The Sweetest Hallelujah

Betty Jewel leaned her head back, drifting on the melody to a better time, a sweeter place.

Suddenly the phone rang, jerking Betty Jewel upright.

Queen hollered from down the hall. “You want me to get that, baby?”

“I’ll get it, Mama.” The afghan slid to the floor, but Betty Jewel didn’t stop to pick it up for fear she’d miss the caller. The phone was perched on a faux maple telephone table by the couch. She was so out of breath when she got there she could barely speak.

“Betty Jewel?”

“Oh, my god.”

“Betty Jewel, is that you?”

She should tell him, No. She should jerk the phone jack out of the wall, then sit back down in her rocking chair and pretend that Saint Hughes was not on the other end of the line, his voice as seductive as dark honey drizzled over yeast-rising bread.

But he was there waiting, and suddenly she was faced with a new horror. He wanted something from her, and he wouldn’t give up. He’d keep calling and calling, and maybe get Billie. And then … She couldn’t let her mind go there.

“What do you want?” She didn’t dare say his name, didn’t dare chance that Queen would hear.

“I want to talk, that’s all. Just talk.”

Betty Jewel’s worst nightmare was coming true. The Saint was trying to weasel back into her life, and she was plunged into a new kind of hell. In the kitchen Queen was singing “Amazing Grace,” but all Betty Jewel could think about was taking a gun and blowing Saint to Kingdom Come.

“I have nothing to say to you.”

“Well, I got plenty to say to you. You still my wife.”

“Are you insane? You were so drunk the day I left it took you two weeks to notice I was gone.”

“It’s all gonna be different now.”

“Are you out of prison? Lord have mercy, tell me they didn’t let your low-down hide out of jail.”

“Got out last week. I can’t wait to be with you.”

“I’d rather eat cow shit. Where are you?”

“Memphis.” It was too close, only a hundred miles away. Betty Jewel thought she might faint. “I’m fixing to make a comeback. I’m putting together another band, found some great guys on Beale Street. I want you to sing the lead.”

“I’m not ever singing with you again. You hear me? Not ever.”

“Aw, Betty Jewel. Don’t be like that.”

She heard the oven door slam shut, knew the pies Queen was making for Tiny Jim were cooking, knew her mama would be washing the dough off her hands and would soon be coming to the den to stretch out on the flowered chintz couch and watch Milton Berle on Texaco Star Theater.

“Can you hold on a minute?” Betty Jewel eased the door shut. When she picked up the receiver, her hands were trembling so hard she nearly dropped it. “You stay away from here. I mean it.”

“We were good together, sugah.”

In more ways than one. Her legs wouldn’t hold her up anymore, and she sank onto the arm of the old couch. “Don’t you sugar me. You couldn’t pay me enough money to sing with you.”

“You and me, we got a little girl. What’s she like?”

Betty Jewel bit her lip so hard she brought blood. If she screamed, Queen would come running. And Billie. Tiny Jim would have told Saint about Billie. Musicians stick together. “Don’t you ever call here again. You hear me? If you dare show your face around here, I’ll have you arrested. I’ll say you’re trying to sell me cocaine.”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

She heard Queen’s slow shuffle in the hall. “I swear on a stack of Bibles.” Betty Jewel hoped God was not listening. She hoped Queen was not. She’d wash her mouth out with soap, and her a dying woman. “If the cops don’t get you, I’ll shoot you myself.”

She slammed the receiver down and made it back to the rocking chair, but all she could think of was Saint coming to get Billie and Sudie trying to fend him off.

“Pies’ll be ready in twenny minnits.” The old couch springs groaned under Queen’s weight. “Lord, my feets is killin’ me.”

Years ago when Betty Jewel left Shakerag, who would have believed it would all turn out this way—Queen getting ready to bury her only living child, Billie searching for the truth through keyholes, the Saint resurrected from the awful past, and her sitting in a maple rocking chair with cancer cells eating her alive.

But then what twenty-year-old ever imagines herself dying right at the height of middle age—or any age, for that matter—when all she had on her mind was a man who was fixing to set the world on fire? That was the Saint. Lord, that man was the most dazzling person she’d ever laid eyes on, him all dressed in white up on that stage at Blind Willie Jefferson’s juke joint in the Delta, the lights turning him red and blue and green. Like Christmas tree lights. Like one of those chameleons you’d never guess from one minute to the next what color he was going to turn.

Saint Hughes. With his silver tongue and his silver trumpet. When he put that horn to his lips and commenced playing, she’d swear the angels wept. And when he started in on her with his glib talk, there was nothing she wouldn’t do for him, including throw away her college education and her blossoming singing career and say I do to whatever he asked.

The wedding dress he bought her was white silk. The real thing, he’d said. It wasn’t till years later she’d learned it was cheap imitation.

Her ring came from a Cracker Jack box. By the time she’d met him, the once-great jazz legend was already on the skids.

“Someday I’ll get you a ring with diamonds big as golf balls,” he’d said, and Lord help her, she’d believed him.

She’d believed everything he told her back in those days, including that he was going to reclaim his fame and be rich. It wasn’t riches she cared about, though, but the dazzling future he promised.

“I’m going to buy an antebellum house bigger than any high-and-mighty cotton plantation. Miz Queen can sit on a blue velvet cushion and drink tea from a china cup and brag to all her friends that a white woman is gonna be scrubbing her floors one of these days.”

Back then, Queen had believed in Saint Hughes, too, but that hadn’t kept her from crying her eyes out when Betty Jewel married him. Still, she stood in the door way and waved as her only surviving child climbed into the old school bus the Saint had painted black with his name in foot-high red lettering on the side. Betty Jewel had thought she was on the way to fame and fortune.

“Baby, I’m gonna take you on a ride you’ll never forget,” the Saint promised. He’d made many promises, but that was the only one he ever kept.

Betty Jewel closed her eyes and could still see Queen standing by the front porch swing, wearing a yellow voile dress calling out, “Ya’ll be pa’tic’lar now, you hear?”

It was the only advice Queen had offered when Betty Jewel left Shakerag, and it wasn’t till years later that she wished her mama had offered more. How to stretch two dollars over two weeks without having oatmeal three times a day. How to conjure up a dream when the only hope she had was the Saint, and the only hope he had was the bottle.

Then, later, the cocaine. Demons clawed at that man’s back, demons she’d never even seen till the jobs got scarce and the music started going sour.

“Someday we’re gonna live on easy street, baby.”

It was uneasy street she remembered. That and the long journey that finally brought her back home.

Now she was on another journey, only this time the road she was traveling was fixing to peter out. Already she could glimpse the end. She’d praise the Lord if she was all by herself, but she’s not…

She looked over to see Queen staring at her.

“What’re you thinking, Mama?”

“I’m just tryin to remember that recipe for molasses cookies. I’d make some if I had me some good black-strop molasses and half the sense God give a billy goat.”

Need makes liars of us all.

Still, she smiled at her mama’s white lie. And that was a good thing. It was hard these days to find something to smile about, any little thing to take her mind off the future.

For Betty Jewel time had become a pink damask rose, the petals dropping one by one, the fragrance fading till the sweet rich smell of living was only memory. Sometimes an urgency ripped through her like a tornado, and she’d go to the bathroom and stuff a rag in her mouth so Billie and Queen wouldn’t hear her scream.

She eased out of her chair and walked over to the window. It was too dark to see the bus, let alone a stick-figure child sitting on the rooftop.

“Maybe I ought to go out there and get her, Mama.”

“Leave her be, chile. She’s gotta mourn.”

Betty Jewel left the window, went to the chest freezer in the kitchen and got this week’s Bugle from its hiding place under the frozen peas. The last sentence leaped out at her. Loving heart required.

There was no way on God’s green earth she’d let her child live with somebody who didn’t love her. If Queen went before Betty Jewel—God forbid—and Sudie couldn’t take Billie, she wasn’t going to die. Period. And she’d fight anybody who told her different.

She slid the paper under the peas, then went back to sit down in the rocking chair. Queen was snoring with her mouth wide open. The sound of the clock on the TV came to Betty Jewel, magnified, and she shut her ears to the loud ticktock of time. Her breath sawed through her lungs, and she reached into her pocket for pain pills.

“Lord, if you’re going to send me a miracle, you’d better hurry.”

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.