Free JEWEL by BRET LOTT

fervent prayer with the death of both my daddy and momma, blessed me with Missy Cook and a crowd come to see what the next generation of Cook looked like sopping wet and crying.
    “Cathe ral, ” I said again, and now I was wringing my hands on my apron.
    “You want to come in? ” She shook her head. Behind her, Nelson dropped the cigarette, and I saw in the darkness the failing orange light disappear beneath his foot.
    She said, “First Corinthians fifteen five say, I would that ye all speaketh with tongues, but rather that ye prophesieth, for greater is he that prophesieth than he that speaketh with tongues.”
    She looked down, the same old Cathe ral, the only difference I could see being in her face and the skin drawn taut over bones, her mouth grown thinner. She looked up at me. “Nelson tell me you with child again.”
    I nodded, smiled, though I felt certain she couldn’t see me for the kitchen light behind me. “I guess Leston told y’all, ” I said, and looked past her to Nelson, quick disappearing in the growing dark.
    He said, “Yes’m.”
    “I come to prophesieth unto you, ” Cathe ral said, her eyes still on me.
    She moved her shoulders beneath the quilt, pulled it tighter around her.
    “I come to prophesieth unto you about coming hardship you or nobody ain’t ever be ready to bear.”
    I tilted my head, stopped with my hands in the apron. I lost my smile, though I’d wanted to show Cathe ral how pleased I could be at my age with a baby on the way. But I figured it wasn’t the baby she was talking about. I said, “You know about my James heading off to the War? ” I dropped the apron, put my hands together in front of me. The night was growing colder as we stood there. “Because even though I love my James, ” I said, “God will bless him and us both, and his being gone one way or the other will be a hardship we can live through. At least that’s my prayer.”
    “I don’t know nothing about James, ” she said, and blinked. Nelson said, “We don’t know nothing about that.” His voice curled through the black around him, the words coming to me like an echo.
    She looked down again, moved her foot on the ground. The light from the kitchen grew stronger the darker the world became, until now she stood in a hard rectangle of light from the doorway behind me, my shadow on the ground her only interruption.
    She poked her heel in the dirt, tapped it twice, took in a deep breath.
    She lifted her head to me, swallowed. “I say unto you that the baby you be carrying be yo’ hardship, be yo’ test in this world. This be my prophesying unto you, Miss Jewel.”
    Nelson leaned into the light, reached toward her. All I could see of him was his arm and shoulder and head in the light from my kitchen.
    His hand touched her elbow, and he glanced up at me, then at the porch steps.
    “Come on, now, ” he whispered.
    Cathe ral didn’t move.
    Slowly I shook my head, made myself smile. “What are you saying? ” I said. “Why do you say this? ” Cathe ral smiled, let the quilt loosen, slip an inch or so off of her neck. “The Lord say to tell you, Miss Jewel, ” she said. “You and me both know He work in mysterious ways.
    But this not any mystery. He telling you right out. He letting you know. He smiling on you this way.”
    I felt my palms begin to sweat out there in the cold. I went to the edge of the porch, moved down one step.
    “Momma, ” Billie Jean called out, on her voice the whine she’d perfected in the last year or so, “close the door or come back inside.
    It’s cold!
    ” “Momma? ” Annie said.
    Nelson gently pulled at her elbow. “Come let’s go, ” he whispered.
    But Cathe ral and I were still looking at each other. I moved down another step, then another, until I was only a foot or so from her, her eyes on mine, her smile still there.
    I put out a hand, cold with sweat, held it in front of me. I wasn’t
    ..
    .
     
    smllmg anymore.
    From beneath the quilt one of her