Orchard of Hope (44 page)

“Now don’t you be worrying. I told you the sheriff was in here a bit ago. And Jimmy, he promises me that wherever I go to stay, he’ll be sure to see that I’m safe. See, the Lord is going to use this. If Jimmy keeps me safe, he’ll have to keep Myra and Alex safe. Don’t you think?”

“I pray so,” David said. “Maybe we should pray so together.”

He held her hands and felt strength coming through to him as he prayed. Here she was the one who’d lost her brother and all her possessions and yet she was pushing strength toward him.

When he said amen, she told him, “Now you go on and see about Jocie. Make sure she’s okay. She took an awful chance running up the stairs after us with the smoke so bad.” She squeezed his hands before she turned them loose. “I’ll be just fine. Myra and little Cassidy will be back in a few minutes. Myra will take care of me.

“And you tell all the folk at Mt. Pleasant what I told you about Harvey and the angels. That way maybe they won’t be so sad. Tell them that we’ll be having Homecoming next week same as always. Harvey would have wanted us to.”

The next morning the Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church members came and sat in the pews the same as always, but they didn’t have church the same as always. David didn’t preach a sermon. They didn’t even sing any songs. Jessica Sanderson tried playing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” but she didn’t get through the first verse before she just stood up and went back and sat in the second pew with her family.

There wasn’t a dry eye in the church when David told them what Miss Sally had told him to say. And everybody prayed. Really prayed. There had probably never been a better message straight from the Lord in all the many years the Mt. Pleasant Church had been meeting. It was a message that didn’t have to come out of a preacher’s mouth. It was a message that just went heart to heart.

44

Mr. Harvey’s funeral was on Wednesday afternoon at two o’clock. Hollyhill shut down. Jocie didn’t go to school. She didn’t go Monday or Tuesday either. She was still coughing, still had that nasty smoke smell in her nose. She could have gone to school, but she just didn’t want to, and her father said she didn’t have to. At least, until after the funeral.

Besides, Wes had needed her to help get the
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out. Her father was busy helping Miss Sally. He took Miss Sally to Hazelton’s Funeral Home on Monday morning to get everything arranged for Mr. Harvey’s funeral service. And then he and Mrs. Hearndon took her out to see what was left of her house. He looked grim when he brought his film back to the office for Wes to develop for the paper. That was all he’d done for this week’s issue.

He’d said he didn’t care whether they printed a paper this week or not, but Zella said they had to. She said they were just like the post office that never let anything stop the mail. Blizzards, floods, gloom of night, whatever. She said it had to be the same with the
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. They couldn’t just decide to skip a week.

“Why, if we don’t put out some kind of paper, there will be people lined up here Thursday morning with their hands out for a refund for this week’s cost of their subscriptions,” she’d told Jocie’s father. “Can you imagine what kind of headache that would be? Refunding a week’s worth of their subscription.”

“They wouldn’t do that,” Jocie’s father said, but he didn’t sound too sure of it.

“You know some of them would. Besides, we need the money from the counter sales to stay out of the red, and the people that have bought ads have a right to see them in the paper when they thought they would be in there.” She looked hard at Jocie’s father. “I’m as tore up as anybody about Harvey. He was a fine man, a godly man, but he wouldn’t have wanted us to just sit down and hold our heads in our hands and say ‘oh, me.’”

“I’m not doing that.”

“Well, no, you’re helping Sally, which you ought to be doing, but Harvey would be the first to tell us to go on about our lives, and part of that is putting out a paper. Besides, don’t you think this is a story that ought to be told? As a testimony to him. To Harvey.”

“You’re preaching at me, Zella,” David said.

“Turnabout’s fair play,” Zella snapped. “We can’t just hide our heads in the sand on this one. Let Jocelyn write a story about it. She was there.”

Jocie’s father said she didn’t have to if it was too hard for her to think about what had happened, but it had helped to write some of it down. And then she’d been so busy helping Wes and Noah get the pages ready to run and running them that she hadn’t had time to think about the flames racing up the stairs to trap her and Miss Sally and Mr. Harvey.

Her father had been there on Tuesday when they folded the papers. So had Leigh with her brownies, but the folding session was solemn and somber as they folded the papers with Mr. Harvey’s picture on the front page, top fold.

Wednesday, Leigh took off work. That morning after they took the papers to the post office, she drove Jocie over to the hospital to see Tabitha and her baby. He was the cutest thing Jocie had ever seen as he lay there in his little bed on wheels behind the viewing window. He kept waving his fists and fussing at the nurses.

Jocie told Tabitha how cute he was and that she needed to hurry up and come up with a name or they’d just have to call him Boy Brooke the way she’d heard some people name their dogs Pup or Dog. And then she suggested Stephen Lee. Stephen for Aunt Love’s baby and Lee for Mr. Harvey. That had been his middle name. It was in the obituary they’d printed in the
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.

“Stephen Lee. That does have a nice sound, and I liked Mr. Harvey. He was sweet to me,” Tabitha said and then looked worried. “But do you think, you know, if I ever do have another baby that I could still name her Stephanie Grace? Would that be too confusing having a Stephen and a Stephanie?”

“Not for anybody with half a brain,” Jocie said. “The names don’t sound a thing alike. And who cares what anybody thinks, anyway? He’s so cute. He needs a good name.”

“He looks like his father,” Tabitha said.

“Well, you did tell me once that his father had beautiful brown eyes,” Jocie reminded her.

“But I forgot to add the part about the beautiful brown skin,” Tabitha said.

“It won’t matter,” Jocie and Leigh both said at once.

But Tabitha just looked at them without smiling. “How can you say that after what just happened to Mr. Harvey? It will matter.”

Leigh stepped closer to give Tabitha a hug before she said, “All right, you’re right. It might matter to some people, but it won’t matter to the people who are most important to you and now to him. Your father and Jocie. Aunt Love and me. Wes. We’ll be there to help you and him through whatever happens.”

“So name him already,” Jocie said.

“Okay, okay, I will.” Tabitha had made a face at Jocie, then looked sad as she’d asked them to be sure to tell Miss Sally how sorry she was about Mr. Harvey.

And now her father had preached the funeral, and they were at the cemetery getting ready to put Mr. Harvey beneath the ground. It was still hot, even though some clouds had drifted in to cover the sun. People had looked up at the sky as they’d walked from their cars across the graveyard to crowd around the tent set up over the grave. In hushed voices they talked about how much they needed rain.

Miss Sally was sitting under the tent with Myra and Alex Hearndon on either side of her. Cassidy sat close to Myra, and Noah had the twins at the back of the tent. Dorothy McDermott had moved up beside him to help with the children if she was needed. A few nieces and nephews filled up the rest of the chairs under the tent.

Miss Sally dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief as Jocie’s father read the graveside Scriptures. Jocie had attended a lot of funerals with her father. She knew how they went. Most of the crying happened in the funeral home before Mr. Hazelton shut the casket. The graveside was just one final good-bye, but today everybody was crying. Everybody but her.

Jocie didn’t have any tears. It was as if the fire had been so hot that it had seared every tear out of her heart. Beside her, tears ran down Leigh’s cheeks. Even her father had to wipe away tears as he read from his Bible. But Jocie just listened with her eyes so dry they almost hurt as she looked around at the people gathered there and wondered if any of them had been under the hoods.

None of it seemed real when she thought about it. The white-hooded men around Miss Sally’s house. The fire. Crawling out the window and across the roof with Mr. Harvey talking to the Lord. But it
was
real. Her father was reading from his Bible. The people around her were weeping. Mr. Harvey was dead.

What was it Mr. Harvey had told her when they went out to see the new calf? That birth and death were all part of God’s plan for his people. But the fire had nothing to do with God’s plans. That was hatred with feet and torches.

Her father was through praying, and Mr. Hazelton was picking a rose out of the spray on top of the casket to give to Miss Sally. When he handed the rose to Miss Sally, she whispered something to him. He looked a little surprised before he went back to the casket for two more roses to hand to Mrs. Hearndon and Cassidy. Cassidy wouldn’t take hers, so Mrs. Hearndon had to take them both.

The first raindrop hit Jocie’s head as Miss Sally stood up on the green fake-grass rug under the tent. And then more drops splattered against the tent. There was no sign of a storm, no thunder or lightning, no wind. The clouds overhead just broke open and rain began falling, almost as if the very sky was weeping for Mr. Harvey. It was a gentle rain, and nobody ran for their cars. They just stood there and held out their hands to catch the drops.

Miss Sally came out from under the tent and looked up toward the sky, letting the rain wash the tears off her face. And then she laughed. Right out loud. “Isn’t that just like Harvey?” She looked at the people around her. “He just went right to the source of all rain and talked the Lord into sending it on down to us.”

It rained the rest of the day and all night long and into the next morning. The same gentle steady rain that let the ground drink in every drop. And all the time it was raining, everybody in Holly County kept thinking about Mr. Harvey and how much he had loved his land and his neighbors and how the rain was saving the crops. Of course, Noah and his family didn’t have any apple trees left to be saved by the rain.

Jocie went back to school on Thursday. Everybody was extra nice to her. Paulette even left Janice and Linda to sit with Jocie and Charissa at lunchtime. Of course, that might not have had as much to do with the fire as Paulette still hoping Jocie would say it was okay for her to like Ronnie Martin. Jocie didn’t know why Paulette needed her okay, but for some reason, she did.

But Jocie had too much other stuff on her mind to worry about whether she’d ever be able to forgive Ronnie Martin. She didn’t even have time to pray about that right now. She had to pray for Miss Sally and Noah’s family. And she had to pray that somehow she would be able to close her eyes and go to sleep again without seeing flames and men in hoods. She thought about asking her father to help her pray on that one, but he’d been so busy helping everybody that they barely had the chance to talk about anything except what needed to be done at the
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.

Thursday, her dad took Wes back to the doctor. Wes came home wearing what he called a walking cast. He still had to use his crutches, but he got to put weight on his leg, and he started eyeing his motorcycle. When Jocie went by the newspaper office after school, he told her, “You know, I think if somebody helped me climb on the thing, I could take a ride now.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Jocie told him. “Enough bad things have happened this year already.”

“Wouldn’t be nothing bad about me taking a ride.”

“It would be bad when you had a wreck because your leg was in a cast.”

“I didn’t say I’d do the driving. Noah could. Or maybe you,” Wes said with a grin.

“Don’t either one of us have a license,” Jocie reminded him.

Wes sighed. “Well, I guess that is a problem. Maybe I can talk your daddy into being a preacher on a hog. Might make Miss Leigh think he was dashing and handsome.”

“She already does,” Jocie said.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. Then how about old Zell? You think she’d take me for a spin?”

The thought of Zella on Wes’s motorcycle was so crazy that Jocie had to laugh. For the first time all week.

“There, that’s more like it,” he said. “You can’t stop laughing, Jo.”

“You weren’t doing all that much laughing a few weeks ago yourself.” Jocie peered over at him. “Then it was me trying to get you to laugh.”

“That’s what friends and family are for.” Wes reached over and touched her hand. “What is that verse Lovella sometimes says? That one about the merry heart.”

“‘A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.’”

“It’s medicine all of us need.” Wes sat back in his chair.

“But how can your heart be merry when bad things are happening?” Sadness welled up inside Jocie as she thought about Mr. Harvey.

“That’s too hard a question for an old Jupiterian like me,” Wes said. “But could be it has something to do with that peace that passeth understanding your daddy talks about sometimes. And with how even when bad things are happening, good things are still happening too.”