The Sweetest Hallelujah. Elaine Hussey

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СКАЧАТЬ “He dropped from the American jazz scene,” then went back to feeding her husband’s Sunday shirt through the washing machine wringer. Billie liked to think of her daddy traveling around Europe playing his silver trumpet.

      Celebrities don’t have time for ordinary lives. Why, some of them hardly know their kids. Billie didn’t know any of them personally, but she kept up by reading Modern Screen magazine in Curl Up ‘n Dye, the beauty shop where Lucy’s mama did the shampoos and swept up the fallen hair.

      Billie used to hope her daddy would send a birthday card, but she got over it last year. You can’t just spend your time crying over spilled milk. Queen said that all the time.

      The only thing her mama ever shared about her daddy was this bus. It had been on Billie’s fifth birthday.

      “Back when I was singing with the Saint and his band, we used to travel in this bus,” her mama said. Then they all piled in, Mama at the wheel, Billie riding shotgun and Queen with a big basket of fried chicken. They drove to the Tombigbee River where they swam till their arms got too tired to lift. Afterward, they spread the picnic on Queen’s quilt called Around the World, and ate till Queen said they would all grow feathers and start clucking if they didn’t pack up and go home.

      When the bus wore out, her mama was going to get rid of it, but Billie had a conniption fit, and Betty Jewel built a shed out behind the house so the bus wouldn’t be an eyesore. She called it her potting shed and Queen called it her henhouse. Billie made her leave the roof off the front end on account of the clever rooftop patio her daddy had devised on the bus. He had built the ladder with his own hands and added a shiny brass railing around the top.

      Though the railing would never shine again, Billie kept it polished. It was the least she could do.

      Billie ate till every last piece of Queen’s fried chicken was gone, then she set in to eating fried pies. A curtain of darkness dropped around her, but Billie wasn’t scared. She wasn’t scared of anything except her mama dying.

      She was probably in the house right this very minute asking the Good Lord to make her well again. Billie would like to know what was good about Somebody who’d let her mama die. If He was in charge of things, how come nice people got cancer while folks like Miz Quana Belle’s daddy lived to do their meanness till they got so old they didn’t have teeth? He drank hard liquor and robbed gas stations. How come God didn’t strike him down?

      Billie couldn’t ask Queen about such stuff or she’d get the business end of her willow switch.

      There was nobody she could ask. Except maybe her daddy. If she ever found him.

      Billie just knew the Saint would come back and live with them and pay a fancy doctor to make her mama well and they would all be a family, especially when she proved that she wouldn’t be a bit of trouble. She could cook, and she’d learn to do his laundry.

      She could even polish his silver trumpet. And maybe, if she was really a good girl and didn’t tell lies, he’d let her play it. Maybe he’d buy her a silver trumpet, then they’d sit under a sky hole-punched with a billion stars and send a blues duet up to a moon so awesome it felt like God watching. It felt like being on top of the world.

      Betty Jewel would never have let her daughter find out the truth from listening at keyholes, but now that it had happened she didn’t have to pretend anymore that she was going to live. Somehow that was a relief to her. She was so tired. She was tired of pretending everything was going to be all right, tired of getting out of bed in the morning, tired of trying to live up to everybody’s expectations.

       You’re not dying!

      That was Billie’s expectation, and it was so fierce Betty Jewel worried that when she actually did die her daughter was going to do something crazy, such as run away from home. Nobody knew whether Saint was still in prison or God knows where, but Billie might find out about his family up in Chicago, everyone of them crazy as Betsy bugs and that sister of his—that Jezzie—mean as a yard dog.

      Drawing her crocheted shawl about her, Betty Jewel walked to the window. The old bus looked like a hulking animal, something extinct, a dinosaur. When her eyes adjusted, she could make out the slight figure of her daughter perched on top, a little brown sparrow getting ready to fly.

      “Baby?” She turned from the window to see Queen standing in the doorway, her face shrunken as a dried-up apple. Betty Jewel’s cancer had sucked the regal and the jovial right out of her.

      “Did she eat, Mama?”

      “She done got that plate I took out. But she settin’ up there like she don’ never inten’ to come down.”

      “Don’t worry. Billie’s got a head full of sense.”

      Queen stood in the door way till she couldn’t bear the view any longer. And who could blame her? The disease had eaten away so much of Betty Jewel she looked like a one-dimensional cardboard copy of her former self.

      Her old house slippers dragging on the linoleum, Queen shuffled off singing, her way of trying to make bad things good. Always she picked a spiritual or one of the gospels. She’d belt them out, too, though it had been twenty years since she’d had the voice for the soaring solos she used to perform in church. Tonight she was singing, “Somebody’s Knockin’ at Yo Door.”

      Death, that’s who was knocking. Still, Queen’s expectations were softer and easier to bear than Billie’s. Lord, chile, I ain’t seein’ no way I can carry on without you. You gone have to hang on a mite longer.

      Queen was eighty, the age where death could come without warning. She was at least twenty years older than you’d expect Betty Jewel’s mama to be. But she’d been the last of Queen’s twelve children and the only one to survive. Since they’d found out the cancer was too far gone, Queen had told Betty Jewel the only reason she was still living was so she could help take care of Billie awhile longer.

       Till you finds somebody, honey. You gotta find somebody to raise that chile. Saint ain’t fittin’.

      Betty Jewel shivered so hard her teeth knocked together. Ain’t fittin’ wouldn’t begin to describe the reasons she’d sell her soul to the devil before she’d let Saint Hughes get his hands on Billie.

      Saint and his devil ways got into her head as bad as they had the day she’d flown off the handle and taken out that pitiful newspaper ad. Lord, what had she been thinking?

       Desperate. Nowhere to turn.

      She was desperate, all right, but she’d chop off both her legs before she’d put her child in the hands of strangers. What she needed was some of Queen’s divine intervention. But miracles were hard to come by in Shakerag.

      “Please, God …”

      Her head was pounding, so heavy with despair and secrets she didn’t know if she could ever lift it again. Or was the pounding at the door?

      Before Betty Jewel could get out of her chair, Merry Lynn and Sudie barged in, Merry Lynn leading the way, waving The Bugle like it was a red flag and she was searching for the bull.

      “Betty Jewel, what is this?” Sudie cried.

      “My, God. You’re trying to give Billie away like a stray cat!” Merry Lynn flung the newspaper onto the couch and sank down beside it. The aroma СКАЧАТЬ