Orchard of Hope (41 page)

Then Mr. Harvey was pulling her back from the top of the stairs and talking in her ear. “We’ll have to go out the window in Sally’s room.”

Out the window. Jocie might do that, but dear Lord, could Mr. Harvey and Miss Sally? Still, it was that or trying to run through the flames to one of the downstairs doors. And none of them could do that.

Mr. Harvey opened Miss Sally’s bedroom door. The flames swooshed up the staircase like a live thing, ready to devour the fresh air from the bedroom. Jocie pushed Mr. Harvey and Miss Sally inside and slammed shut the bedroom door. She took a couple of breaths, but that just seemed to make her cough harder. Outside there was an unnatural glow.

Mr. Harvey was holding his chest again as he leaned on Miss Sally. “Do we need to tie sheets together to make a rope to the ground?” Jocie asked.

“No, child,” Miss Sally said. “The back porch roof slants away from the window. We can crawl out and over to the cellar mound and down. Me and Harvey used to do it all the time when we were kids just for the fun of it.”

Jocie looked at them. “You’re not kids now.”

Miss Sally actually smiled. “You go first and help us remember how.”

“No. I’m okay. You go, then Mr. Harvey, and I’ll come last so I can help you if you need me to.”

“No time to argue,” Mr. Harvey said. He was panting a little. “Just push the screen out and go, girl. We’ll need you out there on the roof to keep us from rolling off when we come out.”

Jocie knocked the screen out of the window, dropped Mr. Harvey’s shoes outside, and then slid out after them. The roof was right under her feet, not even a full step down. Maybe they were going to get out after all. She picked up Mr. Harvey’s shoes and moved them out of the way. She wished she’d put on her own shoes when she’d gotten out of bed to go look out the window. The roof shingles were scratchy under her feet.

Miss Sally hiked up her nightgown, grabbed her leg below the knee, and pulled it up until she could push her foot out the window. Jocie helped her balance as she pulled her other foot out and stood up on the porch.

“It’s more slanted than I remember, Harvey. Be careful,” Miss Sally said back in the window.

“Hurry, Mr. Harvey!” Jocie could smell the fire coming after them.

Mr. Harvey stuck one foot out and then sat straddling the window frame in his nightshirt. Sweat was running down his face.

“You two go on ahead,” he said after a couple of seconds. “I’ll catch up.”

“I’m not going without you, Harvey. So you just take a couple of deep breaths and come on out of there,” Miss Sally said.

“Go, Sally. For the girl’s sake.”

Jocie’s heart was pounding, and she imagined she could feel the shingles heating up under her feet. Still, she couldn’t run away and leave them stranded on the roof. Jocie moved over and put her arm around Mr. Harvey. “You can lean on me,” she said. “Please, Mr. Harvey. You have to get out. We can’t leave you here. We just can’t.”

“No, I suppose not.” He sounded very tired, but he leaned toward Jocie and held on to the window frame as he worked his other leg out through the window. He was panting again. He looked up when he stood down on the roof and said, “Dear Lord, just a few more minutes.”

Jocie wasn’t sure if he was talking to her and Miss Sally, or the Lord. Then they were making their way over the shingles to where the roof dropped down to almost touch the dirt mounded up over the root cellar. The fire was licking up the sides of the front of the house and coming through the roof to light up the sky, but the back of the house was still okay.

They were off the cellar and moving away from the house when the men in white were suddenly around them. Eyes stared out through the hoods at Jocie. Just like in her dream, except Mr. Harvey and Miss Sally weren’t with her in the dream.

Mr. Harvey straightened up. His anger seemed to give him strength. “You men did this!”

“We didn’t aim to burn the house. We just wanted to give you a message,” one of the men said through his hood.

“Bob, is that you?” Mr. Harvey peered over at the man.

“No, you don’t know any of us,” one of the other men said.

“It doesn’t matter what I know. The Lord knows all of you. You can’t hide your evil under hoods and expect the Lord not to see you.”

“You brought this down on yourself,” the man in front said. “You should have never sold your land to that—”

“Go! Leave! You’ve done enough harm for one night,” Mr. Harvey said, not letting him finish. His voice was cold. “And I’ll pray the good Lord can forgive you.”

“We don’t need your prayers, old man,” one of the men said, stepping toward Mr. Harvey. But a couple of the other men grabbed the man’s arms and pulled him back. They fell back out of the light of the fire and melted away into the night.

From the front of the house, Jocie heard truck doors slamming and motors starting up. And then there was only the noise of the fire crackling and devouring all Mr. Harvey and Miss Sally’s things. Jocie wished she could run back inside and grab the old clock off the mantel that Miss Sally said had belonged to her father. It had never quit ticking through all those years, and now it was burning. All their precious keepsakes were burning.

They moved a few more feet away from the house and turned to look back at the flames leaping through the roof toward the sky now. “So fast,” Miss Sally whispered.

And then Mr. Harvey leaned forward and clutched his chest again. “I’m really sorry to do this to you right now, Sally—” he gasped for breath before he was able to go on—“but I think I’m having a heart attack.”

“Oh no, Harvey. No!” Miss Sally cried.

But Mr. Harvey wasn’t listening. He was staring straight ahead. “Look, Sally. Have you ever seen anything so beautiful? They must be angels.” And then he was slumping.

Jocie tried to hold Mr. Harvey up, but he was too heavy. He slid away from her arms down to the ground. Miss Sally dropped to her knees beside him. She put her ear down on his chest. After a couple of seconds she said, “He’s still breathing. We’ve got to get him to the hospital.”

“But how?” Jocie said. Miss Sally couldn’t drive, but Jocie could if she had to, at least to a neighbor’s house. But she and Miss Sally would never be able to get Mr. Harvey in the car by themselves. They wouldn’t be able to lift him off the ground.

“I don’t know,” Miss Sally said. It sounded as if she was crying.

Pray.
The word echoed in Jocie’s head. The Lord would help her. Hadn’t he always helped her before? And hadn’t he helped Mr. Harvey and Miss Sally by putting Jocie in their house so she could wake them up when the house caught on fire? Another five minutes and they wouldn’t have gotten out. “Dear Lord, please help us. Show me what to do next.”

She’d no sooner finished whispering the prayer than she saw headlights out on the road. “There’s a car coming.”

“Praise the Lord,” Miss Sally said. “Go get them, and bring them here.”

Jocie started around the house, but then hesitated. “What if it’s some of those men coming back?”

“If it is, they’re surely coming back to help. Use what the Lord sends.”

It wasn’t any of the men. It was Noah and his whole family, even the twins and Cassidy. Cassidy’s eyes were big as they stared out of the car window at Jocie and then at the flames behind her.

Noah and his father carried Mr. Harvey to the car. Mr. Hearndon touched Mrs. Hearndon’s arm. “You take them. Noah and me will stay here and try to keep the fire from spreading to the other buildings.”

Jocie and Miss Sally climbed in the backseat with Cassidy and the twins. Cassidy scooted as close to Miss Sally as she could get, and Elise climbed over into Jocie’s lap and said, “Hot.”

Jocie pulled her tight to her with one arm and put her other arm around Eli. He snuggled against her without a word as his mother pulled out on the road to head toward the nearest hospital in Grundy. Too far away. Other cars, neighbors Miss Sally said, passed them headed toward the fire.

“Sweet Jesus,” Mrs. Hearndon said in a voice not much over a whisper. “Watch over our menfolk this night. Bring them into the sunlight of another day.”

Miss Sally reached up and put her hand on Mrs. Hearndon’s shoulder. “The neighbors are good people. They weren’t part of any of this.”

“I pray you’re right,” Mrs. Hearndon said before she mashed on the gas and sent the car flying through the night.

Jocie tightened her arms around the twins, and Cassidy scooted even closer to Miss Sally. In the front seat they could hear Mr. Harvey’s labored breathing. Jocie kept her eyes wide open, but she never stopped praying all the way to the hospital.

42

Tabitha lay in the hospital bed and stared at the tiny holes in the ceiling tiles over her head. She squinted her eyes and started counting them row by row to distract herself from the pain. She was on the third row when a new contraction grabbed her. The holes in the tiles blurred and ran together as she grabbed the sides of the bed and braced herself. She was breathing the way Aunt Love had said she should, but it still hurt. Way worse than anything she had expected.

She needed Aunt Love in the room with her to tell her it was okay. That she was going to make it. That thousands of women had babies every day and it hurt, but they lived through it. Even Aunt Love had lived through it. And she hadn’t even been in a hospital with doctors and nurses the way Tabitha was.

Tabitha needed somebody beside her. She needed to be able to reach out and touch a real person instead of the cold metal rails on the bed. The nurses had swarmed in on her at first, getting her in a hospital gown, checking her blood pressure and the baby’s heartbeat, shaving her down there. Tabitha hadn’t been expecting them to do that, but the nurse said it had to be done to keep down the chance of infections or something like that. Faces came and went—looming over her, telling her this or that—but she could hardly remember anything they had said.

She did remember what the doctor had said after he examined her. She was doing fine. Just fine. If she was doing fine, she was glad she wasn’t doing bad. She’d never be able to stand “bad” if this was “fine.” Then he said it would be awhile. That she might not deliver till morning. He acted as if he might go on home and go back to bed.

How was she going to stand this pain until morning? And all by herself. As the pain began to ease back, a couple of tears slid out of the corners of her eyes and down her cheeks. She hadn’t expected to be all alone.

No nurse had even been in to see about her since one of them had put up the side rails on the bed, as if she was some little kid who might fall out. If they were going to lock her in the bed, the least they could have done was let somebody, Aunt Love or her father or anybody, stay with her. Maybe they made her be alone because she didn’t have a husband. Maybe this was part of her punishment.

She tried to say a prayer, but she wasn’t very good at praying. Her father said she didn’t have to be good at praying. That the Lord didn’t care if her prayers were fancy or not, as long as they came from the heart. But Tabitha felt funny praying. She’d gotten too out of the habit all those years she’d been gone from Hollyhill with her mother, who thought praying was nothing but a big waste of time. Better to be out doing, DeeDee had always said, instead of hiding somewhere in a corner, praying to a God that never listened anyway.

Tabitha hadn’t believed that. She knew God listened, at least to some people. She’d just never been sure he would listen to her. At least not then, while she was with her mother. Why would he? They never went to church, and the truth was, she hardly ever even thought about praying except when she was thinking about her father. And then it wasn’t her praying, but him praying.

Of course, she was going to church now. Had gone most every Sunday since July except when she stayed home with Wes. And Aunt Love was always talking church stuff to her at home too. Tabitha didn’t mind. She liked it when Aunt Love assured her that the Lord loved her and her unborn baby and would take care of them no matter what.

But now Aunt Love was out there somewhere in the hospital where they wouldn’t let her come and talk to Tabitha. And the pain was rolling back toward her. She could feel it coming. Then it didn’t seem to hardly pause until it was rolling back at her again. This couldn’t be the way it was supposed to be. Not with her in here all by herself. Maybe if she screamed as loud as she could, her father would hear her and come help her.

The door to her room opened, and one of the nurses came in. She didn’t come to the bed to look at Tabitha’s belly or anything, but just walked over and looked out the window as if checking the weather or to see if her ride was in the parking lot down below. She didn’t even look around at Tabitha as she said, “How are you doing?”

“The pains aren’t stopping. Please, I need my father or my aunt to help me. The pain isn’t stopping.” Tabitha hated the way her voice sounded. Weak and teary, but it hurt. She wanted to be strong for Stephanie Grace, but nobody had told her it was going to hurt so bad. Or maybe they had, and she just hadn’t understood until she was feeling it herself.

The nurse left. Didn’t even pat her arm or check her pulse. Just left. Tabitha had to scream. She wanted to be a good girl and do what they told her, but for Stephanie Grace, she had to scream. There wasn’t anything left to do. But the sound was swallowed up by all the holes in the ceiling tiles. And the pain rolled on, crushing her.

Then the door was pushing open and nurses were swarming all around her. One shoved a gas mask over her nose while another one put her hands on Tabitha’s stomach. Suddenly Tabitha had to push. Stephanie Grace wanted out and Tabitha’s whole body was pushing.

The nurse with the gas mask held it tighter over Tabitha’s nose and mouth and said, “Breathe in. Don’t push. Breathe. Don’t push.”

But she couldn’t keep from pushing. She had to push. And breathe. And then she began sinking away from the noise and the pain.