Orchard of Hope

by Ann H. Gabhart

  “But somebody threw it,” Noah said, standing beside Jocie.

  “They did for a fact,” Wes said. “But the damage is done now. It’s over.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Jocie’s father said as he took a step toward the rock. Glass crunched under his shoes.

  “Wait, David,” Wes said. “Jo, go get a camera. This is news.”

  “Maybe I won’t want to print this in the paper,” Jocie’s father said.

  “No, it ain’t that you’re not wanting. What you don’t want is for the rock to be laying there in the first place,” Wes said. “But it is, and folks will be expecting to read about what happened. We’ll need pictures.”

  As Jocie ran to get a camera, Zella said, “Doesn’t anybody care that I’m bleeding?”

  “Of course we do, Zella,” Jocie’s father said as he moved over to look at her arm. “How bad is it? Do you want me to call Dr. Markum?”

  “No, I don’t think it needs stitches, but it could have been cut deeper.” Zella rolled her arm over to get a better look. “I could have been hurt bad.”

  Jocie reappeared and held up the camera. “Want me to take a picture of you, Zella?”

  “Don’t be silly, Jocelyn. Heaven knows, you waste enough film. Nobody wants to see a picture of me bleeding on the front page of the Banner.” She dabbed at the cut with the handful of pink tissues Leigh handed her.

  Once the blood was wiped off, the cut wasn’t much more than a scratch, but there were bits of glass scattered all over Zella’s desk. So Jocie took a picture of that instead of Zella’s arm. Then she focused in on the rock lying in its glass nest. She popped in a new flashbulb and took a picture of a large piece of glass with the letters BA on it. She looked through the viewfinder at the pieces of glass still stuck in the window frame with their sharp, jagged ends, like fingers pointing toward the gaping hole in the window. Some of the letters of the word Hollyhill were still there, some were gone, and others were broken in half. She needed the picture from the outside, not the inside.

  She was pushing open the door when her father stopped her. “Don’t go out there, Jocie.”

  “But, Dad, I need to take the picture from out there. So the letters will be right. I mean, look. See how Hollyhill is all broken up.”

  “I’m afraid I do,” he said as he leaned down to pick up the rock.

  She turned away from the door to watch him pull the rubber band off the rock and unfold the paper. Maybe the rain would hold off a few more minutes so she could still get the outside picture, but she couldn’t miss her father reading the message on the rock.

  He stared down at the paper in his hand. Nobody in the room said anything as they waited for him to speak, but he didn’t. Instead, his mouth tightened into a thin line as he dropped the rock back on the floor and tore the paper through the middle. Then he put the pieces together and tore them twice more.

  He kept the pieces clutched in the fist of one hand as he grabbed Zella’s trash can with his other hand and dumped it out. Zella gasped as pink tissues flew everywhere along with torn envelopes and crumpled papers. Jocie’s father didn’t seem to notice as he dropped the ripped-up paper down into the trash can. He kept his eyes on the bits of paper as though expecting them to try to make an escape.

  He finally spoke. “Get me a match.”

  Jocie, along with everybody else in the room, just stood there and stared at her father. She couldn’t imagine what might have been on the paper that had her father looking so grim. Then Zella pulled open a drawer on her desk and handed Leigh a book of matches. Without a word, Leigh handed the matches on to Jocie’s father.

  Jocie crept closer so she could see down in the trash can, but she didn’t lift her camera up to take a picture as her father struck the match and dropped it into the papers. The flame flared up for a couple of seconds before vanishing into wisps of smoke. Jocie’s father reached down and mashed the black remains of the paper into nothing but ash.

  Outside, the thunder and lightning were easing away from Hollyhill taking with it the promise of rain, but nobody in the room paid much attention even with the window wide open to the weather. They were still staring at the trash can as if it might reveal answers to questions none of them dared ask.

  Then Wes was saying, “All right, that’s done. Now we better get going on all this or we’ll be folding papers all night. Jo, you finish your picture taking. Noah, go hunt around back behind the press and see if you can dig up some boards or something we can cover up the window with.”

  Jocie’s father interrupted him. “There’s plastic back there. Some I got when we were thinking about painting the place last spring. It’ll do to cover the window temporarily.”

  “Well, that might be easier,” Wes admitted and went back to assigning duties. “David, you go call the police, and Leigh, you hunt up the broom out by the back door.”

  “Broom?” Zella gasped and turned pale.

  “Are you feeling faint, Zella?” Leigh asked. “Maybe you should sit down.” Leigh scooted Zella’s chair out and leaned it over to dump any bits of glass out of it.

  “I’m fine,” Zella said, even as she sank down into the chair. “I’m just not sure we have a broom. It may have gotten thrown away or something.”

  “Don’t worry about it. We’ll find a broom somewhere,” Leigh said. “Here, let me help you put a bandage over your cut before it starts bleeding again.”

  Jocie started toward the door to get the picture she wanted of the window from out on the street. But then she stopped and looked at her father, who was stooped down, picking up the bigger pieces of glass. “What did it say, Dad?”

  He looked up at her after picking up another piece of glass. “No words you will ever hear passing out of my lips.” He dropped the glass into the trash can. It crashed into more pieces. “Just let your curiosity rest this time, Jocie, with the knowledge that it was nothing but words of hate. Nothing any of our eyes or ears need to see or hear.”

  “Does somebody hate us?” Jocie didn’t like saying the word. Not when she was talking about real hate. She didn’t mind saying she hated dusting or washing windows. She hated mosquitoes whining in her ears. She hated boiled cabbage. But this was a different kind of hate.

  Her father looked straight into her eyes. “I don’t know, Jocie. I want to say no, but I don’t know.” Then he reached up and touched her cheek. “But maybe not. Maybe it was just a stupid prank.”

  She knew he didn’t really believe that. He was just handing her a way to think of it without having to have the word “hate” bouncing around in her head. The problem was, she couldn’t believe it either. She turned her mind back to the business at hand.

  “I’ve got to take a picture from outside. It’s okay if I go out there now, isn’t it? The storm’s moving off.”

  Her father stood up. “I’ll go with you.”

  “You don’t think whoever threw the rock is still hanging around out here, do you?” Jocie said as she stepped through the door out onto the sidewalk and looked around. Dark shadows lurked at the edges of the pools of light from the streetlamps. People could be standing there ready to throw more rocks.

  “No, probably not. People who do things like this are cowards who don’t want to take the chance of being seen.”

  “Do you think they broke other windows or just ours?”

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about that possibility, but I’ll ask the chief when I call him in a minute. If so, I might have to go take more pictures.”

  “Everything looks okay from here.” Jocie looked up the street. She couldn’t see anything but more shadows. The street looked deserted. That wasn’t unusual for the nights they folded the Banner. All the other businesses were closed and locked up. Maybe whoever threw the rock knew that. They would have seen the lights and probably Zella at her desk. At night it was easy to see into the office when the lights were on. Jocie looked in now. She could see Leigh in there plain as day, opening another Band-Aid for Zella�
�s arm, and Noah and Wes unfolding the plastic sheeting Noah had found.

  “Take your picture,” her father said. “We’ve got a lot to do.”

  Jocie looked through her camera at the broken window framed in the viewfinder. She brushed aside all the questions swirling around in her head. She didn’t have to think about the reasons why in order to take the picture. She just had to think about how best to capture the shot so that other people might look at it and ask why.

  She snapped one picture before she moved down the sidewalk for a different angle. Her father stayed by the door, and the shadows behind Jocie began reaching long fingers toward her. She took a deep breath, willed her hands to stop trembling, and braced the camera against her face. She concentrated on the square of the world in front of her eye as she squeezed the shutter and the flashbulb exploded in a burst of bright light.

  For the rest of the night she was just going to concentrate on doing one thing at a time. The window was broken. Jocie couldn’t fit the pieces back together. She couldn’t do anything about rocks with hate words tied to them. Or about what might be in the shadows behind her other than to try to stay in the light out of reach. She couldn’t do anything about yet another thunderstorm moving away without gifting them with rain. Nothing but pray. Yet wasn’t that the best thing to do? Pray first. Do something second.

  She hurried away from the shadows breathing down her neck to where her father waited. “It isn’t going to rain, is it?” she said as she looked toward the east where thunder was still rumbling as the storm rolled away from them.

  “Not out of that one,” her father said. “But it will rain.”

  “But when?”

  “I don’t know, Jocie. We just have to keep praying.”

  “But we have so much to pray about. And now this too,” Jocie said. Maybe she should just forget about all her other prayers and concentrate on a no-hate prayer.

  “Yes, this too, but the Lord knows what we need, and he will take care of us.”

  “If he already knows what we need, why do we need to pray?”

  “Because he wants to hear from his people and because it helps us when we pray.” He put his arm around her shoulders and moved her toward the door. “But now we’ve got to get this mess cleaned up and back to work to get the Banner ready to go out.”

  “Nothing stops the Hollyhill Banner.”

  “I don’t know about that, but this isn’t going to.” Her father waved his hand toward the broken glass on the floor as they went through the door.

  For the last couple of months, folding papers hadn’t been so bad with Leigh showing up with food to give it sort of a party atmosphere. And with Wes back, Jocie had been expecting a really fun night, but now nobody was smiling or saying much as they did what had to be done.

  After Leigh had helped Zella put a row of Band-Aids up and down her arm, she helped Jocie sweep the glass up off the floor while Noah and Jocie’s father carefully worked the remaining shards of glass out of the window frame. Wes tried to stay out of the way, and Zella disappeared into the restroom to try to dab a couple of spots of blood off her white blouse before the stain set up.

  By the time Chief Simmons showed up to give the broken window an official once-over, Noah and Jocie’s father were already tacking the plastic over the opening. “Looks like you got on somebody’s bad side,” the chief said.

  “So it seems,” Jocie’s father said as he and the chief stepped inside.

  “You know who?”

  “Not who, but what.”

  “So there must have been a note,” Chief Simmons said.

  “There was.” Jocie’s father looked straight at the chief. “I got rid of it.”

  Chief Simmons frowned at him. “We might have got some leads off it.”

  “I doubt it. The letters were all cut out of the newspaper and pasted on.”

  “So where’d you throw it away? That trash can?” Chief Simmons stepped toward the trash can full of glass shards. “We can fish it out, I guess.”

  “Nothing to fish out. Nothing but ashes. I told you I got rid of it.” Jocie’s dad mashed his mouth together in a thin hard line as he waited for whatever the chief might say next.

  “Well, I guess it’s too late to do anything about that now. So you think it was the Klan?”

  “I know it was the Klan, and so do you.”

  Chief Simmons sighed. “Yeah. I’ve been hearing things.”

  “Did you know they were going to be marching here yesterday?” Her father narrowed his eyes as he waited for the chief’s answer.

  “Come on, David. You don’t think I would have let them be here if I could have done anything about it, but it’s a free country. A person can walk down whatever street they decide to walk down.”

  Jocie was glad Noah was outside hammering the plastic in place instead of inside hearing Chief Simmons. Things were weird enough without Noah having to set the police chief straight on how it didn’t always work that way, that sometimes the police brought out dogs and firehoses to keep certain people from walking down certain streets.

  Her father said, “And sit wherever he or she wants to?”

  “Well, it looks like they can now. At least at the Grill. And I’m not saying it shouldn’t have always been that way, but people being people, it isn’t always that easy.”

  “No, not easy at all. Are the windows up there okay?” Jocie’s father asked. “And Brother Boyer’s church? You haven’t gotten any other calls?”

  “I came by the Grill. As far as I could tell, everything looked okay. And I’ll go by the church when I leave here. But surely they wouldn’t bother a church.”

  “Tell that to those people down there in Birmingham. The families of those little girls.”

  “But we aren’t Birmingham, David. We’ve never had that kind of trouble in our town, “ the chief said. “We need to keep a level head here. It’s just a broken window.”

  “This time.” Jocie’s father looked from Chief Simmons toward the plastic over the window flapping in the wind.

  Jocie didn’t like the way her father said those words. Did he think whoever threw the rock would be back with more rocks? More hate? She suddenly remembered what Ronnie Martin had told her earlier that day. She moved closer to her father’s side and touched his arm to get his attention.

  “Not now, Jocie,” her father said.

  “But it’s probably something Chief Simmons will want to know too.” Jocie rushed on, not waiting for her father’s permission. “Somebody at school told me I should warn Noah and his family to be on the lookout. That something bad might be going to happen.”

  “Did they give you any details?” Chief Simmons asked. “What or when or anything?”

  “No, he just said he’d been hearing things.”

  “Well, that’s not much help,” the chief said. “I’ve been hearing things. Of course, where the Hearndons live out in the county is out of my jurisdiction anyway. But I’ll pass it along to the sheriff so he can keep an eye out about that.”

  “This is in your jurisdiction,” Jocie’s father said. “The West End Church is in your jurisdiction.”

  “And I’m going to investigate and drive up there through the West End to be sure everything is peaceful. You don’t have to tell me how to do my job, David.”

  “Sorry, Randy.” Jocie’s father shook his head a little. “I wasn’t meaning to do that.”

  “That’s all right. I understand.” Chief Simmons put his hand on Jocie’s father’s shoulder. “It’s been a long day. But the truth of the matter is we aren’t ever going to find whoever threw that rock. You know that and I know that. The best we can hope to do is make them think we might so that they won’t throw another one.”

  “You’re probably right,” Jocie’s father said.

  “Of course I am,” Chief Simmons said. “You let me know if you have any more trouble.”

  Jocie and her father watched Chief Simmons go out the door. Wes hobbled up behind them. “You get pa
st writing out parking tickets, the chief’s done in over his head,” Wes said.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t be too hard on him. He’s probably right. We’ll never know who threw that rock,” Jocie’s father said.

  “We might not want to know,” Wes said.

  37

  The Banner got folded that night, but Leigh wasn’t quite sure how. Things were all turned upside down after the rock came through the window. Wes was pale and drawn from being up on his leg too long. Zella jumped at the slightest noise. Noah hardly said two words except to ask David to drive him home after they were through. He couldn’t very well ride his bike all those miles home with that evil lurking out there somewhere in the dark.

  Even Jocie was silent as they folded the papers. Leigh wasn’t sure she’d ever seen Jocie without something to say for so long. But then again maybe that was because David was so grim. He hardly managed a smile even when he told Leigh good night, but she knew it didn’t have anything to do with her. It was whatever had been written on that paper.

  He wouldn’t talk about it. Not even several days later when they went to the high school football game on Friday night. He said he didn’t want to talk about any of it. He said that was all anybody in town had wanted to talk about all week, and that was true enough. Leigh heard it every day at the courthouse. Who did what? Why whoever did what? And the most asked question, what were they going to do next? Everybody had their opinion, but nobody had any answers.

  But David said he wanted to give his mind a rest, and then he smiled at her. Leigh was ready to talk about anything he wanted to—or not talk about anything he didn’t want to—as long as he kept smiling at her like that. He gave his camera to Jocie and let her run along the sidelines to get the pictures they needed for the Banner.

  “She’s better at taking pictures than I am anyway,” he said.

  “I don’t know about better, but she does seem to be having fun,” Leigh said after they found a seat up in the bleachers.

  As Jocie made her way out to the field with the camera, kids kept yelling at her and striking poses. Jocie turned the camera toward them and focused in.