The Thorny Path Read online

  “Well, now—we can’t ask Mrs. Hinton to look after you, kiddo, after all she’s done for us,” the bishop stated.

  “But no, Dad—she’s the one who said! She said she wished us kids could just spend the day with her—that it was like having her grandkids here. Ask her if she didn’t!”

  “I’m sure she did,” Trish soothed. “We’ll see, okay? Right now, though, it’d probably be a good idea if you were to go wash your hands really good, before breakfast. And see if Tiffi’s up, all right? Tell her breakfast is almost ready.”

  “Okay.” Jamie gave the donkey one last pat and hopped down from the fence.

  “Coward,” the bishop teased gently, as he and Trish turned back toward the house. “You just didn’t want to brave a sleepy Tiffani!”

  “You’ve got that right,” she agreed, leaning against him. “I feel kind of lazy, myself. Can I stay here, too, while you go see the not-so-nice lady?”

  “Not a chance, matey. I take courage from you. Besides, you’re the class part of our act. Mrs. Leanore—whoever—St. John will be so impressed with your innate quality that she’ll fall all over herself offering us information!”

  Trish bumped her hip against his. “Oh, yeah—I’m just so sure,” she said, her voice echoing Tiffani’s at its most cynical.

  He hadn’t thought he’d even be hungry for breakfast, after the supper and subsequent watermelon of the night before, but he found himself happily working his way through fried ham, grits with red-eye gravy, hot biscuits, and scrambled eggs. The fragrance of coffee wafted through the house, and May Hinton was surprised when no one accepted a cup.

  “Well, y’all are likely better off,” she opined, “but lands! I don’t see how you make it through the day ’thout it. Don’t know as I could.”

  “You get used to it,” the bishop explained. “Some folks have a headache for two or three days, but that’s all. I reckon it always smells good, though. It even smells good to me, and I’ve never been a coffee-drinker.”

  “And that’s part of y’all’s religion, is it?”

  “It is,” Trish replied. “We avoid anything addictive—alcohol, coffee and tea, tobacco, and of course street drugs. It’s like a law of health, and we feel that we’re blessed for obeying it.”

  “And I expect you are. Now, how about it—can I keep the young ’uns here with me, while ya’ll go visit Leanore? I kinda think it might work better. Leanore’s not real big on kids. But I am,” she added, winking at Mallory. “I can think of all kinds of fun things to do.”

  The bishop and his wife exchanged glances. Trish turned to Tiffani.

  “Tiff—could you keep an eye on Jamie and Mal? We don’t want to impose on Mrs. Hinton’s kind nature.”

  “Sure,” Tiff replied, yawning. “Besides, I want to finish one of her books that I started last night. Plus, I haven’t had my shower, yet. But I’ll watch them, too,” she added. “Don’t worry.”

  So it was that the bishop and his wife set off together to find Leanore St. John. First, of course, they’d had to call Muzzie, as promised, to be sure all was well with Samantha and the house. Reassured that there had been no abduction attempts by “that lady,” Mallory was content to stay behind and play with the kittens and her new Barbie. Jamie had been elated.

  The bishop had taken a few moments to himself to walk off under the shade of the live oaks and commune with his Heavenly Father, asking Him to soften the heart of Leanore St. John, so that she might provide them with any available knowledge that would be of use. Thus fortified, he enjoyed the drive with Trish to Leanore’s home.

  “I could just about believe the antebellum part,” Trish whispered as they walked up the wide approach to the columned porch. “It feels really old, but it’s beautifully kept.”

  “Even if it wasn’t built before the war,” he reminded her, “it’s still over a century old. That’s pretty respectable, historically speaking.”

  “I wonder who had the money to build this, soon after the war. I thought everybody was pretty much financially devastated for a long time.”

  “Maybe she’ll tell us.”

  Leanore herself answered the bell. She was a slightly plump woman with an erect carriage, imperious expression, and graying hair piled on her head in a complicated-looking arrangement.

  “Yes?” she asked briskly. “If ya’ll are missionaries, or selling anything, I’m not interested.”

  “We’re neither,” the bishop assured her, with a smile. “We’re Jim and Trish Shepherd from Fairhaven, Alabama, and we’re here researching a part of our family history. A couple of folks have told us that you’re one of the most knowledgeable people in the county on that subject, and we’ve come hoping you might have a few minutes to discuss it with us. Oh, and one of the people who spoke of you is Mrs. May Hinton of Winns Corner. She said she was a classmate of yours and sent you these preserves, with her greeting.” He held out the jar. Leanore St. John took it cautiously and slowly turned it over in her hand.

  “May Hinton made these?” she asked.

  “Indeed she did—just yesterday. She said some really nice things about you. She told us you were a very smart lady and that you always did a good job at whatever you set your hand to. We took that as an excellent reference and presumed to call on you and get acquainted.” Both he and Trish were smiling hopefully.

  Leanore stared at him for a long moment. “Are ya’ll related to May, or to her husband?”

  “Actually, neither, as far as we know. We just met her yesterday, for the first time. My grandparents were from around here. Benjamin Rice and Annie Josephine Burke.”

  She shook her head. “Must be the wrong one. The Annie Burke from around here married a Mitchell.”

  He nodded, feeling a pang of sorrow for his grandfather, Benjamin, whose memory seemed to have been so thoroughly expunged from the annals of county lore by the brevity of his life. “That’s the one. Benjamin Rice was her first husband,” he explained patiently. “He apparently died in the First World War, leaving Annie with two little daughters. She then married Robert Lee Mitchell, and they moved to Alabama, where they had several more children. But we’re trying to find more about Benjamin and his family—the Rices.”

  Leanore looked at him again for a long, silent pause, as if she expected him to break under pressure and admit his mistake.

  “Come in,” she finally reluctantly invited, and showed them into a parlor that rivaled that of Miss Susie, though not in flower-motif. This one was furnished in pale greens, with stands of ferns and smaller replicas of famous statuary scattered between the dainty chairs with curving, carved legs, the name of which style he couldn’t recall, but he was sure Trish did. He could all but feel her, next to him, avidly absorbing details to relate to Muzzie later. A large, blocky, very old piano stood against one wall, its top draped with a fringed shawl between two shaded oil lamps.

  “Sit down,” indicated their hostess, “and tell me what it is you want from me.”

  Trish spoke up. “Your home is absolutely lovely, by the way,” she began. “It must be a treasure, historically, in your family as well as to the whole area. But as to what we’re hoping to learn—we’ve been told that at one point, you spearheaded an effort to transcribe the tombstone inscriptions in local cemeteries. Is that true?”

  “It is.”

  “What a job that must have been!” commented the bishop. “I’ve only barely looked into one of them—King’s Chapel—and it’s so grown-over that it’s daunting. I’m really impressed that you’d take on such a challenge.”

  She shrugged slightly. “It needed doing.”

  “That’s certainly true,” Trish agreed. “Inscriptions wear away, stones crumble, and precious information is lost forever. But what a service for you to undertake! Who helped you with it?”

  Leanore raised her eyebrows wearily. “I hired some history students from the University of Georgia, but I found that I had to recheck their work so frequently that I finally let them go and simply
finished the job myself. It took longer, of course, but at least I knew it was done right. It’s very important to me to be accurate.”

  The bishop nodded. “Integrity in research certainly is important. Have you published your work?”

  “I have not.”

  “I see. So you use it for your private research? Do you take clients?”

  “Occasionally. If it’s worth my while.”

  “How much would you charge to search for Benjamin Rice? Or to let us search for him?”

  She was silent again, looking back and forth from one of them to the other. Finally she asked, “Do you want his whole family tree run, or are you just interested in where he’s buried?”

  “We’re interested in everything about him and his family,” the bishop replied, “but we’d like to do as much of the research ourselves as possible. We’re just beginners, though—and we’ll surely need some guidance and suggestions along the way. Plus, there may be some records that we just don’t know how to find or interpret correctly, and we’ll need professional help there.”

  “At least you recognize your ignorance,” Leanore allowed. “You’d be surprised how many bull-in-the-china-shop genealogy enthusiasts there are, making wild guesses and creating chaos out of perfectly good information, twisting facts and ignoring dates and running lines that are worse than fictional. I won’t be a party to that.”

  “We’re not at all interested in that kind of genealogy, either,” Trish said gently. “We want to be as careful as we can to draw correct conclusions and avoid guesswork. Our reason for coming to see you is the hope that you can save us valuable time. If Benjamin is buried in one of the local cemeteries, we could visit and photograph his grave, see if any other relatives are buried close by, and move on to other possibilities. But if we have to spend our limited time here looking for his grave, we wouldn’t get nearly as far along in our search. I assume there isn’t a sexton’s record for King’s Chapel, is there?”

  “Not that I’ve ever seen. And at the Methodist Cemetery, the current ministers kept records of the burials, but the records moved on with them. Some of the earlier ones might have found their way to Methodist repositories when the ministers died or retired, but I’m not aware of where that might be, as there are several. The new Baptist Cemetery does have a man who serves as sexton, but I’m practically certain he won’t be likely to help you. He’s very staunch against Mormonism. Ya’ll are Mormons, aren’t you?”

  The bishop nodded. “We are.”

  “Thought so. I’ve had occasion to use your church’s family history centers and Web site. The volunteers in the centers were mostly rather ignorant of advanced research methods, but they were as helpful as they knew how to be, and very patient. For that reason, I’ll allow you to search my cemetery transcriptions here in my home. Come with me.”

  The bishop and his wife exchanged looks of anticipation as they rose to follow.

  Leanore St. John ushered them into a study that would have done credit to any of the Family History Centers she had mentioned. Books lined the walls wherever windows were not, two computers and a copier sat against one wall, and a sturdy table with four chairs stood in the center of the room.

  “Sit down,” she directed. “Please use pencils, not pens, and please turn the pages carefully. If you have any questions, ring the bell and I’ll come. I’ll be attending to some things in the kitchen. Here are the three cemetery books. The names are alphabetized, and there is a number assigned each, which corresponds to a series of charts in the back of the book, so that you can locate the grave of anyone you may find. Good luck.”

  “Thank you so much, Mrs. St. John,” the bishop said. “This will be such a help to us.”

  She shrugged again. “Perhaps,” she agreed. “But what makes you think your grandfather’s body ever made it home to be buried here? So many did not.”

  The bishop stared at her. Why had he never thought of that possibility? Of course it could be so! “Do you happen to know,” he asked slowly, “if there’s a list anywhere of the men who served from this county? Or those who died?”

  She nodded. “There’s a memorial in the park across from the courthouse. I don’t know how complete it is, and some of the dates are missing, but you could look.” She turned without waiting for a response and left them to their work.

  “Wow, do you think he could be buried overseas?” he asked his wife, who nodded.

  “It’s a thought, isn’t it? First, let’s see if we find him here. I’ll take this book—you get the Methodist one.”

  Finally they leaned back and regarded each other wearily. There was nothing written in their notebook. There hadn’t been a Rice in the whole collection.

  “What now?” the bishop asked his wife.

  She shook her head. “Mrs. St. John must be right. He must be buried somewhere overseas.”

  He tapped his pencil on the table, frowning in thought. “Funny, though, that we don’t find anyone at all by that name, don’t you think? He didn’t just appear out of nowhere!”

  “Do you think he might have changed his name?”

  “No idea. Don’t know why he’d do that.”

  “Or maybe he was an orphan, or something, and didn’t know his family. Maybe he was a foundling and they named him Rice at the orphanage because they were having rice for dinner the day he was found.”

  “Oh, man—that’d stop us in our tracks, wouldn’t it?”

  “Well, it’s probably something much simpler than that. Shall we see if Mrs. St. John has any ideas for us?”

  They summoned their hostess by use of the bell provided and confessed their lack of success.

  She shrugged. “Well. I expect he was buried overseas, then. So many were. Or maybe his body was never even recovered.”

  “We just wonder why we can’t find any of his relatives around here, either,” the bishop explained.

  “What makes you so sure he was from this county? Maybe his people lived in one of the adjoining counties, or even farther away.”

  “Well, he married here, and I just assumed—”

  “One of the first laws of geometry and genealogy is ‘Never assume,’” she said severely. “We work from the known to the unknown, using facts as our stepping-stones. Assumptions are dangerous. The fact that your grandfather married in this county means only that. He may well have come here from elsewhere.” She reached across the table and pulled the bound typescript books toward her, leafing through them one at a time. On the second volume, that of the Methodist cemetery, she paused, gazing at the page. “I wonder,” she said, and moved quickly to a shelf, from which she retrieved a tall, thin book.

  “What is it?” Trish dared to ask. The bishop, having been previously rebuked for his assumptions, merely watched in interest.

  “I wonder if he changed the spelling of his name,” Mrs. St. John said. “I find there are some people named ‘R-H-Y-S’ buried at the Methodist cemetery,” she added, raising her eyebrows at them. “I would have thought that would be pronounced like ‘Reese,’ but perhaps not. I’m checking now to see if they owned any property in the county in 1877. I have a copy of the plat book for that year, and I’ve indexed it. Let’s see . . . yes, Rhys, page twenty-nine, C-19.”

  She turned to that page and perused it silently. Then she made some notes on a slip of paper and handed it to the bishop.

  “If you care to check into it, it appears that a couple of Rhys families owned some property in the northeast corner of the county in the year 1877, along a stream known as the Horsepen Branch of the Hatchacoonee River. Whether their name ever became ‘R-I-C-E,’ I cannot tell you. Sometimes part of a family would spell a name one way, and another part insist it should be different. I have a line where half of them call themselves Johnson and the other half add a ‘t’ and call themselves Johnston. I don’t know whether any of the Rhys family still live there, but it’s a lead I would follow if I were you. Look for Five-Mile Road—they seemed to be concentrated along there.”
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br />   “Thanks very much,” the bishop told her. “We certainly will follow up on it. Now, what can we pay you to compensate your time and the use of your materials?”

  “Not to mention your expertise,” Trish added, smiling.

  Leanore St. John gazed past them out the window at the green and gold day. “It’s been my pleasure,” she said abruptly. “However, should you decide that you require my services, I charge $45.00 per hour plus expenses. And you might mention to May Hinton, if you see her again, that an occasional visit from an old classmate is surely not too much to expect.”

  “We’ll be glad to tell her that,” the bishop agreed. “I expect she’d be happy to come. I think she gets lonely.”

  “Not surprised. I stay far too busy to be lonely, but I will say that those with whom I spend most of my time are not very talkative.” Her lips pressed together, and the bishop realized she had made a small joke.

  “Very quiet friends,” he said, nodding at the books around the walls. “And yet, I’d imagine that in some cases, you know more about most of these folks than their friends and family did when they were alive.”

  Her eyebrows rose again, but she didn’t disagree. “It’s surprising the secrets the records can yield, when you know how to read them,” she agreed, as she showed them to the front door. “By the way, ‘R-H-Y-S’ is a Welsh name. If you’re related to them, then no doubt you have some Welsh ancestry. Many people do, and don’t know it. Common names like Jones, Evans, Davis, Meredith—all Welsh names.”

  “Really? That’s interesting,” Trish commented. “Thank you so very much for your help, today.”

  “Here’s my card. Let me know if I can be of assistance.”

  They got into their car and sat and looked at each other while the motor purred and the air conditioner labored to dispel the built-up heat. Finally the bishop spoke.

  “Wow.”

  “I know. You did a good job, Jimmy. A little sincere flattery, a little praise—and it worked. We got to see her lists, and I was doubtful of that happening. And this ‘R-H-Y-S’ business might just be the clue you need.”