Pray for Us Sinners
My life, my love, I am yours!
MARILYN L.R. HALL
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
“Pray for Us Sinners,” by Marilyn L. R. Hall. ISBN 978-1-62137-548-7 (hardcover); 978-1-62137-549-4 (softcover); 978-1-62137-550-0 (ebook).
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014912481
Published 2014 by Virtualbookworm.com Publishing Inc., P.O. Box 9949, College Station, TX 77842, US. 2014, Marilyn L. R. Hall. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Marilyn L. R. Hall.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
All these stories in this series are completely fictional—and were written for the writer’s own creative enjoyment—the characters, incidents and towns, except for the mention of major cities are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons or places is wholly coincidental and unintentional. This has been written over a great number of years—beginning in the mid to late 1940s—when the writer was in her early teens and the story and characters are original with her and her deceased cousin.
GOD CREATED THE WORLD—AND HE SAID, “IT IS GOOD.”
God did not create conformity. No two snowflakes are alike. In his divine love, he luxuriantly takes the time to create even each snowflake separately to be unique.
EACH SNOWFLAKE UNIQUE.
Why then does man in his arrogance force square pegs into round holes? Why, in his arrogance, does man demand conformity and in the process destroy the individual works of art that God himself created—and approves and encourages and loves!
CONTENTS
Prologue
December 1933
Summer 1919
June 1927
April 16, 1927
December 1933
January 1934
February 1934
April 1927
Summer and Autumn 1927 to Early Spring 1928
April 13, 1928
March 1928
March 11, 1928
1929
1930 Winter and the Spring of 1931
April 1931
April 1931 to December 1933
November 1931
February 1934
June 1935
April 1937
July 1938
1938 October
Prologue
The angel left her place in choir when she heard her name called and as quick as the thought, she was in the presence of the Father. While the voices of the choirs swelled round her, the eternal light that was the Creator impressed a message upon her heart. Love poured over her, and a thrill of joy shivered her being as the words came alive in her and simultaneously on Earth in the womb of a woman during the act of love with her husband.
Praising and glorifying God, Varda sang her thanksgiving and then, wrapped in the awesome love of her Maker, was again transported in a twinkling—this time to an earthly destination. In her exquisite joy at being designated a guardian, Varda took no notice of her physical surroundings, choosing instead to focus on the woman who had conceived the child who from this moment on would be her special charge—the child she would watch over, guard, protect, and guide safely back to heaven.
The enormity of that responsibility weighed lightly upon her at this moment. For the time being, all she felt was an inexpressible thankfulness to God for the privilege she’d been granted and a tingling anticipation of the actual birth of the child. For now, there was little for her to do anyway, except to get to know the family—the environment—the history, and all that would affect the child. To be an effective guardian, Varda needed to know the baby’s background. It would have simplified matters to have been able to ask the mother’s own guardian all those pertinent details, but the Creator, in his wisdom had made it impossible for one guardian angel to see another while they were with their charges. Varda couldn’t know if Rose Nash’s angel was there with her or if she was with the Father in heaven—or taking her place in the choirs—or even, although it was unlikely, being disobedient and abandoning her charge. In any event, such an angel would answer only to the Father, and it was probably for that very reason he had made them invisible to one another on earth.
It would be several weeks before Rose Nash would know that she carried a new life in her body. Because of that, she would continue doing things pretty much as she had up to now. That would be helpful to Varda; it would give her time to get to know the young woman, to learn what kind of mother she would be. So with anxious but joyous eagerness, Varda—God’s gracious gift to her daughter—hovered above Rose Sharon Nash and began her new and future existence.
It was the second week of the month of December in the year of our Lord, 1933.
December 1933
Rose awakened long before dawn that morning—jerked to awareness out of a strange dream whose message evaporated even as she struggled to remember it. She sat bolt upright, shivering with excitement and a sense of change in the air, her heart pounding. She hugged the blanket under her chin, staring wide-eyed into an eerie blue-tinged darkness. Something. What? Had reached down into the depths of slumber and jerked her straight up in bed while her flesh tingled into goose bumps. There was something different about this new day!
Her sister Claire Louise had always preached that such an electric experience indicated a visitation of the Holy Ghost, and Rose thought it might be considered blasphemy to entertain that Mighty Spirit while lying next to Jack Nash in his bed, even if he was asleep. So, cautiously as a cat stalking a bird, she worked her way to the edge of the bed and rolled off it onto the linoleum, which was cold as a chunk of ice against her naked body. Then, though she was shivering hard enough to shake the bed where her husband still slept, she crept into the kitchen. There, her heavy winter coat hung on a nail by the door; with that wrapped around and under her, she knelt in the dark and waited for something to happen.
Nothing did.
Jack would say it was just the cold made her shiver, but she knew it was something a lot more portentous than the apartment’s ill-fitting sashes. Sure as Christmas, something good was gonna happen! And oh, Sweet Jesus! Wasn’t it about time.
Too excited to go back to sleep, Rose returned to the bedroom to gather her clothes. Jack was lying as she left him; the blankets that covered him moved gently with his soft breathing. She had an urge to climb back beside him and snuggle close to his warm body but discarded that notion and instead grabbed her clothes from the chair where she’d tossed them the night before and high-tailed it into the bathroom.
When she emerged a little while later, she was wearing several layers of clothing and a pair of woolly socks she’d purloined from her husband’s bureau drawer. Over them, instead of her shoes which were stiff from the cold, she wore a pair of old felt slippers given to her by her friend Mary Jean, who had lived in this ice-box of a city all her life and knew what to expect once summer was gone.
In the kitchen, she took her apron off the chair, pulled it over her head, and tied it around her before starting a batch of biscuits. They were baking in the oven and the water was bubbling in the coffee-pot when she lit the burner under one skillet to fry some eggs and another for milk gravy. Resentfully, she noted the feeble Chicago-winter sun was just beginning to nudge darkness from the room. Back home in Mississippi—she started thinking, but remembering was a foolish waste of time, and besides there wasn’t anything she regretted leaving in Mississippi.
Except maybe January.
She heard
Jack go into the bathroom and she sent him a merry little “Mornin’ Hon,” over her shoulder. He acknowledged her greeting with a surly grunt and she smiled understandingly. Jack hated these frigid winter mornings even more than she did.
The eggs sizzling in the skillet and the coffee percolating in the pot made a cozy and comforting music that set Rose’s felt-covered foot to tapping and she added a beat by patting the pancake turner against the rim of the skillet. Pretty soon her hips had started to swivel and her mouth flew open, “Mammy’s little baby loves shortnin’, shortnin’—Mammy’s little baby loves shortnin’…” Her song ended right there, though she whispered the final word “bread,” just to satisfy her own sense of propriety.
“Squash blossoms!” she chided herself, all too aware of Jack’s feelings on the subject.
“Dammit!” Jack’s voice exploded from the bathroom. She heard some curse words plain enough and then a long stream of guttural mutterings that she couldn’t make out and didn’t try to, but she smiled tenderly and blew a consoling kiss in that direction. “Poor darlin’,” she crooned. Jack’s handsome face was lean and his cleft chin and sharply chiseled jaw with deeply etched dimple lines down both cheeks rarely allowed him to get through his morning shave without inflicting another notch or two on it, no matter how carefully he pruned his whiskers.
Rose had started her tapping and patting and swiveling again and was about ready to burst into song when she heard Jack slam out of the bathroom and stomp off into the bedroom growling and muttering and she realized the recklessness of her behavior. “Oh squash blossoms!” she swore again. On more than one occasion Jack had let her know that she embarrassed him with her “schoolgirl antics” and that he expected her to act with dignity, which wasn’t all that easy for her. Sometimes, she just couldn’t keep still and act like a lady her age ought to. Sometimes she just had to wiggle and shimmy and jig as if the Spirit himself had a hold of her. She felt real bad about mortifying Jack and she felt tremendous bad whenever he chewed her out over it, but every now and then she just went on and did it anyway. It was her nature to be exuberant and excitable. And sometimes she just felt so good she couldn’t resist acting up. Then her grin turned smug—it wasn’t like Jack didn’t enjoy that side of her personality—especially when the spirit got a hold on him too.
But with Jack’s temper already on simmer, she decided not to push her luck, and stiffened her spine and planted her feet and stood there rigidly facing the stove, focusing all her attention on the stirring of the milk gravy.
In a couple of minutes she heard Jack return to the bathroom and took note that he shut the door a little less irately that time. Shortly thereafter, she heard a long, drawn-out groan that shook the plumbing and echoed clear down to the basement, bringing to mind the agonized souls of the damned. It was a sound she recognized well enough after two and a half years, and after having endured it that long, had actually grown comfortable with. Now she knew it signaled that Jack had flushed the commode, was about finished with his morning routine and would soon be sitting down to breakfast.
The table was already set for the two of them and the butter was out along with a Mason jar of peach preserves she’d canned herself with a crate of fruit that got too ripe for Leo to sell in his grocery store downstairs. Hurriedly, Rose slipped the eggs out of the skillet onto a platter and poured the thick, peppery milk gravy into a small blue-rimmed crock. She took her perfectly browned biscuits out of the oven and turned them onto a tea towel in another bowl and was pouring the coffee when Jack opened the bathroom door and came out.
She looked up to meet his eyes, which were giving her a tantalizing look of lusty appreciation from where he stood just outside the bathroom and even from across the kitchen she could see the crystal blue of his eyes glinting as if lit with a fire behind them. She shivered with delight. Those erotic blue eyes showed his notion plain enough and made the blood burn in her cheeks. She had long ago understood that Jack Nash knew she liked him to look at her like that—that she thrilled to the sight of his wild and willful sky-colored eyes just about eating her alive.
Mary Jean was always telling her how she ought to feel pretty special having a man like Jack Nash still look at her that way after being married to her for five years. And truth be told, she did, and not just special but blessed as well.
She returned his stare boldly in spite of all the blushing and then she tossed him a coquettish smile. “Come on, Jack. Sit down and have your breakfast. The biscuits are gettin’ cold.”
She had just finished pouring his coffee when he came over and took his seat at the table. He flung an arm around her waist and hugged her against him, bending his head to plant a kiss right about where her tummy button was before he let her set the coffee pot down and take her place across from him.
From that vantage point, serenely content in his presence, she watched him scrape three eggs off the platter onto his plate and add three biscuits, which he split and buried under a couple ladles of gravy. He still had a scrap of tissue paper stuck to a nick on the bony jut of his jaw and that made Rose smile tenderly. His face was smooth-shaven, but his beard, like his hair, was as black as a raven’s wing. So there was always a darkness, like a shadow, under his skin.
“You cut yourself,” she murmured sympathetically.
He glanced at her, shrugged a smile and started eating.
Rose sipped her coffee, buttered a biscuit, and plopped a spoonful of peach preserves on it. Then she nibbled at it with little bunny-bites that she knew aggravated her husband but she persisted at it anyway until Jack raised his head. He stared her down with those piercing eyes of his, and his expression was fierce, wicked. She thought, with a delighted shiver, that if Old Nick himself were to take human form to seduce a hapless maiden, he’d like as not look exactly like Jack Nash did when he was being sassy.
Thinking that, she couldn’t suppress a giggle, causing Jack to grin and utterly destroy the stern, disapproving façade he had intended to worry her with. Defeated, he snorted and took a swig of coffee while she continued to vamp him with her smug, self-satisfied smirk.
Abruptly, he changed the subject. “Sugar, I want you to get all dolled up tonight. Put on that soft blue silky thing we got you for our wedding portrait. And those high-heeled dancin’ slippers! And that pair a’ silk stockings—you still keep ‘em in your little hope chest, don’t ya?”
Surprise made Rose abandon her smirk and replace it with a wide-eyed stare. “Whatever for?”
Jack’s eyes were skating all over those parts of her he could see above the table. It was a quick but thorough examination that might have unnerved a more humble soul.
“Honey! What for?” She asked again when it became plain that he intended to ignore her first query. She was about to ask a third time when he swung his eyes up to meet hers and lowered his voice provocatively.
“You are sure one hellava woman, Rose Sharon.” And to reinforce his meaning he growled at her out of the corner of his mouth. “Even Mary Jean’s old nightgown and my long-johns can’t hide all the goodies lurkin’ under them!”
“This ain’t no nightgown,” she frowned down at her dress and then raised her eyes to glare at him.”
“Whatever it is,” he grinned, “it sure as hell don’t discourage me.”
Rose giggled and then because her curiosity was still unappeased, she demanded he explain his earlier request.
He cocked his fine dark head at her, narrowed his beguiling blue eyes, and kept her waiting while he decided just how much he cared to divulge to her. When she’d just about given up on him, he started talking.
“I haven’t said nothin’ before, Rosy, because I didn’t want to jinx this thing, but now…” and he paused to take a deep breath while he gave the table a sharp rap with his knuckles … “knock on wood” he said with a superstitious wink. Then confidently he continued. “I think it’s a done deal now. Anyways it appears to be all set and I can’t hardly keep it to myself anymore. So I think I will let
you in on it now, Rosy-Love”.
With that he tipped back his chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and crazy as it seemed to her, started looking kind of nervous. Rose couldn’t recall ever seeing Jack Nash look nervous before and having it happen just now gave her a real start … even made her feel a little shaky herself.
“Oh Jack, don’t drag this on so” she pleaded and he started grinning at her. Not quite as reckless and provoking as his grins tended to be on most occasions but at least it was a bona fide grin and not the trembly misbegotten lip-spreading that had preceded it.
Rose relaxed and leaned toward him with her elbows on the table in eager anticipation and he nodded at her. “I got a real job, Rosy,” he said and his grin finally looked natural—moved up into his eyes and lit up the whole room.
“Oh Jack, is it true? A real honest-to-goodness regular job? No foolin’?”
He nodded again. “Sure as hell, Rosy. Anyways it’s almost sure as hell. I’ll know tonight. I got to meet this gent down at a place called The Wine Cellar. I got to be there tonight at eight-thirty sharp.”
“The Wine Cellar?” she echoed.
“It’s no speak-easy, Rose Sharon. It’s a restaurant. A real fine joint, too. I’m gonna take you there once I start drawin’ a regular paycheck.”
“But what about the law?’” she argued contentiously. “I thought nobody respectable could sell alcohol. How can they call it a wine cellar?”
“Dammit, Rosy. I guess they can call it whatever they want. Far as I know there ain’t any laws against words yet.” It was plain Jack was losing his patience with her. “And anyways, Prohibition is repealed and done with. Don’t you ever read the papers?”
“Just the funnies” she said with a coy, little-girl grin.
Pray for Us Sinners Page 1
