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Chapter or Story
Chapter 20
Miss Parker couldn’t quite believe the way these people spent a Sunday afternoon. They sang together.
Andy got out his guitar and perched on the edge of the sofa to play. Opie stood near him and sang very loudly with a big grin, while the others sat nearby and contrived several parts in harmony. It was all old folk songs, mostly, tunes she had never heard of with words she would not have sung if she had, all about fishing and agriculture and country dances. Broots loved it, of course. He had that kind of low-brow taste. He bopped along with it, snapping his fingers and singing when he knew the words, or could guess at them. And Sydney enjoyed it too, of course, as if it had all been organized for his own analytical benefit. Miss Parker wanted to shake him and say, “What is it about you and people? How can you like people so much and still see them as specimens?” He might as well have been looking into a Petri dish.
She, of course, didn’t like people at all and certainly didn’t care anything about the dumb things they chose to waste their time with on a Sunday afternoon. But she should be chasing Jarod and not sitting trapped in this house! Since Andy had let Otis go yesterday evening, the stout little man scuttling away like she had the plague, her restlessness and sensation of claustrophobia had been building up. Jarod would be gone from New York by the time they got there, and she would be left with another red notebook to mark another failure. If she had to deal with Mr. Raines shoving her failures in her face anymore, she was seriously going to go postal.
“You look a bit uptight, Miss Parker,” Andy said. “Why don’t you relax a little?”
She opened her mouth to snarl something very rude at him when she caught Opie’s eyes on her, very frank, slightly accusatory, and she heard the pastor’s words in her mind again, heard them in her mother’s voice: “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a large millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.” Her words choked inside her, and she contented herself with a withering glare at the sheriff. He only smiled back and began to play something soft, which Helen and Thelma Lou sang along to. Something about green pastures, cool waters, soft evenings, and being led like a sheep, which was rather pathetic but which the song’s gentle but haunting harmonies made sound rather attractive, soothing even. She hardly noticed when Aunt Bee beckoned Opie out onto the porch, nor when Barney sidled after them, though there was a relief that he would stop profaning the music with his voice.
The song over, Helen asked with a sparkle in her eyes, “Does this mean what I think it means, Andy?”
“It shore does! Aunt Bee’s homemade ice cream.”
“Oh boy!” Broots exclaimed.
“Oh boy,” Miss Parker mocked him, to make up for having liked the music enough to care if Barney profaned it.
“Y’all can go out and watch if you want,” Andy invited. Broots immediately took him up on his offer. “Guess I better go lend a hand to the crank. Makin’ ice cream’s quite a job.”
“Please can I go back to jail?” Miss Parker groaned as he went out with his broad grin. “All this home life is going to kill me.”
Sydney smiled at her. “There are worse ways to be killed, Miss Parker.”
“I know, and when I find Jarod, he’s going to experience them all.”
Helen and Thelma Lou were staring at her with wide eyes. Helen was the first to recover. “Miss Parker, would you like to come out with us and watch?”
“Oh, believe me, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to watch grown men sweating into frozen milk. But no. You go right on with out me.”
With uncertain expressions, they did.
Sydney said, “You really ought to make more of an effort to get along with these people, Parker. They have been very kind to us.”
“Oh, shut up, Syd.”
She mostly said it out of habit, without her usual harshness, and when Sydney got up to go join the fun outside and paused for just a second to touch a hand to her shoulder, she didn’t jerk away. With some tiny, unacknowledged part of her soul, she wished he would put his arms around her and hold her the way no one had ever done since her mother had been murdered. But of course he didn't, not that she would have allowed him to. He went outside, and she was left alone in the house.
Chapter End Notes:
The song Andy plays is an old one I grew up singing:
His Sheep Am I
In God’s green pastures feeding, by his cool waters lie,
Soft in the evening walk my Lord and I.
On the mount, in the valley, by his hand he will lead.
His sheep am I.
Waters cool, in the valley
Pastures green, on the mountain.
In the eve, in the evening walk my Lord and I.
Dark the night, in the valley
Rough the way, on the mountain.
Step-by-step, step-by-step, my Lord and I.
Yes, the Lord is my shepherd, and no want shall I know.
He’ll guide and comfort me where e’er I go.
On the mount, in the valley, by his hand he will lead.
His sheep am I.
Waters cool, in the valley
Pastures green, on the mountain.
In the eve, in the evening walk my Lord and I.
Dark the night, in the valley
Rough the way, on the mountain.
Step-by-step, step-by-step, my Lord and I.
His Sheep Am I
In God’s green pastures feeding, by his cool waters lie,
Soft in the evening walk my Lord and I.
On the mount, in the valley, by his hand he will lead.
His sheep am I.
Waters cool, in the valley
Pastures green, on the mountain.
In the eve, in the evening walk my Lord and I.
Dark the night, in the valley
Rough the way, on the mountain.
Step-by-step, step-by-step, my Lord and I.
Yes, the Lord is my shepherd, and no want shall I know.
He’ll guide and comfort me where e’er I go.
On the mount, in the valley, by his hand he will lead.
His sheep am I.
Waters cool, in the valley
Pastures green, on the mountain.
In the eve, in the evening walk my Lord and I.
Dark the night, in the valley
Rough the way, on the mountain.
Step-by-step, step-by-step, my Lord and I.
