The Scent of Lilacs Read online

  Her father must have peeked at his watch, because he began winding up the points of the sermon and making his appeal for people to come down the aisle if they had any decisions to let the church in on. Jocie hoped a couple of people would join church to make a few extra points in her father’s favor, but nobody walked the aisle, and they quit singing before they got to the last verse of the invitation hymn. Her father didn’t allow much time for working up your nerve.

  Still, everybody was smiling as they headed toward the door to shake her father’s hand on the way out. Ronnie Martin, one of the boys who had laughed at her in Sunday school class, stopped at Jocie’s pew. He was older than her, already in high school and always bragging about playing varsity football the next year.

  He blocked her in the pew. “Aren’t you a little old to be praying for puppy dogs?”

  “What’s it to you what I pray for?” Jocie glared at him. He was too big to shove out of her way. She might as well try to move a rock wall.

  “You ought to be praying for boyfriends.” He let his eyes drop down to her chest. “With your equipment it might take some heavy-duty praying.”

  Jocie’s face got hot. She was already raising the hymnbook still in her hand to pop him upside the head when just in time she remembered the vote and Ronnie’s deacon father. She took a deep breath and tried to think of one of Aunt Love’s Bible verses to zap him with. She couldn’t, so she made one up on the spot. “Foolish words spout out of a fool’s mouth and propel him along the road to destruction. Proverbs something.”

  “You sound like a preacher’s kid.”

  “I am a preacher’s kid.” Jocie stepped up on the pew. She wasn’t going to let him block her in a minute longer.

  “Yeah, but where’s your mama, preacher’s kid?”

  As ladylike as possible, Jocie vaulted over the back of the pew. If Ronnie was right, she didn’t have any “equipment” worth showing anyway. Her feet hit the floor hard enough to draw attention from the few people who hadn’t made it out the door yet. She didn’t dare look toward her father. Instead she glared at Ronnie and said, “Take a hike.”

  “Your little doggy can come with me.”

  Miss McMurtry was suddenly beside Jocie. “Is everything okay, dear?” She looked at Ronnie. “Are we having a misunderstanding?”

  Jocie smiled her best smile. “Not at all, Miss McMurtry. Ronnie was just suggesting some new things I might pray for.”

  “Well, that was helpful of him, I’m sure.” Miss McMurtry darted a sharp look his way. “Maybe we should have a little prayer right now, just the three of us.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ronnie said.

  Jocie didn’t see any way to escape, so she bowed her head and let Miss McMurtry pretend to talk to God while she was really preaching at her and Ronnie about getting along and being brothers and sisters in Christ. At least her prayer was mercifully short. Ronnie must have felt the same way, because he was out the door the second Miss McMurtry whispered amen.

  Miss McMurtry gave Jocie an extra pat on the shoulder and said, “He was probably just picking on you because he likes you.”

  “Oh boy. That makes me feel loads better,” Jocie said before she thought. “Sorry, Miss McMurtry. It’s just that I don’t think Ronnie’s my type. To tell the truth, I don’t think I have a type right now.”

  Miss McMurtry laughed. “You’re way too young to worry about it just yet, dear. The Lord will send the right type along when it’s time.”

  “Good. I’ll just trust him on that one.”

  Miss McMurtry put her arm around Jocie’s waist and walked her toward where her father was waiting.

  People were still gathered in clusters under the big oak tree out front. Jocie stayed by her father’s side as they made the rounds one more time before joining Aunt Love, who was already in the car. She even managed to smile sweetly at Ronnie when they passed by the Martin family sharing fishing stories with the Sandersons.

  After Sunday dinner, David and Mr. McDermott left to visit the sick. They figured to be gone all afternoon, since it had been a busy week at the Mt. Pleasant Church, with a gallbladder surgery, a sprained ankle, a broken arm (Herbert Haskins had been painting the eaves on his house when wasps dive-bombed him, and he’d taken the direct route to the ground), a new baby, a root canal, and a teenager threatening to run off to sing country music in Nashville.

  When Jocie started helping clear away the dinner dishes, Mrs. McDermott shooed her out of the kitchen. “Go on outside with little Matt Jr. and Molly. It’s too pretty a day for you to be stuck inside with us old ladies.”

  Jocie opened her mouth to inform Mrs. McDermott that she wasn’t exactly a kid like Matt Jr. and Molly, but then she thought about sitting all afternoon hiding her yawns while Mrs. McDermott and Aunt Love talked about the best way to freeze green beans or how to keep the bugs off roses. She shut her mouth. The McDermott kids had to be more entertaining.

  Before she went outside, she tiptoed down the hall to peek in at the baby, Murray, napping in his crib. Babies amazed her, and she stood there hoping Murray’s eyes would pop open so she could offer to carry him outside for a while. She watched his little chest rise and fall at least ten times before giving up and heading for the door.

  She found Matt Jr. and Molly watching wiggletails hatch out in the rain barrel. “They’re baby mosquitoes, you know,” Matt Jr. informed Jocie.

  “Why don’t you dump the water and kill them?” Jocie asked.

  “Mom would shoot us. She likes having rainwater for her flowers. Besides, you’d never be able to kill all the wiggletails anyway,” Matt Jr. said. “Hey, you want to go pet the horses out behind the barn?”

  As Jocie sidestepped cow piles on the way to the barn, she told Matt Jr. and Molly how lucky they were to have so many animals around. Then she told them about Zeb, her one and only animal.

  Matt Jr. made her tell the part about Zeb riding the motorcycle twice. He was a serious-looking kid with dark-rimmed glasses over sky-blue eyes. He’d changed out of his church clothes into blue jeans with a rip in the knee.

  Molly had changed into a sundress with strawberries the same red as the ribbons on the ends of her braids, which bounced against her shoulders as she kept hold of Jocie’s hand and tugged her along behind Matt Jr.

  On the way to the barn, Molly tipped up rocks and dried hunks of cow manure so Matt Jr. could grab any worms under them before they sank back down into the ground. They were hoping to go fishing the next day. They let Jocie hold the coffee can half full of black dirt laced with fat, pink earthworms.

  At the barn Matt Jr. stuck the can inside the milk room and found a piece of wood to lay on top of it. “You ever been fishing?” he asked Jocie.

  “Once.”

  “Catch anything worth mentioning?”

  “Nope. Just got eat up by mosquitoes.” She’d gone with a family at the Sinai Church the summer before. They’d promised her it would be fun. Nobody had mentioned the mosquitoes and deer flies or having to squash stinky worms onto a hook. But as bad as worm juice had smelled, the unlucky fish that had taken the bait had smelled even worse. She’d had to take hold of the fish and work the hook out of its mouth. After catching two fingerlings that the others had told her to toss up on the bank to let die, she’d quit putting worms on her hook. The day hadn’t been all that bad after that except for the mosquitoes and deer flies.

  Out behind the barn, two old work horses raised their heads and plodded over to them when Matt Jr. climbed up on the fence and whistled through his teeth.

  “We should have brought them some peppermint,” Molly said.

  “Peppermint? Peppermint candy?” Jocie asked.

  “Yeah, they’ll almost run if they think you’ve got candy. Almost. I doubt if anything could really make them run,” Matt Jr. said. “But if you don’t have candy, they’ll eat grass out of your hand. I guess to them it’s sort of like going to a restaurant. Having you pull the grass for them.”

  Jocie jerked up
a handful of clover and let the biggest horse nibble it off her hand.

  “Your fingers should be safe. He don’t bite very often,” Matt Jr. said.

  “Oh, Matt,” Molly said. “Ace and Annie have never bit anybody. But you do have to be careful not to let them step on you.”

  Jocie looked down at the horses’ feet, which were as big around as Molly’s waist. “Do you ride them?” she asked as she rubbed Ace’s velvety nose.

  “Yeah, but they won’t do more than a plod,” Matt Jr. said. “Daddy is going to get me a riding pony next year when I’m ten.”

  They gave the horses a last serving of grass and then went up to the hayloft to search for a new litter of kittens. The loft, half full of spring hay, smelled sweet and green. Dust and seeds floated in the air and caught in cobwebs that dripped down from the roof posts.

  Jocie had to keep yanking loose hay straws out of the toes of her Sunday sandals, but the kittens were worth it. They found them in a small depression between a couple of bales of hay. Two were gray and white, one almost all white, and the other one black. The kittens were just beginning to open their eyes, and when Molly picked up the black kitten by the nape of his neck, they all set up a high-pitched mewing that brought the black-and-white mama cat running. She squeezed in between the bales of hay and wrapped her body around the kittens, who stopped mewing and started nursing.

  “I bet she moves them again,” Molly said as she carefully placed the black kitten back beside his mother. “She hates it when we find them.”

  “I just hope she doesn’t lose them like she did the last bunch. Mama says Miss Kitty has some learning to do about being a good mother,” Matt Jr. said.

  “I thought all animal mothers were good mothers. You know, natural instinct and all that,” Jocie said.

  “Nah, that’s not true,” Matt Jr. said. “We have to bottle-feed a couple of lambs every year because the mama sheep decides the baby she just had isn’t hers and kicks it away when it tries to suck. Of course, sheep are dumber than rocks.”

  The mama cat licked her babies in between glares over her shoulder at Jocie and the kids. Jocie said, “She looks like she’s being a good mother now. She’d like us to disappear.”

  “Yeah, she does okay till they’re big enough to follow her around. Then like as not, she’ll lead them off and lose them in the woods.”

  “On purpose?” Jocie said.

  Molly shrugged. “Mama says she probably doesn’t aim to lose them, that maybe she hasn’t figured out how to sneak off without them seeing her, and they just follow after her and get lost. Or then again, Mama says she could just get tired of being a mother.”

  “Does she? Your mother, I mean.”

  “No, of course not,” Molly said. “People mothers don’t get tired of their babies.”

  Jocie pushed aside the thought of her own mother. She hadn’t been a baby when her mother had left. Far from it. She’d been five, the same age as Molly. One night she’d had a mother and a sister when she went to bed, and the next morning she hadn’t.

  Jocie wondered again for the thousandth time why her mother had taken Tabitha and not her. Of course, she wouldn’t have gone. She would have grabbed hold of the porch posts and held on for dear life before she would have left her father and Hollyhill. Still, her mother could have said good-bye. But there had been no good-bye, no note from her mother to her or to her father, no anything.

  Tabitha had left a note for her father. Jocie had seen it in one of her father’s Bibles once. The paper was limp from being handled, and some of the folds were tearing in two. Tabitha had said she was leaving, that her mother wouldn’t let her wake him up to say good-bye, and to make Jocie leave her stuff alone, because she’d be back someday. Except for her dolls. She’d said Jocie could have the dolls. But Jocie hadn’t played with the dolls. Mama Mae had packed them away in boxes along with Tabitha’s other stuff. It was all still there in the closet waiting for her.

  Jocie was glad when Matt Jr. said he was thirsty, and they headed back to the house. She didn’t really want to think about good mothers or bad mothers. Cats or otherwise.

  Aunt Love nearly had a stroke when they came in, but Mrs. McDermott just laughed and made them go back out on the porch to brush off the hay seeds before pointing them to the bathroom to wash up.

  “That girl,” Jocie could hear Aunt Love saying. “Sometimes she acts more like ten than thirteen.”

  “Oh well,” Mrs. McDermott said with another laugh. “Ten can be more fun and lots easier on Brother David, I’d say. At thirteen, she could be starting to run after the boys instead of crawling around in a hayloft hunting kittens.”

  Jocie splashed cold water on her face to try to douse the red blooming on her cheeks. She hated getting embarrassed. Wes said people from Jupiter didn’t turn red. Instead their ears tingled until they had to wiggle them to let the embarrassment out. Jocie opened her mouth wide and breathed out until the bathroom mirror in front of her was foggy and her cheeks were a nice normal pink instead of red. Who said you couldn’t learn a few tricks from a Jupiterian?

  That night after evening services, David stepped down from the pulpit and shook the hands of the people who stayed seated in the pews as he walked down the aisle toward the door. Most of them looked him in the eyes and smiled. Surely that was a sign the vote might go in his favor.

  David wanted the position badly. While he’d filled a lot of pulpits when a pastor was sick or on vacation, no church had called him for any kind of permanent position since Adrienne had left.

  He’d been the pastor at New Liberty over in the small community of Summersville when that had happened. It was an old church but with life. Around fifty faithful members had showed up every time the church doors opened, and he had been urging more back into the pews. The people had adopted Tabitha and Jocie into their hearts and had mostly overlooked Adrienne.

  Adrienne had never taken to the idea of being a preacher’s wife. “Why should I waste my every Sunday afternoon listening to some toothless old country woman telling me to plant peas in February and how to pick the worms off cabbages and that I should sew ruffles on my ‘precious’ little girls’ dresses? I don’t like peas. Cabbage with or without worms makes me puke. And I detest ruffles,” Adrienne had told him on numerous occasions. She flat out refused to go to church more than once a month.

  And while he always encouraged her to go, sometimes it was worse when she did. David was afraid to let her out of earshot for fear of what she might say or do. If he asked her to be kind and careful about what she said, she’d say, “Thou shalt not lie.”

  He told her that didn’t necessarily mean she had to run with arms flailing at the head deacon’s wife to warn her that birds were circling her bouffant hairstyle for a prime nesting spot. Or tell the choir director that she could hear a better chorus around a pond. Adrienne would just laugh and say, “At least things were interesting for a few minutes.”

  She let him know every Sunday, every day really, that she hadn’t married a preacher. She’d married a soldier who had freaked out in battle and insanely made promises to God for her that she couldn’t keep. Being a good preacher’s wife was as much a calling as being a preacher. Adrienne hadn’t been called, and she didn’t plan to pick up the phone if the Lord did dial her number.

  “What is your calling?” he’d asked her once.

  “Who says I have to have a calling?” she’d said with that smile that could make him forgive her almost anything. She’d lightly traced her fingers across the back of his neck. “At least from God.”

  A tingle tickled across his back and slammed him in the stomach even all these years later. She’d always known just what to do to get around his anger. At least until she was out of sight. Then the resentment would flood back, and he’d practice arguments in his head until they threatened to block out his sermons—Didn’t he try to be a good father and husband? Didn’t he work long hours to get her the things she wanted? Was it too much to ask her to support hi
m in his calling by going to church on Sundays and being nice to the people there? He couldn’t remember ever actually asking those questions, but he’d gotten an answer anyway. She’d left.

  None of the churches they’d ever been part of had warmed to Adrienne. They had always hired David in spite of his wife, but once she was gone, she became an obstacle the churches could no longer overlook.

  The deacons at New Liberty Church hadn’t exactly fired him. They had just encouraged him to take some time off until he got his family situation under control. After all, a man who couldn’t control his family certainly couldn’t be expected to lead a church. So Paul had written to Timothy.

  Now some of the people here at Mt. Pleasant seemed willing to look past his fractured marriage to give him a new chance. But would enough of them feel that way to vote him in as their interim pastor?

  Aunt Love and Jocie followed him out. He shut the church door behind them and headed for the car. It felt strange to leave the church full of people, as if he was running scared.

  In the car, Aunt Love sniffed loudly and said, “Did you ask for a unanimous vote? If so, we might as well tell this church good-bye for the last time right here and now.”

  “Ninety percent,” David said as he started the engine.

  Aunt Love dug into her pocketbook for a handkerchief. “You should have said eighty. It’s only an interim position. They’ll send you packing as soon as they get wind of a preacher they can call full-time.”

  “I don’t expect it to last more than a few months, but however long, I didn’t want there to be a lot of friction about me being here. I think I’ve got a chance at ninety. What do you think, Jocie?” He looked in the rearview mirror at Jocie in the backseat.