Tides of Truth [03] Greater Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

heard the sound of the locomotives. All the trains were hauling pine tree logs. Each time a train got close, Jessie moved away from the tracks and crouched out of sight.
    She’d read in a book about a man who’d tried to hop on a train for a free ride and ended up losing his leg. Jessie wasn’t tempted to jump on one of the trains. It wouldn’t have worked anyway. Without a city or town to slow them down, the trains shot past at top speed.
    As she walked, Jessie scavenged along the tracks. To her, the littering by others was a virtue, not a vice. Within a few hours Jessie’s plastic garbage bag contained two more water bottles and additional scraps of half-eaten fast food. She quickly learned to judge the freshness of discarded items. One bag with particular promise had been torn up by an animal. Jessie was afraid to eat the remaining scraps of country ham. She also found a full can of beer. She’d been given sips and gulps of beer by grownups since she was a little girl and could tolerate the taste. However, when she popped open the can, the brew smelled so foul she poured it out on the ground. She placed the can on the tracks to be smashed by the next train that came along.
    As the sun reached its zenith, Jessie stepped away from the tracks into a pine thicket. It was a mature stand of trees. Many of the rulerstraight trees didn’t sprout a limb until thirty or forty feet in the air. A rough dirt road ran parallel to the train tracks through the woods. Beside the road was a discarded wooden pallet. Jessie sat on the pallet and ate her remaining scraps of food. After taking a long drink of water, she took out the leather pouch. It was closed with a goldcolored snap.
    When she’d snatched the pouch from the table, Jessie had hoped to find a few lower-denomination bills to hide in the secret place in the old wooden nightstand in her room. She didn’t need a lot of money, just enough to give her some extra cash in case of an emergency. But when she retreated to her room and looked inside the pouch, she decided to return it. The discovery of her theft, and the uproar it caused, kept that from happening.
    She emptied the contents of the pouch onto one of the wooden boards of the pallet. There were nine or ten square sheets of decorated paper written in a foreign language and an ordinary sheet of paper covered in an indecipherable gibberish of letters and numbers. Jessie held one of the sheets up to the sunlight. It was pretty. Red and blue highlights enhanced the predominant green ink. All the sheets seemed the same. She knew the colored pieces of paper had value; otherwise, the two men wouldn’t have gone to the trouble to chase her into the thicket, but she couldn’t read them to find out how much. To her, they were worthless.
    Returning everything to the pouch, she lay on the pallet and stared at the tops of the trees. The combination of sun and food made her drowsy. She closed her eyes and dozed off.
    She didn’t wake up until it was too late.
    E VERYBODY GATHERED ON THE FRONT PORCH WHEN IT WAS TIME for me to leave on Sunday afternoon. Mama had filled a grocery sack with food for Kyle. He was a freshman living in a dormitory. A taste of home might not remove his homesickness, but it could dull the edge.
    A girl from Dalton, who was a graduate student in the history department, had agreed to pick me up at 2:30 p.m. She was as punctual as a chronological timeline and pulled into our driveway on schedule. It was always noisy when I arrived home and quiet when I left. Daddy carried my suitcase to the car then kissed me. Mama held me longer than usual.
    “Let us know when you go to Savannah so we can pray,” she whispered in my ear.
    I nodded. Ellie hugged me and pressed a small present in my hand.
    “Open it later,” she said.
    When Emma hugged me I could see that she was on the verge of tears. Bobby was friendly but nonchalant. Then I was gone.
    I looked down at Ellie’s present. It was no bigger than an earring