“Joella’s right,” Reverend Martin said, standing to capture the attention of the room. “The Scovilles may fail us. But the Lord never will. Faith will see us through this.”
Some of the people looked sheepishly into their laps, but most of them kept right on complaining.
Joella swallowed hard and dropped into a chair, giving in to a wave of despair. Time was when her number-one goal had been to get away from Bethlehem as fast as she could. College in Asheville, North Carolina, then marriage to Andrew Ratchford, the high school valedictorian whose aspirations matched hers, had seemed the perfect plan. Then, two years later, Nathan was born and college put on hold for the more important job of motherhood. But Andy stuck with it, graduated with Joella’s help and took a promising job with a major bank. Not long after, Andy told Joella his lawyer would be in touch. She didn’t fit his plan any longer.
In the middle of all the hurt, old-fashioned and soothingly familiar Bethlehem had seemed a safe haven.
But as much as Joella hated to admit it, Rutta and Eben and the rest were right. Their safe haven was on the verge of turning into a bankrupt ghost town. Joella looked around the church basement at the cracked plaster, the rusty legs on the chairs. Even the construction-paper turkeys made by the children’s Sunday school classes had been cut out of faded, yellowing paper.
She looked for the one with Nathan’s name on it and wondered if anyone would have enough holiday spirit left to replace them soon with herald angels and Nativity scenes.
“Don’t know why we all act surprised.” Fred Roseforte’s strident voice carried over the rest of the rumbling voices. “This here’s the only family-owned mill village left in the state. We’re a dinosaur. The rest of ‘em’s already gone belly-up or sold out, long time back. We might’s well quit our grousing and start looking to the future, too.”
Fred stood then, and took a step toward the door. “I’m looking for work somewhere else, starting tomorrow.”
Joella watched other heads nod, saw others rise. “Wait!”
“Wait for what?” Fred demanded, his voice revealing his impatience just as surely as his red face did. “Wait till they tell us they ain’t got money to pay us for the last month’s work we did? Wait till they cut off the power to our houses—excuse me, their houses—and ask us to clear out?”
“Wait for…” Joella thought fast. There had to be something someone could do. “Wait till we hear what young Mr. Scoville has to say.”
Fred guffawed at that. “You might be too young to remember young Scoville, Joella. But I ain’t. I’ll wager most of us ain’t. You saw that big, fancy automobile he just rolled into town in. He’s not going to dirty his hands for long with a hundred or so grubby little mill families.”
A sense of loss settled into the pit of Joella’s stomach, like too many sour green apples when she was a kid.
“Then wait till Christmas, at least,” she pleaded. “It’s only a month away. But if you start walking out, they might have to shut down now. Then none of us will draw a paycheck this month. What kind of Christmas will that be for our kids and grand-kids?”
She took heart when she saw a few heads nodding at that reminder.
“Let us all remember that this is a holiday for miracles,” added the Reverend Martin.
“By golly, a miracle’s just what it’s gonna take,” Eben Ford said.
“Won’t be much Christmas, anyway,” Rutta said. “What I hear is there’s no money for the celebration.”
Joella didn’t want to hear that, either. For more than a century the Christmas celebration in Bethlehem had been Scoville Mill’s gift to its employees. And a spectacular gift it had become over the decades. Hundreds of thousands of lights twinkled all over the village. Life-size Nativity scenes and painted plywood angels decorated churchyards and rooftops. Caught up in the spirit, residents each year dressed in Dickens garb and walked the village at dusk, carolling. The light-studded village drew visitors first from all over the state, then all over the South, then all over the country. Christmas Town, U.S.A., it was called. Year before last, a national magazine wrote up the story.
Losing the Christmas celebration would cut the heart right out of the town, that was for sure.
“Let’s talk to them,” she pleaded, hoping to keep everyone else from feeling the despair she felt at the prospect of Bethlehem without its celebration. “Sit down and at least make sure our voices are heard when they make their plans.”
“Joella, you’ve got stars in your eyes, girl,” Fred said. “They ain’t worried about our future. All they’re worried about is coverin’ their own backs and cuttin’ their losses.”
“Still—” Eben spoke up “—she’s right. Somebody ought to be there. Looking out for us. Sort of a union representative, you might say.”
Fred’s snort made his opinion of that obvious. “If we’d had a union before, we might not be in this fix now.”
“Now, Fred, you know Mitchell and Truman always treated us right,” Joella said. “The Scovilles are good men and—”
“Fine! You want to know what a good man their nephew is? You go sit down at the negotiating table with young Scoville. You ask him what kind of retirement we can look forward to. You ask him what we’re gonna have for a lifetime making the Scovilles rich when he closes the doors the first of the year.”
Again a brief silence descended. Followed by a loud rumble of agreement.
And that was how Joella got herself elected to represent the mill hands in the Scoville Mill bankruptcy proceedings.
Jordan Scoville surveyed his father’s office and decided not to sit.
His father and his uncle Truman sat in the matching silk-striped chairs that faced the desk. He remembered his mother telling him, back when his legs were still too short to reach the floor, that those chairs were reserved for people who were reduced to asking a favor or listening to a lecture. Now Mitchell and Truman Scoville, once two of the most influential men in South Carolina, sat side by side in those chairs, feet crossed at the ankles, agespotted hands clasped expectantly in their laps, hope shining in their eyes.
Clearly they’d left Mitchell’s big leather chair behind the desk vacant for Jordan. But Jordan had no intention of taking on that burden for them. He was here to clean up their mess because that’s what sons did when their fathers couldn’t do it for themselves. But he would be granting no favors and delivering no lectures.
“Well, Jordie, your father and I—”
“Jordan.” He interrupted his uncle. There would be no misunderstandings. Not about his role here. Certainly not about the fact that he was no longer a kid. “I’m not eleven any longer, Uncle Truman. Please call me Jordan.”
Truman smiled uncertainly and looked at Mitch-ll, who didn’t look back. The two men, one seventy-seven and the other seventy-nine, might have been twins. Both had flyaway white hair that floated atop their pink scalps in wispy tufts. Both wore round, wire-rimmed glasses and favored white buck shoes and seersucker suits, even in the winter, now that Jordan’s mother was no longer around to exlain why white buck and seersucker could not be worn after Labor Day. The seersucker hung loosely on their rounded shoulders. Both had plump pink cheeks, and their razors tended to miss a gray whisker or two directly under their noses. Both were dreamers and people pleasers and entirely too soft-hearted to have been given the responsibility of running a business that had been in the family four generations.
The only significant difference between the two was that Truman had never married and Mitchell favored bow ties, although Jordan noted he had switched to the clip-on