Nazareth's Song Read Online Free

he’d made last week, he could pay off his debts at Will Honeysack’s store and still have extra for daily grub.
    After speaking with Hayes, Jeb waited outside the lumberyard office while Hayes figured his numbers and payroll. Finally, to while away the time, Jeb pulled his old banjo out of the pickup. His brother, Charlie, had dug it out of their mother’s attic and sent it to him over a month ago. Jeb played an open note, placed his finger over the middle fret of the first string, and then chimed the note. He plucked the fretted note next, but found it low. After adjusting the bridge, he plucked the note again, chimed it, and found it right.
    As he waited for the yard boss to appear, he strummed a tune about a sailor. It set the lumberyard dog to barking, so Jeb played faster, laughing at the mutt the men called Dawg for lack of a better name. Dawg squatted in front of him, his tail swaying, friendly-like, a hairy pendulum.
    Jeb felt the weariness of study and work easing out of him as he played. He had stayed up too late trying to tend to the obligatory sermon, all the while sensing Gracie looking over his shoulder. Then he’d stared up from his bed for hours, troubling over how some townspeople of Nazareth still looked down on him and the Welbys. The duties of the clergy seemed to hang over him like a hammer, ready to pound out of him any hope for gaining respect if he took the job before his time. If he ever did take the pulpit again, he told himself, he would prove his sincerity for reaching for so high a mark as the station of clergy.
    Then his mind had run to worry, to finding a way out of the fight for everyday survival. He did not know how he could keep the Welby children without this lumbermill job or even afford to keep up his studies and work at the same time. He had not planned well for everyday life. But what else could he do but keep trying? The youngens had no place left to go. Angel had written to her aunt in Little Rock so many times he couldn’t bear to see her watching every day for a letter saying her momma had gotten well. Much less a note from a daddy who had left the children in the care of an old girlfriend and then disappeared with a wave of migrant workers.
    Hayes Jernigan exited the office and shambled across the quiet lumber lot, counting a few dollar bills. Jeb’s heart sank.
    “Nice picking for a preacher. Dawg seems to like it anyway.” Hayes laughed at the mutt’s interest in Jeb’s playing. “A few of the boys put in a word for you. Tuck Haw especially.”
    Tuck played pool down at Snooker’s every evening with the other lumbermen. Jeb had stopped in to say a polite word to him and the other lumbermen last Friday night, but they mostly kept to themselves. It surprised Jeb that Tuck had spoken up for him, what with that particular group of men not finding favor first of all with a former con man but worst of all with a man intent on the study of church doctrines and such.
    “They asked me to keep you on, Jeb. But I got to do what I can to hang on to men with tenure.” He handed Jeb his final pay. “If we hadn’t gotten that deal to build barrels, I’d be losing lumbermen that’s been eating sawdust since they was born. I hate that I don’t have no more work for you. I hope you find some.” He studied for a bit, as though rehashing what he had just said, and then added, “What I mean to say, Jeb, is it’s a cryin’ shame I got to let you go, what with those youngens you been carin’ for. My wife won’t hardly talk to me for it.”
    Jeb thanked him anyway. “I’m obliged to you, Hayes.”
    “You still countin’ on preacherin’, I guess. Some people believes they’s good money in religion.”
    Jeb counted the coins from his pocket before adding the dollar bills. “One day, Hayes. You ought to come to church.”
    “My wife would agree,” said Hayes.
    Jeb knew that even Hayes had heard how he had skulked into town over a year ago pretending to be a preacher to feed