Orchard of Hope

by Ann H. Gabhart

  Wes had told her it wasn’t her fault. Everybody told her it wasn’t her fault, but it was. She was the reason Wes was in the tornado’s path. If only she could go back and live that day over. But she couldn’t. As Aunt Love said, each day brought its own trouble. Aunt Love had a Bible verse she quoted about it, but Jocie could never remember exactly how it went. Something about sufficient unto the day the evil it was going to have.

  Jocie thought that verse too depressing to memorize, but her father had told her it was just telling her not to worry about everything and anything. Said there was no need worrying yourself to distraction about things when what you were supposed to do was trust in the Lord. Besides, once something happened, it was done. Jocie couldn’t change the fact that Wes had hurt his leg because of her. She just had to figure out how to help him get better. Right now she had to help Wes get in the car before Nurse Army Boots decided to pick him up and carry him back in the hospital.

  “Another inch and I think we can close the door,” she said. “Or maybe we could get a rope and tie it to the other door to keep it mostly closed.”

  “I don’t know about that, Jo,” Wes said as he scooted closer to the door until the armrest had to be digging into his back. “The way your dad drives, he’d go around a corner, the rope would come loose, and I’d slide right out of here and maybe break my other leg instead of my head, and you guys would want me to come back to this hospital, and I already told you and anybody else who wants to know, I ain’t never going back in there again.”

  Jocie looked over her shoulder at the nurse who was giving her father an earful. “I know that’s what you said, but I don’t know how much longer Dad can hold off Nurse Army Boots, and she’s bigger than all of us put together.”

  Wes grabbed hold of the back of the seat and pushed himself back a little more. “Okay, stick that wash pan you carried out under my heel.”

  Jocie helped Wes lift his leg and pushed the wash pan under the cast. The plastic bent but didn’t break. “Now what?” she asked.

  “Now shut the door and grab your dad before old Army Boots calls for reinforcements.”

  The door pushed up against the bottom of the cast, but it clicked shut. Jocie went over to where the nurse was still talking to her father. “Excuse me, Dad, but Wes is ready to go. He said he’d like to get home before his pain pill wears off.”

  The nurse glowered at her. “He wouldn’t take a pain pill.”

  “Oh,” Jocie said. “Well, maybe he said so we could get home before the drugstore closed and he could get his prescription filled. Maybe it’s the one for the pain pills.” Jocie knew she’d heard something about pain pills in the lecture the nurse had given her father up in the room. “And he wanted me to tell you how much he appreciated all you nurses who took care of him these last few weeks.” She smiled at Nurse Army Boots and avoided her father’s eyes. It wasn’t much of a lie. Wes might have said it if he hadn’t been so worried about the nurse trying to roll him back inside. And Jocie wanted to say something to make the nurse forget about calling for reinforcements.

  “Well, did he really? I didn’t expect that,” the nurse said, a smile actually breaking out on her face. “I’ll be sure to tell the others.” She went over to the car window and leaned down to look in at Wes. “If you have any problems, Mr. Green, you just give us a call.”

  They were on the interstate headed home before Wes said, “Fat chance.”

  Jocie looked over her shoulder at him in the backseat. “What’s a fat chance?”

  “That I ever call that woman.”

  “She might be single,” Jocie said with a grin.

  “I would’ve bet on it, but Nurse Merry Sunshine told me she was married,” Wes said. “Poor man is all I’ve got to say.”

  Jocie’s father laughed. “She’s probably sweet as pie at home, and she was just doing her job watching out for you. She really liked you telling Jocie to thank her for the way she’d taken care of you.”

  “I think that must have been more Jo talking than me,” Wes said.

  “It got us out of there, didn’t it?” Jocie said. “And I’m sure you would have said the same thing if you’d thought of it.”

  “That and some other things,” Wes growled.

  “Then maybe it’s just as well that you let Jocie deliver the message.” Jocie’s father glanced up in the rearview mirror at Wes in the backseat. His smile turned to a worried frown. “You don’t look very comfortable. Is the way you’re squeezed in there hurting your leg?”

  “Not enough to bellyache about,” Wes said.

  “We should’ve brought some pillows,” Jocie said.

  “No, we should’ve brought the ambulance.”

  “Or a pickup truck with a chair in the back,” Wes said. “How long did they say I was supposed to keep this thing on?”

  “At least a month,” Jocie’s dad said. “Then they’ll do more x-rays and decide what to do next.”

  “Doctors,” Wes said. “What do they know?”

  “A lot, we hope.”

  Jocie searched for something to say to lift the mood in the car. She hated it when Wes got all cranky and discouraged sounding. Before he hurt his leg, he’d sometimes dipped into a bad mood but he’d never carried it around with him. Her father said when people were hurting you couldn’t expect them to be smiling all the time and happy. He told her it was really hard on Wes not being able to move around the way he wanted and that she should be more worried about how Wes was feeling than how she was feeling.

  Still, sometimes if she could pull out the right thing to say, she could make Wes smile and then they both felt better. So now she said, “Didn’t you have doctors up on Jupiter before you came down here and fell out of the spaceship?”

  For a minute she didn’t think he was going to pick up on it, that he was just going to keep his eyes closed. But then he said, “We didn’t have need of doctors, as best I recall.”

  “You didn’t get sick or hurt?”

  “Not sick. No germs on Jupiter. Injured sometimes, but say like somebody hurt their leg, they just went to the warehouse and found a new leg the right size, unscrewed the one they had, and screwed in the new one. Some Jupiterians paid attention to color and others didn’t, so sometimes you’d have a body walking around with one blue leg and one red leg.”

  “That was sort of weird, wasn’t it?” Jocie said.

  “No, just colorful. Very colorful.”

  Relief bubbled up in Jocie, and she laughed. She looked straight at Wes. “And what was that about you telling Nurse Army Boots you weren’t kin to me? You’re my granddaddy, remember, and there’s no way you can get out of that.”

  “All right, if you’re sure you want a Jupiterian grandpappy.” Wes wasn’t smiling much, but he was smiling. “But you can just forget about taking me to school for show-and-tell.”

  6

  What Wes hated the most was feeling old. Old and helpless. He could put up with the pain. Even when it thumped through his whole body the way it was doing now as he lay his head back against the window and felt the wheels rolling under him, taking him back to Hollyhill. He wrapped his mind around the pain, absorbing it and letting it carry him as he rode out the worst of the pain like a rodeo rider staying on the back of a raging bull until the horn sounded.

  Wes had followed the rodeo trail for a while before he ended up in Hollyhill. He’d never ridden the bulls. He was one of the even crazier clowns who waved flags in front of the bulls’ noses to keep the fallen riders from getting stomped. He got pretty good at scaling fences or jumping into the barrels when the bulls charged him. So he knew about pain. He could handle pain.

  But he’d never felt old before. Helpless, but not old. And the last time he’d felt helpless he just ran away from the feeling. Ran away and became a new person. A person who might have fallen out of a spaceship the way he was always telling Jo. She didn’t believe him anymore the way she had when he first showed up in Hollyhill and started working for her dad. She wa
s just a little squirt then. Now it was more of a game they played.

  He wished he could catch a ride on a spaceship and go somewhere that he could unscrew this old leg and screw in a new one. Then maybe he could stop feeling so old and helpless. And useless. A man who couldn’t work wasn’t worth much, and Wes couldn’t even walk, much less work.

  David was always talking about when Wes came back to work at the Banner, but Wes wasn’t all that sure that even David believed it. Jo did. Jo couldn’t believe anything else. She wanted everything to be the way it was, when she should know, after all the things she’d been through, that nothing could ever be the way it was. Things happened. And there wasn’t any going back.

  Wes kept his eyes half closed as he watched Jo and David talking in the front seat. Every once in a while he caught a word when Jo glanced back at him as if she thought he was part of the conversation, but he couldn’t really hear what they were saying. Too much wind whipping in the windows and bringing in road noise.

  He should have taken the pill old Nurse Army Boots had tried to shove on him. He might have, in spite of the way the things made his head spin, if he’d known how he was going to have to wedge himself into the backseat. Who’d have thought his leg would be that long? Of course, his legs had always been long for the rest of him. His mother used to tell him his legs started under his armpits. Now, with the crutches, they did. He almost grinned at the thought.

  In the front Jo let out a laugh. That did make Wes smile. He was glad she’d survived the storm intact with no more than a few scrapes and bruises. And she seemed to have weathered the emotional storm as well. She and her father were as tight as ever, maybe tighter. And she wouldn’t let go of this granddaddy idea. He’d told her maybe uncle would be better, but she said uncle wasn’t close enough. It had to be granddaddy. He pointed out that even the name sounded old, but she just laughed. In her young eyes, he probably looked ancient even before the tree fell on him and knocked a few years off his life.

  When he thought about it, he probably was old enough to be her granddaddy. Actually, no probably about it. He was past sixty. He didn’t think about exact years. He’d always told himself years didn’t matter, but now he felt every one of them plus. Fact of the matter was, he could be a real granddaddy to somebody somewhere. He didn’t know it if he was, but he could be. No, more than could be. Probably was. He’d had a son back in that life before he fell out of the spaceship and landed in Hollyhill.

  Just because he cut the boy loose some twenty years ago and hadn’t made the first attempt to even check to see if he was still living, that didn’t mean he wasn’t. He was married when Wes took off. Wes frowned, trying to remember the boy’s wife’s name. Michelle or Madeline. Something with an M for sure. As best he could remember, she’d looked like the type who would want children. Most every woman did. And a good thing. It’s what kept the old world spinning.

  He wished it wasn’t spinning quite so much right at this particular moment. He guessed the pain was making him light-headed. And the heat. Air was flowing through the car, but it had to be close to a hundred outside. The sun coming through the window was cooking his shoulders. He tried to shift in the seat a little, but he couldn’t move his leg.

  “You all right back there, Wes?” David called over his shoulder at him.

  “Fine as frogs’ hair,” Wes lied.

  “You want to stop and take a break? Move around a little or get something to drink?”

  “Better go on in, David. I ain’t sure we could prize me back in this car if I got out.” He met David’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “I’ll speed up a little.”

  That was the trouble with David. He always knew when Wes was lying. He never tried to pry out the truth, but he always knew. And he cared. He was full of the fruits of the Spirit. Wes might not go to church, but he recognized the genuine article when he saw it, and David was it. Goodness oozed out of his pores.

  Just like now, taking him home with him when he didn’t have to. Not only didn’t have to, but probably shouldn’t. The man had a house full of problems already. He didn’t need to add a crippled-up old man. A crippled-up old man who couldn’t shake the dark cloud hovering over his head.

  The doctor back at the hospital had told Wes there wasn’t a thing unusual about a man feeling low after he’d gotten his leg about mashed off. He offered him some pills for that too. For the low feelings. But Wes hadn’t ever been much for taking pills even when he was in the kind of crowds where pills were handed out like candy.

  Wes let his mind freewheel to try to keep away from the dark thoughts of never walking again. Of being old and helpless. And useless. He looked at Jo in the front seat and tried to hear what she was saying, but he couldn’t. She’d grown taller even in the short time he’d been in the hospital. Or maybe it was only because he felt shorter on the crutches.

  She was growing up. He hadn’t aimed to ever get close to anybody again after the wreck that took his wife and daughter from him back in the old life. And he hadn’t, until he stopped in Hollyhill to get an odd job to put a little more gasoline in his motorcycle before he went on down the road. But then Jo came to work with her daddy. She couldn’t have been more than three, and as soon as she laid eyes on Wes, she walked right over to him and held her arms up to him. Before a week went by, he’d have died on the spot for her.

  He never had the opportunity to prove it until the tornado came barreling at them back in July. He’d have fought winds twice as strong and trees twice as big and passed out of life gladly as long as she was safe. Maybe she was right about him being her granddaddy.

  At last they drove through Hollyhill. Wes looked over at the newspaper office and wondered if he’d ever see the inside of it again. He liked keeping the contrary old press in running order. He liked ink under his fingernails. Wes looked down at his hands in his lap. Not the first sign of ink, and even the mashed thumbnail had about grown out.

  “Maybe you should let me try the steps up to my place, David. I could just hibernate there for a while till my leg gets better. Jo here could bring me wieners and coffee.”

  “In a few weeks maybe,” David said. “You wouldn’t want to cheat us out of the blessing of taking care of you for a while first.”

  “It may not be such a blessing. Old Nurse Army Boots could’ve warned you about that,” Wes said. “I’m not sure Lovella is up to it.”

  “I’ll be there to help,” Jo said. “And Dad too.”

  Then they were out of the town, and Jo was pointing at an old bike by the side of the road. She looked around at Wes. “There’s the bike I told you about. The one Mr. McDermott found for me.”

  “What’s it doing there? Did it run out of gas?” Wes asked.

  “I had a wreck. I’ll have to tell you all about it after you get settled in at the house. It’s too crazy a story to tell in the car.”

  “Did you get hurt?” Wes asked.

  “My ankle’s a little sore,” Jo admitted.

  “So that’s why you were limping. And I thought it was just sympathy pains.”

  And then they were pulling up in the yard beside the end of the porch where it was only a little step off the ground. Lovella and Tabitha were waiting on the porch in the rocking chairs. Tabitha stood up. No doubt about it, the girl was blooming, but happily, it appeared from her face and all David had told him. She might be a dead ringer for her mother, but perhaps the resemblance was only skin deep. If she wanted to be a mother, that would have to be true. For sure, Adrienne had never wanted to be a mother. Had never actually been one. To Jo at any rate.

  It was a bigger ordeal getting out of the backseat of the car than it had been getting in. For one thing, he didn’t have old Army Boots to inspire him. He just had Jo watching him and looking as if she was going to burst out in tears any second. The poor kid had a load of blame slung in a sack over her shoulder. When Wes felt better, when the dark cloud quit drifting over his head, he’d have to try to get her to throw that sack a
way. He’d never been able to do it about Rosa and Lydia. But that was different. There weren’t any tornadoes that night. Just the road and the car and him behind the wheel.

  He turned his mind away from the memory of the wreck. He couldn’t think about that now. Not unless he wanted to get lost in the black cloud that kept trying to settle over his head. And right now he had to get out of the car.

  Jo had hold of his cast, and David had his hands and was trying to tug him out of the car. Trouble was, Wes could barely move. His backside and other leg had gone numb during the ride home. It would have been funny if they hadn’t all been looking at him as if he were going to turn purple and blow up any second.

  Then Jo’s ugly dog, Zeb, came racing from somewhere and started dipping in and out under his leg and barking. Lovella shouted at the dog and then started reciting something. What with the blood thumping in his ears and the dog’s barks echoing off the side of the house, Wes couldn’t make out the words, but he could tell it was Scripture. David was saying something too. His mouth was moving as the sweat dripped off the end of his nose while he pulled on Wes.

  Maybe he was praying over Wes. It wouldn’t be the first time. He knew David prayed for him even if the man never said so in so many words. After all, the man was a preacher, a man called of God. He had to pray for everybody. It was part of his job.

  Wes couldn’t remember the last time he’d prayed. Maybe when he was a kid tagging along with his mother to Sunday school. Maybe never. Not a real prayer. He might have said words. Our Father up in heaven, hallowed be thy name. For years, he’d thought it was “Howard be thy name.” Wes had a brother named Howard and had once asked his mother if she’d named Howard after God. She laughed as if he’d told a good joke when she finally figured out what he was talking about. That was the best thing about his mother. The way she could laugh. She died when he was fifteen, so many years ago that he could barely remember her face, but he remembered her laugh.