Marcia Talley - Daughter of Ashes

I smiled back. ‘We already have a church home, I’m happy to say. Saint Timothy’s in Elizabethtown.’

‘Ah, yes. Episcopalians.’

‘Dyed in the wool,’ I said.

‘My husband is retired now, but he used to be the minister at the Methodist church next door, back before the merger. We were EUB in the old days.’

‘EUB?’ I’d never heard of that denomination.

‘Sorry. Evangelical United Brethren Church. We merged with the Methodists in 1968.’

‘This was the parsonage, I gather?’

‘Yes. When they built the new parsonage – perhaps you saw the fancy brick house around the corner? – the church allowed us to buy this one.’ She smiled. ‘A love gift, really. Except for the years we spent doing missionary work, we’ve lived here since our twenties, so we were very grateful.’ She gestured toward a wrought-iron chair. ‘Won’t you have a seat?’

‘Paul and I just bought the old Hazlett place on Chiconnesick Creek,’ I told her as I scooted the chair out from under the table and sat down in it. ‘Perhaps you know it?’

Bernadette stared at me for a moment without blinking. Then she closed her eyes, took a deep breath and blew it out slowly through her lips. When she opened her eyes again, it was to say, ‘I knew this day would come.’

‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ I asked.

She chewed her lower lip, then said, ‘It’s a long story.’

I smiled in what I hoped was a friendly, non-confrontational way. ‘I’m not in any hurry.’

Inexplicably, her face brightened. ‘I’m sorry, I promised you some tea! I’ll be right back.’

I shot to my feet and said, ‘Can I help?’ Now that I’d come so close, I didn’t want to let the woman out of my sight.

She raised a cautionary hand, chuckled, said, ‘No, no. It’ll only take a minute. I’ll be right back,’ and disappeared into the kitchen.

I passed the time by admiring the beautifully manicured lawn and her well-tended vegetable garden, surrounded by chicken wire fencing to protect it, I assumed, from hungry deer. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, carrots – I was constructing a mental salad when Bernadette called out, ‘See, that didn’t take long,’ and reappeared with a tray holding a pitcher of tea, three glasses, a plate of cookies dusted with confetti-colored sugar, and an elderly man I took to be her husband.

‘Ronald Nightingale,’ the man said, extending his hand. Pastor Nightingale wore a white polo shirt tucked into a pair of green-plaid Bermuda shorts that ended just north of two knobby knees. From his tawny complexion I suspected it was Ronald, not Bernadette, who was responsible for the orderly garden.

Bernadette glared at her husband. ‘Hat!’

Ronald’s cheeks flushed. ‘Be right back,’ he said. When he returned, an Orioles baseball cap had been pulled on over his bald head. A few wispy white hairs stuck out of the opening at the back.

Once we were settled around the table with glasses of tea, Bernadette spilled the beans. ‘Hannah is here about Nancy Hazlett.’

If Ronald was surprised, his face didn’t show it. ‘When I read about the baby in the chimney, I was afraid…’ His voice trailed off.

‘There’s been no positive I.D.,’ I said softly, ‘but the child was wrapped in a newspaper from 1951.’

Bernadette stole a look at her husband. ‘I told you we should have taken her with us.’ There was nothing accusatory in her tone, simply anguish, raw and deep.

Ronald seized her hand and held it tight against his thigh. ‘We can’t second guess ourselves now, Bernie. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.’

My attention had been focused on Ronald, so I didn’t realize, at first, that Bernadette was quietly crying. She turned her tear-stained face to me. ‘Nancy was just starting her senior year and she’d gotten the lead in the school musical,’ she sobbed. ‘It seemed cruel to drag her away to Angola.’

‘Angola?’ I was losing the plot.

‘In 1951, God called us to the EUB mission station in Quéssua, Angola,’ Ronald explained. ‘Bernie taught nursing and I ran the agricultural station.’

‘We were there for a year,’ Bernadette added.

‘Was Nancy a parishioner, then?’ I asked.

‘In a manner of speaking, she was,’ Bernadette said.

Ronald returned his wife’s hand to her own lap and patted it. ‘Let me tell the story, Bernie.

‘When we were young, still in our twenties,’ Ronald began, ‘we got the call to United Brethren here in Sturgis. I was fresh out of seminary.’

Bernadette leaned forward. ‘We couldn’t believe our luck.’

‘Yes,’ her husband agreed, then grinned. ‘They must have been desperate to hire a newbie like me. Anyway, we needed a person to clean the church and someone recommended Mary Hazlett. Her husband had been killed during the war, you know.’

I nodded.

‘Mary came twice a week…’

‘On Mondays and Thursdays,’ Bernadette chimed in.

‘On Mondays and Thursdays, yes, and we grew close to her.’

‘So, that’s how you met Nancy.’

Ronald nodded. ‘Mary would sometimes bring Nancy along while she worked. Bright as a button, that little girl was.’ Ronald smiled at the memory. ‘Wasting away in that dreadful all Negro school down near Pocomoke. A crime, really. Nobody’d put up with it for a minute these days, but times were different back then.’ He took several long swallows of tea, his Adam’s apple bobbing, then set the glass down on the tabletop. ‘Even before we lost Mary…’ He leaned forward, whispered, ‘cancer,’ then forged on, ‘… Bernie took Nancy under her wing, tutored her here at the parsonage, mostly in math and science. But Nancy’s real talent was music. That was obvious from an early age. She played the piano and sang in our choir.’

‘And solos,’ Bernadette interjected. She closed her eyes, drifted somewhere far away and began to sing, ‘Oh, sometimes I feel like a motherless child…’

Ronald squeezed his wife’s apron-covered knee. ‘It’s OK, sweetheart.’

Ronald waited patiently for Bernadette to finish the stanza, her ruined soprano wavering, slowly dying away, before continuing, ‘One day, Bernie and I had a long discussion and decided we had to do something about it.’

Ronald’s eyes cut sideways. ‘Have you seen any photographs of Nancy?’

‘I have.’

‘Ah, well you understand, then.’ He coughed and cleared his throat. ‘So one day, with Mary’s permission, I put Nancy in my car and drove her up to the high school in Elizabethtown. Registered her as my niece from Chicago, my late sister’s child. It was a lie, of course, but one I know God will forgive me for.’

‘Nancy was such a talented young girl,’ Bernadette said. ‘She would have languished in that poor black school. “Separate but equal!” What a crock. Rundown buildings, untrained teachers, ancient textbooks, no extra-curricular activities to speak of.’

‘They asked for her transcript from the school in Chicago, no surprise, and I told them it was on the way,’ Ronald continued. ‘The principal telephoned me about her missing records again about a month later, but by that time he’d heard Nancy sing and I don’t think it mattered much anymore. Just a freshman, and they gave her the lead in the school musical…’ He paused to consult his wife. ‘What was the show, my dear?’

‘Gilbert and Sullivan,’ she replied. ‘Nancy played Yum-Yum in the Mikado .’

‘She was making straight As, too,’ Ronald added.

‘Wouldn’t they have written to the Chicago school directly for the transcript?’ I asked.

‘Oh, they did!’ Bernadette glanced sideways at her husband, as if waiting for permission to go on.