Orchard of Hope (40 page)

The man on the rock path paid no attention to what her daddy said. “Sell your land back to the one you bought it from. That way no one will have to get hurt.”

“He wouldn’t buy it,” Cassidy’s daddy said.

“We’ll convince him. We have many convincing ways.” The rest of the men took a step closer to the porch as the man in the middle spoke. “Many ways. Ways you won’t want to know about.”

“You’re trespassing. Now get off my land,” Cassidy’s daddy said.

“We’ll leave. This time. But remember we can come back and next time we might not be so polite.” The man paused a moment before he went on. “We hear you have a beautiful wife.”

Beside Cassidy, her mama went stiff again.

“You leave my family alone.” Cassidy’s daddy sounded mad now. He stepped toward the edge of the porch. Noah grabbed his arm.

Cassidy’s mama began whispering, “Dear God, put your hand between him and the evil out there. Oh, dear Lord, I beg you.”

The white ghost hoods shook as the men in the yard began making a horrible sound like the way the rocks screeched when the shovel scraped against them in the holes Cassidy’s daddy and Noah dug for the trees. Back in the bedroom, Eli and Elise were crying louder and yelling for their mama in between sobs.

“A man should take care of his family,” the white ghost man said. “Take them back to where you came from. We don’t want your kind here. You’ve been warned. Next time there won’t be any talking.”

The men flicked off their flashlights and began melting back into the darkness beside their trucks. Truck doors opened and shut. When they were all gone except the man on the path, that man said, “One last thing. You should have listened when the people around here told you trees wouldn’t grow in this ground. At least not nigger trees.” Then he too disappeared into the darkness.

Cassidy’s mama waited until the trucks backed up over her flower beds again and went through the fence back to the road before she went to get the twins. She picked Elise up and hugged her before she handed her to Cassidy and went to get Eli. Cassidy stayed right beside her mama, moving when she did, stopping when she did. She smelled her mama’s perfume and felt the moisture of perspiration on the skin of her arm. Cassidy held Elise and told her to stop crying, but she kept hold of her mama too. If she didn’t do that, she might just fall into a deep black hole and never come out. She glanced around in her mind for the opening to her safe cave, but she couldn’t find it. It didn’t matter. Her mama would never let her take Elise in the cave with her.

When her daddy and Noah came in off the porch after even the sound of the trucks had disappeared into the night, Cassidy’s mama hugged her daddy so tight that Eli, who was mashed between them, started crying again. Then they all huddled together, and her mama said they should say a thanksgiving prayer.

“And why’s that?” Cassidy’s daddy said as he pulled away from Cassidy’s mama. “What’s there to be thankful about in all this?”

“We’re all here together. The Lord took care of us. He kept us safe in his hands.”

“If we’re in his hands, he must be clenching his fists, mashing the very juice of life out of us.”

“Alex! Stop that kind of talk.”

“You know they tore up our trees.” His voice sounded funny, not like her daddy at all.

Cassidy’s mama was quiet for a minute, and then she said, “Maybe we should go look.”

And so they went together down to the orchard field. All of them. Her daddy led the way, walking a few steps in front of Noah, who put Eli up on his shoulders. Eli didn’t pay the first bit of attention to how quiet the rest of them were and whooped with delight to be walking outside in the moonlight. Cassidy’s mama carried Elise, who laid her head down on her mama’s shoulder and fell back to sleep. Cassidy matched her steps to her mama’s and kept her hand where it brushed her mama’s arm.

She’d slipped on her shoes, but she was still in her nightgown that used to be blue but now was faded out to almost white. She wondered if she would look like a cartoon ghost to anybody watching. Her arms and face would disappear in the dark of the night, and it would look like just a white dress walking along. A ghost girl like the ghost men.

She turned her mind away from that thought. She didn’t want to think about the ghost men. But when they got down to the orchard field, it was hard to keep from it. The trees were no longer standing up with their little leaves reaching for the sky. They were mashed and broken.

Her daddy stood at the gate into the field for a long moment, as if he could keep it from being true by not walking into the orchard. His orchard of hope. Their orchard of hope.

Finally he said, “They drove the trucks over them. Didn’t even have enough honor about them to pull them up. Just let their trucks do their dirty work for them.”

He went into the field and knelt down by one of the broken trees. Cassidy remembered that one. It had been the biggest tree, the one her daddy always gave two dips of water because it was going to be the tree leader to show the other trees how to grow and make apples. Tears rolled down Cassidy’s cheeks. She’d helped her daddy water these trees and wrap their trunks to keep the rabbits from eating them. She’d walked through them, imagining them tall over her head loaded with apples. And now they would never grow.

Her mama walked over and put her free hand on Cassidy’s daddy’s shoulder. “We’ll get more trees.”

“And they’ll come and destroy those too. What then, Myra?”

Her voice got stronger, sounded surer. “Then we’ll plant more trees.”

Cassidy’s daddy shook his head. “Is that what your Lord tells you? Is that how he answers your prayers? Just keep starting over?”

“The Bible says, ‘Tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope.’”

“I can’t feel much of that right now.” He stood up, still holding a bit of the broken tree.

“That’s because you aren’t leaning on the understanding of the Lord,” Cassidy’s mama said.

“Don’t you be preaching at me tonight, woman.” Cassidy’s daddy threw the branch he held as far as he could into the field. But then his anger seemed to leak away, and he sounded almost sad as he said, “Not tonight.”

They turned and began making their sad procession back to the house when Noah pointed at the sky beyond the barn. “Something’s on fire over that way,” he said.

They stopped walking to look. Off across the fields, the sky was glowing red.

“Oh dear Lord,” Cassidy’s mama said. “Miss Sally’s house is over there.”

“I hope your Lord can help you understand that,” Cassidy’s daddy said.

41

By the time Jocie helped Miss Sally put fresh sheets on the bed in the parlor, she was beginning to wish she’d gone on to the hospital with her father and Aunt Love. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Miss Sally and Mr. Harvey. She did. A lot. But she just felt out of place here in this room of memories that was fine when the sun was shining through the windows, but sort of spooky when night shadows lurked behind the doors.

Plus once she went to bed, she wouldn’t know till morning about Tabitha’s baby. Her father had called earlier to say they made it to the hospital and that the doctor said Tabitha was definitely getting ready to give birth, but the baby wasn’t expected to make an appearance for several more hours, maybe not till morning. Jocie’s father said Tabitha was doing fine or at least as well as could be expected for somebody about to have a baby. Or so the nurses told him. They wouldn’t let him stay with Tabitha.

“It’s just as well you’re not here, Jocie. You wouldn’t believe how hard these chairs are out here in the waiting room. Aunt Love’s wishing she had a cushion. And the only magazines are about fishing.”

“You like fishing,” Jocie said.

“I like to go fishing. Not read about somebody else going fishing.”

“No Bible?”

“I haven’t seen one,” her father said.

“Aunt Love can quote some verses for you.”

“That might work,” he said. “Everything okay there with Miss Sally and Mr. Harvey?”

“It’s fine.”

“Good. I’ll call you early tomorrow morning. By then we should have a new baby and I can come on to church. I don’t know what kind of sermon it will be. The Lord keeps telling me not to put off my sermon preparation until the last minute. Maybe I’ll start paying attention now.”

“It’ll be okay, Dad. You can just preach the same one you did last week.”

Her father laughed. “Are you trying to say they will all have forgotten it by now anyway?”

“No, not that. You can just say you thought they needed to hear it again. I mean, all sermons are some the same. Believe and be saved. Treat others the way you want to be treated. Love one another. That kind of thing.”

“The people expect me to preach a little longer than that.”

“But why do sermons have to be so many minutes long? Is there a rule book for sermon giving?”

“No rule book. Just the Bible,” Jocie’s father said. “Now behave yourself and don’t drive Miss Sally and Mr. Harvey crazy asking questions like that.” And then he laughed again before he said good-bye.

Now in Miss Sally’s parlor, Jocie shut her eyes and tried to go to sleep. Mr. Harvey had offered to bring his fan down for her from his bedroom upstairs, but she’d told him she didn’t need it. And with the windows open to the night air it was hot, but not too hot to sleep. That wasn’t the problem. It was the feeling that Miss Sally’s mother’s ghost might be hovering over Jocie trying to see who was sleeping in her bed.

Jocie told herself firmly there were no such things as ghosts, and even if there were, Miss Sally’s mother was probably just as sweet as Miss Sally and wouldn’t mind Jocie sleeping there. The spooky ghost feelings faded away, but then other worries came to poke at her. Wes on his crutches. Figuring out how to forgive Ronnie Martin—and Paulette for wanting her to. Tabitha having a baby. Not just expecting one, but actually having one. The Klan. Thinking about the men in sheets and boots was scarier than thinking about ghosts watching her.

Jocie started repeating Psalm 23 the way she did when she couldn’t sleep at home. She was on the part about the shadow of death when she heard wheels crunching the gravel of Mr. Harvey’s driveway. At first she thought it might be her father coming to tell her about the baby, but it didn’t sound like just one car but several. Why would people be coming to see Mr. Harvey and Miss Sally in the middle of the night?

Jocie got up and went over to the window. Up above her head she could hear the vibration of the fan on the floor of Mr. Harvey’s bedroom. Outside, it wasn’t cars but pickup trucks. They stopped before they got to the house, and men started getting out. For a minute Jocie thought she must have actually fallen asleep and was in her dream when she saw their white robes. They were moving without any noise. Surely that could only happen in a dream.

One of the men carried a torch high above his head. Behind him, several men carried a wooden cross. Jocie wanted to yell, but her mouth wouldn’t work. That’s the way it sometimes was with dreams. A person was frozen, unable to run or do anything.

The men laid the cross down in the yard in front of the porch. Then other men were splashing something on it. That was when Jocie knew for sure she wasn’t dreaming. She could smell kerosene. One of the men laughed softly as he told the other man to be careful not to get his robe soaked or he might get lit up too. The sound of the man’s voice was muffled by the hood over his head.

And then the man threw his torch on the wooden cross and jumped back as the flames swooshed up and licked the porch roof. One of the other men ran over to them and said, “You idiots! You put it too close to the house. We didn’t want to burn them alive. Just put a scare into them.”

The flames licked out at the dry grass, and the whole yard was suddenly on fire. Jocie ran for the steps. Smoke was already sweeping through the house, and the flames crackled as they bit into the porch roof.

“Miss Sally! Mr. Harvey!” she screamed. “Wake up!”

Outside there were some loud bangs and lots of shouting. Jocie couldn’t make out the words, but she could hear the panic. The same feeling was blasting through her. Then even the shouts faded away as the roar of the fire grew louder. It was hot in the stairway and hard to breathe. Jocie pulled her gown up over her nose and mouth, and kept going.

Miss Sally met her at the door to her bedroom. She had on her robe and slippers with a hair net over her gray hair. “What’s happening?”

“The house is on fire!”

“Oh, my word! We’ve got to get Harvey.”

Jocie started banging on Mr. Harvey’s bedroom door. The smoke was getting thicker. She pushed the door open. Mr. Harvey was sitting on the side of his bed holding his chest. Aunt Love did that a lot, but most of the time it didn’t mean anything. Jocie wasn’t so sure about Mr. Harvey.

Miss Sally moved past her and put her hands on Mr. Harvey’s shoulders. “Get up, Harvey! We’ve got to get out of here.”

He just looked at her as if he hadn’t quite heard what she said. Then he took a couple of deep breaths and said, “Do I smell smoke?”

“The house is on fire,” Jocie said. “Please, Mr. Harvey, we’ve got to hurry.”

He stood up and reached for his pants. Miss Sally yanked them away from him. “You don’t have time to get dressed, Harvey. I’ll carry them for you. Jocie, get his shoes. Once we get outside, then you can put them on.”

Jocie grabbed the shoes sitting on the floor by the bed and led the way out toward the stairs. She was almost afraid to look back to see if they were following her. What would she do if they weren’t? She whispered a prayer. “Dear Lord, help us.”

The smoke was getting thicker, swirling around them, making her cough. She stopped at the top of the stairs. It was too late. Maybe she hadn’t prayed soon enough. Flames had raced from the porch and across the hall to the stairs. The bottom step was burning. Jocie tried to take little breaths to keep from breathing in the smoke, but the flames were sucking up all the air. It was so hot that she couldn’t breathe.

Behind her, Mr. Harvey and Miss Sally were coughing. Jocie’s lungs were hurting and black spots were forming in front of her eyes. She couldn’t pass out. She’d die if she passed out and so would Mr. Harvey and Miss Sally.