“But how did she do?”
“I’m so grateful, darling, that you pulled all this together. It was wonderful of you.”
“But?”
“If Del comes again, I’m leaving.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Yanking up rugs, hauling them to the clothesline, beating them within an inch of their lives ...”
He decided not to comment.
“... screeching furniture across the floor, up on the stepladder polishing ceiling fixtures, scrubbing the countertops like there’s no tomorrow ...” His wife looked pale. “And then ...”
“And then?”
“... scaring the daylights out of me about bears and coyotes and an absolute zoo of creatures prowling around out there, including something called wild painters.”
“Panthers,” he said.
“Panthers?”
“Local people say painter for panther.”
He decided the timing wasn’t right to mention that once Lloyd and his helper got going, there’d be—how had Lloyd put it?—a good bit of in and out.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A Clean Heart
<No Kenneth or Kenny Barlowe in fed system.
<Absolutely cannot look into state systems right now, am up to kazoo.
<Snickers has ear infection, drops three x a day. You should check Barnabas’s ears on a regular basis.
<Harold down with flu and home from P>O>. Don’t feel so rosy myself. Remember to wear something on your head, it is still flu season big time.
<Going to Atlanta to see Catherine!!! for two weeks!!! Pray for Harold and Snickers who are helpless without Yours Truly.
<Can you believe what’s going on in the Queen’s family? Pray for her while you’re at it.
<Emma
<P.S. Gene Bolick transferred from Charlotte to Mitford Hosp., better get over there.
<Dear Father Tim and Cynthia,
<We wanted to tell you the glad news about Morris Love.
<He has been invited to play the organ at St. John’s Cathedral in New York City!
<We are overjoyed. There is talk of a bus trip from our own little St. John’s. Otis will help underwrite. June 14. Let us know if you can possibly meet us in New York, we would be thrilled to death!
<Little Timothy growing like a weed. All here would love to see his namesake again.
<We pray faithfully for Sammy and Kenny, as you asked.
<With love as ever from Sam and Marian
<Dear Sam and Marian:
<To God be the glory, great things He hath done!
<Sammy arrived at our back door, we are taking things slowly. Continue him in your prayers. Kenny still unaccounted for. My new mountain parish a great blessing to Cynthia and me.
<We hope to see you after my year’s tenure here.
<With great love and appreciation from both of us.
<Fr. Tim
<Hey, Dad—
<When are you going to get a cell phone?
<Dooley
<Hey, Buddy!
<When you get your truck.
<Love, Dad
<I’ll program it for you.
<Tell Sammy I’ll call him tonight.
<I hope things are working out.
<Things are working out.
<We look forward to our time together this summer.
<Sammy is going to load us up with okra.
<I pass.
<Dear Timothy,
<So here we are in our dotage, and, after years of busting rocks with the big guys, we find ourselves Priests of the Hindmost. You in a church with no facilities, much less a crank organ, and me in no church at all, reliant merely upon two trustworthy feet (now sporting a veritable array of bunions) and a truck with an engine older than the Bill of Rights. What on earth did we do—or fail to do? How have we offended?
<Just talking to hear my brain rattle, of course. I must say I love this farflung mission work better than all those years of coddling, and being coddled by, the lukewarm. Forgive me!
<Come now, are you really above the clouds? We are beneath a waterfall! The great pounding and bellow of this fall is a godly tongue that I cannot interpret with the mind, but somehow understand with the heart.
<When the three of us first encamped here in a four-room cabin, I thought the almighty roar of it might drive me mad as a hatter (why are hatters mad, anyway?). Now, if I’m away for a day or two, as is the occasional case, I miss it heartily!
<I was downhearted that you and Cynthia weren’t able to join this marvelous ministry—Timothy, on my life, you would love it—but then, I am happy that He has flung you out into your own backyard, to accomplish His odd and peculiar business.
<Perhaps when we are old and gray (I am gray, but have thus far refused to be old), we might sit by a fire in wing chairs (what is it about the wing chair that seems so consoling?) and smoke a pipe and talk of the adventures with which He so generously endowed us in this short and wondrous life.
<Remember Abner? The boy who sent you that marvelous ark tableau which he carved without any training or example? He has surrendered his life to Christ, and I must tell you he is the finest of evangelists when we go calling around these hills and hollers. What a grand being he is, and has yet to become, in our Lord.
<In closing, I charge you with the task of improving the frequency of your communications! And for heaven’s sake, as always, SEND MONEY.
Fr Harry
While he found e-mail pretty exciting stuff, snail mail continued to exert its charms—one of which was the required afternoon jaunt to the mailbox.
He read George Gaynor’s handwritten letter as he trekked up the driveway, a biting April wind at his back.
Dear Father,
After all these years, I’ve discovered my niche. My job as Chaplain to the inmates of this somewhat remote prison is definitely what God has long prepared me for. Indeed, I believe my prison term was spiritual boot camp for what I’m doing today ... proving once again what Paul told us in his second letter to the Thessalonians—in everything ...
Have heard the good news from Hope and Scott. I plan to attend the wedding, and look forward to seeing you and Cynthia and Harley. It will be the first wedding, other than my own mistaken affair, that I’ve been part of since college. Best Man! Until I entered into relationship with Christ during the long sabbatical in your church attic, I was most assuredly Worst Man. His grace continues to astound and humble me.
Had a line from Pete Jamison, we keep in touch. I’ll never forget your two-for-one deal. He is growing in faith, though beset, like most of us, with advancing one step and falling back two.
Hope says you’ve been given a mountain church that was closed for decades, and asked to get it going ASAP. You, Father, are the very one for such a call. He has girded you with strength, he has made your feet like hinds’ feet, and set you upon high places.
Write when you can, mail is manna.
In His mercy,
George
It was the farm dogs’ grooming day at the kennel, thus only he and Barnabas answered the knock at the door.
“It’s me!” Lily announced. “I’m b-a-ack!”
“Thanks be to God!” he said. “I didn’t know who to expect, but I knew you wouldn’t let me down.”
“Oh, nossir, I don’t let people down if I can he’p it.”
“Are you recovered?”
“Good as new, didn’t last hardly twenty-four hours.Went th‘ough me like seed corn th’ough a goose.
Lily refrigerated her bottle of sweet tea, stuffed her purse into the old pie safe, and put on what appeared to be a nurse’s mask. “Did Del do you’uns a good job?”
He opted for strict diplomacy. “Better than good!”
“She wore you‘uns out, is what I’m guessin’. Del wears us all out, bless ‘er heart, but this floor won’t need scrubbin’ for a month of Sundays!”
Violet trotted from under the kitchen table and wound herself around Lily’s ankles.
�
�See there? Never fails. Ever’ cat in creation rubs theirself ag’in’ me. Shoo! Git! An’ stay git!”
“Cynthia suggests you see what’s on hand and cook whatever you think best. With the thought that there’s a diabetic in the house.” He hated saying it.
Lily tied on an apron. “No problem. My husband’s got diabetes.”
He felt oddly glad to hear of another poor sap who suffered this odious tribulation.
“Good heavens!”
“But don’t worry,” she assured him, “it wadn’t my cookin’ that done it.”
He and Willie sat on pallets of fresh straw, each giving a hungry lamb its bottle.
“Ever had a wife, Willie?”
“Had one.”
“Ah.”
“Gone t’ glory. Th’ best of th’ lot. No replacement.”
“I’m sorry. Want to eat with us tonight? We’ve got a fancy cook working today.”
“Don’t believe so, thank y’.”
Father Tim stood, creaking in the knees, the hip joints, and the greater portion of the lower back. He wondered if he’d ever grow used to such dilapidation....
“We’ll send something over. Whether you need it or not.”
There was Willie’s grin again. “I’d be beholden.”
“How’d it go?” he asked.
“Terrific! She’s wonderful! Lovely meals in the freezer, the cake is beautiful, and I sent Sammy over to Willie’s with a meat loaf.”
“Not my old recipe, I devoutly hope.”
“Absolutely not!” She laughed. “She even wanted to bake your ham for Sunday, but I said you insist on baking your own.”
She peered at him. “Did you just sigh?”
“I’ve been thinking—I haven’t been much of a granpaw lately.”
“You’ve been busy being much of a vicar. Puny understands; we talked today. The girls are working hard in school, the boys are eating like dockhands, Joe Joe’s working the night shift, and she’s worn to a frazzle—precisely the way it always is with a houseful of tots. Though heaven knows, I can’t speak from experience.”
“You always wanted children....”
“Yes.” She was silent for a time. “And now I have Dooley!” she said, brighter. “And Sammy—for as long as God gives him to us.”
“How is it with you and Sammy?”
“It may be a long wait. Remember how long it took with Dooley?”
“I do.”
“But I have time to wait.”
“You’re the best of the lot, Kavanagh.”
“Thank you.”
“No replacement,” he said.
He pondered their talk as he walked Barnabas through the old horse pasture. As for how long Sammy would be with them—that was definitely God’s department. In any case, a summer on the farm with his brother would be a very good thing.
They would simply take it as it comes, and go from there.
On Friday evening at Holy Trinity, sheets of rain lashed the windows, rattling the panes in their fragile mullions. On the lower branches of the rhododendron behind the stone wall, a male cardinal bent his crested head beneath his wing and waited out the storm with his mate.
Down the road and around the bend, 129 squirrel tails nailed to the logs of Jubal Adderholt’s cabin whipped wildly in the blowing rain; smoke pouring from the chimney was snatched by the wind and driven hard toward the east where Donny Luster’s double-wide was stationed.
Inside the trailer, images of a revolving sapphire necklace broke into colored blocks on the television screen; moments later, the screen went black. In the darkened front room, an unfiltered Camel burned down in the ashtray as Donny Luster sat looking out the window, seeing nothing. In their bedroom, Dovey and Sissie Gleason slept as close as spoons in a drawer, oblivious to the shuddering of the trailer on its pad of concrete blocks.
Two miles to the northwest, in the well-stocked yard of the McKinney sisters, the old watering trough filled up, overflowed, and ran into a ditch worn by years of overspill. On the porch, the orange and white cat hunkered under an ancient washing machine covered with a flapping tarp.
A half mile to the west, Robert Prichard’s TV antenna was torn off the roof and flung into a stand of rotting rabbit hutches. It was briefly trapped among the hutches, then hurled down the slope behind the two-room house. It landed near a pile of stones dug from the black soil more than a century ago by someone wanting a corn patch, and came to rest on a maverick narcissus in full bloom.
Scornful of calendar dates or seasonal punctuality, spring was announcing its approach on the blue mountain ridges above the green river valley.
He hurried down the stairs, mindful of the honking of Canada geese flying over the house to the farm pond.
“Alleluia!” he said, struck by the scene in the kitchen window. The sill was lined with blue Mason jars of tulips: crimson, purple, buttery yellow, pink with splashes of lime green.
“They began opening this morning, I’m painting them like mad.” His wife, who sat on her stool at the easel by the window, had a fetching daub of red on her chin. “Be off with you, Father, your deacon is busy at her own calling.”
“Sammy’s getting his seed in pots down at the shed. Thought I’d blow in to see him, then I’m off to Holy Trinity. Agnes and I need to get our act together for teaching the prayer book. Also need to figure out what to do about our covered dish if the rain keeps up.”
“The Weather Channel says rain through Saturday. But in case it’s wrong, there’s a folding table in the furnace room. I think it would fit behind the back pews.”
“The Lord be with you, dearest!” She squinted at the stroke of color she was brushing onto the paper.
“And also with you!”
Nothing like a good, sound, liturgical send-off, he thought, noting a new spring in his step.
His mackintosh hung, dripping, on a nail as he stood and watched Sammy deftly tuck seeds into the black potting medium.
“‘Is here’s t’maters.”
“How many plants will we put in?”
“I figure eight.”
“There’ll be you, Dooley, Willie, Blake, Cynthia, and myself, and we all like tomatoes. Will eight plants be enough?”
“Way enough. This here’s p-peppers. An’ ’at’s eggplant. I s-sure ain’t eatin’ it, but Cynthia said you’uns do.”
“What about cucumbers and squash?”
“Th’ seed goes right in th’ ground.”
“Thank God for Lon Burtie. And for you, Sammy.”
“You know I got t’ bring all ’is stuff to th’ house an’ keep a grow light on it.Th’ f-furnace room would work. Got t’ have light ‘n’ heat.”
“You’re a wonder,” he said, meaning it.
Sammy shrugged.
“What do you remember about Kenny?”
Sammy recited the liturgy of the Barlowe family. “Mama give ‘im away f’r a g-gallon of whisky.”
“Anything else?”
“Dooley said th’ man that took ’im was n-named Ed Sikes.”
“Dooley thinks Kenny would be eighteen.”
“Kenny’s t-two years older’n me. So, y-y-yeah.”
“Anything special about his looks? Does he look like you and Dooley and Poo?”
“He 1-1-looks more like ... you know.”
“Your dad.”
“But he has hair like us.”
“What else?”
“He’s sh-shorter’n me.”
The vicar chuckled. “Who isn’t?”
“He’s got a big ol’ m-mole on ’is face ...” Sammy thought. “On ‘is left cheek. An’ ‘e’s got a big ol’ m-mole on ‘is back, too. He’d m-make me scratch ’is back an’ said he’d whip me good if I scratched ’is m-mole—but he didn’t mean it, he was jis’ jivin’.”
“You know what I believe?”
“What?”
“I believe Kenny will find us, or we’ll find him. I’m actually expecting that. But in the end, I have to let it all go to God; it’s really His job.”
“He ain’t doin’ too g-good, if y’ ask m-me.”
“Consider this. The Bible tells us that two sparrows once sold for a penny. Yet, one of them shall not fall to the ground without His knowing—and caring. If He cares about a sparrow, I’m inclined to believe He cares about me—and you—even more. How many hairs are on your head?”
Sammy made a face; he shrugged.
“God knows how many. Jesus says so, Himself—‘The very hairs of your head are all numbered.’”
“I ain’t believin’ ’at.”
“Here’s the deal. He made you. He cares about you. He loves you. He wants the best for you.” Father Tim was quiet for moment; this was a lot to take in, even, sometimes, for himself.
“And because of all that, He even has a plan for you, for your life. That’s why we can trust Him to do what’s best when we pray the prayer that never fails.”