Public Enemy Number Two

The oil-black 32 Ford wrecked into an oak tree that had been in front of the white chapel church since Washington crossed the Delaware. A man giving no thought to Washington, or that aged tree but for what it did to his radiator, spilled from its busted body, limping across the gravel in the crisp fall night, shot up many miles ago and about bled to death. They didn’t usually have church in the evening, but there was such an unusual September hot spell they decided to worship at night which was good for Jack Hart, Public Enemy Number 2, as everyone knew that John Dillinger was Public Enemy Number 1.

His suit was bloody and he loosened his tie as he staggered to the chapel door where he stopped on the stoop to do his best to fix his hair, proper like. He hiccuped from the whisky he drank on the way to kill the pain. He thought to have another drink and reached for the empty pocket but he left the bottle in the car. He had seven unnatural holes in him. Five that went clean through, but two that had no exit. The slugs were in him and he felt them as though they burrowed like some burning metal parasite. He had been shot before, but only buckshot, never slugs. There is a first for everything. Jack Hart in a church, included.

He heard the singing from inside before he opened the door. “Oh, hell,” he groaned half-heartedly. He could hear the sirens of police cars barreling down the rural country road behind him. He had eluded them for twenty miles and stopped a few miles back and buried the money under a rock alongside Cattail Road at the base of a stone fence that set before a large red barn. Forty thousand American dollars. His biggest payday in well over a year. He would come back later for the money. If there was a later. But the way he bled, there wasn’t going to be a later unless someone helped him. And with the cops closing in, he knew he needed a miracle. “Right place for it, I s’pose,” he half joked.

He opened the door and the singing carried on. They were singing a song he heard his grandmother sing. “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms of the Lord.” He could still hear his grandmother sing it as he walked in. As she hung laundry on a clothesline long ago outside her country home in southern Wisconsin. His parents lived in Chicago and he could remember the long car rides to grandma’s in Wisconsin. Her hanging that laundry in the bright summer sun with a seemingly constant breeze, and her singing the song with her sweet voice. He smiled, despite his condition, and a hundred faces turned back and looked at him, still singing the song.

“Welcome, stranger,” the pastor said when the verse ended. The pastor was a tall kind-looking man wearing a blue ragged suit that had seen better days. His tie was as black as his hair, which was slicked over. He grinned a goofy grin. Jack thought of that fellow from Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane, looking at him. He nodded his head in acknowledgment of the pastor.

“I am Pastor Ivery,” the pastor said. “Please! Come join us!”

Pastor Ivery was the single best man in the county. There was not a mean bone in his body, not a jealous or unkind one either. He was never in a bad mood and nothing bad that fell upon him made him change in the least. His wife of 32 years passed last June, and instead of being depressed or angry that he lost the love of his life at just 50, he thanked God for the time they had and celebrated where he knew she went. She was buried in the hillside cemetery beside the church; in body she wasn’t far, and in spirit she was even closer because God and the kingdom of Heaven is truly in the heart, the pastor frequently proclaimed. So Helen Ivery dwelled in the eternal kingdom of her faithful husband’s heart. And no other women existed for him in the way she did.

Jack rubbed his forehead with his green handkerchief. He broke out in a sweat and found the chapel to be sweltering, though many folks wore their suit coats and sweaters because the breeze that blew in through the tall windows brought a chill. They would go back to Sunday morning services next week, so it was fortunate for Jack that he hadn’t robbed the Hocking County Bank next Sunday or he would have had no company. His car would have been parked alone in front of a locked church and he would have been at the mercy of the tombstones outside to keep him hidden. The elders kept the church locked because there were vagrants about, they said, much to the displeasure of Pastor Ivery whose view was it that no church should ever be locked for any reason. Some of those same elders gave Jack dirty looks as he stood there wiping his sweaty brow with that green handkerchief.
       
Lolita Murphy, who everyone called Lo, eyed Jack from the beginning with a much different eye. She was 18 and had no prospects of a husband, despite the fact that she was a very attractive woman. No man in the county would deny that she was a beautiful woman, but her over -zealous love of playing musical instruments, writing poetry and stories, and painting, paired with her inability, or rather unwillingness, to do anything else, including housekeeping and bearing children, made her a very poor prospect for a wife. But she wanted to be a wife and she wanted to be in love and love walked in the door and stood there in the agape with all of night behind him. It was like witnessing a rare comet, though with no effort at all. And the way fortune had it, Lo was the greeter that week and so she had every right, an obligation even, to go to the door and help the curious stranger to a proper seat. And there happened to be an open one beside her because her mother and father were on a trip to Pittsburgh visiting a sick uncle. God works in curious ways, she said to herself.

Lo wasn’t a bad girl. She had never been with a man and had no intent to do so until marriage, though the event seemed about as likely to happen as an alien invasion, or another World War. The unsavory men had tried to bed her. And men who felt she wasn’t the marrying type still pursued her for dances and dates, picnics and parties, and if it went well, parking somewhere. She was a practice girl, as one said. But Lo had none of it and any boy that ever tried was quickly put in his place so sharply and with such ridicule that he wouldn’t dare speak a word of his effort to anyone. So if Jack Hart had any unscrupulous intent with Lo Murphy, gangster or not, rare comet or no, he would surely be put in his place very quickly by a girl who feared no one but God in Heaven.

The choir carried on with the song and everyone stood and sang beside Jack and Lo who sat in a back pew in the shadows. Jack let out a grunt and leaned on Lo who took him in her arms without pause. She put her hand on his chest to hold him up and it was quickly soaked in blood. But rather than screaming or overreacting, she took him deeper in her arms and wiped his head. The blood wasn’t immediately apparent on his black suit, but the wool was sodden and it left a considerable imprint on her white dress. Jack looked down and saw the stain and winced an apology to which Lo said to not worry about it. It was an old dress, she lied. 

What a fellowship, what a joy divine,
Leaning on the everlasting arms;
What a blessedness, what a peace is mine,
Leaning on the everlasting arms.
Leaning, leaning,
Safe and secure from all alarms;
Leaning; leaning,
Leaning on the everlasting arms. 

A few people gave them odd looks. The stranger with his head on Lo’s shoulder, as they sang another verse. Pastor Ivery only smiled from the pulpit where he sang along. When the song paused, he made sure to say welcome to the stranger and emphasized how the doors of Cherry Hill Chapel are always open to all. He gave a sermon about being bound together by love and obligated to serve, and he smiled while he talked and the breeze blew in and cooled everyone but Jack, who was burning hot. Jack drifted with his head on Lo’s shoulder back to the road from Chicago to Wisconsin with his parents who didn’t speak to each other the entire way there and who hardly said goodbye to him before they left. But his grandma’s face was there to greet him and he ran from that cold Model T to her arms and her warm smile melted all the coldness of the trip. He could smell the lilacs by her porch and the lavender in her garden. And he could hear those wet sheets whip as they hung on the clothesline. And for a moment, Lo’s shoulder was his grandma’s until she spoke in his hear.

“We need to get you to a doctor, mister,” she whispered urgently.

“I can’t go to no hospital,” he countered.

“Why not?”

“I’m public enemy number two,” he winced. “I’m Jack Hart.” He looked at Lo to see it in her eyes if she recognized his name. He was relieved when her eyes widened and she replied.

“The gangster?”

“The bank robber. I should be number one, but the FBI loves John,” he paused. “Dillinger. Goddamn media. Scuse me Lord.  He got hemmed up and put in jail some and escaped, which added to his mystique. They ain’t never caught me so I ain’t got any escapes on my sheet. And they don’t know the half of what I’ve done. They gave other people credit for most of my jobs. Suits me fine, though,” he lied poorly. Even shot up and bleeding out, Jack wasn’t too sick to boast and complain about John Dillinger. 

“Public enemy number two?” Lo replied uneasily.

“Yeah,” Jack grimaced. “This isn’t exactly the place to be.”

“No!” Lo argued a little loudly. People turned to look and she smiled apologetically at them and went back to a whisper. “This is exactly where you should be! Hang in, Jack, until service is over, then we’ll get you help.”

“It’s as good a place to die as any.”

“You ain’t gonna die, Jack. My name’s Lolita Murphy. But you can call me Lo.”

“Listen, Lo,” Jack replied quickly into her hear. “I got 40,000 dollars buried at the base of a stone fence along that road a mile back. I put a rock on top of it. It’s on the crook in Cattail Road by mile marker, 41, I think. Maybe it was 31. You know where that is. There is big sugar maple...and a dilapidated red barn...”

“I know it,” Lo said excitedly. “I know exactly where that is. That’s old man Wilson’s place.” She gave no thought of the money, but a man dying in her arms was an unusual prospect, like something from a movie. And suddenly, all the boredom of her life was traded in for a real-life crime drama, like one of those stories she read at the drugstore when she was waiting for her grandmother’s prescriptions to be filled. Nothing exciting had ever happened to her before and her whole life had been lived in a series of strung together fantasies. The collection plate came around and Jack was barely conscious. His grandma swung him in her arms in the field behind her house.

“There’s money in my pocket,” he gasped over a sharp pain. He couldn’t open his eyes. Lo uneasily reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. She had never seen so much money in her life. There must have been $500 in hundreds and twenties.

“You don’t have any ones,” she whispered, counting the money.

“No need. Put it all in. I need God’s help.”

Lo smiled. “Well, it don’t work that way, Jack.”

“I ain’t meaning it that way. I’s only joking. Nothin’s gonna help me now anyhow. Put it all in, Lo. The whole thing.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Please,” Jack insisted. He was burning up and began to cough. Although he was in church, it felt like he was already in Hell.

Lo looked up at the usher who stood next to her with the humble wood collection plate in his hand. There was barely enough to cover the bottom. She put in her usual two bits and then Jack’s large wad of cash.

“There’s silver in the other pocket,” Jack murmured. Lo reached in and pulled out about five dollars in coins. She put them in the plate on top of the wad of cash. The usher’s jaw dropped as he looked down. He swallowed and looked back at Pastor Ivery who could sense something was amiss. Still, after the plates were brought to the alter, he continued the sermon but finished quickly. Everyone stood and sang as sirens blared outside. Lo helped Jack to his feet and smiled at everyone as she escorted him to the back of the chapel where they disappeared through a door. 

Oh, how sweet to walk in this pilgrim way,
Leaning on the everlasting arms;
Oh, how bright the path grows from day to day,
Leaning on the everlasting arms.
Leaning, leaning,
Safe and Secure from all alarms;
Leaning, leaning,
leaning on the everlasting arms.

Jack was a kid in Wisconsin again and his grandma laid him down in bed. She left the window open in his room and a breeze blew in and cooled him. He was younger than he was before. The bed was soft and cool and the room was dark but for a candle that was lit in a red hurricane lamp by the bed and whipped back and forth making strange shapes that danced wickedly across the wall. A cotton-knit blanket lay over him and felt good upon his legs and gave him the comfort of security as though no evil thing could get through it. But then he opened his eyes and Lo was over him. Pastor Ivery came in and looked down at Lo who said something to him that Jack couldn’t hear. He could still hear the congregation singing the song in the chapel. They sung with fervor and zeal.

Pastor Ivery gently closed the door behind him. “The police are out front, Lo.”

“They’re looking for him,” she affirmed.

“We have to turn him over...”

“No, Pastor Ivery! We can’t. They’ll kill him. I know it.”

“You can see it?”

“Yes. I can see it.” Lo took off Jack’s coat and his white shirt showed the extent of his wounds, most was covered in red blood the way a globe is covered by blue ocean. Pastor Ivery knew of Lo’s ability to see the future and didn’t discourage it the way her parents did. He encouraged her and said it was a gift from God, not a curse from Satan. He stood above her as she opened Jack’s shirt and wiped the wounds with his handkerchief.

“Get him underground,” Pastor Ivery ordered reluctantly. “I will stall them then and come after with supplies.”

Lo grinned in appreciation for the pastor. She helped Jack along and she pushed a bookcase that creaked opened and led to a flight of secret wood steps. The steps were lined in large sandstone blocks and Lo guided Jack down them easily. Before the pastor shut the bookcase, he again assured Lo that he would be down shortly with supplies to mend Jack’s wounds. She knew he could because he was a medic in The War. He still shook because of it and had what they called “battle fatigue.” When he came home, he dedicated himself to God and the Church. Lo often wondered what he had seen, having read much about The War. What had his large hands touched? What death had he witnessed and how many lives had he saved?

“Where am I?” Jack sighed looking up at the dimly lit cellar. He was lying on a cot and there was a black entryway and a black exit on opposite sides of the room. They came from the entryway on the right and the exit was a mystery to Jack’s roaming eyes on his left.

“The chapel cellar,” she answered. “We’re going to help you along and you’re going to be just fine, Mr. Hart. We’ll see to it. Pastor Ivery was the best damn medic in The War.” Lo’s use of an expletive surprised Jack a little until he was again distracted by a sharp shot of pain. She comforted him as best she could while they waited and she sang to him, the song he wanted to hear. He smiled at her and in and out of consciousness he drifted. Sometimes she was his grandma and sometimes she was Lo. Sometimes she was an angel who was a combination of the two, but he knew that was merely a delusion because he would not make it to Heaven. He had already been when he lived with his grandma until he was 14 when he ran away and stayed gone for two years. When he came back, his grandma wasn’t there anymore. There was a family living in the house who didn’t know anything about her. There weren’t any clothes on the line out back. There was a headstone in a cemetery nearby with her name on it that didn’t seem to suit her. After Jack robbed his first bank he bought her a much better one. A widowed spinstress had the best headstone in the entire cemetery where lied dead bankers and lawyers.

Jack awoke to Lo comforting him, washing his wounds with a cold wet cloth. Pastor Ivery had mended the wounds by digging two .44 caliber slugs from his left shoulder and chest and sewing him up. He left an hour ago after saying a prayer over Jack. Lo promised she would see him through and the pastor said he would lock the door behind them. Police dogs were scouring the area for Jack, he warned her. They had searched the chapel but hadn’t found Jack. Pastor Ivery protested when they threatened to bring the dogs in and said it was unholy for a dog to be in a church, which made Lo laugh because he had brought his own dog in several times in the past. They relented and resolved that Jack came to the door of the church then left. They had searched the church thoroughly, but they knew nothing of the room behind the bookcase in the cellar and without the dogs to sniff, they wouldn’t know the second most wanted man in America was just a few feet from them behind a bookcase full of dusty books. No one in the chapel, not even the curmudgeon elders who insisted on locked doors, recalled seeing Jack’s face when asked by the G-men.

It was four days, through most of which he slept, before Jack was up and moving. The pharmacist gave Pastor Ivery the necessities he needed without any questions and not a single sole had called Pastor Ivery during the week to ask him what became of Jack Hart. The Lord’s work. Jack smiled at Lo when he opened his eyes before he got up. She had a present for him. She had bought him a new suit, shirt and tie and she had the necessities for him to get cleaned up and shave. He thanked her, but she deflected his gratitude and said she was only a humble servant of the Lord and doing His work.

“Did you go get the money?” Jack asked her.

“No, sir. I think you ought to go get it for yourself now that you’re healed up enough. The FBI men left the area a day or two ago. Heard talk they figured you had another car stashed somewhere, or you hitchhiked out of town. They said you never stay nowhere too long so they figured you pushed on.”

“I ain’t ever had a reason to stay anywhere,” he confessed. “Guess til now.”

Lo blushed. But she could see it as it happened. She would leave and he would be gone, sure as day was long. And when he asked her to go get him something to eat, she knew their inevitable end would come even sooner than she expected. The room would be empty when she returned.

“That there is a tunnel,” she pointed at the black opening on the other side of the room. “There’s a lantern here to guide you through it; it’s about 3 miles long and will lead you to an old farmhouse, the Cobb place. It connects to their storm cellar and they leave it unlocked as most people do in these parts. There’s a car in the barn that old Mr. Cobb hardly ever drives anymore on count of his vision being that of an old possum’s. Reckoning possums have bad eyesight, so I’ve been told. I imagine you know how to start ’em without the key. Take you out of your way from Cattail Road and old man Wilson’s place some, but you can swing back in his car on your way out of town and pick it up easily. If you want.”

“Well,” Jack said uneasily. “I wanna eat first, if you don’t mind. Nothing special. Just a meal between the two of us. I gave my money to the church so I have none to give ya. But anything will do.”

“Chicken sound fine?”

“Mighty fine.”

Lo shook her head and smiled a sad smile. She stalled a little knowing the inevitable end that was to come. She had a right to a few questions she figured. “How many women have you been with anyway, Jack Hart.”

Jack laughed a little. “More than the men I killed.”

“How many men have you killed?”

“Lost count at a dozen or so.”

“You proud of that?”

“No,” he replied solemnly. “Not at all. Them men just got in my way is all.”

“From what?”

“From livin’.”

“And them women?”

“Well, they got in my way from dyin’.”

“I don’t know that I understand...”

“Don’t know that you ever should, Lo. Wouldn’t be good if you did.”

“I would like to.”

“No. Somethings best not understood. I ain’t never been close to anyone, Lo. It ain’t in my work to stay long or get close. Leave a widow and some orphaned kids. No, thank you. That ain’t right.”

“All women don’t want kids, you know. They don’t all want to be housewives.”

“Then what do they want?” Jack asked fitting his tie around his neck.

“To be truly loved and not wanted for some material or commodity they can provide. Loved for the beauty of their soul. The sound of their music. Their song.”

“You a singer?”

“And a songwriter.”

“Really. You got one for me now?” he smiled.

“Got a whole lot of em. I’m going to be doing a concert next Saturday. Here in the chapel. They are particular about the songs I sing and the elders don’t want me playing my guitar, but they agreed so long as I don’t sing any devil music.”

“Devil music? What you singin’ then, lullabies?” Jack laughed lathering his face up in a porcelain sink for a shave. There was a small mirror on the wall and he could see Lo in the reflection.

“Church hymns, mostly.”

“Sing that one.”

“What one?”

“That one you all were singing when I came in. That’s the one.”

“Leaning on the Everlasting Arms of the Lord.”

“That’s the one,” Jack replied sliding the razor gently beneath his nose.

“You ain’t gonna be here to hear it.”

“I’ll always be in spirit.”

Lo grinned sadly. She hesitated. “I could go with you.”

“Then you’d miss your big premier.”

“I could bring my guitar and have it elsewhere. Maybe you can take me to New Orleans.”

“You’re too good for New Orleans, Lo.”

“Please. I want to go. I insist.”

“Me robbing banks and you playing your guitar and singing songs.”

“Like Bonnie and Clyde.”

Jack wiped his face indignantly and turned to look at her. “I ain’t no Clyde and you sure the hell ain’t no Bonnie. You’re good and wholesome like. Everything that is right with the world while the rest of us are everything that ain’t. You are on your side of life and I’m on mine and the two shouldn’t ever mix. It ain’t natural.”

“Come on, Jack...”

“You know I killed ten times more men than John Dillinger ever thought to kill. More than Babyface Nelson, damn sure. Hell, I might’ve killed more men than Al Capone’s whole Chicago outfit. Ain’t no tellin’. But because you all fixed me up and made me whole again, I’m makin’ a vow not to kill any man. I can’t have no man’s life end on the account of you all’s good deed.” Jack paused and rubbed his forehead. He changed quickly as he shaved his chin. “Public enemy number two, my ass! I’m number one. Should be number one! Now how bout that fried chicken, Ms. Lolita Murphy?” He grinned wide-eyed and charismatic like he did when he robbed a bank. When he tried to smooth talk the tellers into not signaling the alarm so fast so he didn’t have to shoot them. He could sell insurance or cars and be damn good at it, but it was all the same line of work to him. You rob people in either business, it just happens that one is illegal because no one is fooled into thinking they get anything out of a bank robber. So robbery isn’t simply robbery. The banks can rob the people but the people cannot rob the banks.

“I’ll be seeing you, Jack Hart.”

“In about ten minutes with some good fried chicken I hope,” he grinned.

“Yep,” she said walking up the cellar steps to the chapel. She knew better. She saw it already and didn’t know why she bothered to argue.

“Lo,” he called softly as she walked up the steps. “I’ll think on it. Okay?”

She nodded. He was already gone. Just as she saw the death of Helen Ivery from the cancer a year before she passed. Yet, she still went to get the fried chicken because that is what she said she would do. She had never hoped she had been more wrong in all of her life. She walked to the diner and bought the chicken and walked back slowly. She had never wanted to be normal in all her life, but maybe if she was normal things would be easier for her. She could go to college and get a degree and teach music. She wouldn’t desire to play it as much and to not have children and to love freely rather than to be avowed to someone and bound to them by the ropes of life. Those that everyone willingly ties themselves. She wanted to be with someone by choice rather than an obligation and able to move away on a whim without being bound by forced commitments. She was ready to give up on anyone understanding her and the possibility that love would ever walk through her door. Fall on her head like a comet that she happened upon. The love that she wanted.

When she got back to the chapel she took a deep breath and slowly descended the cellar steps. The room was orderly, the cot was made and the sink was wiped clean, and it was quiet as a tomb with no body. No Jack Hart. There was a Jack of Hearts playing card stuck in a crack between the wall and the mirror which said all that Jack needed possibly to say. She held it and smiled. How many living people ever got one of these, or did he give one to all his women? How childish she felt considering herself his when all that she did was nurse him to health until he was able to run. Like a bird with a broken wing. She was not his cage.

She stood at the black exit that once led many slaves to freedom as part of The Underground Railroad and looked down its long dark throat and saw the faint, distant gleam of a burning lantern. She stood there in silence and sadness and watched it go out. “You’ll always be public enemy number one to me,” she smiled. And she wrote that night in her journal, that was all for her brief love affair with the infamous Jack Hart. She put the Jack of Hearts card he left in the pages of that journal, then closed the book forever.

Out of curiosity she had her father take her to old man Cobb’s farm for a visit. Her father was a quiet man who didn’t ask many questions but who loved his daughter very much, despite his objection to her eccentricities and wanting her to be normal. He waited in the car as she went to Mr. Cobb’s doorstep. She asked Mr. Cobb how his health had been and asked if there was anything she could do for him. He smiled at her and said he didn’t need anything and she invited him to her concert at the chapel on Saturday night. He said he would love to come in a way that she knew he wouldn’t. Anyone who has ever invited anyone to anything knows that sort of reply. Then before going back to the car she walked to his barn and peeked inside. The car was gone. She didn’t know if she expected it to be there or not, but seeing it missing made her heart sad. Maybe she hoped he was staying nearby and didn’t need it. Found a cabin in the woods somewhere close. Maybe she was hoping that she would be wrong and that what she saw wasn’t true and wouldn’t happen.

She was melancholy for most of the week but lifted her spirits through music. She played her guitar daily so that her fingers hardened without blistering during her show Saturday night. She chopped the happy songs from the set list and filled the void with sad songs and downcast hymnals. She decided to close with the song Jack requested and hoped she could get through it without crying. It was a beautiful song, but it had never meant so much to her.

On Friday night, Melvin Purvis of the FBI arrived in town and took a room at the town’s only motel. Melvin Purvis had killed Babyface Nelson and was known to be in pursuit of John Dillinger. Rumor got around town that he was in the area to ask people questions about Jack Hart. It was Saturday morning when he got to Lo. He met her at her house and asked to see the dress she wore last Sunday night at church.

“I don’t have it,” she replied nervously.

“Well, where is it?” he asked sternly.

“I threw it out.”

“Your family doesn’t appear to of means where you can just toss dresses out. Specially a Sunday dress.”

Lo didn’t reply. She looked at her father who looked at the ground.

“What happened to your dress, Ms. Murphy?”

“I spilled some ink on it. I’m a writer and was writing a story. Well, clumsy me spilled a whole well of ink in my lap and the dress was ruined forever. I’m sorry, momma,” she nearly cried looking at her mother who nervously stood in front of a grandfather clock that clicked loudly through the silent room.

“I like silence,” Mr. Purvis said. “Great things happen in silence. In the still, small voice of God. You know God spoke to Elijah after his dramatic victory over the prophets of Baal. God told Elijah that the Israeli King Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, was seeking to kill him. Elijah ran out into the wilderness and collapsed in exhaustion. But God sent him an angel with food and water to comfort him, who told him to rest, and then sent him on. And while hiding in a cave, Elijah complained to God that God’s prophets had been killed by Jezebel and he alone had survived. God told him to stand alone on the mountain in His presence. Then the Lord sent a mighty wind which broke the rocks in pieces, followed by an earthquake and fire, but his voice was in none of them. After all that, God spoke to Elijah in the still, small voice, or gentle whisper. We live in a world of loud bangs and flashy cars. God’s voice comes best in the silence. But divine silence does not mean divine inactivity. Zechariah 4:6 says that God’s work is...”

“....not by might or power, but by My spirit.” Lo finished. “I know scripture, Mr. Purvis.”

“Good,” Mr. Purvis finished. “Then be not confused that you are some angel providing food and comfort for this wicked man. Confuse yourself not for they who aided Elijah.”

“He is gone, Mr. Purvis. He ain’t here. You ought to go off and find him.”

“Certainly, I will. And be mindful of your ink. Good day, folks.” Mr. Purvis carried himself with an indignant purity, good posture, taller than he was, and proud. He left a certain coldness in the room in his absence, which was simply the ghost of his presence. 

Lo took to the stage that night with a feeling of nervousness, but it ended a song into the show. She was pleased to see that the chapel filled and she looked around the room to find the smiling faces of all those she cared about in this world, and all those who cared about her. Her melancholy washed away though she felt a little anxious still from meeting Mr. Purvis. She had written a song after Jack left called “Queen of Hearts,” and though it might have been deemed inappropriate by the church being unrelated to Christ or the church, and being about the Jack of Hearts who was in love with the Queen, but who never wanted to be King. Despite her trepidation, she was going to sing it anyway.

It was sometime after the second song that the doors gently opened and standing there in a black suit and tie holding the largest bouquet of the most gorgeous flowers Lo had ever seen in this life was Jack. She messed up the song she was singing, swallowed, then smiled at him as he stood there with his slicked back hair and million dollar grin. He looked modest in a way, flashy in another, and he playfully hid his face behind the flowers. He stood behind the back pew where he sat with her last Sunday when he was shot up. Lo couldn’t take her eyes off him and she sung song after song until she finally came to the moment when she sang her song for him, “Queen of Harts.” And he never stopped smiling and his eyes sparkled as he stared at her and occasionally amid chorus she looked and smiled at him, but not wanting to give his identity away, particularly to her parents, she made herself look away.

Jack swayed easy in the back of the chapel and fell more in love with Lo with every verse of every song, especially the song she wrote for him, in particular the line: “Dillinger may be King, But the Jack has the heart of the Queen.”

No one batted an eye when she sang it; there were no looks of disapproval or reproach. Her voice was sweet and tender and seemed to lull people into a deep tranquil trance and it was quite clear that she could make anything she sang beautiful. Her voice was perfect as though all her life she had prepared for that moment and she had chosen wisely not to marry and snuff her own voice with the choke of domesticity. And when she sang “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms of the Lord,” Jack froze, and though he continued to smile, she could see him cry as everything he ever lived settled somewhere in him, all in its right place. The wind on wet sheets on the clothesline, the scattered shadows of the red hurricane lamp, every wrong and right, and all the bodies on his gun. The collection plate came around and he pulled out a stack of forty bills and put them in. Forty thousand dollar bills. The usher stared down at the plate and then smiled at Mr. Hart and carried on. Lo was singing the last verse when Jack smiled, gave the large bouquet of flowers to an old lady, and left. She sang it slow like his grandma did and her eyes followed him sadly out the door wondering if he intended to wait for her after the show. 

What have I to dread, what have I to fear,
Leaning on the everlasting arms;
I have blessed peace with my Lord so near,
Leaning on the everlasting arms.
Leaning, leaning,
Safe and secure from all alarm;
Leaning, leaning,
Leaning on the everlasting arms.

Lo hadn’t finished the last line when a gunshot rang out and echoed through the church. She closed her eyes and something left her. Killed in its place with the loud bang that shook her. She stood there with her guitar in hand as everyone rushed out to see what happened. Then she dropped the guitar and its neck cracked on the wood floor at her feet. The old lady, Mrs. Guthrie, who Jack gave the large bouquet of flowers to, gave them to Lo without saying anything at all.

Lo walked outside and saw Mr. Purvis standing in the cemetery with a crowd of people around him including some newspaper men. She was in shock and sang the chorus of the song again softly to herself. Mr. Purvis lowered his shotgun as photographers snapped pictures and the bulbs burst brightly against the purple of night, the barrel haloed in smoke. He said, “The still, small voice of God, told me he’d be here. God finally cut you down, you wicked bastard. Another victory for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and law abiding citizens everywhere.” Everything Lo had waited for all her life washed away in the thick grass of the chapel cemetery. She stood there holding those flowers as though they were life itself. And when she looked up, maybe it was the way a tear refracted the light of another bursting camera bulb, but she swore she saw the tail of a comet that probably would never come again. 

Jack Hart was buried in Cherry Hill Chapel Cemetery, made an honorary member of the congregation. His tombstone was the nicest in the humble cemetery and was a tourist attraction for some. His story and pictures of his dead body were in all the papers and magazines. Hollywood made a movie, love story included, and until Melvin Purvis shot John Dillinger dead, there was no gangster more famous. The FBI would never see a penny of that forty thousand dollars.

Here Lies Jack Hart

1909-1934

"Public Enemy Number One"

Leaning, Leaning.
Leaning on the everlasting arms.