Summer of Joy

by Ann H. Gabhart

  “You sound like Aunt Love.”

  “That’s not in the Bible, is it?” Wes looked up at her with a little frown. “I thought old Abe or maybe Ben Franklin said that.”

  “I didn’t say it was in the Bible. Aunt Love quotes stuff besides Bible verses sometimes. She’s been doing that ‘penny saved, penny earned’ a bunch lately since the refrigerator died on us and Banner sales have been down. Do you really believe it’s because of Stephen Lee, like Zella says? Not the refrigerator but people canceling their subscriptions.”

  Wes made a clicking noise out of the side of his mouth before he said, “Hard to believe for sure, but then old Zell usually has a finger on the pulse of what’s happening in Hollyhill.”

  “But that’s just so silly.” Jocie stepped back from the composing table and threw out her hands. “Daddy didn’t have anything to do with Tabitha falling in love with that guy out in California or at least thinking she was in love with him. She says now that she must not have known what real love was and now she probably never will.”

  “Why’s that?” Wes turned to look at her. He leaned back against the table and waited for her to answer.

  “Because of Stephen Lee, she says.”

  “Poor little tyke. He seems to be getting blamed for a lot not to be no bigger than he is. How old is he now?”

  “Three months this weekend. He’s trying to turn over. We can’t lay him on the couch anymore. He might just plop right off on the floor if somebody isn’t holding on to him.” Jocie almost smiled thinking about Stephen Lee.

  “How about that? Next thing you know he’ll be crawling.” Wes did smile with a little shake of his head. “He seems a happy little fellow every time I see him. Chewing on his fingers and drooling all over himself. I guess he doesn’t know he’s causing problems all around.”

  “He’s just a baby. It’s everybody else that has the problem.” Jocie frowned and sat down on a pile of newsprint paper. “I mean, even as much as they act like they love him out at church, I thought some of them were going to faint when I suggested he could be baby Jesus in the Christmas manger scene. Just because they’d never used a real baby before didn’t mean they couldn’t this year. The doll they have doesn’t even look real.”

  “Could be they thought a baby might be too real. Afraid he might exercise his lungs at the wrong time.”

  “Yeah, well, I still thought it was a good idea even if Aunt Love says nobody, not even an innocent little baby, can play Jesus. It looks like we could do something different. Anything different.”

  “You aren’t paying attention if you don’t think anything’s different out there, Jo. Your daddy preaching every Sunday. Me sitting in one of the pews. Myra Hearndon leading the singing. That church out there has been floating on the sea of change for months now.”

  “I guess.” Jocie put her elbows on her knees and stared down at the floor. “Maybe it’s just me, Wes. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Sometimes I feel like I’ve got a bunch of spiders inside me making me feel all jumpy and weird.”

  “Spiders, huh?” Wes stepped over closer to her.

  “Spiders. Or maybe hummingbirds fluttering their wings.”

  “That sounds better than spiders spinning webs on your rib cage. ’Cept for their pointy beaks.”

  “I guess.” Jocie didn’t smile.

  Wes put his hand on her head for a second. “It’s just an age problem, Jo. All them crawly legs and fluttering wings just mean you’re growing up.”

  “Well, I don’t like it. It’s almost Christmas. I’m always happy at Christmas.”

  “You’re not happy?” Wes asked. “You could have fooled me yesterday.”

  “I was happy yesterday.”

  “And you must have prayed the no-pneumonia prayer and the Lord must have heard you, because I’m here without sneeze one and your daddy looked in fine fettle when he left out of here to take his watch to be cleaned.” Wes sat down in his chair and put his foot up on a box.

  “That’s good, I guess,” Jocie said.

  “Of course it’s good. If your daddy’s watch isn’t working, then we might have to depend on my Jupiter sense of time and never meet the paper deadlines.”

  Jocie knew Wes expected her to pick up on the Jupiter talk, that he was probably ready to spin some wild story about how Jupiter days were a year long or something. But instead she just sighed and wished she could open her mouth real wide and let those hummingbirds fly out of her insides so she could go back to being happy all the time. But that was before this year. Before she started high school. Before some of the kids started taunting her because she was friends with Charissa and Noah. Before she had to have Mr. Hammond for her English teacher. Before Charissa had called her moody.

  Charissa was supposed to understand. Charissa was a preacher’s kid too. But Charissa didn’t let it bother her when somebody was being mean to her. She just turned her dark brown eyes on whoever was picking on her and stared holes into him until the other kid suddenly remembered he was late for class or whatever. Jocie had tried to do the same thing, had even practiced her glare in the mirror at home, but it never worked for her at school.

  Her father had told her to pray about it. To pray every morning before she walked into the school, and she’d done that. Short and to the point prayers. All right, Lord, I’m going into the school. If Sammy Sparrow is in the hall, make him trip on his shoelaces before he can say anything mean to me.

  But so far Sammy Sparrow hadn’t tripped on his shoelaces once, even though he never tied his sneakers. She really wasn’t all that worried about Sammy Sparrow and what he said, although it would be great if he fell down so everybody would laugh at him for a change. Still, she could just walk away from Sammy Sparrow and whatever he was saying.

  She couldn’t walk away from English class. She had to go in there every day and sit through a whole hour of Mr. Hammond. She’d never had a teacher who didn’t like her. She’d had some who told her she talked too much and that she should pay more attention. But they’d never put her name on their bad list and left it there the way Mr. Hammond was doing. Jocie didn’t just pray before she went into English class. She circled a little prayer constantly inside her head. Lord, let me be invisible today.

  It wasn’t one of the prayers the Lord had decided to answer for her. At least not with a yes answer. Her father said no was an answer too, or not yet, and that they had to trust the Lord to pick the right answer for each of their prayers, even if it wasn’t the answer they wanted.

  Jocie wasn’t complaining about that. She’d probably had her share of prayers answered this year already anyway, what with finding Zeb out in the woods to answer her dog prayer and Tabitha coming home from California to answer her sister prayer and Wes throwing away his crutches to answer her let-Wes-walk-again prayer. And that was just a few of the prayers.

  When she thought about it, she’d kept the Lord pretty busy all year helping her out of first one mess and then another. So if the Lord decided she should find her own way out of the mess English class had become, then she couldn’t really complain. Not after he’d kept her safe during the tornado and had helped her find a way out of Miss Sally’s burning house.

  English class wasn’t going to kill her. It might make her unhappy. No “might” about it. It was making her unhappy. But Aunt Love was always telling her that nobody had to be happy all the time. That rain fell in everybody’s life. Something like that was in the Bible somewhere. Of course at the end of last summer everybody had been praying for rain to fall on them in Hollyhill. Everything had been drying up.

  But that was the good kind of rain. The rain Aunt Love was talking about was troubles, and there was plenty about troubles in the Bible. Everybody had troubles. Even King David. Jocie’s father had preached on that just a couple of weeks ago. And King David had been a man after the Lord’s own heart. If the Lord let him have troubles, then Jocie shouldn’t expect not to have things go wrong for her now and again. Or lately every day she ha
d to go to school.

  Beside her, Wes was being so quiet that Jocie thought maybe he’d dozed off in his chair, but when she peeked up at him, he was just sitting there waiting for her to be ready to talk again. “You think Daddy would let me quit school? Not forever. Just for a few weeks?” she asked.

  “It’s not likely,” Wes said. “You want to talk about it? Tell me what the teacher from Neptune did today that’s got you so low?”

  Wes always knew. Some kind of invisible thought line ran between them. That’s how Wes had found her when the tornado was coming. That’s why she could talk to Wes about almost anything.

  “I guess it really wasn’t all that bad. He just made me stand in front of the class and repeat ten times that I’d quit daydreaming and pay attention.” Jocie’s face felt hot just thinking about it. “I wasn’t daydreaming. I heard every word he said. I just wasn’t looking at him.”

  “But that didn’t keep him from seeing you.”

  “No.” Jocie looked down at her hands. “Everybody laughed at me. Even Charissa.” After class, Charissa had told Jocie she was sorry, but that it was just so funny she couldn’t help it. Jocie hadn’t cried then. She’d been too mad. But now a few tears pushed out of the corners of her eyes.

  “You want me to go to school with you tomorrow and give him a Jupiter sock in the nose?” Wes asked.

  “Yes. No. Maybe.” Jocie imagined Wes going into the school and cornering Mr. Hammond in his room and popping the man in the nose. “He wears glasses.”

  “I’ll make him take them off,” Wes said.

  “He’s bigger than you.”

  “That don’t matter to me. No Neptunian could ever hold his own against a Jupiterian.”

  Jocie couldn’t keep from smiling. “But you’ve forgotten. You’ve been earthed, remember? And not just that. You’ve joined the church. Become a card-carrying Christian. You have to turn the other cheek now.”

  “My cheek. Not yours.”

  Jocie got up and hugged Wes. “Thanks, Wes. I’m the luckiest girl in the world to have a granddaddy like you.”

  “Yeah. One who can still fight.” He stood up and moved over to shadowbox the press. He stumbled over a pile of papers and almost fell down.

  Jocie laughed as she reached out to steady him. “Maybe you better be careful about picking your battles.”

  “Okay. So Betsy Lou won that round.” Wes patted the side of the press. “But I’ll win the next one.”

  “Shh.” Jocie put her finger against her lips. “She might hear you and throw a cog on purpose, and then we’ll never get the paper out on time.”

  8

  Wes could always make Jocie feel better. He didn’t tell her what she should be doing. How she should be feeling. He didn’t tell her Edwin Hammond was right just because he was a teacher. That’s the way most grown-ups thought. If there was a problem between a teacher and a student, then it had to be the kid’s fault. Nobody ever thought the teacher might be doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing. Like trying to teach when it was obvious he couldn’t.

  When she had tried to tell her father that, he’d given her his stern look and said she should be worrying less about what Mr. Hammond might be doing wrong and more about what she might be doing wrong. That was after Mr. Hammond called to complain about her setting him straight on the “God helps those who help themselves” thing. You’d think a teacher would appreciate knowing how something really was, instead of teaching it the wrong way.

  It didn’t matter all that much who started that thing about God helping them, though. The Lord did help you. A lot of times whether you helped yourself or not. And maybe her father was right. Maybe she should think about what she’d done wrong to get on Mr. Hammond’s bad side.

  She wasn’t perfect in school. She talked out of turn. She sometimes forgot to hide her yawns when a teacher droned on and on about something that everybody had known since second grade. She couldn’t keep from giggling when one of the boys acted up in class. But she didn’t act up. She did what she was told. She behaved properly. But Mr. Hammond said she didn’t.

  As Jocie helped Wes and her father finish printing the pages of ads and fillers, she tried to remember the first time Mr. Hammond had given her that evil eye. It was before the “God helps those who help themselves” thing. But it wasn’t right at first, when he’d come to finish out the year for Mrs. Wickers after she’d had to take time off because she was expecting a baby. That was in October.

  He’d seemed nice enough then. An exciting change. Paulette said he was a dreamboat, and some of the girls clapped their hands over their hearts and practically swooned when he walked past them in the hall. He did look like somebody out of a book. Mysterious. Exotic. Not at all like the other teachers. He wore black all the time, even on warm days, and he never wore a tie. The other men teachers did. But Mr. Hammond wore T-shirts under his suit jackets.

  She’d asked him about that in the new-teacher interview for the Banner the second week he was at Hollyhill High. He said a tie was a noose some depraved person had designed to keep a man from being able to soar free and realize his potential. She had the whole idiotic answer written down word for word in her notes somewhere. Maybe that’s where she’d gone wrong. Writing the new-teacher article. When she thought about it, it was after the article came out in the Banner that he’d started marking up her papers and inventing things she’d done wrong.

  Later, back at the house after she helped Aunt Love wash the supper dishes, Jocie dug through the stack of old papers out on the porch and found the one with Mr. Hammond’s new-teacher article. Her father had put the piece on the bottom fold of the front page. The picture she’d taken of the man wasn’t bad. He looked sort of like a young Sherlock Holmes without the pipe or the hat. It was the most flattering picture of the four she’d taken. She remembered.

  She skimmed through the words in the article under the picture. He’d taught in Cincinnati last year. Spent some time in New York City before that. Planned to write literary novels someday. Was sure being part of a small town like Hollyhill would expand his horizons. Maybe someday he’d put them all in a book. Hoped to marry and have children in the near future. His mother was in the Peace Corps. Jocie had left out the part about the tie. She’d left out a lot. She hadn’t written anything that could upset anybody.

  Of course Mr. Hammond hadn’t wanted to answer her questions at all. When she’d asked him about doing the interview, he let out a weary sigh and said, “A necessary evil, I suppose. I’ll give you fifteen minutes after school today, so have your questions ready. I could probably write out the answers and give them to you without even hearing your questions, but we’ll carry through the usual farce.”

  Jocie had written out her questions in history class. And they were the usual, but that was what people wanted to know. Where he was from. Why he had taken the job at Hollyhill High. Et cetera.

  After the last bell rang that day and all the other kids had exploded out the doors toward home, Jocie had hurried back to Mr. Hammond’s classroom. The hallways seemed twice as big and spooky quiet without all the kids pushing toward their classes. Earlier at her locker, she had heard the muffled sounds of bouncing basketballs and the coach’s whistle from back in the gym where the boys were practicing, but even those sounds faded away as she went down the hall past all the closed classroom doors. Her footsteps echoed on the tile floor. She should have asked Charissa to stay with her and keep her company while she talked to Mr. Hammond.

  He looked up from his desk at her when she knocked on his open door and motioned her in with a long slender finger. “I’ve got the questions ready,” she told him holding up her notebook. “But if it’s okay, we can do the pictures first.”

  “Whatever.” He looked bored with the whole idea, but he sat still while she snapped four pictures.

  “Great,” she said as she dropped the camera back against her chest and scooted into the student’s desk right in front of his desk. She didn’t know why she w
as nervous. She’d interviewed a half dozen of the teachers in the school for this or that story in the Banner already this year. Interviews weren’t hard. She just asked the questions and wrote down the answers.

  “I wasn’t aware the school had a student paper,” he said.

  “We don’t. This is for the local paper. The Hollyhill Banner.” Jocie opened up her notebook and pulled her pencil out of her purse.

  He frowned. “You work for the local paper?”

  “I don’t really work for the paper. I just help out. My father is the editor, so he lets me do the school news.” She gave Mr. Hammond what she hoped was a dazzling smile.

  He didn’t smile back. “I thought you said your father was a preacher.”

  “Right. That too.” Their first assignment from Mr. Hammond had been to write a page about themselves. She’d written that her father was a preacher and an editor, but a teacher couldn’t be expected to remember every word every student wrote.

  “Interesting.” Mr. Hammond leaned back in his chair, made a steeple with his long index fingers, and studied Jocie over them. “Are you sure you are capable of doing a proper interview?”

  “I’ve done a lot of interviews.” Jocie let her smile drain away and plastered her best serious look on her face as she gripped her pencil until her fingers hurt. The man’s eyes bored into her as if he didn’t believe a word she was saying. “You can read the final copy before it comes out in the Banner if you want.”

  “Oh well, it won’t matter all that much. Your news rag is hardly the New York Times.” He waved his hands in a dismissive gesture before he picked up a pen and began twirling it back and forth between his fingers. “So on with it. Ask.”

  When she started reading her first question about where he was from, he stopped her. “Wait. Let’s shorten this. Please. I’ll give you the capsule info. I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My mother taught eighth grade math. My father was a policeman. He was killed in the line of duty when I was fifteen. My mother joined the Peace Corps last year and is somewhere in South America helping the poor unfortunates there learn how to add and subtract, I suppose. No brothers or sisters.”