Orchard of Hope

by Ann H. Gabhart

  Now the dog, maybe dizzy from all his running back and forth, banged into Jo’s knees and knocked her backward. She let out a little squeal as her hands slipped off his cast. Wes stiffened and braced himself for the pain of his leg jarring against the ground, but Zeb, as if he really knew what was happening, scooted under the cast and stopped, letting the weight of it land on his back. He stopped barking and looked over at Wes almost apologetically. Then the dog started panting with his tongue near to dragging on the ground as the poor creature’s legs almost buckled under the weight of the cast. He turned his head to direct a little hurry-up woof at Jo, who was scrambling to her feet.

  “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” Tabitha said. “Do you think he aimed to do that or he just got under there at the wrong time?”

  “Well, of course he aimed to,” Jo said as she grabbed hold of the cast again so the dog could move out from under it. Zeb wobbled over to the shady side of the car and collapsed. “He didn’t want to hurt Wes. He was just excited.”

  “Come on, Jocie,” Tabitha said. “He’s just a dog.”

  “Try telling him that,” Jo said.

  “Why? You think he might bite me or something if I say he’s a dog? He is a dog.” Suddenly Tabitha didn’t look all that sure. “Isn’t he?”

  David smiled at Wes as he tugged him a little closer to the edge of the car seat. “He looks like a dog, he sounds like a dog, and heaven only knows, he smells like a dog. So I think we can be pretty sure he’s a dog.”

  “But smarter than any other dog you’ll ever meet on this planet,” Jocie said. “Right, Wes?”

  “Oh, no, not the out-of-Jupiter stories again.” Tabitha smacked the palm of her hand against her forehead as if her head had started hurting. “You guys are weirder than anybody I ever met from here to California and back.”

  Wes laughed. He was out of the car at last and on his feet, or foot might be more accurate. The good leg was tingling awake. He needed to stomp it, but it was hard to stomp when only one foot was in working order. He shoved the crutches up under his arms and didn’t pay the first bit of attention to the complaints his arms and shoulders started shouting at him. He just kept laughing. That somehow seemed a better thing to do than cry, especially with Jo watching him.

  “‘A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.’” Lovella smiled at him.

  “‘But a broken spirit drieth the bones,’” Wes said.

  “Proverbs 17:22. I didn’t know you knew the Scriptures, Wesley,” Lovella said.

  “There was a Bible in the table drawer at the hospital. And a lot of time for reading if I could get the nurses to let me alone.”

  He let them help him up on the porch and into the house. They’d shoved all the living room furniture to the side of the room and put up a cot for him with a table beside it. The bed looked awfully low to the floor, but maybe if they set a straight chair beside it he could pull himself up out of it. Jo must have gone to his rooms and brought him a stack of his books. An easy chair with a footstool sat right by the table with a floor lamp over the chair. He could feel Jo watching him to see what he thought of how they’d fixed it up for him. He let the smile hanging around from the merry heart stay on his face and tried not to think about broken spirits drying up bones as he looked at her. “You guys have got me fixed up so good, you may never get rid of me.”

  For a minute he thought Jo was going to start bawling. He was glad she fought it off, because he wasn’t sure he might not have joined in. And then the merry heart medicine would have been down the tubes.

  7

  Things were always a little wild on Sunday mornings at the Brooke house as they all scrambled to get ready for church. Before Tabitha came home from California, Aunt Love had kept David and Jocie on schedule. If either of them stayed too long in the bathroom, she rapped sharply on the door and got them moving. But it was hard to move somebody out of the bathroom who had morning sickness. And it was beginning to look as if the only thing that was going to ease Tabitha’s morning sickness was having her baby. Her doctor had told Tabitha some women were just unlucky that way.

  David still had a hard time thinking of Tabitha as a woman. He’d lost so many of her girl years after she’d left with Adrienne that he wasn’t ready for her to be a woman, even if she was only a few weeks from being a mother. She had settled in better back in Hollyhill than he ever imagined she would after they came home from church a couple of months ago to find her on the porch. She’d ridden a bus all that way. By herself. Holding the secret of her baby close within her for weeks after she was home. Aunt Love had finally insisted Tabitha tell him what he’d been too blind to see. So many surprises already this summer.

  Sometimes David was almost afraid to stick his head out from under the covers in the morning for fear of what the Lord might send his way next. But then when the sun started pushing light in through his window, David would say his morning prayer. “Oh, Lord, be with me today.” And the Lord’s answer would echo back. Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. The Lord’s promise was good to the disciples who faced much more perilous times in those New Testament days than David could even imagine facing, and that same promise was good to the Lord’s followers now. David just had to lean on the Lord and in all things be thankful.

  And he was. He was thankful Tabitha was home. He was thankful for the child on the way. He was thankful for a church that trusted David to lead them. He was thankful Jocie had weathered the storms of the summer. He was thankful Wes had survived the tornado. He was thankful that it was so easy to smile when Leigh was around. He still didn’t know exactly what he should do about Leigh. If only she wasn’t so young, but maybe it was her being young that kept him smiling.

  But none of that made it one bit easier to get out the door on time to leave for church. Or easier to decide what to do about Wes. David wasn’t having second thoughts about bringing Wes home with him, but he was having second thoughts about their ability to take care of him, especially Aunt Love’s and Tabitha’s and Jocie’s when David wasn’t there to help.

  On Saturday, they had all three volunteered to stay home with Wes on Sunday. And now Tabitha had found David going over his sermon notes in his bedroom and was trying to convince him she should be the one to stay home. “Let me stay with Wes. Nobody will miss me at church.”

  “Everybody will miss you,” David told her. “Whenever you’re not there, they all ask about you.”

  “Probably to see if I’m properly ashamed of myself yet.” Tabitha made a little face as she touched her rounded stomach.

  David stood up from his desk and went over to hug her. “You know that’s not true. The people out there have been nothing but kind to you. Haven’t they?” He peered down at her face. Maybe there was something he didn’t know. Maybe the Martin boy was at it again. It had been Ronnie Martin’s ugly words in Jocie’s ears that had sent her reeling earlier in the summer.

  David and the boy’s father, Ogden Martin, one of the deacons at Mt. Pleasant, had talked it out, then prayed together on their knees in the men’s Sunday school room until the Lord helped them find a way to both continue on in the same church. Ogden made his son apologize to Jocie, something she stood still and endured even though she didn’t want to. The words were said, but David didn’t sense a genuine feeling of sorrow in the boy over what he’d done any more than he felt any hint of forgiveness in Jocie. He wouldn’t be surprised if Ronnie was already making more trouble.

  But Tabitha was shaking her head. “No, they don’t say anything outright. It’s just the way they look at me with those ‘oh poor pitiful thing’ eyes like I had leprosy or something instead of just expecting a baby. And then if I tell them I’m doing fine, they look at me like I shouldn’t be doing fine, like I should be sitting over in the corner staring at my hands and crying big crocodile tears or something.”

  David tightened his arm around her shoulder and smiled a little. “We don’t always act the way other people think we sh
ould.”

  Tabitha looked up at him. “Well, I mean, I know I did wrong, that I should have waited till I was married, but if I had, this baby would’ve never been. And Aunt Love helped me pray and tell the Lord I’m sorry. She said the Lord would forgive me if I did that.”

  “And the Lord did. In the Bible it says if we ask for forgiveness the Lord will separate us from our sins as far as the east is from the west.”

  “How far is that?” Tabitha asked.

  “If you were to start walking east and never turned around, you would never go west. You would just keep walking east forever around and around the world.”

  “Really? I’d never thought about that.” Tabitha looked as if a light had come on inside her head. But then she was frowning again. “But the women at church want me to be miserable instead of happy. They think I’m sinning if I smile when I feel little Stephanie Grace kicking.”

  “Oh, I don’t think they’re that bad.” David had given up sticking in a word here and there to prepare Tabitha in case her baby didn’t turn out to be the girl she was so sure she was carrying. She said she was having a girl. She was naming her Stephanie Grace, and that was that.

  “But why can’t they just be glad for me? I’m glad. Why can’t they be?”

  “Tell them that. Tell them you’re glad about the baby and hope they will be too.”

  “I couldn’t do that.” Tabitha looked half scared at the thought. “They’d really think I was awful then.”

  “No, they wouldn’t. They’d think you were a mother who loved her baby just the way they loved their own babies before they were born.” David brushed Tabitha’s forehead with his lips.

  “I’m not sure about that. They already think I’m half heathen because I’ve got this rose on my cheek.” Tabitha touched the small tattoo on her left cheek. “And I’m probably causing you enough problems at church without saying all the wrong things the way DeeDee used to when she went.”

  “Your mother never liked being at church.”

  “I remember,” Tabitha said.

  “I suppose you do.” David hadn’t realized until Tabitha came home how much the girl had known about the problems between David and Adrienne. He thought he’d kept it all hidden so well. “But you’re not causing me any problems, and when your baby comes, the people at Mt. Pleasant will be won over by his or her first smile.”

  “If you say so, but somebody has to stay home with Wes. It can’t be you. You have to preach. And Aunt Love likes to go to church too much to miss. I guess Jocie and me can take turns, but let my turn be first. Please.”

  “Okay, if you promise to call Mr. Crutcher next door if you need help. If Wes were to fall or something, you couldn’t try to help him up.”

  “Mr. Crutcher goes to church too, doesn’t he? Doesn’t everybody in Holly County go to church except Wes?”

  “Well, I’m not sure the whole county is that faithful, but just in case, I’ll tell Wes not to try to walk to the bathroom till after church time,” David said.

  “Maybe you’d better ask him instead of telling him. Nicely,” Tabitha said. “Wes doesn’t take orders too well. He was even cranky with Jocie last night when she was trying to get him to eat.”

  “We may be expecting too much out of him. He’s lived by himself for years now, and we plop him down in the middle of what he calls Brooke Central Station. He told me that it wasn’t even quiet around here at midnight with the way Grandfather Brooke’s clock bongs out the hours.”

  “I’ll go out and sit on the porch today and let him have all the silence he wants.”

  “He’ll probably appreciate that,” David said.

  Jocie didn’t protest when he told her Tabitha was going to take the first turn staying with Wes. She just said, “Okay. I forgot to get somebody to help Miss Vangie in my place with the Beginners’ Class today anyway. I’ll ask Paulette if she can do it next Sunday.”

  Letting Jocie help with the Beginners was how David had found a way to keep her out of Sunday school with Ronnie Martin. David believed in avoiding confrontation in church if possible. The Lord instructed his followers to love one another, and David believed that with the Lord’s help it was possible to love all people. Liking them enough to sit in Sunday school class with them for an hour was a whole different matter.

  “I’m sure Miss Vangie would appreciate that,” David said, but he could tell Jocie was thinking of more than Miss Vangie. After all, Miss Vangie had managed the Beginners’ room alone for nearly twenty years before Jocie started helping her.

  Jocie saw his look. “I know Miss Vangie would be okay without me there, and I don’t mind staying instead of Tabitha, but I just thought that if Noah and his family did decide to show up for church this morning, I maybe should be there. You know, since I’ve met Noah already.”

  “If they come, I’m sure Noah will be glad to see a familiar face.”

  “Do you think they will?”

  “I don’t know, Jocie. I haven’t visited them yet or talked to his parents.”

  “He said that his father didn’t go to church, but that his mother was half preacher. She went on that march in Washington with Reverend Martin Luther King.”

  “She sounds like an interesting woman.”

  Jocie hesitated a second before she asked, “Do you think people will get upset if they do come?”

  He didn’t have a sure answer for Jocie then, nor did he have a sure answer for Harvey McMurtry when Mr. Harvey pulled him aside before the Sunday school assembly.

  “You knew I sold my farm on Hoopole Road, didn’t you?” Mr. Harvey said as he ran his fingers down the inside of his black suspenders. He’d been a member of Mt. Pleasant all his life. He and his sister, Sally McMurtry, still lived in the house where they’d both been born sixty-plus years ago. Neither of them had ever married. Mr. Harvey said he was always too busy on the farm to go courting, and Miss Sally said nobody ever asked her.

  “So I heard,” David said.

  “Good people. A nice family. Name of Hearndon. Moved down here from Chicago. Got four kids.” Mr. Harvey hemmed and hawed a bit. “I asked them to church.”

  “I should hope so since they’re in our church community. You think I should go visit them this afternoon and extend a pastor’s invitation to them as well?”

  “Well, uh, that might be good, Pastor.” Mr. Harvey rocked forward on his toes and then back on his heels before he stopped flat-footed and leaned a bit closer to David. “But just so’s you know, they’re colored folk.”

  “Right,” David said. “I met their boy Thursday. He’s going to be helping me out at the paper until Wes gets back on his feet.”

  Mr. Harvey looked relieved David already knew his news. “Well, that’s fine then. The boy helped me put up fence Saturday. Polite, good worker. Better than some I’ve had working for me.” Mr. Harvey frowned a little.

  “He won’t be working for me every day, so he can still help you out when you need him.”

  “I’m not worried about that, Pastor.”

  “You seem worried about something, Mr. Harvey. You want to tell me about it?”

  “All right. I’ll just be out with it and quit beating around the bush. Do you think the folks here will get upset if the Hearndons do take me up on my invitation?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think? You’ve been part of this church a lot longer than I have.”

  Mr. Harvey sighed and looked a little sad. “I guess it will be like anything else. Some will and some won’t. The same as with your girl. Some understand and some don’t.”

  David was a little surprised by Mr. Harvey’s honesty with him. He knew there were people in the church who hadn’t fully accepted that Tabitha was going to keep her baby even though she wasn’t married, but nobody had spoken the words directly to him. David put his hand on Mr. Harvey’s shoulder and said, “We just have to pray for the ones who don’t. And for ourselves too, that we’ll say and do the right things.”

  “It’s not like we�
��ve never had colored folks in the church before. When it was founded back in the 1820s, a third of the members were black.”

  “Is that right?” David asked, surprised.

  “Slaves of the founding members.”

  “Oh,” David said. “That might be something you wouldn’t want to bring up to Mrs. Hearndon if she does decide to attend church here. At least not right away.”

  “You sound like you’ve met her,” Mr. Harvey said.

  “No, I was just going from what Noah said about her.”

  “Well, you got the right idea.” Mr. Harvey smiled and shook his head a little. “She’d grab that in a minute and be gone with it. She’s something. Just wait till you do meet her. Fact is, I might ought to worry more about our members than her if she comes. She’ll probably set us all on our ears.”

  “Maybe we need to be set on our ears every once in a while.”

  “You could be right, Pastor. You could be right.”

  8

  They had six beginners in the class that morning, all under the age of six—counting little Murray McDermott who wouldn’t be a year old until October, but he was happy as long as Jocie was carrying him around. Miss Vangie somehow managed to get them to sit around the little table and listen when she told them stories about Jesus. Of course, she kept the lessons short. Stuff like Jesus loves you and God made the world and how to say, “Thank you, Lord.”

  Miss Vangie said singing had never been her best talent, so she turned that part of the class over to Jocie. Jocie loved the way the little boys and girls kept their eyes tight on her while they were singing. She liked the way they shouted out the “Yes, Jesus loves me” part, and she couldn’t keep from laughing when they got the deep and wide mixed up when they sang about God’s love. She was having more fun in Sunday school than she’d had since she was a beginner herself in some other church years ago.