Nazareth's Song

by Patricia Hickman

  “Winona, you really wear the color blue better than any woman I know. May I walk you to your automobile?” he said.

  She took to the idea like jelly on bread. With the banker’s daughter on his arm, Jeb felt a sense of destiny rising inside him. By morning, the pastorate would be his new frontier, a land of milk and sweetest honey. He would savor it with the highest measure of dignity a man of his standing could muster.

  The rifle barrel aimed out the front door of the Hopper house confused Jeb. His feet both frozen in the cold, barren Hopper soil, he faced Clark Hopper’s assault with a sort of blind paralysis. “Clark, it’s me, Reverend Nubey!”

  “You lyin’ polecat of a preacher! Ain’t no one sorrier than you ever walked the earth, not since Lucifer hisself. You never told my momma the truth about them papers. I’m goin’ to kill you dead and bury your sorry hide under all them trees that Mills intends to plant on our land.” The way he said “our land” was thrown out like a kind of indictment against Jeb.

  “Clark, I’m a little mixed up about things. What do you mean by the ‘truth’ about the papers she signed?”

  The gun barrel disappeared, and Telulah appeared in its place. “Don’t matter what he did, Clark. You take that gun out of the preacher’s face or I’ll bean you with it myself. Just because he done wrong, don’t mean we’ll make it right with two wrongs.”

  Jeb dropped his hands at his sides. “Mrs. Hopper, I heard you were leaving town.”

  She laughed, her lips drawing up like a dried-out apple. “You havin’ sport with us, Reverend?”

  Cautiously, he approached the front porch, stepping over the two dogs that were too lazy to stir from their warm place in the sun.

  Telulah took a seat on the last stick of furniture on the place, the front porch rocker. “Clark, you better go and fetch your brother from town. They’s still a bit of gas. I don’t want him walking all that way in the cold.” She said to Jeb, “H’it takes him pert near to dark to walk all the way home from town when he goes off of an afternoon. They’s been a hard frost on the ground the last week. He’d catch his death, and I can’t pay no doctor.”

  “Mrs. Hopper, I don’t think I must have known all the particulars about this bank deal.” Jeb found a warm spot on the cold porch next to the hounds. He remembered how many pages long the contract had been. He had only skimmed the first page.

  “You mean you brought those bank papers all the way out here without knowin’ what was in them? Reverend, I thought you had read them through, or I wouldn’t have signed. I told you I’m not the best reader, and God knows my boys can’t help me with such things.”

  Jeb buried his face in his hands. “I was only the delivery boy, Mrs. Hopper.”

  “But you’re the preacher, too. That’s what made me sign it.”

  “What did they give you in return?” Jeb lifted his face to look at her.

  “The bank took all our land, that’s what. They paid off the past few months’ note, the back taxes, but they took all hundred and eleven acres. All they give us was the boot. That, and fifty dollars to help us get out of town and out of their way. You look pale as Solomon’s ghost, Reverend.” Her face softened around the eyes. “You really didn’t know, did you? Banker Mills took you like he took me and Asa.”

  “I thought since he said he was giving you at least half of what the land was worth, you could at least keep a plot of land with your house, a spot for your garden.”

  “And here all along I thought you was helping Mills so you could be rid of my boy, Beck. I know he’s caused you grief. All of my boys run on the wild side. If I could, I’d make them better men. But Asa, he’s not much for knowing about such things. His daddy weren’t no good, and his momma died young. I was hopin’ you’d help him find the way out of his troubles.”

  “You thought I was trying to get rid of Beck?”

  “Beck’s sweet on that Angel of yourn. Blamed fool got it in his head that he could run off and marry a girl as young as her. Many a kid is doin’ that kind of thing, I know. But when you came after your girl like that, it made an impression on him. He came home that night and said he wished his daddy would be that hard on him and his brothers.”

  “I’ve made a fool mistake,” said Jeb. “But it wasn’t aimed at you or Beck or Asa. No wonder your boy wanted to bury me out in the woods.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Reverend. You’re a young preacher. People like Mills, they don’t think nothing of using a good man like you to get what they want.” She rose from the rocker as though it took her last ounce of strength. “Clark, run and fetch your sisters, load up this h’yere chair and me with it. I reckon I’m done with this place. We may as well all go into town and pick up Beck. When this town wakes up in the mornin’, I’d just as soon not be here to see it.”

  She turned and saw several sets of initials scratched in the porch railing. She bent and kissed each one, saying good-bye to the ancestors who had sweated to pay for the land she was now leaving.

  Jeb walked her to the old Hopper truck.

  “Soon, every person in this town will owe Horace Mills, Reverend. Nazareth won’t be the same place it once was. You mark my words. Be careful about his friendship,” she told him.

  He thanked her and gave her the handkerchief from his pocket, in which he’d hidden twenty dollars. It was the least he could do. She waved good-bye without looking at him. It was better that way.

  19

  The Long house had more drafty cavities in the walls than Jeb could stuff with paper and rags. He woke up to the coldest Sunday he could remember. Every blanket he could find was piled on the children, with all of them sleeping in the same bed to stay warm.

  The evening before, Angel had screamed until she was hoarse about Beck Hopper. Every student in Stanton School knew of his daddy being sent off to the pen. But worse than that, they all heard how the new preacher had helped to run the Hoppers out of town. Around the school, Jeb had become a sort of folk hero, with Asa Hopper as the town foe. The enemy had fallen, in their eyes.

  Angel told him that Beck had left school last Friday before the bell just to get away from the mob of kids that had taunted him during the midday break until Fern had shouted from the steps for them to stop. Angel had feared that Beck might face more than just taunting before he got away, so she had helped him slip out between the history lesson and the last math lesson of the day.

  Jeb could not figure out how the word had gotten around about his involvement with the bank and the Hoppers. He didn’t think Telulah had a vindictive bone in her body. But one slip from the lips of a bank employee at the teller window would send the tale multiplying and changing each time it was passed.

  He padded down the hallway, watching his breath mist in front of him as he went. It would be a relief to move into the parsonage again. The place had been built as good as any house in town, with a good stove and a brick chimney.

  Telulah Hopper’s gaunt expression had haunted him in his dreams. She had not told him where they would go next, and he knew it was because she did not know. Asa would be sent down to the state pen in two days. His family would not be around to witness the state boys taking him away in chains.

  Jeb could not figure out how he could have been so wrong about Mills and his own decision to deliver the ill-fated papers into Telulah’s hands. Asa had acted wrongfully. Beck had nearly taken Angel into youthful ruin. Yet Jeb felt like the dickens for helping Nazareth Bank and Trust bring down the Hoppers. He would give the remaining dollars in his tin box to have Sunday’s new church duties not weighing him down at the same time. When Gracie recovered well enough to travel to Cincinnati, he would confess the whole matter to him. Gracie always helped him to see clearly when the world was so clouded over with details that nothing made sense to Jeb. Gracie had tried to warn him about entanglements with Mills, but somehow the common sense of it all had not found a landing place until now.

  Yesterday he had felt on top of everything. Today he didn’t know i
f he could step foot on the new church floor without it caving in and dropping him straight into the pits of hell.

  He dressed early and got Willie up to start a pot of grits. Willie wore a quilt into the kitchen. “Dang, Jeb, if it ain’t cold as Alaska in this house. When can we move back to the parsonage?”

  “Put some butter in that, Willie. I’ve been eating too many diner grits over the past few days. I want something that tastes like we’re not completely destitute.”

  “Angel says you got money like nobody’s business now that you work for Horace Mills. Is that right, Jeb? Are you rich now, rich like Mills?”

  “Your sister’s mad, and she exaggerates when she’s mad, Willie. You know that about her.” He did not feel the need to discuss his personal business with youngens.

  “Angel told us about Momma while you were away at the hospital too. Is she exaggerating about our mother being out of her mind? To hear Angel tell it, Momma ain’t never coming out of that nervous hospital. She made Ida May cry.” Willie stirred the pot like he was mad at it.

  “What if that part is right, Willie? I’m no doctor, but your momma didn’t look too good to me. Can you live with knowing the truth about her?”

  “I wish I could have seen her. Maybe I could have helped her remember more things about us. I don’t know if Angel tried hard enough. She gives up on people too easily.”

  “Don’t be putting that kind of thing on your sister, Willie. She spent a whole morning with your momma. I’m the one that decided she should go home. No amount of wishing can make your mother better than she is right now. I wasn’t about to leave Angel or either of you in that madhouse with your aunt. She’s got her hands too full of problems with that oldest girl of hers as it is.”

  “We do have butter this morning.” Willie stood with the icebox door wide open. “Granny used to say it’s a good day when you have butter in the house.”

  Jeb picked up his Bible and opened to the morning’s text he and Gracie had selected together:

  For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do . . . But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

  Jeb felt his knees weaken. He ran into the parlor, yanked up the loose board, and pulled out the tin box, throwing open the lid. The money scattered onto the floor.

  Willie glanced in at him and said, “You all right, Jeb?”

  He gathered the money back into the box before Willie could see it. It seemed to him he had done both a right and a wrong in taking it. Knowing the difference is what left his insides churning. God was silent at the worst of times.

  Hayes Jernigan from the lumbermill was the first to greet Jeb at church, just as he yanked the rope for the tolling of the bell. Hayes had not darkened the door ever that Jeb could remember. He shook Jeb’s hand and grinned from ear to ear. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to this town, Reverend. Mills had a meeting with me and my boys last night at the sawmill. He told us the lumber business coming our way was due in part to your help.”

  Jeb gazed up into the belfry. Nothing had happened when he’d pulled the rope. He yanked once more, but heard nothing. In fact, the rope’s resistance made it feel as though it was hung up on a rafter.

  “Hayes, please don’t give me any credit,” he said. “Mills’s investment group is bringing in the work for the lumbermen. Not me.”

  “You’re a minister like no other I ever met. I told the banker you’d have my support at the first sounding of the bell come Sunday, and here I am! My wife’s busting at the seams. She’s been trying to get me in church for ten year or more. You helped save the whole town, Reverend. And to think you was once a notorious criminal. In a manner of speaking, that makes you more like the rest of us. Don’t God move in mysterious ways?”

  The wood rafter from the belfry squeaked, and they both looked up.

  “I told Gracie I’d fix that bell, but what with him being so sick and all, I forgot entirely. Now I can’t get it to ring at all.”

  “It appears to me you ain’t got a bell, Reverend, if you don’t mind my saying so.” Hayes laughed. He acknowledged two of his saw bosses coming up the front steps and walked out to greet them at the church portals. His wife joined several women on the porch, all of them giddy with the good fortune that had come to Nazareth in the form of Ace Timber.

  Jeb stared up into the steeple. He stepped back so that the sunlight bleeding through the roof would help him get a better look inside. Hayes had told it right. The bell was gone entirely. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why.

  Curious, several women gathered around Jeb and joined him in staring up into the empty belfry. They muttered among themselves about how thieving men were running loose even out in the country now. Then they took a seat. Jeb sighed and squeezed through several churchgoers to make his way up the aisle.

  The wad of cash in his trouser pocket felt like an anvil. He continued to greet the people who poured in from all over the county, even the boys who shot pool every Saturday night at Snooker’s. Gracie would be proud of who he had brought in this morning. Seeing the pool hall bunch made him feel more easeful. Each person came forward and shook Jeb’s hand. The schoolkids gathered at the back of the church, whispering and casting admiring glances at their new minister.

  The atmosphere of welcome had Jeb letting out a sigh of relief. At least with support, he could lead the flock as Gracie had taught him to lead.

  Angel had not yet shown up. Fern appeared, though, with Ida May, her hair pulled into perfect pigtails and then pinned, making a cinnamon bun on each side of her head. The teacher observed the crowd in attendance with a quiet amazement before she helped Ida May find a place on one of the remaining pews and engaged a few of the women in idle chat. Then she lifted her brows and smiled at Jeb more approvingly than she had in a year.

  Winona and her mother, Amy, came in, both wearing something that looked as new as the latest wintry freeze upon the trees. Winona mouthed something to Jeb that he could not understand. Fern read it better. She glanced away, ignoring Winona altogether. Winona said it once more and Jeb read her lips: “You look good in that suit.”

  Jeb relaxed and smiled at Winona, careful not to linger too long over the way she put the shape back into that dress of hers.

  Fern had already engaged in other conversation. He remembered the way she once helped him study out on the porch on Saturdays. She could cut through confusion with the precision of a dutiful seamstress. But he was too respectable now to ask the town schoolteacher to tutor him through his latest crisis of the heart—namely the Hoppers. Besides, it seemed that things had turned around for the better this morning. Church in the Dell had not seen a Lord’s Day this blissful in a boatload of Sundays. He shook a few more hands and felt his confidence lift.

  Horace Mills finally appeared at the church entrance, but he wasn’t alone. He stubbed out a cigar on the porch railing and then patted the backs of several of the lumbermen. The two men behind him removed their hats. Distantly, Jeb recognized one of the men with him; he’d been part of the circle of investors he had been introduced to the night of the Mills party, when he had given his plate of food away to Beck Hopper and a pack of hungry youths. Horace met Jeb in the aisle, bringing a whole parade of admirers along with him.

  “Welcome to Church in the Dell, Reverend Nubey! Jernigan says someone absconded with our church bell. I’ll lay odds it was a Hopper.” His smile stretched woodenly as he added, “Looking forward to the morning message.” He shook Jeb’s hand.

  Jeb didn’t know how much an old church bell would bring on the market, but he figured if Mills was correct, it might be enough to feed a few hungry children and a desperate momma. Gracie might tell
him to wait and see what came of matters first, but it seemed Mills might be right.

  The words on Gracie’s key echoed in Jeb’s ears. He had not known how heavy the plow would become, wearing calluses on his heart so early on.

  He returned Horace’s greeting and then headed back toward the lectern as though an invisible hand walked him along with strings tied to his hands and feet. He opened the Bible as the last few townspeople standing took their place on the pews. Church in the Dell fell quiet, all eyes on Jeb Nubey, expectant of what their new minister and the most popular man in town might say to them.

  “Let us pray,” he said. All heads bowed, and he felt the soul of every man, woman, and child in the room delivered into his hands. Where he took them next was anyone’s guess.

  The songs filtered out into the hollow, churchmen and saintly women praising God to the highest for his great works. A truck had stalled down the hill, overfilled with every earthly spoil a broken-down family owned.

  Clark Hopper finally made the right connection under the truck hood that sent the engine humming. “Got her started, Momma.”

  He let out a sigh of relief. The truck was just about done for. After stalling twice yesterday as they got on the road, it had simply died yesterday evening. The sun had already gone down, so there hadn’t been anything else to do but wait for sunlight. The two oldest children had slept beneath a bundle of goods all night to allow their momma and younger siblings the warmth of the cab. They’d awakened to see several families motoring past them on their way to church. The adults had all carefully averted their eyes. The children had stared with unabashed curiosity.

  “Listen to that purty music,” said Telulah, her ear cocked toward the church. “Sounds like the angels of heaven rising from the frost this morning.”