The Sweetest Hallelujah

Four

THE EMPTY ROOM YAWNED before Cassie, a graveyard filled with ghosts. There, underneath the window facing the east, was the spot where Joe had put the crib.

“The first thing I want our baby to see is the morning sun.” He’d slipped his arms around Cassie and kissed her behind the ear where he knew it tickled and would make her giggle. “The second thing is my beautiful wife.”

She’d lost their first child that night, lying in their bed in a puddle of blood while Joe cried.

She’d been farther along with the second pregnancy, almost three months. Convinced they were having a boy, Joe had bought a tiny catcher’s mitt to put on the new walnut bookcase opposite the crib. Baseball, his first love. Then he’d added a harmonica. Music, his second love.

Afterward, they’d toasted each other with Pinot Grigio, sitting on the patio surrounded by the fragrance from Cassie’s Gertrude Jekyll roses. He pulled a blues harp from his pocket and serenaded her with the Jerome Kern ballad he’d sung for her at their wedding—“All the Things You Are.”

“You give me roses,” he said. “I give you music.”

The next day while he was on a road trip with his baseball team, she painted a pink rose on his B-flat blues harp. She never got a chance to give it to him. By the time he returned, she was in the hospital fighting a losing battle to save their baby.

When she got home, the harmonica with the rose was gone. She never knew what happened to it.

The baby crib, the bookshelves, the miniature baseball mitt and every other hopeful item they’d purchased were up in the attic, consigned to gather dust after her third failed pregnancy. Was that when her relationship with Joe started gathering dust?

Startled, Cassie wondered where in the world that thought had come from.

“Cassie? Did you hear me?” Fay Dean, who had dragged her straight from the soda fountain to the Empty Room, was standing with her hands on her hips and a take-no-prisoners look in her eyes.

“I was just remembering.”

“Stop looking back. We’re going to fill this room with everything you love. By the time we finish, it will be your favorite retreat.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

“I do. Follow me.” Fay Dean whizzed past, marched into the living room and grabbed a rocking chair that Mike had given them as a wedding gift. It had belonged to Joe’s mother.

“Wait a minute. I like the chair where it is.”

“You’re going to like it better where I put it.”

Fay Dean sailed out, a ship under full steam, leaving Cassie searching the bookshelves for the photographs she loved best: the one of Joe sitting in the boat on Moon Lake, a harmonica in his hand and his fishing pole in the water; Fay Dean and Cassie, arms linked, Fay Dean in her mortar board when she’d graduated from Vanderbilt School of Law and Cassie in her favorite pink hat, never mind that her mother always said pink clashed with her red hair; Cassie’s famous mother, Gwendolyn, and her beloved daddy, John, the year they’d gone to Paris to hear Gwendolyn sing at the opera. It had been the best year of Cassie’s childhood. Normally, she and her daddy were left behind while her mother trekked the world.

All these years later—her mother and daddy both long gone—she still remembered wondering why she wasn’t good enough to go with her mother. If she’d had children, Cassie would never have left them behind.

As she carried the photos into the Empty Room that no longer qualified for its title, she wondered what her child would have looked like. She’d wanted a girl with Joe’s easy smile.

“Cassie? What’s wrong?”

“She would have been ten years old.” The last baby Cassie had miscarried had been a little girl. “I wonder if she’d have been a tomboy or if she’d enjoy sitting on the bed with me reading poetry.”

“Don’t do this to yourself.”

“After I lost her, I dreamed she was standing in a field of Queen Anne’s Lace on Mike’s farm, and I was doing a watercolor of her.”

“Cassie, if you want to talk about this, I’ll listen, but I really think you ought to focus on something else. Maybe you ought to take up painting again.”

“Maybe Sean was right about making another appointment to see him.” Cassie looked at the pictures in her hand. “I don’t know where to put these.”

“Leave it to me.”

“Don’t I always, Napoleon the Second?”

“Yeah, well, without me, you’d never get across the Rubicon.”

“As I recall, neither did Napoleon.”

Fay Dean had already swept from the room, a woman on a mission.

Cassie set the rocking chair in motion, and Joe stared at her from the picture frame, his smile both comforting and heartbreaking. Had their marriage really been made of stars and fairy dust, or had goblins crept through the cracks?

“I’m going out,” Joe would say, and Cassie would look up from her supper, too weary thinking about the forever-closed nursery door to ask why.

He loves music, she’d tell herself after he was gone and she was trying to get up enough interest to brush the moo goo gai pan out of her teeth. All blues musicians are like that, she’d say after she finally found enough energy to crawl into bed. They go wherever they can find the gut-bucket blues, racial divides as wide as the ocean vanishing in the commonality of music. Joe had even gone to the Delta once, the cradle of the blues, seeking the old songs, the laments invented in cotton fields by a people with a hoe and no hope.

Later, after she’d climbed out of her depression enough to bury herself with work at The Bugle, she’d glance out the window, hoping to glimpse a gibbous moon, that lopsided miracle in the night sky that never failed to lift her spirits. She’d see a blanket of stars and suddenly feel as if somebody had thrown a sack over her head.

Fighting that same smothering sensation, Cassie jumped up and raced to the attic. She wouldn’t look at the baby stuff, didn’t trust herself. She wouldn’t even look at her dusty art-supply kit and her easel, but went straight to the corner where the dressmaker’s dummies stood. Grabbing one under each arm, she struggled across the floor. The fold-down ladder presented another problem. Even banishing ghosts of the past didn’t seem worth a broken neck.

“Cassie? What the hell?” Fay Dean stood at the bottom of the ladder, craning her neck.

“Thank God.” Cassie poked the male dummy down the staircase. “Here. Take Tarzan.”

“What are you doing up there?”

“I’m coming down with Jane.”

“That explains everything.”

Jane bumped down the stairs behind her, and Cassie hoped she didn’t lose body parts in the process. Finally, both of them stood at the bottom, Cassie triumphant and the dummy intact.

“Fay Dean, do you remember when I used to sew?”

“Back in the Dark Ages, I believe.”

“Keep it up, and I won’t be giving you a hand-tailored suit for Christmas.”

“If I recall, you don’t tailor.”

“What’s to keep me from learning?”

Fay Dean pumped her fist in the air. “Now, that’s what I’m talking about. Soon you’ll have so many projects, you won’t have time to think of what you’ve lost.”

They dragged the dummies into the room where the white wicker bookcase from Cassie’s sunroom now sat along the west wall holding her favorite photographs. She placed Tarzan in the rocking chair, and Fay Dean stood Jane by the bookcase.

“They look natural, don’t they?” Fay Dean said.

“They look naked.” Cassie went to the hall closet and came back with one of her gardening hats for Jane and one of Joe’s baseball caps for Tarzan. Her husband’s scent clung to the hat, and he whispered through her mind like a song with lyrics she was struggling to remember.

“Cassie? What is it?”

“Nothing. I was trying to figure out how to get the sewing machine down from the attic.”

“Daddy will do it,” Fay Dean said. “Let’s have something to drink. A celebration.”

They kicked off their shoes, linked arms and went into the kitchen where the moon was shining through the window and anything at all could happen.

Suddenly they heard a knocking at the back door.

“Anybody home?” It was Ben, carrying a bottle of Pinot Grigio. “I saw Fay Dean’s car in your driveway and thought we might all enjoy a drink.”

The bottle in Ben’s hand reminded Cassie of Joe, of how they’d celebrated every major milestone with that same type of wine, and how, in a heartbeat, events you think of as triumphant can turn into regret that follows you everywhere, no matter how you try to hide.

Cassie took down three glasses instead of two. They drank their wine while Fay Dean regaled them with stories from the courtroom and Ben chatted about doings at The Bugle. If anybody noticed how quiet Cassie was, they didn’t say.

Afterward, Ben toted the heavy cabinet-style sewing machine from the attic and moved it around the room four times before Fay Dean was satisfied that it was just right.

When they both left, Cassie sat in the rocking chair staring at the sewing machine. Would her little lost girl have loved pink ruffles on her dresses or yellow ribbon?

Five

IN BETTY JEWEL’S DREAMS, her daughter was a young woman dressed in a real linen suit with dyed-to-match pumps. She was eating at a restaurant where waiters served sweet tea in crystal glasses and sliced sirloin on china plates.

Betty Jewel jerked awake. Her afghan was on the floor, and the only light in the room came from the pattern on the TV screen. Across the room, Queen had turned sideways, one foot hanging off the couch, an arm flung over her eyes as if she couldn’t bear to view her dreams.

Was she dreaming about the years she’d spent cooking other people’s meals at the Jefferson Davis Hotel, the extra job she’d taken scrubbing other folks’ toilets so she could send her only child to college?

Scooping up the afghan, Betty Jewel covered her mama, then tiptoed down the hall to Billie’s room. It took a while before her eyes adjusted enough to see the small lump under the covers. Her daughter had finally come down off that old bus. Betty Jewel said, Thank you, God, or maybe she just thought it.

She stood awhile in the doorway, listening to the sound of Billie’s breathing. Then she slid across the room as silent as a moonbeam and folded her daughter to her, all fragile bones and sharp angles, the beauty as yet unformed in her freckled face. Betty Jewel was thinking of dark rivers that swallow you whole. She was thinking of deep waters that rush by while you fall down dead in a drifting boat. She didn’t want to let go this child of hers. She wanted to hold on to her until they were both very old, and then lie down together in a cool spring meadow and open up like springboks whose brown fur unfurls along the backbone when they die to reveal white as pure as a newborn.

Billie stirred, her voice a sleepy question mark. “Mama?”

“I’m here, baby.” Her daughter curled against her, warm and smelling of sweat and summer and little girl dreams.

There was another scent in the room, too. Barbecue. Since Christmas it had taken over Queen’s house, seeping into cupboards and behind closet doors and into the dug well behind the house. Every drink they made with the well water had a slight tang of barbecue, even their morning coffee. If Queen noticed, she kept it to herself, and thank God, Billie was too young.

With clouds gathering right over her head and a killing storm on her coattail, Betty Jewel drew a deep breath. If she didn’t get off the bed now, she might never be able to. Easing up, she tucked the sheet around Billie’s coltish legs. She was going to be tall. Like her daddy.

Betty Jewel closed her daughter’s door and went straight to the bedroom she’d once shared with her husband. Since the cancer, she’d become a creature of the night, navigating silently through the dark.

The moon laid down a pale yellow path from the window to the doorway. But it was no hopeful yellow brick road leading to a fix-all wizard. It was an aching road, every step she took uncertain.

As she followed the sliver of moonlight to turn on a bedside lamp, her room gave off the odor of barbecue mixed with cherries. Since she’d been sick, the only thing that tasted right was Maraschino cherries. Empty jars tattooed her bedside table, the top of her dresser and even the windowsill. She gathered all the empty jars and tossed them in the garbage can.

For three weeks, Betty Jewel had been systematically cleaning house, filling cardboard boxes with dresses and shoes, hats and purses, labeling them for Merry Lynn and Sudie and the church charity closet. She’d packed her jewelry for Billie in a cigar box covered with blue velvet—the Cracker Jack wedding ring, the fake pearls and ear studs, the bracelet with charms from each state she’d traveled with Saint and his band.

But it was not costume jewelry that urged her on tonight. Rummaging in her chest of drawers, she brought out a pair of brown socks. At first glance, they looked like every other pair of socks in the drawer, folded double and placed at the bottom of the stack.

Betty Jewel wadded them into her fist, then sat at her skirted dressing table and pulled them apart. A path of moonlight gleamed off the mirror and illuminated the piece of jewelry that tumbled out of the sock.

She’d found it last week. Merry Lynn had picked up Queen to deliver her pies to Tiny Jim’s, and Billie had been on top of the bus playing house with her doll.

In her cleaning frenzy, Betty Jewel had been going through Saint’s stuff, too. He might never get out of prison, was what she’d been thinking. The law didn’t take a kindly view to possession of drugs. And even if he got out, she’d never see him again. Not if she could help it. Any chances that he’d reformed were remote, and even if he had, she’d never been able to trust him, so why start now? One minute he was Prince Charming and the next, the devil himself.

She could sell his good white suit and his silver trumpet and get some much-needed cash to pay her doctor’s bills. She’d laid his suit on the bed. It was out of style, but the dry-cleaning bag had kept the shoulders from turning yellow. Tiny Jim could probably help her find somebody to buy it. Nobody in Shakerag was picky about hand-me-downs, especially musicians. If they tried to live by their music, scraping by was all they knew.

She put Saint’s good shirt and tie with the suit, then emptied his socks and underwear drawers into a paper sack. The church would get those.