Nazareth's Song (7 page)

“I haven’t told a thing to anyone, so don’t blame me,” said Angel.

Jeb could only remember the talk he’d had with Fern at Beulah’s. From that little get-together, a barrel’s worth of stories could spread, Thursday to Sunday. He searched Fern out. She stood talking with a few of the single college girls, not much older than one herself. If she had shared Jeb’s news with anyone, she did not show it on her face. Jeb walked past her without looking at her or her latest annoying hat.

Willie ran and blended into the group of boys that looked cut out from the same family tree—thrice-mended shirts tucked into pants, kitchen-cut hair, and shoes either too tight or loose as their momma’s tongues.

Jeb joined Gracie on the church steps while a third cousin of Mr. Plummer, the tailor, rang the church bell. Plummer, who normally rang the bell, had stayed home three Sundays in a row to tend to Mrs. Plummer’s gout.

Gracie touched Jeb’s arm and led him through the doors ahead of the crowd.

“More people here than usual,” said Jeb.

“Our secret sprung a leak,” Gracie whispered. He had never whispered in the whole year and a half Jeb had known him.

“Will Honeysack placed an extra chair behind the pulpit for you, Jeb. You ought to take a seat right now and stay there until after I make the announcement. Otherwise, you might have too many questions to answer.” Gracie stopped in the middle of the aisle as though he could plug the leak while Jeb made for the chair. The minister didn’t act aware of the few ladies who dabbed their eyes in plain sight of him.

Jeb could not remember why he had taken so many notes or if it was humanly possible to tie the scrawled jumble into a steady stream of thought. A familiar jumpiness worked its way up his arms to his neck, like the day he had first taken the pulpit as a fake, not knowing Adam from Job’s pig. Gracie took a seat beside Jeb and smiled his encouragement before bowing his head in prayer. Jeb was not reassured. It would satisfy him to no end if Gracie would stretch his prayers into the noon hour and then call off his morning in the pulpit until a day that Jeb might feel legitimate. As Gracie prayed for the message soon to be delivered, Jeb reasoned it would be good for God to strike him dead. It was the fastest cure to drum up when his good sense took wing. His thoughts tangled like kites.

He had not felt this sick since the time his momma had taken him and his brother to church against their will. Jeb being so young, it was his first recollection of the little church cradled between a cotton field and downtown Temple. Laurel trees had scented the churchyard that day, and he remembered it like he remembered triangles of cold corn bread on the stovetop left out for midnight hunger pangs.

Once inside the small building, a church lady who taught the children and was therefore duty-bound to the whole bunch of them had taken Charlie and Jeb by their elbows and said, “All of the child-ern are going to say a Bible verse in front of the church this morning. You may as well join them.” She had not sounded the least bit enthused nor told them her name or asked them theirs. She’d pressed a piece of paper with a Scripture scribbled on it into Jeb’s hand, his fingers still sticky with breakfast jelly.

Jeb’s abrupt onset of paralysis of the mouth had not allowed him to tell the churchwoman he could not read—not at age five or ever. By the time twenty or so girls and boys had popped off their verses followed by a sigh of relief, Charlie had taken a step back and hidden behind a tall youth who stood bowed in front of him as though ashamed of his height, leaving Jeb out front. The old woman, who sat with her long dress falling between her knees, pointed at Jeb like she expected a recitation out of Shakespeare’s works. All Jeb could see was his momma lowering her eyes. Her cheeks blushed like summer apples on the bough. Charlie gave him a poke and with a loud suck of breath, Jeb blurted out the only thing he had ever memorized by heart.

A lot of people had cordially flattered his mother afterward for the fine way her boy gave the Pledge of Allegiance. Jeb had run all the way out to the wagon with Charlie running behind him calling him things like
idjut
and
ignert fool
.

Gracie brought Jeb back to the present. He must have noticed Jeb’s blank stare. “Good crowd this morning. The rumor mill is in our favor this go-around.” He read Jeb’s anxiety. “This kind of thing always leaks out, Jeb. Best to take it in stride.”

Jeb read over again the first of sixty-seven note cards in his Bible.

“I’m going to let you preach, and then I’ll announce that you’ll preach again in two weeks. I’d like them to warm up to you.”

Jeb decided he would step outside when Gracie announced his revisit to the pulpit. The best image he could conjure was of himself running away from Church in the Dell before the town decided to roast him. It had a familiar smack to it.

At the other end of the church, the banker, Horace Mills, waited outside the doorway until his wife, Amy, entered ahead of him. She spoke to two women as she gestured behind her. A young woman with Amy’s round eyes followed her into the room. The older women greeted the younger as if they already knew her. She turned and swayed back onto her heels to Doris Jolly’s organ playing, a little of the jitterbug in her steps. Jeb thought,
This must be Horace’s daughter, Winona
.

Amy included the girl in all the female banter, but some of the older women’s discussion must have bored her because she soon turned away to shop around the sanctuary for a diversion. Her eyes fell on Jeb. He swallowed, too aware of the way she noticed him. He wondered if he looked as awkward as he felt. Nothing about her should have caught him off guard. Any local girl around town who had given him a look always got at least a smile back, even with, as Gracie called it, his best minister’s decorum on hand. The girl’s face relaxed. She hooked her arm into her father’s and said something privately to him. Horace glanced at Jeb, shook his head, and escorted his daughter to their customary pew.

Fern, who usually spent every Sunday buttoning dresses for Angel and Ida May, took her seat behind the Mills family. She looked crisp as clothesline laundry and as aloof as if they’d never met for coffee that week at Beulah’s.

Angel brought Willie and Ida May in alone now, mothering them into the church even though Willie despised her nagging at him.

Jeb knew the way the churchwomen stared and whispered would prove more than a coincidence. All the gazes drifted from Gracie to him and then back again to the minister.

Gracie did not have to quiet the congregation. The roomful of people fell silent when he took the platform. He bowed his head. A ripple of shuffling followed, and then every head surrendered to the morning prayer. He prayed for Church in the Dell as if he had to keep the devil from the door, his moderate pitch rising and falling. Sun trickled through the eastern windows and across the bowed heads. Particles of dust danced like gold dust in the light, drawn up toward the windows, lifting like God might walk in at any moment upon the light beams.

Gracie wiped his brow. A pale whiteness around the eyes hinted at his illness.

When Gracie spoke of Jeb’s dedication to his education as a minister, Fern studiously turned her head and stared out the window as though what was outside was infinitely more interesting than what was in front of her. By the time the minister expounded upon Jeb’s scholarly devotion to theology, Fern was smoothing her skirt and thumbing through her Bible—anything to show she wasn’t the least bit interested in what Reverend Gracie was saying at the moment. Jeb imagined how he might look out over the congregation every Sunday at a face that refused to acknowledge his existence.

He glanced over at the Welby children. For some reason Angel could not take her eyes off Gracie’s oldest girl, Emily, as though her strange mix of jealousy and admiration were interfering with her validation in the eyes of the churchgoers. Since Gracie had rightfully taken the pulpit, Angel had somehow got lost in knowing her place at Church in Dell. She was no longer the minister’s eldest girl and had aimed her lostness and jealousy at Emily Gracie.

“After a full year of study as my apprentice, I’m happy to introduce Reverend Jeb Nubey and ask your kind attention as he brings the morning’s sermon,” Gracie finally introduced him.

Before Jeb had made his way to the lectern, Gracie gave him a firm pat on the back. He wanted to turn and follow Gracie off the platform. The lectern was too thin to hide behind. When he placed the Bible open faced in front of him, his notes spilled out onto the floor. He knelt to retrieve them and found he could not shuffle the cards back into any sense of the original order.

When Jeb gave the concluding prayer he felt as though his feet were nailed to the floor. Not a soul whispered so much as an amen when he finished. But before he could gather his notes and disappear through the rear exit, he felt Gracie grasp the back of his arm and stand beside him.

He thanked Jeb for his wonderful delivery of the morning’s message and then said, “For the sake of order, I would like to quell the speculation about my health. For those of you who have already expressed concern to me this morning, I thank you. I can’t think of any better place to be but in Nazareth during my time of need. Your compassion for me and my children has not gone unnoticed. I love you all beyond words.” His voice broke for the first time since he had divulged his illness to Jeb. “But God did not intend for our bodies to go on forever. A good friend and family member has made the way for me to see a doctor in Cincinnati in the coming months, maybe sooner.” He waited for the muttering to fade. “I promise not to abandon the pulpit at Church in the Dell until you have found confidence in my replacement.”

Jeb would have liked to leap from the platform and depart without leaving a single track in the sawdust. Gracie, without warning, said the thing that Jeb felt should not be said for months: “I submit my resignation to you but will stay on for the weeks it takes to prepare your new minister for service. Before reacting, I urge you to take this matter first to God in prayer.”

Jeb studied reactions. But it seemed he found none. He could not decipher the congregation’s assessment of his preaching or Gracie’s announcement. Except from Gracie’s children. Emily had a stoic look, but her eyes were damp around the lashes. Emily’s self-assurance had always deflated Angel, he knew. The instant she was no longer “the pastor’s daughter” but instead the con man’s conspirator, something had been taken from Angel. Even though the Gracies’ kind of community standing never belonged to her in the first place, her resentment toward Jeb had worsened. Throughout the following months Angel’s attention had wandered back to Emily every Sunday morning, like a street child who watched a family through snowflaked windows. She wanted what Emily had—the understood respect that came from being a pastor’s daughter.

Now, Angel righted herself as though she’d been asked to draw a straw.

“When will you go?” Doris Jolly asked from the second pew.

“If it weren’t for God’s gift of an apprentice, I’d not know what to do,” said Gracie. “Reverend Nubey has kindly accepted the chance to stand behind this pulpit. When Reverend Nubey and all of you feel he is ready, I will make my departure. If you support him and embrace him as I have, you’ll not be sorry.”

No one said a word.

Fern Coulter tucked her handbag under her arm and slipped out the back door. Emily Gracie pushed past her brother and sister and ran out behind Fern.

Angel studied the churchfolks’ cold reaction, and then, deflated at their lack of popularity, withdrew her approval as quickly as she had given it. She looked at Jeb as though he had robbed a bank.

A delegation of men, farmers, and shop owners from downtown disappeared into the parsonage with Philemon Gracie. That quickly arranged meeting left Jeb in the midst of all the curious women.

While the other ladies clustered in the sunlight of the open front door, Evelene Whittington, the sovereign of the downtown Woolworth’s, approached Jeb first. “I know you’ve been hard at the books this past year. Not a lot of young men want to fool with church matters, what with the country being in such a bad shape. Let me be the first to say that if Reverend Gracie has to go, welcome, Reverend Nubey. God’s will be done, I say.”

Two other women moved in behind Evelene as Jeb accepted her hand. “Your words mean a lot to me, Mrs. Whittington.”

Mellie Fogarty, Ida May’s substitute aunt, told Jeb, “Beats all the way you took in these child-ern like they’s your own. Don’t know how you get by these days, but the Lord will provide, as they say. Glad to know little Idy May will still be traipsing through these church doors every Sunday. I’d have thought you’d have sent them off to parts unknown by now. But no, not you, Mr. Nubey. Or do we call you ‘Reverend’ now?”

Florence Bernard reached between Evelene and Mellie with her large-boned hands. They felt warm as she clasped his fingers. “I don’t know what the men is up to, but we ladies welcome you, Reverend.” She said “Reverend” with more ease than the other two. “That was the best sermon I’ve heard you preach ever!”

Florence’s friend Josie kept a yard or two of distance, as did the other women who watched the door of the parsonage through the open back door. Josie and Fern had spent many a Saturday blowing on cups of coffee at Beulah’s café. Beulah, who never had come to church until now, talked with Josie. Both of them chatted and paused to glance at Jeb and then out the back door. He was glad to see any alteration in the community’s paradigm bring Beulah to church, even if led by the scent of gossip.

Maybe he had done some good already.

The men spilled out into the yard between the parsonage and church. Jeb could not tell by Gracie’s stride if he came bearing good news or bad. Before reaching the back door of the church, Gracie caught his eye and gestured for Jeb to meet them all outside. He excused himself through the clusters of restless women.

Gracie smiled at Jeb. “They agreed to consider you as their minister.”

Jeb repeated the words “agreed to consider” and then read the worst into its context.