The Sweetest Hallelujah. Elaine Hussey

life was startling until she remembered all those evenings Joe had spent at Tiny Jim’s. Though Joe would never spread his personal life among strangers, he was a well-known public personality. And in a town as small as Tupelo, the gossip grapevine flourished.

      “No, we had no children.”

      The conversation reminded her all too vividly of the many ways she and Joe had found to blame each other for their childless state. Joe was dead. She wanted him to remain perfect, but a thick blue fog clouded the room, seeding discontent and making sanctifying the dead impossible. If you weren’t careful, you could get lost in that kind of fog and never find your way home. Searching for something solid to hang on to, Cassie spied the piano.

      “Tell me about yourself. You play, don’t you?”

      “I’m dying. What else is there to know?”

      There was no barb in the remark, only soul-searing truth. Cassie took a notepad and pencil from her purse. “Please understand that I’m only here to write a story that might help you find a home for your child.”

      Inscrutable, Betty Jewel slipped a pill out of her pocket, then washed it down with a sip from the yellow plastic glass on the table beside her. “Does it make women like you feel good to help women like me?”

      Cassie felt as if she’d been slapped. She had better things to do than seesaw between rage and pity with Betty Jewel, even if the woman was desperate.

      “You don’t even know me. If you did, that’s the last remark in the world you’d make. I consider us the same.”

      “You mean equals? Like I can walk through the front door of your white house and go into your white bathroom without you going in there after me and scrubbing it down with Dutch Boy?”

      Anger and admiration warred in Cassie. She thought of Bobo, her gardener, and Savannah, her maid. Had she ever invited them to sit down at her table and enjoy a glass of iced tea? Cassie was beginning to feel like a hypocrite until she remembered how she inquired about their children, went to their homes with soup when one of them got sick.

      “Yes,” she said. “Exactly like that.”

      Betty Jewel fell silent, her steady stare saying that when you’re dying your life is reduced to the essentials. Eat, sleep, breathe. Tell the truth. The dying don’t have time for lies.

      “I’m sorry, Cassie. I’ve been rude and arrogant, and I’ve misjudged you.”

      “Thank you. Now will you please give me something I can put into a story?”

      “There’s not going to be a story. That ad was a mistake, and I don’t intend to compound it with a news spread I have to hide from Billie.”

      Cassie started to ask, Why am I here? Then she remembered it was Queen who’d invited her, not Betty Jewel. Folding her notebook, she put it back into her purse.

      “I’m disappointed, naturally, but I didn’t come just for a story. I have lots of connections. Maybe I can help you that way. First, though, I’d like to meet Billie.”

      A fierceness came over Betty Jewel that made Cassie think of a mama eagle protecting her young from snakes. “No. She’s going through enough pain without me adding to it with drama.”

      The screen door banged open, followed by stealthy footsteps in the hall. Then a bony-kneed, big-eyed child drifted by. Billie. Full of contradictions. Defiant and tragic. Fearless and scared. Forced by her mother’s fatal illness to grow up overnight, she wore an expression that clearly said she’d rather remain a child because growing up was such a tragedy.

      The look that passed between mother and daughter was almost beyond enduring. In the face of such devotion, there are things you can’t do. You can’t ask How long before you die? and Will you give your daughter up before or after? You can’t snap pictures for The Bugle, though a photo would be more compelling than that heart-wrenching, hopeful little ad. You can’t think of your empty bed and the empty crib in your attic and the long string of empty years ahead. You can’t think of anything except a little girl who has turned her stare to you, a little girl with eyes so green they remind you of deep rivers and lost love and the unbearable beauty of the human spirit.

      With one last, big-eyed stare, Billie slid past the door and out of sight. Cassie was left feeling as if her bones had been rearranged.

      It took a while for them to settle back into place, and when they did, she was filled with an unexpected resolve.

      “Betty Jewel, what you’re doing is one of the bravest things I know. I want to be personally involved. I want to help you.”

      “Joe always said the biggest thing about you was your heart.”

      It was the kind of generous compliment Joe used to pass around. But Cassie found it shocking coming from this woman’s mouth.

      “You knew him personally?”

      “From Tiny Jim’s.”

      “Of course.” Cassie pictured her husband in the juke joint, mellow with blues and beer, easygoing and approachable, talking about his wife to strangers as if the very telling could make her more real to him. On those long, lonely nights after the last miscarriage when she’d sometimes felt as if Joe were drifting away, as if she might meet him coming around a dark corner and not even know him, had he felt the same way?

      “Cassie, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

      “No. It’s okay. Everybody in town knew and loved Joe.”

      A coughing spell bent Betty Jewel in two, and when she turned away Cassie saw patches of her scalp where radiation had stolen her hair. She wanted to cover her vulnerable baldness with a silk scarf, and at the same time she wanted to take a picture and spread it in on the front page under a caption titled Hero.

      “Can I get you anything? Water?”

      “No. I’m all right.”

      Cassie gathered her purse. “I should go. If there’s anything I can do to help you, please let me know. Here are the numbers where you can reach me. Day or night.”

      As she handed over the card, another fit of coughing bent Betty Jewel double. With her face covered by her hands and her head bowed, she looked like somebody praying. And maybe she was. Maybe Cassie was, too, though she was sitting there with her eyes wide open.

      Should she call Miss Queen? Phone for an ambulance?

      Still bent, Betty Jewel reached into her pocket for a bottle of pills and out tumbled a harmonica.

      B-flat.

      Silver with a pink rose painted on the side.

      The pink rose Cassie had painted.

      A keening built inside her, and she pressed her hand over her mouth to hold it back.

      When Betty Jewel lifted her head, Cassie found herself looking at a woman for whom everything had been stripped away, everything except love.

      From somewhere in the house, a tea kettle whistled and a shaky soprano sang a hymn Cassie remembered from childhood. Rescue the perishing. Care for the dying.

      Long ago when Cassie had played church piano, she would read the verses at the same time she read the music. Not many people can do that. It’s a gift. Like knowing things before they happens.

      Here is what Cassie knew: the harmonica had set events in motion that were beyond her control. She didn’t know the particulars yet, only that her fate was somehow tangled up with this woman.

      “Is that Joe’s?”

      “I didn’t mean for it to come to this.”

      Lord God, Cassie was going to die on the spot. Betty Jewel hadn’t denied it. She hadn’t laughed off Cassie’s question and offered some simple explanation. I found this at Tiny Jim’s juke joint.

      Now