Whisper Town (22 page)

Oz’s reputation for possessing vigorously pursued court skills would not be undermined even to lend confidence to a girl who
looked every bit as old as fourteen. He slammed her last attempt to the ground. She spun her racket up, caught it, and then
left him to boast alone on the wintering lawn.

Jeb seized the solitary moment. He stepped out from behind the row of cedars; not that he had hidden for the duration of the
badminton game—he hadn’t. He had parked too far down the winding path to Oz’s newly purchased house, a small mansion outside
Nazareth’s town limits, and hiked a half mile before he realized the distance to the tree-shrouded home.

Oz’s expression of small victory faded. “Afternoon, Nubey.”

“Glad to see me?”

“Elated.” Oz called to a woman inside the house, who brought him a towel and a drink before disappearing back into the house
to tend to his young relative.

“Sorry to barge in. You beat the socks off your unwitting contender. Must feel good, I guess,” said Jeb.

“What brings you out here?” Oz asked.

“A matter that may concern you, your bank.”

“That’s doubtful, isn’t it?”

Jeb gestured to a lawn chair. Oz invited him to take it and sat across from him next to a table, where he placed his drink
within a few inches of his wrist.

“The young man you employ from Hope, an apprentice named Pella, has come under scrutiny. I’m here to ask you about him,” said
Jeb.

“Whose scrutiny? God’s, Nubey?”

“Maybe for now, my scrutiny until I make it someone else’s.”

“Pella’s from a good family. You already know that, though. He works for me.”

“You do know Frank, don’t you? Know him well, I mean. Not too many things get past you, like the way he talked to that young
girl downtown that day you called him off.”

“I chided him for mingling,” said Oz. “Girls like her tell too many lies.”

“Mingling? Is that what you call it?”

“Get to it, why don’t you?”

“Last year, last winter, a Negro girl only thirteen got dragged away from her sister’s house in Hope and suffered things little
girls shouldn’t ought to endure. The white boy who took her innocence shut her up, told her he’d kill her if she breathed
a word.”

“You’ve been listening to the wrong voices, Nubey. I’m not surprised.”

“Frank Pella raped Lucky Blessed. Her brother, Ruben, felt she ought not to be forced to bring up a baby half belonging to
whites.”

“She’s a liar, like I said.”

“So they gave her to me.”

“No one will believe her. I don’t.”

“Our baby-in-the-basket, Myrtle Blessed, is the offspring of Frank Pella. He’s going to jail, by the way.”

“That’s very doubtful.”

“Don’t doubt me, Oz. It’s an annoying habit.”

“Frank Pella, the accused? He’s the son of Wallace and Justina Pella.”

Jeb shrugged.

“They own a little piece of every pie in every town between Hope and Texarkana.”

“I like pie.”

“Now, you take the town of Hope. Wallace Pella holds the mortgage to a little place called the Church of Hope Eternal.”

Jeb felt like a bit of lawn moved beneath him.

“Good Reverend Williamson neglected to tell you that, I’m judging by your rosy countenance.”

“You saying Pella’s daddy owns the Church of Hope Eternal’s building?”

Oz got up and took his drink with him. “You keep saying that all the way back to your jalopy, Nubey.” The back door opened
and Oz walked inside.

The servant woman holding the door open asked Jeb if he was coming inside.

Jeb shook his head. He closed his eyes. It was a long prayer back to the truck.

“You are implying I sacrificed this girl for the sake of my church building,” said Louie Williamson. “Maybe I should have
forced her to go to the law. I did tell her, but I knew she wouldn’t go. I have known the law. It doesn’t honor our kind,
Reverend Nubey. Lucky Blessed’s only covering is the blood Christ shed for her.” He sat back on his chair and it groaned.
“We know too well what it means to trust fully in God.”

“You knew all along.”

“I only suspected. She never gave me the name of the white boy that did this to her.”

“She was protecting you.”

“Maybe protecting all of us. Big load for a child. Think about it.”

“Frank Pella is a monster.”

“I’m not afraid of monsters, Reverend, only the men who bow to them.”

Jeb came down on his knees, next to the shrunken candles where he and Louie had last prayed. “I want you to give a message
to someone for me,” he said. He handed him a note.

“I’ll try my best,” said Louie.

Jaunice had not switched out the old candles with new and the cold melted wax of penny candles failed to offer the same monastic
elegance to Louie’s sparse study as Jeb had observed during his last visit. “Tell me what to do, Louie.”

Louie Williamson watched Jeb cry. Maybe he had already surrendered his daily portion of tears or it could have been he simply
honored Jeb’s right to cry with a fresh awareness of injustice. Louie possessed the look of a man well-practiced in wakefulness.
Either way, he did not have to say much of anything.

Jeb figured out how to interpret the silence of a friend. It sheds its own light.

Deputy George Maynard stared out his window. He kept saying things like “Sure as the dickens, it’s been a long winter” and
“Some say another snow is headed our way.”

Jeb said, “George, have you listened to anything I’ve said?”

“Girls like that Angel of yours and the little colored girl, they got fertile imaginations, Reverend. It don’t bother girls
like them any to tarnish a family name. It’s good you came to me first. Careful where you carry such tales.”

“Is that your advice?”

“They don’t know the meaning of a good name, not that you haven’t done charitable by both of them, and improved your own standing
in town, Reverend.”

“This isn’t about me, my reputation, or my charitable works, George!”

“I think you’ve caught this child in her own shame. Strange that over a year passes before she comes up with a story. I know
of the Pellas. They wouldn’t stand for slander, I tell you the truth.” George could not stop staring out the window; Jeb wished
the snow would start and get it over with, so George could concentrate on the matter at hand.

“She told me that no one would believe her.”

“Why should anyone believe her?”

Jeb felt the need to swear. He refrained, at least where George was concerned.

The jailhouse door came open. Will Honeysack carried a rock through the door. He showed it to Maynard. “You see this? Every
elder sitting on the board of Church in the Dell got one just like it through the window of their business this morning, and
you know it’s not the first time. Nice how-do-you-do, as if we don’t have enough to contend with.”

Jeb took the rock, turned it over twice, and held it up to the sunlight coming through the window.

“What do you make of it, Reverend?” asked Maynard.

“Looks like the work of a fertile imagination,” said Jeb.

“Jeb, this whole business has gone as far as I can take it,” said Will. “I want you to know that even as your friend, I lose
control of things when they go this far.”

“I’m glad you still call me friend, Will.”

Will took the rock from Jeb’s hand and laid it on Maynard’s desk. “I’m glad we ran into one another so I have the chance to
tell you first, Jeb.”

“What is it you need to tell me, Will?”

“I didn’t call this meeting tonight. But as head deacon, I have no choice but to attend.”

Jeb could not take his eyes off the rock. It held Maynard’s eyes too, and Will’s—like they all waited for the thing to go
off in their faces. Jeb raked the rock into the deputy’s garbage pail. “It’s a rock, boys, not a gun.”

“They’re calling this meeting private, like I’m not supposed to invite you, Jeb. I don’t have to agree to that, and so I am
inviting you. You come if you want and I’ll make sure you have your say. After supper, say six, then?” Will left the jailhouse
as though he dragged the entire hundred-year-old structure back to his store by a single rope.

Maynard retrieved the rock. “As evidence,” he kept saying.

Lucky twirled and looked at the dress in the parlor mirror and then touched each button, testing the threads’ security. “Angel
give it to me,” she told Jeb. “That Josie lady better not say a word about it. It’s not from her old things anyway, but Angel’s.”

Angel measured the distance from the hem to the floor. Faith Bottoms had evened out her hair quite well. It hung above her
shoulders and made her look older.

Jeb picked up Ida May from the rocker and set her on the floor. Ida May had grown gangly over the winter. When he lifted her,
her limbs hung long and thin, spidery. They alighted on the floor as though she weighed less than air. Jeb turned the chair
away from the girls’ modeling of rag bag dresses and stared through the front window. In one hour the automobile lights would
flood through the tree trunks of the church lawn. Will Honeysack would call the meeting to order and Floyd Whittington would
second it. Sam would rush into matters while Will staved him off and waited, in some manner hoping and not hoping the Church
in the Dell minister would show.

Jeb rocked out of the chair and paced to the window, breathing out shallow streams of air, scratching at his chapped lips,
and then returning to the rocker to rock some more. Angel and Lucky laughed and they were loud. Jeb inched the rocker farther
away from them and thought he heard an automobile engine. A minute passed and he settled back into the rocker. He glanced
up and found all three girls staring at him. He turned his back completely on them.

“Something’s wrong with Dub,” Ida May whispered.

“You like Lucky’s dress, Jeb?” asked Angel. “It’s a good fit.”

Jeb gave Angel and Lucky an obligatory nod. Myrtle cried from the children’s room. “I’ll see to her,” said Lucky.

Angel crawled on her knees and then sat back on her feet beside Jeb. She stared with him out the window. “What’s going to
happen?”

Jeb kept looking hard at the trees and the cold sky overhead and feeling little parts of him slipping away with the shortening
winter day. “I couldn’t say.”

“I’m glad we know about Myrtle now, I mean, that we know that Lucky’s her momma and all.”

Jeb felt like an attempt to speak might stick in his throat, so he kept answering Angel with silent nods and short grunts.
Several times he did that, until she blew out a breath. “I need some time to think,” he told her.

“Last time you acted like this, you was about to get arrested,” she said.

“Dub’s not getting arrested,” said Ida May.

Jeb told Ida May to go and help Lucky. She got up, but her bottom lip quivered and she sniffled all the way down the hallway.

Jeb mouthed,
“I’m sorry, Ida May,”
but the words stayed cooped up inside him.

“Have you talked to Miss Coulter today? She might could help with whatever it is that’s bothering you,” said Angel.

“Fern can’t help me. Don’t know that anyone can.”

“Except God, you mean.”

Jeb did not answer right off. “God has either put me here or maybe the Devil,” he said. It seemed cruel, no matter how he
had arrived at this desolate situation. He did not know how to shepherd a flock that bit and butted at one another and at
him. The Scriptures told him one thing—that we are many souls, but of one bread, one body—but the body led him to believe
otherwise.

“Does Frank Pella have anything to do with it?” asked Angel.

“Frank Pella, Oz, Louie Williamson, Will Honeysack, George Maynard, people I’ve never met. The whole town, maybe.” It came
to him that he might be without the aid of any friend at all, not any one person who could right wrongs.

Lucky came into the room, bouncing Myrtle, laughing, and saying that Myrtle was beautiful and that she had never seen such
a pretty child, and smart, she added. Lucky sat with her baby on the sofa, dressed in the newly buttoned dress that made her
look older, her hair pulled back and making ringlets around the crown. She had made the leap from fourteen to womanhood without
the help of a single person. “I’m going back to school somehow,” she said. “I’m going to teach, I’ve decided.” Since no one
seemed to be paying her any mind, she told Myrtle of her plans, referring to herself as “your mother.”

A tear slipped down Angel’s cheek.

“I don’t want you to cry,” said Jeb. “Hold fast and it will all work out.” He wanted to believe it.

The sanctuary had one electric light in the entry, a dim yellow light that cast long atticlike shadows from the front door
to the pulpit. Jeb waited in the shadow of the lectern, not wanting to be the last girl to arrive at the party.

Sam Patton parked his Chevy next to the church sign. He took one draw on his cigarette and stomped it out on the stone walkway.
He paced out front, looking down the church drive and toward the road. He finally tramped up the church steps, opening the
door, and then stopping. He asked who was there and Jeb said, “Your minister, Sam.”

Arnell Ketcherside parked and came in behind Sam. He said quietly to Sam, “I thought this was board members only.”

“So did I,” said Sam.

“Will informed me of this gathering.”

Sam and Arnell made an awkward pair, waiting halfway inside and outside. Jeb bid them to come inside and they finally did,
but they took a seat on the back pew. Will and Floyd arrived. Will entered slowly, like a man not wanting to enter a funeral
parlor.

“Will, we agreed that we should meet first as a board only,” said Sam.

“You agreed, Sam. Truth is, Jeb lives out back. How you going to explain all our vehicles parked out in front of the church?”
asked Will.

“I guess he’s right,” said Arnell. He took off his hat and approached Jeb, his right hand extended.

Jeb thanked him and said, “Gracie always taught me that if I was to lead this flock, that I had to take the reins. You all
swore me in by the laying on of hands. I’m entrusted to lead, so from now on, I lead these meetings.”