Nazareth's Song

by Patricia Hickman

  Jeb tried not to show the discomfort he felt when he thought of asking Telulah to sign Mills’s offer. “I’m grateful you saved the job for me, Mr. Mills. I could not get the Welbys back to their momma without it.”

  “This envelope has your wages. This extra here is for your trip.” Horace pulled out several bills and held them out to Jeb.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You’re building a life for yourself, Reverend. Most people sit around letting life happen to them, like all they have to do is lift their feet. That’s why so many folk are getting swept away by this Depression. But I’ve been watching you. You studied under Gracie; you took in kids that didn’t belong to you and gave them a home. Now you’re cutting loose the things that are holding you back from what you want. You plan for life, and life treats you sweetly—mark my words. Nazareth’s Church in the Dell’s been needing a man like you behind our pulpit. Gracie’s getting old and can’t see beyond tomorrow. You can take this little church places and build a life for yourself, Depression or not.”

  Mills made Jeb sound as though he were fulfilling a part of his own master plan for life. Truth be told, he had not thought much beyond tomorrow. He took the money and the parcel and left the bank.

  “Where we going to make this delivery, Jeb?” Angel eyed the parcel in his lap as they motored down Main. “Is it far? Sounds like an easy job to me.”

  “Will and Freda have been needing some chores done down around the store. I won’t be long. I’ll leave you in Freda’s care until I get back.”

  “Chores for Mrs. Honeysack?”

  “I don’t want to hear any of your lip, Angel.”

  “You don’t trust me anymore,” Angel said.

  “Like I said, I won’t be long.”

  “You’re not going to tell me where you’re going. I can’t go with you. Something’s up. Mr. Mills ask you to do something shady?”

  “Not at all. Me and shady don’t dance together no more. You know better than that.”

  Jeb left her at the front door of Honeysack’s Grocery. As far as he was concerned, Angel had been in too much of his business all along. She would never have to know about the bank’s business with the Hoppers.

  He felt a strange uneasiness seep inside him again, even though he had accepted honest work. He decided that his guilty past would always follow him around and cause him to question even the best of motives. He turned left on Pine at Sewell and headed the truck toward the ten-mile stretch of road leading out to the Hopper farm. Today would be a day of good news for Telulah Hopper. That made him an ambassador in God’s eyes.

  The Hopper place, like a speck of gravy on the horizon, might have been a place overlooked, like no one had lived in the shanty for years. It had fallen into the kind of disrepair seen only in a remote foreign hellhole. Past crop rows defined the landscape in strips of brown, shriveled twigs. Soiled cottony tufts clung to the brittle cotton plant shafts as meaningless survivors of the dust storms that had blown across Oklahoma and into Arkansas without remorse.

  Two hounds loped alongside the truck until Jeb brought it to a stop right in front of the portals of the unpainted shack. He reached outside the truck and patted both dogs until they rolled onto their backs for more attention, then stepped out of the truck expecting to see Clark Hopper’s rifle pointed straight into his face. Instead, Telulah appeared in the doorway with a bowl of apples. She welcomed Jeb with a smile, exactly as Mills had said she would.

  “Mrs. Hopper, did your boy Beck make it home last night?”

  “I liked to have whupped him for running off with your girl like that, Reverend. He’s been raised to know better. I got him out in the barn with his brother Clark cleaning out the bad hay. Seems like we don’t have much use for the barn now, but it’s best to keep those boys busy.” She laughed, but her eyes retained a spark of regret. “Keeps them out of trouble.”

  Whenever she said her s’s or th’s her tongue protruded through the gap left by her missing front teeth.

  Jeb picked up the parcel and toted it along with him.

  “I’m glad to know Angel made it home safe. I don’t figure Beck would have been gone long. He can’t make a living on his own yet. He wants to larn how to fix automobiles like his brother Clark, but Clark says he cain’t do nothin’ yet but dream about it. I guess that’s a blessing in disguise, as they say.”

  “Mrs. Hopper, I’m here with some business I want to tell you about,” said Jeb. He felt uneasy again.

  “Business with me? What business would I have with the church?” she asked. She laid the bowl of pared apples on the porch railing.

  “Not church business. Bank business.”

  Her smile faded. “You workin’ for Mills now too, I guess.”

  “I wouldn’t be out here if I didn’t think it would help you all out. I know Asa can’t help you from jail. You can’t make a living without your husband around.”

  Telulah seated herself on the front steps as though all of the breath inside her had been let out. She rested her face on one hand, her eyes lifted like the two hounds’ heads that panted at her side.

  “If you don’t mind, open this up and see what the bank has to offer you.”

  “Offer me? Eviction notice is all they want to offer me, Reverend.” She held up her hands, refusing to take the parcel. “Asa’d skin me alive for taking those papers.”

  Jeb prayed that Mills had not played him for the fool just to deliver foreclosure papers. “You can trust me, Mrs. Hopper.”

  Telulah took the parcel, pulled out the documents, turned them over, and said, “I never could read too well. Asa used to read the newspaper to me at night and laughed at me when I couldn’t say my words right.”

  “I’d be glad to read it to you, ma’am.” Jeb took the documents from her and quickly read the opening lines. “Mr. Mills and his investment group, Ace Timber, would like to buy your land, it says.”

  “Buy it? Why, we can’t grow nothing on it now but dust.” She laughed.

  Jeb read farther down until he came to the actual offer. When he read her the price she said, “Why, it’s worth twice that even without the crops.”

  “Would you rather I take this offer to Mr. Hopper at the jailhouse?” he asked.

  “I’ll let Clark and Beck tell him. Best he doesn’t hear it from me.”

  “But you inherited the land from your family. Is that right, Mrs. Hopper?”

  “Free and clear, until Asa took out a loan on it to build up the farm and that barn. Would have been better to build me a new house than make me keep living in this old shack.”

  “So the land is in your name?” Jeb asked.

  She studied the matter and then said, “Come to think of it, it is.”

  “Would you like for me to take your part of the signed papers to Mr. Mills for you, or would you rather wait?”

  “How much money was that he offered me again?” She took the offer and read it as best she could. “Where do I sign?”

  Jeb had a fountain pen in the truck. But his feet felt stuck to the ground. “Mrs. Hopper, maybe it’s best you wait. You’re in an awful way with Asa in jail. You should have more time to think.”

  “Half the money’s better than none at all, Reverend. Can you fetch me something to write with?”

  Jeb went out to the truck to do as she asked. But the elation that he had expected never settled on him.

  15

  The way of an orphan, Angel decided, brought disaster and people into her life that kept trying to fix her. She felt kind of like a Philco radio with a broken knob. Everyone that came her way would try to bang something useful out of her, fidgeting with her wires and tubes and then finally unplugging her altogether. It seemed like everyone wanted her to sing or say something funny or clever, but when she did not feel like performing, they called her broken and sold her away like used goods to the next person who felt like they could help her rise above her clutter of broken wires and tubes.

  Her heart had be
en exchanged like the wares of a peddler, some unseen guy that threw her into his cart hoping to find a home for her soon. Was it God? Didn’t God know her parts were jimmied and tinkered with and no longer the original apparatus?

  Jeb had driven her away from town with no good-bye to Willie or Ida May, as though he were sweeping her dusty soul away from Nazareth’s pristine threshold. Angel felt as barren and leafless as the oaks that lined the dusty road to Little Rock.

  “I forgot my pillow,” she said.

  Jeb inhaled slowly as the truck climbed the next hill and then said nothing at all.

  “I said, I forgot my pillow. Aunt Kate would want me to bring my own things for sleeping.”

  “If Aunt Kate is shy a pillow, we’ll buy you one at the Woolworth’s. Little Rock’s a big place. Pillows are the least of our worries.”

  “You could have at least let me tell Willie and Ida May I was leaving. What if Ida May can’t go to sleep tonight?”

  “Fern says she slept good at her place. Besides, it didn’t bother you none last night to go off and leave Ida May.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about Ida May. That was wrong. I know that now.” Angel was not sure if what she said was true, but she knew that it should be and that Jeb would want to hear her repent. If she recanted enough her running off, he might soften so that she could at least bear to ride with him all the way to Little Rock. As it was, the air was thick between them and made Angel feel even more rejected.

  “Angel, this is not about apologies. It’s bigger than a single mess-up on your part. You’ve got to know you’re finally home, and maybe when you know that, you’ll settle down and stop throwing away your life on people that don’t mean anything to you.”

  “You keep telling me what I’m supposed to be feeling and who means what to me. Beck Hopper meant something to me.” Even when she said it, the words seemed to ricochet off her hollow insides like dropped acorns.

  “Beck Hopper was your way of saying, ‘I want a place to belong. I want someone to belong to me.’”

  “You don’t know me like you think you do.” Angel slid down in the seat, tired of the scenery.

  “I need gas. Here’s a filling station. Looks like they set up a stand outside.” Several itinerant workers gathered around a barn-red stand on wheels buying sack lunches. “Maybe they’ll sell us a sandwich. If you get out, put on your coat. It’s gotten cold.”

  The sign across the road from the gas station read “Prescott City Limits.” A man and his girl sold harmonicas from a roadside stand. While Jeb pumped gas, Angel talked with the girl. She handed Angel a harmonica. Angel blew on it until it made a wheezing squeal. “How much for one of these?”

  “I’ll toss in the box it come in,” said the man. “For a harmonica and a box, two bits.”

  Angel only had a few pennies left from her pie the day before with Beck.

  “Go ask your daddy. See if he’ll let you buy one,” said the girl. She was a heavy girl who did not seem to have missed any meals lately. “We had to sell our store, and these harmonicas is all that we have left to sell. Momma was fixin’ to pitch them.”

  “I’ll play you a tune,” said the man. He picked up his own harmonica and played a song. The men in line next to the stand glanced up and then focused mundanely again on the sandwich line. “Give ye somethin’ to play with as you’re drivin’ along. Bernice plays with hers better than her dolls.”

  “I don’t think I can get a whole song out of it. But I’ll see if I can give you the two bits for it.” Angel crossed the road, holding the harmonica with both hands and making steam with her breath.

  Jeb came out of the filling station and strode across the lot to stand in the sack lunch line. Blackberries and thorn bushes grew up at both ends of the stand as though it had parked in that place for a long time. “What you got in your hands, Biggest?”

  “Harmonica. I need twenty-five cents.”

  “I don’t want no squawking harmonica in my truck. Drive’s been peaceful so far. No need to add noise.”

  “I’ll learn fast. Please, Jeb.”

  “I know how it’ll be. Youngens get bored and do nothing but make noise with those things. Take it back across the road where you got it. Do you want a ham sandwich or not?”

  “If you’ll let me have it, I won’t eat nothing. I won’t cost you a dime this whole trip. Please let me have it, Jeb. I never had an instrument like you have, not in Snow Hill or anywhere.” Her daddy, Lemuel, had hated anything, he said, that took food out of the mouths of his youngens.

  “You’re going to pass up dinner for the sake of that stupid harmonica?”

  “They only have a few left. It’s like an orphan.”

  “How much did you say that orphan costs?”

  “Two bits, but that includes the box.”

  “Your Aunt Kate won’t want to add noise to the mix of extra mouths to feed.”

  “Aunt Kate likes music. I heard her say it once.” That was a lie. Aunt Kate had never visited them in Snow Hill. But it was a chance she was willing to take.

  Jeb handed her the change. “You’re still eating if I have to shove it down your throat, Angel Welby.”

  Angel threw herself against Jeb. “You are the best, Jeb!” She pulled the harmonica out and tried to sound a note. All she got was another hissing wheeze. She ran across the road and handed the money to the girl. Two Mexican men in line laughed and said something to one another in Spanish.

  “I’ll play it when you play the banjo!” Angel yelled across the road at Jeb.

  Jeb turned away, more out of sorts with the long sandwich line than with Angel. She ran and clambered back into the truck, running the instrument back and forth against her lips, trying to mimic the sounds the man had played.

  Jeb finally got the sandwich order and climbed in, handed Angel her food, and headed down the rural route. A half mile into the countryside, he rolled down his window. “Either I’m cooped up listening to that thing, or I’m freezing. You’re tossing it out the window.”

  “I’ll put it back in the box.” Angel did that and then tucked the box protectively under the seat.

  “Angel, you beat all. Other girls want a kitten or a puppy. You’re the only girl I ever knew that wanted a harmonica.”

  “I think I’m going to be a natural. You’re not the only one in this outfit with talent.”

  “There’s a sign. Not too many hours from Little Rock now.”

  “You think my momma will want to see me?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he said without much in the way of expression. Then he said more gently, “She’s pining for you, Angel. No telling how many times she’s looked out her window and prayed you’d come see her.”

  “Maybe she is. Aunt Kate never says one way or another.” She thought for a moment. “I wonder sometimes what made Momma like she is. When I was little, she wasn’t like this at all—crazy, I mean. She used to take me for walks down by the pond that froze over every winter. She’d tell me, ‘Don’t walk out on that ice, Angel. It won’t hold up,’ and stuff like that to let me know she was watching over me.”

  “I remember things about my momma too. But nothing stays the same. The way this Depression’s gone, it’s a wonder everybody hasn’t been locked up in the loony bin.”

  “Don’t call it that, Jeb.”

  “Hospital, then.”

  “Your momma only have two kids?” asked Angel.

  “Me and Charlie. And we have a younger sister. My mother died when I was small. Certain things remind me of her. Cherry blossoms, the smell of preserves bubbling on the stove on a hot summer day. I remember certain things about her too, like the way she fell quiet when my daddy’s brother, Festus, came around.”

  “She must not have liked him.”

  “No one liked Festus. Not even daddy. But my momma had a way of calming Festus that set the whole house at ease. She had that way about her. She called it ‘God inside.’”

  “Your daddy ever talk much about God?”
<
br />   “Daddy thinks about God like he thinks about fixing the roof. If it’s raining, it’s too wet to fix the roof. If it’s dry, the roof don’t need fixing.”

  “When’s the last time you saw him?”

  “Charlie says Daddy needs to get it straight that I’m preaching now and that I’ll be a preacher from here on out. He thinks I’m doing this to get through the Depression, or to bide my time until something better comes along.”

  “So your family don’t want nothing to do with you, neither.”

  “I wouldn’t put it like that. Daddy never could get close to Charlie or me. Probably not Momma, either. He likes it best when I’m doing something he disapproves of. Then he can say that I’m the one that never comes around, like I’m neglecting family duties, not him. Truth is he never stops to think he could come off that porch and go see Charlie or me. Daddy never knew why he pushed people out of his life. He never stopped to wonder why. I used to be like that.”

  “What is a good family anyway? When I see families at church—mommas looking after their kids or grandmas sitting with their grand-youngens—I feel like I’ve missed out on the whole show of life. It makes me wonder why some people get their own ticket to a good family while I get a big fat nothing.”

  “Families aren’t perfect, Angel. Not a one of them.”

  “They’re together, Jeb. Not like us. We’ve been piecing us together a family since we met, you and me, our own little patchwork quilt—here’s the Jeb square, next to the Angel square, sewed right next to the corner of Willie and Ida May.”

  Angel amazed Jeb sometimes with her perception.

  “Too bad we keep coming unraveled,” she said.

  The afternoon did not turn colder as all the old-timers had predicted. It was November and the sun came out to play. The sky above the road to Little Rock danced with cottony clouds alongside the blue as though a timbrel kept rhythm for the heavens. A field was colored by the faces of fifty men out baling hay as fast as their backs would allow.

  The truck cab heated up, making Angel peel off her coat, a donation from Florence Bernard.