Nazareth's Song (3 page)

Hopper yelled out the open window of the jalopy driven by his oldest boy. “I’ll be back tomorrow, Dudley! You tell that to Mills!”

Jeb hesitated long enough to watch Hopper disappear around the next block. “Finn, go on and lock up behind me. It’s getting late.” He waited until Finn had locked the door.

When the sun set, it was as though all Jeb’s energy drained with it. He was as tired as the day had been long.

2

A
ngel came running out of Honeysack’s General Store holding a newspaper under one arm and hair ribbons in the other. As she seated herself next to Willie and Ida May, who sat in her brother’s lap, Jeb said, “I asked you to get a newspaper and that’s all.” He took the newspaper from her. “I can’t have you spending money we don’t have, Biggest.”

“Ida May and I can’t go to school without ribbons.”

“Your hair is fine. Vanity never did no one no good.” Jeb cranked the truck engine.

“Fellers shouldn’t get involved in a girl’s business. Here, Ida May, take two, one for each braid.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It don’t mean nothing. Let’s hurry before we’re late.”

Jeb slowed the truck to goad her. Angel huffed in exasperation.

“Men like you don’t get women—how we think and such, and what we got to have.”

“I knew women in Texarkana who would disagree with you.”

“Floozies don’t count as real women.”

“Last time I checked, women was women, big, little, purty, or bad.”

“What’s a floozie?” asked Ida May.

“If you knew women, you wouldn’t have so much trouble keeping one. A woman needs a man to spend his last dime making sure she has what she needs.”

“You got a lot to learn, Biggest, about men and women.”

“Be stubborn, then. And single.”

The drive away from the schoolhouse was quiet. Jeb had deposited all three Welbys at the school drive so that he could be the first to see Hayes Jernigan, the lumberyard boss, about more work at the lumbermill. The way he had it figured, with what he’d made last week, he could pay off his debts at Will Honeysack’s store and still have extra for daily grub.

After speaking with Hayes, Jeb waited outside the lumberyard office while Hayes figured his numbers and payroll. Finally, to while away the time, Jeb pulled his old banjo out of the pickup. His brother, Charlie, had dug it out of their mother’s attic and sent it to him over a month ago. Jeb played an open note, placed his finger over the middle fret of the first string, and then chimed the note. He plucked the fretted note next, but found it low. After adjusting the bridge, he plucked the note again, chimed it, and found it right.

As he waited for the yard boss to appear, he strummed a tune about a sailor. It set the lumberyard dog to barking, so Jeb played faster, laughing at the mutt the men called Dawg for lack of a better name. Dawg squatted in front of him, his tail swaying, friendly-like, a hairy pendulum.

Jeb felt the weariness of study and work easing out of him as he played. He had stayed up too late trying to tend to the obligatory sermon, all the while sensing Gracie looking over his shoulder. Then he’d stared up from his bed for hours, troubling over how some townspeople of Nazareth still looked down on him and the Welbys. The duties of the clergy seemed to hang over him like a hammer, ready to pound out of him any hope for gaining respect if he took the job before his time. If he ever did take the pulpit again, he told himself, he would prove his sincerity for reaching for so high a mark as the station of clergy.

Then his mind had run to worry, to finding a way out of the fight for everyday survival. He did not know how he could keep the Welby children without this lumbermill job or even afford to keep up his studies and work at the same time. He had not planned well for everyday life. But what else could he do but keep trying? The youngens had no place left to go. Angel had written to her aunt in Little Rock so many times he couldn’t bear to see her watching every day for a letter saying her momma had gotten well. Much less a note from a daddy who had left the children in the care of an old girlfriend and then disappeared with a wave of migrant workers.

Hayes Jernigan exited the office and shambled across the quiet lumber lot, counting a few dollar bills. Jeb’s heart sank.

“Nice picking for a preacher. Dawg seems to like it anyway.” Hayes laughed at the mutt’s interest in Jeb’s playing. “A few of the boys put in a word for you. Tuck Haw especially.”

Tuck played pool down at Snooker’s every evening with the other lumbermen. Jeb had stopped in to say a polite word to him and the other lumbermen last Friday night, but they mostly kept to themselves. It surprised Jeb that Tuck had spoken up for him, what with that particular group of men not finding favor first of all with a former con man but worst of all with a man intent on the study of church doctrines and such.

“They asked me to keep you on, Jeb. But I got to do what I can to hang on to men with tenure.” He handed Jeb his final pay. “If we hadn’t gotten that deal to build barrels, I’d be losing lumbermen that’s been eating sawdust since they was born. I hate that I don’t have no more work for you. I hope you find some.” He studied for a bit, as though rehashing what he had just said, and then added, “What I mean to say, Jeb, is it’s a cryin’ shame I got to let you go, what with those youngens you been carin’ for. My wife won’t hardly talk to me for it.”

Jeb thanked him anyway. “I’m obliged to you, Hayes.”

“You still countin’ on preacherin’, I guess. Some people believes they’s good money in religion.”

Jeb counted the coins from his pocket before adding the dollar bills. “One day, Hayes. You ought to come to church.”

“My wife would agree,” said Hayes.

Jeb knew that even Hayes had heard how he had skulked into town over a year ago pretending to be a preacher to feed himself. He figured Hayes’s churchgoing wife had more to do with the lumberyard owner hiring him than he had admitted. Jeb had hated how first one man downtown and then another always kept bringing up the past. But Hayes had kept his opinions to himself for the most part. After several months Jeb had finally felt a friendship forming between them. But Hayes’s letting him go said that business priorities had finally overridden camaraderie.

“Wish I had more work for you, Jeb.”

With what Hayes might have paid him over the next two weeks, Jeb could’ve stretched out beans and corn bread for that long. Now he would be back at the general store by Monday, most likely, delivering seed to farmers again.

Hayes walked him out to the truck. “I ain’t seen a banjo around these parts in a while. I had a cousin who could play like the devil.”

“My momma once said it was of the devil. After she died, I felt bad every time I picked it up. Only reason I got it is because my brother, Charlie, sent it to me. Seems a shame to hide it in the attic.”

“I’d like to hear you do another tune sometime. I like good fiddling and banjo playing. Makes me forget my troubles for a bit. Maybe it is of the devil, but I like the sound of it.”

Hayes heard a dinner bell ring and glanced up toward his office. His wife, Molly, waved a brown bag of something fatty from the grassless path to the office. Hayes told her to wait inside. “You drop by and tell us how you’re doing from time to time, Jeb.”

Jeb left him to tend to his meal.

The road from the mill to downtown Nazareth wound for miles, with rocks spitting out from under the tires like vipers. If he had turned right at the crossroads, he would be headed toward Hope. He had driven the kids there in July to buy a watermelon. Willie had eaten it until the bottom half of his face was stained red.

The thought of sending that boy and his sisters to places unknown quickened Jeb’s anxiety.

He headed straight and aimed for downtown Nazareth. He had to meet Reverend Gracie at the bank. Gracie intended to let Horace Mills, the banker, know of the upcoming transfer of the pastorate to Jeb, maybe by Christmas or even sooner. Mills and his wife had at times been the sole support of Church in the Dell, other than the families who tithed from their pantry or henhouse when cash had become such a rarity. Gracie had often sought advice from Mills about financial matters.

Jeb parked alongside the walk that ran in front of the bank and pulled out a fountain pen given to him by Freda Honeysack from the general store. She had called it a good-faith gift when he had begun his apprenticeship with Gracie. Through the glass of the bank’s windows, he saw the back of Philemon Gracie’s head colored like frost. He had arrived early and taken a chair to wait on Jeb. When he saw him he waved him inside.

Jeb had never known Reverend Gracie to cater to anyone, let alone Mills. But he had always shown his appreciation. Still, Jeb remembered how Horace Mills had changed toward him when he’d told him how sorry he was for the scam. Horace had not taken much stock in Jeb’s conversion, paying him as much mind as he would that lumberyard dog.

“I hate to bother the banker on his busiest day,” Jeb said now.

“Mr. Mills has supported Church in the Dell when no one else could. Better that we tell him about the change rather than surprise him.”

Mills’s office door opened and then stopped partway as though it had a spring weighting it from inside. A muffled voice, low like a man keeping secrets, followed the drawling door.

Asa Hopper appeared. His anger drew up his elongated jaw and turned his face pink as pickled eggs. Behind him came a tall young man who looked to be the oldest Hopper boy, skinny with a face that looked stepped on. Hopper leaned back inside the office and yelled something critical and then closed the door. The boy lagged behind, mumbling monotonous echoes to his father’s angry rants.

“Hopper has it in for Mills,” said Jeb as they watched the two leave.

“I believe we’re next.” Gracie lifted his body from the wooden chair as though it took all the strength he had mustered from breakfast to do so. He sipped on a bottle of medicine like it was milk and then hid it away inside his coat.

From the office Mills called an older woman, Mona, inside and then sent her right back out. “Reverend Gracie, Mr. Mills is ready to talk with you.”

Jeb issued a sigh that emptied him all the way to his feet. “It might be best for you to tell him without me present. I’ll leave and come back later.”

Gracie thanked Mona. Then he touched Jeb at the back of his arm and gave a gentle thrust forward, allowing Jeb to enter ahead of him. Jeb felt more illegitimate than when he had come into town posing as Gracie himself.

“Reverend Gracie, glad to see you,” said Horace before eyeing Jeb.

Jeb extended his hand, to which Horace responded with a politician’s squeeze. “I guess those Welby children are keeping you busy. That Angel is growing like a weed.”

Horace could immediately put people at ease, even those he tended to dislike. Jeb relaxed.

The banker’s office had a leather smell—not like well-worn saddle leather but like the shiny leather of a gambler’s study. Jeb wondered if the door behind Horace’s desk chair led to the man’s genuine working desk, cluttered with stacks of papers and loan applications. This room had not one speck of dust. His desk had atop it only one gold magnifying glass and a fountain pen that Horace tucked into a desk drawer.

Jeb and Gracie sank down into the two soft leather chairs that faced the desk. Gracie had a way of swallowing up the silence in a meeting with a pensive, reflective look about him, as though he owned the quiet and was preparing to fill it with brilliant, perfectly selected words. Jeb sat forward, prepared to look equally astute, until he saw that the coat sleeve around his wrist had frayed, with threads protruding like an old woman’s whiskers. He dropped his hands.

Horace sat forward, his dark worsted jacket scented by the faint suggestion of a cigar he had no doubt extinguished before the minister turned up. “Have you been to see the doctor, Reverend?”

“A few times since we last met. How is Mrs. Mills?”

“Bossy and loving it. Preparing for our daughter, Winona, to come home. She has a break coming up from her classes. Wants to take off a semester. For what reason, I couldn’t tell you, but who can figure out what goes on inside a girl’s head. Amy is her usual anxious self, rolling out pie dough and keeping her kitchen help busy.”

Jeb shifted to one side. His right elbow sank into the leather, which deflated like a tire beneath him.

“Horace, I’ll be brief. Doctors in these parts are big on honesty but low on know-how. I’m all my girls and Philip have in the world.”

Mills’s gaze trickled over to Jeb and then back to Gracie.

“My brother and his wife live in Cincinnati and they have the highest regard for a doctor they want me to see.”

“A visit to Cincinnati would do you good,” Horace said.

Gracie lifted as though the chair were swallowing him whole.

“Not leaving for good, though.” Horace’s brows made a gray ledge beneath the age lines that mapped a near perfect tick-tack-toe in the center of his forehead.

“Jeb is near ready for his ordination. He’s studied like the wind, like I did at his age.”

Jeb saw how Horace examined him for any sign of a blemish. Before the banker could raise a complaint, he sat forward. “Mr. Mills, I know my past is shady. But Reverend Gracie has taught me well. I trust his teaching. I love Nazareth, and I want to serve Church in the Dell.”

“Jeb’s passed every seminary course I’ve had mailed to him,” said Gracie. “He has agreed to preach this Sunday. It will be his first time since his apprenticeship with me began.”

Jeb’s stomach did a flip-flop.

“And his first time since he was jailed for fraud and attempted murder,” said Horace.

Jeb felt as though his entire body had gone numb, like his whole bottom half had been run over by a tractor.

Horace’s smile spread like the opening of a dam. “Ha-ha! Just joshing you, Jeb. Or is it Reverend Jeb?”

Gracie, if he were elated, hid it soberly. “I can’t stay in Nazareth much longer.”

“If I could get him to stay, I would,” Jeb told Horace. He knew his promise sounded empty. Only this morning he had found Gracie seated at his desk drinking his bottle of medicine.