Nazareth's Song (9 page)

Political hopeful Bryce threw his campaigning signs into the back of his pickup after a day of stumping in the next county. He was packing up to head away from the mob. When Jeb tapped on his window, he threw his hands up over his face and yelled, “Don’t shoot, Mister!”

“It’s me, Bryce. Jeb Nubey. You still got that tin thing you been politicking into every Saturday?” Jeb had hunkered down in the alley and crawled out to the walk, where he’d spotted Bryce.

“It’s all put away, Reverend. You needing a ride out of town, I’ll give it to you. But I’m not sticking around with things this hot. If they’d burn old Mills in effigy, they’d not think a minute about lighting fire to a politician. Mobs like their kind don’t take nicely to my kind, I’m afraid.”

“Can you string together your contraption for me so’s I can talk into it? Maybe just right in the back of your truck like you do when you give your speeches?”

Will had crawled up the alley behind Jeb. He sat on the ground with his back against the wall, panting. Down the street the rumblings and shouts grew more agitated as men swarmed through the growing crowd.

“Trying to yell at these men’d be like planning your own funeral, Reverend. Sorry I can’t help you out.” Bryce gunned his engine.

Jeb reached into the cab and turned off the gas. Before Bryce could protest, he’d tucked the man’s keys into his pocket. “Help me set up your stuff, Bryce. Then you can hide with Will here in the alley.”

Bryce hesitated until he saw that Jeb would not give in. “I’ll hook it up, but then you’re on your own.”

Working quickly, Bryce and Will ran the juice to the public-address system through a window in the front of the store. The tops of their heads peeped over a cracker barrel. Jeb stepped up onto the truck bed, where Bryce had a wooden platform wedged into the end. The public-address system squealed like corralled hogs when Jeb turned on the switch.

Asa Hopper hurled a rock through the bank window to the mob’s cheers.

“Boys, have a look this way!” Jeb yelled. More squealing from the ringing loudspeaker caught a few of the men’s attention. They stopped their rock throwing for a split second.

Hal Lincoln and several men ran with buckets down Waddle Street. Six more followed. A brigade spread out, starting from Front stretching down to Lincoln’s Barbershop, a fast-moving bunch of local boys not so inclined to run from Hopper’s mob.

“Fellers, have a listen!” Jeb tapped thrice on Bryce’s microphone.

“Stone the bank, boys!” Asa hurled another rock at the window and watched it ricochet right off the bank’s front door. Glass shards splintered and tumbled into the shrubbery. “Come out, Mills, and face the ones you stole from!”

“Mr. Hopper, you want to give us a listen?” Jeb had not seen Hopper since the day he had stormed out of the bank.

“You don’t know me,” Hopper yelled. Loaded to the gills with home brew, he stumbled back and then forward to throw another rock that missed the building altogether.

“Sure I know you. Know your wife and kids. Seen some of them in church,” answered Jeb. “I’m Reverend Nubey, and I work alongside Reverend Gracie at the Church in the Dell.” He had not called himself by that title until now. It caught in his throat like a moth.

“You just another old boy in Horace Mills’s back pocket. I seen you with him at the bank!”

A young boy no more than ten years old drew back to hurl a brick through Will and Freda’s window.

“Please, wait,” Jeb pleaded with the youth. Then he saw the soft curve of the boy’s face and said, “Roe Ketcherside, you don’t have no business with these men. Your momma’s done planned for your baptism down on Marvelous Crossing. I hope I don’t have to tell her you hurled a brick through good Will Honeysack’s window.” When he saw Roe hesitate, he said, “I don’t know how many grocery deliveries you’d have to make for Will to pay for what you’re about to do.”

Roe let out a sigh and said, “I hadn’t been baptized yet, Preacher.”

Will stepped out of the store and around the milk truck. When Roe saw him, he dropped the stone at his feet.

“Any of the rest of you want to throw rocks at your neighbor, here’s Will Honeysack in the flesh. Best grocery man from here to Hot Springs. You think one of those meat vendors from Hope would give you extra in your sack like he does, you should think again. No one I know of is as generous as Will and his good wife, Freda.” Jeb could not tell if Asa Hopper was listening to him or not.

Asa stumbled forward but then righted himself.

Jeb said, “Asa Hopper, maybe you been drinking again. You think? Maybe it’s that liquor that’s got you riled up more than Mr. Mills.”

“They all been drinkin’, Reverend,” said Roe. “I seen them out back behind that warehouse. One of them set fire to the place with a cigarette. After that, they all let loose like nobody’s business. They said they wanted food. Momma, she needs help with that, so I waited around to see if I could get a share.”

“You shut up, Roe!” A woman ran out of the tailor shop across the street where she had been hiding. “A-fore I box your ears!”

Jeb tipped his hat at the woman, who came up behind Roe and then grabbed him by his large right ear. “You needing food, Mrs. Ketcherside, I’ll give you some of what I got. They’s others that will help out too. Help you too, Asa, if you’ll allow it.”

Roe blanched at his mother’s presence. “Momma, I didn’t know you was downtown!” His mother turned him around and led him by a fistful of shirt to her old Chevy parked alongside the street, fussing the whole way.

Several men dropped their bricks in the street.

Asa threw another rock at the bank. Then he fell backward and passed out. A breeze of reason seemed to sweep over the crowd as Maynard and Floyd Whittington lifted him by the arms and pulled him toward the jail. Jeb could feel the tension lifting. By ones and twos, sheepishly or sullenly, the men began to scatter.

“Rest of you men want to help Mr. Lincoln put out a fire, he’d appreciate it.” Jeb took off his jacket and tossed it in the back of Bryce’s truck. He climbed out of the truck to run and help the bucket brigade at the barbershop.

“Wait, hold up!” Horace Mills stepped out of the bank. Two of his clerks embraced in the doorway behind him.

“You did a good job, Reverend Nubey!” said Mills.

Jeb liked the sound of
Reverend
rolling from Horace Mills’s tongue. He liked even more how Mills looked him in the eye and shook his hand before he returned to the bank and locked the door behind him. Jeb caught a movement at the window by the door. Mills’s daughter, Winona, offered Jeb a gentle wave before letting the blinds fall back into place.

7

Dear Lord,

I pray my boy gets well from this fever. If he does, I will give him to you. That is my vow. He has a speshul look about him for a baby. I saw a redbird on the churry tree branch this morning, right outside the winda where my child is sleeping. If sines tell tales, this baby will live and be marked for your good use, O God. I give my baby boy to you, Jochabed Nubey. I know he will live poor as you lived poor, my Savyur. So hep him, if you will, find riches beyond mony. It comes to me that sech thangs com high priced. Keep him well, Lord. Keep my Jeb well. He is yorn for your aposul or whatever you see fit for him.

Geneva Nubey

No one had ever called Jeb “Jochabed” except his own momma. It was her given name for him, even though his daddy never liked it. But until Jeb had unwrapped the parcel from Charlie, he had never known she kept a diary. Charlie’s wife, Selma, had found a trunk filled with Geneva’s belongings. When she read the passage about Jeb, she made Charlie wrap it up and send it off to him.

The place where Geneva had prayed for Jeb to be healed of a fever was marked with a strip of lace. Jeb held it next to his face. It smelled faintly of lavender and cloves. Jeb could imagine his mother now, standing beneath the cherry tree, the blossoms falling around her like snow.

He’d always believed that she held little hope for him to make anything good of his life. He read the passage again.

Ida May bounded down the hallway. “Dud, you awake?” She had wrapped Angel’s heavy cotton sweater around her and buttoned it all the way up to the neck. It made her look caterpillarlike. “Is Reverend Gracie going to die?” she asked.

“I’m awake, Littlest.” He reached for the Bible on the table next to the bed. Not too long ago he had not been able to read a single line in it. Now it was the first thing he went for every morning.

He pretended to read. But she hovered right in front of him and kept a bead on him until he looked at her. She repeated her question.

“Did Willie tell you to ask that, Ida May?”

“Not Willie. It was Philip told me about it. Philip said his sister told him she was skeered about her daddy dyin’.”

“Run take a look and see if your brother and sister are awake.”

“God wouldn’t let him die. Not a preacher.” She climbed onto Jeb’s bed and looked at the letter in his lap.

“Everybody dies. Even preachers, Ida May. But Reverend Gracie’s going to be fine. Don’t you go off and tell anyone what Philip said. That’s gossip.”

“You got a letter. I’m the only one that never gets letters. I can read now almost good as Willie. Who wrote you?”

“My brother, Charlie.” Jeb closed Charlie’s letter up inside his mother’s diary.

“Want me to read it to you? I can.”

“Go about your business and don’t worry about mine, Littlest.”

Ida May slid back onto the floor and ran out calling her sister’s name.

Jeb came to his feet, stretched, and then sniffed. The stench of charred barbershop lingered in the room, a smell that only Mrs. Bluetooth’s lye soap would leach from the clothes he had worn when he helped put out Lincoln’s fire. Sunday had so filled his day with the excitement of quelling the gossip that had been tossed from pillar to post around church about his single-handedly facing a mob that he had forgotten to open the mail he had picked up before coming home Saturday evening. The smoke-suffused clothes he had dropped on the floor Saturday night still lay untended. He stuffed the shirt and trousers into a burlap sack and tied it tight, then shivered as he pulled an extra shirt on over the union suit in which he had slept. It felt stiff against his neck, like newly woven cotton.

The morning had turned off cold, near bitter. The frost turned the blades of grass outside as crisp as a boy’s whistle. A fog rolled through the forest, low and crawling on a misty belly. Jeb stuffed a rag along the windowsill to try to keep out the cold. Sliding back onto the bed to pull the covers over his feet, he opened the Bible and read a passage until curiosity drew him back to the diary.

He could not imagine his momma thinking about him in such lofty ways. He had a picture of her in his mind, one painted by someone else. An aunt, her sister, was the only family member who had spoken about her. She’d rambled one evening about one thing and then another while canning beans. She told Jeb about how he had nearly died of scarlet fever, but matter-of-factly, like the matter weighed less important than storing up grub for winter. He wanted to recall her face in that afternoon sunlight and glean from the sight of it. But all he remembered was his aunt’s stooped posture and the way her low man’s voice softened whenever she spoke of her sister, Geneva.

Angel peeped inside Jeb’s doorway. “I can’t believe you’ve not made coffee yet. I still have to do everything around here, I guess.”

“You look rough, Biggest.” He stopped short of saying the redness in her eyes looked like she had cried for half the night.

“Nice thing to hear first thing of a morning, Jeb. You still don’t know nothing about women. It’s no wonder you can’t get one.”

“You look like a horse rode hard and put away wet.”

“We got a history test right after the bell. I can’t be late. So get up!”

“Angel, there’s a bag of fresh bar soaps setting on the kitchen table. Mrs. Honeysack gave them to us along with some eggs after church yesterday. I forgot to tell you. I thought you’d like those; they smell like women’s soap. Not something I’d want.”

When she stared back, Jeb said, “Or I can give them to someone that needs them.”

“I’ll take them, for Pete’s sake! Freda must have been happy you helped save her store.”

“That’s just a rumor.”

Angel paused. “Ida May said Reverend Gracie is about to die,” she whispered, even though she was the last person in the house to hear of it. “His kids was talking about him, like they was afraid of what would happen if they left for Cincinnati and all. I don’t think they wanted him to hear.”

“It appears their imagination’s got the best of them. Don’t pay them any mind.” Jeb didn’t want to think about it. Gracie had never told him that he was dying, but the thought had come to him on some of Philemon’s bad days. The preacher had never been one to tell much in the way of personal business. Jeb figured that if any bad news cropped up, he’d surely let him know. But Gracie’s poor appearance did not speak well of his health.

“I’m riding home with Beck Hopper from school.”

Angel did not get far down the hall before Jeb yelled, “No, you ain’t!”

“He’s sixteen. Nothing wrong with catching a ride with somebody you know, Jeb.”

“Everyone knows the Hoppers started the riot.”

“No one that matters. Besides, Beck would never do that, even if his daddy told him to.”

“Angel, I’m asking you nice not to run with the Hoppers—Beck or any of them.”

When she didn’t answer, Jeb said, “How you think that looks anyway? Asa Hopper starts a fire and I help put it out and then let you run around with his boy like we’re all just good buddies.”

“You never cared before what anybody thought of us. I don’t know why you care now. Jesus said to love your enemies.”

He stared at the rug as Angel returned to the kitchen to feed Ida May. Between Charlie’s parcel and Angel’s comments, a melancholy crept up inside him and nested. He pulled the banjo out from under his bed and closed the door. Not knowing how people would take to banjo music, he had not even played it when the kids were underfoot. It would be like Ida May to say too much to someone like Florence Bernard, who thought the least amount of lace in a girl’s hair was a sin.