Fallen Angels (20 page)

“Fine education to be gotten in Texas.”

“What were your parents’ names?” Fern never let the conversation stray from the subject of Jeb's family.

“Charles and Geneva … Gracie,” said Jeb.

“You said you had a brother? So it was just the two of you. You came from a small family?”

Fern's query took on an uncommon weight.

“My mother died young. We were very poor, Fern.”

Fern digested his history and then said, “You must have had to work very hard to make it through school.”

“Oh, sure, sure. Work and study. Study and work. I believe I'll have another piece of that chicken. Say, this is really good.” It was.

Fern passed the platter to him. “So what kind of college did you attend to become a minister? Did you take Latin?”

Jeb cut a meaty piece from the chicken leg and chewed it for a moment. The Latin question baffled him. He remembered a small college in Texas that attracted men of the cloth. What country spoke Latin, he could not remember. He felt it was something akin to Spanish, but to be safe, he contrived to make the girl feel as though she did not allow him to enjoy his supper. Halting his knife midway through the cut he hesitated.

“You finish your meal,” she said.

Jeb fixed his sights on the plate and decided he would use the children's schoolwork as a reason to leave, even though it was Friday. “You ever been to Texas?” he asked.

“Oklahoma is where I grew up. I went down to Louisiana once, and then, of course, here, Arkansas. That's the extent of my world travels.”

“You've never heard of Texas Preacher's College, then?” He could not recall the name of any of the colleges back home.

“Never heard of any college by that name.”

“That's where I went to school.”

The answer satisfied her, he thought. All the talk of family had made him think of his daddy, Charlie senior. He had always favored his oldest boy and namesake over Jeb. Drunk once, he had said to Jeb while stupefied by his liquor, “You are destined for the rock piles at Benson Prison and I can't wring no better future put of your life than that. You was born under evil”—the fact that his hated brother Festus had shown up asking for money the night of Jeb's birth—”and evil will follow you for all your days.”

“You must have been close to your father if your mother died young,” said Fern.

“Close. Yes, we were tight. A tight family.”

“And godly, too,” said Fern.

Jeb sopped up the juice from his beans with a pinch of biscuit. “Yes'm. Godly. Especially that.”

12

M
ake the top of the letter look like the roof of a house.” Angel could not reach her back buttons of the church dress and had Ida May try. But her small fingers faltered at the task until Angel demeaned herself and let her brother finish the job.

“Like an A?” asked Jeb. He had made her stand and watch him scrawl out the alphabet.

“Now make two of them. You made an M.”

“See if you can read this letter, Charlie is a good reader, always was good in his books. He'll know if this is done wrong.” Jeb slid the letter across the table.

Angel read it aloud. “
Dear Charlie, I got me a gud job in a plas where the fud is gud and the likker is plenty
—you spelled
good, liquor, place, food
wrong and the last part isn't true anyway.”

“Keep reading.” Jeb retied his necktie.

“Dont you mary off befor we can get together agin and ti won on
.” Angel pushed the letter away. “Nobody could read this. I'll have to rewrite it. What did you do here at the bottom of the page? That's nothing but a big, fat X where your name goes?”

“It's a code between me and my brother in case someone else gets a-hold of it. I didn't ask for a sermonette, Sister Myra. I can tell that you can read my writing Maybe Charlie will just have to figure it out, too. I don't have no more time for this. I'll have this whole business figured out real soon and won't have to put up with your mouth every time I need a little help.” He folded the letter and tucked it inside his coat pocket. She liked the control and held it over his head. “Fact is, it wouldn't hurt you none to give a man a little help without landing all over his business with your nasty little opinions.”

“You think Miss Coulter is on to you?” Angel asked.

“I do not.” He really could not tell either way.

“She's been acting funny. I can't really say how, though.”

“You never liked her because she has her life all orderly and happens to be quite pretty to boot. Fact is, women are always jealous of a lady who is both beautiful and smart.” Jeb practiced his text again, two Scriptures from John.

“I say you're blind to Miss Coulter. Maybe she knows something. You notice how she never said a word again about our other school grades and such?”

“I told her I made a call and found out your grades were destroyed by a fire,” Jeb told her.

“You're nothing but a big nut if you think she'd believe that.” Angel lurched away from Willie, who had skipped a button and fastened her dress together until one buttonhole stood out, undone.

“Fern Coulter is a decent woman, fair minded. And unsuspecting.” That fact left Jeb carrying a melancholy empathy for Fern. “You think she really; likes it here in Nazareth?”

“How should I know?” Angel modeled in front of the mirror. One of the local women had loaned her a hat created for a woman of twenty.

“She talks about cities a lot, it seems. How things are better in city schools, how she came here to try and help out. Something tells me she'd leave here in a heartbeat if the right offer came along.” Jeb turned Angel around and refastened her buttons.

“You think you're the right offer, Jeb Nubey, you wrong as wrong can be,” said Angel.

“Maybe I'm just what she's been waiting for. Willie, grab my Bible. I got to get this show moving before I up and forget everything altogether.” He took the Bible, opened it to the marked page and studied the underlined Scripture. He recognized an
A,
an
M,
and a smallcase
e
It would, not be long until he could fly with the big boys, score with a woman of superior intelligence.

Angel seated herself back upon the farthest pew in the church, having found Fern Coulter entangled in too many threads of her life. She tucked herself one pew behind the thin-haired heads of the Wolvertons, although to mix with them, she said, was like social suicide.

Women with babies on the breast sat in the, rear while the men, sat politely three rows ahead, Doris Jolly played a gentle, sleepy hymn that sounded like the sun going down. Jeb asked if she could pick up the pace with an anthem but she could not readily recall one.

Evelene Whittington called from the second row for
A Mighty Fortress Is Our God
.

Doris covered her mouth as if to say, “Where is my mind today?” She chorded the chorus while the pews’ empty spaces filled with the stragglers.

“You think maybe we're having revival, like we hear about in other places?” Doris asked Jeb. But he was busy troubling over the name Nicodemus. He concluded that if he gave the man a nickname some might consider it a sacrilege. A word he learned meant wrong in the Big Man Upstairs's eyes. Nick, Nicko. Doris stared at him, expectant. “I'm sorry, Doris. Did you say something?”

Doris hadn't removed her bright, Blue Jay hat. “I asked if you thought revival was coming. Or have you not noticed how the pews are filling up with more folk every week?”

He had not noticed. Way back in the clouds of his memories he thought his momma might have said it a time or two—revival.

Doris lifted her right arm and sang the words to the sacred hymn. The congregation followed her lead and sang, although most of the men moved their lips as though they might suffer a whipping if they didn't. So they sang with a faint undercurrent of melody, faintly sweet like old cedar.

Jeb remained seated on the platform as had been his custom for the last few weeks. Doris did a fine job without him and it gave him a moment to massage away the headache that lodged itself above his right eye. Besides, he still had not learned the lyrics. And Doris's tendency to change up the song list every week only drove home the fact the minister did not know his hymns. So Jeb stared hard into the open Bible on his lap, giving the impression that he ascended to the pearly gates themselves.

Ezekial Hipps, who wore a plaid shirt with his overalls, and then a corresponding necktie, opened the rear door and offered the incoming deputy sheriff a funeral parlor fan. The sheriff refused the fan and fixed his eyes on the front of the church, his eyes like shooting gallery ducks, until he fastened a bead on Jeb. It was the same officer who had waited for Jeb at the parsonage the day he stopped at Marvelous Crossing. He ignored Ezekial's friendly graces and declined the only empty seat on the back row. Instead, he stationed himself next to the back door, a sentry.

Fern, although she had made it her objective every Sunday to see that Ida May and Willie made it to the front row fifteen minutes before Doris struck the first chord, ears washed and socks turned down, was nearly invisible. Five rows to the left, her small yellow hat nodded slightly in time to the music. Willie sat with Ida May alone on the front row.

Jeb knew Doris had softened the music to allow him the timing to take his place behind the lectern But many thoughts came to him, of Fern filling in too many, puzzle pieces, contacting the sheriff. He would not give Angel the satisfaction of saying she might be right about Fern. But what if she had only invited him to her home to question him? Fern was a garden spider and he the insignificant little fly. Doris hit the last key. Someone punctuated it with a hallelujah. Jeb could not recall the text from John. He said the first thought that came to him, “I think revival is coming.”

Doris sat back down on the organ seat. She hit a few well-laid chords.

He said it again.

Something stirred through the rows of faces; mothers lifted their heads from nursing infants. Jeb saw how the word stimulated and impassioned the church people. “Revival!” he said and his voice tremored.

“I think I feel something,” said an old man who barely stood and then fell back in his seat.

“But before revival, you have to be born again.” He hoped the name would spill out of him, so he began the sentence, “A man came to Jesus asking about being born again. That man—”

Florence Bernard clasped her hands together, ecstasy filling her senses and said, “Nicodemus “Nicodemus!” Jeb repeated happily. It seemed God played pinch-hitter with his morning message. “Before revival you must be born again. It is in this Book and no other.”

The deputy sheriff had steady, watchful eyes, as though waiting for a prod in the chest to bring him out like a snake from his hole.

Fern's face lifted through the parting of many heads, an emerging snow lily. Her eyes were comfortably blue in the natural chapel light. She turned and gave a slight three-fingered wave to the cop. Jeb pieced one and one together and figured out the lay of things—Fern had found him out and told that deputy. Jeb wanted to slap her for her expression of pure innocence instead of that of a traitor.

“Born again, from treachery,” he said, staring right at her. “Born again, from deceit.”

Florence's expression faded, like her thoughts had turned inward, found a target, and fired.

Jeb wondered if Mr. Bernard had awakened some place from his Saturday night binge and right then felt a poke from hell.

Fern rolled a stick of gum into a snail and popped it into her mouth. Flippant, Jeb thought. Right there in my face and flippant. He could grab her by those luscious curls and give her a shake. The cottage on the lake, it could have been his and theirs together. Reverend and Mrs.

He found his original thought, the idea that he had drummed up about how to conclude the query from Nicodemus to Christ. But a new idea congealed, a quick getaway through the door just beyond the American flag. He had never roused the church to a fever-pitch, but it seemed he could.

The deputy sheriff checked his watch.

“Brothers and sisters, I charge you on this day to choose who you will follow. If it be Christ, then come to your feet!”

Florence Bernard was the first lone apostle. But two more women joined her. The men were nudged by righteous females in churchy hats. Finally, he had his gauntlet.

“Now all across this room, join hands in an affirmation of faith. That's right, stretch out across that aisle and join hands with the person next to you.” Jeb came out from behind the lectern. The deputy sheriff had disappeared, but just through the partially open door Jeb saw a ring of smoke float by.

“Pray like you've never prayed. Like if you were Nicodemus and Christ was before you.”

A young mother broke through, her skinny toddler clinging to her dress. “Pray for me, Preacher!” She stretched her hand out to him.

Jeb glanced at the platform exit “I will, Sister.” He took her hand, bowed his head, and mumbled a few words. Her hand inside of his pricked his heart. A trusting hand clasping a snake. He should slither away. Not utter prayers. The young mother opened her eyes. “Touch her, oh, LORD and revive her—”

“Forgive me, LORD!” she said.

It seemed he could not breathe.

Jeb felt a jerk on his coattail. Angel had somehow pushed her way to me front. “What do you want?” He turned his back to the congregation.

“That deputy sheriff has come around again asking for you,” she said.

“I know. I have eyes.”

“Something about your truck. I think maybe he found it for you. Just thought I'd better tell you,” said Angel.

Jeb threw back his arms and raised his hands. “Praise be, praise be, we can all rejoice! We are redeemed.”

Fern had a look of sincerity about her.

The deputy sheriff, the same deputy pasting wanted posters around the county with Jeb's mug, stared at him. Not six inches from Jeb's face. “We might be on to something. Your truck have a dent in the right-hand fender beneath the headlamps?”

Jeb considered how he might stomp the man that had put a dent in his brother Charlie's truck. “Not originally.”