Whisper Town (2 page)

Jeb deemed the girl to possess few comely traits.

She had flowered handsomely in her youth, a teenage beauty; but her disposition had soured on her. Her habit of deriding Jeb
at inopportune moments, such as at church functions in plain sight of respectable congregants, made him wistful for the day
the girl’s journey would lead her quietly back to her origins.

Jeb saw no sign of that happening any time soon. Summer had come and gone with no promise of change. He did not aspire to
heroism, especially since a hero’s wages plus a nickel would buy little more than his morning cup of coffee. He did not want
his life to become the stuff of fables, but try as he might, the whole gallantry matter came knocking uninvited.

The moon hung over the hollow so full it appeared that any minute it might burst. Children and youths scrambled to claim a
spot on the hay wagon. Florence and Josie commandeered the clean up of tables and grounds. Jeb herded children and pining
teen couples toward Ivey’s wagon. “First rule, no hay throwing.” He shot a warning glance to Angel’s brother, Willie. “That
means you, Willie Boy.”

Willie pulled a buddy down from the edge of the wagon and claimed his place while the boy pummeled his arm. Willie poked him
hard and traded licks while telling him he was soft as a girl.

Two boys pulled Angel into the wagon, youths far too old for her, at least in Jeb’s estimation. Jeb took the spot next to
them, if for nothing else but to keep an eye on matters, and realizing too he should save room for Fern. He glanced up the
path and saw her picking her way around a stand of birch trees. She lifted her face and smiled at him. Jeb knew she intended
the smile for him. He pulled rank on one of the boys next to Angel and cleared a Fern-sized space. He waved at Fern. “Wagon’s
filling up. Best you hurry.”

“You coming too, Jeb?” Angel sighed. Her brows formed fallen crescents.

“Make way for the chaperone of your life.”

Angel had the look of a cornered fox. “All the other old people are staying back at the tent, Jeb. You ought to stay and be
sociable.”

He said, straight into her ear, “Mind your tongue, Biggest.”

Not so fast to admit defeat, Angel said, “I saw Oz Mills drive up in his fancy Packard. You’d better corral that teacher before
she’s snatched up by a higher bid.”

“Fern, you coming?” Jeb asked. The banker’s nephew Oz had taken over the family business when his uncle Horace Mills had moved
his family to Hope when Oz’s ailing father had taken to his bed. The brother bankers held tight while other financiers sunk
into the Depression’s quicksand. Oz and a pack of his college-swell friends swarmed like flies around Nazareth’s last surviving
bank.

“Sun’s going down.” Fern glanced over the heads of the children. “I’d better run back for my jacket.”

“You can wear mine.” Jeb pulled off his suit coat.

Fern reached for his coat, but then said, “I don’t want to mess up your good coat. I’ll only be a minute.” She turned and
ran back up the path.

The last of the youths clambered aboard and Ivey pulled out his whip.

“Hold up a second,” said Jeb. “We’re waiting for one more.”

A cloud rolled across the moon and the last tincture of sunlight faded. The hollow blackened except for the lanterns on the
wagon. Jeb anticipated the warm feel of Fern next to him in a jostling wagon. Eagerness rose inside him, an underground stream
bubbling to the surface. Wooing Fern Coulter had been a tedious occupation over the last year, first winning trust from a
woman that once thought of him as lower than algae. Inviting her to join him on the hay ride and hearing her low boylike voice
say, “Why not?” had raised his hopes.

“Miss Coulter’s not coming back, you know,” said Angel. “She always finds an excuse.”

“Tonight’s different and you got your own friends to yammer at, Angel.” Jeb put on his jacket and warmed his hands inside
his pockets. He shifted from one foot to the next. Finally Fern appeared at the top of the hill. Behind her, stretching his
long bones down the path, loped Oz Mills, the banker’s nephew. His silhouette cut an intrusive figure even in the moonlight.

“Jeb, I’m so sorry,” said Fern.

Angel whispered something near to sarcasm to one of the boys.

Fern talked rapidly. “Oz has come to tell me that my mother and father have shown up tonight a day early for their visit.”

“Invite them to join us,” Jeb said. He wouldn’t look at Oz.

“This is awful, I know. But Daddy’s not feeling well and he’s back waiting at my house with my mother. I’m sure the long drive
from Oklahoma’s exhausted him. I should go and see about him.”

Ivey gave the old horse a whistle.

“I’ll see her back,” said Oz. He helped Fern slip into her jacket. As she turned to head back up the path, Oz said, “You have
fun with the kiddies, Reverend.”

Angel set the boys to snickering at Jeb’s expense.

The wagon ride turned into a grueling festival of screaming girls and hay-tossing boys. Jeb’s woolen coat was prickly with
straw and his imagination bristling with thoughts of Oz joining Fern and her family for coffee while he fended off attacks
of hay. He jumped from the wagon, reminded Willie to see Ida May up the path, and then meandered back toward the tent site.
He led the departing rabble by the light of a lantern and elbowed through into the sanctuary of the tent.

Deputy Maynard bellyed up to the remnants of pie salvaged for him by the ladies’ food committee. “Don’t you look the scarecrow?”
Maynard laughed.

“Spare me the compliments,” said Jeb. “Any coffee left, Josie?”

The families gathered up their children and headed back toward their trucks and wagons.

“Sorry I missed the festivities, Reverend. We got us a for-real investigation up at Apple Valley.”

“I was hoping it was just gossip.”

“Nazareth hasn’t seen this kind of business since, well, since your arrest. Hey, what’s past is past, I always say.”

“The apple pickers told it right, then?” asked Jeb.

“Best as I can figure, someone come to some harm out in those orchards, but who it was is yet to be known. Nobody’s filed
a missing person on anyone. But we got a shirt that says that somebody took a beating. What’s become of him is anybody’s guess.”
He turned and told Florence what good pie she made.

Maynard said, “Don’t like the sound of bloody-shirt stories, nosirree, nosir! Makes folks nervous. Seems to me like everyone’s
too scared to know what to make of it, or to talk about it.”

“You saw the bloodied shirt, Maynard?”

“Got it locked up in the jailhouse.”

“Anyone missing from around town?” asked Jeb.

“Not that anyone has reported. Or no one wants to fess up. Say, where’s your schoolteacher gal pal?”

“Her folks showed up tonight. You believe someone in Nazareth knows what happened down in the orchard?”

“It’s the best guess for now. Florence, how about slicing me another piece of your apple crumb pie?”

Jeb made an excuse and left the tent. The families congregated outside, laughing and talking about whose kids were going without
shoes. Not a person from Church in the Dell could possibly know about a beating down in the orchard, not without blabbing
it to everyone.

He said his good-nights to the departing families and gathered up the Welby brood.

The moon had disappeared entirely, overtaken by the evening clouds. He led the children around to the parsonage by the light
of the lantern.

“Tonight was like heaven!” said Angel. “Not one, but two boys like me. Both of them gave me a ring.” She slid the rings up
and down the chain around her neck.

“You ought to at least pick one.” Jeb cupped his hand behind Ida May’s head, moving her ahead of him on the path.

“More fun this way. You get more stuff and all anyway.”

“It’s not about how much stuff you can get out of a boy, Angel,” said Jeb.

“I’ll give one of the rings back after I decide which one I like the best,” said Angel.

“It’s not like picking out a new dress. A body has to study the situation, keep an eye on the person, and see how they treat
you.”

“If that’s true, you ought to stop trying to win Miss Coulter over then. She treats you like an old shoe.”

“Fern is a complicated woman. Jewelry and flowers and such don’t mean a thing to her. She wants to know more important things,
like what a body’s been reading or how much of your time do you give in helping out a neighbor in need.”

“Every woman likes flowers and jewelry, I don’t care what she tells you. She’s still a girl and girls like to be given stuff.
Men who don’t know that are up the creek, far as I’m concerned.”

Willie told Jeb, “I like Miss Coulter. She knows how to hunt and fish and I never see her walking around bragging about who
give her what. I think you’re wrong, Angel.”

“Neither of you know nothing about women.” Angel dropped the chain into her blouse.

“Dub, how come Miss Coulter thinks you’re an old shoe?” asked Ida May.

“Fern can hunt and fish? Who told you that, Willie Boy?” asked Jeb.

“She tells it to her class. When some of the boys are having trouble with math, she uses her fishing line and asks things
like, ‘If Willie’s trout is ten yards from him but is swimming a foot every five seconds, how far will he have to throw his
line to reach that trout in fifteen seconds?’”

“Fern never said she fished,” said Jeb.

Angel blew out a breath. “That don’t mean nothing. Miss Coulter was raised with boys.” She said it like Fern had been raised
with wolves.

“Fern’s not average. But she takes a long time to get to know.” He figured Fern had a reason for never bringing it up. “You
take this whole fishing-and-hunting matter. Not once has she told me that she does either one. Leastways, not that I can recall.
She’s never shown up in the deer woods, has she? I’ll grant you, she doesn’t brag about all of her abilities. She’s uncommon.”

“News flash, Jeb Nubey. She doesn’t tell who she doesn’t like,” said Angel.

“She made Bobby Gray give up his hunting rifle once when he brought it to school.” Willie directed his comments to Jeb. “But
then she opened the barrel and told him he should clean his gun. After school she give it back to him and showed him how to
carry it.”

A gun blast reverberated, tree to tree, through Millwood Hollow.

Ida May latched onto Jeb’s arm.

“Someone’s out hunting possums, Littlest,” said Jeb.

The ratchet of toads boomed out of the woods, but no other identifiable sound.

“Let’s get inside,” said Jeb. “Some fool teenager out there might mistake us for night prey and I don’t want to be his next
kill.”

“I don’t believe no stories about the apple orchards,” said Willie. “People tell lies all the time.”

Ida May asked what stories. Angel guided her around the church and onto the parsonage lawn. The Welbys made for the porch.
Jeb locked them all inside for the night, checking out the window twice. He shut off the lights.

A rumor gave no man cause to waste good electricity.

Y
ELLOW-WHITE LIGHTS MOVED THROUGH THE
marsh at the edge of White Oak Lake, boys out frog gigging most likely. The lights undulated in the fog that stretched all
the way down the stream that emptied out beneath the bridge at Marvelous Crossing. A torchlight moved down the stream and
into the woods.

A bird called out in the night, a trilling song that made the darkness easeful. A goose flapped down, landing on the stream’s
shore, followed by tufted goslings that pursued the mother into the shadows.

Stillness eventually blanketed the woods and Jeb closed the window shades, satisfied that peace prevailed in spite of women’s
rumors.

Jeb stared at the ceiling from his bed until the soft yellow of lunar light trickling through his window allowed his eyes
to adjust. He felt startled awake, as though someone had shaken him out of his slumber. But he heard nothing outside that
would justify such a thing. An owl hooted and then fluttered off its limb to chase dinner. Jeb’s eyes closed slowly. Then
he heard a noise, like something soft and padding quietly through dewed-over grass. He bolted upright. Stumbling across the
floor, he thrust one leg into his trousers and then the other. The children slept. He crept so as not to bring them spilling
out into the hallway. Halfway up the hallway and out of his stupor, he mulled over the fact that he had not grabbed his hunting
rifle. He stopped at the edge of the parlor entry and peered across the room. Only a tree limb shadowed the front window.

Jeb threw on the light switch, illuminating the naked bulb outside near the door. The churchyard was nothing but evening shadows.
He reached for the table lamp, but his hand froze over the lampshade.

A cry came loud, harsh.

Jeb threw open the door. He took one step and his toe bumped against a basket. He knelt and pulled back a jumble of cloths.
He fell backward and then came seated on the door’s threshold, assessing the matter before him, a child—an undersized baby,
it seemed—lying in a laundry basket. He dragged the basket inside, out of the chill.

The baby wailed again, its eyes squeezing out tears like a ripe lemon. Jeb lifted the child from the basket, handling it awkwardly,
the same as when he’d pulled a bass from White Oak Lake last Saturday.

He came to his feet, holding out the squirming bundle as though it might bite him, and looked through the door glass, hoping
to see movement in the woods or a lantern light. All was still and quiet as though the night hardened like iron in the cooling
shadows.

Jeb held the baby close, pulled out the waist of the diaper, and said, “She’s a girl.” He studied her round eyes, full lips.
Her skin was soft like peaches but tawny and her eyes stared out like two of Willie’s prize marbles.

“What’s going on?” Angel appeared in the doorway, her thin legs showing through her translucent cotton gown.

The baby girl threw back her head and cried again. Jeb held her out to Angel.