The Sweetest Hallelujah. Elaine Hussey

spite of the fact that plain, petite Sudie looked as if she wouldn’t say boo to a cat, she’d always been the leader in their circle. The three B’s, they’d called themselves—brains, Betty Jewel; beauty, Merry Lynn and boss, Sudie. They let themselves out, and Betty Jewel thought she ought to get up and check on Billie, but she didn’t have the strength to walk to the window. Snatches of her mama’s song floated down the hall. Queen was singing “Dwelling in Beulah Land” now, an old hymn that promised the downtrodden some blessed relief.

      What relief was there when your meager savings were running out and the only income you had was from the three people in Shakerag who could afford piano lessons and the pies your ancient mama sold at Tiny Jim’s?

      Betty Jewel leaned her head back, drifting on the melody to a better time, a sweeter place.

      Suddenly the phone rang, jerking Betty Jewel upright.

      Queen hollered from down the hall. “You want me to get that, baby?”

      “I’ll get it, Mama.” The afghan slid to the floor, but Betty Jewel didn’t stop to pick it up for fear she’d miss the caller. The phone was perched on a faux maple telephone table by the couch. She was so out of breath when she got there she could barely speak.

      “Betty Jewel?”

      “Oh, my god.”

      “Betty Jewel, is that you?”

      She should tell him, No. She should jerk the phone jack out of the wall, then sit back down in her rocking chair and pretend that Saint Hughes was not on the other end of the line, his voice as seductive as dark honey drizzled over yeast-rising bread.

      But he was there waiting, and suddenly she was faced with a new horror. He wanted something from her, and he wouldn’t give up. He’d keep calling and calling, and maybe get Billie. And then … She couldn’t let her mind go there.

      “What do you want?” She didn’t dare say his name, didn’t dare chance that Queen would hear.

      “I want to talk, that’s all. Just talk.”

      Betty Jewel’s worst nightmare was coming true. The Saint was trying to weasel back into her life, and she was plunged into a new kind of hell. In the kitchen Queen was singing “Amazing Grace,” but all Betty Jewel could think about was taking a gun and blowing Saint to Kingdom Come.

      “I have nothing to say to you.”

      “Well, I got plenty to say to you. You still my wife.”

      “Are you insane? You were so drunk the day I left it took you two weeks to notice I was gone.”

      “It’s all gonna be different now.”

      “Are you out of prison? Lord have mercy, tell me they didn’t let your low-down hide out of jail.”

      “Got out last week. I can’t wait to be with you.”

      “I’d rather eat cow shit. Where are you?”

      “Memphis.” It was too close, only a hundred miles away. Betty Jewel thought she might faint. “I’m fixing to make a comeback. I’m putting together another band, found some great guys on Beale Street. I want you to sing the lead.”

      “I’m not ever singing with you again. You hear me? Not ever.”

      “Aw, Betty Jewel. Don’t be like that.”

      She heard the oven door slam shut, knew the pies Queen was making for Tiny Jim were cooking, knew her mama would be washing the dough off her hands and would soon be coming to the den to stretch out on the flowered chintz couch and watch Milton Berle on Texaco Star Theater.

      “Can you hold on a minute?” Betty Jewel eased the door shut. When she picked up the receiver, her hands were trembling so hard she nearly dropped it. “You stay away from here. I mean it.”

      “We were good together, sugah.”

      In more ways than one. Her legs wouldn’t hold her up anymore, and she sank onto the arm of the old couch. “Don’t you sugar me. You couldn’t pay me enough money to sing with you.”

      “You and me, we got a little girl. What’s she like?”

      Betty Jewel bit her lip so hard she brought blood. If she screamed, Queen would come running. And Billie. Tiny Jim would have told Saint about Billie. Musicians stick together. “Don’t you ever call here again. You hear me? If you dare show your face around here, I’ll have you arrested. I’ll say you’re trying to sell me cocaine.”

      “You wouldn’t do that.”

      She heard Queen’s slow shuffle in the hall. “I swear on a stack of Bibles.” Betty Jewel hoped God was not listening. She hoped Queen was not. She’d wash her mouth out with soap, and her a dying woman. “If the cops don’t get you, I’ll shoot you myself.”

      She slammed the receiver down and made it back to the rocking chair, but all she could think of was Saint coming to get Billie and Sudie trying to fend him off.

      “Pies’ll be ready in twenny minnits.” The old couch springs groaned under Queen’s weight. “Lord, my feets is killin’ me.”

      Years ago when Betty Jewel left Shakerag, who would have believed it would all turn out this way—Queen getting ready to bury her only living child, Billie searching for the truth through keyholes, the Saint resurrected from the awful past, and her sitting in a maple rocking chair with cancer cells eating her alive.

      But then what twenty-year-old ever imagines herself dying right at the height of middle age—or any age, for that matter—when all she had on her mind was a man who was fixing to set the world on fire? That was the Saint. Lord, that man was the most dazzling person she’d ever laid eyes on, him all dressed in white up on that stage at Blind Willie Jefferson’s juke joint in the Delta, the lights turning him red and blue and green. Like Christmas tree lights. Like one of those chameleons you’d never guess from one minute to the next what color he was going to turn.

      Saint Hughes. With his silver tongue and his silver trumpet. When he put that horn to his lips and commenced playing, she’d swear the angels wept. And when he started in on her with his glib talk, there was nothing she wouldn’t do for him, including throw away her college education and her blossoming singing career and say I do to whatever he asked.

      The wedding dress he bought her was white silk. The real thing, he’d said. It wasn’t till years later she’d learned it was cheap imitation.

      Her ring came from a Cracker Jack box. By the time she’d met him, the once-great jazz legend was already on the skids.

      “Someday I’ll get you a ring with diamonds big as golf balls,” he’d said, and Lord help her, she’d believed him.

      She’d believed everything he told her back in those days, including that he was going to reclaim his fame and be rich. It wasn’t riches she cared about, though, but the dazzling future he promised.

      “I’m going to buy an antebellum house bigger than any high-and-mighty cotton plantation. Miz Queen can sit on a blue velvet cushion and drink tea from a china cup and brag to all her friends that a white woman is gonna be scrubbing her floors one of these days.”

      Back then, Queen had believed in Saint Hughes, too, but that hadn’t kept her from crying her eyes out when Betty Jewel married him. Still, she stood in the door way and waved as her only surviving child climbed into the old school bus the Saint had painted black with his name in foot-high red lettering on the side. Betty Jewel had thought she was on the way to fame and fortune.

      “Baby, I’m gonna take you on a ride you’ll never forget,” the Saint promised. He’d made many promises, but that was the only one he ever kept.

      Betty Jewel closed her eyes and could still see Queen standing by the front porch swing, wearing a yellow voile dress calling out, “Ya’ll be pa’tic’lar now, you hear?”

      It