Whisper Town

by Patricia Hickman

  Jeb dropped a penny in his cup and then two more.

  “I know a stranger when I see him.” Fern must have seen Jeb’s truck parked outside Fidel’s. She appeared from the drugstore doorway the minute Jeb stepped off the walk.

  “Fern, you’re out late.”

  “My folks just left for Oklahoma. The house was too quiet, so I drove into town.”

  “How’s your daddy? I’m sorry I didn’t get the chance to visit with your folks this go-around.”

  “He says he’s better. But my mother is frustrated. He’s hard to look after.”

  “I’m glad you decided to come into town.”

  “I’m grading tests tonight. It’s monotonous. I drove to Fidel’s for coffee and hoping I could find some adult conversation. My lucky night. Join me?”

  “Coffee sounds perfect.” Once inside, Jeb helped Fern off with her sweater and ordered two coffees.

  “Ida May told me about your midnight visitor. As a matter of fact, she told the whole school and half the church.”

  “Kids drop into my life like walnuts,” said Jeb.

  “The girls thought surely by the time they got home, you would have found a landing place for her. To hear Angel tell it, you even tried to keep her home from school to watch the poor little thing.”

  “I’m desperate. You know I drove all up and down Tempest’s Bog and not one person knew a thing about her. It’s like invisible hands dropped her out of the sky onto my porch.”

  “Where’d you leave her?”

  “Angel’s watching her, but she assures me that I shouldn’t grow too accustomed to that. I even had to hire a wet nurse.”

  “Belinda Tatum? She was in my class a few years back. Shame about her.”

  “Well, she’s Myrtle’s only meal ticket. As a matter of fact, she’s coming tonight, so I should go, I guess. That girl gives me the willies. I don’t want her around the kids without me present.”

  “Belinda’s all right. I should head home.”

  A solitary light burned in the bank window. Oz had parked his Packard out front. He’d most likely be getting off soon, closing out the books for his uncle Horace Mills. If he saw Fern parked at Fidel’s, he’d be down the street in the shake of a stick. “Fern, you ought to drop by the house tonight.”

  She hesitated. “I’d better get home to those test papers. Work never ends.”

  “I’ll walk you to your car.” Jeb snapped his fingers at the druggist.

  “Right away, Reverend,” said Fidel.

  Jeb cupped his hand beneath Fern’s elbow and guided her to the door. He saw the lights go out at Nazareth Bank and Trust. “Off we go, Fern.” He helped her into her car.

  “She’s been screaming since right after you left, Dub.” Ida May waited out on the porch. She cupped her hands over both ears. “Angel’s a nervous wreck.”

  Jeb went inside and found Angel rocking Myrtle on the couch. “Jeb, she’s hungry. Where’s this Belinda woman you hired to keep something in this baby’s mouth?”

  “She’s late, I reckon. Willie, you get your schoolwork finished?”

  “Not with that caterwauling going on, Jeb. This babying stuff is not for me. I’m ready to join the railroad boys.”

  “Jeb, run fetch me a damp cloth, like the cheesecloth I keep over the butter. Sweeten it with a little sugar,” said Angel. Her face was washed out and colorless with strands of hair hanging over her brows and into her eyes as though she had just climbed out of bed.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” said Jeb. He fetched the sugar cloth.

  Angel held it to Myrtle’s lips. She took to it right away but grunted between suckles in a manner that said that she would not be satisfied for long. “Can we give her milk, Jeb?”

  “She’s too young, Biggest.”

  A flood of light beamed across the parlor.

  “Someone’s here!” Willie jumped up and ran to the door. “This Belinda drive an old black Model A?” asked Willie.

  “It’s got to be her,” said Jeb.

  “Praise be to Jesus!” said Angel.

  “It’s about time you got religion, Biggest.”

  Belinda stubbed her cigarette out on the porch railing. She blew out a trail of smoke that followed her all the way into the house. Before Jeb could offer her a private room, she began unbuttoning her sweater.

  Willie turned around and headed into the kitchen.

  “Angel, why don’t you show Belinda to your room?” Jeb suggested.

  Belinda did not follow Angel. “There’s the matter of seven dollars.”

  “I’ll pay at the end of the week,” said Jeb.

  “No can do. I need it up front.”

  “How do I know you’ll show?”

  “I’ll show,” she said, and pulled off her sweater.

  Jeb pulled out his wallet. “I’ll pay you half now and half at the end of the week.”

  “Deal, Preacher.”

  Angel lifted Myrtle to her shoulder, holding her close. “I’m going with you,” she said.

  “Suit yourself.” Belinda took the money out of Jeb’s hand and followed Angel down the hall. “Oh, and my grandmother is watching my brats tonight, but she can’t always do that. Sometimes I have to drag them along.”

  Jeb seated himself on the sofa with his study notes. After a half hour he heard Myrtle’s cry. He lost his place reading, got up to go see what was going on, then, thinking better of it, sat down again and picked up his book. He should have insisted that Fern bring her tests to grade at the parsonage. She might have had a better way with Belinda that he lacked. Besides, he was starting to feel lonely at nights after the kids went to bed.

  Even in the dark, standing out on the town walk, she looked lovely, like the first time he laid eyes on her. Dogged if he had ever met a woman like her who took her time about deciding if she was going to have a serious go with a man or not. Things between them had seemed to glide along with a renewed pace for a while. She had begun to say things to him that let him know that she was beginning to trust him. She had shared with him more about her brothers in Ardmore and about her girlhood growing up in Oklahoma. This whole situation with her daddy’s health had distracted her.

  Once, she had disclosed how timid she had been as a girl in a house full of boys. Jeb could not picture her timid in any form or fashion. She had told him of a tree house built within the limbs of a giant cherry tree. “In the summertime I slipped out of the house in the mornings with my stack of reading and made fast for that tree. If I could be the first to it before my brothers awoke, I’d pull up the ladder my grandfather had made from rope. No amount of yelling on their part could get me to lower that ladder. Then I’d read all day until my mother called us home for dinner.”

  Jeb pictured her in his mind, reclined on a make-believe bed, stomach down and reading book after book. Then he imagined the way that life led him across her path and then made him work like a slave to get her. He had read a story like that in the Old Testament, about a man who had to work seven years to get the woman he wanted.

  Now this whole matter about her daddy had left him feeling outside her circle of trust again.

  “I’m done and I need another smoke.” Belinda walked out, pulling her blouse down.

  He glanced away, not willing to stare at Belinda’s ample milk supply.

  “I’ll be back in the morning. Your oldest has a mouth on her. If you want to keep me coming around, you’d best tell her to watch herself.”

  Jeb held the door open. “Good night, Belinda.” When he shut the door behind her, he let out a sigh. She had left behind the scent of tobacco. He had to find a home for Myrtle soon, if for nothing else but the clearing away of every trace of Belinda Tatum.

  “The whole house is disrupted, Will.” Jeb had gone out into the night for a walk and was surprised when Will Honeysack’s car pulled over. Will yelled to him, “Get in.”

  “One day your life is taking on what seems to be a sense of order and the next it all comes tumbling down
around your ears. I think I’m finally getting ahead, making a little headway with Angel, or seeing Willie take a little more interest in his studies, and then boom! Down comes the whole sky around my ears.”

  “I asked Freda about the baby girl. She says you got a problem on your hands.”

  “Tell Freda that I said thank you. I don’t think I knew until now what it really must look like to be an orphan. I mean, I know the Welbys were abandoned. But at least we’ve had some contact with family. They know from whence they came. Myrtle has no past, no one to tell her how she was born or what her daddy looks like.”

  “It’s a dilemma.”

  “The families at Tempest’s Bog won’t take her in, the families around town won’t even consider it. Doc Forrester says all the foundlings’ homes he once knew about have been shut down like the whole world has closed its doors to the orphan.”

  Will gave his words a thought as they crossed White Oak Lake. “Most people don’t like to think about orphans, Reverend. They don’t know what to do, so they just don’t give it a thought.”

  Jeb was unsure whether or not he would have given thought to it either—if Myrtle had not been dropped off on his watch.

  Will backed into a private road and then pulled out to deliver Jeb back to the parsonage. “I told Freda I had forgotten my newspaper, but I really couldn’t stop thinking about you and what you might be doing tonight.”

  “You’re a good friend, Will Honeysack.”

  “Not as good a man as you, Reverend.”

  5

  JEB WAITED A HALF HOUR PAST TIME ON Thursday morning for Belinda to show her face. She dragged her two small sons out of the car along with her baby. With one hand she crushed her played-out cigarette against the oak tree that Jeb’s mentor, Reverend Gracie, had once planted in the front yard. With the other she settled her baby on her hip and herded the other two toward the house. If she read in Jeb’s face how testy she made him, she either did not have the sense to let on or did not care.

  “I’m going into town to see the deputy about Myrtle,” he told her. It had taken all day Wednesday to prepare his evening message. What with performing a juggling act between reading and then pacifying Myrtle, he had not had the benefit of a spare moment to tend to the business of passing her off to more nurturing arms.

  Myrtle had awakened again this morning at two, four, and again at six. He had paced with her on the front porch a solid hour waiting for Belinda’s old car to chug into the yard.

  Jeb drove away without looking back at Belinda, who seated herself in the front porch rocker, her dress pulled down on one side. The sight of it would haunt him for the remainder of the day, so he kept his sights on the road. No doubt she was an ample girl. He figured by the time she hit her twenty-fifth birthday, she’d have breasts reaching to her knees.

  Maynard had collected his newspaper and a cup of coffee and propped his body into a chair outside that teetered back against the jailhouse wall. “Morning, Reverend. Sorry I missed services last night. Some boys got into some liquor and decided to raise a ruckus down on the south side. Seems we been having a lot of that lately.”

  “Deputy, we have another situation on our hands.”

  “I heard you took in another youngen. Ain’t you the cat’s pajamas, as the young people say. Was it a little boy or a little girl? The one that told me didn’t know for sure.”

  “I didn’t take in the baby, as you say. Someone dropped her off and I can’t care for her properly. I already spent half the grocery money paying off Belinda Tatum to wet-nurse a baby that’s not mine.”

  “Shame what come of her. Good family. Can’t say what led her astray,” said Maynard.

  “What I’m saying is that you’re the law around here. Dropping off a baby can’t be legal. I need you to do something about it.” Jeb took the chair next to him. He stared straight ahead for a while, folding his arms, crossing and uncrossing his legs, fidgeting.

  “You want me to put the little thing in jail, Reverend?”

  “You’re funny, Maynard. I’m saying that I can’t take care of this girl baby. I already know for a fact that I don’t have a way with girl children. Ask Angel.”

  “Seems to me the Almighty done decided you was awfully good at it.”

  “On top of that, I got the whole Tatum clan parked out on my front doorstep, as though I didn’t have enough youngens underfoot. I have to leave my own house just to get some peace and quiet and study for my sermons. Imagine trying to read and study with Belinda Tatum jawing about her milk production while her kids hang from the light fixture. Something about it is plain uncomely for a man of my standing.”

  “Problem is everybody’s got it hard. Families around here have already taken in more kin than they can feed. On top of that, I heard it was a colored child.”

  “She’s the color of a human. She’s a baby, that’s all.”

  “Have you been to Tempest’s Bog?”

  “Already did that. I didn’t find what I was looking for, that’s for sure.”

  “I can keep an eye out, Reverend. That’s all I can do. You know I got this sudden crime wave going on here in Nazareth. Keeps me up nights just trying to figure out what I’m going to have to do to keep this town safe. We got the mystery of a bloody shirt down on the apple pickers’ path and drunkenness down on the south side. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the world was going to hell on a rail.”

  “Will you send a telegraph to Little Rock and see if they know of some family that can take in a baby?”

  “I can try.”

  Jeb came to his feet. “I got to get back. No telling what the Tatums might do to the place with me being gone so long.”

  “You ought to ask Josie to come around ever so often and watch that baby for you. She’s a nut about little ones.”

  “Josie. I forgot about her. She all but adopted Littlest. She’s always had a way with Ida May that I couldn’t explain.”

  “Josie’s got the touch.”

  “I’ll stop and see her before I go home. You take care, Maynard.”

  Jeb found Josie at home soaking her feet in salt water. She invited him through the screen door to come inside. She pulled her feet out of the bowl and dried them as she spoke to him. “What brings you by today?” she asked.

  “Because you are so highly recommended when it comes to advice about caring for the little lambs of the flock,” said Jeb.

  “How is that sweet Idy May? She’s still my favorite,” said Josie.

  “The child can’t stop chattering about Mrs. Hipps this and Mrs. Hipps that.”

  “Go on! The minute I laid eyes on that little girl, I just saw so much of my own baby girl. You know she went on to be with the Lord back in ’27.”

  “I do know, and I hope Ida May has been a comfort to you.”

  “Oh, she has, Reverend. No other child can steal my heart like that one.”

  She lifted the bowl from the floor and carried it to the sink. “I’ve got to keep my feet from drying out. But you didn’t come here to hear about such things.”

  “Actually I do have a mission in visiting you here today.”

  “Just say it, Reverend. You know I’ll help out however it’s humanly possible.”

  “You’ve heard about the visitor dropped off on our doorstep, I suppose?”

  “Visitor? I haven’t stuck my nose out, what with the influenza going around. How was the Wednesday service, by the way?”

  “A real humdinger, Miz Josie. So you haven’t heard of the little girl left on our doorstep?”

  “No one tells me anything. You know I stay out of the town’s gossip. You’ve another little girl? Praise be, that’s good news, Reverend. Boys is a whole lot worse trouble.”

  “I’ve hired a wet nurse to come and feed the orphan girl.”

  “Only one I know about.”

  “Belinda Tatum. But I can’t leave the baby in her care.”

  “Heavens no, I don’t blame you a bit for that, Reverend.”

&nb
sp; “So I’m paying you a visit today to see if you could help out days with this baby while I assume my duties as the preacher of Church in the Dell.”

  Josie hesitated and then said, “Take care of a little girl again? Well, I can’t think of another thing I’d rather do.”

  “Just until I can find the child a proper family.”

  “A baby girl. What is her name and her age?”

  “Myrtle and she is a newborn.”

  “A newborn. That’s a handful, Reverend, and me approaching middle age.”

  “I would have taken you for late twenties.”

  Josie laughed.

  “Not every person could care for her like she should be cared for. That’s why I came to you.”

  “Does she fuss before your wet nurse shows up?”

  “Belinda comes twice a day. In between times Myrtle does grow fussy.”

  “Newborns have to eat more than that. This Belinda knows better.”

  “I’m paying all I can pay for twice a day.”

  “That poor baby. I’ll go and see about her right now. Is Belinda with her now?”

  “She is, but she wants me back soon.”

  “I heard bad things about that girl. It’s too bad you don’t have another girl to hire.”

  “If you can see about Myrtle now, then I can go into town and handle church errands.”

  Josie fished around in her closet for a jacket. “I got some blankets left over from when mine was small. Myrtle must be such a sweet baby.”

  “She has a way about her.”

  “Reverend, no one’s expecting you to take care of a baby and preach three times a week on top of that. You got to go and take her to some family,” said Will.

  Jeb sighed. “Will, you act like I have a choice in the matter. What you want me to do, leave her on your wife’s doorstep tonight like what was done to me?”

  “I can’t take in a baby, not with rheumatoid arthritis,” Freda yelled from the back of the store.

  “It’s not rheumatoid arthritis,” Will said like a whisper. “It’s gout. Her daddy had it and she don’t want to deal with it.”