Читать книгу: «Christmas Town»

Chapter One

All 122 pairs of eyes in the basement fellowship hall of the church watched in riveted silence as the black Lincoln glided down Main Street The only pair of eyes that held even a tiny spark of hope was the honey-flecked brown pair belonging to Joella Ratchford.

When the imposing automobile was out of sight, all eyes returned to the institutional green room whose walls were decorated with construction-paper cutouts of turkeys and Pilgrims.

“Looks like the executioner has arrived,” someone muttered.

“We can’t give up,” Joella said as forcefully as she could manage, although forcefulness wasn’t her strong suit.

Joella looked for reassurance to white-haired Reverend Hatfield Martin, who had been there for Joella during all of the toughest times of her life. He smiled his reassuring smile—the one that always seemed to say she wasn’t alone in whatever difficulty life was dishing up. Then she looked around her at the roomful of mill workers, most of whom she had known all her life. Some had wandered back to the circle of metal folding chairs, some remained beside the windows. All were dear to her.

Most of them weren’t smiling, reassuringly or otherwise. Joella could see in their faces that they had already resigned themselves to an unwelcome future.

“Come on, everybody,” she said, her tone close to pleading. “Don’t any of you believe it when Reverend Martin says the Lord will provide?”

Only a few people would return her gaze. Joella wanted to cry. She had grown up in Bethlehem, South Carolina. Her father had worked for Scoville Mill as long as she could remember, until his death three years ago. Every person in this room was like a member of Joella’s extended family. Surrogate aunts and uncles, cousins by marriage, best friends she’d played summer softball with. People she loved, all of them. Even the ones who got on her last good nerve sometimes, for that was the way with family.

Bethlehem was home, and Joella felt the loneliness of being the only one in town still willing to fight for it.

“Shoot-fire, Joella,” Eben Ford finally said. “What’re we supposed to do? The Scovilles are outta money. That means the mill’s outta money. The whole town’s outta money.”

“We’re all as good as homeless,” came Rutta Story’s thin, creaky voice. Mumbling, grumbling voices joined Rutta’s statement of doom.

“There’s the retirement fund,” Joella protested over the rumble, but no one listened. Weakly, knowing nobody heard, she finished, “At least we’ve got that to fall back on.”

“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 variety now that he didn’t have Eugenia Jordan Scoville’s nimble fingers to help with the tying.

Jordan had heard it said that Southern women were often the real backbone of the family. Considering the mess that had developed following his mother’s death, he had no choice but to believe it. Steel magnolia, indeed.

Although as a child he’d always wanted a softer, warmer mother, Jordan was now grateful for all that Eugenia had been. For he was, thankfully, more like her than he was the Scoville side of the family, both in appearance and temperament.

Eugenia had been statuesque where her husband was stocky, golden skinned and dark haired where her husband was pale, assertive where her husband was tentative. She had been an aristocrat and her husband a man with the common touch. Growing up, Jordan had admired neither option. He’d hated being regarded as the little prince in the village where his parents were benevolent monarchs. But he’d been too much like his mother to play the role of the common man at his father’s side.

In the end, he’d followed his natural inclinations. He supposed, after all, he’d become his mother’s son.

Uncle Truman cleared his throat. “Well, then, Jordan. I see. That is, we’re so glad you’re home. For the holidays and all.”

Jordan frowned. Another sore spot struck. All his adult life, Jordan hadn’t been able to think of the holidays without thinking of Christmas Town, U.S.A. And as much as everyone else in Bethlehem had loved the elaborate celebration, it had done nothing for young Jordie Scoville but remind him that he didn’t fit in. He’d hated the extravagance and the knowledge that it was bought and paid for by his parents, that it wasn’t the product of anybody’s real Christmas spirit.

Since leaving, he managed to find ways, each December, to concentrate on anything but the holidays. Big deals closed on December 24. Trips to scout property took place on December 25.

Jordan frowned and walked to the window overlooking Main Street. “I’m not here for the holidays, Uncle. I’m here to shut down the mill.”

He heard the little hum of dismay that was his father’s response and wondered if other sons could handle all this with more grace, more sympathy. And, if so, why couldn’t he? Why did all this family stuff bother him so?

And why couldn’t he manage to be tough enough that it really didn’t matter?

“Well, of course, Jord…an. Of course. But it is almost December and we will all be together.”

“Not all of us,” Mitchell reminded his brother gently. “Not Eugenia.”

“Well, I didn’t mean that, of course. I’m not senile, Mitchell. I know the dear woman is departed. All I meant was—”

“Do you have all the records I asked for?” Jordan interrupted, impatient with their prattle. Impatient with himself for his impatience. He couldn’t stand seeing them like this, so helpless and so clearly in need of someone’s help.

But there was no one but him, and that was out of the question.

Little wonder Scoville Mill was bankrupt. What had Eugenia been thinking, dying and leaving the family business in their care these past ten years? “Is everything in order?”

“Oh, yes,” his father said. “To be sure. Venita has everything you’ll need, doesn’t she, Truman?”

Jordan shut out the sound of their cheery debate over who would summon the woman who had served as their secretary for as long as Jordan could remember. This was taking its toll on him already, dredging up memories he preferred to keep buried.

He studied the block-long Main Street of the town where he’d grown up, the town he’d left without looking back as soon as military school, followed by Duke University, offered an escape. He remembered Main Street as busy, like a midway at a rural carnival. People milling around, talking, in and out of the post office and the general mercantile and the diner. All the storefronts were still the same, except for being about fifteen years drearier. Few cars or pickups were parked along the street. No third-shifters moseyed along carrying out the day’s errands. The yellow caution light at the end of the hill didn’t even blink now, simply stared out dark and unseeing over the narrow, deserted street.

Just as Jordan had decided that Bethlehem was already a hopeless cause, with blessedly little left for him to dismantle, the door opened from the basement of the Little Bethlehem Baptist Church at the top of the hill. People poured out, talking, gesturing. In their denim and flannel they were more than animated, they were agitated. And all their agitation seemed directed toward one person at the very center of the frenzy.

The eye of this human hurricane was a petite woman, also wearing the requisite denim and flannel—snug jeans and a red-and-yellow-plaid shirt open over a red turtleneck. She kept shaking her head. They kept shaking their fingers at her. Finally she slapped a baseball cap on her short, dark hair and stalked away, dismissively waving them off. Without his realizing it, Jordan’s lips curled into a small smile.

They can’t push you around without your permission, he thought, remembering the words his mother had said to him more times than he could count. The woman in the baseball cap looked ill inclined to be pushed around, despite being heavily outnumbered.

The heavy oak door to his father’s office closed with such determination Jordan knew at once that Venita Tanner had made her entrance. He turned to her, his smile automatic. Surely, if there was anything left in this town to feel good about, it would be Venita.

She didn’t disappoint him. She stood in the doorway like a tall, dark warrior, broad of shoulder and sure of stance. The turquoise of her suit lent a glow to her ebony skin. She still defied her black hair, now shot through with silver, to return to its natural waves by yanking it back in a knot so severe it had always made Jordan stand straighter, even as a boy.

After all this time, he noted, squaring his travel-weary shoulders, Venita Tanner was still a formidable woman. Although Venita was called secretary, Jordan knew she had run much of the show herself for years. He also knew the African-American woman would never have been hired for such a responsible position if not for his mother. Thirty years ago Eugenia had been adamant that this college graduate was a better choice than a local high school girl of eighteen, who could barely find the shift key on the old Underwood typewriter. Jordan believed that if Venita hadn’t come of age at a time when black women didn’t easily go far, Venita could have owned the world, or at least a substantial portion of it.

She didn’t smile back, but he knew there was welcome in her big heart, even for the Prodigal Son.

“You always said you’d marry me when I was as tall as you,” he said, hanging on to the small smile prompted by the petite woman at the center of the storm on Main Street. “I’m back to see if you’ll keep your word.”

She grunted. “As long as they’re still selling four-inch heels, Jordie, you don’t stand a chance.”

“Oh, um, Venita, you see,” Truman began, nervously, “he wants us to call him Jordan now. Of course.”

She grunted again, hands on her generous hips. Jordan had the strangest notion she was waiting to see if he had enough human being left in him to hug the woman he’d spent more time with, growing up, than he had with his own mother. He didn’t want to disappoint her. He tried to remember the last person he’d hugged. Really hugged, not one of those phony social embraces at cocktail parties when some client’s anorexic wife remembers you from the last cocktail party.

By the time he’d made up his mind to give it a try, Venita had clearly grown tired of his indecision.

“Okay,” she said briskly, thrusting a folder in his direction. “Here’s what I’ve got. You better sit down.”

Feeling more completely alone than he had only moments before, Jordan caught her eye as he took the thick file folder from her, one that looked identical to the one she retained for herself. She looked apologetic and resigned. If he’d seen an ounce of fight in Venita’s eyes, he would have harbored some hope. Instead, he gave up any notion of salvaging anything from the wreckage that was the once-mighty Scoville Mill.

He’d hated this town and this company for so long, he couldn’t even say he was sorry, except for what this would do to his father, his uncle, and Venita.

He gave in to the inevitable and dropped into his father’s chair. From the corner, Venita pulled up a smaller, straight-back chair and opened her file folder. Jordan followed her lead.

“The first thing you should know is that—”

Mitchell’s crumpled-paper voice interrupted. “Maybe Truman and I should leave. Let you two go through this first.”

Jordan and Venita exchanged a look. Jordan’s inclination was to have them suffer through the autopsy, but he relented at the recommendation for mercy in Venita’s eyes. The two elderly men stood and shuffled toward the door, leaving behind another round of cheerful welcomes and their bright-eyed optimism for the wonders Jordan could accomplish, now that he was here.

Watching them leave, so defenseless and so rumpled looking, would have broken Jordan’s heart if he hadn’t become so good at steeling himself against such compassion.

At the door, just before it closed behind them, Truman stuck his head back in. “Um, Venita, my dear?”

“Yes?”

“Um, you don’t…That is, will it be necessary…um…?”

“Yes, Truman,” she said softly, her smile apologetic. “I think it will be quite necessary.”

His brow deepened its furrows, but he merely nodded as he backed out the door and closed it at last.

Hurt squeezed Jordan’s heart. He thought perhaps it was merely the bad chicken dinner he’d had at the country-cooking truck stop on the way in from Atlanta. “What will be quite necessary?”

Venita pursed her glossy mahogany lips and sighed deeply. “For you to know about the retirement account.”

Jordan felt uneasy as he heard the words and sensed how deep her distress went. “What about the retirement account?”

She smiled, a sad smile that for the first time made her look all of her fifty-plus years. “I’m afraid we don’t have one anymore.”