The Sweetest Hallelujah

Cassie started to ask, Why am I here? Then she remembered it was Queen who’d invited her, not Betty Jewel. Folding her notebook, she put it back into her purse.

“I’m disappointed, naturally, but I didn’t come just for a story. I have lots of connections. Maybe I can help you that way. First, though, I’d like to meet Billie.”

A fierceness came over Betty Jewel that made Cassie think of a mama eagle protecting her young from snakes. “No. She’s going through enough pain without me adding to it with drama.”

The screen door banged open, followed by stealthy footsteps in the hall. Then a bony-kneed, big-eyed child drifted by. Billie. Full of contradictions. Defiant and tragic. Fearless and scared. Forced by her mother’s fatal illness to grow up overnight, she wore an expression that clearly said she’d rather remain a child because growing up was such a tragedy.

The look that passed between mother and daughter was almost beyond enduring. In the face of such devotion, there are things you can’t do. You can’t ask How long before you die? and Will you give your daughter up before or after? You can’t snap pictures for The Bugle, though a photo would be more compelling than that heart-wrenching, hopeful little ad. You can’t think of your empty bed and the empty crib in your attic and the long string of empty years ahead. You can’t think of anything except a little girl who has turned her stare to you, a little girl with eyes so green they remind you of deep rivers and lost love and the unbearable beauty of the human spirit.

With one last, big-eyed stare, Billie slid past the door and out of sight. Cassie was left feeling as if her bones had been rearranged.

It took a while for them to settle back into place, and when they did, she was filled with an unexpected resolve.

“Betty Jewel, what you’re doing is one of the bravest things I know. I want to be personally involved. I want to help you.”

“Joe always said the biggest thing about you was your heart.”

It was the kind of generous compliment Joe used to pass around. But Cassie found it shocking coming from this woman’s mouth.

“You knew him personally?”

“From Tiny Jim’s.”

“Of course.” Cassie pictured her husband in the juke joint, mellow with blues and beer, easygoing and approachable, talking about his wife to strangers as if the very telling could make her more real to him. On those long, lonely nights after the last miscarriage when she’d sometimes felt as if Joe were drifting away, as if she might meet him coming around a dark corner and not even know him, had he felt the same way?

“Cassie, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“No. It’s okay. Everybody in town knew and loved Joe.”

A coughing spell bent Betty Jewel in two, and when she turned away Cassie saw patches of her scalp where radiation had stolen her hair. She wanted to cover her vulnerable baldness with a silk scarf, and at the same time she wanted to take a picture and spread it in on the front page under a caption titled Hero.

“Can I get you anything? Water?”

“No. I’m all right.”

Cassie gathered her purse. “I should go. If there’s anything I can do to help you, please let me know. Here are the numbers where you can reach me. Day or night.”

As she handed over the card, another fit of coughing bent Betty Jewel double. With her face covered by her hands and her head bowed, she looked like somebody praying. And maybe she was. Maybe Cassie was, too, though she was sitting there with her eyes wide open.

Should she call Miss Queen? Phone for an ambulance?

Still bent, Betty Jewel reached into her pocket for a bottle of pills and out tumbled a harmonica.

B-flat.

Silver with a pink rose painted on the side.

The pink rose Cassie had painted.

A keening built inside her, and she pressed her hand over her mouth to hold it back.

When Betty Jewel lifted her head, Cassie found herself looking at a woman for whom everything had been stripped away, everything except love.

From somewhere in the house, a tea kettle whistled and a shaky soprano sang a hymn Cassie remembered from childhood. Rescue the perishing. Care for the dying.

Long ago when Cassie had played church piano, she would read the verses at the same time she read the music. Not many people can do that. It’s a gift. Like knowing things before they happens.

Here is what Cassie knew: the harmonica had set events in motion that were beyond her control. She didn’t know the particulars yet, only that her fate was somehow tangled up with this woman.

“Is that Joe’s?”

“I didn’t mean for it to come to this.”

Lord God, Cassie was going to die on the spot. Betty Jewel hadn’t denied it. She hadn’t laughed off Cassie’s question and offered some simple explanation. I found this at Tiny Jim’s juke joint.

Now the woman was scaring her, but Cassie had never been one to back down from the hard things. Smile and carry on. Did her husband die without warning, leaving her to wish she’d held on to him longer the morning before he went to Moon Lake, held on and said I love you, instead of waving to him from the door and saying I’ll see you tonight. Save your tears for private. In public, smile and carry on.

There would be no smiling and carrying on today.

“Come to what?” Cassie struggled to keep her voice low. Somewhere in the house was a dignified old woman who deserved better than a quarrel in her living room.

“What?” Betty Jewel’s silence ripped through Cassie, as damning as the worst nightmare she could imagine. “For God’s sake! Tell me.”

“Something happened a long time ago, before Billie was born, something with consequences that reached far beyond what I’d ever dreamed.”

Betty Jewel’s voice sounded like distant music, a smoky blues song that could haunt a person forever. Cassie fought to hold back terror so fierce it would consume her.

“I never meant to hurt you, and I certainly never meant for it to come to this.”

“You and Joe?” The question tore from Cassie’s gut, deep where the fearsome truth dwells. “Tell me this is not what I think it is.”

“I’m sorry, Cassie.” If Cassie could go deaf on the spot, she would. “Joe is Billie’s father.”

Look for disaster long enough and you’re sure to find it.

Nine

LORD GOD, CASSIE WAS sitting there looking as though somebody had poked a hole in her heart and drained out all her blood. Betty Jewel regretted telling her flat-out that Joe was Billie’s father.

“Cassie?”

She jerked as if she’d been electrocuted, then bolted. Betty Jewel struggled from her chair, calling after her. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m sorry.”

But she was already out the door, tearing off in her fancy red car. Betty Jewel hung on to the door frame, whispering, “I’m sorry.” Now she was the bloodless one. She slid down the door frame and rested on the floor, still apologizing to the woman who was no longer there.

Queen came out of the kitchen with soapy water glistening on her hands. She looked so normal that for a moment Betty Jewel could pretend none of this had happened. She could pretend she’d decided to simply make sure Sudie would help Queen raise Billie and not mess around trying to fix the past.

“You done tole her?”

“Oh, God, Mama.”

Queen bent down and tried to help her up, but Betty Jewel pushed her arm away. “Don’t. No sense in you falling down, too.”

“It’s gone be all right, baby. I been prayin’ ‘bout this.”

Queen didn’t merely pray: she battered the gates of Heaven with her petitions till God got so weary He’d say, All right, Miss Queen, have it your way.

Betty Jewel tried hard to conjure up her mama’s faith, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t think of anything except how she’d destroyed another woman’s life. Not once, but twice.

Not only that, but she’d probably destroyed her daughter.

“Where’s Billie?”

Queen patted her hand. “She didn’ hear nothin’. She done gone outside to that ole bus.”

“Thank you, Jesus.”

“Amen.”

The prospect of her daughter spending another night on top of the bus paled in comparison to the tragedy of finding out the man she idolized was not her daddy.

“Mama, do you think Billie’s ever going to accept this cancer?”

“Give her time.”

“I don’t have time.”

When Queen put her hand on Betty Jewel’s head, she was humming “In the Garden,” probably without even being aware of it.

“Baby, when the good Lord takes you on home, thas gone be the sweetest hallelujah.”

“No, Mama. The sweetest hallelujah will be when Billie can walk in the front door of any place she pleases, and nobody will tell her she doesn’t belong.”

Resuming her hymn, Queen smoothed back Betty Jewel’s falling-out hair. They stayed that way a long time, both finding solace in the ordinary. Finally, Queen ceased her humming.

“Baby, what you needs is a little perk me up.”

“You got any Jack Daniel’s, Mama?”

“I might. Just for medismal ‘mergencies and such.”

“I think this qualifies as a medicinal emergency.”

Queen’s slippers dragged along the floor, slower than yesterday Betty Jewel was thinking. While her mama was gone, she got off the floor, but it took her a while. By the time she was upright, Queen was back with two glasses full of amber anesthesia.

“I fixed myself a little snort. For my rheumatiz.”

Lord, if anybody deserved a little snort, it was her saint of a mama. Betty Jewel tipped her glass. The first swallow went down smoothly, but the next one set everything from her shoe soles to her breastbone in turmoil. She didn’t even have the luxury of drowning in her sorrows.

Queen held her head while she heaved over the toilet.

Lord, this price is too much to pay for loving another woman’s husband.

Cassie didn’t know how she got home. She didn’t remember driving. She didn’t remember the road. She didn’t remember anything except the damning words, Joe is Billie’s father.

Cassie wanted to kill him. She wanted to break him into a million pieces the way Betty Jewel had broken her.

With one arm wrapped around herself to hold the shattered parts together, she picked up her blue stone pitcher and hurled it against the wall. She and Joe had bought it on their first anniversary trip to Mountain City, Tennessee. Got it at Laurel Bloomery. Got a whole set of dishes to match because Joe said the blue reminded him of her eyes.

Cassie plowed through the shards without even cutting herself. That’s how mad she was, so furious she was superhuman, made of broken glass and still able to heft a whole stack of pottery plates off the cabinet shelves and smash them onto the floor.

“Damnyoudamnyoudamnyou!”

A piece of pottery the size of a baseball flew up and cut Cassie’s leg.

I’m bleeding. I’m perishing.

“Oh, God.” She searched the ceiling for help but all she found was a cobweb that needed raking out of the corner.

With her own blood sticky on her leg, she moved to another cabinet. One sweep sent her wedding glasses airborne. Sun caught the Baccarat crystal as it arced through the air. For a moment there was a rainbow on the wall.

After a rain when the sun was shining just right, Joe used to race inside to get her so they could watch the sky light up together. He would tell her I want to give you rainbows.

But he’d given Betty Jewel Hughes a child.

There was an awful sound coming from somewhere far away, the high-pitched wailing of a woman grieving, a woman who had lost everything. Her husband, her memories, her marriage, her trust, her pride.

Cassie cleaned out the cabinets one by one, raking and hurling until there was not a dish left. Not even a salt-and-pepper shaker.

Her kitchen was Berlin, bombed. Her left leg was cut in two places, both arms were scratched, and her linen dress was speckled with blood. She looked like a woman gone crazy. She sank into a kitchen chair and didn’t know how long she sat there, paralyzed.

Her legs would hardly hold her as she finally moved through her house, blind, partially deaf. The phone was ringing and ringing, a small annoyance filtering through the swirling red fog of rage.

Cassie focused on the tub, the water taps, the bottle of pink bath beads. She dumped in the whole bottle, then stripped, stepped into the water and vanished in bubbles.

The phone stopped ringing a while, then commenced again. It was probably Fay Dean. She’d promised her sister-in-law they’d see East of Eden tonight. “We can salivate over James Dean,” Fay Dean had said, and Cassie had laughed at the idea she could salivate over anybody except Joe Malone.

Closing her eyes, she slid under the water and her hair floated out behind her. I could drown in here. I could stay under and let the water steal my breath, still my beating heart.

“No!” She scrambled up, sputtering. “Liar! Cheat!” Cassie fought her way out of the tub, slid through the overflowing bubbles, then slammed the bathroom door on the whole mess. Joe’s baseball jacket was hanging next to her white linen blazer, polluting her closet, filling it with the stench of betrayal.

Holding it at arm’s length, Cassie started to enter her warzone of a kitchen, then backtracked for shoes and a robe. Back in the kitchen it took her a while to find the lighter fluid, the matches.

When she stepped onto the patio, she was soul-punched by the universe. It was her favorite time of evening, that perfect moment when you can see the faint colors of sunset still bleeding all over the sky while a sliver of moon hangs around on the opposite side waiting for the stars.

It seemed a shame to ruin a perfectly good evening with a bonfire of deceit. Cassie sat in the wrought-iron glider and rocked back and forth, trying to find ease.

There was none. Cassie thought about the sneaky nature of disaster, how it could creep into the room without warning and announce itself in the quiet voice of a dying woman. Shouldn’t there have been thunder shaking the ground, sirens screaming, people scattering to take cover? Maybe the quietness itself should have been a warning—the lull before a tornado rips your house apart.

She got up, poured lighter fluid into the bowl of the grill, tossed in a match. She was getting ready to toss in Joe’s jacket when grief buckled her knees. She buried her face in the leather and cloth that still retained Joe’s scent.

“How could you?” she moaned.

She remained on her knees with the flames licking out of the grill and the sky popping with stars. Finally she smothered the flames with the grill’s lid, then went inside and lay down on her bed, clutching Joe’s jacket. She cried until exhaustion claimed her.

Her fitful slumber was raided by memories, all bent on inflicting pain. When she awoke, Cassie huddled in a fetal position in the middle of the bed she’d shared with a man she didn’t even know, a stranger who’d had a life beyond their marriage.

She’d told Joe everything. She’d kept no secrets. Until today, she’d thought he’d done the same.

Was it still today? It was too dark to tell.

The phone was ringing. Cassie counted twelve rings before it stopped, then started all over again.

Fay Dean was probably upset that she hadn’t shown up at the theater, and maybe worried, too.

“I’m sorry,” Cassie whispered.

She stumbled to the bathroom and turned on the light. She didn’t know the puffy-faced, dead-eyed woman with her feet sunk in wet, bubble-ravaged carpet. She used to find part of her definition as the woman Joe loved, but he’d stolen that from her. He and Betty Jewel.

She wanted to smash something. Hard. She picked up her perfume, gardenia, Joe’s favorite fragrance. With her hand raised she was fully intent on hurling the bottle into the mirror.

What if Betty Jewel’s lying? Her tilted world righted itself. “Of course. That has to be the answer.”

Cassie’s gut reaction to Betty Jewel’s shocking revelation had nothing to do with logic. How could she have let the words of a virtual stranger destroy fifteen years of marriage? How could she have doubted Joe’s love?

Powered by restored reason and burgeoning hope, Cassie started jerking on white pedal pushers, a green short-sleeved sweater set. She was planning how she’d race back to Shakerag and force Betty Jewel to admit her lies when she glanced at the clock. It was past ten. She couldn’t barge over there and disturb that sweet old lady, Miss Queen.

And what about Billie? She was innocent. No more than a pawn in her mother’s cruel game. Cassie couldn’t bring the child’s world tumbling down as carelessly as Betty Jewel had hers.

Fully clothed, Cassie lay in the dark, waiting for morning.

When Billie woke up to the smell of ham and red-eye gravy, she thought she was in the wrong house. Queen reserved fancy breakfast fixings for Sundays and special occasions. Ordinary days meant biscuit and molasses.

Her mouth watering, she bounded out of bed, slipped into shorts and a halter Queen had made from the printed cotton sacks her Martha White flour came in, then made a beeline for the kitchen.

“Good morning, sleepyhead.” The way Mama was smiling almost made Billie think this was just another summer day.

Billie pulled up a chair and helped her plate, as if she’d never heard of cancer. What would it hurt to pretend for five minutes?

“That Miss Cassie Malone is sho’ a fine lady.” Queen buttered another biscuit and handed it to Billie, though she already had two on her plate. “And smart. Mmm-hmm. I reckon she got mo’ sense than any white woman I ever knowed.”

There went pretend right out the window. Billie couldn’t believe her ears. All Queen had talked about last night at supper was that newspaper lady. How smart she was, how pretty, how kind, how nice. Billie didn’t know what had got into her. If Miss Cassie Malone told her pigs could fly, Queen would race to the window to see how much pork was in the sky.

“I don’t know how you could tell all that with one visit, Queen. I thought she was just a skinny white woman with ugly red hair.”

“Young lady, I ain’t puttin’ up with no sass from you.”

Billie figured she was in for a session with Queen’s willow switch. She didn’t care. She’d go off and spend the day on Gum Pond and maybe the monster who got Alice would get her, and then everybody would be sorry.

“Mama. Go easy on Billie. She’s got lots on her plate.”

You could say that again. Three biscuits. Two pieces of ham. A pile of backberry jam. It was going to take her practically all morning to eat it.

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