Orchard of Hope

by Ann H. Gabhart

  “Wait a minute.” Noah held up his hands as if to protect himself from Jocie’s father’s words. “You’ve got me all wrong, Brother David. I don’t want trouble. I hate trouble.”

  “Good. Then let’s get to work on this week’s issue.”

  Jocie tore the crusts off what was left of her sandwich and tried to think of something to say to get some of the tension out of the air. Wes would have been able to if he’d been there. He’d have said something about Jupiter or how they didn’t have anything but snooze news for this week’s paper. But before she could think of anything, Noah spoke up. “I think the top story should be about the drought. Or is it always this hot and dry here?”

  “No, it’s extra hot,” Jocie said. “Hey, Dad, didn’t you take a picture of a dried-up pond somewhere last week?”

  “That might work,” Jocie’s father said. “I’ll work on that while you show Noah how to start setting up some of the ads.”

  Jocie pitched the rest of her sandwich in the trash and moved over to the table to start work. She was relieved when Noah followed her and paid attention to what she told him to do. Maybe they’d be able to work together. Still, it might be that she should start praying harder for Wes to be able to come back to work soon. Real soon.

  14

  As David went out of the pressroom, leaving Noah and Jocie with their heads together over one of the ads, he couldn’t keep the thought away that maybe he had made a mistake offering Noah a job. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but as Zella was quick to point out to him earlier that day, he hadn’t even given himself time to pray about it.

  He’d talked to Zella as soon as he’d gotten to the office that morning about what he could pay Noah. Zella kept the books, made sure the bills got paid on time, wrote out their payroll checks, and kept them straight on taxes. She’d been doing it for years, even before David started working at the Banner when he came home from the service after the war. She kept them out of the red. And David was grateful, but sometimes Zella acted as if the money was hers. Especially when he proposed a new expense like hiring Noah.

  They had the means. David kept his eye on what came in and what went out, so he knew the paper had been bringing in more money this summer. The tornado issues had sold out, and they could count on a boost in church ads with end-of-summer revivals and homecomings in the fall. Plus Zella had already sold a whole page of ads for the big sidewalk sale the downtown merchants were having over Labor Day weekend.

  So he didn’t think it was beyond reason that the paper could hire an extra hand for two or three afternoons a week, even if they did keep paying Wes his salary. And the truth was, if they didn’t get extra help before Jocie went back to school, then the paper might not get printed on time. Late papers brought complaints, and no paper meant no revenue.

  That’s what he’d told Zella, but she hadn’t bought it. She’d just looked up at him standing beside her desk and said, “It’s not like you to do this kind of thing without taking time to think and pray about it.”

  “What kind of thing? You mean hiring some help? We need to get the paper out.”

  She just kept looking at him. “You’re borrowing trouble. That’s what you’re doing, David. Borrowing trouble.”

  “What makes you think that? Because Noah’s black?”

  “It’s not just that he’s colored. He has a chip on his shoulder. Worse than a chip. A whole block. The boy will make problems. And besides that, you won’t be able to let him and Jocelyn work back there alone the way you did Wesley and her. While Wesley certainly can’t be the best influence on a young girl like Jocelyn, even so, you could rest easy knowing he’d take care of her.”

  “He’s the same as family,” David agreed.

  “Well, this boy very definitely isn’t family.” Zella pointed her ink pen at David. “And you can’t expect me to supervise them every minute while you’re out gathering stories or covering meetings or whatever. I have to do my work up here.”

  “Jocie knows how to behave,” David said.

  “Jocelyn has been doing whatever she’s wanted to do for years. Why, half the time you don’t even know where she is or what she’s doing.” Zella waved her pen around.

  “That’s not true.” David frowned at Zella. There were limits and she had just about reached his. “Jocie is a good girl.”

  Zella seemed to realize she’d gone a step too far. “I didn’t mean to imply she wasn’t, but she has had a different upbringing than most girls in Hollyhill. Working here since she was a child. As far as that goes, she’s still a child. She’s only thirteen. But even if she does want to do the right things, how do you know that boy will?”

  “I’ll make sure that he does,” David said.

  Zella mashed her lips together as if to keep from saying whatever else she wanted to say, but decided not to because of the look on David’s face. After a couple of seconds, she simply shook her head a little and said, “If you wanted to get some extra help, you should have hired one of the local boys. People aren’t too happy already about the Hearndons buying that place out there. Things might turn ugly, and if their boy’s working here, it’s liable to rub off on us. People might cancel their subscriptions.”

  “I offered him a job, Zella,” David said flatly. “I plan to stand behind that and give him a chance. I’ll have him keep his hours, and we’ll pay him a dollar an hour.”

  “You’re the boss,” Zella said as she started typing again. “But like I said, if you ask me you’re borrowing trouble. As if you didn’t have enough already. Sometimes it looks like you go out hunting it.”

  Now David was sitting at his desk, staring at the picture of the dried-up farm pond and trying to come up with a headline, but he couldn’t keep from wondering if Zella was right. Maybe he was borrowing trouble. He didn’t really know anything about Noah. Still, he’d always prided himself on being a good judge of character. Except of course with Adrienne.

  Adrienne had been the biggest mistake he’d ever made, and he’d done that on impulse. He let her talk him into running off to get married twenty-four hours after he’d come home on leave for his father’s funeral, but then there was a war going on. Everybody was making fast, sometimes rash, decisions. A man didn’t know whether he was going to live long enough to make a slow decision. And she hadn’t had to talk all that much to convince him. He was carried away by the sight of her. Whatever else anybody said about Adrienne, nobody was ever able to deny she had looks.

  The decision to hire Noah wasn’t anything like that. Impulsive maybe, but David hadn’t been carried away by emotion. The boy was okay. A person could tell. Noah wasn’t going to cause any problems, David told himself even as he sat extra still in his desk chair and listened to see if he could hear what was going on back in the pressroom. All he could hear was Zella, back from lunch, pounding on her typewriter just outside his office, and he had to make himself not get up to go back to the pressroom to make sure everything was all right.

  He told himself again that Noah wasn’t going to cause problems. At least not that kind of problems. The boy was going to shake things up. Shake David up. He had already done that.

  David had never thought he was prejudiced. He had studied Paul’s sermon to the Athenians in Acts where Paul said God gave breath to all life and made all the nations of men of one blood. David never doubted that the Lord loved all people regardless of color or station in life. The Lord looked on the heart of man, not the outward appearance.

  But what was the Lord seeing in David’s own heart? Love for all neighbors or only love for those David chose to be his neighbors? Was he only willing to love his neighbor if it was easy? If it made him feel good? Perhaps the Lord had sent Noah his way to jolt David out of his comfortable thinking and make him see in a new way.

  David bowed his head and prayed silently. Dear Lord, open my mind and heart and help me step forward with faith on the path you are putting before me. Now give me the words I need to get this week’s Banner read
y. May your love and mercy ever surround me. And mine. Amen.

  He opened his eyes and stared down at the picture of the pond with its cracked mud bottom. He wrote “HEAT PARCHES COUNTY” in big letters over his article about the drought before he carried it back to the pressroom where Jocie and Noah had several ads blocked out and ready to run.

  Jocie looked up at David with a big smile. “Noah’s catching right on. Together me and him are almost as fast as Wes.” Jocie’s smile disappeared. “I’ll bet Wes wishes he was here.”

  “I’m sure he does,” David said. “Maybe in a couple of weeks when he gets a smaller cast he can come back and boss us around.”

  “We’re going to have put in a super long day tomorrow, aren’t we, Dad? Maybe we should pack our lunch and our supper. Or maybe we can beg Leigh to bring some sandwiches along with her brownies tomorrow night. She is coming, isn’t she?”

  “I don’t know,” David said. “I haven’t had time to talk to her today.”

  “She’ll be here,” Jocie said with a smile. “She told me she thinks folding papers is fun. And of course, she likes the company.”

  “Is that the lady that was with you at church?” Noah asked.

  “Yep. Leigh makes great brownies. Wait till you taste them,” Jocie said.

  “There’s more to like about Leigh than just her brownies,” David said. “You shouldn’t make it sound as if we’re just wanting her to show up for the food.”

  “I know, Dad.” Jocie’s smile got even wider as she turned to Noah and whispered loudly, “Leigh’s my daddy’s girlfriend.”

  “A friend, at any rate,” David said.

  “She is a girl,” Jocie said. “So if she’s a girl and a friend, doesn’t that work out to girlfriend?”

  “Just get to work and save your girlfriend/boyfriend nonsense for next week when you start school.” David went over to the press and pretended to give it the once-over.

  There was that word again. Girlfriend. Could a man his age have a girlfriend? Maybe a better question was, should a man his age have a girlfriend? Especially a man about to be a grandfather. But at the same time, he wished he could slip out the back door and walk down the street to the courthouse where Leigh worked.

  Ever since Sunday he’d been thinking about how he might ask her out on a date. A real date. He’d almost asked her the day before, but he didn’t know what people did on a real date nowadays. When he was in high school, he’d taken girls to the drive-in movies over in Grundy. And with Adrienne their first and only date had been running off to get married.

  Jocie probably had more ideas about what to do on a date these days than he did, but he couldn’t very well ask her for dating advice. He supposed he could ask Zella. As far as David knew, she’d not been on a date in all the time he’d been working with her, but she read all those romantic stories.

  The only love stories David read were in the Bible, and some of those weren’t exactly something a person would want to copy in his own life. Other matches were literally arranged by the Lord. Some took the intervention of angels. David thought it might take the intervention of an angel to help him get off square one in the dating game.

  The very word date made him uneasy. But at the same time, girlfriend wasn’t sounding nearly so strange to him these days. While he had no idea why a young woman like Leigh would ever want to be his girlfriend, he sort of liked the sound of it. Maybe he’d take time to slip down to the courthouse later before Leigh left work to see how her day had been going. Maybe he’d see if she was planning to walk the next day. He could pick one of the red roses out behind the house and go walk with her. He’d walked with her one morning several weeks ago, and they’d been comfortable walking and talking together.

  Of course, it would be hard to get away from the house that early now that he had to help Wes get cleaned up and dressed in the mornings. And he needed to make time to go by and see Ben Atkinson who’d had a tumor removed last week. Wednesday he had to take Tabitha to the doctor over in Grundy, and then there was his interview with Mrs. Rowlett that he had scheduled for Thursday. He wanted to have his story about her going from teaching at the West End School to the high school for next week’s issue.

  Time. The hours were all too full and went too fast. But sometimes if a person didn’t grab hold of an hour and keep it for himself, life just passed him by. Somehow he’d manage to pick that rose in the morning and be there at the park when Leigh got there for her morning exercise walk. She said she was trying to lose weight.

  Maybe tomorrow morning he’d tell her she didn’t have to lose weight to look nice. Maybe he’d find the right words to ask her on a real date—if he could figure out what that was and carve out another hour or two. He wanted to. It surprised him how much he wanted to. And right on top of that surprise was another. Without summons, the memory of her hugging him on the day Jocie had run away and the tornado swept Clay’s Creek Church off its foundation came to mind. Her arms around him had felt right. Maybe it was time for him to return the hug.

  15

  Tuesday morning, Leigh’s alarm jerked her away from a dream. A good dream. The kind of dream she wanted to hold on to and enjoy to the end, but as soon as she opened her eyes to grab the clock on her bedside table to stop its buzzing, the dream slipped away. All she had left was the vague feeling that if only she’d had five more minutes to sleep, something really wonderful would have happened.

  She lay back on her pillow and shut her eyes to see if she could recapture the dream, but it was only feathery mists in her memory. She kept her eyes shut anyway to block out the morning light. The sun wasn’t up. She’d set her alarm early to have time to walk before work, but maybe she’d just sleep in. The air the fan was pulling in through the open window across from her bed already felt hot. It was going to be another scorcher. Her boss, Ralph Mitchell, had a noisy window air conditioner that kept his office bearable, but only teasing hints of cool air leaked out to the counter in the large office next to the hallway where Leigh and Ralph’s wife, Judy, waited on the people wanting to get married, go fishing, vote in the next election, or license their cars. If Leigh went out walking this morning and got hot, she’d be sweating all day.

  Still, she had lost ten and a half pounds when she weighed in on the courthouse scales last Thursday. She only let herself weigh once a week since she’d started trying to lose weight back in the spring. It was too depressing when the needle on the big scale crept up instead of down. That hadn’t happened for a few weeks. She’d been faithful to her walking and no-potato-chips plan. But she did eat two pieces of that butterscotch pie at Miss Sally’s house on Sunday. Not that she had much choice about that. She had to eat when she went to people’s houses on Sunday with David.

  With David. She savored those words a moment and whispered them out loud. “With David.”

  She hadn’t exactly gone to church with him. She drove out there herself. He didn’t exactly ask her to go to the McMurtrys’ with him. Miss Sally did. But he did ask her to stay for the evening service. The lost dream inched back closer to her consciousness. It had surely been about David. Surely. A smile slipped across Leigh’s face and she sighed.

  Then she remembered the two slices of pie and the problem at hand. She put her hands on her stomach. It didn’t stick out too much when she was lying down, and it wasn’t as soft and flabby as it had been. Still, it wasn’t flat. She shouldn’t have eaten the pie, but the Mt. Pleasant women expected her to eat twice as much as she could hold or they got insulted. Leigh didn’t know how David and Jocie stayed so slim. Sometimes it seemed as if everybody in the whole world was slim but her.

  Leigh’s mother said carrying a little extra weight ran in the family. Leigh wasn’t worried about a little extra weight. She was just tired of carrying a lot of extra weight. She figured she needed to lose fifteen more pounds before she got down to that little-extra-weight size. That wasn’t going to happen if she didn’t put her feet on the floor and get out of bed to go walk. She opened
her left eye and then her right eye and let the mists of the dream completely vanish as she sat up.

  In the bathroom, she splashed cold water on her face before staring critically at her reflection in the mirror as she jerked a comb through her almost-blonde hair. She wondered if the people at David’s church would think she was a hussy if she put highlights in her hair. More to the point, would David?

  Maybe she should just concentrate on her eyes. Everybody always said her eyes were her best feature. Cornflower blue. And eyes didn’t get fat like the rest of a person’s body. But this morning her eyes looked bloodshot and tired. She shouldn’t have sat up so late watching that stupid tearjerker movie, but it had been too hot to sleep. She dug the shorts and T-shirt she’d worn to walk on Monday morning out of the dirty clothes. It didn’t matter how she looked. She hadn’t seen anybody in the park for weeks. Everybody else was sitting in front of their fans drinking iced tea for breakfast.

  Leigh made herself down a whole glass of water before she went out the door and tiptoed down the outside stairs to the ground in her socks before she put on her tennis shoes. She didn’t want to wake up Mrs. Simpson who lived below her and rented her the upstairs apartment. There weren’t that many good apartments for rent in Hollyhill, and Leigh had been lucky to get this one over Mrs. Simpson. But the woman had to keep her ears tuned on high level all the time. She complained if Leigh so much as dropped a big spoon on the kitchen floor. Heaven only knew what would happen if she dropped a pan.

  Her landlady did regularly fuss about Leigh’s music, but there were some things a girl just had to do. And one of those was play an Elvis record now and again.

  Sometimes Leigh wondered if her mother wasn’t behind Mrs. Simpson’s complaints. She knew her mother called Mrs. Simpson at least once a week. Her mother wasn’t happy with Leigh living in Hollyhill. She wanted Leigh to come back home to Grundy. She wanted her back in her old room with the frilly little girl curtains and princess bedspread. Leigh had hated that bedspread since the day she’d gotten it on her eleventh birthday. She’d never been anybody’s princess. Not even her mother and father’s. Not that she hadn’t tried.