Fallen Angels

by Patricia Hickman

  Freda, whose long mustine face was framed by a fountain-pen display, a tower of Coty face powder, and a running list of meat, deliveries, dropped the spools and needles into a brown bag, ba-dop, ba-dop. “Will says he has not seen the Wolvertons all week. Could be they're away.”

  “Or holed up like mice. This Depression is eating families alive. What do my eyes see?” Greta pointed at the display of candies. “Half a pound of those horehounds for my grandson, since you have some spanking new.”

  “Hoover ought to do more.” Freda rang up Greta's purchase. “Thirty-one cents. I hope someone up in the White House remembers it's an election year. We don't give a flitter about politicians and emergency committees if they leave the rest of the country to fend for itself.”

  “Or let children run truant due to shoelessness. Someone ought to write Hoover a letter,” said Greta.

  “You think he'd read it? I'll bet not,” Freda told her in a way that needled Greta into position.

  Wouldn't that be the gab around this place? A letter from the president himself!” Greta mulled it around.

  “You'd make us all jealous, Greta.”

  “Oh, doodle! I'm writing a letter to the president and I don't care what anyone says!” She minced around Jeb, who was collecting two cans of Del Monte beans from the center aisle. “Reverend, I guess you should know I'm writing a letter to the president.”

  Jeb noticed the grocery list bent over her wrist with the several items unchecked. “Don't forget to stock the grape juice for communion, Greta.”

  “I'll have to do it later. Communion isn't for two more weeks. Busy, busy.” She halted fully in the doorway. “I'll mention to Hoover that my husband fished last summer with the man who once cut his wife's roses.”

  “That'll show him,” said Jeb.

  “Do remember to speak of the Wolvertons,” said Freda.

  “Presidents lead hectic lives, Freda. And it is an election year,” Greta said, and continued down Font-Street, a bit of the temperance march in her step.

  “After the Mississippi Flood, Greta sent letters to the governor. She means what she says,” said Freda.

  “Maybe Hoover will read it and stop the Depression altogether,” said Jeb. He wanted sweet banana pudding but did not want to ask Freda for the ingredients when everything was clearly spelled out on the package. A sign hand-lettered by Hank Honeysack extended beyond a sugar display that advertised Jell-O, three for twenty cents. He knew his numbers good and the Jell-O picture helped.

  Angel padded in behind him, one hand scooting Ida May through the door and the other looking at her own face in a hand mirror. The dress she wore had a wide yoke—too wide for a girl her size—that stayed in place like a box even if she moved her shoulders. She kept tucking her hand into the basket pocket, creating a posed expression, Jeb thought, like the movie star Loretta Young.

  “What could I do for the Gracie family?” asked Freda.

  “I need to post a letter.” Jeb handed her the sealed letter, Charlie's letter, and the one that would surprise him since Jeb penned it himself, even if he was a bad speller. It had taken a week and several wadded up and tossed away sheets before he got it close to right, according to Angel, who had insulted him all the way.

  ‘Texarkana.” Freda examined the address.

  “Cousin of mine, on my mother's side,” said Jeb.

  “None of my business. But you should put your return address on here. If they don't get it delivered, they'll need to know how to mail it back to you.”

  “I'm sure they'll deliver it.”

  “Never know. I'll scribble down your address on the envelope,” said Freda.

  “Then it won't be a surprise.”

  “Suit yourself.” She dropped Charlie's letter into the out mailbox.

  “So the Wolvertons are without shoes,” Said Jeb, getting better at the nice tactful touch, a pastorly concern that softened his phrases.

  “I didn't say that.”

  “Greta said it, I know. But I overheard.”

  “But she doesn't know herself. It's all speculation.”

  Jeb sent Angel off with the shopping list. “Perhaps I should drop by, pay them a visit.”

  “Just don't mention my name. I know nothing about the Wolvertons’ affairs. Nice family. Shame to see them fall into the pit of this Depression,” she told him. “But everyone is hit by hard times. I just hope that Mr. Wolverton doesn't turn to crime. So many do, nowadays. Dillinger, George Nelson, Bonnie and that what's-his-face.”

  Every time someone dropped a nickel into the Catholic cauldron out front, the sisters rang their bells. Front Street sounded like St. Mary's Cathedral in intermittent jangling intervals, a lively fête that broke through the quiet Saturday spell that settled over downtown when the Grande Theater opened up for the matinee showing of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Tarzan in a serialized showing preceded the moving picture.

  Jeb had never paid an official visit to the Wolvertons, having made as few stops as possible around town, just enough to convince the locals that the Gracie train had landed. Another interval of chiming bells caused him to stiffen with his own thought. “Maybe we ought to have our own kind of charity bell ringing. Shoes for the Wolvertons.” He laughed about it, then got all of a sudden serious.

  Angel announced, “We have everything on the list. Can I go watch the nuns now?”

  “You all sell bells, by the way?” Jeb asked Freda.

  “Cowbells, maybe. Nothing like the Catholics.”

  “Add up my bill, will you? And sell me one of those cowbells.” Jeb walked across the wooden floor to get a better look at the nuns. Their thin faces were wedded between the folds of fabric that shrouded their heads. They looked jittery, like Mexican dogs. Even the virtuous suffered skimpy meals during the autumnal grinding of days leading toward the November election. There was always the coming victory of voting out the old to usher in the new, but it didn't fill empty bellies.

  Jeb figured by Christmas this Depression would be rolled under the White House rug, a ploy that could be laid aside or shoved in a drawer after the vote count. Maybe he would be in Canada by then. He envisioned Fern dressed in a seal coat, her legs lifting out of the snow, her Ardmore feet strapped in wooden skis. But a picture of a long habit raided his image of her platinum locks and snapped the lust out of the whole picture.

  “Is this bell what you wanted, Reverend?” Freda rang it until he took it out of her hand.

  “I'll take it just like that. No need to wrap it for me. Ever get in a supply of skis, Sister Honeysack?”

  Jeb made Willie count the pennies he had collected outside the Grande. “You need the practice,” he told him.

  While Willie painstakingly counted every penny aloud, Ida May sang, “Won't you try Wheaties? For wheat is the best food of man.”

  “This man and his wife walked nine hundred miles through Texas to look for work in the Rio Grande.” Angel read the newspaper to Jeb.

  He sat feet crossed on a bench sipping a Coke and watching the cinemagoers milling out and back to Beulah's Café and Fidel's Drugstore on the corner. Stiffness crept into his right hand from the bell ringing.

  “Four hundred seventy-two cents,” said Willie. “A fortune.”

  “We're in the money now.” Angel folded up the Gazette and laid it over Jeb's lap like a Hoover blanket.

  “We can buy shoes, I'll bet.” Jeb raked the coins into a paper sack and plopped it into the sack of canned goods from Honeysack's.

  “You ain't buying shoes for the Wolvertons, no way,” said Angel. “This is another scam. I can read it on you like milk on a baby.”

  “Of course, I don't know the shoe sizes.”

  “I knew it. You'll find a way to keep the money,” said Angel. “The day you go soft is the day I grow wings.”

  “If I give this money to Mr. Wolverton, reckon he'll use it for shoes? If I say it's a gift from the church and tell him, ‘Go buy your children shoes’—can preachers tell people things like that?” If so
meone had said that to his daddy, he might have taken offense. An invasion like that could knock the wind out of a poor man's sails.

  Angel told him, “Let's take the biggest four on a trip into town. Their momma knows we give them rides sometimes. The oldest ones can pick out their own shoes. Then we'll let them pick out the two littlest ones’ shoes and take them home.”

  “Charity is a shameful thing to a man,” said Jeb.

  “Pocket the money like you planned to do all along, then,” Angel held up her hand, bracing Ida May as she clambered into the wagon. She collected the cowbell and removed the sign Jeb had asked her to make. The penciled writing read, “Help buy shoes for poor children.”

  “They call me Clovis and the wife is Alma. You met the youngens.” Mr. Wolverton's slight build gave him the look of a twig trapped between two opposing poles, a bowed appearance as though his back would snap under the weight of the next landslide. Even inside his own house, he wore an old felt-brimmed hat that added years to the windswept face. The hat and the habit of pacing made him look like a man who waited his turn for one big break. “My apologies to you for alla-us missin’ yer church service, Reverend. We had to attend to other matters.”

  Someone had placed a small Bakelite radio on the floor with the electrical cord rolled up and tied with twine.

  All six Wolverton children collected inside the one room shanty as though the electricity had come back into the house during the Amos ‘n’ Andy sketch.

  “I'll try to get your names right,” said Jeb. The oldest boy, he remembered. “Dillon, right?”

  Dillon nodded with a weak smile. The school children laughed at his blackened teeth Willie had mentioned over supper.

  Angel named the others.

  None of them wore shoes and the oldest boys wore pants too short and so tight around their thin stomachs their hip bones squeezed against the seams. The girls’ clothes had an oversized slouch, their dresses drop-offs left on their porch in the night, according to Angel, but that was gossip. The oldest girl, Wanda, confided such things to her.

  “Angel and Willie had an idea, Clovis. We'd like to take your oldest ones for a wagon ride. They seem to like it,” said Jeb.

  “Ride to where?” asked Clovis.

  Alma slunk into a chrome chair like one of the children and hid her face behind the youngest girl, who squirmed to leap from her knobby lap.

  “No where in particular,” Jeb told him.

  Dillon's younger brother said, “I'd like a ride in Reverend's wagon.”

  Dillon batted the boy and then whispered a secret that his brother appeared to already know. He pushed Dillon away.

  “Did someone send you by, Reverend?” Clovis asked.

  “Nobody sent us,” Angel answered for Jeb.

  Jeb let out a breath. “The fact is, I ought to tell you, there was a—”

  “A raffle,” said Angel.

  “A raffle is right,” said Jeb. “And you all won.”

  The Wolverton children shouted support for the timely raffle.

  “Best of my knowledge, we didn't enter no raffle. Alma, you enter something I don't know about?” Clovis asked her.

  She shook her head and gave off a funny laugh that caused all of the children to laugh, too.

  “A raffle for new shoes. For all the children.” Jeb could tell that Clovis did not buy the raffle story. So it just laid there, a lie in the mouth of the town preacher.

  “Someone's sent you,” said Clovis.

  “I can promise you not.” Jeb picked up the youngest girl. “If you can give me the shoe sizes of your littlest two, Mrs. Wolverton, I'll bring them back to you. Then we'll just take the four oldest ones for a fitting at Whittington's Woolworth's. Why, Evelene Whittington, she's just silly about children. I'll bet she'll have some good shoes that are to your liking. If that would help you all out.” Jeb had noticed the old Wolverton truck parked a mile away from the shack, as though it had blown that far on fumes and then expired.

  “We don't need no charity,” said Clovis.

  Alma tried to speak but Clovis glared her into silent obedience.

  Jeb pulled the old movie stub out of his pocket from when he and the Welbys had seen The Miracle Woman. He handed it to Alma. “If you change your mind, Mrs. Wolverton, here's the winning raffle ticket.”

  Alma turned it over. Her mouth widened. “We're the winning ticket, Clovis. I didn't sit out on that porch praying to God for nothing. You kids behave yourselves and go with this nice preacher.”

  “You'll not defy me, Alma,” said Clovis.

  “Just this once, Clovis. Sunday I'll atone,” she said.

  The Wolverton children goaded Jeb through the doorway.

  They entered the downtown square with a whole Wolverton parade, four pairs of dirty, bare feet gadding about the Woolworth's, dozens of hungry fingers touching luxury as though a pack of terrycloth towels belonged in a bank vault. In most cases of late, that was every bit the truth. Evelene met him at the counter. He said to her, “We are here for six pairs of shoes, the good ones, and a pair of socks each.”

  While Evelene turned to go for the shoes, Jeb had a brief mirage where he felt his body rise to a dizzying height. He did not hear a crack of thunder or stand fixed on the pyre of a burning bush. But a soaring sensation entered through his nostrils, filling-him up. It took over his mouth and he heard himself say to Angel, “Oh, and don't tell Fern.”

  Angel led the oldest Wolverton girl into the shoe aisle, but she kept looking back at Jeb like he'd lost his mind.

  14

  Iheard a haint in the wood last night, fierce like a bear and telling the summer to go away. It made me cry,” said Willie.

  “Hush, and don't tell Ida May your bad dreams or you'll give them to her.” Angel had grown good at stirring up biscuit batter. She cut the bread with a snuff glass just in time for Fern to show up any minute and give a dozen the final shove into the cook stove.

  “It didn't seem like a dream,” said Willie.

  “Quiet. I'm listening to Joan and Kermit on the radio,” Angel shot back.

  Sunday came into the house, sunlight melting into the windows, sunbeam butter on the griddle of the house, quiet, and simmering golden and yellow while the tinny, muted voices spilled out of the new. Woolworth's radio. Floyd Whittington had paid his church tithes with an RCA Radiola calling the last week the worst week of the whole entire year.

  “Let's wait out on the porch for Miss Coulter.” Ida May said her name now as though she breathed the sacred name of “Mother.”

  “I think you need to be careful about who you make friends with, Ida May. A teacher is the best friend to those that pay them but children, we are a nuisance to them. Miss Coulter doesn't love us. Not like you think.”

  Ida May crept in sock feet out to the porch. Her dress ties trailed behind on the porch, waiting a proper tying at the hands of Miss Coulter. “I'm not listening to Angel, Dud.”

  “It is a good thing I do. I said that right, didn't I?” When Jeb spit out his first full sentence, he could have raised the dead with his whoops—Eeyah! He'd read a sentence from Ida May's Big Little Book, a merciful story of a farmer.

  “What would happen if someone called off church? Would God get mad?” Wearing her feed-sack slip, Angel finished dressing right on the front porch. She pulled on a blouse, white and crisp with sizing.

  Jeb flew through the first word of the next sentence, onto a simple verb and a five-lettered word that sounded like the blade of a fan turning. “Wh-ere.” He butchered the sentence and then stammered through the next. He held the book out in the sun and read sentence after sentence, his arms spread in a ritual between his mind and nature. “It is a good thing I do. It is a good thing I do. Where no man gives mercy, I give it to you.”

  The girls rocked together, Ida May on top of Angel, their arms rising and falling like centipede legs. Ida May's skin had bronzed over the summer and the freckles on her face had darkened until her skin burst with the color of a pinto bean.<
br />
  “He memorized it. That's not the same thing as reading,” said Angel, speaking about Jeb as though he had gone inside.

  “I really didn't,” said Jeb. “Willie Boy, ego fetch that Bible. Things is coming to me now, like a lightbulb coming on in this old boy's attic.”

  Willie brought Evelene Whittington's Bible to him and swapped it for the reader. Jeb opened to the book of Psalms. “Here goes nothing. ‘I will … sing … of the mer-cies of the Lord forever: with my mou-th will I make known thy faith-ful-ness to all german—‘”

  “Generations,” Angel said in a monotone. “I don't believe you. Read one more.”

  He read the next verse of the Psalm and made “establish” sound like a vegetable, but the rest he figured out right nice. “Today, I preach straight out of the Good Book, on my very own.”

  Angel measured out her words slowly, dropping each like a fly before a fish. “Go-od. You'll so-und like Ida May when she re-ads.”

  Fern's Chevy Coup generated a red puff of dust at the end of the parsonage drive.

  “Don't guess you'll be wanting to brag to her,” said Angel.

  “I don't brag to Fern,” Jeb read another passage to himself. “We share—accomplishments. Wonder how you spell accomplishments?”

  Angel shrugged. “I'm going inside. If she cooks again, I'm going to fast.”

  “Going too fast for what?” asked Willie.

  “If I can do this, Willie, so can you,” said Jeb. He practice-read the Scripture he had stuck together for the Sunday morning message in the same manner Ida May tried to create puzzles from newspaper pages.

  Fern opened, the automobile door, one heel down, with her entire ankle aimed straight into the toe of the shoe. When she stood, the trendy Ghillie Ties tossed back and forth on the front of her ankle. She wore a felt hat, brandy colored with one brim turned up above her left brow and held in place with cut-felt pompons.

  Ida May announced to Fern, “Dud can read!”

  “Of course he can,” said Fern.

  “Ida May, go and let Angel fix your hair,” said Willie, the tops of his ears like rubies in the pearled morning light.