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  PRAISE FOR WHISPER TOWN

  “Patricia Hickman’s WHISPER TOWN shows that love of neighbor, springing from a heart broken by Jesus, is ultimately the greatest triumph...A compelling page-turner.”

  —ERIC WIGGIN, author of The Gift of Grandparenting

  “Hickman’s prose rings with gritty authenticity and stark, lyrical description.”

  —LIZ CURTIS HIGGS, author of Thorn in My Heart

  “Patricia Hickman’s characters in WHISPER TOWN are so realistic, so endearing, you come away believing you must have met them somewhere, and if not, you wish you could. A most enjoyable read!”

  —SYLVIA BAMBOLA, author of Waters of Marah and Return to Appleton

  “Yet a third marvelous visit to Nazareth, Arkansas...Ms. Hickman delights us with quaint humor and a cast of quirky characters, even while shining a keen light upon racism in the thirties.”

  —LAWANA BLACKWELL, author of A Table by the Window

  “Patricia Hickman has given us a wonderful book about the many facets of love—a man for a woman, a father for his children, a pastor for his flock, and a caring individual for a needy one—without ignoring the cost of such love. Insightful, layered, and faith-filled, WHISPER TOWN is, quite simply, tops.”

  —GAYLE ROPER, author of Winter Winds, Autumn Dreams

  “Out of the Depression-era mystique of the Ozarks comes a parable for our time. Thank you, Patty Hickman, for daring us to get on our knees—to not just pray, but to wash feet.”

  —NETA JACKSON, author of The Yada Yada Prayer Group series

  “The Millwood Hollow series keeps getting more compelling and more triumphant. Reading WHISPER TOWN is like returning for a visit with old friends, only to discover they’ve become even more lovable and admirable in your absence.”

  —JANELLE CLARE SCHNEIDER, author

  “Shout it from the rooftops—WHISPER TOWN is fantastic! Hickman’s lyrical Southern style, with its snap of Depression reality, makes WHISPER TOWN one of her best. Encore!”

  —LOIS RICHER, author of Shadowed Secrets

  “Patricia Hickman’s style flows with smooth storytelling and gritty detail. WHISPER TOWN bristles with racial tension, succulent Southern senses, and a pastor who takes what God gives him.”

  —JANET CHESTER BLY, author of Hope Lives Here

  Copyright © 2005 by Patricia Hickman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  WARNER BOOKS

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  Warner Faith® and the Warner Faith logo are trademarks of Time Warner Book Group Inc.

  First eBook Edition: June 2005

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56148-8

  To my nephews and nieces, Elizabeth, Tim, Michael,

  and little Patricia, who are so much more than a mix

  of black and white, having had placed within you

  the lampstand of conflicting cultures,

  a candelabra of beauty, lovely in God’s sight.

  Contents

  Praise for Whisper Town

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Reading Group Guide

  For we, being many, are one bread and one body;

  for we are all partakers of that one bread.

  1 CORINTHIANS 10:17

  1

  EVERY SUNLIT COMMUNITY CAN CAST A DISCONCERTING shadow. That is why a town celebrates its own virtues with harvest festivals and greased pig competitions, thereby casting its citizens in the best light, all flaws dimished. Church in the Dell’s yearly apple social lured the happiest of saints and the worst of sinners into its cinnamon and spice womb.

  Jeb greeted people out on the lawn using his best minister’s handshake: thumbs up, skin to skin. Talk of an unusual nature sifted through the ordinary chitchat, spoken three times in succession from the lips of three different church members before he eventually latched onto the gist of the matter.

  A commotion down in Apple Valley, where, on good authority, rumors had circulated not more than a summer ago of how the daughters of the county commissioner had lost their virginity, now had tongues wagging with a new vigor; the whole operation of this recent rumor mill affected the chatter even more vibrantly than the commissioner’s daughters’ scandal.

  A hush settled over the church lawn and, what with Florence Bernard’s lighting of candles along the path, even the boys inclined to rowdy exuberance took to whispering. The apple orchard hid secrets, awful stories, mothers said, that caused the schoolchildren to walk around instead of going through Apple Valley. A shadow had slipped over Nazareth and no amount of conjuring could lift its spell. The rumors shadowed the evening like the darkening horizon, the color of brine gone bad.

  Florence Bernard and Josie Hipps acted as hostesses directing visitors to the tables. Hot spiced apples, crumb pies, cobblers, apple dumplings, hot cider, and squash and apple soup enticed guests into the tent set up by the Church in the Dell elders, where tables and chairs borrowed from first this one and then that one presented a plain yet inviting asylum for the church social.

  Mellie Fogarty made a point to tell every woman who came through the tent’s entry that her roses had come in good this year. Every table displaying a Fogarty centerpiece proved her right.

  Angel Welby, with her hair pulled back to emphasize her emergence as a fifteen-year-old woman, offered herself as a centerpiece to a circle of boys from Stanton School. Jeb floundered more often than not in what he perceived as his awkward paternal offerings to his less-than-receptive charge. It was in his estimable opinion that his duties as fledgling shepherd to the Church in the Dell flock had a greater chance of fulfillment than his fatherly offerings to the Welbys, and that being evidenced with the passing of days.

  Angel’s hair had darkened and her eyes had blued in the spring of her adolescence. She had never been a girl who would divulge her thoughts to anyone, let alone a preacher to whom circumstances had forced her to yield her life and siblings. So Jeb watched her grow, wild as wood roses, and rendered helpless to tend her soul with any measure of goodness. Angel grew fast among the weeds, her lot as a poor girl born to a momma whose mind had been swept away with the Depression.

  Florence brought Jeb a bowl of soup with a slice of sopping bread. “Taste Josie’s soup, Reverend, and then tell her how good it is before she drives me nuts with worry.”

  Jeb sipped from the bowl and then raised his thumb to Josie, who waited nervous as a rabbit beside the cider pot. “Tell her it’s the best squash and apple soup I’ve ever tasted,” he said to Florence, and then whispered, “except for yours, Florence.”

  Florence thanked him. She let out a sigh and said, “I’ll be back shortly with something sweet. Anything in particular tickle your fancy, Reverend?”

  Jeb knew better than to play favorites
, so he said, “Bring me what you like best, Florence.”

  His answer satisfied the middle-aged divorcée. She went out in search of a new conquest: a farmer widowed two years who might be easy pickings for the best apple pie chef in Nazareth.

  Jeb milled among the men, who talked about the measly harvest and last month’s dust storm. Ivey Long told him, “Got the plow horse hitched up to the hay wagon. I guess the children are anxious for a moonlight ride.”

  “I haven’t been on a hay ride myself since I was yea high,” said Jeb. “The church appreciates you driving your wagon, Ivey.”

  Jeb heard the pleasant sound of the handsome schoolteacher behind him. Fern Coulter brought the sweet scent of a woman into the tent. He straightened his tie and smoothed his slicked-back hair around his ears. “Fern, you look fine in that dress.” He offered her cider and she accepted it.

  The rumors twisting like a cyclone through downtown the last few days had not dampened their feast of apples. Jeb would wait and bring up the matter to Deputy Maynard, who would surely show up at the mere mention of free eats. If anyone could quell the rumors of a slaying in the orchard, George Maynard would know the truth and help dispel the outlandish stories of blood on the apple pickers’ path.

  Jeb believed in the world he could not see, but he left the practice of dwelling on the unseen to lonely old women whose neck hairs rose up during full moons. He did not listen to the wind when the children claimed to hear whispers at night. Least of all, he did not pay heed to the bad dream that awakened him on the morning of the autumn’s first apple social.

  He had no choice but to be a reasonable man. The church he shepherded down here in the hollow needed a rational minister, one who treated each day like a new pearl collecting on the town’s long string of bad days. Too many villains had emerged from hard times. Nazareth, Arkansas, held in its possession a short list of heroic souls.

  In 1933, heroes had ebbed from the national canvas like the hacks on Wall Street, or else took to masquerading as tramps on railroad cars, and oftentimes as politicians who peddled emotional causes for a little sway. A body had to look hard into those places and imagine a hero existing beneath the subterfuge of a swindle. The long and short of it was this: a loaf of bread bought votes. Myths arose primarily from the ink of pulp fiction, meaning that for a dime, heroism could be rolled up and tucked inside a ten-year-old boy’s shirt. Ordinary men quit aspiring to valor what with its high cost and all. Empty stomachs spawned nostalgia, but it was the kind that turned sensible people into monsters, and that led to unimaginable grief considering the sad state of affairs for jobless heroes.

  To inflame the bonfire of a national calamity, freedom had been bought and paid for on good, compatriots’ paper, but not all Americans had redeemed their own personal bundle of liberty. Not enough of them, at least, and not soon enough. When the lean years of the Great Depression swallowed up hope, the yearnings of the insignificant were relegated to the end of the bread lines; this was a quagmire for Jeb whose reckless habit of trading in the tide of human sorrow got him into trouble with the everyday people, those who, when in a tight spot, gave little thought to even the least imaginable yearnings.

  Jeb had requested no particular elements of his encumbered life, not a tin whistle’s worth of the weight hanging over his head. He had said more than once it was his turn to be at the receiving end of a lucky break. At the head of his want list: a quiet Arkansas parish church to shepherd that could pay him a steady wage, a pond where he could wet his line, and a wife to bed; more specifically, an uncommonly good lady named Fern Coulter, who had supplied his library with an abundance of classical works. Each book he read had shown him his own lack, causing him to reach beyond his sharecropper’s state of mind.

  Fern had come to him in the most gingerly fashion. Out of all the women he had known back in Texas, none had wooed as slowly as Fern.

  He laid blame at the door of their thorny beginnings and justly so.

  In the first place, his most recent years consisted of a series of surplus hindrances kicking through the door, elements and people whom he did not want, ask, or need. These were children he looked after but had not in the least manner sired—Angel Welby, the biggest girl, who paid him the least amount of regard and respect for what little necessities he had provided, and her two younger siblings, Willie and Ida May. The Welbys took to him like pond leeches.

  Angel admittedly had taken better to him when he was a con man than when he had bowed his heart to God and become a legitimate preacher. The oldest girl from the family of Welby—a clan whose elders never bothered to check up on their displaced progeny—favored the idleness of a life pretended over the strenuous efforts of a life devoted.

  Jeb deemed the girl to possess few comely traits.

  She had flowered handsomely in her youth, a teenage beauty; but her disposition had soured on her. Her habit of deriding Jeb at inopportune moments, such as at church functions in plain sight of respectable congregants, made him wistful for the day the girl’s journey would lead her quietly back to her origins.

  Jeb saw no sign of that happening any time soon. Summer had come and gone with no promise of change. He did not aspire to heroism, especially since a hero’s wages plus a nickel would buy little more than his morning cup of coffee. He did not want his life to become the stuff of fables, but try as he might, the whole gallantry matter came knocking uninvited.

  The moon hung over the hollow so full it appeared that any minute it might burst. Children and youths scrambled to claim a spot on the hay wagon. Florence and Josie commandeered the clean up of tables and grounds. Jeb herded children and pining teen couples toward Ivey’s wagon. “First rule, no hay throwing.” He shot a warning glance to Angel’s brother, Willie. “That means you, Willie Boy.”

  Willie pulled a buddy down from the edge of the wagon and claimed his place while the boy pummeled his arm. Willie poked him hard and traded licks while telling him he was soft as a girl.

  Two boys pulled Angel into the wagon, youths far too old for her, at least in Jeb’s estimation. Jeb took the spot next to them, if for nothing else but to keep an eye on matters, and realizing too he should save room for Fern. He glanced up the path and saw her picking her way around a stand of birch trees. She lifted her face and smiled at him. Jeb knew she intended the smile for him. He pulled rank on one of the boys next to Angel and cleared a Fern-sized space. He waved at Fern. “Wagon’s filling up. Best you hurry.”

  “You coming too, Jeb?” Angel sighed. Her brows formed fallen crescents.

  “Make way for the chaperone of your life.”

  Angel had the look of a cornered fox. “All the other old people are staying back at the tent, Jeb. You ought to stay and be sociable.”

  He said, straight into her ear, “Mind your tongue, Biggest.”

  Not so fast to admit defeat, Angel said, “I saw Oz Mills drive up in his fancy Packard. You’d better corral that teacher before she’s snatched up by a higher bid.”

  “Fern, you coming?” Jeb asked. The banker’s nephew Oz had taken over the family business when his uncle Horace Mills had moved his family to Hope when Oz’s ailing father had taken to his bed. The brother bankers held tight while other financiers sunk into the Depression’s quicksand. Oz and a pack of his college-swell friends swarmed like flies around Nazareth’s last surviving bank.

  “Sun’s going down.” Fern glanced over the heads of the children. “I’d better run back for my jacket.”

  “You can wear mine.” Jeb pulled off his suit coat.

  Fern reached for his coat, but then said, “I don’t want to mess up your good coat. I’ll only be a minute.” She turned and ran back up the path.

  The last of the youths clambered aboard and Ivey pulled out his whip.

  “Hold up a second,” said Jeb. “We’re waiting for one more.”

  A cloud rolled across the moon and the last tincture of sunlight faded. The hollow blackened except for the lanterns on the wagon. Jeb anticipated
the warm feel of Fern next to him in a jostling wagon. Eagerness rose inside him, an underground stream bubbling to the surface. Wooing Fern Coulter had been a tedious occupation over the last year, first winning trust from a woman that once thought of him as lower than algae. Inviting her to join him on the hay ride and hearing her low boylike voice say, “Why not?” had raised his hopes.

  “Miss Coulter’s not coming back, you know,” said Angel. “She always finds an excuse.”

  “Tonight’s different and you got your own friends to yammer at, Angel.” Jeb put on his jacket and warmed his hands inside his pockets. He shifted from one foot to the next. Finally Fern appeared at the top of the hill. Behind her, stretching his long bones down the path, loped Oz Mills, the banker’s nephew. His silhouette cut an intrusive figure even in the moonlight.

  “Jeb, I’m so sorry,” said Fern.

  Angel whispered something near to sarcasm to one of the boys.

  Fern talked rapidly. “Oz has come to tell me that my mother and father have shown up tonight a day early for their visit.”

  “Invite them to join us,” Jeb said. He wouldn’t look at Oz.

  “This is awful, I know. But Daddy’s not feeling well and he’s back waiting at my house with my mother. I’m sure the long drive from Oklahoma’s exhausted him. I should go and see about him.”

  Ivey gave the old horse a whistle.

  “I’ll see her back,” said Oz. He helped Fern slip into her jacket. As she turned to head back up the path, Oz said, “You have fun with the kiddies, Reverend.”

  Angel set the boys to snickering at Jeb’s expense.

  The wagon ride turned into a grueling festival of screaming girls and hay-tossing boys. Jeb’s woolen coat was prickly with straw and his imagination bristling with thoughts of Oz joining Fern and her family for coffee while he fended off attacks of hay. He jumped from the wagon, reminded Willie to see Ida May up the path, and then meandered back toward the tent site. He led the departing rabble by the light of a lantern and elbowed through into the sanctuary of the tent.