The Blessed (3 page)

As Sadie Rose rambled on about how Lacey needed to do this or that to be sure Rachel stayed healthy, Lacey fastened her eyes on the child playing with her new doll. Her mind wandered back to that first day when Preacher Palmer had talked of carrying the baby over to the city of Lexington. Miss Mona squashed that idea before it much more than got out of the preacher’s mouth. While what Preacher Palmer said pretty much went as law for everybody else in their corner of the woods, in the house it was Miss Mona’s words that mattered most. She never said them loud or anything, but when she spoke up to the preacher, he paid her mind.

Lacey could remember as well as if it had been yesterday the feel of baby Rachel in her lap as she tried to spoon tiny bits of warm milk mixed with honey into her mouth. Of course they hadn’t been calling her Rachel yet. It was a week before they settled on Rachel as the baby’s name. After Lacey’s own mother. A good Bible name, Miss Mona said. But that day with the preacher’s words clanging in the air overtop the baby’s pitiful mewling cries, the milk had dribbled out of the baby’s mouth. So Lacey had dipped a cotton handkerchief into the milk mixture and let the child suck it off the rag.

Miss Mona had looked right straight at Preacher Palmer and said, “The Lord set that baby down on our doorstep, Elwood. He was surely intending on us keeping her until her mother got able to come back for her.”

“You can’t take care of a baby, Mona. You can’t even take care of yourself.”

The preacher sounded agitated, but Lacey hadn’t looked at him. She didn’t let her eyes light on him very often. It wasn’t exactly that she was afraid of him, but he did have a way of making her uneasy.

Miss Mona’s voice was soft and patient. “But Lacey can. Maybe that’s why the Lord sent her to us first. Because he knew what was coming.”

That was a little over four years ago now. Miss Mona would have said the Lord knew this day was coming too. This day with Sadie Rose sliding her eyes all around the room while she figured out the best way to say what the women of the church had sent her to say. Lacey guessed she should have given Miss Sadie Rose some slack instead of turning her contrary ear toward her, but it was Miss Mona who knew all the right answers. The answers the Lord handed down to her straight from heaven or put on the pages of Miss Mona’s Bible plain as the morning daylight coming in the east windows. Lacey wasn’t privy to those answers. Any answers she was looking for seemed to be as hard to see as the bottom of the well out back.

“How old are you, Lacey?” Sadie Rose asked. She didn’t need Lacey to answer. She knew already. She just wanted the number to come out of Lacey’s own mouth.

“I’ll be twenty in May.” Lacey got up and filled their cups with the tea left in the pot. She needed to be moving. She put her hand on Rachel’s head. When the little girl smiled up at her, Lacey asked, “What are you going to name your new baby doll?” Maybe if she could turn the woman’s attention back to Rachel, she’d forget her other questions.

“Maddie,” the little girl said at once. “Like in the stories.”

Miss Sadie Rose smiled at Rachel. “What stories are those?”

“I can’t tell you. They’re secret,” Rachel said without looking up.

“Oh.” Color rose up in the woman’s cheeks. She wasn’t accustomed to anybody keeping secrets from her.

Lacey busied herself setting out the cookies Sadie Rose had brought on Miss Mona’s prettiest plate and hoped the woman wouldn’t demand more from the child. The stories weren’t anything important. A bad feeling was growing inside Lacey about whatever words Sadie Rose was going to finally spit out at her, and confessing to making up silly stories about talking animals and fairies and such whenever Preacher Palmer wasn’t in earshot didn’t seem to be something that Lacey should do right then.

“You make a fine sugar cookie, Miss Sadie Rose.” Again Lacey tried to ease the conversation in another direction. “I’m the worst at baking. Miss Mona tried to teach me, but my biscuits are always hard as rocks and my cakes flat as cornpones. It’s a good thing you ladies are always baking cakes and pies for the Reverend or he’d never get anything sweet.”

But Sadie Rose didn’t take a cookie off the plate. She wasn’t about to be distracted again. The sun would be sinking soon and she had to get home in time to stir up her cookstove fire and get her family supper. “And how long has it been since your father brought you here to see to Miss Mona’s needs?”

Again the answer wasn’t a mystery, but Lacey didn’t see any need in trying to slip out of the noose now. “I was a few months past my thirteenth birthday.”

“Already a near grown woman. Plenty of girls start looking for a husband along about that age,” Sadie Rose said.

“Miss Mona always told me there wasn’t any need being in no hurry.” Lacey bit into a cookie. Its sweet taste didn’t make the moment any sweeter.

“She was right enough about that. But you’re more than near grown now, Lacey. You’re every bit a woman, and there’s some that think it’s not exactly proper you living here with the preacher, seeing as how our dear Mona has passed on.”

Lacey put the cookie down. It was time to look whatever was coming square in the face. “Then what are they thinking I should do? It’s not like any fellows are coming around to knock on my door.”

“I never noted you giving any of the fellows the first bit of encouragement.” She spoke the words as if pointing out some lack on Lacey’s part, while any pretense at a smile disappeared from the woman’s face.

“True enough,” Lacey admitted. She’d never met the first man she wanted to give the kind of encouragement Miss Sadie Rose was meaning. Lacey had hopes that man might be out there somewhere, but so far he hadn’t shown up in the Ebenezer community.

Rachel must have heard the sharp edge that had come into their voices. She put her new doll under her arm and climbed up into Lacey’s lap to run her finger and thumb up and down the edge of Lacey’s apron. She’d been doing that since she was a little baby.

Lacey tightened her arms around the child as she looked across the table at Sadie Rose. “And there’s Rachel.”

“She’s not your child, Lacey. She wasn’t even Mona’s child, though the child called her mother. Strange as it seems in a community small as ours, nobody knows whose child she is. It’s always been my guess that somebody carried her in here from some other town. That there must have been some sort of shame about it all. No proper marriage or such.”

Lacey wanted to put her hands over Rachel’s ears and stop the words from going in. Preacher Palmer had told her often enough not to talk back to the churchwomen. To remember her place. Most of the time, Lacey did. But this time she stared straight at Miss Sadie Rose’s face and spoke her words with force, like testifying to some basic truth of the spirit. “Whatever the reason for her being here, I know whose child she is now. She’s mine.”

Thank goodness, Rachel hadn’t been bothered by their words. With Lacey’s arms strong around her, she’d snuggled down in Lacey’s lap and gone to sleep. And more goodness thanked, Sadie Rose had given up talking sense to Lacey and gone on home to tend to her own family.

Now Lacey sighed as she turned away from letting her eyes dwell on little Rachel and went to stir up the embers in the cookstove to start the preacher’s supper. Preacher Palmer would know Miss Sadie Rose had come to call. The cookies on the table gave evidence to her being there. If he knew the purpose of the woman’s visit, it could be he might send Lacey away. Lacey would just have to pray that if that happened, he’d let Rachel go with her. He had never shown all that much interest in the child. More times than not, the very sight of her seemed to be a hurt to his eyes.

Miss Mona said that was because he’d wanted babies of his own and looking on Rachel reminded him of that loss. A loss Miss Mona always took complete blame for. She cried sometimes when Lacey was reading about Hannah in the Bible. Said she supposed the Lord never answered her prayers for babies because she couldn’t have ever willingly surrendered her baby completely to the Lord the way Hannah had done Samuel.

But then she’d mop up her tears with her handkerchief and smile as she said, “But the Lord, he answers prayers in all sorts of ways. Now I’ve got both you and Rachel. Some blessings pop up like mushrooms around a dead tree stump and surprise you when you least expect it.”

Lacey needed a few of those mushroom blessings right now.

3

It wasn’t right. Lacey knew that as she stood beside Preacher Palmer in front of his preacher friend. It was worse than not right. She felt the wrongness of it down through the core of her being, all the way out to her toes. But nobody with the first lick of sense expected everything to go right all the time. At least nobody who had piled up a few years of living. Sometimes a body had to do what had to be done, right or wrong, to make something more important right. That’s how this was. She didn’t have any other choice. Not if she wanted to keep mothering Rachel.

Rachel stood beside her, her face pressed up against Lacey’s leg so hard her nose was bound to be mashed sideways. The little girl didn’t like strangers. Lacey figured that was because of how she’d once been left lonesome on the preacher’s doorstep, even though there was no way the child could actually remember that. All she had ever known was Miss Mona and Lacey taking care of her. Lacey put her hand on Rachel’s back and held it steady there. She wasn’t sure which of them was drawing the most courage from the other’s touch.

“We come here today to join this man and this woman in lawful matrimony.”

The Reverend Williams had a deep voice, somber and cold. Lacey imagined him preaching on hell and shuddered. Or maybe it wasn’t his woeful sounding voice so much as the matrimony words he was intoning that made her shudder. In her fanciful dreams, the idea of marrying had joy, like July sunshine warming a meadow full of daisies with butterflies all aflutter and meadowlarks trilling their songs. But here in this man’s parlor, Lacey couldn’t imagine the first bit of joy—only condemnation.

Condemnation was what Preacher Palmer claimed to be trying to keep away from his door, but Lacey had doubts this ceremony would stop the church ladies from talking. None of them had come along to the town to witness what their gossipy imagining had brought about. The only people in the small parlor besides Lacey, Preacher Palmer, and Rachel were the Reverend Williams with his resonating voice of doom and his thin, sharp-featured wife who stared at Lacey as though she were some kind of Jezebel. Lacey supposed churchwomen were churchwomen wherever, and she was just as glad none of the Ebenezer churchwomen were there to add their frowns to the load of misery Lacey was already feeling.

Preacher Palmer said there wasn’t any need in a crowd gathering. Especially since Miss Mona hadn’t been in the ground overly long. That’s why the church ladies weren’t going to be all that happy with Preacher Palmer’s solution to their worries about the propriety of Lacey continuing to sleep under the preacher’s roof.

In a separate bed yet for a while. There wouldn’t be any way the women could know that, but at least Lacey had managed to finagle that promise out of Preacher Palmer. How long she could hold him to it, she didn’t know. Folks thought preachers were something special with spiritual fortitude that overcame normal lusts, but Lacey had been in the preacher’s house long enough to know he was a man like any other. Maybe worse than some, because of the way folks thought the Lord spoke through him like that gave him extra privileges.

While Miss Mona lived, Lacey had been able to scoot away from that bothersome look that came in his eyes at times. Early on she’d learned to hide behind Miss Mona, who understood the temptations that could beleaguer a man, even a man of God. Miss Mona was as good a person as Lacey was ever likely to meet this side of heaven, and she did admit to loving Preacher Palmer beyond reason, but she didn’t close her eyes to the fact that he wasn’t as saintly as some imagined him to be. No man other than Jesus Christ was ever perfect, she told Lacey.

“Look at King David,” she’d said once. “That man wrote psalms that so overflow with love for the Lord that we’re still reading and storing his words in our hearts today. And the Bible says David was a man after the Lord’s own heart. Imagine that. And yet he was brought low by lust.”

The word “lust” seemed to sit uncomfortable on Miss Mona’s tongue. Her cheeks burned red, but she didn’t change the word. And while she never once mentioned Preacher Palmer when she was talking about King David’s falling to temptation, she did make sure Lacey knew to take a bath where no wrong eyes could see.

Now wrong eyes were poking clear through her, and Lacey felt like she was tiptoeing along the edge of a crevice that might spring open wider and swallow her whole. But she’d always had good balance. Never once tumbled off the stepping-stones in the creek back in the woods where she and Junie used to play before their mama died. And what had she been doing but balancing ever since? Keeping out of Widow Jackson’s way. Protecting Junie. Staying away from Preacher Palmer’s eyes while seeing to Miss Mona.

There was always some kind of balancing to do in life. Standing there with the matrimony words pounding into her ears was no different. Preacher Palmer was on one side with a frown that could summon up storm clouds, and Rachel was on the other side with enough sunshine to make whatever storm Lacey had to run through worth getting soaked down with trials of the spirit.

And though Miss Mona had moved on up to heaven, she had still somehow come through to help Lacey balance things out. At least that was how it had seemed to Lacey the night she and Preacher Palmer sat at the kitchen table to come to their agreement while Rachel settled into sleep in the upstairs room.

“Deacon Crutcher has brought to my attention that there’s some talk in the church,” Preacher Palmer pronounced after he told Lacey to sit down across from him.

No more than two days had passed since Sadie Rose had shown up on their doorstep with her sugar cookies, rag doll, and busybody advice. It appeared the woman was not willing to leave the issue of the decency of the preacher’s living arrangements solely in Lacey’s hands.

The preacher’s eyes narrowed on Lacey as he waited for her to say something, but she made out like she didn’t have the first idea of what he was talking about as she looked down and began rubbing a spot of flour off her apron.

When the silence dragged on too long, she finally murmured, “There’s always talk in the church.”

That was God’s own truth. Three people got together under the Lord’s roof, and two of them would be talking about the other one not doing something proper. Before Miss Mona died, Lacey hadn’t been to church services for a good while. Miss Mona had lacked the strength for the walk to the church building, but they observed the Sabbath with their own worship hour by reading out of the Bible and singing a hymn or two.

Miss Mona knew how to bring the Lord down and make him real for Lacey. She experienced more worship in one Sunday with Miss Mona than she had in the two dozen Sundays since sitting on the hard pews listening to Preacher Palmer. The fault was in her. She knew that. Since Miss Mona passed on, Lacey seemed resistant to the word of the Lord. As if he’d done her a wrong turn and she didn’t see the need of offering herself up for another round of sorrow.

As she waited for Preacher Palmer’s next words, she kept her eyes on her apron and swallowed down the sigh that wanted to heave out of her. It appeared that such bouts of trouble came along to seek a body out even when that person was trying to stay small and hidden from the notice of the Lord. And the preacher.

“True enough,” Preacher Palmer agreed in his pastor voice. “But a church can’t long stand united when that talk is about their leader.”

She didn’t know what to say to that, because she couldn’t deny the truth in his words. In her mind she was already wondering what she could use to carry off the books Miss Mona had given her over the years and hoping the preacher had another house in mind that might need a hired girl. One that would take her and Rachel, but even as she thought it, she knew there wouldn’t be any such house as that. He’d simply be shed of them both. Soon as he found Lacey a place, he’d carry Rachel down to the city to turn her over to whoever would take the child off his hands.

Lacey folded the edge of her apron over and then over again. Just the thought of that, of Rachel being given over to strangers, loaded down her heart with so much pain that it seemed to be sinking down into her stomach. How could the Lord take Miss Mona and leave them in such a predicament? Miss Mona had always prayed and done what was right. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe now that Miss Mona was gone, Lacey hadn’t prayed enough. If so, she was willing to make some changes.

She pushed out her words. “Miss Mona would tell us we need to pray over those who see problems where there aren’t any.”

“You can rest assured I pray over my people every day. Not an hour goes by that I don’t reach up for the Lord’s hand in guidance. I walk in prayer.” Preacher Palmer’s voice didn’t sound a bit prayerful. Instead he sounded almost angry. “I never had need of Mona telling me to pray.”

“I wasn’t aiming to say you did,” Lacey said softly. “But I do miss her prayers for me.”

Preacher Palmer shifted uneasily in the chair across from Lacey, as if her mention of Miss Mona’s prayers smote him. Lacey guessed the grief was even heavier on his heart than it was on Lacey’s after the years the two of them had been together. Longer than Lacey had lived, Miss Mona had told her once.

Lacey sneaked a look up at him. His face was hard as stone as he stared out toward the door. His nose was long and sharp, and his eyes more gray than blue and just as sharp in a different way. His long legs twitched a little, and she thought he was wishing he could just get up and go do some walking and praying right then. But he stayed in the chair as silence fell over them. The fire popped in the cookstove and the teakettle sang as the water in it began to steam. Lacey hadn’t washed the dishes from their supper yet, and she wished she could get up, pour the water in the pan, and make the dishes rattle as she washed them clean. The silence overtop them was too loud. Especially after she’d invited in Miss Mona’s shadow to sit down with them.

She stared back down at her apron and waited. Preacher Palmer opened and closed his hands on the table as if his rheumatism might be paining his fingers. She thought of offering to fetch him a hot rag to bring him some comfort, but she didn’t move. Instead as the silence between them deepened, she allowed her mind to slide away from the worrisome feeling growing in the kitchen to the story she’d been making up for Rachel that morning.

Now that Rachel had the new rag doll, she wanted a Maddie story every time, and Lacey had put Maddie in a heap of trouble in the story that morning. Had her scrambling up a tree to get away from a wildcat. They’d left her stuck up in the tree, too scared to climb down, because as Lacey explained to Rachel, what a person could do in a panic, the same person might not be able to do when the panic leaked out of them. Lacey was thinking she might have to bring fairies into the story to sprinkle some courage dust on Maddie. Lacey liked putting fairies into her stories even though Miss Mona had warned her that the Bible didn’t make the first mention of fairies. She had suggested Lacey put angels in her stories instead, but it didn’t seem right to be making up foolish little stories about angels. Fairies, yes, but not angels. Angels came down from the Lord, but fairies were nothing but a flight of imagination.

Courage dust. That was what she needed right at that moment, but the fairy thoughts deserted her when the preacher started talking again.

“There’s just one thing to do. We’ll have to get married.”

“Married?” Lacey’s voice came out in a squeak. Her eyes flew up to Preacher Palmer’s face and stayed there even after she saw that look in his eyes that brought uneasiness down on her. He couldn’t have said what she thought he said. He couldn’t be suggesting she marry him.

“It’s the answer the Lord gave me.” His words came out like he was revealing a truth in one of his sermons. The Lord saith. “The only answer.”

She stared at him and wanted to laugh. He was older than her own father. A man with deep wrinkles around his eyes and gray in his beard and bony hands with bent and knobby fingers that she couldn’t imagine ever touching her in any kind of caress. But he kept looking at her, waiting for her to say something, and she forgot about wanting to laugh. Instead she wanted to run out the door and go throw herself on Miss Mona’s grave. Maybe crawl in there with her. Marrying Preacher Palmer would be about the same thing.

Her eyes popped open even wider at the thought. “I couldn’t—”

The preacher held up a hand to stop her before she could get out the necessary words. “You have to.”

As though to make sure she didn’t escape, he reached across the table to grab her. His fingers dug hard into her upper arms, even though she sat perfectly still and didn’t try to pull away from him the way she wanted to. His eyes burned into hers as he said, “It’s the only way you can stay here with Rachel.”

He knew the thing to say to get her attention. He was a preacher, after all. He knew about people’s weaknesses and the power of love. When she just kept staring at him with her mouth hanging open, he began talking in a calm voice the way she’d heard him talk to those in his church flock who’d been knocked low by some trouble.