The Scent of Lilacs

by Ann H. Gabhart

  “If Mr. McDermott is counting the votes, you’re a shoo-in.”

  “Matt likes us, but he wouldn’t cheat on the count.”

  “Besides, you can rest assured Ogden Martin won’t let him do the count alone,” Aunt Love put in.

  “Well, I daresay I don’t have Brother Ogden’s vote,” David said. He hadn’t figured out exactly what Ogden Martin held against him. He’d heard through the church grapevine that Ogden said there was no way a newspaperman could also be a preacher. David shook his head and went on, “But we’ll just leave the vote up to God. That’s whose hands I want it to be in anyway. ‘A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps.’ ”

  “Proverbs 16:9,” Aunt Love said. She waited a minute and then said over her shoulder to Jocie, “Go ahead and look, child. I know you want to.”

  Jocie turned the whisper thin pages of her Bible in the last of the daylight. “Yep, right as usual.”

  “That’s amazing, Aunt Love,” David said. “I study and study, but I can’t snatch Scripture references out of the air like that.”

  “I’ve got a few years on you, and I’ve always had a good mind for numbers. I don’t know them all, by any means. Just the ones that are quoted most often.”

  “I know John 3:16 and Psalm 23. ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,’ ” Jocie volunteered from the backseat.

  “And could know more if you spent any time with your Bible,” Aunt Love said. “Even one verse a week gives a person a lot of heart Scripture after several years.”

  “I guess we could both try harder on that one, couldn’t we, Jocie?”

  “Yes sir,” she said. “But you’ll get the vote. You telling the story tonight about how God called you to preach should be good for a dozen votes.” Jocie scooted up to lean on the back of the front seat beside David. “Did you really feel God’s hand on your shoulder? I mean really feel it instead of just thinking you felt it.” Jocie laid her hand on his shoulder. “Did it feel normal like this? Or did you know right away something spooky was happening?”

  Jocie had always wanted to know more than he could explain about God calling him. He’d told it a thousand times to her and to others who had asked in the nearly twenty years since it had happened, but some things were beyond rational explanation. Still, it had been good to tell the story again tonight. He needed to keep reminding himself that he was doing what God had told him to do and not just drifting along under his own direction. David put his hand over Jocie’s. “No, not like a normal hand, but not spooky either,” he said.

  “Then how did it feel?”

  “It’s hard to put into words.” David pulled on the lights of the car and stared out at the shadows of the trees beside the road. Aunt Love was nodding off in the seat beside him, but he could feel Jocie’s rapt attention waiting for him to try to explain the unexplainable.

  He remembered trying to explain it to Adrienne. “Dear Adrienne, my darling,” he’d written. “Last night my life, maybe I should say our lives, were changed forever. God laid his hand on me and told me to preach his Word.”

  All these years later, he could recall his exact words, probably because he had written and rewritten them so many times before stuffing the letter in an envelope and sliding it through the mail slot. Later he’d tried, without success, to get one of the guys in charge of bagging up the mail to fish out the letter and give it back to him. When that hadn’t worked, he’d written another letter trying to explain and another until in the end Adrienne had received seven letters on the same day, since the mail was delayed going out when they were in a war zone.

  It had been another lifetime, months, before he’d gotten an answer back from her. Mail call was infrequent on a submarine, and even if they had been on a regular mail line, Adrienne wasn’t good at writing letters. She usually just scribbled a few lines to send along with his mother’s letters, saying that she was sick of having a big belly and a backache and that it was too much for him to expect her to have this baby by herself and she needed him to come home right away. As for God calling him, she’d simply told him he must be half crazy and she hoped he got over it before he wrote again. And of course, she was right about the half crazy part.

  Being in the submarine deep in the ocean had messed with his mind. No sunshine, no daylight, no grass, no trees. Only the dark. Even with the lights fully ablaze, he was always aware of the crushing blackness lurking a power failure or a depth charge away. He still had nightmares where he opened his eyes to total darkness.

  “Just try,” Jocie begged now.

  “You’ve heard it a hundred times, Jocie. You just heard it again tonight.”

  “You didn’t tell the church how it felt. You just told them it happened. You were in a submarine at the bottom of the ocean. The enemy ships were feeling through the waters to find you so they could blow you up. Your job was to tell where the enemy ships were so you could sneak up on them and blow them up first. It was war. Ships went down. Submarines took hits. People died.” Jocie stopped and squeezed her father’s shoulder. “I’m glad you didn’t.”

  “Me too,” David said. “I did tell it a little bit better than that tonight, didn’t I?”

  “Oh yeah. I’m doing a Reader’s Digest version.” She took a breath and went on. “You were more afraid of getting hit and not being able to get back to the top than of being blown up. One night when the sonar was going crazy, God showed up and let you know he was in control and that he had plans for you back in Hollyhill, so you weren’t going to end up shark food.”

  Aunt Love roused up with a shudder. “Heavenly days, child. You shouldn’t talk about your father being shark food.”

  “I shouldn’t, should I? That was awful,” Jocie said. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” David said with a laugh. “I didn’t end up shark food, and the image does give the story a certain dramatic flare. Maybe I’ll throw that in the next time I tell the story.”

  “I think your usual version is quite dramatic enough without the mention of shark food,” Aunt Love said.

  “But you never say how you felt. Were you afraid?” Jocie asked.

  “Of course I was afraid. Every day. But after a while it was like a bad toothache. You couldn’t make it go away. You couldn’t forget it. So you just blocked it back away from the front of your mind so you could keep breathing, keep cracking jokes, keep writing letters home, keep thinking it would be over.”

  “I don’t mean the war. I mean were you afraid when God showed up?”

  “If God or his angel showed up here in this car this very minute, would you be afraid?” David asked.

  “We’d have to be unnatural human beings to not be afraid,” Aunt Love said. “Just look in the Bible everywhere it says an angel showed up, and the first thing the angel always said was ‘Be not afraid.’ ”

  “That’s right,” David said. “So yes, I was afraid, but it was a different kind of fear. And you have to realize that at first I didn’t know what was happening.”

  “What did happen first?” Jocie asked.

  “I smelled locust blooms,” David said.

  “Locust blooms?” Jocie said.

  “One of the sweetest scents on earth,” Aunt Love said.

  “Lilacs are better,” Jocie said.

  “Not to me,” David said. “I used to be the first one to notice the locust trees blooming in the spring. Mama would always come right out on the porch to see if she could smell them too, but sometimes it would be a couple of days before she could. She used to say God must have gotten me mixed up with a dog when he gave out the noses.”

  “Everybody has a gift,” Aunt Love said.

  “A sensitive nose isn’t always that great a gift. Plenty of smells are better unsmelt.” David concentrated on the road for a moment. Funny how he could still call up the odor of those locust blooms. Along with the metallic smells, the machine oil, and stale body odors that were the norm in the submarine.

  “Are you saying G
od smells like locust blooms?” Jocie asked.

  “No, no. I think he just used the locust blooms to get my attention. To tell you the truth, when I smelled the locust blooms, I thought I was going to die. That God had sent me this last blessing, like a gift from home before we got blown out of the water. It was certainly a possibility that night.”

  “And then his hand was on your shoulder. Was it hot? Or cold?” Jocie said.

  “I wouldn’t say hot, or cold either.”

  “It had to be something,” Jocie said.

  “True. Let’s see, how can I describe it? Maybe like a towel you get off the line in the summertime that’s warm from the heat of the sun. Comforting. Perfect. And while it wasn’t heavy, it wasn’t something you could shake off even if you wanted to.”

  That wasn’t a particularly good description, but it seemed to satisfy Jocie.

  “How did you know it was God’s hand?”

  “I really don’t know. I don’t think I did at first. I just knew I wasn’t afraid of dying anymore, that I felt completely different than I had five minutes before.”

  “The peace that passeth understanding,” Aunt Love put in.

  “That must have been it,” David agreed. He remembered thinking that if this was the way it felt to die, then it wasn’t going to be so bad. He’d had regrets. Especially the baby on the way he’d never see. And then the peace had gone deeper into his soul and wiped away even the thought of regret.

  The needle on the sonar screen had been going crazy. The submarine had been bouncing in the waters as the charges went off around them. The man next to him had been trembling as he tried to operate the controls to rotate the sonar, but David had been as calm as if he were drifting along in a rowboat baiting a hook to drop a line down into a sun-dappled stream.

  And then a message had begun flashing on the screen in front of him. “YOU WILL PREACH MY WORD.” All capitals. Dark green one flash. Red the next.

  “I thought maybe I’d lost my mind,” David told Jocie. “We weren’t using that screen, didn’t even have it turned on, and even if it had been operating, it showed echo signals, not words. But there they were. Red and green flashing words. I yelled at the officer in charge to come look. I don’t know what I expected him to see.”

  “Flashing words, I suppose,” Aunt Love said.

  “But he didn’t,” Jocie said.

  “Well, I’ve never been sure. Maybe he did see them and thought he was slipping over the edge. Or maybe he thought the message was for him. I always intended to catch him by himself and ask him straight out sometime, but I didn’t.” David could never decide whether he was afraid the chief officer did see the words or he didn’t.

  “But what happened?” Jocie asked.

  “I came home and started working at the newspaper and preaching.”

  “No, I mean then. The officer came over, didn’t act like he saw any flashing words anywhere, and then what?”

  “The words disappeared. The locust bloom scent was gone. I could smell the guy next to me sweating again. My shoulder felt empty. Really empty. And the sonar showed an enemy ship practically right over top of us. The chief officer sounded the attack alarm, and we went into battle mode and sank the ship.”

  “But you weren’t afraid anymore,” Jocie said.

  “Not of dying,” David said. There had been new things to fear. Having hallucinations. Preaching. Telling Adrienne. And being a light in the crushing blackness that still surrounded them. Knowing people were dying because radio waves had bounced off their ship and showed up on his sonar. It was war. War and death could not be separated.

  He hadn’t wanted to die. He hadn’t wanted to be the reason others died. He hadn’t wanted to preach. Not then. But God had said preach, so what else could he do?

  Jocie liked hearing the story of her father’s calling. She knew her father was special, but the fact that God had singled him out just proved it that much more. Of course, her father said everybody was special in God’s eyes, but everybody didn’t have a story to tell like her father’s.

  She talked to God all the time. Mostly one-way stuff like the dog prayer and “Bless Daddy” and “Help me not drive Aunt Love completely batty since half batty is bad enough” and “Thank you for the mockingbird that sings and dances in the tree beside the house” and “Watch over Tabitha and my mother.” Prayers like that were easy, but she never really expected to hear God talking back, saying do this or do that.

  The idea that he might made her nervous. What if he told her to do something she didn’t want to do? Like be a missionary in Africa, where she might have to eat fried ants or who knows what. She was happy with the way things were. Especially now that God had answered her dog prayer. But what if God expected some kind of payback for sending her Zeb?

  Her father said that wasn’t the way God worked, but fair seemed fair. God had given her Zeb. He might expect her to give him something back. Maybe not socking Ronnie Martin in the nose next Sunday if her father got voted in at Mt. Pleasant. Or actually learning her Sunday school memory verse before she got to Sunday school instead of just reading it over on the way to class and faking it. Or not complaining about Aunt Love burning the biscuits. Or even better, getting up early enough to be in the kitchen to rescue the biscuits before they burned.

  If she promised to work at showing how thankful she was, surely God would let Zeb still be there on the porch. She offered up a silent prayer as they turned up the lane to their house. Please, Lord, don’t let Zeb go find another house.

  It was already dark, but the car lights would hit the porch as they pulled up. She’d be able to see if Zeb was there waiting for her. She scooted up on the edge of her seat again and peered through the windshield toward the house. There was a light on the front porch. Not the porch light. More like a flashlight with the batteries running down. Or a jar of lightning bugs. Or a candle flickering in the breeze.

  “Look, Dad.” She pointed past his head toward the porch. “What is that light?”

  Aunt Love woke up with a little snort. “Light? What light?”

  “It looks to be a candle,” her father said.

  “A candle? How odd.” Aunt Love sat up straighter and peered out of the window.

  “Somebody is on the porch,” her father said.

  “Who?” Jocie asked.

  “I can’t see who. It’s too dark,” her father said.

  Jocie strained to see, but all she could make out was the shape of a person in the rocking chair on the porch. No shape of a dog was anywhere in sight. “I can’t see Zeb. You don’t think he’s gone, do you?”

  “Don’t worry, Jocie. That dog knows a good thing when he’s found it. He’ll be here,” her father said.

  Jocie touched the sack beside her that held the bone she’d begged from Mrs. McDermott, and she suddenly had a terrible thought. “What if it’s Zeb’s owner come to claim him?”

  “Nobody in their right mind would come hunting that dog,” Aunt Love said shortly. “It’s probably just Wes with something about the paper.”

  “I don’t see his motorcycle. And Wes never walks anywhere,” Jocie said.

  “His motorcycle could have stripped a gear or whatever motorcycles do besides make an unholy racket,” Aunt Love said.

  “We don’t have to do the five guesses game. We’ll find out who it is as soon as we get there,” her father said.

  “But, Dad, somebody on our porch this time of night with no car anywhere around and with a candle lit? Don’t you think that’s weird? I mean, who sits on anybody’s porch and brings a candle to light?”

  “Somebody afraid of the dark who doesn’t have a flashlight?” her father suggested.

  “But it’s too late to come visiting or anything normal,” Jocie said.

  “Unless they’re bringing bad news,” Aunt Love said. She too was leaning forward trying to get a better look at the mystery person on the porch.

  “Hush, you two,” her father said as he parked the car in front of the
garage. “It’s probably just somebody who knows I’m a preacher and needs to talk. Or somebody who’s lost and needs a ride home.”

  “Carrying candles in their pocket?”

  “People carry all kinds of things in their pockets. Or pocketbooks. Who knows? Aunt Love might be able to pull a candle out of her purse.”

  “No candles,” Aunt Love said. “Matches, but no candles.”

  Paws hit against Jocie’s door, and Zeb stuck his nose to her window. Jocie pushed open the door and let Zeb lick her face. For some reason her heart was banging around inside her. And it didn’t have anything to do with the dog. It was whoever was on the porch. In spite of what her father said, it wasn’t normal. Something was up. The dog prayer had been answered. The father getting a call to a church prayer was being answered. Maybe God had just decided this was the week to answer all the Brooke family prayers.

  People from California probably carried candles in their pockets. Jocie had seen pictures on TV of teenagers in wild clothes with candles everywhere. Hippies. Not something you’d find in Hollyhill. Here you might find birthday cake candles and candles for when a storm knocked the electricity out. Nothing anybody would carry in a pocket, but who knew what people in California carried around with them.

  Jocie rubbed Zeb’s head and gave him the bone. He plopped right down in the middle of the driveway to start chewing on it. Jocie trailed after her father and Aunt Love to the porch.

  The person on the porch stood up, and the wicker chair rocked back and forth. The candle flame flickered and went out in the slight draft. The candle hadn’t given off much light, but the night suddenly seemed intensely dark in spite of the bright glitter of millions of stars above their heads. The moon was in hiding. Somewhere far away an owl hooted, and chills shot up Jocie’s back. She moved closer to her father and touched the back of his shirt. She held her breath and waited. It seemed as if the night was doing the same. She couldn’t even hear Zeb chewing now.