But what to tell Fern eluded him. He wanted to sit down with her and explain how the situation had gotten away from him. Out of all of the bad men in the world, he was the least among them. He said it out loud. Didn't have much of a ring to it. He played out the scene in several different situations. Fern would help him prepare a sermon but he would flip-flop to something else entirely; he would preach the truth to her, sit her down, and ask her to stay and hear him out. He practiced several confessions. But every declaration of guilt sent her packing; her look of disappointment deflated his entire scheme.
In his mind, Charlie senior scolded another of his bad ideas.
I don't know how I raised a boy with no character. I don't know how you got so seared in your thinking.
Much different was when he sat at his momma's knee as a young feller and she told him he had the sign of an apostle on him. She'd only said that once. It had come to her in a dream. In any case, after the fire, his daddy had said,
“It scares me to death to think you'll end up on a rock pile someday.”
Scared young Jeb to death, too, like fate hovered over his life sucking him up into its cyclone. Jeb saw the whole picture through his daddy's eyes, as though he looked straight into the theater of his mind — him chained to six other men while an oversized guard poked him in the shoulder blades with a rifle muzzle. Ol’ Charlie's words always had the intended effect—the very word
jail
scared the wits out of him. Even worse, the threat of being locked up seemed to follow him around as though he had been fatally picked to spend his life pounding rocks, just as Charlie would spend his days married to Selma from Oklahoma.
Often when they visited a dry goods store in Dallas, Charlie senior had pointed to every law officer that passed in front of the plate glass window. “They will haul you off if ever you steal what don't belong to you.”
One lazy Saturday he had examined a rubber ball from a whole bin of them, a red bouncing ball just right for stick ball or hurling at Charlie to inflict mortal wounds upon his freckled skin. Without thinking, or maybe seized by the forces of nature, he'd walked past the clerk and out into the sunlight imagining how high into the sky the ball would fly if popped in the sweet center by his hard pine beauty. He'd tipped his hat at the town deputy, Wesley Bishop, given the ball a good bounce and then felt his knees buckle when he realized he had walked out of the store without paying for the ball. Daddy had known he had the thief inside of him. At that moment guilt had swept over him. He'd stumbled back inside with the ball tucked underneath his shirt, past the clerk, and down the aisle to the rubber ball bin. When the clerk had glanced up at him a third time, his eyes, he felt certain, had rolled back in his head. He had dropped the ball at his feet and left it spiraling on the floor. Without stopping, he ran two miles to escape his destiny.
Every time the deputy came sniffing around Nazareth, Jeb thought it a matter of days, maybe just hours, until Charlie's prophecy found fulfillment. He had dreamed of good and evil, men in chains, and stars colliding. He wanted to believe Momma. And believe that divination might have been her lot as much as an early death. But Charlie senior never left his head. Never stopped telling him his fate.
A cloud came across the moon, dappling the white face that lit the edges of trees and the hills of Nazareth with unearthly silvering. Jeb rolled onto his face. It came to him that he could not remember the past he had invented for Fern's sake.
He pulled pen and paper from the crate beside the bed and wrote down every pertinent fact he thought he had given to Fern. Making the letters lean, he wrote faster than he had the week before. But even Will Honeysack's handwriting had a shaky line. He had noticed that when he wrote down the offering funds. The lantern flickered and he raised the wick to read what he had written down already. His script read well enough. But compared to Fern's liquid penmanship, his was doddery, like the handwriting belonging to a feeble man.
Wife, Verna. Born in Texas.
He had said Texas, hadn't he?
Moved here from — Tennessee.
Or was it Atlanta?
Brother, Charlie.
He might have mentioned Charlie to her but even if he had not, he was certain to do so. Stories of Charlie and him could fill volumes as well as interjecting homey repartee into the quiet moments of a Sunday afternoon.
Repartee.
He'd read that word from a poem and had decided to try it out on Fern this Saturday.
Repartee.
It looked false coming from his Woolworth's pen.
He swapped the pen and paper for a book left tucked into a basket of Fern's bread. She had called it the writings of Pascal and seemed surprised when he did not respond with a comment. Out loud, he practice-read until the rims of his eyes stung as though filled with rubbing alcohol. He practiced sounding fluid. The moon disappeared entirely. The last thing he remembered was laying Pascal across his chest.
When he awoke, the children had gotten themselves off to school. Ida May rocked on the porch alone. Best of all, he was not in jail.
T
he Yankees win had lifted morale as though every out-of-work Joe had hit the home runs themselves. Majesty ebbed and flowed into every nook and cranny of the country, spilling down into the mousiest holes. Even into Nazareth. Saturday, everyone flooded downtown, anxious to share the united good spirits, and that is how Fern happened to pick up the letter from Charlie.
Jeb did not know if she had read the sender's name on the smudged corner of the envelope but suspected she had. Informing her that he had a brother Charlie without explaining the difference in last names complicated the plan, so he took the letter from her hand and dropped the idea entirely. He only addressed the matter by thanking her for dropping by the mail, and left it at that. Charlie had scrawled his alias on the front—Philemon Gracie.
Fern sounded short on breath but euphoric when she showed up on the parsonage porch, Charlie's letter in her hand. “I've never seen so many people out and about town. You'd think a holiday had come the way folks are out milling through all of the stores. Woolworth's is full to capacity. I'll bet Floyd Whittington has to squeeze customers in with a shoehorn. The Honeysacks are sitting in chairs in front of their store with a fruit stand right out on the walk. It's kind of like those outdoor markets in Europe I've heard about.”
He didn't ask her about Europe. “October brings out the best in people, even when they're dickering over a nickel's worth of beans to save a penny. Maybe the cooler weather does it, or maybe it's just a
collective
mood.” Jeb did not know if he had used “collective” in the manner he should, but it sounded clever and Fern agreed so quickly he felt all right about it.
She dug through the beaded handbag until she found a band for her hair. She pulled her hair back away from her face. “I hope you aren't apprehensive about today,” she said.
“No reason to be, is there?”
“I keep thinking maybe I'm not the one who should be helping you.” Fern had a stack of books, including one of the oldest dictionaries Jeb had ever seen.
He liked the thought of it, a woman listening while he talked. She sank back against the sofa and closed her eyes as he read something to her from
Pensees.
It did not sound as profound as it had the night before. So he pulled out his notes, although he did not want her to look at them. “Nice fellow, Oz. That must stand for Oswald or something.”
“Oswald Thurman Mills, after his great-grandfather on his daddy's side. Are your children awake? It's so quiet.” She slipped out of her shoes and pushed them next to the sofa.
“Down by the stream. Catching crawdads or tadpoles. You're right. For once it is quiet.” He liked the way she casually deposited her shoes onto his rug, as though she had just gotten home. Her toes were long, especially the chief toes, which appeared able enough to pick up a pencil.
“I think we should do this out on the front porch. Sunny but cool. Persimmon in the air.” She left him in the living room as though she fully expected him to follow her.
Jeb left the copy of
Pensees
on the sofa arm. He followed her all the way out.
She must have noticed how he faltered when he picked up the Bible. “How about if I stare down at the porch and you just act as though you're preaching to the woods.” She looked intently at the porch until she realized he had offered no sort of response.
Jeb asked the first thing that came to him. “Are you and Oz Mills seeing each other?”
“Not often.”
“Often as once a year?”
“Things like that matter to you?” she asked.
“Of course they don't.”
“What is your subject matter for tomorrow, if I may ask?”
“But some things matter, because I don't know this Oz very well. He rolls into town and just expects you to drop everything. I think that seems like a peculiar dating ritual.” Now he felt more clumsy than before, when he wanted to say more. He didn't.
“That's your subject?”
“Paul on the isle of Patmos.”
“So my dating rituals interest you?”
“I imagine he was lonely.”
“Paul or Oz?”
“Oz. That is, Paul. I'd like to get back to the preaching materials,” said Jeb. He had not intended to bring up Oz at all. It was one of those subjects that had buzzed around his thoughts for a few days until it spilled out, as though he had just asked her what she thought about Babe Ruth, but instead asked her, “Is this a serious thing between you and Oz?”
“I don't know,” she said. “We've never discussed it.”
Women knew more than they confessed, he felt. But he left the subject alone. “I think there's something to be said about Paul and how God left him to write letters on the isle of Patmos.”
“What do you want to say about it?” she asked. A bit of something that stirred inside of her sparked when she spoke, shelling him like little bullets. But she stayed to task.
“If he hadn't been cut off from the rest of the church folks, we would not have his letters or this part of the Bible.” Jeb had not fully developed that thought, but was hoping she would.
Instead she sat down in the rocker and stared into the trees. “Why don't you just preach? I'm not in the mood to talk, anyway, if you don't mind.”
Jeb opened the Bible to gather the first thought of the lecture.
Fern crossed one leg and tapped her foot in the air. The mulish way that she refused to look at him thickened the air so that even the crickets’ pipes were muted.
Since the last few minutes had plodded ahead unrewardingly, like a badminton contest with no drops, he found her silence agreeable. With at least the quiet in his favor, he read from his notes until a certain comment about Paul caught her attention. “Do you agree with that?” he asked.
She nodded. “Maybe say that Paul's persecution wound up being enlightenment for the whole world.”
He cottoned to the word
enlightenment.
But he would not stoop to ask her to spell it. After he had continued for what felt like another ten minutes, Fern said, “You know, Paul had it in his mind that he would go and preach to certain places. But instead, he spent his last days writing letters. Maybe he didn't even have the assurance that anyone would ever read them. I wonder if he felt like he had failed God?”
Jeb wished he had said that, or even thought it. But then all of a sudden, he just knew it. He didn't know what to make of it, as though a con like him could get inside the head of Saint Paul or would even want to. Jeb had always run around the tree of his problems and just kept running until he ran out of rope. But he expected that of himself. It came to him that Paul had felt the same way. He wrote down her comment and decided to study on it.
They continued. When Fern would fall silent for a while he would prompt her until she would pick up where she left off. What she said had plainness but stirred things up inside of him. It felt as though he was eating her little truisms. He finally got up off his rocker and sat down in front of her. “I like listening to you talk.”
“That's a kind thing to say,” she said.
“I'm not trying to be kind. Oz, I'll bet he knows all of the kind and right things to say to you. But I could just lay on a bank, listening to the river, your voice, and nothing else.”
“Could you tell me why you have such an interest in Oz Mills?” she asked.
“He appeared out of nowhere.”
“We've known each other for a couple of years.”
“That's a long time. Seems like he would do something about now, find ways to see you more often.” Jeb leaned against the porch railing. His feet were inches from Fern's elongated toes.
“You think I should see him more often? Try and deepen things between us?” Fern never lost momentum when Jeb questioned her, a practice that kept knocking him off the fence post.
“That's not for me to say. Just seems like if he's going to try and keep a girl on a leash—”
“I'm not on Oz Mills's leash!”
“So what you're trying to say is that Oz and you are just friends?”
She pulled her bare feet up under the cotton skirt. The fabric enveloped her like a mushroom. “Something like that. You and I, we're friends, aren't we?”
He did not know how to answer her.
Angel ran through the house, as though she had come up the back steps, and bolted for the front porch. “Jeb, Jeb!”
Jeb stood and met her at the door. Her voice sounded like an alarm.
“What name did she call you?” Fern asked.
Angel saw Fern and pulled her hands up to her mouth.
“Daddy,
we saw the deputy coming through the woods, down the road to our place. See, he's coming.”
Jeb's lips came together, not a smile nor a grimace, just the steady pretense of a man in hiding. “Nothing wrong with that, Angel. You go back inside and check on your brother and sister. Maybe the deputy has news about the truck.”
Fern's feet dropped onto the porch. She went back inside to look for her shoes.
Jeb met the officer out on the lawn with a smile as wooden as an Indian nickel. “Afternoon, Deputy. What can I do for you?”