“I’d surely love to see that Bible,” the bishop said wistfully. “Where does Dovie Jane live?”
“She passed on last April, and I swear I don’t know who got the Bible. She had four young ’uns, and they all scattered to the four winds when they married. Their names was Ezra-Ann—she was named for me and my dad, then Eleanor, then Jake, and Albert.”
“What’s their last name—who did Dovie Jane marry?” the bishop prodded.
“She married a man by the name of Whitlow, from over in Moultrie. Al Whitlow, he was. He died back in seventy-seven.”
The bishop diligently made notes, planning to track the Whitlow family for all he was worth, to try to find that family Bible.
“Do you know the married names of Ezra-Ann and Eleanor?”
“Ezra-Ann married her a sailor-boy, name of Messick. I don’t r’collect Eleanor’s husband. She watn’t never very friendly to me. I don’t recall that we even got an invite when she got married.”
“That’s too bad,” the bishop sympathized. He could hear protests from Mallory outside and knew that his family’s patience with this visit was probably running low. He stood up.
“Junior, it’s been a real pleasure to visit with you,” he told the old man sincerely. “I know we must be cousins of some kind or other, and you’re the first Rhys I’ve met. Thanks so much for your help. Now tell me the name of the home you’re moving into, so I can keep in touch.”
Junior’s delight was a joy to see. He stood up and took a card down from a shelf above his bed and handed it to his new friend. The bishop wrote the name and address of the place into his notebook and shook Junior’s hand, then gave him a hug. Jamie and Tiffani also shook hands with him and trooped back outside, where Mallory stood with her arms folded, a mutinous expression on her face.
“All right, then,” Trish whispered to her. “We’ll just have to find you a bush. Get in the car.”
Mallory complied, slamming the door with unaccustomed ferocity. The bishop winked at his wife, who rolled her eyes in amused exasperation. He took a picture of Junior, and they took their leave. The bishop felt the beginnings of a lump in his throat as Junior stood on his porch, smiling and waving as they pulled away.
Everyone was silent for a few moments, and then Tiffani spoke softly. “Dad? You know what just happened, don’t you?”
“What’s that, Tiff?”
“You know why none of those people down the road answered the door, don’t you?”
He smiled. “Reckon I do know, honey—and I’m grateful.”
“Why?” asked Jamie.
“Well, it wasn’t aliens, little brother,” Tiffani explained. “It was so that we could find the one person in this area who’s related to us, who could tell us about the family. See, if anybody else had been around, we would’ve asked them where Five-Mile Road is, and they’d have told us, and we wouldn’t even have known about Mr. Rhys. It’s like a miracle.”
“What—like all those people were struck deaf or something?” he asked.
“Something,” the bishop replied, profoundly grateful not only that such a thing had happened in their behalf, but that his eldest daughter recognized it for what it was.
Chapter Six
* * *
“ . . . And signs shall follow living faith”
“Let’s take a little time off, shall we?” Bishop Shepherd asked his family. “Trish, why don’t you check your list of motels and find us a nice one with a good pool? I believe our loyal employees here deserve some splash time.”
“Yay!” agreed Jamie.
“And see if you can find one in a real town,” Tiffani added. “I’m getting pretty tired of bean and cornfields.”
“Boy—good thing I didn’t decide to follow my ancestors’ career of farming,” her dad remarked with a grin.
“That’s for sure,” Tiffani agreed. “I mean, it was kind of fun to stay at Mrs. Hinton’s place for a couple of nights, but that was enough farm life for me.”
“I liked it,” Jamie said. “I liked the donkey and the goats, most of all.”
“And the baby kitties,” put in Mallory, restored to good humor after her dad found her a service station with a reasonably clean rest room. She hadn’t been about to use Junior’s privy.
Trish consulted the atlas and the printout of potential places to stay she had downloaded from the Internet before they left home.
“Here’s a nice-sounding place in Albany,” she reported. “It’s only about thirty miles from here, and Tiff, I believe Albany’s the biggest city in the area. This place has two pools, a spa and exercise room, and an attached restaurant. It’s more expensive than the Southern Belle, but then we’ve saved quite a bit, staying with Mrs. Hinton.”
“Go for it,” her husband suggested, handing her his cell phone. “See if they can accommodate us.”
They could and did, and the family spent a pleasant afternoon alternately playing in the pool and relaxing in the coolness of their room. After a refreshing swim, the bishop took the opportunity to study the deeds he had copied, poring over the formal wordiness and cramped handwriting of the documents until he had isolated and extracted the pertinent facts from them.
“So what’d you learn?” Trish asked quietly as he stretched out beside her on one of the beds. Tiffani and Jamie were watching a video across the room, and Mallory had fallen asleep curled on the other bed.
“Well, what I did was try to figure out any relationships mentioned in the deeds, and there are some—and I kind of traced who owned which pieces of land through the years, according to the description given. It’s pretty interesting. But here are the relationships I found.” He passed her the notebook, in which he had listed names of married couples and, where noted in the deed, any names of children or heirs.
“Okay, so here’s the Robert and Edna we found in the cemetery,” Trish said. “I suppose they weren’t your great-grandparents after all, from what Junior said—that they just had the three daughters. So, what does this mean—are these their girls?”
“Well, I’m sure no expert, as you know, but it looks like after Robert and Edna died, one of the girls, Zora Daynes, bought out the interest of her sisters, Lena Potter and Barbara Rhys, in the property their folks left to them.”
“Interesting. Now who are Arthur and David E. Rhys, who sold land together in 1867—any idea?”
“I’m thinking they were probably brothers. And it looks like they also had a brother named Robert, since it mentions that he had retained his interest in the estate of Robert Rhys, Sr., deceased, but they were both selling theirs.”
“Well, didn’t Junior say his dad’s name was Arthur?”
“Um—flip back a page. No, Arthur was his grandfather, remember, because he’s Ezra Junior, named for his father.”
“Oh, that’s right. It gets so confusing. But then, so Arthur, David E., and Robert were sons of another Robert? And if the Robert Jr. had only daughters, then he’s not your direct ancestor. Do we know what children Arthur had, except for Ezra Sr.? Or maybe you’re descended from this David E.”
“Maybe. Unless I’m from a totally different branch of the family that we don’t even know about yet.”
“Possible, I guess. But since your Benjamin was listed as being from the county on the War memorial, I’d suspect he lived somewhere around Horsepen Branch.”
“Likely. Although he was already married to a local girl when he went off to war, so maybe it just means he moved there when they married. Ahh. Man, I’m tired. Too many questions and too few answers. And I don’t have a clue where to turn, next.”
“Why don’t you give it a break and just relax for the rest of the evening? Maybe something will occur to you.”
He grinned. “If it doesn’t, then Tiffi might get her wish to see her friends on Friday instead of Saturday.”
* * *
He put through a call to his counselor Robert Patrenko and learned that apart from the little Arnaud boy having broken his arm, all seemed
on a fairly steady course in the Fairhaven Ward. After the children were tucked in bed and Trish was heading to the shower, he told her where he was going, carefully locked the door to their room behind him, and went out to the car, where he sat enjoying the night sounds of frogs and crickets from a nearby wooded area and taking advantage of the solitude to ponder and pray for guidance and understanding in his search for his kindred dead. He expressed gratitude for all who had helped him so far and reminded the Lord that he had only one more day available on this journey and wanted to use it to best advantage, if only he could know what that might be. He also prayed for his ward—for the several individuals who had ongoing sorrows or problems—and for his family. He prayed for the missionaries and the servicemen and the leaders of the Church, both general and local. Finally he closed his prayer and leaned back, growing drowsy. He tried to stay awake in case an answer to his question was forthcoming, but after falling asleep twice, he locked his car and went back to the room, where he slept more-or-less soundly all night, despite the fact that the mattress was firm enough to make the term “pressure points” take on a whole new meaning.
* * *
“Where are we going today, Dad?” Jamie asked as they ate breakfast at a nearby pancake house.
“Home, right?” asked Tiffani brightly. “If we leave like right after breakfast, I’ll have plenty of time to get ready for the square dance.”
He smiled at her regretfully. “Well, I’ll tell you,” he said slowly. “I have a feeling we need to go back and visit Mr. Junior Rhys one more time.”
“What? Why?” demanded Tiffani. “He already told you everything he knows!”
“Yeah, Dad, I don’t want to go back there,” Jamie said. “His place was kind of creepy, and smelly.”
“And he doesn’t even have a bathroom!” Mallory added.
Their dad nodded. “I know. I don’t particularly want to go back, either, although I enjoyed meeting him. But I really feel I should. Sorry, guys.”
“Do you have any idea why you feel that way, Jim?” Trish asked.
He shook his head. “Woke up this morning with that impression, and it was pretty strong. I don’t know what good it can do, but I figure when you pray for direction, and direction comes, you should follow it.”
“I think you’d better,” Trish agreed, and all three children responded with groans of disappointment.
“Well,” Trish reminded them, “remember yesterday when we all agreed that we were led to Junior’s place, because we were apparently invisible and inaudible to everybody else in the neighborhood? He’s obviously related to Dad, and he must know something important that he hasn’t told us yet.”
“But why couldn’t Heavenly Father have prompted him to remember whatever it is, yesterday when we were there?” Tiffani’s voice was dangerously close to a whine.
Trish shook her head. “No idea, honey,” she said with a sympathetic smile. “You’ll have to take that up with the Lord.”
“Maybe it won’t take long,” her dad suggested. “Maybe we can still get home today—although if you’ll recall, Tiff, I didn’t promise we would.”
“We won’t,” Tiffani grumbled. “I already know that.”
The bishop was tempted to reiterate his feeling that Tiffani should only go out with Billy Newton once a week, if that, but he held his peace. He wanted the remainder of their trip to go as smoothly as possible, and Tiffani had been pretty cooperative for a teenager who was cooped up with parents and younger siblings for over four days. Of course, he credited a lot of her cooperation to the relative freedom of the time spent at May Hinton’s—a genuine blessing, in his book.
They wound through the countryside again, trying to retrace the route to Junior’s house, with all absorbed in their own thoughts. Jamie played a traveling game, Mallory whispered to her Barbie, and Tiffani buried herself in a book, emerging only once to say, “You know Junior’s supposed to be taken to a rest home today, Dad. He’ll probably already be gone when we get there.”
The bishop held up his notebook with the address of the home in it. “If need be, we’ll follow him there,” he said, and she subsided with an annoyed sigh. Trish reached over and patted his knee in wifely empathy, and he sent her a wink.
Junior had not yet departed the premises. He was dragging his cardboard boxes out onto the front porch when they pulled up, tugging to get them over the threshold. The bishop sprang from his car and went forward to help.
“Hey, there, Junior, let me get those—I’m a couple of years younger than you!”
Junior turned and squinted in the sunlight. “Well, hey, there, young man,” he responded, and once again spat a brown stream into the dirt.
“Mom, how come he spits all the time? And why’s his spit brown?” Jamie asked.
“I believe he uses snuff, honey,” she told him, as she prepared to get out of the car.
“That is unbelievably gross,” Tiffani stated. “I can’t believe Dad’s related to somebody who uses snuff!”
“What’s snuff?” Mallory asked.
“It’s kind of like powdered tobacco,” Trish explained. “It’s dangerous to use, but a lot of elderly folks use it, especially in the country. And some young people, too.”
“Yuck,” said Jamie. “I wouldn’t want to be spitting out tobacco all the time. Not even if I was a baseball player. I’d chew gum.”
“It’s a pretty disgusting habit, all right. Be glad your parents and your church teach you better.”
“Didn’t nobody teach Mr. Junior better?” Mallory inquired.
“Probably not, sweetie.”
“Maybe I’ll tell him.”
“Um—maybe you’d better not,” advised Tiffani. “He’s old enough to be your great-grandpa, and it wouldn’t be good manners.”
“What’s a great-grandpa?”
“That’s your grandpa’s daddy,” Tiffani told her.
“Does Papa have a daddy?” she asked, referring to the only grandpa she knew—her mother’s father.
“Of course he had one, honey—everybody has a mother and father,” Trish said, reaching for her hand. “But Papa’s father died a long time before you were born.”
“Well, that’s not fair. I wanted to see him!”
Trish exchanged a smile with her two elder children and turned toward the little house. Tiffani shook her head and chose to stay in the car, but Jamie went to sit on the steps.
“There we go,” Junior said, as the last box was deposited on the porch, ready for pick-up. “I thank you, sir. And I’m sure proud to see y’all folks again. I been thinkin’ on things, since you was here yestiddy, and somethin’ come to me. Remember how you was askin’ me about the family Bible?”
“I sure do,” the bishop said. “Have you thought who might have it?”
“Naw. I sure wisht I knew. I’d be plumb tickled for y’all to see it. But what I recalled was that before Dovie Jane come and got the Bible, I took out some loose pages from the middle of it. You know how folks write their birthdays and such on special pages in some Bibles?”
The bishop held his breath and nodded encouragingly.
“Well, I don’t rightly know why I done it—reckon it was orn’ry of me—but I kept them pages for my own self. They’re right in that box, yonder, if ya’ll want to see ’em. I put ’em in a vanilla envelope that come from the insurance comp’ny.”
The bishop didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He did neither, but carefully opened the box Junior had indicated and began to look through it, feeling a burning and a quivering beginning in his midsection, which was definitely not heartburn from breakfast.
About a third of the way into the assorted items Junior had packed to take with him, he located the “vanilla” envelope and drew it out. His hands were trembling as he opened the clasp and carefully peered inside. There were three pages with writing on both sides. He sat down quickly on the edge of the porch, mostly because he didn’t trust his legs to hold him upright much longer. Trish perched besi
de him.
“Oh, my—look at that beautiful handwriting!” she exclaimed.
“Ain’t it purty?” Junior agreed. “See, my great-granddaddy was a school teacher. And he taught my granddaddy to write real nice, too—but time it got down to daddy and me, there was so much farm work to do that we didn’t get much time for school, so I barely just scrawl, nothin’ like that!” He nodded toward the pages, which the bishop was scanning eagerly. There were two pages each of births, marriages, and deaths.
“Look,” the bishop said. “Here’s a Robert Rhys, and it says he ‘passed from this life on Monday, June the 11th, in the year of our Lord eighteen sixty-five.’ Wow. That was during the Civil War.”
“Yep, that’d be my great-granddaddy. It was his Bible. He wrote in his wife and kids, then my granddaddy took over and wrote in the time when he died.”
The bishop turned to a page of marriages and squinted at the tiny but elegant script. “Robert Rhys and—what’s this name, Trish?”
She examined the entry. “Looks like an R. Um—I think it says ‘Rhiannon.’ ‘Robert Rhys and Rhiannon Meredith was married on January the first,’ I think it is—it says 1th—‘in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and fifty-six.’ That’s so cool, Jimmy—it even gives her maiden name!”
He turned to the births page to look for a list of Robert and Rhiannon’s children, and found five listed—Arthur Christian, Robert Benjamin, David Evan, Christine, and Gwyneth—all with their respective dates, including the day of the week on which each had been born. Scanning further, he found Robert Jr.’s three daughters and Arthur’s grandsons, Ernest and Ezra, and their sister, Dovie Jane. Then, in a different hand—not nearly so fancy, but still legible—he read “Caroline Mary Rhys, daughter of David E. Rhys and Marian Rose Walters, born March 22, 1890. Benjamin Evan Rhys, son of David E. Rhys and Marian Rose Walters, born October 30, 1895.”
“Trish!” he whispered urgently, pointing a shaking finger at the entry. “There he is.”
Trish clapped one hand over her mouth, and her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Jimmy, it is! It has to be—born in 1895, just like it said on the War memorial!”
The Thorny Path Page 7
