Orchard of Hope

by Ann H. Gabhart

  “Maybe she’s just shy.”

  “I guess, but you know, I thought for a minute she was going to run and hide behind a tree or something. It made me feel funny to think somebody might be afraid of me.” Jocie pointed to her chest.

  “Why don’t you ask Noah about it?”

  “Oh, I don’t think I can do that,” Jocie said. “He’s already told me I’m too nosy.”

  “Newspaper people are supposed to be nosy.”

  “That’s what I told him, but I can’t just start asking him questions about Cassidy.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I guess because I don’t know him well enough.”

  “You will soon enough if he’s working with you and your dad. And don’t worry about him being black. After a week you won’t even notice what color he is.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so.” Wes looked at her over his coffee cup.

  “Have you known a lot of black people?”

  “We had all colors up in that spaceship I fell out of.”

  “Right,” Jocie said, but she didn’t follow up on the Jupiter bit. Instead she spit out another worry. “You know I’m going to start high school next week.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Wes said with a nod. “I thought you were looking forward to it.”

  “I am. Mostly.” Jocie hooked her hair back behind her ears and sat up a little straighter. “I guess I’m a little nervous about finding my classes and that kind of stuff.”

  “They’ll point you in the right directions the first few days, and after that you’ll be able to do the pointing.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Jocie said. “But things are going to be a lot different. What with the schools desegregating and everything.”

  Wes looked at her. “That’s not bothering you, is it?”

  “No, it just got me to thinking. I don’t think I know a single black kid my age by name. Don’t you think that’s kind of strange?”

  “For sure,” Wes said. “Maybe that should go into that Book of the Strange you’ve been after me to write.”

  “I guess.” Jocie pushed a smile out on her face even though she didn’t feel much like smiling.

  Wes leaned over to touch her on the shoulder. “It’s not going to be a problem for you, Jo. You’ll find out their names, and then you can be friends or not. And Noah will just be Noah. You can’t take care of the whole world.”

  “How about just Hollyhill?”

  “Not even all of Hollyhill.”

  “How about you?”

  “That you can do,” Wes said as he held out his cup toward her. “You can start by moving this table off my legs and getting me more coffee.”

  13

  Jocie glanced at the clock on the pressroom wall. Almost lunchtime. She went in the front office to remind Zella that Noah was supposed to show up for work around noon.

  “Dad wanted to be sure you hadn’t forgotten.”

  “How could I forget that? We can only hope he remembers his manners this time.” Zella yanked the paper out of her typewriter and glanced up at the clock over her desk. “But if your father wants him to have a welcoming committee, he’ll have to do it himself. I’m leaving early to meet Leigh at the Grill for lunch.”

  “It’s only eleven thirty.”

  “The special today is fried chicken. You know how crazy that place gets when Willanna fries chicken. There’s no way you can get a decent table if you wait till twelve.” Zella dropped the black plastic cover over her typewriter. “I’d ask your father to come along, since heaven only knows, he’s too backward to ask Leigh to lunch himself, but it wouldn’t be proper you being here alone with that colored boy.”

  “What’s proper got to do with it? Noah’s just going to be working for Dad.”

  “Proper has everything to do with it,” Zella said as she patted her hair to be sure all her perfectly round curls were still in order. Then she pulled a mirror out of her desk drawer and applied a fresh coat of lipstick. She popped her lips together before she went on. “It was bad enough with Wesley back there. That man has to be running from the law or something. Who knows what he might have done before he showed up here in Hollyhill? But something for sure, or he wouldn’t be so secretive about his past.”

  “He’s not secretive. He tells me stories about where he came from all the time,” Jocie said just to egg her on a little. She’d heard all Zella’s theories about Wes dozens of times. He was on the run from the law. He had an ex-wife or even wives after him. He owed the IRS money. Lots of money. Or if not the IRS, he owed the kind of people it was dangerous to owe money to.

  “Don’t start with those silly Jupiter stories. Wesley Green is no more from Jupiter than a pig, and you know it, Jocelyn. It’s high time you started paying attention to what is true and what is only stories. After all, you’re almost fourteen.”

  “But stories are fun,” Jocie said.

  “There’s more to life than having fun.”

  “Don’t you ever try to have fun?” Jocie asked. The question made two spots of color appear on Zella’s cheeks, but Jocie hadn’t asked it to be mean. She really wanted to know. A few days ago she had tried to write something about Zella in her journal and realized she didn’t really know all that much about her. She knew Zella had never married but sighed over romance novels. She wore bright red lipstick. She could type sixty words a minute without making even one mistake. She could fold a whole pile of newspapers without getting the first spot of ink on her clothes. She was as much a part of the newspaper office as the press in the back. Still, what she did when she wasn’t at the newspaper office was a total mystery to Jocie.

  “Well, of course. I have fun all the time.” Zella peered in her mirror and grabbed a tissue to wipe a bit of lipstick off her tooth.

  “How?”

  “Well, there’s my bridge club. And I’m always doing things with my Sunday school class. You’re the one who doesn’t know a thing about anything.” She dropped the mirror back into the drawer and slammed the drawer shut. “You’re way too young to understand how a person can be satisfied with life the way it is. You’re just all filled up with fantasies and dreams.”

  “Didn’t you like to dream about things when you were my age?”

  “I didn’t have time for that kind of nonsense. I had to help my parents on the farm.”

  “I can’t imagine you feeding chickens or pigs,” Jocie said.

  “Well, I did, but I never planned to make a career of it. So after my father died, Mother and I moved to town and I got a job here at the paper. That was while Mr. Henry still owned the paper. He was such a nice man.”

  “Dad’s nice too.”

  “Well, of course he is. I never implied he wasn’t. Your father’s problem is that he’s too nice for his own good sometimes.”

  “How can you be too nice?” Jocie asked.

  “The same way you can ask too many questions.” Zella snatched up her purse and stalked out the door and up the street.

  As Jocie watched her go, she wanted to call out a couple more questions. How could she be a dreamer and ask too many questions at the same time? Didn’t dreamers come up with their own answers without having to ask anybody anything? Not that she would have expected an answer to either of those questions from Zella.

  Her father was always telling her she couldn’t expect to get an answer to every question. Or every prayer. But with prayers, a person just had to trust God to send the best answers at the right times. And the Lord did. She’d been praying Tabitha would come home for years, and now she had. Maybe the same was true with questions. She just needed to give the answers some time to come clear.

  She couldn’t know whether Noah would show up for work and be willing to let her teach him how to do things. She couldn’t know how long it would be before Wes would be back helping them. She couldn’t know what was going to happen next week when she started high school. Would she get lost and not be able to find the right classrooms? Would the
older kids laugh at her just because she was a freshman? Would she start worrying, the way Paulette did, about whether boys thought she was cute?

  Of course, Paulette was cute. She had a figure and long blonde hair that curled up at the ends, and her mother let her wear lipstick. Jocie was straight as a stick, had brown hair that she hooked out of her face behind her ears, and she didn’t even own a lipstick. Some questions weren’t even worth wondering about, Jocie decided as she headed back to the pressroom to help her father get the paper ready to print.

  Noah showed up just as the noon siren sounded. Then the clock on top of the courthouse started its twelve slow bongs. On its heels, the Christian Church bells rang and then played “Rock of Ages” the way it did every Monday at noon. There was a different hymn for each day sort of like day-of-the-week underwear. One thing for sure, nobody in Hollyhill was going to forget that it was time to eat lunch. That was what Jocie and her father were doing when Noah tapped on the pressroom door before he pushed it open.

  “Nobody was at the desk out front,” he said. “So I just came on back.” He had on jeans and a plain white T-shirt.

  “Come on over and grab a chair,” Jocie’s dad said. “We’re just finishing up lunch.”

  Jocie pulled a sandwich out of the paper sack. “I made extra if you want one. Bologna and cheese. And we have tomatoes. Boy, do we ever have tomatoes.”

  “I ate before I came. I don’t expect you to feed me,” Noah said.

  “Suit yourself,” Jocie said as she laid the sandwich on the table. “But there it is if you want it. Me and Dad won’t want it and Zella wouldn’t eat it even if she was here. She says nobody would eat bologna if they gave the first thought to what they put in it. She’s probably right, so I don’t think about it.” Jocie took a big bite.

  Noah looked back over his shoulder toward the door. “Where is Miss Curtsinger?”

  “Zella?” Jocie said. “Oh, she usually gets lunch up at the Grill or goes home. She’s not much for eating at her desk.” It sounded funny hearing Zella called Miss Curtsinger, but maybe it would be better if Noah stayed extra polite to her for a while until Zella got over what she called his impertinence last week.

  Noah pulled over a chair and eyed the sandwich a minute before picking it up and saying, “There’s no need letting it go to waste.”

  “No need at all,” Jocie’s father said. “We’re trying to come up with which story we’ve got that might sell a few extra papers this week.”

  “Nothing much happened in Hollyhill this week,” Jocie explained. “At least not newspaper-type stuff. First Baptist is having a revival, and we have a piece about the evangelist they’ve brought in from Louisville, but that’s for the church page. And we’ve got some pictures of the schools being cleaned up for school to start.”

  Noah looked over at Jocie’s dad. “But aren’t the schools being desegregated? That should be a big news story in a little town like this. Actually, it’s a pretty unbelievable story that the schools aren’t already integrated. I’ve never gone to a school that wasn’t integrated.”

  “You’re farther south now,” Jocie’s father said as if that explained everything. “Besides, school doesn’t start till Thursday next week and the Banner goes out on Wednesdays. So we’ll print those stories next week.” He gave Noah a look. “Do you like to write? If you do, you could write something about how different starting school here is from what you were used to in Chicago or something like that.”

  “You might not like what I wrote,” Noah said.

  “Then I wouldn’t print it.” Jocie’s dad fastened his eyes on Noah. “We might as well get one thing clear right at the beginning, Noah. The Banner is just a small-town paper. We put out one issue per week. We’re here to serve the community by reporting on what happens in Hollyhill and Holly County. We don’t do national news like what Congress is up to or what’s happening in Vietnam unless it has a local handle, such as one of our Hollyhill boys flying the bombers over North Vietnam or one of our senators coming through town. Neither of them ever has, but if they did, it would be front-page news for the Banner. We leave the national and state news to the daily papers out of Lexington and Louisville.”

  “So how do you sell papers if you don’t have anything much to write about?” Noah asked.

  “We manage,” Jocie’s father said. “Folks here want to read about what happens in town and at the schools. They like seeing their pictures or their kids’ pictures in the paper.”

  “Sounds pretty dull,” Noah said. “I thought newspapers tried to come up with controversial stories to keep people interested.”

  “I don’t print stories to stir up trouble just for the sake of stirring up trouble.”

  “But sometimes trouble needs to be stirred up in order to get wrongs righted,” Noah said.

  “Then that would be a different matter, but I always want to walk the peaceful route first,” Jocie’s dad said.

  “That’s fine by me.” Noah took another bite of his sandwich and chewed a minute before he went on. “The peace road is a fine one to walk if people will let you walk it. But the fact is, they’ve put my mama in jail three times for walking that road or trying to walk that road down in Mississippi and Louisiana. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., he doesn’t do anything but talk the peace road, and they’ve put him in jail a few times too. According to Mama, he and a few thousand more walked on your state capital here in March. Did you print anything about that then?”

  “They didn’t march through here. People got that news in the daily papers.”

  Jocie had stopped eating her sandwich as she watched them talk. They weren’t exactly arguing, but Jocie could hear an edge of irritation to her father’s voice. He was trying to hide it, but it was there. Having Noah in the pressroom wasn’t going to be a thing like having Wes there to back up her father in whatever he wanted to do. Noah had questions and he didn’t seem to want to wait for the answers.

  “Do you really think your Hollyhill is going to be that much different when the black people here decide they want to go in the front door at the courthouse or sit at the counter to eat at the restaurant uptown?” Noah said.

  “I hope so,” Jocie’s dad said. “And I pray so.”

  Jocie spoke up. “What do you mean, go in the back door at the courthouse? Can’t anybody go in any door they want to?”

  Jocie’s dad looked uncomfortable as he answered. “I’m sure they can now.”

  “What do you mean ‘now’?” Jocie asked.

  “Well, there used to be a sign. I don’t think it’s there anymore, but it could be I just haven’t been paying attention. Is there a sign there, Noah?”

  “I didn’t see one, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was,” Noah said. “There are signs like that all over the South that white people don’t pay much attention to until black people quit paying attention to them too.”

  “What signs?” Jocie asked.

  “Saying colored people should use the back door or ‘whites only’ signs that say they shouldn’t come in at all.” Noah took another bite of sandwich as if he was just talking about the weather or something.

  Jocie stared at Noah. “There’s no sign like that here.”

  “So maybe there isn’t,” Noah said with a shrug. “But whether the sign is still there or not, it’s still in people’s heads. A few of them told my mother as much when she went in the courthouse when we first came down here. Of course she went right on through the front door and out it again when she’d finished her business there.”

  “As she should have.” Jocie’s father crumpled up the wax paper that had been around his sandwich and threw it in the trash can. “I know we’re far from perfect here in Hollyhill, Noah, but I think if you and your family will give the people a chance, they’ll come around. Desegregating the schools is going to change things.”

  “Things need to change,” Noah said.

  “You’re right. There’s no place for the kind of things you’re talking
about in our town.”

  “Do you think there’ll be trouble next week when school starts?”

  “No, I don’t. Not in Hollyhill.”

  Jocie’s father sounded sure of his answer, but Noah didn’t seem ready to believe him. “There’s been plenty of trouble in other places in the South.”

  “We’re not that far south.”

  “Then how come the schools aren’t already desegregated?” “The black people here didn’t want to give up their community school.”

  “All the black people live in one community?”

  “They did till your family moved in,” Jocie’s father said.

  Noah sort of smiled as he said, “I guess my mama will have her chance to stir things up even when she’s not trying. She promised my daddy she’d stay off the Freedom Road for a while.” Noah’s smile disappeared. “Things are just getting too bad. People, even women like Mama, have been getting dragged off to jail and beat up by the police. Others just come up missing down there on the Freedom Road and then show up later, dead.”

  “Nothing like that will happen in Hollyhill,” Jocie’s father said.

  “But if it did, would you report it in your newspaper the way it really happened instead of trying to say it was the colored people’s fault because they were out there trying to breathe the same air the white folks were breathing?” Noah looked at Jocie’s father as if his answer was especially important to him.

  “I would report the truth.”

  “Even if it meant half your subscribers would cancel their papers?”

  “Even if it meant all my subscribers canceled their subscriptions.” Jocie’s father’s mouth was set in a hard line. “I look to the Lord to lead me to do and say the right things both at church on Sundays and here at work the rest of the week. But like I said, I don’t make trouble just to make trouble, and if you want to work here, Noah, I’ll expect the same out of you.”