Jubilee's Journey

by Bette Lee Crosby

  Barbara protested, saying she’d decided to become a vegetarian. But Olivia insisted almost all vegetarians also ate meatloaf. “They just don’t talk about it,” she said. Shoving the overloaded plate into Barbara’s hands, she then scurried off in case Ethan Allen was trying to call home.

  By the time the clock chimed five, Olivia had grown increasingly worried. She began scrutinizing the movements of the minute hand, and with each tick her apprehension increased. Before another fifteen minutes had passed she was so edgy it was impossible to sit still. That’s when she decided to try her hand at homemade potato chips. Ethan banged through the front door moments after she had a skillet of hot grease sizzling.

  “It’s about time!” Olivia called out angrily. Bounding from the kitchen in a few quick steps, she stopped short when she saw the frightened-faced girl.

  “Ethan Allen,” she grumbled. “You’d better have a good explanation.”

  “It ain’t my fault, Grandma,” Ethan said. “It really ain’t.” He told how he’d been distracted by the robbery, stopped to see what was going on, and spotted Jubilee sitting on the bench early this morning. After telling how he’d met Seth Porter and a lengthy description of the bodies being carried out, he shrugged and said, “Anyway, she was still sitting there waiting, and since her brother wasn’t back yet I asked if she wanted to come home and have dinner with us. That ain’t so wrong, is it?”

  “Isn’t so wrong,” Olivia corrected. “And, no, it isn’t.” Her anger subsided, but a cluster of suspicions still picked at her brain. It wouldn’t be the first time Ethan Allen had stretched the truth to the closest edge of a lie.

  “Even though you claim to have had good intentions,” she said, “you’re still in trouble for stopping when you were supposed to be on your way to school.”

  Olivia looked at the girl who was half the size of Ethan and skinnier than a string bean. She squatted to the girl’s height and looked into eyes as blue as Charlie’s had been. “Jubilee, dear, how old are you?”

  “Seven.”

  “Do your parents know you came home with Ethan Allen?”

  Jubilee shook her head.

  “Good gracious!” Olivia exclaimed. “By now they’re probably worried sick. You’re certainly welcome to stay for dinner, but first let’s call and let them know you’re here.”

  “There ain’t no need,” Jubilee said.

  “Of course there is,” Olivia replied. “Why, your mama’s probably worried crazy—”

  Jubilee shook her head. “Mama ain’t worried, on account of she’s dead.”

  “Dead?” Olivia blinked. “Your mama is dead?”

  Jubilee nodded.

  “Well, what about your daddy? Surely he’s—”

  “My daddy’s dead too.”

  “Your daddy is dead too?” Olivia gasped.

  Jubilee nodded again.

  Believing the child had to be making up such a horrible story, she repeated the question. “Jubilee, are you telling the honest truth when you say your mama and daddy are both dead?”

  The girl tucked her head down and without looking up answered. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Olivia could see the weight of sadness bending the child’s neck and knew Jubilee had spoken the truth. She stammered a few words about how sorrowful such a situation was and then inquired who Jubilee was staying with in Wyattsville.

  “Who’s taking care of you?”

  “Paul,” Jubilee answered. “He’s my brother.”

  “Okay, then, we’ll call Paul and let him know where you are.”

  “You can’t. He still didn’t come back from a job.”

  “Well, when he does get back he’s sure to be worried. Give me your home number, and I’ll leave a message.”

  “I don’t got a home number.”

  Growing a bit less tolerant Olivia said, “Then give me Paul’s address, and I’ll have Ethan take a note over and leave it in the mailbox.”

  Jubilee gave Olivia a quizzical look. “I done told you, Paul ain’t at no address, he’s still at the job.”

  “Well, I have to notify someone. So give me the address or telephone number of wherever or whomever you are staying with here in Wyattsville.”

  “We ain’t staying nowhere yet. We’re gonna get a sleeping room after Paul gets money.”

  “You’re homeless?” Olivia gasped. “A child your age homeless?”

  The word had a shameful sound and slammed into Jubilee like an angry fist. “We ain’t homeless! We’re gonna get our own sleeping room, or go stay with Aunt Anita! We just ain’t decided yet.”

  “Oh,” Olivia backed off. “Thank God you have someone.” For a brief moment, she’d feared the girl was another Ethan Allen, a child with no one. “Well, then, we can call Aunt Anita.”

  “Before you start asking me again,” Jubilee warned, “I ain’t got her address or telephone number either.”

  “Just tell me her last name. I can look it up in the phone book.”

  Jubilee struggled to remember Paul’s words and after several seconds said, “Walker. She was Mama’s sister, I think.”

  “Anita Walker,” Olivia replied. “That should be easy enough to find.” She pulled out the telephone book and began flipping through the pages.

  Before Olivia even reached W, Jubilee said, “That ain’t gonna do no good.”

  “What isn’t going to do any good?”

  “Calling Aunt Anita.”

  “Why not?”

  “She don’t know Daddy’s dead, and she don’t know we’re coming to stay with her.” Jubilee remembered Paul’s warning about Aunt Anita possibly not wanting them, and she wasn’t anxious to check it out alone.

  “Your aunt doesn’t know you’re coming to stay with her?” Olivia repeated. The reality of the situation became apparent—Jubilee and her brother were not from Wyattsville. They weren’t from anywhere around here. The girl was different, her way of speaking, her dress…

  “Where did you and your brother come from?” Olivia asked.

  “Coal Fork.”

  “Where is Coal Fork?”

  “Up the mountain,” Jubilee said. “Past Campbell’s Creek.”

  “In Virginia?”

  Jubilee rubbed her nose with the palm of her hand and thought for a moment; then she shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  Bewildered by this turn of events, Olivia asked. “How on earth did you get here?”

  “On the bus,” Jubilee said indignantly. “We paid our fares like everybody else.”

  Olivia’s chin dropped. “Does anybody at all, any grownup, know you’re here in Wyattsville?”

  “Just Paul.” Jubilee shrugged.

  “And Paul left you on the bench and didn’t come back?”

  Jubilee folded her arms across her chest and glared at Olivia. “He’s gonna come back, soon as he finishes the job.”

  “So you say.” Olivia sighed. Then she lowered herself into the chair and began wondering what to do. After a good half-hour and no other ideas, she remembered Ethan Allen had brought the girl home for dinner. “Jubilee, are you hungry?”

  When the girl nodded, Olivia stood and gave a forced smile. “Perhaps a nice bowl of beef stew is what we need.” She took Jubilee by the hand and led her into the bathroom. “Wash your hands, sweetheart, and when you’re finished we’ll have dinner.”

  The thought of having another belongs-to-nobody child made Olivia cringe. She’d been down this road before, and it wearied her soul to think of it. Although she could hardly fault Ethan Allen for doing the right thing, she kept asking herself, “Why me?” Irritated at such thoughts, she also grew impatient with Ethan Allen for presenting the problem. As she passed through the living room she glared at him and said, “Make sure you wash your hands too.”

  “They ain’t dirty,” he answered.

  “Yes, they are,” she said sharply and continued to the kitchen. Food was never really an answer, but for now it was the only one she had. Olivia began spooning up three bo
wls of stew—a stew that, like her fears, had simmered for too long.

  Olivia set the plates on the table and called the kids to come to dinner. “Ethan Allen, make sure you’ve washed those hands.”

  “Okay,” he answered, then took the ball he and Dog had been playing with and tossed it across the room. He swiped his hands across the back of his pants and followed Jubilee into the kitchen.

  After she poured two glasses of milk, Olivia sat opposite the children and watched Jubilee gobbling up the stew. She couldn’t help but notice what a pretty little thing the girl was; tiny but with a sweet smile and blue eyes that would one day have lads swooning. Surely the child was mistaken. Someone knew she was missing. Someone had to be looking for a child like this—a brother, an aunt, an uncle. They were probably out there right now, walking through the streets, calling her name.

  Olivia thought back on the night Ethan ran away and felt a stab of pain remembering the anguish that came with the realization he was out there alone. A missing child meant a broken heart for someone. She couldn’t let that happen. She had to find the child’s family.

  Unsure of whether the girl knew something she wasn’t telling or was simply telling all she knew, Olivia made up her mind to discover whatever there was to discover. She thought back on the way Ethan Allen had stubbornly refused to tell what he knew until he’d come to trust her. Trust. It was the dividing line between truth and nothing. She had to cross that line.

  “So, Jubilee,” she said sweetly, “is your Aunt Anita pretty like you are?”

  Jubilee gave a bewildered shrug.

  “Does she look like you or your mama?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw her.”

  “But you talked to her on the telephone, right?”

  Jubie crinkled her nose and shook her head. “We didn’t have no telephone.”

  “Didn’t have a phone? Everybody has a telephone.”

  “Not in Coal Fork. Nobody has a telephone.”

  “Nobody has a phone?”

  “The company store has one, but folks ain’t supposed to use it.”

  “How did your mama communicate with her sister?”

  “What’s com-une-i-cake?”

  “It means talk,” Olivia said, “or send messages.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “Well? Did Aunt Anita send your mama letters?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied with an air of exasperation. “I think maybe Aunt Anita didn’t like Mama.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Paul told me.”

  “That’s too bad.” Olivia gave a sympathetic sigh. “When you came to Wyattsville, were you and Paul going to visit your Aunt Anita?”

  “Maybe visit,” Jubilee clarified. “Paul don’t know for sure where she is.”

  “Did he have her address?”

  Jubilee spooned another bite of stew and shook her head. “Unh-unh. We ain’t too sure of her name either. It was Walker like Mama’s, but if she got married it likely ain’t anymore.”

  “Oh.” Olivia felt stymied and wondered where to go from here. She hesitated a moment, then asked, “When Paul told you to wait there, was he going to look for your aunt?”

  Jubilee shook her head. “I told you, he was going to do a job.”

  “What job?”

  “In the store.” Jubilee scooped one last carrot from the bowl.

  “Do you know the name of the store?”

  Jubilee looked up like she was thinking, then shook her head again. “I ain’t remembering the name. But it had a sign for working.”

  “Okay, that’s something.” Olivia gave her a reassuring smile. “I know remembering is hard, but you’re doing a very good job.”

  Ethan Allen, who generally had something to say about everything, was strangely silent as he listened to the exchange. Then when Jubilee said she didn’t know the name of the store, he jumped up from the table saying he thought he’d forgotten to wash his hands after all. Olivia was going to say he needn’t bother now that he’d finished dinner, but before she could say anything he’d darted off to the bathroom.

  “Can I have more?” Jubilee asked and pushed her empty bowl toward Olivia.

  “Of course you can.” Olivia filled the bowl a second time, handed it to Jubilee, and then went back to her questions. Hoping for even a scrap of information she asked, “Did Paul say anything about where you were going when he came back?”

  Jubilee nodded proudly. “He said we was gonna get a nice place to stay and good food.”

  “Did he say what the name of that nice place was?”

  “Unh-unh. He just said if he got money from the job, it wouldn’t matter none if we didn’t find Aunt Anita.”

  “Were you going to return home?”

  Jubilee thought back on the cabin they’d left behind. “No. We can’t live there no more. The mine man said so.”

  “The mine man?”

  Jubilee nodded. “He said only people what work in the mine can have houses, and ‘cause Paul promised Daddy he wouldn’t work in the mine we had to give back the house.”

  When Olivia asked how old her brother was, Jubilee wrinkled her nose and gave a shrug. “Sixteen, I think.”

  After almost an hour, two bowls of stew, a dish of ice cream, a slice of lemon pound cake, and three cookies, Olivia had learned almost nothing. The girl came from a place where people didn’t have telephones, her last name was Jones, her brother had brown hair, and they had come to Wyattsville looking for an aunt who might or might not be named Anita Walker.

  When Olivia was satisfied she had gotten all the girl knew, she settled the kids in front of the television with a bowl of popcorn. Disappearing back into the kitchen, she began calling all of the Walkers listed in the Wyattsville telephone directory. There were one hundred and forty-seven, thirteen with the initial A, and not one with the name Anita. When the twenty-eighth Walker slammed the receiver down and said it was too damn late to be bothering people about such nonsense she abandoned the project, at least for the remainder of the evening.

  Olivia wondered whether she should call the Wyattsville Police Station when she noticed Jubilee asleep on the sofa. If she notified the police and they couldn’t find the missing brother or the questionable aunt, the poor child would be carted off to a foster home or—worse yet—an orphanage. Olivia shuddered at the thought.

  Remembering how Ethan Allen had come into her life because he’d gone in search of his grandfather, she could understand why Paul was trying to find their Aunt Anita. “Family is family,” she said with a sigh. Convinced there was an Aunt Anita and the only challenge would be finding her, Olivia decided not to call the authorities. If worse came to worst and she became desperate, there was one person she could trust. She hadn’t spoken with Jack Mahoney in almost six months, but she knew he’d be there and he’d answer the call.

  Olivia removed Jubilee’s shoes, carried her into the bedroom, and tucked her into Charlie’s side of the bed. She placed the sleepy little head on a fluffy pillow that hadn’t been used for two years.

  When Olivia returned to the living room, her eyes were watery. “That poor child…” she murmured.

  Ethan Allen, who’d been focused on watching a television show, looked up. “You ain’t even heard the worst yet.”

  “The worst?”

  “Yeah. You know that robbed place I was at? Well, that’s where Jubie said her brother was supposed to be working.”

  “Klaussner’s Grocery Store?” Olivia gasped.

  Ethan Allen nodded.

  “Dear God,” Olivia said. “You don’t suppose her brother was involved in that.”

  “I ain’t supposing nothin’—I figured you was gonna take charge of that.”

  Olivia shooed Ethan Allen off to bed and changed the channel on the television. Maybe there’d be something on the news.

  There was.

  Ethan Allen

  I didn’t want to tell Grandma this on account of she’s a worrier. Mama neve
r worried about nothin’, but Grandma, she worries about everything. The sorry truth is I didn’t see no live people come out of that grocery store. Far as I could tell, they was all dead.

  With him needing money, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Paul was the one robbing Mister Klaussner. Jubie said he was gonna do a job, and that’s what crooks call it when they’re gonna rob a place. Maybe her brother ain’t really a crook, but when you got no place to go and nothin’ to eat you gotta do something—even if it’s something you ain’t none too proud of doing.

  Whatever he did, I can say for sure Jubie’s got nothin’ to do with it. I know what feeling scared looks like, and Jubie was honest-to-God scared. Not the kind of guilty-scared you get from doing something you ain’t supposed to do, but the kind of scared that’s ‘cause you’re all alone and you got nobody to turn to.

  I ain’t no do-gooder like Grandma, but I sure felt bad for Jubie. I think it’s ‘cause she’s so little. She said she was seven, but I’m thinking more like five. If she’s really seven, then for sure she’s the runt of the litter.

  Late News

  Olivia sat glued to the television as she listened to reports of the robbery. According to Martha Tillinger who was being interviewed on the ten o’clock news, two men had walked into Klaussner’s grocery store in broad daylight, brandished a gun, and started shooting. At that point Martha, who had been on the far side of the store selecting a box of crackers to go with her homemade onion dip, ducked behind a large display of cereal boxes and rolled herself into a ball.