by Jan Karon
They walked out to the porch and looked across the pasture and up to the hills. The sun was disappearing behind a ridge.
“How’s Sadie?” asked Absalom.
“Never better, I think. She has a heart like yours.”
“Well ...” said the old preacher, gazing at the hills. They stood on the porch for a moment, silent.
Absalom Greer had passed a torch, and Father Tim had taken it. The only problem was, he had no idea what to do with it.
He was fixing dinner as Dooley stood at the kitchen door, staring into the yard. Cynthia looked up from setting the table and walked over and put her hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off.
“What is it, Dools?”
“Nothin‘.”
“Why won’t you talk to us, be with your family for the two days you’ve got left of your school break?”
Dooley turned around and they saw that his face was white with anger. “You’re not my family. I don’t have a family.”
He stalked from the kitchen, slamming the door behind him.
On Saturday, Cynthia popped through the hedge for an early call from her editor, so he hot-footed it to the Grill, with Barnabas on the red leash. Advent was coming up, and still no snow, or promise of snow. Perhaps they would have a white Christmas—but, God forbid, not a blizzard like the one that paralyzed them last winter.
He took his cup off the hook at the counter and poured his own coffee. “Poached,” he said to Percy, who was flipping bacon on the grill. Percy frowned. He had never liked doing poached, which he considered too time-consuming.
In the rear booth, Mule was reading the paper, printed on the Muse presses overhead. “How’d we get th‘ pleasure of your company this morning?”
“I lost the pleasure of my wife’s company,” said the rector.
“I know th‘ feelin’. Fancy was up doin‘ highlights and a perm at six-thirty.” He folded the Muse and laid it on the table. “You see J.C.’s story?”
“ ‘Getting to Know Your MPD,’ I think he called it.”
“He drove around in a squad car for a couple of days, gathering material.”
“Very readable,” said the rector. “Well done. Anybody seen the new police officer?”
“You mean th‘ woman?”
“Right.”
“Fills out ‘er uniform pretty good. She was in here before you, picked up a coffee with cream and sugar. Forty, if she’s a day. Name’s Adele Lynwood.”
“Where’s J.C.?” wondered Father Tim.
“Gettin‘ barbered. I saw him leggin’ it up th‘ steps to Joe Ivey an hour ago. Speakin’ of which, you’re lookin‘ a little lank around th’ collar.”
“Always drumming up business for Fancy. If she did as much for your real estate interests, you’d be rolling in dough.”
“I call it like I see it, and you could use a trim.”
“Man!” said J.C., sliding into the booth. “He shaved me for boot camp.”
“That’s Joe’s deal,” said Mule. “Take it all off at one whack. Fancy’s of the new school. She believes in trimmin‘ a little at a time. More natural.”
“And more money,” said J.C., wiping his face with a paper napkin. “Six bucks here, six bucks there. Joe gives you fifteen dollars’ worth for five.”
“And sends you out needin‘ a hat to keep your head warm,” said Mule.
Given the surprised, newly hatched look of J. C. Hogan, the rector thought he might dodge Joe Ivey this time and step over to Fancy’s himself.
“Good story,” said the rector. “One of the best in some time. I didn’t know the chief played minor league baseball.”
“Nobody else did, except his mama and daddy, and maybe his wife.”
“Journalism at its best!” announced Mule.
Percy poured a round of coffee and eyed J.C. “What’ll it be?”
“Give me a bowl of Wheaties, skim milk, a cup of yogurt, and dry toast ... whole wheat.”
There was a stunned silence. “Call nine-one-one!” said Mule.
Percy dug a finger in his ear. “Am I goin‘ deef?”
“And snap to it,” said J.C. “I could eat a horse.”
Mule blew on his coffee. “You’ll have to drink a saucer of grease to let your stomach know it’s you.”
“Why didn’t you come to the Feast?” asked the rector.
“Too much carryin‘ on.”
“You could use a little carrying on, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t ask you,” said J.C.
One thing he could say for his collar—it never earned him any respect at the Grill.
After breakfast, he walked out with Mule and untied Barnabas from the bench.
“I don’t get it,” said the Realtor. “Clean tie. Haircut ...”
“Dry toast. Skim milk ...” mused the rector, shaking his head.
“I just thought ... we’ve been wondering ... is anything going on at school that we should know about? Dooley’s not himself, not at all.”
“Glad you asked,” said the headmaster, who promised he didn’t mind being rung up on a holiday. “I thought the trip home might do him good, so I didn’t say anything.”
“Say anything about what?” He was afraid to know.
“About what happened. He made friends with one of the boys, one of the ... disadvantaged boys, if you will, and he talked to him about his family, about his mother and what happened to his brothers and sisters. I think it was hard for him to talk to someone about this. I think it plagues him a good deal. The bottom line is, Dooley spilled his guts to the boy, and the boy betrayed him. He told it around school.”
Dear God. So that was what had chilled Dooley to the bone and hardened his heart all over again.
“While we’re at it,” said the headmaster, “Dooley was caught smoking on the grounds. This put his name on a roster that’s posted in the hall for all to see. He’s also skipped chapel a couple of times. Not a good start. He mustn’t think that’s a way to make a name for himself around here. I’ve spent a bit of time with him, Father, he’s got strong potential. But there may be equally strong liabilities.”
“What can I do?”
“Well, for one thing, you can increase his allowance, if it seems appropriate. Even with the few students from lower economic backgrounds, this is a school for the privileged, and there’s no getting around it. He sees the boys buy expensive school sweatshirts or take off on weekend field trips to Washington, and his allowance doesn’t stretch that far. Perhaps the generous woman who’s sending him here would—”
“What kind of money are we talking about?”
“A hundred and fifty dollars a month. I think that’s fair.”
“Consider it done,” he said.
After the phone conversation, he stared out his office window. He had to hand it to Dooley Barlowe. The boy had never once complained about his allowance, and only once had he asked for money.
He took his checkbook out of his jacket and sighed. Then he called home. Dooley answered.
“I’m taking you to Wesley for a cheeseburger,” he said.
“I don’t want a cheeseburger.”
“I’ll pick you up in ten minutes. Flat.”
Shelling out a hundred and fifty bucks a month did not put him in the mood to mince words.
Sitting in the fast-food restaurant, he laid the check on the table and went over the program.
“Get caught smoking again, and you’re back to what you’ve been getting. Got it?”
No answer.
“Got it?”
“Yeah.”
“No yeah.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Another thing. Skip chapel again and you blow off seventy-five bucks a month. Period.”
Dooley looked at him.
“I’ve talked with Dr. Fleming and I know what happened. Hear me on this. Your friends will betray you. Not all your friends, but some of your friends. That’s life. Let it teach you this: You mustn’t betray your friends. Ever.”
“I could kick his guts out.”
“You could. But for what?”
Dooley stared out the window.
“You can make it or break it in that school. You can stick in there and obey the rules and suck it up and learn something, or you can come crawling home for the world to know you couldn’t hack it up there with the big guys.
“Listen, pal, life is tough. School’s no picnic. But you’ll be home again at Christmas. That’s not far away. Take it a little at a time. A little at a time. You’re going to be OK up there. I promise.”
Dooley wadded his burger wrapper into a ball and lobbed it into a trash can.
“You said the other day you don’t have a family. That hurt. It made us feel rotten. I want you to know that. The truth is, you do have a family, because we love you and care for you and we’re sticking with you, no matter what. That’s family.”
Dooley dropped his gaze. “I didn’t mean it,” he said.
“I know you didn’t. Go call Tommy and ask if he wants us to bring him a cheeseburger, and does he want waffle fries or seasoned.”
It was only there for a moment, but he saw it—Dooley Barlowe couldn’t fool him. It was an instant of happiness in the boy’s eyes, something like hope or relief.
He’d pop a load of Dooley’s laundry in the machine, then swing by Winnie Ivey’s for a sack of donuts to take on the trip back to school tomorrow. A bitterly cold wind was gusting through the village.
“I wish I could go with you to take Dooley,” Cynthia said. “I hate to see him leave.”
“Ummm.”
“Did you hear me?” she asked, peering at him.
“What’s that?”
“Sometimes you’re a thousand miles away.”
He grinned. “The rest of me is a stick-in-the-mud, but my mind has always liked to wander. Living alone so many years didn’t help matters any.”
“A likely story.”
“I’ll try to do better, I promise. What are you up to today?” His wife, he knew, was always up to something.
“I’m mending two of Dooley’s shirts and then working on an illustration of bluebirds in a nest.”
“Your new book is about bluebirds?” Things had been so frantic, they hadn’t found a chance to discuss her book.
“I think so,” she said, “but I’m not sure, yet. I feel it should open with bluebirds, but I don’t know if it’s about bluebirds.”
Sounded like the way he wrote his sermons.
“I’ve always wondered what it’s like to be a bird—soaring around in the clouds, sleeping in trees. I think children would want to know that. All we see from the ground is that lovely, winged freedom. But they must have perils and scrambles like the rest of us, don’t you think?” She peered at him over her glasses.
“I’m inclined to think so, yes.”
“I can hardly wait ‘til spring to go out with my sketchbook,” she said, getting that abstracted look in her eyes.
“Ummm.”
“I hope you’ll come with me! You can exegete Jeremiah while I draw birds.”
“I’d rather draw a bird any day than exegete Jeremiah!” he said with feeling.
“By the way, dearest, what’s blooming around the rectory in May?”
“Let’s see. A fine grove of white mountain trillium, a border of primroses which are pretty showy ... and there’s lily of the valley, of course, a side yard full.”
“Perfect!”
As he kissed her goodbye, he was struck again by the endlessly compelling blue of her eyes. Would he one day take them for granted, or would they always draw him in like this?
He was unplugging the coffeepot on Monday morning when he heard Puny let herself in the front door.
She came down the hall at a trot and disappeared into the downstairs bathroom, where she remained for some time. When she came out, he was leaving for the hospital.
He couldn’t help seeing that she was an odd green color—something in the mint family, to be precise.
“Good heavens, Puny, what is it?”
She sighed. “Remember I said Joe Joe and me won’t be in any hurry to have babies?”
“Yes. I remember that.”
“Well, we forgot to remember,” she said, looking ghastly.
CHAPTER FIVE
A Close Call
IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN a nest of copperheads, for the cold dread he felt when seeing the boxes left by UPS on Emma’s desk.
“Get it off my desk,” she said, her shoulders rigid.
“Where would we put it? The shower stall is filled with everything from 1928 prayer books to the office Christmas wreath.”
“Set it on the visitor’s bench.”
“But we usually have visitors.” Why couldn’t the people it came from have kept the blasted thing ‘til they were ready to install it?
She turned and eyed his desk, a cue that he ignored.
“Put it on the floor, then,” she said with disgust. “In front of your bookcase.”
“Then we can’t open the front door all the way.”
“You ought to see the nice preacher’s office at First Baptist,” she said, glaring around their nine-by-ten-foot confinement. “Enough room for a bowling alley!”
He saw it coming—the Baptist preacher’s office would grow into a stadium, a coliseum, the Parthenon.
“Emma,” he said, “why don’t you take the day off?”
He was sure someone would be around tomorrow to plug it in.
Or whatever.
But nobody came on the morrow.
Reluctantly, he read what was printed on the boxes: 420 drive megabytes. Eight megabytes of ram. PCI architecture. He might have been reading Serbian. If you couldn’t make sense of the box, he reasoned, what sense could you make of its contents?
“Put it in your car,” said Emma. “You could put it in mine, but Harold’s storing hay in the backseat.”
“Hay?”
“It’s wrapped up with old blankets to keep from makin‘ a mess, you can’t tell it’s hay. He wanted to keep it dry and didn’t have any room left in that little barn he built.”
“Aha.”
“Just stick it in your trunk, if it’ll fit.”
He had to hand it to her—Emma Newland could come up with a really good idea once in a while.
“Don’t worry,” he told her as he hauled the largest box out the door, “somebody said a child could operate it.”
He knew he was repeating a barefaced lie, told by someone who foolishly believed clergy to be ignorant of reality and bereft of common sense.
“Hello, Rodney!”
He hadn’t had a call from the Mitford police chief in quite a while, not since they’d done all that business together before his trip to Ireland.
During the dognapping of Barnabas that had led to the drug bust, and the drama of the jewel thief who had lived in the church attic and turned himself in during a Sunday service, he’d seen Rodney Underwood nearly every day for a couple of months.
“Father, I need to talk to you about somethin‘. We could meet at the Grill—or how about me comin’ by your office?” Rodney sounded worried.
“Why don’t I come by your office? I haven’t been there in a while. Got anybody I can visit, while I’m at it?”
“Not a soul. I released a DUI this mornin‘. We’ve done cleaned th’ cell and mopped th‘ floor.” Rodney was the only police chief he’d ever heard of who kept house like a barracks sergeant and provided back issues of Southern Living for inmates.
At the station, Rodney met him at the door. “Looks like marriage is treatin‘ you right.”
“It is, thank you.”
“How’s Dooley? I been meanin‘ to ask.”
“Fine. Doing great.”
“Not gettin‘ the big head, is he?”
If there was anything the village didn’t want Dooley to get, it was the big head. “Let that be the least of your concerns.”
Rodney took him into his office and closed th
e door. “It’s Miss Sadie,” he said, hitching up his gun belt.
He distinctly felt his heart skip a beat. “What happened?”
Rodney sat on the corner of his desk and invited the rector to take a chair. “She’s done run that Plymouth up on the sidewalk one time too many.
“You know I’ve closed my eyes and looked the other way ever since I stepped into this job—but only where Miss Sadie’s concerned. She’s th‘ only one I’d look th’ other way for.”
The rector nodded. If there was ever an honest man, it was Rodney Underwood.
“Drivin‘ up on th’ sidewalk ain’t goin‘ to hack it from here out. This mornin’, she hauled up in front of The Local so close you’d bust out the store window if you opened the passenger door. I mean, we got new people movin‘ in here, it’s not just homefolks anymore. These are modern times. Why, there’s somebody from Los Angelees, California, livin’ on Grassy Creek Road.”
“I’ll be darned.”
“The way I figure it, that car rolled off the line when Eisenhower was in office. If it hit a Toyota, it’d send it all the way to Wesley—air express. Another thing. She hugs th‘ yellow line like it was laid out for her to personally run on. People scatter like chickens when they see her comin’ in that Sherman tank.”
The police chief looked closely at the rector, to be sure he was getting the point. Clearly, he wasn’t. “What I’m sayin‘ is, she’s got to do better or we got to get her off th’ street.”
“Aha.” He didn’t want to hear this, no indeed, he liked things to go along smoothly, business as usual. Sadie Baxter had been driving up on the sidewalk for years. What was the big deal?
“My men have spoke to her twice, but it ain’t sinkin‘ in. Next time, we’re givin’ her a citation. And if she don’t do better then, I’m turnin‘ her in to th’ MVB for reevaluation.”
“Can you discuss it with her?” asked the rector, knowing the answer already.
“That’s what I’d like you to do, Father.”
“I hate to meddle,” he said, knowing full well that he would have to do it, anyway. Actually, someone once told him that meddling was his job. Godly meddling, they’d called it, though it hardly ever felt godly to him.