The Sweetest Hallelujah. Elaine Hussey

the bend.” That brought a laugh from Fay Dean, which was exactly what Cassie intended. Though she waded knee deep into every controversial cause, she tried to avoid personal conflict.

      You never say what you’re thinking, Joe had told her that awful summer she’d lost her third baby, the summer it felt as if he had vanished to the moon and she was left behind trying to see into outer space. Yell, scream, cry … Just, for God’s sake, don’t shut yourself off from me.

      “Are you ready?” Fay Dean linked arms, and Cassie pushed the uncomfortable memory from her mind. “Let’s get this over with.”

      They climbed into Mike’s steady Chevrolet sedan, and as they drove the few blocks to the baseball field, Cassie found herself struggling to recall the exact shape of Joe’s jaw, the way his dark hair had felt against her cheek, the way he’d pull his harmonica from his pocket and start playing so his music came through the door before he did. Even the smell of Joe’s old baseball jacket could no longer bring her husband clearly to mind.

      Blistering in the sun beside Mike and Fay Dean, Cassie was thinking how love can waylay you when you least expect it. She was thinking how one minute you can have your future mapped out and the next you’re arguing over whose fault it is you can’t carry a baby full term.

      And if the sound of a blues harp happened to float by on the breeze, as it was doing now, you might actually believe it was a sign. Was it Joe, telling her he’d always loved her, even during those hard months after they’d lost the third baby and drifted apart?

      Last night she’d gone outside to stand under the stars. Venus had shone down on her, a heavenly reminder of the grace that had enabled her and Joe to get past their hurt and come back together.

      Shored up by memories, she went onto the baseball field where the mayor would call Joe a hero.

      Leaving her gloves and bolero in the car and clutching Joe’s posthumous award under her arm, Cassie entered The Bugle’s offices on the corner of Spring and Court streets. They were in a venerable building in the center of town with twelve-foot tall windows and ivy climbing the redbrick walls.

      Joe used to say she could live at The Bugle, and it was true. She loved the clatter of the presses and the smell of ink. Cassie settled Joe’s plaque on the corner of her desk and her coffee cup on a ceramic trivet painted with rainbows. Give Your Soul a Bubble Bath, it proclaimed.

      Searching her phone book for the number, Cassie dialed Betty Jewel Hughes.

      “Hello.” The woman at the other end of the line spoke with dark, honeyed tones that made you want to sit outside in the sunshine and listen to the universe.

      It turned out the woman was not Betty Jewel, but her mother, Queen Dupree. Her daughter, she said, wouldn’t be home till late that afternoon. Though Queen sounded both ancient and anxious, she finally agreed for Cassie to come to Maple Street.

      Cassie glanced at her calendar. “I’ll be there today at five.”

      A dying woman doesn’t have any time to lose.

      Seven

      SITTING IN THE PASSENGER side of Sudie’s old car, Betty Jewel wondered if it was possible that miracles are not prayers answered but the answer to prayers you didn’t even know you should pray. Maybe she should have left off praying for a cure for cancer and the freedom for her daughter to walk into the Lyric theater downtown and sit anywhere she pleased. Maybe she should have been praying that her life would be ordinary. Wake up, cook breakfast, plant your collard greens and watch your child grow up. The things millions of women took for granted.

      She had been on the front porch swing, wrapped in one of her mama’s quilts and sick from her soles to her scalp, when Sudie’s ten-year-old Studebaker with most of the black paint missing had chugged to a stop in front of her house. Out stepped Merry Lynn wearing a pink hibiscus-print swimsuit—Esther Williams, except colored. Sudie came around the car, her sprigged-green-print skirt swinging as she walked, and her bosom, large for a woman her size, supported by enough black latex to cover a barge.

      “Grab your suit, Betty Jewel,” Sudie had said. “We’re going to the old swimming hole.”

      “I can barely walk, let alone swim.”

      “Sudie took the day off, and don’t you dare try to say no.” Merry Lynn marched onto the front porch with Sudie where the two of them made a packsaddle of their crossed arms and joined hands. “Hop on.”

      “I can walk.”

      “Not today, you don’t,” Sudie said. “Get on, Betty Jewel.”

      “I’m not doing a thing till you promise I won’t hear any talk of finding a cure in Memphis.”

      “I promise and so does Merry Lynn, though I can tell by that stubborn look she won’t say so. Now, get your butt in gear and get on this packsaddle before I put it in gear for you.”

      She climbed aboard her not-too-steady seat and they hauled her off to the car, thankfully before she toppled off and added broken bones to her list of troubles. Merry Lynn raced back into the house, then returned with a quilt and her blue swimsuit, the one Betty had bought in Memphis the year she’d married the Saint.

      “I’m not wearing that. I don’t have any meat on my bones.”

      “If you don’t want to wear it, we’ll all swim naked. How’s that, missy?” Merry Lynn fanned herself with a church fan she’d pulled out of her straw handbag. “Start the car, Sudie. I’m melting.”

      “Well, roll down the windows.”

      “It won’t help till you get moving.”

      By the time Sudie had turned the car and headed out of Shakerag, Betty Jewel knew this outing was exactly what she needed.

      Surrounded by the hum of tires and the scent of pulled pork Tiny Jim had sent for their picnic lunch, she waited for her first sign of the river. It came to her as the scent of childhood, water so cool and deep it smelled green.

      Around the bend, the Tombigbee meandered through ancient blackjack oaks and tall pines, cutting a path that created sloping grassy banks and carved sharp knolls into the red-clay hills.

      “Remember that summer I said I was quitting college to marry Wayne?” Sudie found their old haunt, a paradise canopied by spreading tree branches and hidden by a bank of wild privet and honeysuckle. She parked under the deep shade.

      “I said you were crazy.” Merry Lynn reached for the quilt Queen had made and the towels she’d brought.

      “And I said you should follow your heart.” Advice Betty Jewel would take back if she’d understood how we color another person with our own heart’s desires. What we see is not the truth, clear and unvarnished, but a fantasy built of imagination and stardust.

      “Forget that heavy stuff and let’s go have some fun,” Merry Lynn said. “Get the picnic basket, Sudie.”

      As they lolled on the quilt, eating pork barbecue, they were reeled backward to a place where the dreams of yesterday might still come true. Betty Jewel could almost believe she’d turned back time.

      Afterward, they stretched out on the quilt, side by side, and called out the objects they found in the clouds. Merry Lynn found two angels and Sudie found a frog. When Betty Jewel found a heart, she thought of the locket and felt a pinch of pain that stole her breath.

      “Let’s go in the water.” Sudie stood up and peeled off her skirt. “Merry Lynn brought inner tubes. It’ll be like old times.”

      “You two go on. I don’t have the strength to struggle into latex.”

      A look passed between her friends, and they both started stripping.

      “Betty Jewel,” Sudie said, “if you don’t want to see me down on all fours buck-naked, you’d better peel off that dress before I do it for you. I don’t have