The Messenger of Magnolia Street (12 page)

Just this morning, Nehemiah had been determined that tomorrow, Monday morning sharp, he would take care of some serious business. That tomorrow he would get to the bottom of this thing, and get back to where he belonged. He had told himself these things in the mirror while shaving, and I had laughed when I heard this. I then looked into the pages of history yet to come and saw troubling twists ahead and looked back at the reflection of the man in the mirror, hoping so very much that he would make the right choices. It's a wonder he could drive at all.

Going to church had been Trice's idea. While they were still pouring over their copycat treasure map, she had quietly said, “Maybe we should all be going to church.” And there had been no discussion and no argument. Only Nehemiah saying, “We should get dressed then,” and he and Billy getting up and going to do just that. Just as if Twila had said, “Boys, get ready for church.” The
only thing missing was their “Yes, ma'ams” as their footsteps headed in the direction of Sunday.

Nehemiah, Trice, and Billy enter the church and sit up front next to Kate. They are wearing their Sunday best. They sit in their assigned pew with whispers to their backs, and Kate plumped up with enough pride to bust wide open. This is a regular affair for Trice, a seldom affair for Billy, and, of late, a never affair for Nehemiah. This is almost exactly the way it used to be. Only back then it would have been like this: Twila would have been beaming from one end of the pew, and her sister Kate Ann beaming from the other. They were the spiritual bookends that held Nehemiah, Billy, and Trice firm in their positions.

Trice's blond hair would have been curled very carefully with Kate daring the humidity to fuzz it up until after dinnertime. At least, she had figured, the child could look like a lady on Sunday. The rest of the week if Trice wanted to run wild with Nehemiah and Billy, well, that wasn't Kate's first choice, but it wasn't her last either. Her last would have been not having Trice at all. Miracle babies make you believe in magic. Miracle babies get spoiled rotten.

Twila would have slicked down Nehemiah and Billy's hair. Both of them would have been sitting there with wet heads. But their hair would dry before the end of the service and begin curling up on the ends just like their daddy's had. Kate would be so caught up in surveying everyone's hair that she would lose her singing place and have to find the verse and line in the hymnal again. Kate would have been thinking about how Twila hadn't looked too good. A husband passing can take the wind out of you. She should know. Had known all these years. Now suddenly, there they both were manless as can be. With children. Well, the Good Lord would provide. Somehow. He always had.

But that was almost thirty years ago and right now, this minute, what Kate is trying to remember is what she needs to know most.

Did I leave that oven on 350 or turn it down to 250? If I left it turned up, that roast is going to be cooked to pieces and tough on top and not fittin' to eat.
She hates not to have the roast. But if it's too tough, they'll just have to make do with chicken and dumplings and baby limas and cornbread and blackberry cobbler.

Kate Ann looks over at Twila's empty seat. It has stayed empty now for almost thirteen years. But that's still her space as far as Kate is concerned. The family has sat in the same spot for, well, all of their lives. The church was built when Kate Ann was but a baby. When Kate comes to church with Trice, she makes certain nobody sits in Billy's space or his momma's. Or for that matter that renegade Nehemiah's. And now, on this strange Sunday morning, here they are again. All buffed and shining.
Nehemiah's hair looks just right,
Kate is surmising.
He really is a fine-looking young man
, she thinks. Then she looks at Billy. And Billy's hair…
Lord!
Kate interrupts her busy mind with a prayer,
Lord, send Billy a good wife because—well just look at him.
She continues her survey with a critical eye.
And now would you look at that? Trice looks unusually bloomy. That's just the way she looks, bloomy. Her hair, even though it doesn't look tame, looks just this side of wild and that's an improvement. She's wearing a dress that is just a little more, well there you go again, bloomy. Where'd she get that? I haven't seen that on her.

And she is sitting very, very still. And that's unusual.

The fact is, Trice is very bloomy, as Kate puts it. And very still. And, she is staring straight ahead and not singing very loud and that's another sign of something but Kate isn't sure what. Not yet anyway. But it'll come to her. She knows it will. She looks over at Trice again, and down at her dress.
Flowers, flowers everywhere. Just like a
…and she pauses and leans over and looks hard at Trice,
like a wedding!

It was in this church that Nehemiah's mother had married his father. Here at a later date, that they had carried William Daniel forward in their arms and dedicated him before the congregation. And two and a half years later, they walked forward once again with a new baby in their arms. Nehemiah looks around at the old walls, the same ones he grew up in and hasn't seen for years, and tries to picture this. Tries to capture this image of a Sunday morning family with four squares. But before he can squint hard enough to try to remember his father's large hands, feel one of them vaguely on his shoulder, the hand is replaced by the gentleness of Twila's or the surety of Kate's. His memories latch onto the curves and rest there. In the curves. Not so bad a place to be.

There is general upswelling good mood inside the church. There is the feeling of something sliding into place. There are people leaning and whispering at seeing those heads up front in their assigned seats after all these years. There are a few “
What-do you-know's?”
and some “
I-told-you-so's,”
flying around.

Wheezer is in the back in his usual place, trying to huff and puff out the song. He stands with his knobbed-up knuckles grasping the back of the pew in front of him. Blister stays in back too. Keeps the angry side of his face turned towards the wall. Children have never been afraid of Blister, but he thinks they are. He thinks the scar alongside the left of his face, his pulled-down eye, and the skin puckered at his throat will frighten the pants off them. Because it does him. Over the years he has learned to approach people right side first, with his head turned slightly to the left.

Magnus is not in church this morning on account of the fact that she had her feelings hurt twenty-four months, seven days, six hours, three minutes, and counting,
ago.
She hasn't been back since. She is rocking on the front porch, singing “When we gather at the river” at the top of her lungs and slamming her feet to the porch
floor with every rock and pushing off again, hard. The cats have all run under the porch or up the trees, but there is no escaping the strength of her voice. It can carry for miles, and miles, and miles. Right now, she is hoping it will carry right through the doors of the church and up that aisle, straight up Kate Ann's spine.
It would serve her right for telling me that I cannot sit in Twila's place. Twila has been dead for over twelve years and she sure doesn't care if I sit on the pew next to Trice but Kate sure does. Kate wants Trice all to herself. Always has. But it just ain't ever never gonna be that way.
Magnus slams her feet hard and prays,
God forgive Kate for being so pigheaded so she won't go to hell forever and ever. Amen.
Then she adds as an afterthought, '
Course a short trip through might do her some good.
Then she resumes her singing. Just when the cats thought they were getting a break.

Pastor Brown is finishing the last stanza of today's opening hymn. He is seventy-two years old and looks every year of it. But he still looks it in a saintly way. In a white-haired, blue eyes, lanky-tall kind of way. He looks like he could live forever and not be the worse for it. And all the people that know him, wish this could be true. He adjusts his glasses and looks out across the pulpit at the faces of his congregation. He's seen a hundred faces born and a hundred faces die, baptizing them in and burying them out. He is the caretaker of what is natural in Shibboleth. He is Shepherd to the flock. Watcher of the sheep. All faces should be equal to him, he thinks. But they're not. Some are more precious to him. Some more dear. And now he is watching one of those faces. One that got away. The boy that slipped through his fingers. The one that he knew needed comfort when comfort wouldn't come. When he couldn't give what he didn't have.

Lately, he has been questioning his destiny. Not as a pastor, he knows full well that he's been called. But he has been questioning the decisions of destiny that he has made during the process of his
journey. He is questioning his motives and his might-have-been's. He is supposing that if he had been more honest, just a little more open, that potentially even the ultimate outcome of Twila's illness.

Well,
he thinks now,
wondering won't set the record straight or change a thing.
He is thinking about how he let fear get in his way and let it have its day. He can almost see her sitting there, full of brown-eyed faith, and remember how when he'd make a joke he'd check to see if that dimple was waiting on her cheek. If he had won her smile—even from a distance. Twila Trust. A simple woman, a widowed woman. A faith-filled woman. If only he'd stepped up and confessed his feelings then
maybe,
but then, there he was wondering again. And all the maybe's in the world wouldn't bring her back. Or keep Nehemiah in his place.

All his
maybe's
in the lonely evenings where he sits and reads his Bible, or simply holds it and doesn't read at all. Where he doesn't dare think the words
love
or
loss,
but he feels them in the marrow of his bones. He feels the empty echo of lost possibility. And he is ashamed that with all that he is (and he is a lot) that he was not man enough to express himself. Too afraid of what people might think, of what people might say. And the chance that he had to make a difference when a difference could be made—in at least four lives including his—had slipped away.

Twila used to tell him stories about Nehemiah. Stories about his
gift
, as she would call it. And years later, she was proved right when Nehemiah had walked out of that fire unscathed, carrying John Robert to safety. And she would look to him for guidance, for understanding, of the things that were different about Nehemiah. At church dinners and celebrations, she'd look to him for company, and for conversation. Maybe more. But he would only smile and nod his head; he was so fearful of his mouth. So fearful of his heart.

Now with Nehemiah here, actually
here
in Shibboleth, actually here in
church,
he hopes he might rectify a portion of what he missed. He thinks that perhaps God and Twila both have ordered him a second chance. A method of making his amends. Of setting that boy, no, that
man
, he thinks, as he looks out across the congregation once again, a chance to set that
man
on his path again. And maybe that will stop what is eating them, all of them, from the inside out.

Suddenly Pastor Brown is very serious. His serious looks like this. Like a man who has been carrying a lonely weight. The pastor's sermon today was going to be on the loving kindness of God. On the mercy of divine grace and of a love that is offered when no love is deserved. About how God loves people in spite of themselves. And about how human beings are to follow suit. To love without barriers. Without hoops for people to jump through. Without bells for them to ring. A wonderful message, but today calls for something different, something made to order. And the pastor looks up, and forgoes his prepared sermon. Instead he decides to preach from the Old Testament.

“There was once a man named Nehemiah. Now you know about him, don't you? Sure you do.” A few people edge to the front of their pews and lean forward. They nod their heads and pretend
their
Nehemiah isn't there sitting among them. That the pastor preaching from the Book of Nehemiah is
just a coincidence
. The pastor puts his hands in his pockets, steps down from the pulpit and walks the aisle, his voice rises as he walks forward, “He wasn't much of anything, didn't hold a grand position, certainly wasn't a priest.” He turns and addresses Nehemiah from the front and center of the church. “He had a simple job, one of loyalty. He was cupbearer to the King,” and the pastor says, “interesting,” almost completely under his breath. “Just a cupbearer minding his own
business, until his brother and a friend go to him and reveal that things weren't very good at home. And do you know that with all those people in the city, not one of them made a difference until Nehemiah left the King and came home.”

Trice is listening but fighting the urge to pull her notes from her purse to study the curving, squiggling lines. She is certain that something crucial is hidden somewhere in the clue of its design. That surely, if she looks hard enough, she will find the “X” that marks the spot.

Nehemiah is listening to the message with one ear and thinking,
he's talking to me,
but one ear is all he can afford. The rest of him is thinking about the dark cloud at the springs. And the knowledge that he knows down in his soul that the dark cloud is spreading, breaking beyond whatever boundaries held it there. He is thinking about the presence of evil and the power of good and wondering just where has Pastor Brown been in the middle of all this.
Why hasn't he done something? And why haven't the people of Shibboleth even questioned how all the water could…how did Billy describe it
…“The water just left town.”
And why does Trice look so fine in that dress that he almost forgets she is Trice and thinks about her as a…woman.
He glances over at the flowers and breathes in the smell of something tangibly sweet, and he doesn't know if the smell is perfume or simply the essence of Trice. And he isn't aware that his glance has turned into a stare until Trice turns and looks in his eyes and then neither one of them are listening to the sermon with even a smidgen of an ear.