The Scent of Lilacs (41 page)

He was almost to the top of the hill when he came around a curve into the storm’s battlefield. The wind had definitely won. Trees lay like matchsticks tossed out for a game of pick up sticks, but the roadway was amazingly clear except for a church pew right in the middle of it. David blinked to be sure he wasn’t seeing things. But the wooden bench was there. Where in the world had it come from?

The pew screeched on the blacktop as David scooted it out of the way. He had it off the road before he thought he should have taken a picture of it for the
Banner
. That was the kind of picture that moved papers. Not that he was worried about moving papers right now. He had to find Jocie.

He was almost back to the car when he spotted the wheel. It was crumpled and bent with spokes shooting out in every direction, but there was no doubt it was a bicycle wheel. David picked it up. He wanted it to be old and rusty, but the chrome was shiny and speckled with bright blue paint. The same bright blue Jocie had used to spruce up her bike in the spring.

He didn’t let himself think. He just looked toward the sky and said, “Dear God.” He stayed still a moment waiting for some kind of sign. A finger pointing the way or a cry for help perhaps. He would have been thankful for just a feeling that he should go this direction or that to look for Jocie. But rain kept hitting his face, and all he saw was a spot of blue pushing back the gray clouds up over his head.

He didn’t see any other pieces of her bike. She wouldn’t have been on the bike. She would have found shelter. He just needed to find that shelter. He gently lay the mangled bike wheel in the backseat and drove on up the road. Whatever shelter she had found would be along the road. She wouldn’t have tried to go across the fields on her bike. And Wes had gone this way. She could be with him. David’s heart suddenly felt lighter. He pictured her on the back of Wes’s motorcycle way ahead of the storm, perhaps back to town by now. “Let it be so, Lord,” he whispered as he nosed his car around the branches in the road.

Another curve and he was at the top of the hill where Clay’s Creek Baptist Church had stood for nearly a century, but it was there no longer. The church building was gone. Wiped clean off its foundation. All that the wind had left behind was the pulpit and a couple more pews, one sitting amid the broken branches of what was left of the massive oak tree that had surely been there when the church was built.

David’s heart sank. Wes hadn’t found her in time to escape the storm. His motorcycle was standing on its handlebars against the fence across from what was left of the church. There was
no sign of Wes. Or Jocie. God help them if they’d taken shelter inside the church.

He was getting out of his car when a head popped up out of the oak leaves.

“Daddy!”

He could hardly believe his eyes as Jocie climbed out of the branches and ran toward him. He grabbed and held her so tightly that he knew she couldn’t breathe, but she didn’t seem to mind as she held on to him just as tightly. He loosened his hold just a little, and she started talking.

“Daddy, I can’t believe it’s you. Everything’s so crazy. I was in the church and I smelled lilacs.” She peeked up at him. “Just like your locust blooms. I couldn’t believe it, but then the Lord pushed me right out of the church into the middle of the storm and I didn’t know whether he was helping me or letting me know it was my time. Then Wes came out of nowhere, sort of like you did just now, and knocked me down to the ground, and then everything blew away. I mean really away and I thought I might blow away too, but then I didn’t. But Wes was gone and I couldn’t find him. And then I did, but he’s hurt and I didn’t know what to do. So I asked the Lord for help. And here you are.”

“Are you okay, Jocie?” He let go of her enough to look at her face. Blood was smeared across her cheek. “You’re bleeding.”

She swiped at her cheek and looked at her hand. “Not me, or at least I don’t think so. It’s Wes. The tree fell on him, and I can’t get him out.” She pulled away from David and tugged on his hand. “He’s hurt bad.” She stopped and looked back at him. “You won’t let him die, will you, Daddy?”

“Not if I can help it, Jocie.” He was already praying nonstop as he climbed across the branches, following Jocie. He prayed harder when he saw Wes. The man had a nasty gash on his head, and his eyes were closed. He was so white that David was afraid it might already be too late for prayers for him this side of eternity.

Jocie scrambled down beside Wes. “Daddy’s here, Wes. You’re going to be all right. The Lord sent us help just the way I told you he would.”

David pushed through the branches till he was crouched on the other side of Wes. “Can you hear me, Wes?”

Wes opened one of his eyes and peered at David. “Of course I can hear you. A tree fell on me. I didn’t go deaf.”

“How bad is it?” David asked. “Can you feel your toes?”

“If I still have toes, I don’t know it,” Wes said. “But that might be good. I might not be wanting to feel my toes right now. Don’t hurt much at all, to be truthful. My head smarts a mite but not my leg. Course, if you move that tree, I expect it will. And could sprout some real bleeders too.”

“Well, we can’t leave you under there,” David said before he sent Jocie to the car for some of the string they used to tie up the bundles of papers. “I’ll put a tourniquet on it till we see what’s going to happen. You were right out in the middle of this one, weren’t you? Get any pictures?”

“Sorry, boss. There wasn’t time. I came up the hill just as them clouds started twisting together and came right at us. And there was Jo right out in the middle of the churchyard just staring at the funnel. We didn’t have time to get inside, which is just as well, I guess. Jo says it took that old church here clean away.”

“Not much left,” David said.

“You could get some pictures now. It’d be a doggone shame not to take some for the paper. It ain’t every day that you’re Johnny on the Spot for a tornado. First real news in Holly County for years.”

“We’re not worrying about pictures for the paper.” David broke a stick off one of the branches beside his head.

“Might sell enough extra papers to buy me some crutches and fix my motorcycle. And I ain’t budging till you do it.”

“You can’t budge anyway,” David said.

Wes grabbed hold of David’s arm. “Let Jo take the pictures while you get me out of here. I don’t want the girl to see it.”

“She’ll have to see it. She’ll have to help me get you to the car.”

“Let her take the pictures first. Give her something to think about instead of me yelling.”

Jocie was back with the string. David wound it together before he worked it under Wes’s leg. He glanced up at Jocie. “Go take some pictures. My camera’s on the front seat. Finish off the whole roll, but do it quick. We need to move.”

“I don’t want to take pictures now,” Jocie said.

“But you have to, Jo,” Wes said. “Me and you lived to tell the story, but ain’t nobody gonna believe we were all here and nobody took a picture. They’ll think we’re making it up for certain. So go on and snap a few, and don’t pay me no mind if I let out a few Jupiter whoops back here.”

“Take the pictures, Jocie.” David looked Jocie in the eye. “Wes wants you to. But first clear out the backseat of the car and bring me a bunch of those old papers in the trunk. I’ll have to try to fashion some kind of splint out of them. Oh, and move the car up as close as you can.” When she just looked at him, David gave her shoulder a little nudge. “Go on. Do it. I’ll yell if I need more help.”

Jocie had been driving the car up and down their driveway since she was ten, so she didn’t have any problem pulling up into the churchyard once she’d cleared out a path through the branches and pushed the church pew out of the way. She took her father the papers and more string and then grabbed the camera. It had a fresh roll of film.

The sun had come out, and the sky was mostly blue. Somehow that made the devastation look that much worse. She took a couple of shots of Wes stuck under the tree, several different angles of what was left of the church, a picture of the pew in the
churchyard, a close-up of a hymnbook amid the rubble open to “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder.” She started to flip the pages to find “Amazing Grace,” since she didn’t want to think about the roll being called up there right now, but then she left it the way it was. Maybe the Lord had made the wind open it to that page for a reason.

Behind her, Wes let out a yell. Jocie cringed, but she kept shooting and winding. The sooner she got through, the sooner she could go help. And Wes was right. They had to take pictures. She finished up the film with a shot of her father working on Wes, who looked totally lost in one of those Jupiterian circles he’d talked about. His eyes were shut, and he was breathing hard.

When her father looked up at her, sweat was dripping off his nose. “That’s enough pictures. Come hold these papers while I tie them in place.” He glanced out toward the road. “You’d think somebody would have come out to see what the storm did by now. I’m going to need help getting Wes to the car.”

“I’ll help,” Jocie said.

Wes passed out when her father picked him up to lift him out of the tree branches. Jocie held his mangled leg as straight as she could as they stepped over the limbs toward the car.
Please, Lord, don’t let me hurt him
, she prayed every step.

Her father laid Wes gently in the backseat, and Jocie crawled in the other door to hold his head and steady him on the seat. He was still unconscious. “Will he be okay, Dad?”

Her father met her eyes. “I don’t know, Jocie. I want him to be, but I don’t know. His leg’s bad.”

Jocie looked down at Wes. “I’m sorry I ran away.”

“You should have come to me,” her father said. “But we can’t talk about this now. We need to get Wes to the hospital.”

Jocie looked up again. “But you will tell me the truth?”

“I’ve always told you the truth, Jocie.” He laid his hand on her cheek. “I am your father. I’ve always been your father, and I
will always be your father. You couldn’t change that even if you wanted to.”

She didn’t want to change it. But she still had questions even though she knew she couldn’t ask them now. Not with Wes pale and bleeding as she held his head in her lap. Some of them maybe she’d never be able to ask. She looked back at what was left of Clay’s Creek Baptist Church as her father headed the car down the road. And she remembered the scent of lilacs.

H
ollyhill didn’t have a hospital. Dr. Markum had been trying for the last few years to get the town behind the idea of building one, but most of the local folks balked at the idea of extra taxes. The ones who hadn’t had heart attacks and had to actually make the trip with death knocking on the door said it wasn’t all that far to the emergency room over in Grundy, where they could patch you up or ship you on to one of the big hospitals in Lexington.

Dr. Markum took one look at Wes and said Lexington was where he had to go if he was going to have any hope of ever walking again. Jocie’s father had driven straight to the doctor’s house, since it was past regular office hours. Dr. Markum had carried his doctor’s bag out to the car while his wife called Gordon Hazelton, who had an old hearse the town used for an ambulance.

“No need moving him twice. We’ll just leave him where he is till Gordon gets here,” Dr. Markum said as he filled a hypodermic needle. “This might ease the pain a little.”

Jocie held Wes tighter as the doctor shoved in the needle. Wes never opened his eyes. He hadn’t opened his eyes all the way through the country to the doctor’s house. But he’d kept breathing and didn’t seem totally unconscious, just in one of his Jupiterian circles, floating along in another dimension.

The doctor looked at his watch when Gordon Hazelton came speeding up the street and said he’d made it in six and a half
minutes. “Fastest time ever,” he said, but it had seemed like an hour to Jocie.

The three men lifted Wes as gently as possible out of the car and laid him on the stretcher. Jocie scrambled out of the car. “I’m going with him,” Jocie said as they lifted the stretcher into the back of the hearse.