He was younger than I thought. I saw that now he was in his own place, relaxed as he could be in that black shirt. The deep lines and shrunk-back hair seemed more from hard living than long living. He studied me, tapping a pen on his desk, like he was working out how best to ask about Mora and us sleeping down at the Roost with her. The longer he was silent, the more my nerves fizzed.
‘Johnny.’ He paused. ‘Can I call you Johnny? Do you prefer John?’
Nobody had ever asked me that. Momma and Jenny and Gloria and Rudy called me Johnny but never asked if I liked it.
‘John is fine,’ I said and he smiled.
He wasn’t the same as the other day in the station. There was none of that victorious lion I’d seen with Samuels, he was calmer, relaxed. That feeling of safety came back and a deep sense of calm settled over me like a blanket on a cold night. I had my farm and my pastor and my God, and that’s a mighty army to have at my back.
I sank into my chair. ‘So …’
‘So,’ he said, fingers playing on the desk, not catching my eye like he didn’t know where to start, what to say. The clock ticked on the wall and, outside, I could hear two women chatting on the sidewalk.
He felt it too, I could tell, the awkward silence, so he half laughed and blurted out, ‘You’re not in trouble, okay, John?’
I smiled, wanted to laugh a little at his nerves but I guess it was the first thing he thought of. Grown-ups say stuff like that when you’re so deep in shit you can’t swim your way out.
‘I know,’ I said and he went back to tapping his fingers.
My eyes went to the wall behind him, scanned a poster showing off the birds of Barks County, a Dodge car calendar stuck on April, and a map. The whole world laid out flat, every country a new colour, with strange lines and numbers all over it.
He followed my eyes to the posters, the chair creaked as he turned. I thought he’d explain the map. Miss Eaves did that when she saw a student staring, she’d go, ‘Good eye, that’s the Mississippi delta’, and launch into a talk about drainage basins and steamboats. Pastor Jacobs didn’t.
I kept staring, averting my eyes every time he tried to catch mine, suddenly thinking this was a mistake, I should be home working on the farm or in study hall with my friends. The calm ebbed away. I hoped he would take the hint and let me go, stick true to his you’re not in trouble words and forgive me for saying I’d come here. While I waited for him to speak, in my head, I reeled off the names of the birds on the poster. Such wonderful names, they rolled around my brain like snowballs. I knew them all without looking at their labels. Golden Plover. Kestrel. Redstart. Baltimore Oriole. Green-Winged Teal. And that one, the Lincoln Sparrow, I’d learned from the book Momma gave me. Name them all, Johnny, and a hundred more until this hour is all used up.
‘Hang on,’ the pastor said and his change in tone made me look at him. ‘We’re not doing this right, are we?’
Jacobs stood. He wasn’t that tall but with the trailer’s low ceiling, he was a smiling giant, ballooned into the space.
‘It’s hot as the devil’s shit in here,’ he said and whipped his hand to his mouth. ‘Don’t tell anyone I said that.’
He looked like a schoolboy caught with his hand in the jam, giggling, red-faced.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’
He swerved around his desk and past me, flung open the door, but there was no cool relief, only more swelter, more heat, and the buzz of insects attacking a butterfly bush.
‘You know, John, the summers here are something else.’
As we walked, he took a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. The sheen returned a second later.
‘You shouldn’t do that,’ I said, then clamped my mouth shut. Don’t go telling a grown-up what to do, Momma said, especially a pastor, or he’ll put you on a fast track to Satan.
He glanced down at me, dabbed the cloth on his upper lip. ‘Do what?’
‘Wipe it away,’ I said, pointing up to his forehead. ‘It won’t get a chance to cool you down if you get rid of it.’
I’d told Jenny the same last summer. I’d wanted to tell that joke Samuels a few days ago. Sweat’s there for a reason, the body knows what it has to do, we just have to listen to it.
‘Is that right?’ Jacobs said and I saw that kindness in his eyes I’d seen in the station. ‘I’ll bench the handkerchief from now on. Thank you, John.’
I swallowed. Unsure how to respond. But when I looked up at him again he wasn’t the looming giant sending me to Hell, he was a man who helped me and my sister by fending off the sheriff. He was a man who listened and the more I talked, the more he seemed to listen.
But I wasn’t sure I knew what to say yet. I still hadn’t unravelled it all in my head yet, not Mora, not Jenny, not the way it made me feel, because I didn’t know how it made me feel except sick. Except scared. But not of a dead body. Of my sister. Could I really tell him that? Could I let him think bad of Jenny?
Royal business stays on Royal land, Momma said. But my mind kept flipping. One moment, I’d have spilled my guts the second he asked, in the next I’d clam up and want to get the hell away from him. Maybe Pastor Jacobs was only talking to me because he was a gossip like the kids at school and wanted answers, not because he truly wanted to help. The heat, the man, the conversation, all combined inside me. Sharp fluttering filled my insides. Felt like birds on my bones.
Out of the back of the churchyard, we crossed into the fields. A path cut through the wheat and led up to Barks reservoir. Older kids went swimming there after church on Sundays. Momma said it was too deep for me and Jenny, we’d drown no question. Now I’ve told you that, Momma said with a smile, it means that if you go there and you die, I won’t be crying over either of you.
‘Look, John, check out that beauty,’ Jacobs said, squatting down beside me, arm on my shoulder, pointing.
A hawk, a northern harrier, one of my favourites, hovered above a spot in the middle of the field. Held there, as if on a wire straight from God. The bird stared, tiny movements of its wings kept it level in the breeze.
‘You see that white patch on its tail?’ Jacobs said and I knew he was about to tell me what it was. I kept quiet, let him tell it.
‘That’s a northern harrier. He’s spotted a mouse.’
So intent, measured, patient, and yet, with one turn of his wings, he could strike, quick as a bullet out of a gun. We watched for a few more seconds, then, as the pastor shifted, muttering about his bad knee, the harrier dove. Into the gold wheat, gone for a second, then up into the air, a twitching tail caught in its talons.
Jacobs clapped. ‘Just magnificent.’
The hawk landed at the top of a tree and ripped apart the mouse. I couldn’t take my eyes away. In seconds, tear, crunch, gone. That was all it took, a strike, a shot, and the mouse was ruin and wreck just like Mora. One second, one bullet, and she was a body, not a girl.
‘That’s a hell of a bird,’ Jacobs said, standing up and leading me away, back to the path.
‘The British just named a jet plane after it,’ I said and the pastor looked at me, one eyebrow raised. I clammed up. Momma always said no one likes a smart-ass.
‘They did, huh?’
I nodded, waited for him to question me like Momma would have. Where did you hear that? Was it that teacher who told you?
‘Well,’ Pastor Jacobs said, ‘that doesn’t surprise me in the least. It’s a beauty.’
And he smiled at me and accepted what I said and that was new for me and it felt good. Really good. I kept my eyes