A Flickering Light (38 page)

Jessie felt her face grow warm with shame. She
was
one of those fallen women that Ralph Carleton talked about, someone needing her soul cleansed. She was a woman who ignored a man trying to keep his vows to another.
What kind of woman am I?

The minister kept the message short because people stood in the parlor, and the aroma of Mrs. Kopp’s cooking and the neighbors’ contributions, all of which filled the table outside the open window, wafted over them like a silk scarf blowing gently in the wind, luring them to sustenance.

Daniel boomed out his vows and Voe hers, and when the minister said Daniel could kiss his young bride, he lifted Voe off her feet at the waist and held her to him as though she might fly away if he let her down. People applauded and cheered, and Jessie clapped along with them, though tears pooled in her eyes. She was happy for Voe, glad she could feel that. She looked for Fred, tried to catch his eye to see if he might be thinking the same thoughts as she. What she found instead was the face of Voe’s brother, Jerome, staring back.

When the pastor sent the couple out, Jessie followed close behind, along with a blond-haired man who was Daniel’s older brother. His wife had been introduced to Jessie in the bedroom where the women had congregated to help Voe dress, and she’d learned there that it was Thomas whom she’d be standing up with. She took Thomas’s arm, and he led her outside. “For pitures, then?” Jessie nodded, resisted the urge to correct his pronunciation.

Fred already waited outside. He’d set the camera up just beyond the porch. “Everyone stand up there, as many as you can. Thank you,” he directed. “Voe and Daniel, on the second step, and Jessie and—Thomas, is it? Yes, you stand just behind them, in the middle of the crowd there. That’s good. Thank you.”

People muddled around, moving into position, laughing. Jessie grabbed Thomas’s hand. “Let’s take the second step, and Voe and Daniel, you cuddle on the first step. We’ll be off to the side on the step above you but still look as though we’re flanking you both.”

Jessie could see Fred frown when he looked up from the camera. “Just take one this way,” she shouted. “Don’t you think this will work well, Voe?”

“You’re the poser,” Voe told her. “Any way you want it is all right with us, isn’t it, Danny Man?”

Daniel’s face burned red up through his ears. His brother clapped him on the back and said it was every man’s wish to be called a man by his bride. “Not in public,” Daniel said.

“Oh, especially in public,” Thomas told him to general laughter.

Fred signaled he was ready and asked people to look toward the camera and at the count of four he would take the shot. He took it at three, to everyone’s groan.

“Now let’s get some family photos.” Jessie elbowed her way past Voe and stood in front of the wedding party, her back to Fred. She began directing the immediate Kopp-Henderson family members to the table, where women of the Herold church had been fanning flies from the food. “Just settle down like you were going to eat,” Jessie said. “Then every other one lean forward or out so that I can see each of your faces. Go ahead and pick up a fork or something. A biscuit about to go into your mouth. Make it natural.”

“Don’t you start eating,” Voe’s mother warned. “There’s more to come, and it hasn’t been prayed over yet.”

Jostling and joking continued until all were settled enough, and Jessie walked behind them as though playing Duck, Duck, Goose, tapping shoulders, saying, “In, out, in, out,” indicating which way to lean. When she got to Jerome and said, “Out,” he reached behind his neck and grabbed her wrist. “I’m in,” he said. “Aren’t I in with you?”

“You’ll always be in my heart, Jerome Kopp,” Jessie joked.

“I will?”

“My artichoke heart.” The guests laughed. “But never in my dreams.” Those sitting next to Jerome elbowed him. “Now keep your head back out so we can catch you in the camera.”

“What else do you catch with that camera, Miss Jessie?” he said. “Your very own photographer?” Jessie felt her face burn as she wiggled her hand free of his and kept herself from looking at Fred.

“Why, I catch the faces of strong, handsome men like…Daniel here.” More kudos and applause. “Didn’t you see his portrait hanging in the parlor? Voe and I did the matting and the frame for that.”

“I don’t think you can get them all in that way,” Fred said, coming up behind her.

“It’ll be fine. I’ve done this before.”

“There’s too much in the photograph for the eye to accept,” Fred argued. He kept his voice low. “The food becomes the focus instead of the people. There’s too much chance of movement, Jessie. Miss Gaebele.”

“Just do it as I’ve set it up, or move aside so I can, Mr. Bauer,” she told him, her voice a slightly louder whisper.

“The sun hits in the wrong place. There’ll be shadows. No one will stand out. It’s the bride and groom who should draw the viewer’s eye.”

“They will. People will know. Just do it, please, before they tire.”

“Lover’s spat or professional squabble?” Jerome called out.

Jessie felt like someone had struck her with a chunk of ice.

Fred stood still as a post, so Jessie pushed past him, stuck her head under the cloth so she could see the image, pulled the shutter open, counted, then closed it.

“Now the wedding party alone,” Voe said. “You and me and Daniel and Thomas. Come on, Jessie.”

“All right,” Jessie said. “But let’s set it up over there in the garden. The two of you sitting with Thomas and me behind you.” She picked up the camera before Fred could protest, set it up again as she wanted. After all, it was her camera.

The shot was taken among the rows of new greens sprouting up. “New life,” Jessie said. “It’s the perfect place.” A yellow butterfly fluttered at the camera.

“I think a nice portrait shot of the bride and groom in the parlor would be good,” Fred suggested then. Voe agreed, and so once again the camera was carried back inside while Daniel commented on the growl in his stomach.

Jerome walked beside Jessie, carrying some plates he’d gotten from Fred, who had gone on ahead with the camera to arrange chairs and pull the drapes.

“Still giving directions, are you?” Jerome said.

“It’s what I do,” she told him. She smiled.

“I take directions well.”

“Maybe that’s your problem,” she said.

“It’s a lost cause, Jess. It is. You’re ruining your future hoping for what can’t be.” He nodded his head toward the parlor.

“Don’t be small, Jerome,” Jessie said. “Or foolish. I like you. You’re Voe’s brother. But I have a career to pursue. That’s all.”

“It’s him, isn’t it? I can tell.”

“Did you see the way I directed him? Do you think anyone would want to spend time with a woman like that if he didn’t have to? If the woman wasn’t his mere associate? Better think twice, Jerome.”

“Aw, you’re not so tough,” he said. His eyes sparkled.

“As tough as I have to be,” she told him, then started giving orders to Voe and Daniel.

“Hurry up, Mr. B.,” Voe said after several minutes of his arranging and rearranging. “We don’t have all day.”

“Yes, you do,” he told them. “You have a lifetime. Stay there. Don’t try to smile. It freezes in the frame and makes you look pasted.” Jessie wiggled rabbit ears behind Fred, making Voe and Daniel both laugh just as Fred snapped the shutter. Everyone applauded. It was as it should be. It was a wedding day.

The afternoon waned. The meal had been blessed and the food consumed (before the ale, at the direction of Mrs. Kopp), and the pickup band that played afterward took a break. “I think we ought to leave,” FJ said. “I’m going to be late getting you back, and I promised a ride to Russell yet before the day is over.”

“I suppose so,” Jessie said. She sat on one of the dining room chairs brought under the shade tree. She fanned herself. She looked incredibly young and vulnerable, and he hated himself for his loss of control that morning. It was a momentary lapse. It couldn’t happen again. It must not happen again.

Yet her presence comforted him. Even her pointing and prodding about how to do this or that, while annoying, also demonstrated her vitality, her amazing fire as she flitted like a bee around the honey of the wedding crowd.

“Oh, look,” Jessie said. “There’s a mourning butterfly. Don’t you just love the way they have that little white edge around the gray, as though they’re wearing a little cloak?” One settled on the back of her hand. “They always have the proper clothes to wear.”

“It mourns the loss of sweetness when it leaves your hand,” FJ said.

She turned to him. “You’re poetic,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

“The band’s starting up again,” Jerome Kopp said, motioning as he approached the two of them. “Wouldn’t you like to dance once, Jess?”

“Jessie,” she corrected. “It’s bad enough my mother gave me a boy’s name, so please don’t shorten it any more than it is. And no. You know I don’t dance. Our church doesn’t allow it.”

Jerome cocked his head, looked at her and at FJ. “Doesn’t allow dancing, your church. I bet it doesn’t allow a number of things that you
are
indulging in.”

FJ watched Jessie’s face turn pink before she said, “You’re right, Mr. Bauer. We ought to be getting back so you can give your son a ride in the touring car. I’ll say my good-byes to Voe and Daniel.” She stood then and smoothed her skirt before striding off with as much stature as her short legs allowed.

“She’s quite a woman, wouldn’t you say?” Jerome said. Both men stood staring after her.

“She has a bright future ahead of her as a photographer,” FJ told him. “Your sister too, if she applies herself a little more.”

“Oh, Voe won’t last long at your studio. Daniel will have her waiting on a babe before a year is out. Then he’ll want her home at the end of the day when his train crew’s in town, now that he’s certain she’ll be there waiting. A man likes to have a wife waiting for him, wouldn’t you say?”

“It seems to be the way of things, yes.”

“You’ve got a wife counting on you, don’t you? I’m sure Voe said you were married with children.”

“Indeed,” FJ said. The collar of his shirt felt tight.
The heat of the day
.

“A man has to appreciate what he’s got or he’ll forget and start looking for what isn’t his to have.”

“You’re a wise young man,” FJ said, “but you don’t have all your facts straight, Mr. Kopp. So perhaps you ought to forestall any more advice.”

He walked to the car then. They’d long ago loaded the camera and plates. He busied himself with his back to Jerome, hoping the boy had gone back to the crowd. He could hear his heart pounding a little louder than it should. He opened his shirt and the collar. If a bumpkin like Jerome Kopp saw what he thought he saw, how many others might see it as well?

“I’ll drop you off at your home,” Fred said. “No sense in you having to carry the camera back. I’ll bring the plates in on Monday, and we can develop them together.”

“Oh, just let me off at the studio now,” Jessie told him. “I may as well get started on some of them. I don’t have anything better to do. Besides, my parents don’t know that you drove me. They think Daniel or his brother came and picked me up here this morning.”

“Why would they think that?”

“Because I told the truth slant.”

The drive back had been a silent one, but Jessie assumed that the warm wind breathing on their faces and the tight goggles Fred had remembered he could wear to keep his eyes clear were the cause of the stillness between them. Maybe he was upset about her pushiness with the camera at the wedding or Jerome’s guessing at something improper. But she’d wanted him to see that she was fully capable of managing herself and that she didn’t need his protection or guidance in matters of the lens or her heart. She hadn’t liked Jerome’s comment about what her church didn’t allow. She’d wanted to look at Fred when he said that but didn’t dare. Jerome was seeing things, but she could handle him. He wouldn’t tell anyone that mattered, and what did he have to tell, after all? They’d shared a moment of intimacy, of
affection
. The world needed people to be more affectionate toward one another, more tender. That’s all this had been. Jerome saw things that weren’t there.