The Sweetest Thing (28 page)

The preacher was talking about joy after weeping, and when Mamma reached over and squeezed my hand, tears blurred my eyes too.

And then it happened. Something. I couldn't explain it then or later in any way that made much sense, but I felt a peaceful settling in my soul.

The closest thing to describing it was a memory of something that happened a few days after Daddy died. Exhausted with grief and the details of the funeral and everything else, I'd fallen asleep on the sofa on the screened porch. Being March, it was chilly outside, but I was just too tired to get up and find a blanket. I was cold and had goose pimples on my arms. All of the sudden, as if she could read my mind, Dellareen tiptoed out on the porch and covered me up with the beautiful old quilt that she had made for me when I was born. It was worn through in places and smelled of baby powder and years of love. She wrapped it around me in the gentlest way—and Dellareen wasn't always gentle—and whispered, “You go on and sleep a little bit, Miz Perri. You need some rest.”

I slept for a long time cuddled under that quilt, a sleep without nightmares, without tears. Peaceful.

That's what happened that Sunday in church. I felt warm and comfortable and peaceful. And something else. Sure. I trusted that we were going to make it out of this horrible mess of our lives, but it wasn't up to me. That revelation took my breath away and warmed me at the same time. The crushing heaviness of responsibility seemed to roll off my back, as if Mamma had taken her scissors and cut the strings that held it there.

I felt free. I believed. I believed in that moment what Dobbs had told me for so long. Faith. Truth.

God was going to get us through. Jesus would do it, just like Dobbs always had promised, just like her stories always illustrated.

Just like God had proved to me.

Yes, I had proof. I had the photo of me sitting in Daddy's lap.

I felt loved and comfortable and reassured and excited and beyond exhausted all at once.

And forgiven.

I had said that I wanted to know that somehow, somewhere, with someone, I could be safe.

Now I knew.

But no one else did.

One day, I'd tell Dobbs. I still had way too much pride to do it right away. But someday I'd tell her.

There was one person, though, that I had to tell. Immediately.

Spalding came to our house for Sunday lunch, and afterwards, standing in our little den when Mamma and Irvin and Barbara had gone outside for a walk, I tried to give him back his SAE pin. He listened to me in that way he had of seeming to care, of projecting sympathy. He pulled me close to him, gently, and patted my hair and my shoulder. “It's normal to have the jitters.”

“It's not the jitters, Spalding. I know it isn't right. We aren't right for each other. I mean it. I want to break up.”

As I spoke, his arm got tighter around me until he was clutching my arm. His eyes narrowed, and drawing me even closer, he whispered to me, “You don't always get what you want, little miss-spoiled-society-girl. You know that. There is no way you are breaking up with me. Do you understand?”

I didn't look up at him, so he took my chin in his other hand and forced it up. “Do you understand?”

I felt terror hammering in my heart, almost like I'd felt when the two men had mugged me. Spalding's look was so calculated and cruel. Why had I not seen it before? How had Dobbs known?

That was the first time I saw his anger, uncovered. His face turned a darker shade. He grabbed me again and said, “You're mine and you'll go where I want to go and do what I want to do.” He fingered his SAE pin on the chain around my neck. Then his hand tightened on the chain and he pulled me toward himself and kissed me soundly on the mouth.

I shivered slightly. I was furious with him. And then the fury was replaced by cold fear. “Don't say such things, Spalding! You're making me afraid.”

“There's no need to be afraid, Perri dear”—his hard smile was back—“as long as you do everything I want.”

In a flash, I saw Dobbs before me, warning me again and again and again. “
He's not right for you. He's a womanizer. I've seen him being intimate with another girl. He'll only make you miserable. Please, Perri. Please, listen to me.”

Why didn't I listen to you, dear Dobbs?

I stamped my foot and yanked away once more from his hold on my arm. “I am breaking up with you! You've made me mad, and I have no desire to be with you right now!”

I turned to get away, but he stepped in front, put both hands on my shoulders, and said, “Don't you dare, Anne Perrin Singleton. If you leave me today, the rest of your family will suffer.”

“Are you threatening me? Why would you say such a thing, Spalding?”

“You can call it whatever you want. But you better pay attention.”

It was at that moment I realized the absolute truth. I had thought that Spalding Smith was fitting into my plans, but I was wrong. He was carefully fitting me into his plans, though I did not know what they were.

My heart was pounding and my head sizzling with an ache.

“You hear?” He let me go so abruptly that I staggered backward, caught myself on a chair, and collapsed into it. He pointed at me with one outstretched finger, turned on his heel, and left the house. I heard the door to his sports car slam and then a squeal of the wheels.

My one thought was
I have to find Dobbs and tell her. I have to.

I hurried to the Buick and hopped in, killing the engine three times before it finally caught. I drove, blinded by my tears and real fear, to the Chandlers'. I ran into the house, not even greeting Parthenia, who was in the entrance hall.

“You shore is in a hurry, Miz Perri, for a lazy Sunday afternoon.”

I took the steps two at a time and pushed open the door to Dobbs's room without knocking. It was empty.

“She's out in the darkroom, Miz Perri,” Parthenia called up to me. When I rushed down the steps, Parthenia added, “ 'Bout time you come lookin' for her. With all the sad things in her life, and here she he'pped you when you needed it most.”

I barely paid attention to Parthenia's reprimand but went into the stable and past Dynamite's stall. I opened the door to the darkroom and found Dobbs sitting in the lone chair, a photo in her hands.

She glanced over at me. The look on her face, one of pure grief, halted me in my tracks. Then, gradually, I came beside her. The photograph was one I had taken the past summer of Dobbs and Frances and Coobie. They were all three in swimming bloomers. We had just returned from the club. They had their arms around each other, and Coobie had that look of mischief in her eyes.

“She seemed so healthy then,” Dobbs whispered, but not really to me, more as if she were convincing herself. “I knew it. I hate knowing things. I knew this time her cough sounded different.”

I knelt down in front of her and said, “Oh, Dobbs. Mae Pearl told us something was the matter with Coobie. What is it?”

Dobbs turned a tear-stained face to me. “She has the same disease. The same one as Jackie. The very same one.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Remember I told you about my friend Jackie and the congenital disease that took her so quickly? Well, Coobie has it too.”

“Oh, Dobbs. How can it be? You said the disease is so rare.”

“It runs in the family.”

I just stared at her.

“Jackie was my sister. My half sister, from my father's ‘other life.' I found it out before I left for Chicago. Becca told me.”

Those words catapulted me outside of myself. Dobbs had carried this wound inside her for so long, and where had I been? On a selfish, foolish detour.

“She was three years and nine months older than me.” She said this to herself, as if she had forgotten I was there. “We were the best of friends. But she came to us sick—always had been sickly. Her mother couldn't help her. Mother and Father took her to all the fancy doctors—I didn't realize how hard they tried to help. But in the end, there wasn't a thing to be done. She died two weeks before she turned nineteen.”

At last Dobbs looked up at me, her face destroyed. “Coobie's got the same disease, and there's nothing left to do.”

I don't know how long I knelt there on my knees, the bare earth pressing its imprint into them, trying to share a tiny bit of her deep pain and cursing myself for my selfishness. After a while, I managed to say, “I'm sorry, Dobbs. I'm so sorry I've been horrible to you. You were right. You've been right all along.”

She didn't even acknowledge my words. She simply said, “I don't believe anymore.”

“What?”

“I don't believe anymore.”

I frowned. “I don't understand what you mean, Dobbs. What do you not believe anymore? About Spalding? About the stolen things?”

She shook her head slowly. “I don't believe. I've lost my faith.”

Nothing could have shocked me more than hearing her pronounce those words. “That's impossible. Impossible.”

“It's true.” She finally turned to look at me. Her eyes were pools of black water. “I've stopped believing.”

I plopped down on the floor and tried to digest this confession, but I couldn't. And more than that, I didn't want to digest it. “You can't do that, not when I need you. You can't leave me all alone.”

“Alone?”

“I believed you and then I believed Him.”

“Him?”

“Your God.”

I had hoped to see a flicker of light in her eyes, maybe even a smile of approval or excitement. Instead, she looked forlorn.

“You cannot tell me it's not real, Dobbs. Why would you do that?”

“I don't know.”

Her lethargy scared me, and for a moment I forgot her pain and thought again only of myself. “Is it what I've always said, Dobbs? All your crazy stories weren't true, were they?”

She didn't reply. I watched her profile, the way her short hair fell onto her forehead and the fine slope of her nose.

“Why did you make them up? Was it just to convince us of that crazy Sawdust Trail?”

“I never made up one thing. They are things that really happened to my family. I was there, and I saw it—I lived it. I wasn't lying. You can ask my parents or sisters or a hundred other witnesses. Those stories are absolutely true, just as I've told you before. I promise.”

I narrowed my eyes at her and said, “So you're telling me that all those miraculous things really happened to you, that God kept showing up and providing for your family and for all the poor people, but now you don't believe it anymore? That's impossible! How could you see miracles and stop believing?”

“People change. Things happen. You doubt; you wonder. It's not impossible.”

I felt myself deflate before her eyes. “If you don't believe anymore, who in the world can have real faith? If yours wasn't real, with all your enthusiasm and fervor, what hope is there for anyone else?”

She shook her head. “I don't know. I'm sorry, but I have no answers.” She paused. “It's just what I said. I stopped believing! I just stopped. I didn't mean to or try to. It just happened, on the train from Atlanta to Chicago. It flew right out the window, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.”

She stood up and replaced the photograph in one pile and reached for another, this time of Coobie and Parthenia. “I will not sit here and watch Coobie die. God cannot take her too. ”

“Oh, Dobbs, we'll get all the girls in the sorority to pray so hard for her. I'll tell them right away.”

“Do what you want.” Her voice was resigned. “It might help; it might not. No one knows the ways of the Lord.” A slight sarcasm had crept into her voice.

“But you know He'll care for y'all. He'll provide. You've said it a hundred times. You've seen it with your eyes. Oh, Dobbs, don't stop believing. You can't! You're the one who convinced me; you're the one who made the Bible seem so real, so relevant, who told us those marvelous stories and who gave us hope in the worst moments. You're the one who knew how to keep me living when Daddy left. You told me—”

“Stop it!” she cried out, and for a brief second, passion flashed in her eyes. “Stop telling me what I've said. Don't you think I know it, Anne Perrin? Don't you think it's tearing me up inside to admit the truth? I don't need to be reminded that I'm the worst hypocrite in the world.” Now tears were streaming down her face. “But the thing is, Perri, if you had known your father was about to take his life, you would have done everything in your power to stop it.

“And I know Coobie's dying, 'cause I watched it happen to Jackie. I have to do something to help her. I don't have time to wait on God.” Dobbs stood up unsteadily and braced her arms on a table. She looked thin and weak, almost faint. “They're hoping to bring her down here if they can get her fever under control.”

I grabbed Dobbs in the fiercest hug I had ever given. “I am so sorry, Dobbs. I am so, so sorry. We'll think of something. We will.”

She let me hug her, but she didn't close her arms around me. She just stood there with her head down and mumbled, “I'm sorry I've disappointed you, Perri. I'm sorry I don't believe anymore.”

That night I didn't tell Dobbs about Spalding or about the intricate way her God had answered my prayers or anything else about me. I just held her in the darkroom, and after a long, long time, she rested her head on my shoulder. When I reached up and touched her forehead, I realized it was burning hot.

CHAPTER

24

Dobbs

It turned out that Coobie wasn't the only one with a fever. I had one too. Perri called out to Hosea, and he came in the darkroom just about the time the room started reeling around me. I slumped into his arms, and he carried me across the expansive yard, and as my head hung down, I noticed the first shoots of the daffodils peeping out of the soil.

Hosea brought me into the house, upstairs to my room, and laid me gently on my canopied bed. Aunt Josie appeared from somewhere and, completely flustered, cried out that she should have recognized how weak and flushed I was. I listened to them in a deep fog; all my strength was gone. Maybe it had started as being heartsick, but it had turned into something else.

Aunt Josie brought me a thin chicken broth that evening, made especially for me by Parthenia, and Perri fed it to me, spoonful by spoonful.

In spite of everything, I gave a weak smile to see my friend perched beside my bed.
She's back,
I kept thinking again and again.

Parthenia sneaked upstairs to see me and sat right outside the door, knees gathered up to her chest. I dozed off and on, and once when I awoke I saw Perri sitting on the floor beside Parthenia. Their heads were bowed, and it almost looked as if they were praying. At length, Parthenia stood up and curtsied and turned to go down the stairs, and Perri said to her, “It's going to be okay. Somehow it will.”

Later, the doctor came to the house and listened to my chest. He took Aunt Josie aside and consulted with her. Before he left, though, he came back to the room and said, “Miss Dillard, you rest now, you hear me? And you eat. You can't help your family if you're sick in bed.”

Perri finally left my side late that evening. But before she left, she whispered to me, “One time you told me, Dobbs, that in the darkest moments, we can't pray ourselves. We're too torn up with grief, but God puts other people around us to pray and hold us up and keep us going. They believe for us when our faith wavers.

“That's what you did for me, and it worked. And now, my sweet, faithful friend, I'm going to do that for you. I'll pray. Mae Pearl and I will be like those two men holding up Moses' hands. We'll believe for you. It's gonna work out. God will provide.”

I didn't know what to say to her, so I simply whispered, “Thank you.”

She put her hand over mine, and for the rest of the night, as I drifted in and out of slumber, I kept hearing Perri's voice saying, “My sweet, faithful friend.” I held on to that. Only that.

Perri

I drove to Mae Pearl's that night. Mrs. McFadden opened the door, wearing her robe. “I'm ever so sorry to appear at this late hour,” I apologized. “But it's very important, and I need to see Mae Pearl.”

Mrs. McFadden let me in. “I hope it's not bad news, Perri.”

I shook my head. “It's a little bit of everything mixed up into one, but I believe it will be okay.”

“Go on upstairs.”

Mae Pearl was curled up in her bed, reading a magazine. “Perri! What on earth brings you here at such an hour!”

“It's Dobbs. She needs our help!” And I told her about how bad off Coobie was and about Dobbs's fever and how she had lost her faith.

Mae Pearl got a gentle flush to her cheeks and gave her beautiful sad smile and said, “Whatever do we do now if Mary Dobbs has stopped believing?”

“We carry her,” I said with a strange conviction in my voice. “We help her somehow.”

“But how?” Mae Pearl set aside her magazine and motioned for me to join her on her bed.

I went into my most efficient organizational mode. “Tomorrow you get all the Phi Pis together again and tell them all the details about Coobie. Ask the ones who feel inclined to pray that Coobie's fever will lessen and that she'll be strong enough to make the trip down to Atlanta so she can receive treatment here. And for Dobbs to get stronger—she's got a bad fever too.”

“How in the world will Mr. and Mrs. Dillard pay for treatment here?”

“I don't know. I'll ask Mrs. Chandler, and then maybe we can organize a way to raise money for Coobie.”

“A fund-raiser? During the worst year of the Depression?”

Annoyed, I said, “If the almighty God could provide for all those poor people who were planning to eat their pets, well then, surely He can provide the funds for Coobie.”

“But how?”

“That's not my problem. It's God's.”

“Wow, Perri. You sound just like Mary Dobbs.”

It was past eleven o'clock when I got back to Club Drive. I had warned Mamma I might be late; still, she looked relieved when I came into the house. “Where have you been? We've all been worried.”

“I'm sorry, Mamma. Coobie's real sick, and Dobbs is so torn up about it that she's sick too.”

In my room, I picked up
Patches from the Sky
and hurriedly flipped through the pages. I couldn't find the verses Dobbs had quoted to me about God providing.

Irvin found me in my bedroom, haphazardly pulling out books from boxes we had not unpacked.

“Whatever are you doing, Sis?”

“I need to find a Bible.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. I just need to. For Mary Dobbs. For me.”

My little brother, up way past his bedtime, sat down on the floor beside me, yawned, and then gave a sheepish grin. “Mamma got to fretting about you, and she plumb forgot to make us go to bed.” He opened another box and began removing books. On the fourth box, he announced, “I found it!” and triumphantly held up the black book.

“Oh, Irvin! Thank you.” I hugged him, took the leather-bound Bible, and started thumbing through the gold-rimmed pages. The thin paper made a rustling sound each time I turned a page.

“How do you know where to look in the Bible?”

I flipped to the Gospel According to St. Matthew. “I don't know, really. But it's something Jesus said about not fretting and God taking care of us. And see, in this Bible, everything Jesus says is in red.”

Irvin was peering over my shoulder when Barbara came in the room. “What on earth are you two doing? Mamma'll have a fit seeing all these books spread all over the place.”

“We're looking at the Bible for Mary Dobbs,” Irvin explained.

Barbara gave us her best disinterested fourteen-year-old face, but she sat down beside me and said, “I thought you were mad at Mary Dobbs.”

“I never said that.”

“No, but you stopped seeing her.”

“Well, that's over now. She needs our help.”

I hadn't gotten very far in the gospel of Matthew when the verses leapt out at me. “Here they are! Right here.” Irvin and Barbara crowded beside me, and I started reading to them. “ ‘Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. . . .' ”

I kept reading Jesus' words with my little brother and sister peering over my shoulder, and occasionally Barbara would announce, “Oh, I've heard that verse before.”

“See, it says God is going to take care of us. And that's what we need to remember for little Coobie. God is going to take care of her.”

Mamma came in my room and got a sweet look on her face, seeing us scrunched together on the floor looking at the Bible. “It's way past your bedtime,” she said at last. I handed her the Bible, and she held it open to that page, and I swear she was reading those words of Jesus too, and I almost think her worry lines disappeared for just a while.

Dobbs

I didn't go to school for three days. Aunt Josie practically forced me to stay if not in bed, at least in my room. I took to sitting in a chair by the window and staring out into the backyard. Sure enough, the daffodils kept pushing themselves out of the ground. Father always loved the coming of spring, with all its spiritual metaphors of new birth and regeneration. As I watched the February sun shift through the trees, I thought briefly of the snow falling around Father and me on Christmas night. My heart was cold, frozen over.

I marveled at Perri's profession of faith, but in a detached, distant way. She came over after school on Monday, the first day I stayed home, and told me all about how God had done something for her that was so personal and real and secretive that she had no doubt it came from the Almighty. “Just like you prayed for Him to do, Dobbs! He even did it in the way I could understand best—through a photograph.”

I got chills that had nothing to do with my fever as she told her story, but I did not have the strength or faith to show my usual excitement.

Still, we found ourselves in that comfortable position of friendship, giggling and wiping tears—back and forth, catching up on each other's lives.

At last, she said, “Here I am jabbering away when I want to hear more about you. Tell me everything about Jackie and what happened on that train ride to Chicago where you said your faith flew out of the window.”

For an hour or longer, I talked on and on about my anger at my father and all I learned of Jackie's past and my terror at hearing Coobie's cough. I showed her the hair pin Andrew had given me and described my meal at the Walnut Room with Hank. The telling of it to her was a balm. It didn't restore my faith, but the shadows lifted a little.

“What about Hank now? Does he know all about how you feel—you know, about your faith?”

“I told him. He just keeps writing to me, but it's not going to work for us, Perri. I started thinking about how hard life will be all the time, forever, for Hank and me. And I can't do it. I've gotten used to luxury. Granted, things are hard for everyone, but it's a lot easier here than in Chicago. I'm going to write him and break things off; he deserves a girl who is a lot better than me.”

“But, Dobbs, he loves you so much!”

“You said it before—what does love have to do with it?” As soon as I pronounced those words, I heard in my mind Mother saying, “
Love is the crux of human relationships; the sweetest thing.”
I pushed away the thought and added, “He still hasn't found a steady job, and anyway, he's going to need a strong woman of faith.”

“I'm awful sorry to hear it, Dobbs.” Silence drifted between us, but it was almost back to that easy silence of friends. At last she brought up Spalding. “You were right all along. He's not right for me. For a while he acted like the grandest gentleman.” She explained about finding Spalding at her old house on Christmas Day. “Sometimes he's so kind. Why, he's let us visit our old house several times since then.”

I stopped her. “Why in the world was he at your old house on Christmas Day? How did he get a key?”

“I guess his father gave it to him—he's the one selling it and had him check it out before showing it to a potential buyer.”

“I thought his father was an important man with Coke and now he's selling your house? Is he in real estate too? And Spalding shows up on Christmas Day? That seems awful strange to me.”

“It does?”

I shrugged. “Maybe it's just my imagination, but don't you think it's odd that he was there?” I tiptoed up to the subject. “Remember how I saw the stolen things in your father's toolbox and then when Aunt Josie and your mother went to look, they were gone? And Spalding has a key to the house?”

“What are you saying?”

“Maybe Spalding is somehow involved in the thefts.” I told her about Parthenia's reaction to the photo of Spalding she had seen hanging in the darkroom.

Perri got those deep red spots on her cheeks and covered her face with her hands. “I've been so incredibly blind, Dobbs! I refused to see any of it, even when it was staring me in the face.” She stood up and started pacing around my room. “Yes, that would make sense. It would. On Sunday, after I'd had those experiences with God—that photograph and then at church—well, I just knew all of a sudden that Spalding and I weren't right for each other. So I tried to tell him, but he got so angry. It scared me. He even threatened me, Dobbs, saying I can't break up with him. What am I to do?”

I honestly had no idea and just said the first word that came to my mind. “Pray.”

That night after Perri left, I brought up the subject of the thefts one more time with Aunt Josie. This time, I felt it merited discussing. “Please, Aunt Josie, let me just tell you one thing—I think the thief might be someone from your society.”

Aunt Josie busied herself beside my bed, checking my fever, fluffing pillows. “In the times we are living in, people are desperate, Mary Dobbs. People have had plenty and now they are on the verge of losing it all.” She looked at me. “So they steal.”

“Do you mean you know who's been stealing things? Parthenia does too.”

“Not so fast, Mary Dobbs. I saw what being blackmailed did to my parents. I wasn't going to go through it again.”

“You're being blackmailed?”

“Threatened. We've received threats on our servants' lives, on our lives too.”

That one word took me back to my discussion with Perri. Spalding was threatening her. “Parthenia said she was threatened. She saw who stole the knives, and he grabbed her and threatened her.”

“I don't doubt it.”

“But she's terrified to say anything.”

“She's right to keep her mouth shut.”

“But Anna is innocent!”

“Of course she's innocent. That has never been in question.” Aunt Josie put a firm hand on my shoulder. “And she is absolutely safe in that Alms House. And Hosea and Cornelius and Parthie are safe here—where we can watch them. Do you understand?” Aunt Josie's face became hard, protective, almost fierce.

In that moment, I did understand. “Someone has stolen things and framed Anna and threatened to hurt her family if anyone denounces him.”

“Exactly. So Parthie is absolutely right to keep quiet. Don't try to get anything out of her.”