Fallen Angels (30 page)

“In due time. Maybe I never should have left Texarkana in the first place. If I go back, maybe all the trouble I caused since then can be righted.”

“They'll bang you, Jeb. Don't go back!”

“Maybe I got to do what's right, Angel Sunday's coming.” That is, if Gracie tarried. “I'm going to tell the truth and then get my troublesome self out of the way. I learned some things about God these past few months, even if I didn't mean to. Amazing what you can do with a little book learning. He don't like it when you get in the way of his work. I been in the way of God's business ever since I came to this place. When I leave, everyone here—Fern, the Honeysacks, even the Wolvertons—will all hate me. But they'll know it wasn't God that sent me here. I won't cast no more shadows on his work. I can live with that.”

“Maybe God did send you here. What if he sent all of us here? It could be that he did and if so, I know why.”

“I don't follow you, Angel.”

“He knew me and Willie and Ida May needed you to help us out of a jam, Jeb. And we needed Fern. Do you have to make me say it, you jerk, you?”

“Say what?”

“I love you, Jeb!” She threw her arms around him and cried over her adopted and condemned-to-die daddy “Please don't leave me. I don't want you to go.” She sobbed louder than when she stood holding the rejected mail from Claudia.

Jeb wiped his eyes and set her down easy in the grass. I love you too, honey. But don't cry over me. I don't deserve anything good. You are full of goodness, heaven knows, you crazy girl. Everybody needs a girl like you around just for the gladness you bring, even when I'd like to pop you one sometimes. Always know that in case you ever question your worth.”

It came to him why he had never known the life of a good man. He had not sought it. Not until it was too late.

Jeb left Angel with the other two, the three of them listening to
Amos ‘n’ Andy,
stomachs packed with salt pork, gravy, and biscuits. Through the truck windshield the moon was bright like the bowl of a silver spoon. A trace of film formed around the perimeters of the window, but nothing as cold as frost. By the time he pulled into Fern's drive he wanted the truck engine to have warmed the cab. The only flowers he could find for a nosegay were the tickseed, a yellow wildflower with the face of a daisy. Angel had tied the flowers with a hair ribbon. Jeb considered the sacrifice worth an inch of growth on her part.

He rehearsed the things that he should say until he saw his eyes in the rearview mirror, the ones that had looked back at him when he had memorized Bible text for lies. The image punched a hole in any resolve that he had mustered. If any one word that came out of his mouth was possessed of truth, it was equally laced with grief. No explaining would with ease fill in the gap between the falsehood he had invented and reality. It was time for him to spill it out. Only truthful words with mortal wounds.

He saw an oncoming vehicle. Jeb slowed on the narrow road and drove the right tire onto the slanting roadside. The vehicle slowed and the window came down rapidly. Deputy Maynard pulled chicken from a bone with his teeth. His lips were shiny in the dusk. “Reverend Gracie, I was on my way out to your place to see you.”

Jeb remained calm, as calm as he had learned to be around the law in the last few months.

“Tomorrow a state policeman wants to drop by and ask you a few things. I sent a telegram to them Texarkana boys. Told them we had apprehended the crooks that have been on a spree from Texarkana up.” He tossed the leg bone into the dirt. “Somehow I figure this will tie in these two fools down in the jailhouse to that Texarkana murder that never got resolved. State police says a reward may be on its way to you.”

“George, forget the reward money.”

“Forget it, nothing: You were right beside me that capture.” He patted the side of his A-Model. “Glad I caught you. Nebula's making cobbler. Come by and have some, why don't you?”

“I'm meeting Fern for a malted.”

“Don't say? It's about time somebody wised up and married that little gal. Rich daddy and pretty to boot. You have yourself a fine evening, Reverend.” He drove away

Sparse green leaves and kudzu wound throughout the trees on Fern's lane around Long's Pond. The leaves not blackened by the cold were drawn and shuddering on the limbs. Vines rose from the earth and draped across the road, a net with a partial view of sky. How soon the feds or the Texarkana cops might want to question him for the sake of releasing the reward money could come within a few days. Jeb prayed for one last Sunday. He could make everything right if God obliged him.

Fern wore a new dress, or perhaps a dress new to the cooler season—a blue crepey knit. She waved from the window and then answered the door with her grading pencil still stuck behind her ear.

Jeb pulled it out and handed it to her. “Finish your school papers, schoolmarm?”

“Watch yourself, mister. I look harmless, but many's the poor bum who's fallen under the deadly spell of the schoolmarm. Your children all right?” One foot touched the top step as she peered toward the truck.

“Listening to
Amos ‘n’ Andy.
Maybe doing some school work. No, nix that last one. They don't seem to do much unless I'm standing right over them,” he said.

“Come in, unless … If you want, I'll grab my jacket. We should go.”

Jeb watched her run for the jacket. He took off his coat and stepped inside. She looked surprised when she saw him.

“Maybe it's too cold for a malted,” he said.

“Philemon, it's all right by me. But I can talk as easily here as down at Fidel's, if you prefer.”

“Here is fine. We'll sit at this table looking outside. Nice and bright.” He touched the tabletop, his shoulders widened as though he framed out the whole quaint scene. “I watched you through this winder from the road one night.” Maybe more than one night, he thought. He pulled the chair out from the table. “I notice you sit right here in this big window and work every single night of your life except Sunday. One day, you reserve for God.”

“Spying on me?”

“Admiring.” He held out the chair for her.

“May as well sit yourself down. I've got to make coffee now,” she said.

Jeb took her arm. “Coffee can wait. Fern—”

She did not resist him, but reached for a window pull and let down the shade.

The talk he had in mind did not coincide with Fern's interpretation of an evening designed for two. “You may want to pull the shade back up.”

“I like it down.”

“It's important that I tell you about me. You should know something.”

“I keep bearing about this important talk, Reverend. But I want you to know something. Freda Honeysack told me what you did for Mr. Wolverton.”

“Does it seem kind of warm in here?”

“Things like that get all over town. You really care about the people of this town. Everyone knows it.”

“The thing is, we need to talk about some things. Get them out in the open,” said Jeb.

“But as special as you are, the one: thing you should know about
me
is I don't rush easily.”

“I don't plan to rush you.”

She kissed him. “This is crazy. I'm getting my jacket and we're going out. No more important talk, Philemon. It's just that all the world is in a hurry. My father was always in a hurry. Hurry and make the grades, Fern. Run ahead, lead the pack.” She retrieved the jacket from the arm of the sofa. “I finally meet someone interesting and off you rush with the important talks. We're going; for malteds. I'll sip mine slowly and you—any way you want.” She slid away from him, out of the doorway.

Jeb turned the knob on Fern's electric lamp, the one with imported glass that lit the table where an underpaid rich deb graded schoolwork. He followed her out to the truck unsure of how she might look on a Saturday night inside the partially wrecked cab of a 1927 T-Model. In 1932.

The thing that Jeb realized about Fern was that she could talk the ears off Hoover. She spoke of nights sitting up with her sister making each other up with rouge and rolling each other's hair with old bed sheet strips when her father was just starting his practice. None of her family originated from Oklahoma but from California, transplants not far from a reservation. The force of the evening ebbed and flowed from Fern and her uncontrolled energy that brightened as the night slipped away from him.

“The closer my walk with God, the farther I needed to get from Oklahoma and from my father,” she said.

Jeb observed her mannerisms, the way she opened her napkin as though she expected it to weigh nothing at all. “Your folks not church-goers, I guess?”

“Never missed a Sunday. But everything my family does is all part of the Coulter machine. The Cogs that turn the wheels that supply the power for more. It is not as satisfying as you think to have no need of anything.”

For a moment, he would just like to imagine the pain of it.

She removed her jacket. The small stove in the corner of the drugstore warmed the only two malted customers present. Jeb did not want to react in way to stop up her philosophical wed. But she made him want to delve. “The whole country is desperate to have what your folks have.”

“I can't prove this, but I think that if you satisfy the nation's lack, she'll lose her soul.”

“What do you need when you don't heed anything? Is that what you mean?”

“The need to see. Affluence is a stumbling block.”

She spoke in broad, sweeping strokes. He wanted her to refine her answers to the present company. “What does Fern need?”

“A greater mind, a deeper pool of spiritual understanding. Humilitty. Want the whole list?”

He waited until they had both taken a breath. “Seems to me your shopping list is filled.”

She pushed aside her glass. “I wish that I could explain what you've done to me. In Oklahoma, I'm the girl no man could catch. Not that I'm any great prize. I know I'm not the queen of femininity. That is why I was wise to the designs of those types—snatch a girl and a piece of her dad's pie. But you don't care about those things, Philemon. I've never met a man with your spiritual leanings. See what you've done to me? I can't get enough of you.” She lowered her voice in case Fidel's wife eavesdropped behind the soda fountain. “That is the reason I can't be alone with you, if you have to know.” Her cheeks reddened.

Fern had bought into his pitch. He now felt less of himself than he had an hour before. If he told her the truth now, she would loathe him. “We should go now.”

“Not until you say what you've come to say. You didn't invite me here just to hear me wax philosophical over a malted.”

“Look who we have here,” someone said from behind Jeb.

“Oz, what are you doing here?” Fern sat back and folded her hands in her lap.

“I thought I'd surprise you. Had a bankers’ meeting with Uncle Horace and dear old Dad. Looked up and saw you through the window when we walked down the street for coffee.” Oz wore a long woolen coat that gave his lean appearance a look of authority.

Jeb pushed away from the table and rose to face Oz. “I was about to see Fern home. Good evening to yon.”

“I wouldn't mind doing that for you, Reverend.” Oz kept his eyes to Fern.

“It's all right, Oz. Philemon will see me home,” said Fern.

“Philemon. So that's it. Maybe tomorrow morning, then? A cup of coffee before I leave town?”

“Not this time, Oz.” Fern pulled on her coat.

“Night, Oz.” Jeb turned his back to Oz and assisted Fern with her coat. He walked her to the truck and felt Oz's eyes on him as he opened the rusted door.

“Never leave, Fern, with a man who can't pay for a box lunch,” said Oz. He turned and followed his uncle and father into Beulah's. As Jeb drove away, he glared through the window.

“That was uncomfortable,” she said as they motored toward Long's Pond. “Oz is a little low on manners.”

“Don't apologize for him. Not your place.” Jeb could not look at her. Oz was right. He couldn't afford a box lunch or a wife. The drive home tormented him; Oz's mocking grin toyed with his need to confess. When he finally brought her to her doorstep and left her with a faint, “Good night,” he turned to meander back to the truck cab and realized that he had not kissed Fern good night.

He returned and rapped against the door with the brass knocker he imagined she had screwed on herself, as every old fixture had been replaced with something new. The door opened and she smiled. One arm of the jacket dangled down her back, only half peeled from where he had interrupted her ritual dressing down for the night.

“I was wondering about you, Philemon. It seems like I have to remind you about so many things.” She remained one step higher and kissed him. Her fingers were long and reached up the sides of his face and around both his ears. Fern had controlled every part of the evening.

“You don't know me,” he said. He pulled her off the porch and they kissed until the moon warmed, pale, delicious. Like good cheese in hard times.

20

S
unday morning, the cold weather and the national problem with cash flow filled up the remaining spaces on the pews of Church in the Dell. Florence Bernard arranged a vase of mums for the communion table, a mound of yellows, pale spidery petals, and potent foliage. She called it a communion Sunday bouquet and placed a crocheted doily beneath the vase.

Greta Patton stopped in the aisle, woefully sickened by her mistake. “Florence, I forgot to buy the communion juice. Reverend Gracie said he needed it ready first thing, only my grandchild was sick. It completely escaped me.”

“Not to panic. Let's ask Freda to let us in the store. She won't mind,” said Florence.

“Buy and sell on Sunday? It's a sacrilege.” Greta paled.

“We'll pay her tomorrow then. Just pick it up today.” Florence grabbed her handbag.

Greta followed her down the aisle.

Florence met Jeb at the door. “Reverend Gracie. We've a little problem. Would it be possible to serve communion at the end of the service? Just delay it a tad? Someone forgot to stop by Honeysack's and pick up the fruit of the vine.”

Greta dabbed her mouth with a handkerchief, still a mite nervous. Jeb was feeling weak in his knees. Distracted by his own problems, the women's voices were nothing more than a distant humming, like mosquitoes. “Do whatever you have to do.” He walked past them, tucking the indicting confession into the folds of his sermon notes.