Fallen Angels (16 page)

“Now is not good. Fern is talking about Walt Whitman and slowly finishing off my shoo-fly pie.” He smiled in Fern's direction. “I don't care for any of it but I'd like to watch her eat it.”

“You know why everyone is still hanging out around the church, why the Lundys haven't started the walk home? Well, they just told me. ‘Cause you got round two of preaching to go, that's why.”

“Make sense, Angel.”

“It's called the evening service. They're all waiting for you to ring the church bell and call them all inside.”

The Mills had packed away their picnic inside the Buick Master. They joined Will and Freda Honeysack on the lawn. Several mothers combed grass from their off-springs’ hair.

“How much time do we have?” Jeb asked.

“Fifteen minutes if we start five minutes late like we did this morning.”

“Two messages on Sunday? That is surplus preaching, if you ask me. They're still digesting what I give them this morning.”

Mellie Fogarty strolled past while removing her large sunbonnet. “Looking forward to this evening's message, Reverend Gracie.”

Jeb watched her meander around three restless youths and chat it up with two women on the way inside the church. “We're sunk.”

“We are for a fact.”

Jeb had practiced for three days straight to memorize the Scripture about Adam and the garden. He had no time to remember a whole new passage. Angel coached him, saying over and over some verse her Granny taught her. But then she thought maybe it wasn't a Bible verse at all, just something that got told from one person to the next. “Don't tell them where to find this Bible verse or they'll be on to you for sure.”

Jeb dragged Angel up to the church even though it caused the lingering families to set off behind them and fill up the pews. “I don't get what you're saying, Angel,” he said.

“It's the only one I can come up with. Is it my fault you can't read?”

Fern had Ida May's hand. She settled her on the front row.

Willie ran in with his shirttail out and a dirty ridge of sweat across his brow. He took the back pew next to the Ketchersides, next to boys with grassy knees; although Mrs. Ketcherside was quick to sit in front of them and toss a warning glare.

Jeb said to Angel, “But I don't know why he did it. I don't get it.”

“Same as why anyone else would. I have to sit down, Jeb. Everyone is staring.”

With one hand, Jeb hefted the Bible and laid it on the lectern. He bowed his head and heard the corresponding shuffle across the sawdust floor. “Bless what I am about to say, O, God. O, God.”

Ida May had already fallen asleep right in Fern Coulter's lap. Jeb wished for the same weariness to settle across the entire congregation, a sleeping sickness that would cause the heads to loll, fall back, and drop forward so he could quietly pad away. “They's a story about a friend, a good buddy of Jesus himself who got himself very sick. By the time word spread to the Lord about his friend, his good buddy had already kicked the bucket. So to speak. Now they's a lot of things that the Lord could have done. Something big he was about to do, in spite of the fact they all thought it was too late to ask anything of God,” Jeb said. “But first thing's first. When Jesus came a-walking, walking he did, up to the tomb of his buddy, Lazarus, he was met by the old boy's sister. When she told Jesus Lazarus had gone belly up, the Good Book says, ‘Jesus wept.’ “

Angel's shoulders lifted and relief spread across her face.

“Why, people ask, would the Son of God have himself a good cry? He knew he had the power in his own two hands …” Jeb held up his hands in a vertical claw “… to impress them all with a miracle. And that he was about to do. But first, Jesus wept.”

Florence Bernard hasd a curious gleam, as though the twilight outside were coming straight in through her eyes.

“Because in spite of the bigness of God, he knows how all of us feel. When we smile, he smiles. When we laugh, he laughs. Where you think the good rain comes from so your crops'll come in? Got to be what happens when God is giddy. But when we cry, he cries, too.

“I was having a terrible day once. Well, not once. Many terrible days this old boy has seen. But on this day my mother had passed from this life. She was a lovely daffodil of a lady, my mother. I know of no sweet smell like that of a mother.”

All of the women smiled at one another.

“Not just the way they fill the whole house up with the smell of cornbread, fellers. No, I'm talking about the smell that only a woman has, that aroma of love she has for an ornery boy. It is the smell of a distant sunrise on the lake just when the fish are biting. You know that smell, men. So when your mother passes from your that aroma is gone. The cornbread skillet is cold and empty.”

“The fish stop biting,” said Horace Mills, He blew his nose.

“But it occurred to me when I read this Scripture that when I'd felt so sad, the worst day I ever knew, when my mother was carried away by the angels; God cried with ol’ Gracie. I was not alone.”

Florence, forced to dig through her handbag for a dry handkerchief, wiped her wet cheeks with the back of her hand.

“Sister Jolly, I feel the Spirit. If you would, I know we have an order to things, but if you could oblige us, would you play that song you played this morning? I kind of liked it.” Jeb thought about what he had just said, part of it feeling serenely right and another part a stench in the heavenlies. “Jesus wept,” he said again. “Let's all sing.”

9

J
eb did not sleep, well between Sunday night and Saturday night for the next three weeks. The blanket on his bed somehow always wound up on the floor and he woke up uncovered. The pressure to memorize stuck in his head usually just before he got out of bed and remained until sundown. Every night.

On Sunday afternoon he paced down by the stream behind the parsonage and lost all interest in fishing or checking his trotline. He recalled and then analyzed the Sunday faces of that morning and always noticed if someone drifted from the message. The bored ones worried him since they were the church members who might sit picking apart why his preaching was no good. For drifting minds might ask questions such as “Why does this preacher only preach from one small text every Sunday?” Or even “Why doesn't he seem to have a preacher's history, all of his stories haling from the cotton patch?” Or in the case of the greater minds, such as Fern had been endowed with, “Why did he never correlate his message with what she called a church father, quoting Pascal?” Or that other guy she gushed about.

Jeb had gotten his schooling in the field. Mentored by sky and lake, he'd never thought of preparing for the next decade, or equipping himself with learnedness. He had lived to eat and have a good smoke, and not having the latter was on him like a vengeance. The world continued its turn around the universe while the rest of the country broke its back upon the plow. The plow handles were his future, he thought, Someday he would get himself a piece of land. He had looked at it from every angle. He envisioned how he might turn the soil with the use of a good blade, finish his day with a smoke and satisfaction. But a lesser vision had kept him back in another man's cotton field. It was the crossing over from one life to the next that bewildered him. Getting to the other side with his name on the deed was the hardest piece to unravel.

Fern had a whole cockeyed view that he could not decipher, either. Whereas he pondered how he might get the next meal ticket, she wondered how she might feed the world.

Six trout glistened on the line. Their tails waved gently now, soft and agile, but earlier on, each shining fish must have put up a fight. Over the hours the hook had weakened their resolve. One large fish with passionless eyes opened its gaping mouth, slow, slow, fast. Its fins moved only with the current, translucent wings beneath the surface, subservient to another will. One glistening moment the trout hunted the next meal. The next, it became the meal.

Jeb wanted to ask Fern about the whole idea of a man hooked by his circumstances. But he liked her assumption of him that he had deeper thoughts. But if he asked her, she would see him as plainly ignorant. He could not let that happen. Nor could he give up her image of him even if it meant never obtaining legitimacy. Her respect for him had fed the new image he'd gotten of himself in the mírror. For a moment, he could almost smell his soul rotting.

He left the stringer of fish in the stream as though to do so might mend his hypocrisy.

Inside, Angel paraded in an old borrowed dress in the kitchen, dissatisfied with it, but not unhappy enough to change out of it. Mellie Fogarty had loaned a box of clothes to the girls if they promised to return anything they would not use. The idea of returning anything was what caused Angel to find use for every article in the box.

Ida May walked out of their room in a dress two sizes too big. She flopped the sleeves that fell over her fingertips. “This'd fit you, Angel.”

“Ida May, you will grow into this in six months. Put it in the closet and you'll be glad you have it later.” She watched over her sister unhappily.

Ida May stripped out of the dress and left it on the floor.

“You act like the bless-me bird is going to just fly in here with a box of clothes every other week. It don't work like that.”

Ida May, enjoying her shirtless folly, made checkers out of Coke bottle tops. “I don't want to try on clothes, Angel. I want to play.”

“Jeb, tell Ida May she has to do as I say,” said Angel.

Without a cigarette to his name, Jeb rifled through every kitchen drawer. If he found so much as a butt, he would take a drag on it. “Any of you kids seen the matches?”

“The preacher can't smoke nor drink, Jeb. If anyone sees you, you may as well take yourself down to the jail and lock yourself inside.” Angel held up one last dress ins front of Ida May.

“If they'll let me have a smoke in jail, I'll go willingly.” He slammed a drawer shut. “Not a match, not a smoke in the whole joint.” He had stolen a pack from Honeysack's when the clerk wasn't looking and tucked it, he thought, into a drawer. “It's like someone came in and robbed me of my smokes. Now who did it?”

Angel folded up the last dress and shuffled off the heeled dress shoes, the long shoes too wide for her slender tomboy feet.

“If you know anything about the sudden disappearance of my personal belongings, you'd do best to speak up,” said Jeb.

“You'd never catch me touching your old things,” said Angel. “The way you light up one right after the other down by the fish stream, it is no wonder you eventually ran out.”

“I'd better not find out differently.” Jeb thought he saw a pinch of tobacco in the comer of a drawer but it was nothing but crumbled bread crust.

“Other people go buy their personal things at the store. If you need something, just go down and buy it. Better'n pacing around me like a cat,” said Angel.

“You know I can't.”

“Don't bother me with it, then, like I did it to you. Nobody is out to get you, Jeb Nubey.” Angel had Willie grab the other side of the clothing cast-offs box. “Let's take it to our room, where it's quieter.”

She and Willie disappeared.

Ida May gathered the Coke bottle lids into her hands and ran with the load to follow Angel and Willie. Dropped lids made a trail all the way into the children's bedroom.

Jeb's mother once said that Charlie was given to tantrums, but Jeb was given patience. But the very idea that he could not get a smoke whenever he pleased raised up the soul of Charlie inside of him. For an instant, he felt like him. “Is it too much to ask that I'm allowed a pack of smokes?” During the tirade, his voice rose into the loft and bellowed down into the root cellar. “I think there is a funny joke going on here but it ain't funny to me!”

Angel hollered at the exact moment she slammed the bedroom door. “Stop yelling!”

“If I don't get smokes here in the shake of a stick, I'll tear this place apart looking for them!” He picked up a kitchen chair, thought about throwing it, but then just allowed it to fall back, enough to make a nice slamming bang against the wooden floor.

Angel had stopped yelling.

“Next thing you know, you'll be hiding my liquor. Then my poker cards. There'll be no end in sight!”

“Nobody has your pack of cigarettes or your gin! We don't have your poker cards, neither, and who would you ask into a game anyway?”

“I tell you what you'll do! You take this money in my pocket on down to Honeysack's grocery and you bring me back a new pack of smokest Anything else I want, you get that, too!”

“Reverend Gracie?”

The face pressed against the screen door was too dark to render precisely. Jeb only knew the voice to be feminine.

“I'm sorry if this is a bad time. Miss Coulter said the children might need help with some school things. I have a few extras I keep around if you all could use them.”

It was Florence Bernard. If she'd heard his ranting diatribe, her polite nature would not allow her to say anything.

“Mrs. Bernard! Now is fine, just fine,” Jeb lied.

She waited outside with a shoebox.

Jeb's feet were frozen to the floor as if she would just leave the box out on the porch if he made no move toward her.

“I don't have to come inside,” she said.

“No, no, where are my manners, Mrs. Bernard? I'm sorry as sorry can be! Come insider:” After Jeb opened the door for her, he called out to the children.

Only Angel emerged. She had a sour face and wore another of Mellie Fogarty's hand-me-downs, a pleated dress the color of pickles and at least one size too large.

“Don't you look all grown up?” Florence made no comment on the oversized dress, no more than she addressed Jeb's ranting about smokes and liquor.

“None of them fit. But I have to wear them or give them back to Mrs. Fogarty.” Angel did not address Jeb. Only Florence. “My mother sewed like everything, but I never had the chance to pick up her skills.”

“I sew, too. You want me to fit that dress to your frame, I'll do it. If you have some other things, I'll alter them for you. It doesn't take long and I have the time before school starts.”