Randomly Randomness

The Right Reverend Robert Rose - 10/8/2014

"The reverend preached about you."

I stared at the Sheriff, processing his hangdog face and my husband's muttered curse. "What exactly does that mean?"  I knew what it meant--in the most abstract sense. I also knew who the reverend was. The Right Reverend Robert Rose. My husband had filled me in on him before we were even married. The man had ruined Wade's first wife's funeral when he'd decried her as an adultress (which she was) and informed all those present (including her children) that she'd deserved to die. 

In other words, when the revered spoke, everyone listened (and prayed he wasn't speaking about them). 

"It means everybody hates you," my eldest step-son said with a snicker. He shoved his way past us, out the front door and headed for his truck. Good riddance, I say.

The sheriff nodded. "He's right. In a manner of speaking. You'll most likely be ostracised by most if not all the town."

"That's stupid.  How can an entire town shun me when they don't even know me? What did he even say?"

The sheriff, who was also my husband's godfather, paused, his eyes flitting from me to Wade and back again, his reluctance more than obvious. He swallowed hard, then grimmaced and said, "That you're a whore."

My face was so hot I could feel the skin darn near burning off. I'd lived here six days--barely. I'd cooked, I'd cleaned, I'd scrubbed (a nasty bachelor pad inhabited by two grown men and two teenagers), I'd paid bills and bought groceries and smiled at everyone while my mother-in-law had screamed at my new husband about him marrying some whore from...ah! There it was. My mother-in-law. The screaming banshee. She'd done this. I didn't know how exactly, but I knew that she had. "Jane."

The sheriff had the grace to blush and grimace at the sound of my mother-in-law's name. I blew out a heavy breath. I'd lived through worse than being hated by an entire town. I could get through this. My husband, however, was another matter. He had quickly displayed an amazing lack of grit and self-restraint. "I don't understand--"

"The reverend has spoken." Wade turned from the door and headed for the kitchen.

"I wasn't done." I turned my head and gave him a stern look. There wasn't anything that made me as peevish as having to defend myself. There wasn't anything that made me NOT want to defend myself like having to defend myself. Not physically, I could hold my own in a fight if need be. But words. Words were my undoing.  "I don't understand how one man can make an entire town ostracise a person."

"I told you," Wade said, "everybody's scared of him."

"But he's one man."

"Everybody," the sheriff sighed.

"Including you?" I asked, pinning him to the porch with a steely-eyed gaze.

He didn't say a word. The sheriff, I'd quickly learned was, like my husband, a man of few words. TOO few words. 

"So, let me see if I've got this right. One man is holding four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-eigth people hostage because they're affraid of being gossiped about and shunned?"

"That about sums it up."

"And now, I'm being shunned because Jane cried 'whore' about me?"

"That about sums it up."

"That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of."

"Stupid or no--" the sheriff shuffled his feet, backing away, "--it's how it is."

"Well...there are worse things in this world than being gossiped about." Like losing your entire family, your home, your life, or at least, life as you knew it. But that wasn't information I wanted the sheriff or this little pissant burg to know about. Hopefully, Wade would remember to keep his mouth shut. I didn't need anyone's pity. It was going to take a lot more than the Right Reverend Robert Rose to beat me down. 

Once the sheriff was gone, I tracked Wade down out on the back porch. "What time do we leave for your mothers?"

Mama Jane aka Jane May cooked Sunday supper and expected all to attend and fawn over her. I knew it wasn't right to hate but liking Jane May was, impossible!  

"About that--"

He woudn't look at me. Which seemed to be standard operating procedure these days. Him not looking at me or worse, yelling at me. I blew out a heavy breath and shook my head, then turned to go back inside wanting out of the incessant Texas heat. 

"I'm sorry," he said as I pulled open the screen door.

"Yeah." About that.

***

It didn't take a genius to put together the obvious. Powerful minister = big secret(s). I'd gone upstairs, sequestered myself in the unused mother-in-law suite, calculated the time difference and put in a call to a friend in London, asking him to dig up everything he could find on the Reverend Rose and all known family members and associates. 

Tim had gotten back to me a few days later. Quicker than I'd imagined but the way things were going, the sooner the better. 

"I found some weird stuff but I'm having trouble connecting the dots. I sent it all to you. Check your email and get back to me."

I'd spent a few hours studing it, wondering if I was reading it right, then gone out and bought a printer, hooked it up in the 'suite' that was now my workspace and printed it all out. Tim had managed to dig up any and every reference to the Revered Rose, whose real name was Alvin. Alvin Robert Rose. His wife, Louise was Lavinia. Using your middle name wasn't illegal. I did it myself and after over twenty, years answering to Olivia was second nature. No one called me Marisol; only a few of my elderly aunts called me Marisita, all the cousins called me Abuelita as a sign of respect. 

It took me about two hours to make heads or tails of it and once I'd nailed it all down, I knew I had to a) not let the stuff I'd printed out of my site on the offchance my nosy stepdaughter (who reported directly to Jane May) saw them and b) burn the papers before Wade got home.