Whisper Town Read online

  Angel lay stomach down to write a school paper.

  Lucky swept the floor, leaning into the broom to chase the dust from the floor cracks. She dabbed at the ceiling with the broom straw, executing a spider.

  The sky marbled and the cold settled all around the parsonage, moaning through the attic. Angel buttoned her sweater up all the way to the neck. Lucky rubbed her arms and looked through the parlor window and up at the sky.

  “Two more days and we’re out of school. I guess you don’t miss it,” said Angel.

  Lucky swept dust into a pan.

  “I kind of like writing. Reading’s my best subject. You ever think about reading?”

  Lucky let out a breath.

  “I taught Jeb to read.”

  “He know you tell people that?”

  “Nothing wrong with saying it.”

  Lucky put the broom against the corner wall.

  “I could teach you to read, if you want,” said Angel.

  “Maybe you think I’m dumber than a sack of hammers.”

  Angel stared at Lucky. She shifted from one foot to the other and then said, “I don’t think that.”

  Lucky pulled a book out of Jeb’s library. She threw open the book and slowly read from it:

  As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and as I slept, I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein; and as he read, he wept, and trembled; and, not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, “What shall I do?”

  Angel lifted up off the floor with both hands, brought her feet forward, and came seated.

  “Mr. Bunyan’s got hisself a nice way with words.” Lucky closed up the book and slid it back onto the shelf.

  “Lucky, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you could read.”

  “My father, in spite of his ways, made sure that his kids could read. But how you talk to other people, like the way you talk down to me, is not because you learned to read. It’s from not knowing how others might see the world differently from you. I think they call that ignorance, but you can check the dictionary on that count.” She spelled “ignorance.”

  Angel picked up her pencil.

  Lucky picked up her broom and chased invisible things from the wall corners.

  “I know I’m not perfect, Lucky.”

  “It’s a good thing you know it. The way you hold your cup would make the queen turn whiter than she already is.”

  Angel laughed. “You know the queen?”

  “We’re chums, me and Queeny.” Lucky waltzed into the kitchen and back out into the parlor. She turned on the radio. An orchestral piece played. “Come here,” she told Angel. She held out her hands. “You got to move, one, two, three, without stepping on a boy’s feet.”

  It was time to commence supper preparations. Instead, they danced.

  Ruben Blessed left his father’s old Ford parked back in the woods. He had borrowed it saying that Jewel needed his help making all her laundry deliveries. Jewel let him make a delivery so it would not be a lie.

  Ruben hung a lantern in the tree. He looked toward the minister’s house and waited to see if Lucky would look out and see him. He could see movement through the window curtains. The moon hung high in the west, but not bright enough to give away his whereabouts.

  A car slowed up at the main road. Ruben doused the lantern and stepped back into the woods. The sound of feet running, of limbs swishing, caught his breath. He went all the way down on the cold forest bed. Wet leaves soaked through his clothes.

  He heard a voice like a young man’s. Two young fellows ran past him. They stole a look into the parsonage window. Whoever had been moving around inside did not see the young men. The boys crouched down and crept back up the tree line all the way to the car.

  Ruben saw a rope hanging from a tree. He untied it and retied it to the bottom of the trunk. He crouched down and his hand felt steel. He had brought his tire iron in case he ran into a dirty rat.

  He could see inside the house past an opening through the window drapes. Lucky and some girl twirled around the room. The two of them laughed like girls do when they think they are alone.

  The two young men ran back from the road. The moon shone off something one of them held, like polished metal. He was not sure about anything except that they aimed straight for the parsonage.

  He saw the face of one as he ran past. He pulled the rope and the boys sprawled onto the forest bed, things clattering out of their hands.

  “I know you,” said Ruben. He took him out, laying the tire iron to the side of his head, his aim hitting sweet-as-you-please against his temple before the young man could react.

  The other one ran for the road. He drove away and left his buddy lying on his face in the woods.

  The curtains parted. The girls looked out, but they did not see Ruben. He was running back into the woods to find his daddy’s old car and drive home.

  17

  JEB WAITED OUTSIDE THE LIBRARY, HAPPY THAT he had canceled the Sunday-evening service for Christmas. The librarian took both Christmas wreaths off the doors to take home on the eve of the holy day. His watch said a quarter after five, the time Fern said she would be finished at the library. She met the librarian, who was a friend of hers, to help her with some gifts for her family. Fern had hidden them at her house.

  Loaded with ribboned boxes, the librarian came down the steps.

  Fern had told Jeb that she would drop by the parsonage and help Angel and Lucky start the holiday dinner, like the pumpkin pie crusts and the special dishes that could be made up early.

  Jeb told the girls to start the dough on their own, that he would surprise Fern and pick her up at the library. He had Evelene Whittington wrap a locket for her in her better Christmas wrap. He wanted to give it to her without the pack looking on.

  The door opened and Oz Mills came out the door, walking backward and talking. Fern followed him out.

  Jeb stared, not able to breathe or move.

  Oz kept touching her arm. He said something that made her laugh.

  Jeb came to himself. He turned to head back to Front Street, where he had left the truck parked. He had gone a half block when he heard Fern call his name. He stopped halfway between Front Street and the library, right outside Lincoln’s Barbershop.

  “I thought that was you.”

  By the time he turned around, Oz was nowhere in sight. He wanted to tell her that he had come to surprise her and that he obviously had caught her by surprise. But the sight of her made him forget altogether what he was thinking of saying. She wore something red and the skirt of the thing blew around her knees, exposing her kneecaps. The cold made her stand funny, like her kneecaps almost faced one another. She crouched a bit, bending, and her bottom stuck out.

  “You look pretty,” he said.

  “Oz Mills was here.”

  “What do you have to say about that?”

  “All of my Christmas stuff, the presents, the things I want to cook for you, that’s all in my car. We can come back for your truck?” She held out her keys like she knew Jeb would come and take the keys from her and drive her back to his place. He opened the door for her and she sidled in and he shut the door on her red skirt. She opened it and fixed her dress and looked up at him and laughed. She closed her own door.

  Jeb climbed into the driver’s seat. “It’s noisy back at my place,” he said.

  “If we go to my place, I’ll want to—”

  When she stopped, Jeb said, “I want to too.”

  Fern came across the seat. “Happy Christmas, honey.” She kissed Jeb.

  He slid out from under the steering wheel. “Oz didn’t kiss you or anything, did he?”

  She drew back enough to say, “He met a woman. They want to e
lope.” She pulled Jeb’s arms around her.

  “Did you tell him he should do that?”

  “I told him not to come to me anymore for my approval.”

  “I love you, Fern. Let’s go to your place and do what we shouldn’t do.”

  Her face pulled away from his. “Drive, Jeb.”

  Jeb turned on the ignition and drove past the bank, circled back, and headed for Marvelous Crossing.

  Fern’s head lay against his shoulder. She kept rubbing his leg and talking about how long she had waited for them to be together. The moon looked like a disk, a pendulum hung in the air for Christmas Eve.

  “I’ll have you all to myself.” She laughed. “Look, Nazareth, Jeb and Fern, finally together! Let’s give them something to gossip about. You and me and no one to stop us.”

  “You and me,” said Jeb. Her words “all to myself” stuck inside him like an ax in a stump. The headlights shone across the bridge ahead. His foot came off the gas pedal. The car slowed. He braked and stopped them right in the middle of Marvelous Crossing Bridge.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  The picture of Fern and him overflowed with too many other faces. Erasing all but two was hopeless. “You and me, Fern, and a hungry baby,” he said. He waited for her to respond, but her smile thinned and she kept quiet. “Plus two teenage girls, a young girl, and a boy who wants to grow up to be like a dad who abandoned him.”

  Fern turned and looked out over the water. White Oak Lake reflected the moon in pieces, a winter wind blowing ripples across the disk and slicing it up.

  “I can’t give you anything you ask, Fern. Not a place of our own or time for just the two of us.”

  “I don’t think I’ve asked for a thing.” She stroked his arm.

  Both of them stared into the dark waters.

  He started up the engine. “This is not the life I want for us, Fern. We can’t be alone, not really. The thing of it is, I want you all to myself too.” He turned the wheel after passing over the bridge and drove past Long’s Pond and her cottage and toward the parsonage.

  Fern cried.

  Jeb never knew how to tend to Fern’s tears. He drove them to the parsonage and parked. He climbed out and yelled for Willie and Ida May to come out into the yard. “Come bring in Miss Coulter’s Christmas bags,” he told them.

  Fern reached down into the floor to fidget with some invisible object and to hide her wet eyes. She kept her head down until Willie and Ida May ran back inside, hugging her bags. When her head came up, she banged it against the dashboard.

  Jeb opened her door and held his hand out to her. “Are you all right?”

  She got out on her own. She walked past him.

  “I made you mad.”

  “You did the right thing, didn’t you?” She stopped at the foot of the steps. “Don’t you always do the right thing, Jeb Nubey?” She went inside.

  The moon had not dimmed or even clouded over. Jeb hated the sight of it. He grabbed the last bag and felt against his trousers’ pocket for her keys. His fingers struck against a small package. He had forgotten to give her the box with the locket.

  Fern lingered dutifully. She finished pies and made sweet potatoes and put them in the icebox to keep for Christmas Day.

  Jeb waited in the kitchen for some moment when she might incline her ear to allow him to explain what happened out on the bridge.

  Angel and Lucky never left the kitchen at the same time. The evening gave plenty of reason for levity, a reason to test food and eat sugar cookie batter and tease Ida May about St. Nick.

  “I heard Frank Pella was at the bank sometime this week and someone bashed his face,” said Angel. “I’d like to have seen it for myself.”

  “Someone got tired of that boy and give him what he needed.” Lucky rolled out the cookie dough. “You got any gumdrops?”

  “On the table,” said Fern.

  “Why you hate him so much?” asked Angel.

  “You going to ruin Christmas with that kind of talk.” Lucky rolled out the gumdrops and cut them into shapes.

  “I never seen that done,” said Angel. Lucky demonstrated how her grandmother had taught her to roll gumdrops out for cookie decorations.

  Fern gazed into the cake batter, not as much interested as staring beyond it.

  “Miss Coulter has to give me a ride back to my truck, girls. You keep up the work and I’ll be back.”

  Fern looked surprised. “I thought we would go after the truck tomorrow.”

  “Tonight’s better.”

  “I think I’d rather go home tonight. Today’s worn me out.”

  Jeb saw how she wouldn’t look at him. He got up and put on his coat. “Wouldn’t want to bother you with a trip into town Christmas Day, Fern.”

  “He wants to get Miss Coulter alone, like lovers,” said Willie.

  Lucky said “whoo-ooo!” while Angel told Willie to shut up.

  Fern pulled her coat off the chair back and finally looked at Jeb, her face not as smooth and happy as when she came out of the library. The silent stroll from the kitchen, across the parlor, and out into the cold yard made it even harder for Jeb to speak. Fern asked for her keys.

  “You going to leave me standing here, stranded?” Jeb asked.

  “I feel like driving, that’s all. You can get in.”

  They rode down the church drive, driving the two miles to the lake, and over Marvelous Crossing.

  Ice formed on the windshield.

  “I guess I’m a fool for messing up our evening.”

  “You made me feel like I was throwing myself at you.”

  “I want you to throw yourself at me, that’s the honest truth. It’s all I think about. You probably think I sit around drumming up spiritual truths. I don’t. I have to ask forgiveness for the things I think about you.”

  “You think about me all the time?”

  “Only when I’m awake. Otherwise I just dream about you. I think about how you watch me from the pew and I’m careful not to mangle doctrine, because I know you’ll know. I think of how you smell like clean linens drying in the sun and flowers on the windowsill, and I don’t know how you do that in the winter,” he said.

  Fern trembled.

  “I remember how you taught me to think about things that I hadn’t thought about before. When I write, I find myself rewording every sentence because when you read it, I want it to sound just right on your lips. You make me better than I should be. I like me better when I see me through your eyes. I hate me worse when I make you cry.”

  She parked behind his truck.

  “Hold on.” He ran around to her side of the car. He looked up at the moon. Clouds covered all but a thin slice of silver. Jeb opened her door.

  Fern’s feet came out, one at a time, and she got out. Jeb pulled out the box. “This is not the big gift, the one I want to give you when all of this chaos goes away.”

  Fern held out her hand. “It’s snowing.”

  Jeb handed her the box.

  “You have to know things about me, Jeb. I love you in the middle of the chaos. When I’m with you, the chaos goes away. In the middle of all of the clatter, you sing. I can welcome a bad day because of you.” She opened the rear door and pulled out a heavy box. “Mine’s not the big gift either.”

  Jeb hefted the box. “It feels like books.”

  “For your library.”

  He set the gift on the street.

  “I don’t care what’s inside my box,” she said. “You’ve already given me what I wanted.” She looked at her ring, kissed Jeb, and the snow fell. The night had lost its moon. Snow cast its own net for lovers. They sought warmth, one against the other.

  The last week of December did not bring any better weather along with it. Angel caught the next cold and prayed God to take it from her, but it lingered, settling in her throat and lungs.

  Fern moved Angel to her place to get well on hot soup and tea with honey. Angel allowed it, along with Fern’s steady attention to a chest poultice
while maintaining her own usual posture of pride.

  Two days before New Year’s Eve, Jeb restrung his banjo. He had nearly played it to death over Christmas. The picking soothed Myrtle, quieting her before Lucky took her to bed.

  Lucky let Myrtle fall asleep in the middle of the floor, the center bloom of an old quilt. Frost formed all over the windows in the shape of winter flakes. The baby lay sprawled, holding a spoon in one hand, like she fell asleep waiting for dinner.

  Lucky went out back to take a dip of snuff.

  Someone knocked at the door.

  Myrtle’s spoon hand fidgeted. Her lips pursed, shiny, as though she anticipated that Belinda might descend in her dreams to bring succor from heaven.

  Jeb opened the door in as quiet a manner as possible. “Reverend Williamson, come in.”

  “I come to check on Lucky and that baby.” His voice quavered at the end of his sentences.

  “Baby’s growing in spite of the fact our wet nurse quit on us. She had bigger fish to fry, according to her.”

  “I expect so.”

  “Some of us are getting over sickness, what with the wet weather.”

  “I hate all this snow and sleet. You better keep that baby inside. Children is coming down with awful things these days.” The preacher saw Myrtle and he grinned. “Lucky anywhere’s around?”

  “She’ll be in soon.”

  “Has she told you anything about her family, Reverend Nubey?”

  “Told me about her sister, Jewel, and Ruben. I think he drops by, but he doesn’t come in,” said Jeb.

  “Her brother has a thing about whites. I don’t think he approves of her living among the whites, not that he has anything against you. Ruben’s had run-ins and not all of them his fault entirely.”

  The kitchen door slammed closed.

  “Ruben’s welcome in our home, same as Lucky.”

  Lucky peered from the kitchen, and then she disappeared. The sound of water running in the kitchen ensued.

  Jeb told her that her minister had dropped by. “She’s getting some water,” he said to the minister.

  Lucky ran into the parlor and grabbed Williamson around the shoulders. He hugged her back and she pulled up a chair next to him.