The Scent of Lilacs (2 page)

Jocie couldn’t keep from laughing. “You are without a doubt the ugliest dog I’ve ever seen, but I didn’t tell God I wanted a pretty dog or even a cute dog. Just a dog, and you are a dog.” Jocie stared at him. “I think.”

The dog stood up and trotted ahead of her. For a minute Jocie was afraid he’d just remembered where home was, but then he stopped and sat down beside her bike as if to say, “Let’s get on with it. It’s going on supper time.”

Jocie didn’t try to chase him off after that. She didn’t try to get him to follow her either. She had that line practiced out for her father. She got on her bike and started pedaling. She didn’t look back even once to see if the dog was following. It was a test. Like Gideon and the wool with dew on it or not on it to prove God really was talking to him in the Bible. She decided if she got to the barn this side of the house and looked back and the dog was still there, then he was hers. She really wanted to look back when she passed by the Wilsons’ house, but she kept her eyes on the road in front of her. It would be cheating to look back before she got to the barn.

Just in case the dog was still chasing after her bike, she began
making up reasons they needed a dog. He could be a watchdog to let them know when people were coming. Maybe in time to lock the gate if the people were carrying sacks of zucchini or cabbage. Her dad could try out his sermons on the dog instead of on Jocie. Taking care of a dog would teach her responsibility, since she’d have to feed him and brush him and stuff. That should please even Aunt Love—the more responsible part. The dog could be somebody she could talk to who wouldn’t come up with Bible verses for answers. Aunt Love had to have the whole Bible memorized. No wonder she couldn’t remember to turn off the soup anymore. All the Scripture she had stored up there in her head didn’t leave any room for anything else.

Jocie didn’t come up with a name for the dog until she slid off her bike in front of the porch and the dog started barking at Jezebel. Great tremendous barks. Thunderous barks. Zebedee.

“Zebedee,” she yelled. The dog quit barking long enough to look over at her and give her that stupid doggy grin again. More reasons she could add to why they had to keep him. He had a name. And how could you not keep a dog who kept grinning at you?

Jezebel jumped up on the porch railing and yowled. Aunt Love came outside and grabbed the broom they kept by the door to sweep stray leaves off the porch. She waved it menacingly at Zebedee. “Get that mangy excuse for a dog away from Sugar.”

Aunt Love called Jezebel Sugar, but in spite of the fact that Jezebel’s fur was white like sugar, there was nothing sweet about her. Her cat heart was black. Definitely a Jezebel. She lived to pounce out of the shadows at Jocie’s ankles at the top of the stairs. Her bed of choice was Jocie’s favorite navy blue shirt. She threw up hairballs in the middle of Jocie’s bed. Worst of all, if Jocie ever had a weak moment and tried to make friends, Jezzie would pretend to want Jocie to rub her before swiping at Jocie’s hand as soon as it was close enough. The cat never pulled in her claws.

So when Jocie yelled at Zebedee again, it wasn’t to save the cat. It was to save the dog. But it was too late. Still barking, Zebedee put his front paws on the railing under the cat and got too close. Jezebel landed a quick swipe across the dog’s nose. Beads of blood popped out.

Jocie winced and grabbed for the dog at the same moment that Aunt Love swung the broom. Jocie got a face full of broom straw and landed in the striped grass beside the steps. She tried to pull the dog with her, but Zebedee wriggled free and ran back over to the railing under the cat, who was swishing her tail and licking her paws in victory.

The front door opened, and Jocie’s dad stepped out on the porch to join in the fray. He yelled something, and Aunt Love quit swinging the broom and leaned on its handle as she clutched her chest. Jocie wasn’t worried. Aunt Love clutched her chest a lot.

Jocie scrambled out of the striped grass and went after Zebedee again. The dog had quit barking. Instead, he was studying Jezebel with the same assessing look he’d given Jocie out in the woods, but his tail was as still as a stone. When Jocie started to grab for the dog, Zebedee turned his bloody nose toward her and slid his lips back in another grin as if to say, “Let me take care of this.”

Jocie froze in midgrab.

The dog turned back to the cat, let out one thunderous bark that made the porch windows rattle, leaped straight up like a kangaroo, and popped Jezebel with his nose. Jezebel went flying off the rail and barely had time to get her feet under her before she splattered on the wooden porch.

Aunt Love turned loose of her chest and threw the broom at the dog. The dog jumped nimbly out of the way, then sniffed the broom before he trotted over to Jocie. Jezebel, her belly brushing the porch, slunk to the door, where Aunt Love scooped her up and disappeared inside with a muttered, “That mongrel digs up the first flower, I’ll shoot him myself.”

Jocie pulled Zebedee out of the flower bed next to the porch and stared him straight in the eye. “Bad dog,” she said.

“Try not smiling while you say it,” her father said as he sank down on the porch steps. He looked up a moment as if he were checking the sky for some kind of message from God. Then he looked back at the dog and said, “Okay, let’s hear it.”

“His name’s Zebedee.”

“He told you that, I guess.”

“No, of course not. He can’t talk. At least he hasn’t yet, but you heard him barking. Definitely thunderous. You know, your sermon about James and John last month.”

“Ah, sons of thunder.”

“Zebedee. Zeb for short.”

“Hold on. Let’s not get carried away,” her father said as he stared at the dog, who sat in front of him politely listening to every word. “He may belong to somebody else.”

Jocie stroked the dog’s head. “Does he look like he belongs to anybody?”

“No, he looks like the kind of dog nobody would want.”

“He’ll look better after I give him a bath and some food.” At the word
food
, Zeb wagged his tail. “He may not be very pretty, but he’s real smart. You saw how he handled Jezebel.”

“The cat’s name is Sugar,” her father said.

“You call her what you want to, and I’ll call her what she is,” Jocie said. “I mean, Jezzie’s pretty, but who cares about pretty? Smart’s better.”

Her father laughed, and Jocie knew she had him. But just to be sure, she threw out some of her practiced reasons to keep the dog. Zebedee used some of his brains and held his paw out to her father.

“You’re always saying the Bible says to ask, and I’ve been asking. So maybe God sent him to me,” Jocie said.

T
hat night at supper, David tried to summon up a thankful heart to add to Jocie’s as she said grace. The Bible taught to be thankful in all things, and he supposed that could apply to what was surely the ugliest stray dog in the county, maybe the state. The dog had latched onto Jocie as if she’d raised him from a pup instead of just finding him in the woods a few hours ago. Even now he had his nose up against the screen on the back door, his eyes locked on Jocie and his ears cocked almost as if he knew what she was saying. David wouldn’t have been surprised to hear an amen woof.

Jocie asked the usual blessings on the food before saying, “Thank you, Lord, for Zebedee. I’d begun to worry you didn’t mean for me to have a dog, but Aunt Love says the Bible says to keep asking, so that’s what I did. And I thank you that you let Zebedee find me.”

David heard Aunt Love pull in a little puff of breath and knew her heart wasn’t feeling a bit thankful. She’d hardly been able to put supper on the table for worrying about her cat. After the confrontation on the porch, Sugar had ensconced herself on the top shelf of the bookcase in the living room and had snarled at anyone who came close, even Aunt Love.

Jocie was still praying. “I promise to take good care of him. And, Lord, please give Daddy a good message for the people at Mt. Pleasant in the morning, and watch over Tabitha wherever she is. Amen.”

“Amen,” David repeated after her.

Aunt Love unfolded her napkin and spread it across her lap. No amen passed her lips. Aunt Love had been living with them ever since his mother had died four years ago—another time Jocie had been on the front lines for heartbreak. One late fall day he’d come home from the paper to find Jocie sitting beside his mother’s body in the freshly dug tulip bed. Tears were making dirty tracks down Jocie’s cheeks and dropping on her grandmother’s hands.

David had dropped down beside them in the dirt and cried like a baby. That had scared Jocie more than finding her grandmother dead among the tulip bulbs, but he couldn’t help it. He’d felt as if God had reached down and poked him right in the nose to see if he could get up off the ground one more time. And he’d wanted to stay down.

Jocie had hugged and patted him, but that had made him wail louder. Finally she’d jumped on her bike and pedaled the two miles to town to get Wes out of the pressroom. Wes, who had never darkened the door of a Hollyhill church in the ten years he’d known him, had gotten David back on his feet that night before darkness fell over the farm and his soul.

Wes had listened to his story and then said, “It ain’t God knocking you down, son. It’s life. God’s right here beside us, taking hold of your hand to pull you up.” Wes had leaned down close to his face and almost whispered, “You take a look at this child here and tell me that ain’t so.”

David had listened to Wes, because if anybody knew about life knocking a person flat, it was Wes. David had let Wes and Jocie pull him up and had gone about doing what had to be done. By
the time the funeral was over three days later, he’d even been able to tell Jocie God must have needed help with the tulip planting in heaven.

But they’d needed help too. At the time, he’d thought Aunt Love would be able to step in where his mother had stepped out and help him make a home for Jocie. But Aunt Love had never had children, never been married. Sometimes he wondered if she could even remember being a child. She could cook, or at least she had been able to when she first came to live with them. Now she tended to let things burn or to forget whether she’d already added salt to the stew. Still, he didn’t regret giving her a home. She’d needed a place, and they’d needed family.

Aunt Love smoothed down the lace collar on her dark purple dress and passed David the new potatoes boiled in their skins, a gift from Matt McDermott, one of the deacons at Mt. Pleasant. He figured he had the McDermott family’s vote on the interim job even before they heard his sermon in the morning. Last week they had brought him cabbage and broccoli. He wondered when their tomatoes would start getting ripe. Even Jocie liked tomatoes.

“What are you preaching on tomorrow morning?” Aunt Love asked him.

“The Lord hasn’t laid a sure message on my heart as yet.”

“Well, don’t you think it’s high time he did? The vote’s tomorrow night.”

“I’m not worrying about the vote.” David felt guilty as the lie passed his lips, so he added, “Well, not overly much anyway. If the Lord wants me to serve there, he’ll give me the vote.”

“If they had any sense, they’d offer you the job full-time,” Aunt Love said.

Jocie looked up from her potatoes. “Why don’t they call you as their regular pastor, Daddy? I hear them telling you they like
your sermon on the way out every week. That must mean they like you.”

David put his fork down. “Church people think they have to say that to preachers. Even when they sleep through the sermon. But even if they really do like my sermons, there’s more to leading a church than preaching, Jocie.”

“You mean visiting the sick and keeping folks from fussing? You do all that too.” Jocie spooned three or four potatoes out on her plate. “Except, of course, at Brown’s Chapel, and nobody could have made those people happy.”

“That’s God’s own truth,” Aunt Love muttered. “Those people would fight over what color the pulpit Bible should be.”

“They had some issues to deal with,” David said with a smile.

“When anybody with any sense knows it should be black,” Aunt Love went on. “But why don’t you tell the child the truth? The reason they won’t ask you full-time is because of Adrienne.”

“Mother?” Jocie said. “What’s she got to do with Dad preaching? She’s been gone forever.”

“Baptists like their preachers to be married,” Aunt Love said. “Catholics won’t let their men of the cloth marry, but Baptists figure they need a preacher’s wife to cook for church dinners, teach Sunday school, call people, whatever needs doing that the preacher can’t get done.”

David stared at the potatoes in the middle of a little pool of butter on his plate. He wished Aunt Love hadn’t brought up Adrienne, but that was another thing about Aunt Love. She never sugarcoated anything. He decided to be as honest. “Not having a wife isn’t exactly the problem. Once having a wife and then not having her anymore is. I’m lucky any of the churches in the county ever let me stand behind their pulpits.”

“Luck has nothing to do with it,” Aunt Love said. “You’re a fine preacher. The best I ever heard, and I’ve heard plenty.”