The Sweetest Hallelujah. Elaine Hussey

Dying woman seeks mother for her child. Loving heart required. Call Vinewood 2-8640.

      One look at the newspaper, and Fay Dean read Cassie as if she were a story she planned to use as counsel for the defense.

      “Come on.” She grabbed Cassie’s hand.

      “Where are we going?”

      “To do something I should have made you do years ago.”

      Three

      BILLIE LOOKED UP THROUGH the oak leaves to see if God was hurrying up with some answers. But it wasn’t God’s voice she heard: it was Queen’s.

      “Billie? Where you at, chile? I got supper.”

      She leaned over the edge of the roof to see Queen standing by the bus with a plate covered by a blue-striped dish towel.

      “I’m not hungry.”

      “I’m gone leave it here, just in case.”

      Queen set the plate on an old tool bench leaning against the side of the backyard shed, then lumbered back to the house. The screen door popped behind her, and the smell of fried food drew Billie down the ladder. She gnawed off a hunk of chicken leg, then balanced the plate and climbed back to the top of her daddy’s old touring bus.

      She’d bet if her daddy was here, he’d find a way to make Mama well. She’d bet he knew famous doctors. Her daddy was famous himself. Or used to be. Saint Hughes was a blues great. Ranked right up there with King Oliver and Louis Armstrong. They said the Saint with his silver horn could sway an audience like a preacher at a Baptist tent revival.

      Queen and Mama didn’t tell Billie hardly anything about her daddy. What didn’t come from the kids taunting her in the neighborhood came from Lucy. She’d got the information by hiding under her front porch and eavesdropping on Lucy’s mama, Sudie Jenkins, and dead Alice’s mama, Merry Lynn Watkins. Both of them were Mama’s friends, and you could bet they knew the truth.

      When Billie was little she never thought about not having a daddy. She thought normal was a household of nothing but women. It was after she got to noticing that other little girls had daddies to lift them up so they could see things like parades and stars and birds’ eggs in a high-up nest in a magnolia tree that she started asking about her own daddy.

      Mama would never talk about him, and Queen followed suit. She thought Mama’s every word got handed down on Mt. Sinai from the Lord God Himself. If Queen knew Billie was even thinking such mean thoughts about religion, she’d make her memorize the Ten Commandments word for word. And she’d know if Billie got it wrong, too. Queen knew the Good Book from cover to cover. Mostly, she knew about spare the rod and spoil the child. She kept a willow switch behind the kitchen door.

      What Queen didn’t know was how a girl of six needed to understand why her daddy didn’t tuck her in at night and how a girl of ten needed to know her roots.

      The first time Billie had ever asked about her daddy, Queen said, “Don’t go worrying yo mama ‘bout such stuff,” and Mama just said, “He’s gone.”

      “Dead?”

      “No, just not here.”

      “How come?”

      “Just let it alone, Billie.”

      But she hadn’t. When she got old enough—eight and a half—she and Lucy started spying, sneaking around at Sunday dinners and church potluck suppers listening at keyholes.

      What Billie didn’t overhear, she made up. She pictured him as a darker version of Roy Rogers, only without the white hat and Trigger. She figured she got her height from her daddy. Her mama was only five five, and that’s if she stretched her neck. Another thing was Billie’s skin. She freckled in summer, so Saint Hughes had to be light-skinned. Mama was dark, considering her French daddy, and Queen was blacker than the ace of spades.

      Billie also liked to think it was her daddy who picked out her name. She imagined him thinking about all the stars he’d performed with, then choosing the most beautiful, most talented of all, the great jazz singer, Billie Holiday.

      Once when Billie had asked Lucy’s mama about the Saint, she’d said, “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,