Nazareth's Song

by Patricia Hickman

  “On our own and tired. I should have brought a pillow. I’ll sleep against this door, I guess, and we can share the blanket.”

  “Come lay against me, Angel. I’ll keep you warm.”

  Angel shifted and then turned the opposite direction and leaned her head against Beck’s shoulder. His bony frame felt frail and he had a musty smell like her Uncle Dew after he’d spent the evening tinkering under the hood of their old Ford.

  Beck whispered something that she could not understand. His hands came up under her blouse.

  “Beck, I thought we were going to sleep.” She tried to move his hands, but he was strong from all the heavy lifting he had done for his daddy.

  “We can do anything we want, don’t you see? No one’s around to tell you what to do, Angel. You’re my girl now. I love you, Angel. Let’s get to what we came here for.”

  “Beck, stop it! I’m tired and I can’t think straight. Let’s get some sleep and not rush things.”

  Beck ran his fingers across the top of her skirt. “How you undo one of these things anyway. In the back?”

  Angel tried to pull away, but he pulled her next to him.

  “Girls like you are the most fun, my brother says. A bit on the feisty side, but fun in the sack. My brother Clark told me all about how to do it, so you don’t have to worry.”

  Angel jerked forward, but too fast. Her forehead banged against the side window glass. She howled and then felt her eyes tear. “Beck, I’m hurt. Now quit, or I’ll get out and walk home.”

  Beck sat back in disgust. “I don’t get you at all, Angel. You came all this way with me and now you’re backing out. You’re afraid. I knew you’d be like this. You sure talk tough for a girl in your situation.”

  “What do you mean by my situation?”

  “Your family threw you out. You’re living with a man you hardly know. Seems like you’d appreciate what I’m trying to do for you.”

  Angel’s stomach rumbled. The half a slice of pie had only made her more hungry. “So I have to be desperate to run off with the likes of you, is that what you’re telling me, Beck?” She straightened her skirt and pulled it down below her knees.

  “I’m not better off than you myself. I know I’m no catch. Look at me. My daddy’s in jail. Momma’s about to lose the land and house her daddy left to her. All my brothers are no good, and I’m turning out just like them. I’m skinny and ignorant as a stump. I never knew what you saw in me to begin with.”

  “Beck, I didn’t mean to say you’re a good-for-nothing. You’re not like your brothers, and your daddy’s just fallen on hard times like everyone else. I see a lot of good in you. You’re kind and you make me laugh.” She allowed her hand to fall on top of his. He clasped his around hers and it felt warm. “You’re handsome and you’re not ignorant. You just need to work on your reading some.”

  He laughed and squeezed her hand.

  Angel rolled down the window to let in some air. “You kiss good. At least I think you do. You’re the first boy I ever kissed.”

  “You’re the second girl I kissed, but the best. I can’t tell you who else, or she’d lie and say it wasn’t so. But I know the truth.”

  “Why would she lie?”

  “Because I’m a Hopper and her daddy’d kill her if he knew.”

  “Not Sarah Dolittle?”

  Beck’s stunned demeanor told Angel she had guessed right. “You’re right. Her daddy would kill her and you too.”

  “I hate being poor. I mean, I could take not having all the things the Dolittles have because they have a dairy farm that’s brought in enough to get by on. But I hate being looked down on.”

  “Ain’t no different being a sharecropper’s daughter. It’s worse. Nobody thinks you’re worth a dime unless your daddy owns land and drives a big car. People around Snow Hill all had it bad, though. Lots of families were bad off as we was. But my momma, she took it all inside of her like nobody I ever knew. It affected her mind. You ain’t no good to nobody without a good mind. People say things about you and call you crazy. Momma wasn’t crazy. She was just looking for a place inside of her that didn’t hurt so bad. She started staying holed up in that old shack and quit seeing her friends. She wouldn’t go to church with my grandma no more. Granny had to take us kids and she couldn’t drive and daddy wouldn’t drive us to church. It was a waste of gas. So we rode in Granny’s wagon every Sunday to church. Her horse was older than her, and some Sundays I thought that old mare would just keel over. But it outlived her.”

  “Ivey Long still drives to church in a wagon. Nobody looks down on him.”

  “It’s different when you want to drive a wagon than when you don’t have a choice. Ivey thinks automobiles are of the devil. He saves his money for other things besides gas. The Longs never do without. Beck, I’m tired of being hungry. I’m not spoiled. I just want to have a minute in the day that I can have to myself without worry. Not have bill collectors coming around threatening to shut off the lights. I don’t need no big house or a big car.”

  “I want to give you those things, Angel.”

  Her stomach rumbled again. But she leaned forward and kissed Beck. She wanted to love him and needed to love him. She would settle for the need to love.

  Beck wrapped his arms around her—awkward boy arms that had never loved any more than she had but wanted to know love. It was an empty kiss and it disappointed her. She had expected more from it, as though it would flood her soul with love just by the very act. Or rearrange the hurt inside her. But she felt like the old Long house had looked with nothing inside it.

  The sound of feet against pebbles had them both sitting straight up in panic. Angel saw the troubled face through the open window.

  “Jeb!”

  14

  Angel shivered, even though she had wrapped her trembling limbs in the blanket from Beck’s truck. Jeb had said almost nothing at all to her after he had thrown open the door and marched Angel back to his truck. They had driven less than a mile when he pulled into the same diner where the waitress had told him about seeing Angel and Beck. The parking lot had thinned of cars except for a few farmers who had stayed late for coffee and smokes. “Did he feed you supper?” Jeb asked, even though he already knew exactly what she and Beck had shared.

  “I’m hungry,” was all she could say.

  The waitress put out her cigarette when she saw Jeb walking Angel through the front door. “Hello again,” she said to Angel. “Have a seat, sweetie, and I’ll fix you a plate of corn bread and beans. Have we still got some of that chicken stew?” she asked her husband.

  The cook checked the pot on the stove and ladled out a full bowl of stew. The waitress set it in front of Angel and returned with the beans and corn bread. “Coffee for you, mister?” she asked Jeb.

  “Nice and strong. I have to keep awake for the drive home,” he said. “Bring the girl a glass of cold milk, if you don’t mind.”

  Angel shoved a spoonful of stewed meat into her mouth. Then she let out a sigh of relief.

  “How long you think you can go without food?” he asked.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” she answered.

  As she ate, the waitress commented about the ring around the moon and how cold it had gotten and then how the night had grown cold enough to bring sleet. She filled Jeb’s coffee cup a second time and then returned to the counter’s end to gab with the farmers.

  “Angel, you drive your momma crazy too?”

  “Don’t ever say that!”

  He sighed and rephrased his question. “I didn’t mean to say it like that. What I mean is did you get into this kind of trouble when you lived in Snow Hill?”

  Angel drank nearly half the glass of milk in several rapid gulps. She wiped her face with a napkin and said, “I wasn’t trying to get into trouble. I was trying to find my way out of it.”

  “Beck Hopper can’t take care of you, Angel. He up and sold his daddy’s gun and took what little cash his momma had stowed away for their meals th
is week. Nothing he took with him was his to call his own. It was only a matter of time until he resorted to taking from others along the way. He’s a messed-up kid. I don’t want you getting mixed up with him. With the two of you running out of food and gas in a few days, you think he’d find work at his age when all the qualified men are taking up all the low-man jobs?”

  “I don’t know what I thought. Maybe I had the idea of a better life in my head and it seemed to me I ought to just try and grab hold of it. I’m tired of waiting for a better day to come. What’s wrong with right now?”

  “God doesn’t always give us what we want right now. He likes to teach us things. We humans are a hardheaded lot. I guess he figures that we learn best under the weight of hard times and waiting.”

  “You talk more about God now than you used to. I’m kind of sick of it, truth be told.”

  “I’m not meaning to preach at you. But if you’d learn a thing or two, you’d not throw yourself at boys like Beck. Gracie says that we’re all like baby birds sitting in the nest with our beaks wide open. You know how Ida May wants to know everything we know, but if we try and explain the situation, she gets even madder? Her mind can’t get all that we want to give her yet. God does that for us. He’s so big and deep that he has to feed us a little of his wisdom at a time so we can grasp it. It’s like trying to fit an elephant into a funnel. But if we can learn just a bit of what he’s trying to tell us through the hard times, maybe some day we’ll understand him better.”

  “It’s too late for a Sunday school lesson. I’m tired, Jeb.”

  “I’m up, you’re up.”

  “I’d like some more corn bread, please,” Angel told the waitress.

  “You never answered my question about whether or not you fell into this much trouble at home.”

  “I never ran away. My momma, she did the running away.”

  “So you’re following her lead.”

  “She never should have left us. Daddy only got messed up with that neighbor lady, Lana, because he was missing Momma.”

  “Not to hear Willie tell it.”

  “Willie doesn’t know nothing!”

  “Willie says your momma left when she found out about Lana.”

  “He’s mixed up about her, that’s all.”

  “Angel, I only know that I’ve done all I can do with you. I can’t make you mind me or do right by me or your brother and sister. You never want to listen to me unless I’m agreeing with all you say. No telling what would have happened back at that lake if I hadn’t walked up. You’re too young to play house.”

  “Tell it to the whole diner, Jeb.”

  “Tomorrow, I’m telling Gracie that I can’t preach this coming Sunday. I’m taking you to Little Rock and helping you find your momma and Aunt Kate.”

  “You’re getting rid of me. I saw it coming. If you wanted to do that, you should have let me run off with Beck.”

  “I wouldn’t let my own daughter run off with the likes of Beck Hopper. I wouldn’t let you, either.”

  “We can’t afford the gas for Little Rock.”

  “Horace Mills offered me some delivery work. It pays good, or so he says.” He mulled over what he was fixing to say. “I’m taking him up on it in the morning. After he pays me, we’re leaving town. You best get up in the morning and pack up all your things.”

  “What about Willie and Ida May?”

  “Miss Coulter is watching them. Between her and Mellie Fogarty, they’ll keep those two in good company.”

  “Aunt Kate won’t take me in.” Angel’s voice trembled. “She can’t.” She wiped both eyes and pushed aside her empty plate.

  Jeb always ached when Angel cried. It was a seldom-seen occurrence, but when she cried it tore out his heart. “She has to try. I won’t leave you until you feel settled in, and maybe we’ll find work for you.”

  “You’d give up preaching this week for me?”

  “We don’t have a choice, do we?”

  The waitress lifted the coffeepot above Jeb’s cup, but he covered it with one hand. “No more for me, ma’am.”

  “More milk for you?” she asked Angel, but Angel shook her head. “I guess you’re glad to have your belly full again,” she said to Angel.

  “It was good eats, ma’am.”

  “You ought to thank your daddy for coming after you,” she said.

  “He’s not my daddy.”

  The waitress turned and stared at Jeb, her brows lifted in a puzzled stare.

  “Here’s your money. I thank you for your help, ma’am.” Jeb paid out and headed for the door. He felt the woman’s eyes on him all the way out to the parking lot. When Angel climbed into the truck he said, “I wish I could have been your daddy. Maybe things would have turned out differently for you and your brother and sister. One day I’d like to deserve a daughter like you.”

  He imagined for a moment a child at his knee, a little Fern with cotton silk hair and a mind of her own. The dream seemed to unfold inside him, his life and Fern’s joining and making another. They looked happy, like the fashionable husbands and wives in the moving pictures. “Maybe her life will be better than ours, Angel. But we haven’t been so bad together, you and me.”

  “What kind of delivery, Jeb?”

  “Bank business. Nothing you’d care to know about.”

  He prayed he had not made Horace too angry to reconsider the delivery job. Gracie would simply have to understand.

  The waitress had been right about the weather. November sleet covered every inch of ground and leaf before the sun had a chance to bloom across the Ouachita ridge. Jeb made Angel ride with him to the bank. He dropped by the school to tell Willie and Ida May that Angel had made it home safely the night before. Fern was standing out in the schoolyard ringing the bell. He did not see Beck’s truck anywhere. He asked Angel to wait in the truck and met Fern on the lawn.

  “Looks like your little bird’s flown home,” she said.

  “It was a long night. I found them parked along Carpenter Dam in Hot Springs.”

  “Beck hasn’t shown up for school. Did you see him home too?” she asked.

  “I was too afraid I’d kill him. I told him to go home and give what money he had back to his momma.” When he dropped by the Hopper place with the bank offer, he would ask Telulah if Beck had gotten home all right. But he would not worry over the boy any more than he would worry over Asa or the rest of his rowdy family.

  “Willie and Ida May must have had full trust in you. They slept like lambs.”

  “Fern, I need to ask you something. I’m taking Angel to Little Rock. I can’t see that I have a choice in the matter.”

  “You want me to keep them? I’m happy to do it. Are you sure you want to take Angel away? She’s a handful, but she has been so happy with you.”

  “I’m not her real daddy, and she knows it. One thing I can’t do is hope that she’ll ever pay me that kind of respect.”

  “How long you think you’ll be gone?”

  “Long enough to help her get settled. Once we talk their Aunt Kate into making room for them, I’ll come back for Willie and Ida May. Will you tell them for me?”

  Fern agreed. “I guess we won’t get to hear your preaching this Sunday.”

  “I haven’t told Reverend Gracie. I’ll tell him on my way out of town.”

  “God’s laid a lot on you since you first came into town, Jeb Nubey. I’ve never seen a man work so hard as you to prove yourself to a town.”

  “God’s patient with me. Maybe the townspeople of Nazareth will be too.” He did not read outright approval in her eyes, but she did seem to soften. She always softened when it came to the Welbys. “I’ll leave a message for you and the kids at Honeysack’s if I can find a place to make a call in Little Rock.”

  “I’ll check in with Will and Freda, then, in a day or two,” she said.

  Before Jeb had closed the truck door, Fern waved and called out, “Take care.” He smiled at her, and for once it did not seem to make her angry w
ith him.

  Fern watched him drive all the way down Long’s Pond Road.

  Angel waited out in the truck while he dropped into the bank to ask if Mr. Mills would see him. He had waited only a moment when Mills’s secretary invited him to step into the banker’s office.

  Mills did not stand when Jeb walked in. He held a parcel tied with twine. He pitched it onto his desk in the direction of Jeb. “Ready to deliver our offer, Reverend?”

  “You act as if you’ve been waiting for me, Mr. Mills.”

  “I’ll admit I waited longer than I’d thought to. Take a seat. You look awful.”

  “I had to go off looking for Angel. Drove half the night. You were right about the Hoppers, Mr. Mills. Asa’s boy ran off with Angel. It liked to have scared me to death. I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t found her when I did.”

  “Bad news, those Hoppers. One thing I have is a good judge of character. You should go home after you deliver the documents and get some rest.”

  “I’m driving Angel to Little Rock. That’s why I’m here. I need the work to pay for the gas.”

  “Winona and I told you we’d take care of you getting those kids back to their momma. Winona thinks the world of you, although I sometimes question her judgment in men.” He laughed and held up both hands. “No offense. Just joshing.”

  “Miss Mills is a fine young woman. You’ve done well by her, Mr. Mills. Do I need to wait for Mrs. Hopper to read these documents or do I simply hand them to her?”

  “Good question, Reverend.” Mills opened the parcel. “You get Mrs. Hopper to sign on the dotted line of this document today, and I’ll see you’re paid a bonus.” He shoved another envelope across the table, a long bulky package that looked like the one he used to pay his tithe to the church. “Here’s your first installment, the money you gave back to me. Also, here’s the money I told you to give to Mrs. Hopper for food. I’m not a louse, you know.” He laid down the ten dollars.