Fallen Angels (15 page)

8

D
ivining was of the devil, plain and simple. Whether or not the Mississippi flood of 1927 had sloshed into eastern Arkansas as far as Nazareth was unknown to Angel. But when the banks had emptied into the rivulet, some high waters at one point had deposited an old table along the shallow embankments. The table had no sign of any paint or stain to its finish, but had the textured feel of weathered wood that had somehow preserved its integrity. Having seen the value of a quiet place to lunch, someone had left a straw-bottomed chair beside it. Scattered around it were wood shavings, curled remains of a whittler's happy hour.

The sun obverted its five o'clock face enough to darken the hardwood shadow of pine and oak along the creek and caused to arise the notion that spirits dwelled along the fringes of the cemetery. Angel gathered three customers under her seer's wing, including two younger girls dressed in store-bought linens—Bea and her cousin, Winnie. Their presence attracted three more. Angel's pack was growing nicely. “I'll show that Jeb how it's done,” she muttered under her breath. Ida May, who feared her sister's hushed tone and squinty eyes, returned to the adults situated on blankets on the safe side of the church and far away from the ancestors. Willie, never far from Angel's lead, posted himself next to her, holy man number two. Twin girls from a large sharecropper's family, Marcella and Johnna Lundy, looked on, one girl with a shriveled profile that appeared cut from newspaper, the other, less loved and overfed, moved side-to-side in the shape of a tomato. They kept a safe distance.

“Levitation is a gift from God,” Angel said. “Superfied, mystical, and beyond human imagination, levitation takes a lot of practice, to get things just so objects obey your words.”

Arnell Ketcherside, sack-race winner, sniffed. “Words. Like you know any words.”

“Words is power. Power is words. All of you, come and lay your hands on this table and I'll give you a taste of my powers.” Angel seated herself in the straw chair with the seat bottom scarcely attached by rope.

The smell of rain, long dried up along the creek bank, was a rotting mash of dead tadpoles and sucked-dry algae. The riverbed's decay, along with the retreating light, conjoined with Angel's spell.

She coaxed the Lundy sisters back to the table. “Everyone put your hands on the tabletop, pinkies touching.” When all of the children complied, Angel told them, “It doesn't work right unless someone has gotten a sign from the spirits.”

The two girls from the wealthy families, Bea and Winnie, averted their eyes. Unbelievers.

Marcella, the tomato-shaped twin, inquired with a degree of meekness, “What kind of sign?”

“Dead cats. Stillborn calves. Don't you know nothing, Marcella?” Angel drew in a breath and blew it out as though impatience and her superiority had found agreement.

“I saw a dead rat out in the barn, its mouth froze open.” Arnell's youngest brother, Roe, who spoke ear-splittingly loud, received a box to the ear by his oldest brother for complying with Angel's entreaty.

“You've got the idea. For this to work you all have to close your eyes while I conjure the soul of the rat.”

When Arnell snapped to say how stupid they all were, the others shushed him until he stepped into the ring and joined pinkies between Willie and Roe.

Marcella whimpered like an infant whose face has slipped under the blanket, a muffled sound that Angel disregarded as the lament of a mollycoddle.

She made them close their eyes, but peered through her lashes, pressing the toes of her reclaimed leather church shoes against the ground. Her knees abutted the underpart of the table. Squeezing her thighs together, she poised her knees and said, “OH, TABLE! MOVE!” The table, pushed against the compacted ground, jerked. The tabletop vibrated and moved a good two inches from its original position.

Johnna, who possessed the physical ability to sprint faster than most of the boys, did so. Her shriek ignited Marcella, who lumbered several paces behind her, terrorized. Johnna latched onto the low limb of a tree, swung up, and disappeared into the summer-laced branches. Marcella wailed, unable to either latch onto the limb or hope that it could hold her. She waited on the ground, sobbing and angry that her twin had left her behind.

Willie stared after the twins, open-mouthed, until a laugh fluxed but of him. Deep and throaty, an unbridled honk of a laugh, it drew the laughter of the remainder standing around the table. All except for Roe Ketcherside, who stepped back, fingers lifted as though scorched.

Angel, believing no harm was done, pushed herself away from the table and said, “I guess I made believers out of you all. Who wants pie?”

The Lundys, dishonored by their own histrionics in plain sight of their peers, might never have admitted they had tampered with the devil. But Bea and Winnie, daughters of overindulgent mothers, ratted at once—first to their mothers, who did not know what to make of the minister's daughter, and then to Florence Bernard, who could be, counted upon to expunge evil from the portals of the church. Arnell Ketcherside, when interrogated, made more of the fact that he did not believe the preacher's daughter possessed one bit of supernatural power in her smallest toe and insisted to every person who asked that he had not for one minute bought into her spiel.

Florence Bernard had bobby-pinned a scarf to her head while the corners hung freely down the sides of her face. When she inquired child-to-child in her search for Angel, the flaps blew back from her face like a nun's habit.

Angel had cut a square of coconut cake and laid it next to a triangle of chocolate cream pie when Florence found her. “Ma'am, what's wrong, ma'am?” she asked.

“You come with me.”

Angel stuffed as much of the cake into her mouth as was humanly possible and walked six paces behind Florence. The story of her levitation feat had traveled person to person until every eye followed her to the picnic table where Jeb and Fern conversed. Jeb had loosened his tie. His sleeves were rolled up above his forearm and he sat with both elbows on the table, hands clasped, as he chatted with the schoolteacher.

“Reverend, your oldest has got a thing or two to tell you,” said Florence.

Angel feigned interest in the boys’ race across the church grounds.

Jeb turned his gaze on Angel, but his lips pursed, cagey, as though mistrustful of what might come from her mouth.

“It's just silly, that's all,” said Angel. “We was playing a game. It didn't amount to nothing.”

“Stuff and nonsense! They were messing with witchcraft, Reverend, not a hundred yards from the church steps.” Florence was ashen.

“I lifted a table with my knees. It was nothing,” said Angel.

Fern's head tilted to one side as she said, “Mrs. Bernard, how was Angel involved in witchcraft?”

“She claimed to be hexing a table down by Long's Creek. Sent the Lundy girls up a tree, and that little Roe Ketcherside, who already wallows in confusion, is practically mute.” She addressed Angel. “Now I know you thought you was funning, girl, but you start messing around like that and next thing you know, you'll have the children all mesmerized. You get that stuff started and there will be no end to the beguiling. We'll not allow it in our families.”

Jeb's brow lifted as though he did not understand the nature of the complaint.

“Reverend Gracie, you cannot allow these kinds of games. If the minister's children run amok, then every family in Nazareth will pay the price.” Florence sounded troubled.

“Yes, I understand, ma'am. Angel, you go apologize to the Lundys and see if you can't get Roe to say a few words.” Jeb turned back to face Fern.

“Shall I accompany Angel to remedy her predicament?” asked Florence.

Jeb nodded without making any further eye contact with Angel.

Angel walked in such a way as to put some distance between herself and Florence Bernard. She rinsed her coconut-frosted fingertips in Josie's water pail and then saw the Lundy twins gathered with a group of church children. She approached them in the manner of a grown woman. “I'm sorry I scared you with my table trick. It was a joke, if you didn't know.”

“Of course we know. Anybody could tell you was a fake,” said Johnna.

Angel turned away to seek out Roe Ketcherside. She found him seated beneath an oak tree making a clover necklace. “Roe, if I scared you a while ago, I am sorry.” She waited for him to respond, but he only linked another clover inside the stem of another.

Roe still offered no hope that he had recovered from his bout with silence.

“If you forgive me, then just give me a nod,” said Angel.

Roe's tongue could be followed inside the right side of his mouth. Finally, with his eyes scarcely widening to acknowledge her, he nodded.

“Roe, could you let us know that you are able to speak?” asked Florence.

A shudder went through Roe. It caused Angel to stamp her foot. “Stop it now, Roe. You know you're not beguiled. Let Mrs. Bernard know you can speak if you want.”

Roe fell backward and rolled his eyes back in his head.

“Oh, for crying out loud!” said Florence. “He's fine as rain. I know a possessed person when I see him. Roe, you ought to be ashamed.” She padded away, Angel presumed, in search of chocolate pie and time with the adults, and joined the widowed women, her scarf knotted tightly behind her head, chignon hived up in a whorl of piety all the while, chatting and pointing back at Angel.

The religious had their notions.

Jeb cut the brown substance with the side of his fork. It had a crumbly texture, very brown, like dark-brown sugar mixed with cinnamon. He delivered the load to his mouth and tasted the sweet-yet-still-indistinguishable flavor on his tongue. “What is it?” he asked Fern.

“Shoo-fly pie. My mother's recipe.”

It tasted like nothing to him, as though the main ingredient had been left out of the filling. The dryness of it had the texture of flour, sugar, something once moist and now dried to a crumbly filler. “I've heard of shoo-fly pie.” His mother must have hated it, too; to the best of his remembrance, she had never made it.

The slice Fern had cut for him looked to be a quarter of the whole pie. If there had been others around them, he could engage in picnic chat, baseball, fishing, or any number of things to keep his attention from the shoo-fly pie.

But Fern had a focused alertness, intent on the action directly in front of her.

Jeb ate another bite.

“It's made with molasses,” she said.

The bite of pie crumbled inside of his mouth. “I like your biscuits, too.” He wanted to say something truthful.

“Our last minister studied at a small school out west. I wonder if you knew him, Reverend Guy Holmbeck?”

Jeb said, “I never knew him.”

“I don't know of any schools for ministers, really, though. I work to help the students find placement in other subjects.”

“You went to school where?”

Fern accepted the diversion. “Oklahoma, where I grew up. I remember the loneliness of the first year. I missed my mother terribly and only a hundred miles from home. I suppose it is easier for young men.”

Jeb cut another bite of the pie but left it on the fork;

“When you went away to school, did you miss your family?”

Credentials had not come up before. Jeb could not recollect if his mother's preacher had ever mentioned where he had pursued his education. He decided that it should not be in Oklahoma, at any rate.

Fern waited.

He could not remember the question. “I studied in Texas.”

“Your family is from Texas or you studied for the ministry in Texas?”

“Both.”

“Mr, Mills, the banker, did his studies in Texas, too. I'm surprised you too have not crossed paths. Dallas is a big place, though.”

“Missouri, that is. My family is from Texas. I went to school in Missouri.” Jeb handed her the plate. “I could never eat all of this. Please, if you want, you can finish this for me.”

“If I eat one more bite, I'll explode,” she said.

He placed the plate on the tabletop.

“Who is your favorite writer? For the life of me, I can't detect the influence in your sermons.” Fern took the plate and laid it to the side of the pie.

“I write my own sermons. No influence.”

“Reverend Gracie, I did not mean to imply that you stole your messages. But listening to speeches, like the president, or to ministers, I play a sort of game. I listen for quotes or philosophies. You know, like Pascal or some of those other church fathers.”

Jeb saw the children laying in the shade with their mothers while the men congregated in packs to discuss farming methods. “Everyone looks bored. I think I should start another relay race.”

Before he could pick up the whistle, Fern laid her hand atop his. “They aren't bored, Reverend Gracie. Just tired. They're enjoying the peace of the afternoon. Rouse those children now and you'll get the evil eye from some of the mothers.”

“Tell me who your favorite author is, Fern.”

“Walt Whitman for poetry. Several writers for novels.”

“Why do you like Walt Whitman?”

“His passion.”

Jeb nodded.

“You might explain his work better than I do. What is your favorite Whitman poem, Reverend Gracie?”

“All of them,” said Jeb.

“You're tight. How would one choose?”

Jeb shrugged.

“So true.”

Jeb fixed his gaze upon a sycamore tree. He thought Angel walked underneath its spreading shade to take a rest from trouble, but instead she hid most of herself behind it except for her face, which occasionally appeared around the other side. With Fern's back to her, she lifted both hands and waved.

Fern quoted a line from Walt Whitman.

Angel mouthed silently to Jeb words he couldn't interpret.

Fern now talked of the birthplace of the poet. Jeb pressed both hands against the picnic table surface and stood. “I'm sorry, Fern. Angel is trying to tell me something.”

Fern looked over her shoulder at Angel. “Come join us.”

Angel's agitation showed on her face.

“I'll be right back,” said Jeb.

Angel drew up her fist and covered her brow. “You're in for it, Jeb. We have to leave—now.”