Fallen Angels Page 21

  Dear Jeb or Philemon (haha! how did you come up with that name anyway?) Your first letter, and me the first to know about it! I always said you was a capable man, even when Daddy doubted it. This cover of yours sounds like a good one, so I'd keep doing what you're doing and lay low. You did not say how you are making it, but I guess you always manage to make a living for yourself—must be good money in religion. Bad news, brother. Hank is dead. But you don't need to hear all this. You sound like you got things going your way now and …

  Jeb tucked the letter into his britches’ pocket, pulled it out again, slipped it under the mattress, and then pulled it back out to rip Charlie's woefully regretful mail into a dozen strips for the garbage pail. It had not brought him a speck of comfort. He could not bear Charlie's bragging on him for scamming a whole town—not this town. Somehow, he had lost a taste for it. He picked up Evelene's Bible, opened it, then just held it next to him.

  “Comfort me, God, will you?” He whispered it like he was ashamed to ask out loud. His hands shook like ratlers. All sense drained from him. Run, Jeb! Like you always do. It was time to fly the coop, wasn't it? But too many things anchored his feet to this hick place called Nazareth. As of last night, Fern was his for the asking. His old white shirt still held enough of the faint scent of her perfume to prove it. The feeling of his hands and arms wrapped around her gave him a taste of what time spent with her would do for a man—like a miserly taste of chocolate on the tongue.

  In any case, there were other things that tied him up in ropes and left him ready for the block. People treated him like he was respectable and that had never come up before. A small girl's cough in the next room cracked open his heart. He liked the sound of “Daddy.” Angel, Willie, and Ida May had shown him what it felt like to be needed. Made him soft as butter. He could hear Charlie laugh at that. Turning soft had ruined him and in a queer way gave him a life.

  Somehow the lie had become his life. Or his life was just a lie. Everything clouded again and he rubbed the wet from his eyes.

  The edge of another peaceful hitch was once again at hand as it always had been in the past, coming round like the moon's orbit. His life had known so many beginnings and endings and he hated it. Hated who he really was. Ruination slipped over him. It was the only stinking blanket he really owned and the way he carried it with him everywhere he went like a railroad tramp only proved his vagrant blood.

  He pressed his face into the pillow, half-hoping for suffocation, and rolled over on his side. Sleep escaped him, but he thought he must have drifted enough to enter that place of half-sleep, somewhere between the world of mind and spirit, because he lost a whole half hour he could not account for. He blinked, but dread haunted him like a handful of loaded shot made ready for his coming execution. A wind like the voice of Hank propelled a chill through the window screen and seeped through every drafty crevice in the house. A flash of white moved, ghostly and mixed with shadows, underneath his door. The sun had not lifted even a nub of rays, but the sky had lightened, indicating Sunday hummed just down the hill. It seemed to sing his dirge.

  The doorknob turned. Jeb closed his eyes, ready to swallow punishment, even if Hank's ghost delivered it himself.

  “I couldn't sleep,” said Angel.

  “Don't ever bust through the door like that!”

  “Somebody woke up Crabby.” She set a lantern on the floor beside her.

  Jeb rolled onto his back with the pillow still covering his face. “It's too early to deal with kids.”

  “There's something I need to know.”

  “After my first cup of coffee.” Jeb tried to dismiss her, and waited to hear her pad back into the room next door.

  “You're already awake, so what's the deal anyway?”

  Jeb sat up, hugging the pillow like it was the only thing holding him up, and dangled his feet off the bed. The clothes he had slept in were rumpled. All the fight was gone out of him. He said with a peppering of kindness, “Best to get on with it, Angel. You'll not let me go back to sleep until I do.”

  She looked past him, sort of through him, like her eyes were fixed on something beyond him. “You're leaving, aren't you?”

  He hadn't come up with a reasonable solution yet that sounded humanly decent, so he didn't know what to tell her.

  “If you want to run, I'll go to the church and tell everyone the truth about us.” She still had not looked him square in the eye.

  It took a con to know one. But something about her, the soft pitch in her voice or the innocence of her eyes before daylight made him listen.

  “It's four hours until you got to get up and preach. I figure you can go down by the highway we came in on and catch a ride out of town.”

  “So you're going to tell the truth—to everyone, school buddies and all—and I walk away scot-free.”

  “By the time the church people know about us, you could be in Texas or anywhere but here.”

  “There you go again, just like always.” Before she could jump in with another argument, he said, “You think you can get up and plan my morning, just like that?” Still thinking she might be running a con, he knew what he had to do anyway regardless of her motive. “I'm not running, Angel, but nice try. If I'm a murderer I don't want nobody adding coward to the mix. That Deputy Maynard, if he's not on to me now, will be by tomorrow.” It wouldn't surprise Jeb at all if Maynard didn't already have it in his mind to keep an eye on his goings-on anyway.

  “I'm fresh out of ideas then.”

  “This has to end. I'm the one ending it. Make you happy?”

  “That's the problem with me, Jeb. Part of me doesn't want it to end, like I could lie forever just so's everyone would think I'm somebody. That makes me a big fat hypocrite, don't it?”

  “Angel, we both found something we liked here. Maybe something we needed. At least, I did.” He touched the side of her arm and she didn't pull away.

  For the first time, a tear tumbled out of her like it had escaped. And then another followed. “I don't have no place to go, Jeb. I want my momma so bad it hurts, but I can't have her. But the thought of Willie and Ida May being treated like orphans makes me sick.” She cried. “But here's the whole deal—that preacher man, I know he's coming soon and the gig'll be up anyway. All I been doing is stretching things out, like one morning I'd wake up and all my dreams'd be real. It's time I grow up.”

  “Here's the deal as I see it. For once, I'm the grownup. I am going to go into that church and preach the best little sermon these folks has ever heard. Maybe time is more on my side than you think. Fern has got to know about us. But I want her to know too that what she saw in you kids was real. I'm the phony.”

  “Tell her when?”

  “Maybe this afternoon, if she'll listen. I don't know. But one thing I won't do is run. Not until I've said what should be said. Maybe we have a few days to think on it.”

  “Maybe we don't. You're doing this for her, aren't you? This is about Fern.”

  “Fern, you, Willie, Ida May.”

  “You can't love her, Jeb! Or us! You have to get out of here, put her out of your thoughts. Time is up in this place!”

  “I can't leave. Not yet.” The fantasy came back to him, the blanket and lemonade scene at Marvelous Crossing.

  “But you're not that man, the one she thinks you are. That's not Jeb Nubey at all!”

  “You're a kid, Angel. Act like one. Go and get a little more sleep. Don't worry for me.” He had found his taste of Eden in the form of a day in the life of a good man. For one day, of all days, Sunday, he would be that good man, the man his daddy thought did not exist. “I'll wake you in time for church. Rest until sunup.”

  “I should have shown you this already. Maybe I thought it would all go away.” She pulled a letter out from under her arm. She had hidden it there the whole time they spoke. “I heard what that deputy said to you, Jeb. They'll hang you for killing that man. Even if you didn't mean to do it. You have to run now, while you can.”

  Jeb had
never heard Angel let slip a shred of concern for him. “You care about me, don't you Biggen?”

  “I think you should read this.” Angel gave him the letter.

  “Who wrote this?”

  “The man you wish you was.” She left the room.

  Jeb turned the letter over and read the signature: In Christ's abounding grace, Reverend Philemon Gracie, p.s. Expect my arrival within the week.

  The letter was dated September 15, 1932.

  For the Lord's Day, Deputy George Maynard exchanged his rural police uniform for a dark sport jacket that matched exactly his plaid worsted trousers, stretched tight around his porking stomach. It was every wrong sort of combination that fought his wife's floral dress.

  The Whittingtons kindly invited the Maynards to sit next to them, three rows behind Fern, Angel (who kept clinching her stomach and running outside), Willie, and Ida May with her recent infection of poison ivy.

  Fern approached Jeb twice from the onlooker's galley—the first time to tell him that she needed help with her kitchen plumbing and would he mind taking a look, and me second time to tell him her mother and father would be in town the next Sunday for a visit and would he please join them for Sunday dinner. Both jaunts to the platform resulted in Fern stroking his hand with a bit of feeling, as near a massage as she could muster without drawing attention. “I especially want you to meet my father, Francis.”

  Jeb's head lifted to affirm the invitation, although he knew by then he would be in jail in Texarkana or shot dead on the side of the road. He grabbed her hand the second time, and she looked back, surprise in his eyes.

  “Fern, you and me … I need … You see …”

  She laughed out loud. “See you after church.” When she walked away, he thought she whispered, “Philemon.”

  He dodged another urge to purge himself, realizing all eyes were on him. At any rate, the imagining of it all—a life minus Fern—got the best of him and he felt dizzy. Him as the privileged guest of Francis Coulter III at the Dornick Hills Golf and Country Club was nothing more than an outlandish thought that came out of his life as liar and could not be indulged. Golfing with the swells—that was a laugh.

  Fern kept track of his every move. That one thing he knew to be a fact. But instead of melding happily with the rest of his imaginings, he felt her eyes ever on him. He approached the lectern with the worst case of smallness he ever remembered having. Out of habit every head bowed. Even Fern, who closed her eyes but then stole another glimpse at him and bowed again, respectfully. Jeb read her signal and it felt like charges had been dropped into the depths of his pathetic soul.

  He imagined how a confession would spill from him, tumbling from his tongue in silver magic that caused the listeners to rise in union and applaud him for his honor and upright ways. That wouldn't work. Then he fantasized that Fern would fall into his arms and love him for being Jeb Nubey. No more would he hear the name Philemon come from her throaty voice. Jeb. It sounded sweet, like sap from a maple trunk. And untrue.

  Jeb opened his eyes. A few restless toes shuffled in the sawdust, uneasy at his hesitation to attack the platform with spiritual genius. The awkward silence confronted his daydream; he had drifted while the faithful awaited direction. “Let us pray.” He coughed.

  Onward and upward, he told himself. The writings of Paul spilled as freely from him as if he had sat watching over the apostle's shoulder as he wrote. He used Fern's suggestions and whenever he did, it had the effect of caressing her. She smiled at him, an intense bit of light coming from her, more forceful even than the smile she had given to Oz Mills. But he reshaped her wise little nuggets and deepened each teacherly thought and it was truth, even if missing from his black heart.

  At one point, he felt as if he had stepped aside to let the God of Evelene's Bible probe places he had never visited. He was the undone man. God seeped inside of him. Finally. The message he spoke into the rafters grew bigger than Jeb Nubey and he felt split in two. The one part lay collapsed on the floor as though killed, while the other soared to leave behind the lies of the past. Truth took on life. The Christ of Christendom had reached inside Jeb's puny clichés, and resurrected the truth—not Jeb's truth, but Christ truth. What he said surfaced from his wreckage as something more than a con job. The fact that such a wretched guy could crawl to Christ and find approval bewildered him. In front of the whole church he had to wipe his eyes. Surrendering to God was not like surrendering to the cops. Instead of jail, he got freedom. Finally.

  “This I know, good people! This I know—I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe!” Jeb felt himself step aside and watch in terror as the robe of his charlatan-self fell into a fire not of his own making. He knelt, arms outstretched to the rafters, face turned upward. “I believe,” he whispered. Then jubilation rose from the ashes of sheer terror.

  Florence Bernard rose to her feet and wept.

  Fern handed a handkerchief to Angel, who put her face in her hands.

  George Maynard stiffened, grabbed by the throat of invisible hands. Horace Mills's shoulders sagged and he breathed in and out in shallow pants. A few cried, “Hallelujah” and “Yes, Lord!”

  Doris Jolly, who had in the past taken her cue to run to the organ, instead turned around in the pew and, knees covered in sawdust, prayed.

  Even Ida May halted her relentless scratching and grew still.

  “I think we sometimes think we can play at church,” Jeb said as he rose to his feet. But he preached to his own self. “You're looking at the kingpin of that little game. Religion was my game of the week. Babe Ruth one day, God on Sunday.”

  The men chuckled, a quiet rolling back and forth of something they felt only males could understand.

  Jeb knew remorse and all at once believed his own words. “In this regard I stand before you the biggest fraud of all. I thought for much of my life religion was a refuge for women to run to and a haven where children could find comfort. Faith is those things—a refuge and a comfort—I'll agree, yet so much more. God, for this man, was a high and distant thunder, not something I could grasp. Religion, I thought, was for the weak, the feeble, or a game that little girls played.” He looked at Angel. “But I read of gentle Timothy who faced rock throwers, of Paul who faced both the religious and the big-time thinkers of his day. For his bravery, men tossed Paul into a lonely place, isolated from everyone he loved. It comes to me that a quiet little band-a God-lovers went before us, beat up for the words they spoke. Now, good folk, somethin’ springs from inside of me, a cry, like the voice of many waters. It says that for some, faith is no mere amusement. Nor do we set it on a museum shelf, once a thing to be admired and oohed at, but now covered in dust.”

  Most had bowed their heads. Florence sat back in her seat, but nodded as Jeb preached. If she had had doubts about him before, she bought his goods now.

  “Prayer is something we do on the way to somewhere else. A task, a chore given by God to man as an interlude in man's ever-important day.”

  The stillness that had settled across the congregation did not sway Jeb, but pushed him to continue. The words welled up inside of him, like a spring crossing its banks. Something, Someone was at work in him, and he couldn't have stopped if he tried.

  Jeb quietly said, “When every apostle gave up their life just as their Savior, Christ, had said would happen, did it ever come into their thoughts that what they died for would become the passive food of the church today? Did they know that their words would pass through the lips of lesser men like me? Yet these words should ring like a bell inside us. For me. For you. Whether or not I say these things or you hear them from some truly great preacher, truth can't be changed. We wish by heaven that we could make God in our own image and that our reputation would pass onto the next generation to give us what we think we deserve. It is just like a human to want our names remembered—increase, Self. Lessen, God. And then we take our last breath and our words haven't changed a thing. While our lies lay in ashes, a bright and shining sword slices
through the mess we make for ourselves. Our Christ is who he says he is, in spite of us, in spite of our schemes or the things we think we got to get. If you don't want to hear it from a fraud,” he said, pointing to his chest, then holding up the Bible, “you can hear it straight from God himself.”

  He finished something he had never intended to say, nor could he have said it on his own. The closing prayer brought most of the members to the front of the church to pray.

  Florence Bernard's skeletal fingers gripped Jeb's clasped hands. She murmured just so he could hear, “I am a fraud, too, Reverend. We all are.”

  Fern walked beside Jeb outside her house with a list for which she directed all of her attentions while he waited for the instant he needed, the moment when he would confess the remainder of his crimes to her. Under the guise of helping her plan for her folks’ arrival, he had followed her home. Angel took the other two to the parsonage to decide what to pack and what to leave.

  “I'll need some extra blankets for the sofa. I'll give my parents the bed. It's gotten so cold at night. Do you suppose Daddy will want to go fishing? You should take him.” She hesitated and lifted her face to see into Jeb's. If you want, I mean. Maybe the two of you should have some time to talk. Guy talk or whatever it is you men do off in a fishing boat.”

  “Fishing sounds like a good way to spend the day.” He answered her like his mind had taken off to go fishing.

  “The next order of business is dinner. I'll bet you could eat a horse after the message you knocked off. Truth be told, you made me cry. Are you listening, Philemon?”

  Jeb listened to try and decide at what point in the conversation to tell her everything. When she looked at him, he knew she was looking at the man she thought she knew. Waiting longer did not increase his chances for having a chance with her. But he grieved over the life that might have been.

  “Have you ever imagined yourself with someone of a lesser mind?” he asked.