Whisper Town

by Patricia Hickman

  “I hear good. My legs and hands feel like the pain is going out of them. You doing good by me, Doc.”

  “Who did this?” said Forrester.

  “I think they followed me this evening from Reverend’s place. I stopped for gas and that’s when they grabbed me from behind. Can you hear me? My throat feels like it’s on fire.”

  “We hear you, Ruben,” said Jeb.

  “My momma won’t understand why I didn’t get home in time for her cooking,” he said.

  “Who grabbed you, Ruben?” asked Jeb. “Was it Pella?”

  “You know it was, Reverend. I made him mad, but when he tied me up, I told him that stocking over his face didn’t help his looks none. I got to get home and make sure he doesn’t get to Lucky. Can you help me up?”

  “Your family is coming here to see you, Ruben,” said Forrester. He told Fern to clean the burns on his legs with soapy water.

  Fern kept swabbing, dropping cloths into a tub, wetting more clean cloths, and then she would push the hair out of her face and go to work on Ruben’s legs.

  “His left arm is broken,” said Forrester. “I’ll set it after we get you cleaned up,” he told Ruben.

  “I fought them off but good. They tried to throw me in the hull of Frank’s car, but I fought them. If they hadn’t broken my arm, they couldn’t have tried getting me into that hull.” He sucked in several breaths and said, “I hurt,” like it surprised him.

  “Pella’s not getting away with it,” said Jeb.

  The sky lightened. Automobile lights searched through the woods and then shone into the parsonage windows.

  Jeb opened the door. Vera Blessed ran for the front porch. Jeb met her on the steps. “Your son wants you, Vera.”

  “Tell me my child’s going to live.” She sobbed.

  Jeb once promised Vera he’d always tell her the truth. “Come inside. It’s cold out here.”

  25

  ON MONDAY AFTERNOON WILLIE SAID HE thought he saw Ruben standing out in the garden. When he talked about it over supper, Angel said she thought she saw him too. They all decided Ruben had come to tell them good-bye.

  The sun finally came out on Tuesday, warming the yellow sod, and it seemed like spring at the Hope Eternal Cemetery. Vera kept saying that Ruben could not wait for spring to come, that he had wanted to wet his line, and that this was his way of saying spring had come and he was the deliveryman.

  Louie delivered the eulogy and then Jeb talked about Ruben’s last words and forgiveness. John gave a word over the grave and then Vera and the girls each dropped a flower into the ground.

  The ladies’ choir sang a song that Ruben once sang in church, a hymn that set Vera to crying again.

  Lucky and Angel walked across the cemetery, taking off their sweaters and singing the “Balm of Gilead” song. They found it catchy and kept singing it on the hill until the adults made them stop and come back for the meal at the church.

  Someone had made peas and ham. Jeb ate from that bowl two or three times until he felt he might burst. Louie invited him into his study and they closed the door.

  “I guess you know that Myrtle and Lucky have adjusted well to home.”

  “This is not the end, Louie. Frank Pella’s not getting away,” said Jeb.

  “I can tell you’re used to getting things your way. If I had your confidence, I’d run for mayor.”

  “We’ve been needing a new mayor. I know what you’re thinking. Frank Pella is gone, nothing can be done about it. Pella’s daddy may have snuck him out of town, but that only makes him look guilty.”

  “I don’t want to sound pessimistic, Jeb, but not all people love the way you love,” said Louie. “Not all come to justice. Not all come to the cross.”

  “The last thing I need is a sermon, Louie.”

  “Vera told me how you came to God. You’re one of those Paul types—hard-to-come-along but then God slays you, and for the rest of your days, you follow him around like a mongrel pup. That is very satisfying to know.”

  “How God slew Jeb Nubey?”

  “That you’re going to mellow with time.”

  “I can’t imagine it.”

  “Maybe you are a prophet?”

  “What about you and the way you stand up to the monsters?”

  “Stand and see the salvation of the Lord!” Louie laughed, and it was in an irritating manner that made him sound always right.

  “You’ve given me a new view of redemption, Louie, I’ll say that,” said Jeb.

  “I walk out on the sea of God’s peace, Good Reverend, and as long as I keep walking, his peace sustains me. Whether I stand before a saint or a monster, I won’t sink.”

  Jeb could not take his eyes off the altar. “Mind if I light those candles?”

  “Long as you don’t try and sing ‘This Little Light of Mine.’ You cannot sing, my brother.”

  “No need to get bigheaded, Louie. I’ll only sing along with you. We sound good together.”

  “Long’s you know I got the lead.” He started the chorus out. They sang until Jaunice opened the door and said they were disturbing the sleeping babies.

  “You can’t wake babies,” said Jeb. “They’re unforgiving as the dickens.” He had come to know a lot about children in spite of his days as a bachelor.

  Jeb waited outside the school on Wednesday. Cold air blew across the schoolyard, lifting like sheets, undulating and spitting crystal flakes across the grass.

  Fern saw him through the window and came out to meet him. She tied her white woolen cap under her chin and said, “Willie is still quiet, but he pitched for stickball today. Don’t tell me it’s snowing again.”

  “Smells like snow, feels like it,” he told her.

  The air had that kind of frigid, whistling force, piercing through grab bag woolens. Fern moved closer, her posture suggesting, perhaps to curious students, that she only used Reverend Nubey to block the wind and sleet.

  “Fern, I keep waiting for things to get better, you know, as in a good life. Something that I can offer you that you deserve.”

  She had gotten to where she listened without comment whenever he made this speech about waiting for the ship to dock.

  “It came to me today that it might not ever get any better, that this Depression may never lift, that my house may always be full of another man’s young.” He spread his arms, looking more like a big rooster instead of a savior, he thought. “What I’m saying is, take a look at what you see and ask yourself if what you see is enough. I may never be perfect enough for us, Fern.”

  “I’m not perfect, Jeb. When you know that, you’ll know that what we have is enough for us.” She pulled his face close and they kissed.

  Snow fell down and covered the ground, turning white and erasing the trees and turning the roofs white.

  Fern told Jeb she loved him while snow collected on her lashes and brows, with her lips turning blue, and with students banging inside on the glass and taunting their teacher. “They say that all the heroes went into hiding in 1929, but I have seen a hero of a different nature, and I think that is the way of true heroes. We all find our ways of surviving hard times, but men like you use your life to hold the rest of us up. You make the rest of us poor slobs want to carry on, to not give up.”

  “My baby knows what to say.” Jeb pressed his mouth against her lips, not caring if what she had said was true, but knowing that if she believed it, he could believe that a cotton picker from Texas could fall asleep in jail and wake up in heaven. Fern did look like an angel in the snow.

  She tapped an envelope sticking out of his pocket. “You got a letter?”

  Jeb pulled it out and handed it to her. “I almost forgot. I got a letter from Washington, D.C.”

  “The president wants your advice,” she said. “It’s high time he asked.”

  “Read it.” He handed her the letter.

  She opened the letter and read it to herself. Her lashes lifted and she stared at Jeb, astonished.

  Cherry blosso
ms do fall like snow on the Washington Mall. The clusters hung heavily on the branches, waving in the March wind, scattering onto the heads of people and covering the ground.

  The banner across the platform read THE AMERICAN DREAM and behind it Abe Lincoln looked down from his chair on his hill. The radio emcee Jerry Shaperi talked about Americans who dream, and how the suffering rise from the ashes of diminished hope. He talked about a minister from Arkansas who had climbed from past circumstances to become a hero to the hurting families of Nazareth, Arkansas. He quoted the Scriptures, saying, “‘Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?’ Philip saith unto him, ‘Come and see.’” He introduced Jeb while a group of two hundred or so applauded, including Florence Bernard and Angel, who watched from down front.

  Jeb felt Fern’s hand against his back as he stood up and then took his place on the taped X behind the American Dream lectern. “I can’t imagine how out of all the essays submitted, a transplanted Texan’s shabby version of hope got picked, but I’m grateful to you for asking me to come and read it to you.”

  The crowd laughed and then applauded again.

  “I call my essay for The American Dream, ‘A Feast of Breakable Bread.’” Jeb read:

  I have come to know a people cut from raw substance; alone, a ragged lot of individuals, but who, when fit together, form a deep basket of human expectation. Expectation foments hope. We hope so well and see so far that we are renowned as giants of hope. But even legends can stumble.

  When Americans dream, we come to believe that who we are, or who we might become, is so tightly woven into the material of dreams that when dreams fail, we faint for fear. But we are more than mere dreamers. Our reach can surpass even a grand expectation when we know that sweet secret that can take us farther and higher than one human can imagine. This great mystery of humanity, this elixir that can fill hungry stomachs and put tyrants out of business, holds the key to our success as a civilization. What is this secret that holds so much sway over the human condition, yet is so easily overlooked? How do we unearth what seems so deeply buried in human misery and suffering?

  The weight of national failure is a heavy weight, but we cannot forget that weights are forged by time, and broken by fortitude and character. Failure is the opportunity to scrutinize what has weighed us down, admit our failures, and look for elements most often neglected, elements that corrupt our dreams and leave us as outcasts in our own land, desperately sojourning again, as our ancestors sojourned, and seeking to climb again, to see again, to feel the sun on our faces and read hope in our children’s eyes.

  Our humanity cries for justice and of wrongs being righted. We long to be lifted up and made strong conquerors. But history proves that conquerors fall, so we listen well, retool, and seek a better dream. If we look deep, it is the one most inevitable, the one we can rely upon and trust as our constant; that is in knowing that when we are broken, like the bread from Christ’s table, the whole world is fed.

  The sweet nectar of brotherhood is my reaching across the fence to take the hand of the fallen neighbor. Or if both of us have fallen, we hold tightly to one another and stand together, one against the other. But we have both given and, as a result, we have both received.

  Here we stand broken, some of us fallen, of that we are certain. We dislike this broken state of affairs. It makes us ill at ease and gratefully we look for the morning when we will leave it behind. But as we empty our hands of failure, we should also learn our lessons in knowing for what things we should reach. Remaining breakable is not our natural desire, but in the forging of our plans, it should be our driving mission. If we remain breakable, we are no longer keeping what we know of freedom, ingenuity, and happiness under the roofs of a few. If what we are producing within our own heart is food for many, for others beside us, then we become that feast, a banquet of liberty, love, peace, kindness, generosity, humility, and a country for all men and women that is a bottomless basket. That is not only how we feed the world, it is how we feed ourselves.

  When we cease to feed our brother, to make room for him at our table, bitter corrosion will infect us all and we will find ourselves once more beneath its weight. Greed is not a friend. Love for all is not our foe.

  What is my American dream? To remain that breakable member of humanity who is no stranger to charity. I desire a language that is so fluent in generosity and compassion that all the world will beat a road to my door to learn new tongues. If I can know the fellowship of strangers, see that no orphan is homeless, and rise up to find that no mother is left to grieve over the treatment of her children, I have found my dream.

  Perhaps I am a man of lost causes. But what man or woman is without an ancestor who has not known the bitter defeat of a lost cause, only to rise on that one glorious morning to discover their broken state has proliferated and given them back their land, their fertile condition, and to know that it emerged from brokenness?

  Christ declared we are only one body, one bread. He showed us how by giving up our single purpose, laying down our isolated aims, that we could accomplish magnanimous feats. Such exploits are gotten through pain, but what ideal wrought beneath the beatific pain of selfless love has ever disappointed mankind?

  When the self is told to stand down, what rises is the spirit. From spirit comes flight. Flying once again is our grand enticement. By unfolding our arms to reach into a brother’s life, we are unfurling our wings to fly.

  Who is my brother? He is like me, flesh and blood and soul and yearning.

  What is the American dream? It is more than a dream. This laying down of the self is our mission. It is our calling and we offer it freely, our feast of breakable bread, to our brother and our neighbor and those who sojourn with us on this soil.

  Jeb thanked them.

  The crowd exploded with cheers while Jerry Shaperi presented Jeb with a plaque.

  Fern came up behind Jeb and slid her arms around his waist. “I’ve found my dream too, Jeb,” she whispered. “I dream of you.”

  “It says that the reflecting pool is one-third mile long. I feel small here,” said Fern, who read from a brochure. “This is what it feels like to be an ant.” She glanced up and down the reflecting pool, from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument. “Where did Florence and Angel go?”

  “Sightseeing. You think anyone in Nazareth heard me today?” he asked.

  “The ones who wanted to hear heard you. In time I believe that all will hear.”

  “That’s what I love about you, your optimism.” Jeb took her hand and led her to the center of the west end. He knelt. “I’m sorry this has taken so long. You’d think that with my speech making I’d know exactly what to say at this moment.”

  Fern’s cap blew off in the wind. Her hair blew around her face, as it had done the first time he saw her from the stream.

  “I know there are women who are easy to know, easy to get. I’ve known them and they’ve known me. But only once have I met the one who I knew from the minute I laid eyes on her that she was the prize. I’ve had to fight to have you and lose those parts of myself that made me, at least in part, unworthy to even call you my friend. But I’m asking you now, Fern Coulter, to be my friend for life, with all these children in tow, with my life in a mess.”

  Fern cried. “I never really answered you, did I, Jeb?”

  “Marry me, Fern, just as I am. I love you more than life.”

  “Jeb, you are my very best friend.” She bent and kissed him. “I have watched you grow into a giant of a man, but I’ll gladly stand in your shadow if it means that you will always be holding my hand. I will take you if it means living with twenty children not our own and dealing with a hundred towns like Nazareth. I think you should know that I’m not the perfect woman, though. I don’t have a perfect past either. Over time I want you to know that about me, that my history is not as honorable as you believe. But if you still want me, yes, I want to marry you too.”

  “The past is the past, Fern.” Jeb came to his fee
t and they kissed.

  They walked beneath the Japanese cherry blossoms and it was spring, a time when heroes walked the streets again.

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  1.Jeb Nubey has assumed the full duties as pastor of Church in the Dell but the stresses of the ministry are beginning to weigh down his enthusiasm. His tendency to exemplify a savior style of ministry is central to his self-doubt. How does his need to fix the problems of his church complicate his life? How does it improve his abilities as a minister?

  2.When a baby girl is dropped off on Jeb’s doorstep, his attempts to find a home for the baby are hindered by her race. Would this situation create a conflict today? How have racial relations improved or worsened since 1930’s America? Should the Church or can the Church take measures to improve racial harmony?

  3.Jeb wrestles with the burden he feels he has placed on his relationship with Fern Coulter. He imagines a life with Fern free of the responsibility of the abandoned children he has taken into his home. Some believe that a life of faith equals a life of selfless service to others. Others consider a life of faith as one limited to personal development. What sort of boundaries can a person of faith create that strikes a balance with personal goals and service to others?

  4.When Jeb finally resigns himself to the fact that he is the only one willing to step up to the plate and care for Myrtle, he realizes he cannot shoulder the burden alone. He hires a woman considered amoral by the community to nurse the baby. Then he allows the young teen, Lucky, to move in and help with her care. His life grows steadily more complicated as he invites people from outside the church to help an orphaned baby. How might the people who were judging him for these choices have helped to simplify his decisions?

  5.The church board members view Jeb’s dilemma as one that a good leader can mend quickly. Some of them imply that Jeb is a weak leader because he is not responding fast enough to the demands of the church families. If you were to make a list of the qualities of a strong leader, what would those qualities be? Does Jeb possess some of the qualities on your list? Have you ever witnessed a leader being criticized for not responding quickly enough to the demands of those he is leading?