The Scent of Lilacs (35 page)

The next morning Aunt Love said she couldn’t make biscuits till the jars of beans were out of the way. Jocie suggested toast, but Aunt Love just quoted some Bible verse about not putting off till tomorrow what needed to be done today. At least it sounded like a Bible verse. The flashlight was dim when Jocie switched it on as she went down the stone steps with her first load, but it was still better than a candle.

She didn’t have anybody to help her. Not even Zeb, who was off hunting in Mr. Crutcher’s hay field. Tabitha was still asleep, and Jocie couldn’t ask Aunt Love, because she might fall down the steps and break a hip or something. Old ladies were always breaking hips. And her father was off praying somewhere.

He’d gotten another call from Matt McDermott about the church. They didn’t want to fire him. They still wanted to hire him, except of course for Ogden Martin, who had never wanted to hire him in the first place. Jocie half hoped her father wouldn’t decide the Lord was calling him to stay at Mt. Pleasant. She’d miss seeing Paulette, but she was sick of being nice to Ronnie Martin.

The temperature dropped a few degrees every step down into the cellar. Jocie started saying, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” Then she thought of Aunt Love saying that as she held the bones of her long-dead baby and felt
as if going into the cellar wasn’t worthy of the same Scripture, so she started singing, “Yes, Jesus loves me.” She changed the words a little. “He won’t let the spiders get on my head. Yes, Jesus loves me.”

Jocie kicked the wooden cellar door open as far as she could to let in a little extra light as she set the jars down in the space they always saved for the green beans. Tomatoes and apples on the left, pears and sauerkraut and pickles on the right, and green beans in the middle. She didn’t bother counting how many jars were left from last year before she ran out of the dark cellar. Jezebel was peering down at her from the wall beside the steps. The cat waved her tail back and forth. “Jump on me now, cat, and I’ll lock you in the cellar all day.”

The cat meowed as if she knew Jocie was bluffing.

The flashlight went out on her last trip. The spiders over the door waiting to drop on her head got bigger. Snakes peered out from behind every jar. The shadows deepened and pointed fingers at her. But she was already in the cellar. She couldn’t just drop the jars and run. She had to go through the dank air of the cellar and set the jars down one by one on the rock floor. She switched songs and started singing, “Do Lord, oh do Lord, oh do remember me.”

She was out of the cellar in two seconds flat after the bottom of the last jar touched the floor. She ran over top of Jezebel, who had been lying in wait for her on the top step, and barreled into her father.

“Whoa,” he said as he caught hold of her shoulders. “Where’s the fire?”

“No fire.” Jocie looked over her shoulder at the steps down to the cellar. “Just spiders and snakes and heaven only knows what else.” Jocie ran her hands through her hair to shake out any stray spiders that might have a hitched a ride up the stairs.

Her father laughed. “There’s absolutely nothing in that cellar that will hurt you.”

“That’s what you say.”

“Have I ever lied to you?”

“But you don’t know the things I can imagine,” Jocie said, her heart slowing to a normal beat again. “And Jezebel was on the steps. She can hurt me.”

Her father hugged her. “If I could protect you from all the Jezebels of the world, I would, but—”

“Yeah, I know. I have to develop character, and nobody can develop character if they have smooth sailing all the time. But if I could do the choosing, I’d rather develop character in the daylight and not in creepy old cellars.”

“Tell you what. Next time we have stuff to carry down to the cellar, you can leave it till I can help you. We’ll do the multiplication table while we carry the jars down. You won’t have time to imagine anything bad.”

“Ugh. Math. Spiders and snakes might be better.”

“You’ll get to take algebra next year. I can’t believe my baby girl will be a freshman in high school.”

It seemed the perfect opening. “Yeah, Dad. I need to get some clothes before school starts. Do you think Tabitha would go shopping with me next time you go to Grundy? Just for a few things. You know, some of the basics I can’t get at the Fashion Shop uptown.”

“That’s a great idea. Leigh might even like to go along. She’s from over in Grundy, you know, so she’d know which stores were best.”

“Yeah, that would be great.” Jocie really didn’t care who went along as long as she didn’t have to ask the prune-faced ladies at the Fashion Shop to show her the boxes of bras. Still, she couldn’t keep from asking, “Is she going to be like one of the family now?”

“Let’s just say a friend of the family right now,” her father said. “You do like her okay, don’t you?”

“She makes great brownies.”

“She does. And she’s nice in other ways too. She handled things at church pretty good Sunday.”

“What things?”

“Oh, people staring at her, adding two and two and coming up with five. That sort of thing.” Her father took off his wet shoes and set them by the door into the kitchen. “Did you get that story about the 4-H Club summer projects finished for the paper today?”

“Don’t I always beat my deadlines?”

“You do. Always. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Jocie hugged him. “Thank you for wanting me, Daddy.”

“What brought that on?” her father asked.

“Tabitha told me that my mother—that DeeDee—didn’t want me. That she gave me to you and never did anything for me.”

“She shouldn’t have told you that.”

“I asked her to tell me the truth. It was the truth, wasn’t it?”

“Well, yes. Your mother wasn’t happy when she found out you were on the way. I wanted more children, but she didn’t. Still, there are some things better not told.”

“But isn’t it better to know the truth? I mean, my mother didn’t want me. Plain and simple.”

“Nothing is ever that simple.” Her father frowned and asked, “What else did Tabitha tell you?”

“Nothing.” Jocie studied her father’s face. “Is there more that I should know?” Her father turned away from her and picked up his town shoes. “I’m sure there are lots of things neither of us know about your mother. Things better left unknown. Now, I think I smell something burning. We’d better go rescue breakfast.”

T
hey had the paper ready to run by noon. Nothing very newsworthy had happened in Hollyhill since the last issue. Then, as Wes was fond of pointing out, nothing very newsworthy had happened in Hollyhill since he’d been there except the tornado that blew through town in ’59.

This week the weather had been calm, so about the most exciting thing in the
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was old Mr. Petrey running up on the curb in front of Haskell’s Drugs. Nobody had been hurt, but the parking meter had been bent over double. When Jocie’s father had run up the street to take a picture, Mr. Petrey had been bent over trying to put his nickel in the meter before going in to pick up his medicine. Wes had said they ought to run that picture, but Zella had reminded them that Mr. Petrey had ten kids and twenty-nine grandkids and who knew how many great-grandkids, and most of them were
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subscribers. So they’d just run the picture of the sheriff and Mr. Petrey looking over the damage.

Jocie had finally gotten to use her parade picture of Heather Boyd’s collie with her 4-H story. The mayor and the city council had argued over Christmas decorations for the street. Mayor Palmor had accused the council members of not having any town spirit because they refused to vote for new lights, and the council members had accused the mayor of being reckless with the taxpayers’ money. The Downtown Merchants’ Association was advertising “Sidewalk Days.” Her father had taken a whole
roll of film of kids playing softball at the community park. They had wedding announcements, just-born baby pictures, summer revival ads. Regular, routine stuff.

“This sucker will put the press to sleep it’s so dull,” Wes said as he got the first page ready to run. They hadn’t run more than ten copies when Wes stopped the press. “I hear something that ain’t right, and it ain’t snoring.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” Jocie said.

“That’s because you don’t have Jupiterian ears,” Wes said.

“Neither do you. Tabitha says you’re from Illinois or Ohio.”

“People just listen to half the story and think they’ve got the truth. Fact is, Illinois and Ohio are outer regions on the westernmost part of Jupiter’s frontier. I guess being raised out there on the edge is what made me sign up for space travel. Then I get down here and you Earth people have copied half our names. Course, who knows? Could be some of my folks got stranded down here and started up settlements.”

Jocie laughed. “You’re never going to tell me the truth, are you?”

“I always tell you the truth, and the truth right now is that if we don’t oil down this old boy, something might break big time and the folks would have to do without all the news that is the news in Hollyhill.” Wes picked up his oil can. “Uh-uh. Not near enough. You’d better go up the street and get some more at the hardware store. No telling when your dad will come back in from the courthouse now that he’s found out a certain somebody down there will laugh at his jokes.”

“Yeah, it’s getting serious.”

“Dang right, it’s serious. I don’t get this press moving soon, we’ll be here all night, and I’m right in the middle of the latest Rex Stout mystery and I ain’t figured out who done it yet.”

“I didn’t mean the press. I meant Leigh and Dad. He invited her to church Sunday morning.”

“You don’t say. You think he was trying to scare her off?” Wes said.

“Nobody stared too much. They were all staring at Tabitha.”

“She went too, huh?”

“I think because of Aunt Love. To make her feel better, you know. She thought Aunt Love would be sad, because of us finding the baby and everything.”

“And she’s not?” Wes squirted some oil on one of the gears.

“She wore a red hat to church Sunday.”

Wes looked around. “A red hat? Your Aunt Love?”

“She’s different. I mean, she still can’t remember to take the biscuits out of the oven, but it’s like she’s remembered something more important.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe that the Bible says there’s a time to laugh as well as a time to cry.”

“Your Aunt Love quote that one to you?”

“She has before. It’s in Ecclesiastes. Aunt Love practically knows that book by heart. But you know, now that I think about it, she hasn’t been bashing me over the head with Scripture all that much this week. All she wants to talk about is Tabitha’s baby coming. She’s not worried a whit about what the church people or anybody else in Hollyhill might think. It’s like she forgot who she used to be.”

“Then again, Jo, maybe you never really knew who she used to be.” Wes looked over his shoulder at her again. “She lived a lot of her life before you even discovered America. There’s a lot you can never know about her.”

“Or about you,” Jocie said.

“Now, we ain’t talking about me. We’re talking about your Aunt Love.”

“But you lived a lot of your life before you came to Hollyhill.”

“Mostly just cruising around in spaceships. Don’t much happen in spaceships. It’s like when you’re on vacation and you’re looking out at the scenery and saying, ‘Wow, look at that,’ but you don’t really do anything. You just look. Until, of course, you fall out.”

“But you had your years on Jupiter.”

“Not a bit interesting to Earth people. Sort of like this news here.” Wes waved at the paper they had ready to run. “Only a Hollyhiller would ever think about reading more than two lines of this snooze news. I ain’t even sure why they would, but they do expect to get something in their mailboxes on Wednesdays. So we mustn’t disappoint them. Now run on up the street and get me some more oil and maybe a grease gun while you’re at it. Nero Wolfe is waiting.”

Once he had the oil, Wes worked his usual magic and had the press purring as it spit out the pages of the
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. Jocie didn’t think a thing about it when Leigh dropped by after work to help finish up folding the papers. It was as if she was part of the crew now. And maybe part of the family. Her dad said they’d all be going to Grundy the next day after lunch. Tabitha had to do some blood tests at the doctor’s office, and Leigh was more than willing to help Jocie shop for school. And then they might just all go out to eat. Aunt Love was even thinking about going.