless Fern plied him and then he would eat anything to keep her smiling.

  Angel pulled a baked cake out of the oven and set it aside to cool.

  “I’m glad you made the turnip greens, Lucky,” said Fern. “Mine never look that good.”

  Angel looked less sullen. An abundance of food might have lifted her demeanor
, but she sat next to Lucky, it seemed on purpose.

  “You won, Dub,” said Ida May. She came into the kitchen and climbed into the chair next to where Fern had just taken her seat.

  “What did you win, Jeb?” asked Willie.

  “The prize,” said Ida May. “The radio prize. The man said your name.”

  “I think Ida May’s telling tales,” said Fern.

  Jeb went into the parlor. The jingle was playing for The American Dream. A radio song played, spewing the virtues of Clabber Girl Baking Powder.

  “Are you sure you heard my name, Ida May?” he asked.

  “Your story about bread,” she said. “It won.”

  “I didn’t know you mailed in a story, Jeb. What was it about?” asked Fern.

  “Did they say ‘A Feast of Breakable Bread,’ Ida May?” Jeb asked.

  With all of them looking at Ida May, she pinched out her bottom lip and lifted her shoulders.

  “Someone, give thanks,” said Angel, “before we all blow away.”

  The kids went back to school on Monday. Willie complained as he always did. Angel got to the end of the drive, but instead of leading Ida May up the road, she turned around and looked at the parsonage. Lucky, who had come out onto the porch, turned and took a step, as though she had been pacing and not watching them all leave for school. Angel lifted her fingers and let them move up and down like she was playing “Rise and Shine” on the schoolhouse piano. Lucky did not see her wave.

  Angel had asked her about her school back in Hope. Lucky did not take to talking about school and books, so Angel asked her about her hair and how she braided it in so many braids. Angel’s braids fell out. Lucky asked to fix her hair, but instead of braiding it, she combed it until Angel got tired of the combing.

  “I forgot my lunch sack,” said Ida May.

  “It’s here.” Angel held it out to her.

  “I feel sorry for Lucky,” said Ida May.

  “Not me. She gets to stay home and doesn’t have to do arithmetic all night till her fingers bleed.” Willie took off and left them. His friend from class had come out of the woods onto the road ahead.