Pray for Us Sinners

by Marilyn L. R. Hall

  So Jack relented and returned her smile. Then he leaned forward and reached across the table to take her hands. The happiness he was feeling made him almost giddy.

  “We are not even gonna think about getting disappointed this time, Rose Sharon. We are just gonna straight out believe … like you’re always preachin’ at me. I’m just gonna believe like hell! Like I got that old devil by the tail and the crafty rascal can’t do nothin’ but give me my due!” He paused, and a frown flashed and disappeared. “Anyways, all I want you to do Pretty Lady, is haul that slinky garment outta your cedar chest and slither your pretty little body into it sometime before I get home tonight and then we will go out on the town and damn well celebrate our butts off! Honey, we are gonna live it up till the cows come home!” And then his eyes crinkled and the dimple lines in his cheeks deepened. “Or maybe till the milkman gets home since we’re not in the boondocks any longer.” He squeezed her hands tighter. “You just slip into your sexy silk stockin’s, Sugar. You still got ‘em, ain’t you? You never did say...” When she nodded, he bounced her hands a couple of times. “And them tall-heeled dancin’ slippers?” Rose nodded again. All the excitement was making her eyes sparkle.

  “Hell! If you ain’t just as glamorous as a movie star in those duds! And won’t I be swaggerin’ and struttin’ alongside you just as proud as a peacock. Just because I haven’t seen you all dolled up for a while don’t mean I can’t remember how good you look. No lie! Rosy, with you shinin’ like a movie star and holdin’ onto my arm and me standin’ there like such a proud dude, even that swanky Wine Cellar won’t be good enough for the likes of us.”

  Jack went back to his breakfast then and Rose poured more coffee. But her curiosity had not yet been mollified.

  “What kinda job is it, Jack?”

  He shrugged off her question. “Just a job. Nowadays it don’t pay to be too particular and it sure don’t pay to ask a lotta dumb questions.”

  Then suddenly, he was furious. “God almighty, Rose Sharon, for a woman whose man ain’t worked steady a whole week at a time in more than three years, you got a lotta gall askin’ what kind of job is it?”

  Rose shrugged at him. “I didn’t mean nothin’ by askin’.”

  But Jack’s handsome angular face had turned to stone and he finished his breakfast in silence.

  Rose watched him patiently, thoughtfully. She wasn’t all that much worried. He never stayed mad for long.

  Finally, having sopped up the last bit of egg yolk with the last hunk of biscuit, he raised it to his mouth. But instead of going ahead and eating it, he held it hanging there, his fingers caught in time like in a photograph, just a couple of inches from his lips, and looked at her. Studied her with a most serious expression.

  Rose hid her apprehension as best she was able and met his gaze without flinching while a whole bunch of time passed. At last he shoved the biscuit into his mouth, past a row of even, pearly white teeth, chewed and swallowed it, all the while holding her eyes with his. Then all of a sudden he was on his feet and pushing his chair back with the toe of his boot. He reached across the table for her and before Rose could take a good breath, he had her slithered across the room and squeezed up tight between him and the door jamb and was kissing her most ardently while his hands slid downward, past her waist, down her hips, and closed on her backside, lifting her body up and into his. A blissful sensation of helplessness weakened her knees and she began to tremble and instinctively moved against him. Then Jack raised his head and narrowed his eyes at her. “If you just weren’t wearin’ my long-johns!”

  “Jackson! Ho! Jackson!” At that instant a powerful male voice boomed at them from the other side of the door and simultaneously a fist began to pound on it. “Speederup, old buddy. The morning’s a-wastin’!”

  Rose whimpered her disappointment and Jack swore under his breath but loosed his hold on her and bellowed back at the door. “Hold your horses, Mac.” He had already slid into his bulky sheepskin-lined jacket and was pulling on knee-high rubber boots. “I’m comin’, I’m comin’,” he hollered while flashing Rose a shameless grin along with an irreverent wink.

  Rose sighed and handed him his red plaid cap with the earflaps down and then bent to retrieve his gloves that had fallen to the floor. Because she was unwilling to let him go—she asked as she straightened up, “You really want me to get all dolled up this evenin’?”

  “You betcha, Sugar!” And then his voice softened …became almost a whisper … and he leaned his face close to hers. “I know I ain’t got a whole lot of the world’s riches, Rosy,” then he snickered “actually, I guess I got a whole lot less than I planned to have at this stage of my life.” He paused to brush her cheek lightly with the gloves he held in his hand. “But I got just about the finest looking woman God ever blew breath into” and he took the time to pull her into him again and give her mouth a light kiss. Then he whispered the rest of his compliment directly into her ear.

  After she’d giggled and nuzzled his throat, he backed off, grinning with satisfaction, and added, “I want you to get all gussied up so you can dazzle these big-city boys and show them they ain’t got nothin’ on this old Mississippi cotton-picker. I got the best there is and I got sense enough to know it! I just want to show you off, Rosy-Love.”

  The pounding on the door had resumed and Jack reached for the door knob. “Cut out that damn racket—you crazy sonofabitch!” but he was grinning. “You wanna wake the landlady?”

  Then, before he opened the door more than a slit, he looked sternly at Rose. “Don’t say nothing to nobody about the job.” But before she could reply to that, Jack swung the door wide open.

  A big man with a bushy red-orange beard was standing there. He removed his cap to reveal a mop of hair to match the beard and smiled politely at Rose. “Howdy, Missus.”

  Rose smiled back. “Howdy, Jess.”

  He nodded while pulling his cap back on and then looked at Jack again. “Sanderson’s got some trucks to unload at the warehouse first thing. It’s likely somethin’ else will turn up afterwards.”

  “Ed Schmitt told me he’s gonna need some men to shovel coal,” Jack told him and followed the big man out the door. Then, to Rose’s surprise, Jack turned back and grabbed her arm; pulled her to him. She kissed his mouth lightly and then as if it had just that moment occurred to her she put the question to him; because with Jess right there she felt safe.

  “If Sister Claire should ask again about the Christmas presents, can I tell her we decided to take them and could she just drop them off downstairs?”

  She watched Jack’s eyes darken malevolently and knew her rashness was going to cost her.

  He took a moment to motion Jess on down the stairs before he stepped back inside and shut the door. Then he jerked her up close with one hand and grabbed a handful of her hair with the other to pull her head back so he was able to glare down into her eyes and his pretty mouth was just inches above hers pinching off his words in sharp, icy chunks.

  “Why’d you do that, Rosy? Why’d you ask a thing like that?” You know I won’t have that Bible-spoutin’ hypocrite in my house—no matter how humble it might be. No matter if it was a tent in shanty town. And if you ever shame me by askin’ her favors, you just might as well pack your little suitcase and catch that ole Mississippi Cannonball because you won’t ever be sleepin’ in my bed again! You hear me, don’t you, Rosy? You understand what I’m saying? Am I makin’ my meaning plain enough for your backward little brain? It seems like I have to keep saying the same shit over and over. Why can’t you get my meanin’ into your head? If you don’t get it straight this time, I’ll walk you to the god-damn depot myself. I swear to God, Rosy!”

  Rose twisted and struggled to free herself. “It’s just a couple a’ dumb Christmas presents! And I said I’d ask her to drop them off at the store. It don’t mean we have to be friends with her—we wouldn’t even have to see her—and if she wants to give us somethin’, she can sure afford it. I just thought
it would feel good to get somethin’ new for a change.”

  “Well dammit, Rose Sharon! How many times do I have to say the same thing over again? Nothin’ your sister does for us is meant to make us feel good! It’s meant to shame us! To shame me!” He let her loose then and just stood there looking down at her with questions in his eyes. “I just can’t believe how dumb you are sometimes!” And then shaking his head he sighed. “You just went and spoiled what might have been one of the best days of our life.” And then with his anger mollified, he opened the door and started toward the stairs. At that moment Jess called up from the bottom urging Jack along.

  But Rose’s temper was just catching fire and she followed after him. “You be damned, Jack Nash!”

  He stopped at the top of the stairs and turned around. “What?”

  Reading his eyes and scared witless, Rose decided the only thing for her to do was fall down at his feet and plead insanity and that thought conjured up a vision of her poor sister Flora, racing round and round the kitchen table in the dreary old farmhouse of her childhood while saliva dribbled down her chin and her eyes stared terrified at something hideous that nobody else in the room could see. Instantly, all the spoiled-little-girl posturing and whining that Rose harassed her husband with made her blush with shame. All she wanted to do then was tell him she was sorry, but he was already more than half way down the stairs, and Jess was hollering at him to “get the lead out.”

  “Oh, shit,” Jack muttered, glancing back at her, “I haven’t got time for this crap,” and he took the rest of the stairs two at a time. Then just before he disappeared from sight and without looking back he admonished her.

  “Why don’t you just try to recall what your saggy-assed old hypocrite of a sister told us the day we came to her door weary from that long ride out of Dobbin to ask if we might spend a night or two in one of her hundred and one exotic bedrooms? Why don’t you just do that, Rose Sharon, and then take some time to sit and ponder on her answer for a while. Maybe then you can decide whether Sister Claire means to shame us or not!”

  Rose stood there staring over the railing until she heard the door to the street open and shut, and then she raced back through the apartment to one of the windows where she could look down into the street. With her forehead pressed against the cold glass, she watched Jack tug on his gloves while he and Jess leaned into the wind and started up the sidewalk, their bodies hunkered down, bracing themselves against another bitterly raw gale. Just before they got to the corner, Jack turned around and looked up at the window. His lips spread in a wide grin and then he blew her a kiss. Seconds later, he and Jess trudged across the street and out of her sight.

  And Rose’s earlier jubilant optimism crumbled like dead rose petals—as ugly as the dirty brown slush under Jack’s boots.

  A sense of the unfairness of life smoldered in Rose’s brain and manifested in a petulant thrust of her chin and a pouting of her mouth. “Squash blossoms!” She swore and her copper-colored eyes sparked ominously. “It just ain’t fair, God!” She raised her eyes and noticed that the shallow sun of dawn had already been swallowed up by dark clouds. Again she pressed her forehead against the frosty pane and cried out at a leaden sky that was just beginning to spit sleet back at her, “Oh Sweet Jesus—it just ain’t fair! Jack tries so hard … he works like a darky at whatever work he can get—he puts in long dreary hours doing any pitiful job he can find—gettin’ paid barely enough to keep us in biscuits and gravy. Freezin’ in the cold and sweatin’ in the heat and he never complains out loud, though I can feel his heart and his spirit cryin’.”

  She was almost in tears by then and had about decided to go on and vent all her frustrations with a fit of weeping when a vision came to her. It hardened her jaw and narrowed her eyes and she looked up into the somber sky seeking some kind of answer—but all that came to her was a reflection of her own bitter resentment.

  “And Walter Bradley sits all day in his big fancy office,” she scowled, “just rakin’ in the money—and he goes home every night to sleep in a soft, warm bed in that grand ole house of his—and he gets to ride back and forth between it all in that shiny, black automobile that sits in his driveway—everybody and everything always keepin’ him warm and toasty.”

  For the third time she shoved her forehead against the wet window pane and challenged the sleet-spitting sky, “How come Walter Bradley never even gets his nose cold?”

  Rose wasted some more of the morning as Jack had suggested, thinking about Claire Louise and her merciless nature: about all those years of nagging and preaching and finding fault when there wasn’t anything Rose could do to please her. Claire was hard on everybody, but Rose seemed to be the one who routinely lit her fire and who most often got burned by it. According to Claire, she was lazy, she was wild and willful, she was too rambunctious, she was too mouthy, she was just plain too sinful to be worth the time and money spent keeping her alive! Truth be told, Sister Claire had even predicted she was too dumb to ever get out of the eighth grade—much less go on to high school, which was meant to discourage her Papa from even considering that possibility.

  Sister Claire Louise was the first and only Saylor family member to go to high school and that was only because she was so strikingly brilliant that the Grade School Master insisted she go on with her education. He even offered to pay for her books and clothes and any other expenses she might bump into. Of course, Papa wouldn’t hear of that … it smacked too much of charity … but Mama did convince him to let her go, wearing whatever dresses she managed to make herself, which suited Claire Louise fine because she wouldn’t wear a dress if the collar wasn’t right up there around her chin and the sleeves better at least cover the elbows, thank you! And nobody even knew for sure that her legs went any farther than her ankles because her skirts hid everything above them.

  And naturally she had managed to excel at high school too. She even got to be valedictorian of her class, which was just something else Rose wasn’t good enough to be. Then a tender-hearted God sent that old angel, Walter Bradley, to sweep Claire Louise up and away from the family farm and eventually carry her off to Chicago. They’d come back on vacations in the fall or winter and around Christmas every year—mostly it was too hot for them in the summer. And when Claire Louise found out that Rose had a serious crush on Jack Nash, who by then had earned a less than noble reputation, she joined her father in a relentless self-righteous harangue to malign and disparage her little sister.

  But Rose hadn’t always been so abused. There was a time when she was the spoiled and petted darling of the Saylor clan. And she kept the memory of those early years encircled in a sweet-clover-chain of joy, isolated from all the abuse and violence that came later—because remembering that was the only thing that kept her from absolutely despising her relatives.

  Rose was the fifth and last girl-child born to Art and Olivia Saylor amidst a string of tow-headed boy babies that included two sets of twins. She was petite and pretty with an innocent boldness that captivated everyone around her. Her copper-colored curls were cut short to make them easier to manage, and her eyes, large and wide-set and the color of shiny new pennies, reposed serenely behind curly dark lashes that fluttered charmingly. Her little rosebud mouth wore an engaging pout that at least in her infancy was saucily becoming. She looked so much like a big baby doll that nobody could resist picking her up and squeezing her.

  In the summer of 1920, when Claire Louise and Walter Bradley caught the train that took them to Chicago, Rose Sharon was just 6 years old. She was wearing faded bib-overalls and brown high-top shoes and Claire’s heart was about to break with the sadness of leaving her. Nobody could have convinced her than that those feelings of unconditional love would ever turn into something else.

  Because Jack Nash was only a boy whose reputation then was as yet untarnished, and anyway, as a descendant of pre-Civil War landowners in the area, he belonged to a social class so far above that of the tenant-farmer Saylors, that to imagine any conn
ection between him and Rose was preposterous.

  But Rose Sharon had fallen in love with him.

  Truth be told, though unknown to Claire or anybody else then, the first time Rose really looked at Jack Nash, she’d set her cap for him—and she was no more than four or five years old, playing house with her dolls and making mud pies in the middle of the Saylor’s front yard. The yard also served as a lane past the house and the barn, where it turned onto a narrow road that led to the back of the Nash’s big house. Art Saylor had a real good relationship with Toby Nash and his family back then. He share-cropped one of the Nash farms, planting and picking cotton. But he also planted corn and hay for himself and raised some pigs and chickens and a few cows. He also had two mules, Jimmy and Roy, to pull the wagon that served as the family’s transportation. Sometimes in the late afternoon, Mr. Nash would ride up on his big gray gelding and come up on the porch to sit and visit with Papa. Then Mama or Grammaw Saylor, who lived with them, would bring out glasses of cool water to drink or on rare occasions there might even be a glass of apple cider. The two men would laugh together and Mr. Nash would convey all the local news and gossip, to which Art Saylor politely nodded and then later reminded his wife and children to ignore, because he didn’t believe in carrying tales. On Christmas, there was always a ham and some fruit for the family and a big bag of candy and toys for the little Saylors. Back then, there was no animosity or bad feelings for anybody.

  Summer 1919

  On the particular day that Rose fell in love, Jack Nash had ridden up with his father. While he and Papa talked on the porch, Jack wandered aimlessly about, followed by a bunch of Rose’s little brothers and big sisters, a few assorted hounds, and some cats. They checked out the chickens and the pigs and the cows and the mules and when he tired of all that, Jack ambled back up the lane. For a little distance he was walking backward, teasing and flirting with Rose’s sisters. That was when he stepped into Rose’s mud puddle and smashed a whole afternoon’s worth of meticulously crafted mud pies. The howling that ensued brought Ollie Saylor, her belly swollen with her eleventh child, lumbering ponderously to the screen door, expecting some kind of horrendous disaster. But Flora and the twins darted up the porch steps to tattle on their sister, so their mother just hollered out to Rose Sharon to behave herself. “Just make yourself some more mud pies, honey,” and returned to her work in the kitchen.