The Scent of Lilacs

by Ann H. Gabhart

  When her father looked up at her, sweat was dripping off his nose. “That’s enough pictures. Come hold these papers while I tie them in place.” He glanced out toward the road. “You’d think somebody would have come out to see what the storm did by now. I’m going to need help getting Wes to the car.”

  “I’ll help,” Jocie said.

  Wes passed out when her father picked him up to lift him out of the tree branches. Jocie held his mangled leg as straight as she could as they stepped over the limbs toward the car. Please, Lord, don’t let me hurt him, she prayed every step.

  Her father laid Wes gently in the backseat, and Jocie crawled in the other door to hold his head and steady him on the seat. He was still unconscious. “Will he be okay, Dad?”

  Her father met her eyes. “I don’t know, Jocie. I want him to be, but I don’t know. His leg’s bad.”

  Jocie looked down at Wes. “I’m sorry I ran away.”

  “You should have come to me,” her father said. “But we can’t talk about this now. We need to get Wes to the hospital.”

  Jocie looked up again. “But you will tell me the truth?”

  “I’ve always told you the truth, Jocie.” He laid his hand on her cheek. “I am your father. I’ve always been your father, and I will always be your father. You couldn’t change that even if you wanted to.”

  She didn’t want to change it. But she still had questions even though she knew she couldn’t ask them now. Not with Wes pale and bleeding as she held his head in her lap. Some of them maybe she’d never be able to ask. She looked back at what was left of Clay’s Creek Baptist Church as her father headed the car down the road. And she remembered the scent of lilacs.

  Hollyhill didn’t have a hospital. Dr. Markum had been trying for the last few years to get the town behind the idea of building one, but most of the local folks balked at the idea of extra taxes. The ones who hadn’t had heart attacks and had to actually make the trip with death knocking on the door said it wasn’t all that far to the emergency room over in Grundy, where they could patch you up or ship you on to one of the big hospitals in Lexington.

  Dr. Markum took one look at Wes and said Lexington was where he had to go if he was going to have any hope of ever walking again. Jocie’s father had driven straight to the doctor’s house, since it was past regular office hours. Dr. Markum had carried his doctor’s bag out to the car while his wife called Gordon Hazelton, who had an old hearse the town used for an ambulance.

  “No need moving him twice. We’ll just leave him where he is till Gordon gets here,” Dr. Markum said as he filled a hypodermic needle. “This might ease the pain a little.”

  Jocie held Wes tighter as the doctor shoved in the needle. Wes never opened his eyes. He hadn’t opened his eyes all the way through the country to the doctor’s house. But he’d kept breathing and didn’t seem totally unconscious, just in one of his Jupiterian circles, floating along in another dimension.

  The doctor looked at his watch when Gordon Hazelton came speeding up the street and said he’d made it in six and a half minutes. “Fastest time ever,” he said, but it had seemed like an hour to Jocie.

  The three men lifted Wes as gently as possible out of the car and laid him on the stretcher. Jocie scrambled out of the car. “I’m going with him,” Jocie said as they lifted the stretcher into the back of the hearse.

  “No, no, child.” Dr. Markum caught hold of her shoulder before she could climb in after Wes. “You go on inside and let Mrs. Markum check you out.”

  “I don’t need checking out. I’m going with Wes.” Jocie looked at her father. Not for permission, but for confirmation.

  Dr. Markum looked over the top of her head at her father. “That wouldn’t be wise, David. Who knows what might happen on the way to the hospital? The child would be in the way.”

  Jocie didn’t wait for her father to answer. “I won’t get in the way. Wes needs me.”

  “Dr. Markum will take care of Wes, Jocie,” her father said. “We’ll follow in the car.”

  “You can follow in the car. I’m riding with Wes.” Jocie lifted her chin and stared not at her father but at the doctor.

  Dr. Markum leaned down and lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “Jocie, Wes is gravely injured. There’s a chance he might not survive the trip to Lexington.”

  Jocie didn’t waver. “Even more reason I have to go. I’m his family.”

  Dr. Markum pressed his lips together and stood up.

  “Let her go, doctor,” her father said. “She’s right. Wes would want her with him.”

  “It’s against my better judgment, David.”

  Jocie didn’t wait to hear any more. She climbed up into the hearse beside Wes. “I’m right here, Wes. They’re going to take you to Lexington, where they’ll fix you up good as new. Well, maybe not that good, but good enough to crank out a few more banner issues of the Banner.”

  Wes’s eyelids twitched as if he were trying to open his eyes but didn’t quite have the strength. He lifted his hand a few inches, and Jocie grabbed it and held on. He mumbled something, but even though Jocie leaned down close to listen, she couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying. Something about hearses and motorcycles and spaceships.

  Gordon Hazelton put the flashing light out on the roof of the hearse and fired up the sirens he’d installed for his ambulance runs. Jocie tried to keep her balance beside the stretcher as the hearse barreled around curves and between cars. Dr. Markum waited till they were on a straight stretch of road before he checked Wes again.

  “You’re doing good, Wes. Just keep hanging in there,” the doctor said. Before he sat back down on the bench against the wall, he told Jocie. “Since you’re here, it might help if you talk to him.”

  “You think he can hear me?”

  “I’d be surprised if he couldn’t. He’s got a pretty good grip on your hand.”

  So Jocie started talking. Not about anything much. Just about riding in a hearse and what a story that was going to make for the Banner. She told him he’d have to help her write the story about the tornado and how she was afraid her hands had been shaking when she’d taken the pictures so none of them would turn out. And how she wondered what had happened to her bicycle but that she guessed she shouldn’t be worried about that with how the Clay’s Creek people lost their whole church except for the pulpit and a pew here and there. They didn’t even have a shade tree to stand under and talk anymore.

  She rattled on and on about anything and everything while under her words she kept a prayer going in her head. Please, Lord, let Wes be okay. She didn’t let herself think about why he’d been in the path of the storm. She didn’t let herself think about what Ronnie Martin had said. There would be time enough for that after Wes stopped bleeding and had his leg in a cast.

  Jocie slid her eyes down to the bottom of the stretcher. His leg was covered up, but that didn’t keep the memory of what it had looked like out of her mind. She started talking a little faster about the latest confrontation between Zeb and Jezzie. And all the way to the hospital, she wished she had never crossed the street to listen to old Sallie sing. She wished she had never seen Ronnie Martin. She wished Tabitha hadn’t been at the newspaper office. She wished Tabitha had never asked her if she wanted the truth.

  She’d always wanted to know the truth, or thought she had. She could accept the truth that her mother had deserted her with never a look back. She could accept the truth that she might never lay eyes on her mother again. But she couldn’t accept that her very name might be a lie. She couldn’t accept that Wes might die and that if he did, it would be because she had tried to run away from the truth.

  She wanted to pray about it. Something more than just Let Wes live. She wanted to go back in time and make the wind turn a different way. Maybe go back even farther in time and make her mother never meet up with Ronnie Martin’s aunt’s husband.

  Almost as if Wes knew what she was thinking behind her words, his fingers tightened around her hand as
though afraid she might wish her very existence away.

  A church song popped into her head. “Just As I Am.” She had to have sung that song a million times. That’s the song the church had been singing at Fern Creek when she’d walked down the aisle to join church and say she believed in Jesus. She had been seven years old. She’d wanted to go forward the summer before when she was six, but her father had said she needed to wait till she was older so that she’d know she was responding to the Spirit and not just to him.

  She hadn’t waited for her father’s permission when she was seven. She’d just shot down the aisle at the first notes of the song, “Just as I am, without one plea.” Her father had shaken his head at her, but she hadn’t paid any attention. She hadn’t been able to pay any attention with the way the Lord was pushing her. Sort of like he’d pushed her out the door before the tornado carried the church building away.

  They had to peel Wes’s fingers off Jocie’s hand when they got to the hospital. Men in white came running out of the emergency room door to whisk Wes out of the hearse and inside. Dr. Markum’s wife had called ahead, and they had an operating room ready. Jocie tried to keep up with the stretcher, but they pushed her aside when they reached two large metal swinging doors. “Sorry, kid. You can’t go in here,” one of the men said. “Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of your granddaddy.”

  The doors closed behind them, and the hospital swallowed Wes and the men pushing his stretcher.

  She was still staring at the cold iron-gray doors when her father found her a few moments later. “Come on, Jocie.” He put his arm around her shoulders, but he didn’t try to make her turn away from the doors. “We can’t wait here.”

  Jocie kept her eyes on the doors. “Tell me he’ll tell me another Jupiter story.”

  “We’ll pray that the Lord will let that happen,” her father said.

  “I have been praying, but how do I know God’s listening?” Jocie said.

  “God’s always listening, and he answers. You shouldn’t have any doubts about that after this summer with your dog showing up and Tabitha coming home.”

  “The sister prayer and the dog prayer.” Jocie let her father turn her away from the swinging doors toward the waiting area. “But maybe I’ve had my quota of answered prayers already this summer.”

  “I don’t think God works on the quota system,” her father said with a smile.

  “But he doesn’t always answer the way we want either,” Jocie said.

  “That’s true enough, but we’ve done all we can. Now we just have to leave it in the doctors’ hands and trust in the Lord and wait.”

  The people in the waiting room looked up when they came in, then looked back down at their magazines or went back to their conversations. One large family had taken over the back side of the waiting room. Across from them, a man was scooted down in his chair, his head back, sleeping. Jocie and her father sat down beside a boy who had an ice bag on his arm. Next to him, his mother kept stroking his hair as she started telling Jocie’s dad all about how the boy had fallen out of his top bunk. Jocie didn’t listen. She couldn’t think about anything but Wes.

  Dr. Markum and Gordon Hazelton came in the waiting room, and it was odd seeing familiar faces in this strange place. Jocie’s father stood up to talk to them.

  Dr. Markum said, “I told them you’d check Wes in at the office, that you were the nearest thing to family he had as far as I knew. They asked about hospital or accident insurance.”

  “I don’t know whether he has any or not,” her father said. “I haven’t given the first thought to money.”

  “Well, don’t worry about it now,” Gordon Hazelton said. “We’ll have a benefit for him if we have to. Hollyhill folks take care of their own.”

  After Dr. Markum and Gordon Hazelton left and her father filled out all the forms to officially admit Wes to the hospital, a nurse directed them to the surgical waiting room, a smaller group of chairs at the end of a long hallway on the third floor of the hospital. No one else was there.

  “It’s late. They probably only do emergency surgeries this time of the day,” her father said.

  “Will Aunt Love and Tabitha be worried about us?” Jocie asked.

  “Mrs. Markum was going to call and tell them about Wes and where we were.”

  “Oh.” The couch let out a groaning sigh as she sat down and pushed the air out of the vinyl-covered cushions. “I hate noisy seats.”

  Her father sat down beside her, and the seat groaned again. “And we thought rickety wooden pews were bad.”

  Jocie couldn’t remember ever being uncomfortable with her father. Even when she’d done something she shouldn’t have and knew he was going to fuss at her, she had never tried to hide from him. She’d trusted his love to be there for her no matter what she did. He was her father.

  But now Ronnie Martin and Tabitha and Zella said he wasn’t, and she didn’t know what to say or do. She stared down at her dirty, blood-smeared hands. Her jeans were torn and streaked with blood stains as well. Who knew what her face looked like. No wonder everybody kept looking at her as if she’d gotten lost on the way to the emergency room.

  “Maybe I should go wash up a little before the nurses start spraying me with something antiseptic,” Jocie said.

  “There’s a restroom about halfway down the hall,” her father said. “Or maybe we should get a nurse to check you out.”

  “No, no. I just need to wash up.” Jocie stood up quickly and took off down the hall.

  The restroom was barely large enough for the commode and a sink. When she turned sideways to shut the door, she was staring straight into the small mirror on the wall. The face that looked back at her was scary. She quit looking at her eyes and ran her fingers through her hair. A couple of twigs were imbedded in the tangles. She didn’t have a comb, so she just picked out the twigs and hooked her hair behind her ears to get it out of her face.

  She let the water run over her hands until most of the dirt and blood went down the drain, but not all the blood had been from Wes. She’d banged up her knuckles trying to get the tree limbs off him. And there was a nasty scratch on her face from who knew when. Maybe she needed that antiseptic spray after all.

  When she was finished, most of the blood and dirt was gone, but her eyes in the mirror still looked as scary. She stood there a long time, letting the water run over her hands and down the drain while she stared at her face in the mirror. She didn’t want to go back out to the couch in the waiting room. She no longer wanted to know the truth. And that scared her most of all.

  David had to make himself stay where he was instead of running after Jocie as she walked up the hallway to the restroom. She wasn’t a baby, but he wanted to hold her hand. No, more than that. He wanted to pick her up and cradle her to him. He wanted to scare away the boogeymen and smooth the bumps out of her path.

  He’d not done very well at that over the years. He’d tried, but the heartaches seemed to make a point of seeking her out. And now this.

  Would she ever forgive him for not planting the seed in her mother’s body that had caused her to be born? He couldn’t say would she ever forgive him for not being her father. He was her father. The very thought that anybody would say he wasn’t made him want to hit something. Or somebody. But how could he make her believe that? How could he get her to trust him again?

  And what if Wes died? That didn’t even bear thinking about.

  He knew about death. He was a preacher, after all, and part of a preacher’s job was shepherding his people through hard times, like seeing a loved one pass over to the other side. It was a pastor’s job to comfort, to reassure, to help families accept the truth of death as part of life.

  Some deaths were joyous, a time of celebration when the person had lived to a fine age and left a family confident in knowing their loved one was heaven bound. Comforting words came easily then. Still, the family wasn’t always able to accept them right away. He himself had warred against the truth of his mot
her’s death for months when he should have been celebrating her life and her move to heaven. Jocie would be even less ready to give up Wes. Lord, I need a miracle. Again, he prayed silently as Jocie disappeared into the restroom.

  People didn’t pray for miracles much anymore. Not really. They might speak prayers asking for healing, but most of them didn’t believe it would happen. Not to them or anyone they knew. They could believe it had happened in Bible times, especially when Jesus and the disciples walked on the earth. David had preached once on how people had been healed just by being touched by Peter’s shadow in the early days of the church, and the congregation had shaken David’s hand on the way out and said it was a good sermon. None of them had told him it was too hard to believe. They believed what the Bible said, but it was quite another thing to believe that their mother, father, sister, brother, or they themselves were going to be miraculously healed of their cancers, crippled limbs, or heart problems.

  Had the Bible-times families who had laid their ailing loved ones along the way Peter walked to the temple believed, or had it been a matter of thinking they had nothing to lose by trying? Was faith that the miracle would happen necessary? And if so, how much faith?

  In the Bible, Jesus said that with faith the size of a mustard seed a person could tell a mountain to get up and move to another spot and it would. A mustard seed was so small David could hold dozens, even hundreds, of them in his hand. Yet he could not summon up even a fraction of that much faith in his heart that he could move a mountain from here to there.

  David wanted to have that kind of faith for Wes, but he didn’t really believe Wes’s leg would miraculously knit back together while the doctors were getting ready to insert screws and rods to hold the pieces of bone together while it healed. He believed it was possible. He believed God could make the bone whole again. He truly believed anything was possible with God. Yet he didn’t believe it would actually happen this hour to this man—that the doctors were even now turning back to the operating table and blinking their eyes in disbelief as Wes flexed his leg and tried to get off the table. He thought about the doctors looking at the X-rays and wondering what could have happened—how the bone in this man’s leg could be miraculously whole again. And then David felt foolish even imagining such a thing happening. The best he could honestly pray was that the doctors would be skilled and that Wes would survive the surgery. He had the faith to pray that.