Fallen Angels

by Patricia Hickman

  Jeb turned the mule in the center of town, held up his hand so a driver would allow them to correct their direction. “I guess you going to make me say it.”

  “Make you say what?”

  “I can't read. There. Now you know.”

  “Don't you tell me that now, when I got everything all laid put like some big grand plan, you're gonna blurt out you can't read!” Angel closed the Bible. It popped and made a hollow sound.

  “First of all, I woke up to your grand plan. No intention, mind you, on my part of scamming a whole town of big-eyed church people out of food and everything else imaginable. This wagon and mule, for one thing. Free board for another. Fancy clothes on your skinny back.”

  Angel glanced down at her too-big dress.

  “Every minute your grand plan sucks my life into the mud hole of yours. I had it made, wheeling my way to Tennessee with a little money in my pocket, a plug of tobacco, a flask of my favorite spirits, my hat—”

  “You and your hat, your gun, and your truck! Everything you had Was either stole or borryed. It wasn't like you owned anything. Those two lunkheads you lost your stuff to will most likely lose it to another lunkhead who will turn around and call it his things. None of you worked hard for nothing, you just stole it from each other and called it yours.”

  “You Want to hitchhike back home, you just keep flapping your lips like that,” said Jeb.

  “In four days you have to stand up in front of these people and give them what they been salivating for—a big piece of God. What's wrong with that? Giving people what they want is not against the law.” Angel adjusted her feet and recrossed her legs at the calf.

  “It is against the law if you say you're someone you ain't”.

  “Did you ever tell anyone you was Reverend Gracie?’’

  He didn't answer. Too many lies to remember. Angel's voice sounded all at once soft. “I didn't tell them I was Gracie's oldest daughter. If thinking we're the Gracies makes them happy, well, men maybe we're just doing the work of the Lord after all.”

  “You're just nuts. They sure will take you off to the sanatorium. That I do know.”

  “The one thing I do know is that you got a lot of learning to do. Tonight, after supper, I'll pick out a story and teach it to you. But you got to say it differently, like, you know, everything coming out of your mouth is big news. Maybe, even if they've heard it before, they never heard it said like you're going to say it.”

  “I'm leaving. No way will I walkup in a pulpit and try and pull off the lie that I know somethin’ about religion.”

  “First we got to pick a good story. You want to start with Noah and the ark, Daniel and the lion's den, Adam and Eve—”

  “I'll head out of town on Friday like I'm going on visitation, see. Then I'll just drive on down the road. By Sunday, I'll be long gone.”

  “Granny told me this story once about a woman named Sapphire or some such, but I'll have to study on that one. I can't remember what she did, but it was bad. God struck her with lightnin’ or rained fire down. That's what He does when He's mad.” She arced one hand like lightning. The other hand wiggled her fingers for fire.

  “She lied to God,” said Willie.

  Angel answered her brother with an imperious stare. “I don't remember asking your opinion, Willard.”

  “She lied to God and he struck her dead.” Willie untucked his shirt and leaned far back against the front of the wagon bed. “You act like you was always listening to Granny, but you wasn't.” He never won an argument with Angel, not that Jeb had noticed. But with that one statement carefully laid, a high-handed ease settled over him, one that caused him to cross his arms behind his head and smile. His eyelids made slits, almost smiling.

  Jeb's gaze, the one that said he was suddenly interested, made his brows lift, to make seedy little arches over his eyes. Angel turned away from her brother. Jeb did not know who to believe. Nor did he care.

  Ida May squirmed. Her face contorted as it always did when she had waited too long to do her business. “Dud, I need to go,” she said.

  Jeb stopped the mule before a bridge. The sign read Marvelous Crossing. “Angel, take your tittle sister down this path and over behind that rock to pee before she drives me out of my gourd.” He had not seen Ida May use the outhouse once.

  “Ida May, can't you wait until we get home? We got our own outhouse. It won't kill you to wait.” Angel turned with one knee on the seat facing the rear of the wagon.

  “I got to go,” was all Ida May said.

  Angel didn't wait for Ida May to crawl up to the front, but jumped down and made a puff of dust on the road. She flounced to the rear gate, let itdown, and then pulled her sister out “We'll be back.” They disappeared down the grassy spiral of lane Jeb had pointed out.

  Jeb noticed a family seated on the bank on one side of Marvelous Crossing Bridge. An older man held a pudgy boy in his arms, most likely his grandson. The boy's mother stirred lemonade and poured the older man a glassful. She did not look older than fifteen, although Myrna Lenora Hoop looked young herself and she'd been all of nineteen when Jeb took a turn with her on the cotton bale. Next to her, a young man close to her age in appearance touched her calf with a tickle weed from the water. A dozen other family members gathered in differing clusters of four and six, some pitching horseshoes. A few conversed on blankets and battled the invisible legion of bugs attracted to the water.

  The cozy family scene coulda been a fancy painting of pink dresses and blue work trousers, tall human columns milling along the banks of the green water. The lemonade sippers looked much like his own family when they'd all lived in Temple, Texas. The face of the man took on his father's face; the pudgy child was his youngest recollection of his brother when they played near a lake, the name of which he could not remember. Deer ran along those banks. It seemed everything around them had smelled of rotting acorns and Indian burial grounds. Along that shoreline, he had picked a banjo not far from his momma. She had called it a sin, devil music.

  Jeb's lids drooped and he felt his eyes sink into the cups of his cheeks. He could smell those acorns and the water, the brown and green algae, murky and wonderful. The sound of a hound dog lapping near a circle of sunshine and minnows stirred an inside circle of wanting, a giddy desire to find that green and happy place again—to replace that young man's face with his own and the young woman's face with some girl that held in her possession a higher plane of wisdom than that of Myrna Lenora Hoop. If he could have anything he wanted in a girl, he would narrow down the choices to such a person.

  “Never, never again will I take Ida May to do her business,” Angel loped back up the path. Ida May came walking up, moving sideways like a crab, holding herself with her dress tucked between her thin legs. Angel said, “She never will go out in the woods, like she's too much a girl, or I don't know what. But this is it, Ida May! Don't you say another word to me about needing to go. When we get home, you go to the outhouse A-lone!”

  “Get in, then,” said Jeb. The wagon squeaked only slightly, like a single mouse in a cornfield. The girls added almost no weight to the load. Jeb glanced at the family picnic again. Down on the bank, a hound bayed and loped after a rabbit while the sky cooled behind a cloud two hours past noon. He flicked the mule's ear, which caused the beast in torn to stamp, shake the harness, and then move ahead.

  “I think the best thing for Sunday is Moses,” said Angel.

  Jeb grunted, “What do you mean?”

  “He's this guy that did a lot with nothing. That's what we're trying to do with you.”

  “You'd look pretty floating under the bridge with pennies on your eyes.”

  “Well, actually, think of Moses floating along the water in a little basket. That ain't the worst way to start with him.” Angel flipped back and forth between the pages of Evelene's Bible.

  “He was dead with pennies on his eyes?” Jeb asked.

  “You have to start listening. First, he was a baby floating down the river some pl
ace; I don't know where but I'll look it up. This is tiresome. I'll bet my granny is watching me over a cloud and laughing.”

  “You give her good reason.”

  “She always wanted me to know the Bible stories, now here I am teaching them to you,” said Angel.

  “Kind of like the blind leading the blind, you mean?” said Jeb.

  Angel told him, “So first Moses was a baby in the bushes.”

  “I thought he was in the water.”

  “The bushes in the water. Jeb, you ever been serious with a girl?” Angel asked.

  “I don't discuss my personal business with children. It sounds like you got the whole Moses story confused and can't get back on track, is what I'm hearing.”

  Angel dropped her shoulders back and clasped her hands atop the Scriptures. “I don't want to know nothing personal. Just if you ever got serious with a girl.”

  “I never said the word ‘marriage.’ “ Jeb could not quite decipher her language, but he had found all females possessed a code he could never break. Angel was just another in a long line of them.

  “Was she an older person?” Angel slid one hand under the Bible and closed it altogether.

  “Older than me?” asked Jeb.

  Willie lifted from his perch beneath the wagon seat. ”She means older than her. Don't you get it at all, Jeb?”

  “Shut up, stupid! You stay out of my business,” said Angel.

  “You know how you got names for different people, Jeb. Like you call Ida May ‘Littlest’ and stuff like that?” Willie stood and insinuated himself between Angel and Jeb.

  Jeb nodded.

  “Angel has a name for you, too. She give it to you back in Camden.”

  “Never mind,” said Jeb.

  “I said, shut up, Willie!” Angel turned away, her skirts rustling softly, her cheeks bright like persimmons in the fall.

  “Willie, go find your seat again,” said Jeb.

  “Sweet Eyes,” said Willie. He turned, satisfied at having saved the tidbit of gossip for just the perfect moment, delivering it like a sucker punch.

  Jeb prodded the mule that had slowed. “That's not so critical,” he said. “Kind of has a ring to it.”

  Angel's right hand came up and covered the left side of her face. She remained in that position all the way back to the Church in the Dell parsonage.

  Jeb reined the mule to a halt, allowed a Model-T to pass, and was about to turn into the lane that led to the parsonage when he saw the deputy sheriff's vehicle through the trees.

  “It's the cops, Jeb! You think they're coming after you, that they know who you are?” Willie asked.

  “I'm not sticking around long enough to find out.” Jeb pulled back on the reins. The mule made a backwards step.

  “Looky, it's that nice Mr. Honeyman,” said Ida May.

  “Maybe they just bringing the cops around to help you find your truck, Jeb,” said Angel. “Reckon?”

  Honeysack moved between two pine trees, stooped down, and shaded his brow with one hand. He pointed and the deputy turned around and acknowledged he saw Jeb, too.

  “You're not going to get away whipping this old mule,” said Angel. “May as well see what they want. If it's the cuffs, I'll see you get good food in jail.”

  “Could you stop rattling for just a minute?” said Jeb. “I need quietness to think.”

  “It's helped you so far.” Angel kept moving her feet from one side to the next, crossing her legs at the ankles as though she practiced various starlet poses.

  “Willie, you go run on ahead, like you just got a sudden need to stretch your legs. I'll slowly get this mule turned like I'm about to head on into the parsonage. Take this white handkerchief and if it looks like the coast is clear, like they don't know nothin’ about me, then you just jump around and wave like you're playing a game and I'll know I can come on in.” Jeb heaved a breath, his eyes still assessing the deputy's body movements.

  “That's the stupidest idea I ever heard,” said Angel. “Willie jumping around like a fool, what, those men going to think—that he's lost his mind? No, most likely they'll wonder why you was afraid to come up to the parsonage like a man and give them a proper greeting.”

  “Willie, do as I say.” Jeb handed the boy a-handker-chief. “Go on, now.”

  Willie skipped all the way up the dirt lane, waving the hanky, never looking back. When he made it to the deputy's vehicle, Jeb saw them talk back and forth for a second or two. Willie stood with his hands in his pockets, said a few things to Mr. Honeysack and then skipped around back to the parsonage.

  “He didn't wave it, didn't wave the handkerchief,” said Jeb, ready to bolt.

  “Willie's a lot like that, acting like he's following everything you say. Then he can just walk into the next room and completely forget what you just told him.” Angel sat straighter, restless. “Can we go now? That Josie lady's bringing supper by tonight and I want to change out of this dress. Maybe I'll wear that simple thing Evelene gave me, kind of a soft blue with little white petals every now and then along the hem.”

  “The deputy's walking this way,” said Jeb. “You take the reins. I'm going to slip out the back of this wagon and run up through those woods. That's a big old heavy-set fellow. Can't be too fast on foot.”

  “How am I going to drive tins wagon? Do I look like I can make this mule go? Not me.” She stood up and waved at the deputy, who was halfway up the lane by now.

  “I said take the reins.”

  She called out to the deputy, waving her arm in an invitation.

  “Take them now.”

  “Quit telling me what to do.”

  “Fine. Just stand here looking like a fool then.” Jeb leaped over the seat and landed on both feet in the back of the wagon.

  “Reverend Gracie, you having mule problems?” The deputy called to him.

  Jeb stopped when he heard the deputy call him Gracie. He bent over and picked up a board. “You think I ought to hit her up side the head, Deputy?”

  “Poor old beast. Ever since automobiles came around, these poor animals don't know up from down. When I saw that Model-T pass you I wondered if it would spook your animal.”

  “That's what it is, all right. It's spooked.” Jeb jumped out of the wagon. After meeting the sheriff on the dirt road and shaking his hand, he took the mule by the harness and tugged. The animal moved forward.

  “I'm glad you didn't have to give it a whack. Shame to punish it when machinery's to blame,” said the deputy. “I understand you and your family is victims of a robbery. I hated to hear it, what with your just getting into town. Nazareth is a quiet place. Seldom do you hear of crooks in this part of the state. But what with this Depression on, they's outlaws comin’ out of every nook and cranny. If you can give me a description of the boys that did it, I'll bet I can run them down for you.”

  “One had a skinny look about him, but they both had already climbed up inside my truck so I couldn't see all of them. I don't know how tall, but that boy by the Window, he had a tall look, like the top of his head nearly touched the roof of the truck. He had light-colored hair, straw colored, I guess you'd say.” Jeb tried to remember. It had been dark.

  “I'll check with the sheriff back in Camden and the one up around Hope. If mere's been a slew of crimes, maybe we got some real outlaws. But if nothing else is going down, well, it could be a couple of locals out for a joyride. Maybe from Hope or somewheres else. Now give me an idea of what kind of truck and the rest of your belongings and then I'll be on my way.”

  Jeb described the truck, the food supplies, the tarp that covered the goods.

  “You got anything that says it was your truck?”

  Jeb did not know how to answer.

  “Truck in your name, Reverend Gracie? Free and clear.”

  Jeb knew that his brother had bought the truck off the Hamptons, but how it was transacted, he couldn't remember. “It's mine.” He felt the hope of finding the truck sucked from his grasp like a nickel down the well.r />
  “That's Philemon Gracie,” said Mr. Honeysack. “Good Bible name. Did your momma know you was going to be a preacher?”

  Angel cackled and ran up the road toward the house. Ida May followed her, skirt flying like a paper parasol.

  “How you spell Fi-le-mon?” the deputy asked.

  “It's just like in the Bible,” said Honeysack. “Right, Reverend?”

  Jeb nodded.

  When the deputy finally pulled away followed by Honeysack, Jeb marched up the steps to the parsonage and yelled, “Angel, out here front and center.”

  She failed to appear. He went inside and found her sprawled across her bed while the radio blared from the parlor.

  “I don't need you running off like that. How in the world you expect me to spell a name like ‘Fi-le-mon.’ You pull another stunt like that and maybe you can just explain yourself without me.”

  Angel pressed the back of her head into the pillow. “Of all the names to give you. I mean, you can't read but you got to spell Philemon. That's funnier than the look on your face when Mr. Honeysack said it. I guess you're lucky you know your whole name now. Maybe you ought to practice saying it in front of the mirror. ‘Greetings, I'm Reverend Philemon Gracie, at your service.’ “

  Jeb left her to her own devices—to laugh, wallow around in her own folly, anything she pleased as long as he didn't have to listen to her foolishness. He had an hour to himself before that Josie would show up with supper. He would spend it quietly drinking.

  6

  Jeb found Willie stretched out across the stream, one hand steadying his weight. The rivulet meandered an acre behind the house, clear water full of sun perch and a few trout. “Don't touch my trot line. I put it there for a reason. So no one would disturb it. I want to land a fish, not a boy.”

  “My daddy taught me how to do it.” Willie, on all fours, looked blue in the morning light. Blue denims, blue eyes all beneath the blue morning sky.

  “It's mine. I said don't touch it and I mean it.”

  “You'd make a terrible daddy,” said Willie.

  “Thank you kindly.” Jeb saw Willie purse his mouth, his eyes dimming and disappointment coloring his face. “You know how to clean and cut up trout?”