Whisper Town

by Patricia Hickman

  “You keeping yourself well, girl. Your folks will have to climb a ladder to kiss you if you get much taller.”

  “Baby’s holding up her head and smiling when you look at her.”

  “They do that, don’t they?” said Williamson.

  Unlike most girls, Lucky spent the entire conversation talking about the baby instead of herself. Williamson answered and asked her further questions and she talked like she was the baby expert. In the parsonage that would be true.

  “I brought fresh salt pork for your New Year’s dinner.” Williamson held up a sack.

  “Black-eyed peas and salt pork. Why everybody cook that on the first of the year anyway?” asked Lucky.

  “Luck,” said Jeb.

  “Reverend is right,” said Williamson.

  Lucky took the sack into the kitchen.

  Jeb leaned toward Williamson and said, “Any reason to believe Jewel Blessed has any ties to this baby?”

  “You sharp as a tack, Preacher Nubey.”

  Lucky came back.

  Jeb waited while Williamson and Lucky said their good-byes.

  “We’ll talk again soon?” Jeb wanted him to stay.

  “Come see me at my church. We’ll talk some more.”

  He put on his hat and said farewell to Jeb. “You an agent of the Lord, Reverend Nubey.”

  “I can’t believe it’s another year gone past us,” said Fern. She sliced the salt pork and dropped it into the pot of peas.

  Jeb gave her everything for the dinner. Angel sat up on Fern’s couch now. The pink circles under her eyes gave her the look of a rabbit.

  Will and Freda pulled up outside. Freda carried sweet rolls through the front door. Freda had invited her neighbors to come and wanted to know if that was all right.

  “More the merrier, Freda,” said Fern. She took Freda’s rolls.

  “They’ll be another few minutes or so,” said Freda. “They’ve made up a mess of catfish.”

  Jeb helped them off with their coats.

  “That baby’s almost as big as you, Ida May,” said Freda.

  Ida May rocked Myrtle while the others cooked.

  “She’s only three months, come the tenth,” said Lucky. “I think she’ll be getting her teeth soon.”

  “What’s her birthday again, Lucky?” asked Jeb.

  “October tenth.”

  Freda helped Fern cut up the corn bread for cooling.

  Jeb stared at Lucky. She turned and left the room.

  18

  JEB WAITED FOR LUCKY TO MAKE UP THE BOTtles for the day on Friday. She needed enough formula to feed Myrtle until he could return in the evening with more of Doctor Forrester’s special formula. He told her only that he would be gone for the day and to see to supper. He took along his banjo to see if the new strings he ordered at Honeysack’s store would work.

  Lucky did not ask him why he would be gone all day. She watched him leave without saying a whole lot of anything.

  Jeb drove out of Nazareth. The morning chill never left the inside of the truck cab, even after he had been driving for thirty minutes. A big sign shaped like a watermelon and painted red and green advertised a farmer’s market from at least two seasons ago. The red had turned pale pink in the sun and the black seeds had grayed. The watermelon fields grayed too, swirls of dust ghosting through the fields, with nothing rising unless it had first met a disintegrated state.

  Jeb drove past a boarded-up church. A child’s bicycle frame lay out in front of the church, the tires taken some time ago. Someone had painted across a board: ASHES TO ASHES AND DUST TO DUST, HEADED FOR CALIFORNY OR BUST.

  The Hope City Limits sign had a skirt of grass grown up around the post.

  He made a stop to feed his truck with a little more gas. He asked the filling-station attendant how to go about finding Mt. Zion Church. The man told him to stay on the highway and take a right on a street named Lowell. “Go right on that road into colored town and you’ll see their church on the left.”

  Jeb followed the highway and turned on Lowell. The neighborhood had taken a beating. Tin replaced roof shingles. One building’s architecture suggested it started out as a house, but the sign nailed on the front said MT. ZION CHURCH, and underneath it read MERCY FOR THE DOWNTRODDEN.

  Mt. Zion Church bloomed at the culverts of those dried fields.

  A ladies’ choir rehearsed a song about heaven. Jeb wanted to march, but, as a guest, he kept his feet still. They might take offense. A soloist led the women and they echoed her chorus, a rising and falling of voices of an oceanic quality. Her blue sleeves rose and fell along with the undulating vocals, the sound coming out of the choir was like strings pulled by her fingertips. The ladies’ mouths formed into faultless, open ovals. The ladies’ swaying gave the choir loft a tidal feeling, a swelling from the bottom octave rising into the eaves. The chief singer clapped her hands and those women stopped, not moving so much as a toenail.

  “Mister, you looking for someone?” she said to Jeb.

  “Reverend Williamson, if I’m in the right place.”

  A woman whose cotton-white hair pillowed around her temples and cheeks laughed.

  “Sister Williamson, you want to tell this man where he can find your dear husband,” said the choir director.

  The cotton-haired woman pointed way left and Jeb followed her signal into a short corridor. At the end of the hall, a sign read MINISTER’S STUDY. Jeb knocked in a gentle manner. The door came open a hair.

  A row of candles lighted along a primitive altar blazed in front of Reverend Williamson. He prayed in that light facedown. His shoulders shuddered.

  Jeb removed his hat. He took a chair a few feet away from the minister to wait for him to finish his morning prayers.

  “Father, help my people. They going through some business that I can’t fix for them.” Williamson spoke trancelike, his voice coming from the floor like a man hunkered down in a trench. “Evil is dwelling in our land. We don’t know which way to turn, so we turn to you, Savior.” His fingers stroked the threads on the rug as though he gathered scattered grain into his palms. “Help us to forgive them who throw stones at our children. Show mercy to men who torch our houses and take our little girls for evil deeds.” His left arm stretched out behind him. His fingers waved in Jeb’s direction like a man giving the all clear.

  Jeb bowed his head. He came down on one knee and then knee-walked until he reached Williamson’s altar. He felt like the new man crawling into the trench, dumb to yesterday’s blood on the ground; still, he whispered, “God, you made your life breakable so that we could eat from its bread. Make us breakable bread and then show us how to feed others.”

  “Yes. Make our life a feast for hungry lives,” said Williamson.

  Jeb prayed for God to give his people more love. Williamson prayed for God to give his people more grace.

  Williamson’s hand rested on top of Jeb’s hand.

  Jeb cried. Williamson slid him a handkerchief. Jeb didn’t care if he knew.

  “I’d fix your coffee for you, but Louie says I don’t cream his enough,” said Jaunice Williamson. She gave both men black coffee. “You got to hear our women’s chorus, Reverend Nubey. We got a nice sound, don’t we?”

  Jeb told her, “I might have joined you, but you would’ve asked me to quit, right off.”

  Jaunice had changed from her better dress into a housedress. “I hope you don’t mind fried chicken legs. We out of the other.” She retied her apron. “Our daughter and her six live with us, and we run clean out of food by the weekend.”

  “You got that dough rising, Jaunice. Make him up some bread. He’s our guest,” said Williamson. “She cooks all the time. Company gives her a way to show off.”

  Jaunice halved boiled eggs over a dish and creamed the yolks with mustard and pickle relish.

  “Call me Louie,” he said. “We’re both clergy.”

  “Of course, and call me Jeb. I hoped we could talk some more about the Blessed family.”

  “
I knew that was coming,” said Jaunice.

  “Woman, keep to your kitchen chores,” said Louie. He kept his voice to a tender level.

  “You in my kitchen. You respect me, beloved.” She could smile without moving her face.

  “My apologies, dearest.” Louie let out a breath. “Jeb, the Blesseds have pride, John especially. He’s Lucky’s daddy. Growing up black means you got to fight to hold on to things like self-respect. John takes it to degrees that is hard on a girl like Lucky. He held that little girl’s feet to the fire so long, he might never get her back. Same with her sister, Jewel.”

  “Jewel lives in town.”

  “She and another girl rent a shack outside town. Jewel don’t have the kind of money to get herself anything better. Worst of all, that place is only a mile up the road from the High Cotton Club.”

  Jaunice let out some kind of undefinable noise, like air seeping from a tire.

  “It’s not a real club like in the city, or one of them places operating over in Hot Springs. They high rollers over there. This is a small-potatoes club. Wayne Jackson took an old cotton house and put in a bar and a jukebox and named it a club. They got poker and gin. Lots of men looking for girls, like Jewel and her friend Colleen, who need a free meal and their beer paid for and a body to dance with.”

  “What did she do with Lucky nights?”

  “That’s the question of the hour, Jeb.”

  “Jewel left her sister and went honky-tonking,” said Jaunice. “That’s what!”

  “I’ll tell it, beloved. Lucky is a good girl. She is a lot like her mother, that one. Maybe that’s why John and Lucky had so much trouble. Vera is strong-minded. Lucky and Jewel fought every night Jewel and Colleen went out that door.”

  Jaunice slid a plate in front of Jeb.

  “Can’t tell you the last time I had fried chicken and potato salad,” said Jeb.

  Jaunice gave them both a look of pure examination. “I’ll eat mine in the parlor. You men about to get into some things, I can tell.” Jaunice gave her husband a sideways glance.

  “I’m not divulging, Jaunice, not what I can’t divulge,” he told her. “My pumpkin forgets she can trust me,” Louie said to Jeb.

  “I understand you feel a need to protect the Blessed girls,” said Jeb. “What can you tell me?”

  “How about I tell you how to get down to the High Cotton Club? Long about seven this evening, Wayne Jackson will bring in a live band. You play the banjo. If I was you, I’d act like I was there to meet the musicians.”

  “Banjo’s in my truck.”

  “If you talk their talk, they’ll give you a chair to listen. If you see a thin, pretty black girl, a scar on her left cheek, hair tied up with a flower, that’s Jewel. She’ll come prancing in, wearing a fur.”

  “It’s fake fur.” Jaunice leaned out of her chair to say it.

  “Big gold earrings. Bangles all up and down her wrists. She knows how to get attention.”

  “Jewel might talk to me about Myrtle?”

  Jaunice huffed. Both her feet lifted—heels down, toes up.

  “See if she brings up the subject,” said Louie. “I’m not saying she’ll tell you everything. John Blessed still has control of his girls even if they’re no longer under his roof. That family has its own code. Only way she’ll ever tell you anything is by winning her trust.”

  “Code, my foot!” said Jaunice.

  Daylight lingered, a pale blue January sky near the color of twilight. The moon’s surface could almost be made out, a watery blue and pale. The lights of the High Cotton Club flickered like swamp mosquitoes against the sunset. The club’s name shone in bright white letters on a blue background. Neon pink cursive spelled out Wayne Jackson’s name above the club name and a silhouette of a cheek-to-cheek dancing couple hung off the sign, fastened by iron rings.

  A guitar player swayed through a back door, hugging his instrument case. He and someone unseen clapped hands. Another fellow came right behind him, carrying two sets of drumsticks. Both men wore dark fedoras and the second wore a vest the color of orange rind.

  Jeb picked up his banjo case and approached the door.

  A man whose size filled the doorway raised his chin. He stared down at Jeb. “What you doing here?”

  “Wayne Jackson hired a band, didn’t he?” Jeb’s face lost all feeling except for a tingling around his ears that reminded him of a beating he had taken as a boy.

  “I’m Wayne Jackson.” The voice came from behind Jeb. “But I don’t know you.”

  The bouncer dislodged himself from the doorframe. “Want me to remove the white boy, Wayne?”

  Wayne Jackson was dressed in dark trousers, something like navy blue but it could have been black. The blue shirt he wore covered his belly like a tent. No jacket off the rack could have fit those shoulders.

  The guitar player stepped sideways into the doorway, twisting the keys, making eye contact with the white interloper. He looked Jeb up and down and then said something to one of the men inside.

  Jeb wanted to send a signal to the guitar picker, a code shared by musicians, something that said that musicians don’t let other musicians get dropped off a bridge or tied to a train track.

  “Is that a banjo?” the guitar player asked.

  Jeb fumbled for the case. He flipped open the latch and pulled the banjo out by the neck.

  “Joe, we got us a banjo picker,” he said.

  The bouncer looked disappointed.

  Wayne Jackson and the band leader, a guy everyone called Joe Geronimo, discussed the set. Jeb stuck out his hand and nearly inaudibly thanked the guitar player for saving his hide.

  “Joe’s been moaning about a banjo player. Here you show up. It was like magic.” He introduced himself as Harry.

  “Harry, I’m Jeb.” Jeb could not add a lie on top of his arcane presence with a false name.

  “We do dance numbers, at least that’s what we do at the High Cotton Club. That’s all these people want, at least. You trying out for the band?”

  Jeb had not gotten up the nerve yet to talk to Joe, so he kept talking so that only Harry could hear. “I’m not really here to join the band.”

  “Don’t tell that to Wayne Jackson.”

  “Do you know a girl named Jewel Blessed?”

  “This is only my second time to play this club. Maybe ask Daniel. He’s our drummer. He’s from around here.” Harry initiated their meeting, talking quietly to Daniel before backing up and allowing Jeb into their circle.

  “Daniel, nice to meet you,” said Jeb.

  “Jeb, let me give you a one, two, three, and then, Harry, you do some riffs, and then banjo man here will take us into the night. Jeb, you do know jazz banjo, right?”

  “I can pick some jazz,” said Jeb. He felt idiotic trying to talk jazz with real musicians.

  Daniel let out a whoop and tore into his drums like a man driving bats from the rafters.

  Jeb picked up the key from Harry and hung with them on the song.

  The waitresses listened outside the kitchen doors.

  Wayne Jackson mouthed to Joe, “White boy can play a’ight.”

  Joe picked up the bass guitar and took a spot opposite Jeb.

  Car lights flooded the front windows. Evening sunk the daylight into a corner pocket and the High Cotton Club opened for business.

  Several women slinked in together, threads of purple and blue, grouped like fillies at auction and sharing lights off one another’s cigarettes.

  The club had yet to see the likes of Jewel Blessed.

  “Where’d you get him?” a young woman talked Joe up during the break. Her black dress and the amethyst jewelry around her throat gave her a starlinglike quality.

  “Jeb, meet Colleen,” said Joe.

  Jeb set down his banjo and stuck out his hand.

  She took hold of his fingers with both hands, like she planned to hold on for a while. “You play good banjo, Jeb,” she said. “Want to buy me my very own glass of gin?”

  �
��My money can’t buy gin anymore,” he said. “You live around the club, Colleen?”

  “You’re kind of fast, aren’t you, already checking out where I stay?”

  “Colleen, stop hitting on Jeb. This man’s about to get hisself engaged,” said Harry. “Ain’t that right?”

  “I’ve got a girl,” said Jeb. “Pretty as they come.”

  “Better-looking than me?”

  “You’re at least as pretty. Too pretty to come here alone.”

  “You ain’t my daddy and I ain’t alone. My friend is parking the car. Hey, Wayne, you need to make more parking room. Jewel had to park halfway down the street,” she told the owner. She turned back to Jeb and said, “That’s her coming through the door now.”

  Jewel Blessed owned the floor. Two women turned away when she walked through the doorway, ladies who had danced every dance, but they made way when Jewel showed up. Jewel wore a fur, just like Louie had said. It fell open, revealing a green dress that shook with sequins and beads. Her neckline dipped and she let the coat fall off one shoulder so the dress could have its best showing.

  “You, banjo man, take your break for this first set’s opener,” said Joe. “It’s a slow number.”

  Jeb propped the banjo against the wall. “Colleen, introduce me to your friend.”

  “Why? You’re engaged.” Before she could walk away, Jeb took her by the arm. He pulled out some cash and put it in her hand.

  “You’re strange, aren’t you?” Colleen smiled anyway and took the money. She led him to the table in the back of the room.

  Jewel glanced at Colleen and then at Jeb. Part of Jewel’s hair fell across her face, Jeb figured, to hide the scar. She pushed the other side of her hair back with a flowered comb.

  “This man wants to meet you, Jewel.”

  Jewel told Jeb right off, “I ain’t no whore.”

  “Jewel, I’m Jeb Nubey.”

  Jewel waved Colleen away.

  Jeb sat across from her. “I thought we could talk about Lucky.”

  “You give my sister room and board. She works for you. I don’t have no say anymore in what she does.”