Chapter Four

      First Day Journal: April 28

      “Only God knows the hour of our death!”

      I’m sitting in a coffee shop not far from Biltmore Forest, because I’m not ready to face my empty house for the evening. I’m writing in this journal with hopes those words will stop revolving in my head once I commit them to paper. Reverend Ana spoke them this afternoon, with no idea of their impact. But the first time I heard them was on a day I wish I could forget. In far too many ways that day defines me.

      Maybe in real-time it’s April of my fifty-second year, but in my mind it’s August, and counting backward I think the year must be 1970. I’m ten years old, Maddie’s age, and I’m sure I’ve been sitting in our little country church for at least a century. But, of course, at ten, so much feels that way.

      Ten yards in front of me the preacher slaps his Bible against our pulpit, one my grandmother is particularly proud of, since her own father carved it from a fallen black walnut tree. When I was six Gran pointed out the stump of the “pulpit” tree in a wooded clump not far from her kitchen garden. Sometimes now I go there to think, especially when Hearty comes home drunk, which is most of the time.

      I’m startled by the slapping noise, and only Gran’s withered arm across my chest keeps me from diving under the pew in front of us.

      “Lottie Lou, you sit up now, and no more dozing,” she whispers to me as she hauls me closer. “Else you’ll end up being the ’zample in this fool’s sermon, you get my meaning?”

      The preacher screeches the same words again. He’s a guest in the pulpit of our church, the Trust Independent Baptist Church, because the regular preacher, equally loud but less given to repetition, is hauling a truckload of hand-harvested burley tobacco to Raleigh. Preaching is something he does on the side, for the sake of the Lord.

      The guest preacher farms tobacco, too, but his is as sorry as his sermons, so it isn’t likely he’ll need a truck or a trip any time in the near future. He’s as scrawny as a cornstalk in a drought, and he drools when he shouts, so now his chin glistens.

      I wriggle on the unpadded bench to get blood flowing to my backside. The service started with hymns, then the preacher demanded we stop singing so he could preach—which he’s been doing forever. I worry we’ll be here another hour or more.

      And while we listen to Preacher Pittman’s substitute fumble with words, what will Hearty Hale be doing?

      It’s as hot inside as it would be if we were standing full in the sunshine. All week the church is closed up, and it takes more than half an hour to suck out the heat before services. The building sits to the side of a country road, and there’s no electricity for fans, although we have a woodstove for winter. Windows dot the walls to let in what breeze can be had, but we have no screens. Wasps fly in and out and circle the freshly washed heads of worshipers.

      I have nothing to do except think about the words that brought me so fully awake. I can’t picture a God who not only knows when everybody on earth is going to die, but keeps track of the information, too. I wonder if He makes notes, or if He can just snap His fingers and call up whatever He needs in an instant.

      I imagine God pointing and shouting, “You over there, your day’ll be July 17, 1977, and not an hour later! And if I was you, I wouldn’t bother taking out pork chops when you get up that morning. You won’t be needing them.”

      When I giggle, Gran pokes me with her elbow. I look for something else to occupy my mind. I settle on a girl who’s two years ahead of me in school and two rows in front of me now. She has white-blond hair, wispy and fine, and she’s pulled it back from her face with a black velvet hair band that has a bow on the side, anchored with a cluster of rhinestones. Her name is Sally Klaver, and she lives not far away, in a brand-new house, brought in by truck and set right down on a slab of concrete. The house is the color of a creek bottom, with a porch in front, just big enough for a pot of flowers and a doormat with Welcome printed nice and proper on it.

      The old house, where Sally used to live, is still standing back behind some trees, but it’s boarded up now, and most likely full of mice and hornets’ nests. Sally’s daddy runs cattle and fattens more from his acres of corn. Mr. Klaver grows more tobacco than anybody else in the vicinity. I wonder what that would be like, having a house nobody else ever lived in, having enough cattle to eat beefsteak every night, having money to just walk into a store and buy a velvet headband whenever I felt like it.

      I’m not just tired of sitting, I’m tired of worrying, too. This morning our neighbors, Bill Johnston and his wife, picked up Gran and me as we walked down the road on our way to church. Gran squeezed into the cab, and I settled myself in the back of the truck, making a little nest on an old piece of canvas to keep my dress from getting dirty.

      I was glad to sit in the open. As we bumped over the dirt road I watched out for my father, but I never saw a sign of his truck or him. I’m not worried something’s happened to Hearty. I’m not even hoping it has, at least not while I’m sitting in church, because it’s possible God listens a little harder here, and wishing your father would keel over dead might get you in trouble.

      Right now I just want to know where Hearty Hale is this morning, and whether he’s going to make Gran or me that much more miserable later.

      The preacher finally wears down and stops, slamming his Bible one more time against the pulpit as he shouts “Amen.” The girl who’s playing the piano leaps to her feet and throws herself across the bench, as if she’s afraid he might change his mind.

      In a moment we’re all singing “On Jordan’s Banks,” and the preacher is exhorting sinners to come forward and make a commitment to Jesus. I figure everybody’s as hot and cranky as me, because today only a few straggle forward, as if afraid the preacher will keep shouting until supper time if they don’t.

      After the last chorus I shake down my skirt and admire the lace adorning the hem. My grandmother added the lace by hand to “prettify” my dress, something she made over from one my own mother wore as a girl.

      When I was younger I might have been thrilled at this connection to Thalia Hale, but now I’m not so sure. My mother died of pneumonia just one month after giving birth to me, her only child, and with ten years to consider it, I’ve decided it’s likely Thalia thought the best way to get away from Hearty and her squalling baby girl was to cross the river Jordan as swiftly as possible.

      I wish that weren’t true, but even Gran admits she indulged the sickly young Thalia shamelessly, and forever after Thalia did exactly what she pleased. Gran’s told me pretty stories of baby birds my mother rescued, poems she learned and songs she sang, but nobody else has ever said a good word about Thalia in my presence. And I’ve been paying close attention.

      Around me now people are moving into clusters, most pausing near windows or the door, catching up on the week’s gossip while they try to catch a breeze. Gran will linger. Despite the sorry state of the Sawyer farm—which is what everybody in Trust calls our home place—and the sorry state of her son-in-law, the local people respect Gran and wish her well. As far as they can, they do whatever they’re able to be neighborly, just as long as it doesn’t involve helping Hearty Hale.

      “Lottie Lou…” Sally Klaver of the velvet headband rounds the corner of her pew and heads straight for me. “Weren’t that just awful? Him going on and on like that? I wish we’d gone over to Marshall. They got air-conditioning at the church there, but my daddy says we have to come here sometimes, too, so people don’t forget