A Light in the Window

by Jan Karon

  The superintendent took a long drag off his cigarette and inhaled deeply. "Sit down," he said.

  Leeper swung his feet onto the desktop and crossed his legs. In your face, his muddy boots seemed to say, but the rector sat across the desk from them, unflinching.

  "You probably need to know I don't like preachers."

  "You wouldn't be the first."

  "This hill is not a missionary field."

  "I'm offduty." That was a lie, but he told it, anyway.

  "My granddaddy was a preacher," Buck said, narrowing his eyes.

  "So was mine. Baptist,"

  "Ditto."

  "Did you know your grandfather?"

  "Never knew him. Heard about him all my life. Nothin' good." He stubbed his cigarette in the ashtray.

  "Your dad's father?"

  Leeper toyed with a silver lighter, and the rector saw where his fingers were missing. "Yeah. He turned my old man into the meanest preacher's kid in Mississippi."

  "You're from Mississippi?"

  "Born and bred."

  "Same here."

  Leeper barked an expletive. "Small world."

  "What part?".

  "Northeast. Booneville."

  "Holly Springs," said the rector. "Forty miles from Booneville, as the crow flies,"

  Another expletive and an odd laugh. "Son of a gun."

  Leeper glanced at his watch.

  "Maybe you'll join us at the rectory for dinner—one of these days."

  The superintendent pulled a cigarette from an open pack in his shirt pocket. He lit it with the lighter and inhaled. "I don't think so."

  "Drop by the office, then, for a cup of coffee...anytime."

  Leeper suddenly got to his feet and walked to the door, where he took a jacket and hard hat off the hook. The rector followed him.

  "That redheaded kid yours?"

  "Dooley?"

  "I don't know his name. Tell him if he comes messin' around on this job again, I'll kick his butt. That goes for his sidekick, too."

  "They..."

  "Tell him I mean business. You can get killed out there."

  Leeper opened the door. The machinery vibrated the trailer as if it were a toy. "Got to get to th' hole," he said, putting on his hat. "Some people have to work in this town."

  Springtime was on its way, no doubt about it.

  Hessie Mayhew's gardening column made its annual reappearance in the Muse, under a photograph of the author taken thirty years ago. The first column of the season always disclosed Lady Spring's current whereabouts.

  It seemed she was tarrying on a bed of moss and violets down the mountain, where the temperature was a full ten degrees warmer.

  Do not look for her, Hessie cautioned, for she never arrives until we've given up hope. Once you've sunk into despair over yet another snowfall in April or a hard freeze after planting your beans, she will suddenly appear in a glorious display of Miss Baxter's apple blossoms—not to mention lilacs along south Main Street and wild hyacinths on the creek bank near Winnie Ivey's dear cottage.

  Lest anyone forget what a wild hyacinth looked like, Hessie had done a drawing from memory that J.C. reproduced with startling clarity.

  The old sexton was sitting in a chintz-covered armchair, fixing Betty Craig's alarm clock. The contents of the clock were scattered over the top of a lamp table.

  "You look comfortable," said his caller, sitting on the side of the bed.

  "Dadgum clock's been stuck on high noon since I moved in here. How are you, Father?"

  "Fine as frog hair."

  Russell Jacks laughed and emitted a racking cough. "Lord have mercy," he said, his eyes watering.

  "Might as well tell you straight out, Russell. We've found somebody to look after the gardens. He's not your caliber, not by a long shot. I don't think there are any true gardeners left out there for hire. But we had to have help, and it's going to take time for you to knit. When the doctor gives you a clean bill of health, we'll put you back. How's that?"

  "Fair enough. I thought I could hold on t' my job, but I cain't. I'm tryin' to help Miss Betty all I can. How's our boy? Is he troublin' you?"

  "No, sir. Not a bit." His heart sank. Here goes, he thought. "Russell, I was wondering if you'd agree to...if you'd let us send him off to a fine school next fall, where'd he learn more, think harder..."

  "Send 'im off?"

  "Maybe to Virginia. Close by. You and I could drive up once in a while to see him, and he'd come home for holidays."

  Russell studied two small clock springs in the palm of his hand, silent. Finally, he said, "What do you want t' do, Father?"

  "I don't want him to go. I'd like to keep him right here in Mitford, but we have an opportunity. Someone is offering to pay his tuition, give him a once-in-a-lifetime chance." He stared at the rug, feeling a chill in the room. "I think we should let him go."

  "I want t' do what you want t' do," said Russell.

  "I'll bring the papers when the time comes."

  His heart felt heavy as a brick when he left Betty Craig's house, and he hadn't even gotten to the hard part yet.

  He got no providential word on what to do about Edith Mallory. And he had exhausted every foolish possibility he could think of.

  What was the worst scenario?

  He could go and talk to her—plead for the continuity, the history, the tradition of the Grill and the place it occupied in the heart of the village. Then he thought of he: hand on his leg or being trapped in that blasted car at a speed that did not warrant leaping to safety.

  If Percy Mosely and Mule Skinner and J.C. Hogan and Ron Malcolm knew what they'd asked of him, they would never have asked it. After all, they were friends. A man wouldn't ask this of his worst enemy.

  Of course, all they expected him to do was give it a shot, just one. Nobody said he should keep going back for punishment.

  They tried to puff him up by saying how Edith would listen to anything he said, do anything he wanted. To hear them talk, he might have been the pope. But he saw through it; they didn't fool him. While they had aimed straight for his ego, he'd seen it coming—and ducked.

  On Sunday, Ron dragged him to the country club after church, while Dooley begged to go home and make a sandwich and ride bikes with Tommy.

  He saw Buck Leeper at a table in the corner, eating with a man in a business suit.

  "The honcho," said Ron. "Came to check on the job. They're here as my guests. I figured you wouldn't care to join them."

  "I went up to see Mr. Leeper the other day."

  "No kidding."

  "We were born forty miles apart—in Mississippi."

  "I'll be darned. Amazing. What did he think of that?"

  The rector repeated what the superintendent had said, expletive and all. "End of quote."

  Ron laughed heartily. In fact, he hadn't gouged such a good laugh out of anybody since the opening remarks of a recent sermon on spiritual apathy.

  "We'll drop by the table on the way out. You'll like Emil Kettner. Devout. Solid. He's protective of Buck, views him as a real cornerstone of the company."

  "What does he think about his drinking...about the way he pushes himself?"

  "He knows it. He keeps after him—makes it mandatory for him to get a physical every six months."

  "The goose that laid the golden egg..."

  "In a way. But it's more than that. I think Emil loves the son of a gun."

  Andrew Gregory stopped to say hello, appearing, as far as the rector could determine, more charming than the last time he'd seen him. His mother's warm Italian blood had clearly fought it out with his father's English reserve and won.

  "I have a book you might enjoy looking over. Very early. Splendid engravings, gorgeous binding. Drop by for coffee one morning. Ron, I hope you'll do the same. For you, a book on bridges. German. Eighteenth-century."

  "Consider it done," said the rector.

  "I'll look forward to it," said the retired building contractor. "Who knows what you migh
t learn from an old book?"

  "Our priest and our building committee chairman!" exclaimed Edith Mallory. He thought she swooped down at their table like a crow into a cornfield.

  "Hello, hello!" she said. Both men stood. "Edith..."

  "Timothy, I thought your sermon was excellent. Believe me, I needed to hear all you had to say about fear. I was absolutely eaten up with it for days when I was waiting for the tests to come back. I loved what you said about—what did you call it, the prayer of re...re..."

  "Relinquishment."

  "Yes! Just turn it all over. Give it to God."

  "How are you feeling?"

  "Great! Never better. Can't you tell?" She grasped his hand, and he saw that her blouse was cut considerably lower than he'd noticed at the church door an hour ago.

  Seeing Ron Malcolm gaping like a boy, she fingered a diamond pendant at her neck. "A little momentum Pat gave me," she crooned.

  "Aha..."

  "I can tell you're having boy talk, so I'll get back to my veal chop. I'll call you sometime tomorrow, Timothy—just a weensy thing I'd like to get settled before I go to Spain in May. Hasta vista!"

  Ron shook his head as she walked away. "There for a minute, I thought she was going to have you for lunch—forget the veal."

  He felt queasy. "That crowd at the Grill is sticking me between a rock and a hard place."

  "Don't I know it?" his friend said, grinning.

  Buck Leeper had disappeared toward the men's room as they got up to leave. Ron introduced the rector to Emil Kettner and was snared by the club treasurer for a five-minute meeting.

  Kettner was a big man, cordial, with steel-gray hair, steel-rimmed glasses, and penetrating blue eyes.

  The two men sat over a cup of coffee.

  "Well, Father, I hope Buck isn't more than you bargained for."

  "He is, actually."

  They laughed.

  "I like your candor. Of course he is. I don't know how we get away with sending him to certain jobs. But then, we couldn't get away with not sending him. This is a big project, Hope House."

  "Agreed."

  "I'm here to look it over, check it out. It's a courtesy to your building committee. The job is humming like a top." He paused. "Buck has it in for clergy, you may have noticed."

  "I think I noticed, yes."

  "His grandfather was a preacher who was brutal to his son. It passed right on down the line. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children..."

  "...unto the third and fourth generation," said the rector, completing the scripture from the Book of Numbers.

  "Buck's work is the one place he doesn't fail or mess up. There's not a better man in the business."

  "I believe you."

  "I make no excuses for him. But something happened to him a long time ago, while he was still in Mississippi. Nobody back here ever got the gist of it, exactly. Some loss, something tragic. He felt responsible. That's all I know."

  "Thanks for your candor."

  "Thanks for your understanding. I'm going to walk over the job again, then bust out of here to Memphis." He took a business card from his jacket pocket. "I'm at your disposal if you need me."

  The superintendent came back to the table, grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair, and nodded curtly to Father Tim.

  "Let's hump it," he said to Emil Kettner.

  "I've got it," J.C. announced on Monday morning. "I was up 'til two a.m. trying to knock this thing in the head. This is it. This'll work."

  Mule caught Percy's attention. "Can you step here a minute, buddyroe? J.C. says he's got it knocked."

  Percy came over from the grill. "Make it snappy. I got enough bacon goin' to feed a camp meetin'."

  J.C. took out a handkerchief and wiped his face. "Didn't ol' Pat Mallory come draggin' in here every morning of his life after he retired? Didn't he think he'd died and gone to heaven every time he ate Percy's sausage with Velma's biscuits? Didn't he hole up in that first booth and read the paper 'til it fell apart? I was pacin' the floor last night when boom—it hit me."

  J.C. paused and looked at his listeners. "We change the name to Pat's Grill. Anybody's widow would go for that one." He sat back as if he'd divested himself of the brightest idea since sliced bread. "What do you think?"

  "Over my dead body," said Percy. He threw his hand towel over his shoulder and stalked back to the bacon.

  "Oh, well," said Mule.

  "Dadgummit," snorted the editor.

  "Good try," said the rector. For a few blissful moments, their eyes had been on J.C. Hogan. Now, every head once again swiveled in his direction.

  They waited for the crowd to thin out, so Percy could have a cup of coffee with the rear booth. "Kind of like sittin' up with the dead," said Mule.

  "Do you think you'll get a rent hike for upstairs?" Father Tim asked J.C.

  "I got the letter yesterday. No rent hike, but I can't run my presses 'til after seven o'clock at night. That burned me. I thought this was th' land of the/ree press."

  "Shouldn't be any skin off your nose," said Mule. "You never ran your presses 'til after seven o'clock, anyway. Midnight's more like it."

  "Whenever I bloomin' well please should be the big idea here," said J.C. "She also said the stairs to the Grill would be blocked off and I'd have to use the back entrance." He wiped his face with his handkerchief. "Witch on a dadgum broom..."

  "Who'd want t' walk down th' steps into a shop full of women, anyway?" said Mule.

  J.C. looked around the quiet room. "Where's Percy?"

  "Down th' hatch," said the rector. "I saw him go down there a minute ago."

  "What's this going to do to Velma? We know it'll kill Percy, so that's th' end of that deal," J.C. said.

  Mule drained his coffee cup. "Velma said she'd have to go to work. They've got savings, but not much. You know how they've done with their kids, settin' 'em up in college, buyin' one that little house..."

  "Here he comes," said the rector.

  Percy slid in with a coffee mug, looking glum. "On top of everything else, my back's out. Not only that, they shipped me white grits instead of yellow—I can't sell white grits."

  "Just want you to know I've been talking with someone who handles real estate," the rector told Percy. "I believe he's got the perfect place for the Grill, whether it's right here...or out there."

  "Who is it?" Mule scowled.

  The rector grinned. "God."

  "Oh," said Mule.

  "He's th' very one that put my daddy in this buildin' fifty-two years ago," Percy said, brightening. "They claimed my daddy was crazy to go to feedin' people with a war on. But he was a prayin' man, and when th' good Lord opened th' door of opportunity, my daddy walked through it and went to cookin'. Bread was fifteen cents a loaf, tomatoes was four cents a pound, and rent was ten dollars a month."

  "Oleo margarine," said Mule, "was white, came in a plastic bag with a little colored capsule in there. You popped that capsule and out oozed this colored stuff and you mashed it all around in that bag 'til it colored your oleo and you thought you had butter."

  "Don't think I haven't prayed a time or two myself," Percy said, "especially in '74. There was a whole week when th' single biggest ticket I wrote was for a friedegg sandwich and a Baby Ruth candy bar."

  The conversation slacked off, and they all looked at the rector.

  "I've got to get out of here," he said, meaning it.

  "When are you goin' to do it?" asked Mule. "Today."

  He planned everything he'd say when she called about the "weensy" matter she mentioned. He also worked out what he'd say when they drove to lunch...in his car.

  He wrote it all down, working on it like a sermon. Then he paced the floor, speaking his lines.

  He would plead for a dramatic reduction of the proposed rent hike, stating that the Grill had a been a faithful, long-term lessor who had paid its rent on time and never asked for anything more than a little paint and a new toilet. What would a dress shop demand? Every
thing from wallpaper to carpet, not to mention the repair of the water stain on the ceiling that had been spreading like a storm cloud ever since the blizzard.

  If she wouldn't budge on the rent hike, then he'd plead for more time, to the end of June, say, until Percy found another situation.

  In case she called, he didn't go out for lunch but drank a Diet Sprite and ate a package of crackers. He dusted his bookshelves, tried writing a note to Cynthia but failed, and wrote notes instead to some of the kids at Children's Hospital. Since he refused to let Emma get call waiting, he made no calls in case Edith tried to get through and was brief with whoever phoned the office.

  He wanted to be ready, and he was ready; he was champing at the bit. He even found two positive things he could say to Edith Mallory about herself and wrote them down in case he forgot what they were.

  He would ask her to lunch in Wesley, tomorrow, at that place with the green tablecloths—and he'd give it everything he had, once and for all.

  As for strategy, he would keep it simple. And—he would stay in control.

  There was just one problem.

  She never called.

  •CHAPTER FOURTEEN•

  He waited two days.

  When she didn't call, he called her. Magdolen said she'd gone to Florida unexpectedly, something about old business of Mr. Mallory's. No, she didn't know when Miss Edith was coming back, and yes, she was going to Spain in May, the minute that new shop moved into her building on Main Street.

  He asked for her number in Florida and carried it around in his pocket like a hot potato.

  He also dodged the Grill.

  Thumpetythumpetythumpthumpthumpthumpety...

  He pounded on her door. "Cousin Meg!"

  Silence.

  "Blast it, move your typewriter off the floor!"

  He had turned away from the door when she opened it a crack and glared out at him. "If you don't mind," she said, "I work better on the floor. I cannot think in a chair."

  A chair isn't the only place you can't think, he said to himself. He turned and looked at her. "Off the floor."

  It must be hard to slam a door when it had been opened less than three inches.