The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd Read Free Book Online Page B

through the window.
    ‘Where’re you headed?’
    ‘Town.’
    ‘Again? What’s the bag for?’
    ‘I’m…I’m taking some things to Rosaleen. She’s in jail.’
    ‘Yeah, I know,’ he said, flinging open the passenger door.
    ‘Get in, I’m heading there myself.’
    I’d never been inside a preacher’s car before. It’s not that I expected a ton of Bibles stacked on the backseat, but I was surprised to see that, inside, it was like anybody else’s car.
    ‘You’re going to see Rosaleen?’ I said.
    ‘The police called and asked me to press charges against her for stealing church property. They say she took some of our fans. You know anything about that?’
    ‘It was only two fans—‘ He jumped straight into his pulpit voice.
    ‘In the eyes of God it doesn’t matter whether it’s two fans or two hundred. Stealing is stealing. She asked if she could take the fans, I said no, in plain English. She took them anyway. Now that’s sin, Lily.’
    Pious people have always gotten on my nerves.
    ‘But she’s deaf in one ear,’ I said.
    ‘I think she just mixed up what you said. She’s always doing that. T. Ray will tell her, ‘Iron my two shirts,’ and she’ll iron the blue shirts.’
    ‘A hearing problem. Well, I didn’t know that,’ he said.
    ‘Rosaleen would never steal a thing.’
    ‘They said she’d assaulted some men at the Esso station.’
    ‘It wasn’t like that,’ I said.
    ‘See, she was singing her favorite hymn, ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’
    ‘I don’t believe those men are Christians, Brother Gerald, because they yelled at her to shut up with that blankety-blank Jesus tune. Rosa- leen said, ‘You can curse me, but don’t blaspheme the Lord Jesus.’
    But they kept right on. So she poured the juice from her snuff cup on their shoes. Maybe she was wrong, but in her mind she was standing up for Jesus.’
    I was sweating through my top and all along the backs of my thighs. Brother Gerald dragged his teeth back and forth across his lip. I could tell he was actually weighing what I’d said. Mr. Gaston was in the station alone, eating boiled peanuts at his desk, when Brother Gerald and I came through the door. Being the sort of person he was, Mr. Gaston had shells all over the floor.
    ‘Your colored woman ain’t here,’ he said, looking at me.
    ‘I took her to the hospital for stitches. She took a fall and hit her head.’
    Took a fall, my rear end. I wanted to throw his boiled peanuts against the wall. I could not keep myself from shouting at him.
    ‘What do you mean, she fell and hit her head?’
    Mr. Gaston looked over at Brother Gerald, that all-knowing look men give each other when a female acts the least bit hysterical.
    ‘Settle down, now,’ he said to me.
    ‘I can’t settle down till I know if she’s all right,’ I said, my voice calmer but still shaking a little.
    ‘She’s fine. It’s only a little concussion. I expect she’ll be back here later this evening. The doctor wanted her watched for a few hours.’
    While Brother Gerald was explaining how he couldn’t sign the warrant papers seeing as how Rosaleen was nearly deaf, I started for the door. Mr. Gaston shot me a warning look.
    ‘We got a guard on her at the hospital, and he’s not letting anybody see her, so you go on back home. You understand?’
    ‘Yes, sir. I’m going home.’
    ‘You do that,’ he said. ’
    ‘Cause if I hear you’ve been anywhere near that hospital, I’m calling your daddy again.’
    Sylvan Memorial Hospital was a low brick building with one wing for whites and one for blacks. I stepped into a deserted corridor clogged with too many smells. Carnations, old people, rubbing alcohol, bathroom deodorizer, red Jell-O. Air conditioners poked out from the windows in the white section, but back here there was nothing but electric fans moving the hot air from one place to another. At the nurses’ station a policeman leaned on the desk. He looked like somebody just