Orchard of Hope

by Ann H. Gabhart

  Zella sighed just thinking about Leigh and David and the way they’d been smiling at each other last Tuesday night, as if they knew a secret none of the rest of them knew. Zella might not know it yet, but she would. Leigh wouldn’t be able to keep any secrets from Zella about what was happening between her and David. After all, if it hadn’t been for Zella and all she’d done to shake David out of his self-induced coma when it came to women and romance, Leigh would have never had the first chance of getting the man to notice her.

  Zella liked Leigh. The girl was young, but she would make a perfect preacher’s wife, a perfect wife for David. She’d have a handful with that Jocelyn, but then who wouldn’t? David had always been too lenient with that child. Letting her write up news stories when she should have still been playing with dolls. Letting her be disrespectful to her elders, to Zella, with only the pretense of taking her to task. And now this letting her work shoulder to shoulder, nose to nose with that colored boy. It was just begging for trouble.

  Not that Zella could totally blame David for how Jocelyn acted. He’d done the best he could in a bad situation. The child had never had a mother. Not from day one. Nor David a proper wife. Zella hadn’t been the first bit shocked or the least bit sorry when Adrienne took off for parts unknown. Good riddance was all she had to say.

  But while Zella couldn’t do a thing about Jocelyn, she could do something for David. David was like a little brother to her. She cared what happened to him. He deserved better than what life had handed him so far, so Zella had set out to bring him to the door of happiness. He needed romance and love the same as the men in the novels she read, but just like most of them, he was too blind to see it.

  In those romance books, it took about two hundred pages for the hero to get to a spot where he began to see the heroine as the girl of his dreams and to realize he couldn’t live without her. In the real world it hadn’t been quite that easy or the ending so sure. The ending still wasn’t sure. Endings in real life never were, but David was finally heading up the walk to the happiness door. And Zella was standing there poised and ready to give him another shove or two if he needed it. When something needed to be done, Zella found a way to get it done.

  She’d told Leigh as much early on when Leigh had been discouraged by their lack of progress with David. That had made Leigh wonder aloud, “Then how come you never found the way to the right man for yourself?”

  Zella remembered exactly where they were when Leigh asked her that question. It was last April and they were driving back from Grundy after watching Nadine Richardson’s son marry some slip of a girl over there. There was nothing like a wedding to make a single girl feel depressed. Especially a single girl like Leigh who didn’t want to be single. That wasn’t Zella. She explained as much to Leigh. “I’m quite happy with my life the way it is, and I never met a proper candidate to make me think about changing things.”

  The fact of the matter was even if a Prince Charming had ridden up to Zella’s gate and paced his steed back and forth begging entrance, she might not have unlatched the gate to let him in. Prince Charmings had a way of turning into froggy old husbands who expected their wives to spend all their free time cooking and cleaning and picking up their dirty socks off the floor while they sat on the couch and watched golf on television. Why in the world would anybody want to watch golf on television?

  And then Leigh said the most ridiculous thing Zella had ever heard anybody say. “What about Wes? He’s sort of cute in a weird kind of way.”

  It was a good thing that Leigh was driving instead of Zella. Zella would have probably run right off the road and turned the car upside down. That’s what would have to happen to the world before Zella ever took the first look at Wesley Green as a candidate for anything personal. The world would have to turn upside down.

  Of course, a lot of people were saying it already had, with how President Kennedy had gotten shot last fall, and now President Johnson was bombing some country halfway around the world in the name of freedom, and Congress was passing all these laws about civil rights and everything. As if people didn’t know how to run their own lives without some senators up in Washington telling them what to do. The truth was, even if most people did manage to make a complete mess of how they lived, some things just couldn’t be legislated.

  But the very idea of Leigh even thinking Zella would give Wesley Green the first consideration in that way. Even if he had been handsome, which he was not; even if he had been gentlemanly, which he was not; even if he had any redeeming qualities at all, which he did not, Zella wouldn’t have given him a second thought. The man was some kind of outlaw. Zella had known that from the very first time she’d laid eyes on him. He’d done nothing over the ensuing years to convince her otherwise—which brought her to the matter at hand. The key to the upstairs apartment.

  In the other room, the phone started ringing. Zella slapped both her hands against her chest as her heart started banging against her ribs. She took two deep breaths while her heart slowed its thumping.

  “Now who in the world would be calling here at this time of the morning?” she muttered to herself. She had half a mind to go in there, pick up the phone, and tell whoever it was to look at a clock. The office wouldn’t be open for business for at least an hour. David wouldn’t be there for a half hour after that. Zella was counting on it. And she wouldn’t have to worry about Jocelyn. She would be at school. That was why Zella had waited until now. She’d known she was going to do this ever since the tornado blew through and Wesley had ended up in the hospital practically at death’s door. It was something that had to be done. She’d just been waiting for the right time to do it.

  It was for his own good.

  There was really no need for her nerves to feel all jangly. She stepped quickly across the floor, past the press, and lifted the key off the hook by the back door. She stared at it for a minute as if just looking at it would give her the answers she was determined to find. But of course it was only a key.

  She looked around until she found the old broom that obviously, from the looks of the pressroom floor, wasn’t used nearly enough. She stepped out the back door and around to the steps that led up to Wesley’s apartment. His motorcycle was parked under the landing. Somehow it had survived the tornado in better shape than Wesley. Zella wished it had been blown to kingdom come so that Wesley would have been forced to buy some more sensible mode of transportation. From the looks of his leg, though, he might never be able to get back on the seat of his motorcycle. Or climb the steps to his apartment.

  As Zella started up the stairs, she swept a leaf off a step here and there. That was her cover story if anybody happened by and caught her on the steps. She stopped and looked around as the bells on top of the Christian Church tolled out the hour of seven. She didn’t see a soul. A car door slammed in the parking lot out behind the courthouse. Probably Hal going to open up the courthouse and sweep out the hallway. Hal always walked with his head down as if searching for pennies, so she didn’t have to worry about him noticing her even if he didn’t take the shortcut across the parking lot straight to the back door of the courthouse. A car went by on the street behind the newspaper office, but luckily, the person in the car was looking straight ahead at the road.

  She blew out her breath and told herself to stop acting like a scared rabbit. It didn’t matter if somebody did see her. She had her broom. She was sweeping the steps. They’d probably just think that was part of her job the way it was Hal’s job to sweep at the courthouse. Not that she was the Banner’s janitor or anything.

  By the time she got to the top of the stairs, her forehead was damp with sweat, but that didn’t have the first thing to do with nerves. It was hot. The sun was coming up bright and strong already without even a whiff of a promise of rain. Every church in the county had been praying for rain, but so far the Lord hadn’t seen fit to send them any. David said he would, that sometimes the Lord answered prayers in his own time.

  Zella wished he’d
hurry. Her rosebuds were drying up on the bushes without even opening up, and that was with her carrying out the water she rinsed her dishes in to pour on them. The mayor had issued a ban on watering lawns and flowers. They’d run the notice in the Banner the last two issues. Police Chief Simmons had even handed out a citation to Perry Phillips who’d been caught watering his grass in the middle of the night. Perry set great store by his grass, but he couldn’t be any fonder of it than Zella was of her roses. Her mother had planted most of those rosebushes. Still, Zella wouldn’t break the law to keep them blooming.

  It wasn’t the best time to be thinking about breaking the law, Zella thought, as she stuck the key in the lock. But she wasn’t breaking and entering. She had the key. She wasn’t breaking anything. She was just entering.

  She pushed open the door, quickly stepped inside, and yanked the door shut behind her. It was twice as hot inside as it had been outside. And stuffy. And it smelled. Not just that closed-up stale odor but like printer’s ink and press oil and coffee. Like Wesley. Dust stood in the air and a cobweb stretched from the ceiling light to the door facing above her head.

  No windows or doors had been opened up there for weeks except when Jocelyn had come in to hunt for a book, some clothes, or whatever for Wesley. The place needed a good airing out. Maybe she’d tell Jocelyn as much. Maybe she’d even offer to help. That would give her another opportunity to hunt for clues to Wesley’s past if she couldn’t find them fast enough this morning.

  Zella waved her hand in front of her face to push a little extra air toward her nose. She had never been in Wesley’s apartment. She’d never been invited, and even if she had been, she wouldn’t have come.

  The place wasn’t exactly dirty, just dusty and cluttered. Books were piled everywhere. Zella picked up a couple of them. Nothing she’d ever think about reading. Still, a bit of admiration stole into her mind for a man who read that many books.

  It was a small apartment with a kitchenette tacked on to the living room. He didn’t even have a stove, just a hot plate on a tiny table. Beside it was a half-size refrigerator that she wasn’t about to open. No telling what might be growing in there. Wesley surely wouldn’t hide anything in there anyway. A glass and cup sat on a towel next to a small sink.

  Zella slowly swept her eyes around the room. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for, but she was sure she’d know it when she saw it. Somewhere there would be a letter or a paper or a picture that would lead her to the truth of Wesley Green’s past. He would have kept something. Everybody did.

  Wesley didn’t have a telephone, so there wouldn’t be a telephone book where he might have scribbled down a number. She pulled open a drawer in the table by the old couch, but there was nothing in there but pencils and pens. She found a quarter and three pennies under the couch cushions. She picked them up and dropped them in the drawer with the pencils.

  She took a peek at her watch. A quarter after seven already. She needed to hurry. She intended to be sitting behind her desk by seven thirty.

  She straightened up and looked around. He might have stuck something in a book, but unless she was just lucky enough to pick the right book, she’d never find it in the time she had left. A Bible. People didn’t throw away Bibles. She kept her mother’s and her grandmother’s Bibles in a special place at home. She’d heard dozens of stories about soldiers carrying their pocket New Testaments through this or that war. Maybe Wesley had carried a Bible away from his past with him.

  She went across the room into the small nook where Wesley slept. The cover was thrown back on the bed as if he had just gotten up and gone down to the newspaper office. There was even still an indention in the pillow. It was almost enough to make Zella give up her quest and run for the door.

  “You’re here. Wesley isn’t here. Look for the Bible,” she told herself firmly.

  She didn’t find a Bible, but she did find a road atlas under the bed. She blew the dust off the cover and opened it up. In the front was a map of the whole United States. Wesley had traced so many black routes on the roads between the states that it looked like a spiderweb. Zella couldn’t even begin to comprehend how many miles the lines represented. There were lines to California and Oregon, to Florida and Maine.

  Moving closer to the small window above the bed, she pulled the curtain back to let in more light. Then she narrowed her eyes and studied the map until she located the end of a line somewhere close to where a dot for Hollyhill, Kentucky, would have been if the town had been big enough to be on the map. Painstakingly, ever conscious of the minutes ticking by, she looked for another end of a line. Finally she found it.

  She had closed the curtain and was putting the road atlas back under the bed when a picture slipped out of the atlas and fluttered to the floor. Zella picked it up and stared down at a much younger Wesley with his arm around a beautiful woman. A boy and a girl stood in front of them in one of those frozen-moment-in-time vacation shots where the sun was shining and a stranger must have offered to take a picture of everybody smiling and having a great time.

  Zella very carefully placed the photo back between the pages of the maps and shoved the book under Wesley’s bed. Then she practically ran to the door. She told herself she didn’t need to feel guilty. She hadn’t done anything wrong. She had never planned to turn Wesley in to the authorities or anything even if she did find something that proved he was running from the law. She was doing this for his own good.

  The man could die. He almost had died, and if that happened, they needed to know who to contact. He wasn’t from Jupiter. That of course went without saying. But he was from somewhere. He would have relatives. That picture proved it.

  Zella remembered to lock the door before she hurried down the steps. She remembered to put the key back on the hook in the pressroom. She totally forgot about the broom.

  21

  Wes had been awake for hours before anybody stirred at the Brooke house on Saturday morning. He’d kept his eyes shut and even let loose a fake snore when Tabby had come down to the john around three a.m. The girl was beginning to waddle. It wouldn’t be long now until there’d be a baby crying in the middle of the night to keep Wes entertained through the long dark midnight hours.

  Of course he didn’t plan to be camped out in the Brookes’ living room all that much longer, so unless she had the baby soon, he might miss out on that. He’d got the cast trimmed down to just about six inches above his knee. He could put on his clothes without help, although it took him awhile to get his split britches leg up over the cast. He’d been practicing on the steps some when nobody was in the house. And he’d been feeling extra itchy for days. And not just under his cast where he couldn’t get to.

  This was a different kind of itch. The kind he had before he landed in Hollyhill, where he’d stuff his extra shirt and pants and his road atlas in his knapsack, get on his motorcycle, and move on down the road. But he wasn’t sure he was itching to leave Hollyhill. He was just itching to be out of the middle of Grand Central Station in Brookeville. A man needed some time to be alone. A man needed some time to think.

  Then again it could be all the time he’d had to think in the middle of the night that was causing the itch. That and the Bible reading. He’d been doing a lot of Bible reading since the tornado had blown through his life. Sometimes he felt like a tornado was blowing through his soul when he picked up the Bible and started reading wherever the pages fell open. At first he’d read the Bible at the hospital because that was the only book there. Some Gideon had put it there, according to the front cover.

  It wasn’t that he hadn’t ever read the Bible before. He’d been faithful in Sunday school as a little tyke, and Rosa had set great store by church while they’d been married. At one time Rosa thought their boy might even end up a preacher. For all Wes knew, the boy could have done it. He might be leading revivals all over.

  Fate or the Lord or Mr. Jupiter, whoever it was who pushed the buttons that made things happen, had a funny sense of h
umor anyway. Here Wes was sleeping in the living room of a preacher whose daughter was wanting to call him Granddaddy. Jo was the reason that no matter how strong the itch got he wouldn’t leave Hollyhill. If he left Jo behind, he might as well just ride his motorcycle off a cliff somewhere and face whatever eternal reward was waiting for him.

  He hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about eternal rewards until the last few weeks. A man could sort of ignore the inevitable even when he knew how fast the inevitable could happen, the way it had with Rosa and Lydia. One afternoon they’d been on the beach in the full of the sunshine of life, and the next day, gone. Wes had done a lot of going since then, running away from even the memory of love until he’d gotten to Hollyhill and Jo had needed him. Or maybe it was him who had needed her.

  Wes lay still and held his breath to see if he could hear any movement out on the porch where Jo was sleeping. Another reason he needed to move on out of here. It would be too cold for her to sleep out there once winter came. She’d need his spot in the living room. The Brooke house was running over at the top with people. And who knew? What with the way the man had been humming when he got up in the mornings lately, David might be thinking about moving in another female. Wes was pretty sure David’s song of choice hadn’t been out of a hymnal the morning before. It had sounded suspiciously like an Elvis number, “Love Me Tender.”

  Wes didn’t hear a thing from out on the porch. Jo didn’t have the excitement of school to pull her out of bed early. She’d done all right at high school just the way he’d known she would even without the curly hair. She’d been typical Jo and jumped right in the middle of everything. The first day of school she had come home and sat on the porch with Wes, talking nonstop until Lovella made her help put supper on the table.

  Jo was going to be okay. She was almost fourteen and she knew how to find answers to her questions. She’d be okay even if he wasn’t. Some days he thought he might hobble on through the valley he was in and come out okay on the other side. Other days the black of the valley closed in around him until he lost even the glimmer of hope of finding his way out.