A Distant Music

by BJ Hoff

  “You’re feeling bad again?” she said.

  Summer nodded and then made a face. “Mama says it’s because I played out in the rain. She threatened to switch me,” she said with a weak grin, “but she didn’t really mean it. I could tell.”

  To save her, Maggie couldn’t imagine the good-humored Mrs. Rankin taking a switch to Summer—or to anyone else for that matter. Summer’s mother never seemed to get overly cross with any of her young’uns, though she had been known to throw a frying pan at Summer’s da now and again when he riled her.

  They talked some about school, but Maggie did most of the talking. She could tell that her friend was feeling a lot more poorly than she let on.

  She waited until last to tell Summer about the plight of Mrs. Hunnicutt and the Crawfords and the embarrassing attempt to take up a collection for them. Finally, she explained about the vote that was to be taken the next day. Even though it was plain that Summer wouldn’t be back in school by then, Maggie asked her opinion on the matter.

  “According to Kenny, we ought to ‘vote our conscience,’” she said. “But I don’t rightly know what my conscience is telling me to do. I feel real sorry for the Widow Hunnicutt. And even though it’s kind of hard to feel sorry for Dinah and Duril, I wouldn’t want the new Crawford baby to go hungry. But the whole purpose of the collection was to buy a flute for Mr. Stuart. And if we don’t do it soon—”

  She broke off. For the second time that day, she had caught herself thinking that Mr. Stuart’s time might be limited. Maggie wasn’t superstitious—her da said it was a sin to pay heed to such pagan notions—but still and all some things were probably best left unsaid.

  Summer seemed to understand. She nodded, pushing herself up a little more on the pillows propped behind her.

  “So, what do you think?” Maggie asked her directly. “If you were to vote tomorrow, what would you do, do you reckon?”

  Summer looked at her and then glanced away, staring at something outside the window, her fingers plucking at some loose threads on the quilt in a kind of even rhythm, over and over again. Maggie shivered. Picking at the bedclothes was known to be a bad omen. Indeed, some of the old folks claimed it was a sign that a body’s end was near.

  Shaken, she forced herself to look away. “Well, what do you think?” she asked again, her tongue thick. “How would you vote?”

  A thought struck her then, and without waiting for Summer’s reply, Maggie brought up Mr. Stuart’s suggestion about “giving something of themselves” instead of money.

  “Now, it seems to me,” Maggie said, more to herself at this point than to Summer, “that we could use the collection to buy a flute for Mr. Stuart and do something else—like some chores around the house—for Mrs. Hunnicutt and the Crawfords.”

  When Summer made no reply, she added, “After all, Mr. Stuart said that ‘giving of yourself’ can be just as good as giving money. Sometimes even better. He said it’s like giving God a gift too.”

  The more Maggie thought about it, the more she believed she had found the perfect solution. It wasn’t as if it was her idea, after all. Mr. Stuart was the one who had brought it up in the first place.

  Summer turned to look at her. The flush to her skin had deepened, and the smudges below her eyes were so dark that she appeared to be bruised.

  A peculiar feeling crept over Maggie. It was as if someone had poured an icy dipper of water down her back. Without knowing exactly why, she suddenly felt afraid. Afraid—and mortal foolish for giving in to the fear.

  The feeling passed when Summer spoke. “I reckon if I was to vote tomorrow,” she said, her voice so soft Maggie had to lean forward to hear her better, “I’d first try to figure out what Mr. Stuart would do.”

  Maggie stared at her. “What do you mean? Mr. Stuart doesn’t even know about the collection.”

  “But if he did know, what do you think he would tell us to do?”

  Maggie shrugged, impatient with a question that seemed to have nothing to do with their present predicament.

  Again Summer turned to look out the window. The afternoon light was almost gone, and it had begun to snow, large heavy flakes that drifted down like a curtain falling over the gloom of evening.

  “I recollect,” Summer said in the same quiet voice, “Mr. Stuart teaching us that when we have a hard thing to decide we need to try and reason what Jesus would do. He says if we try to follow Jesus, we won’t ever go wrong.”

  The brief speech seemed to have exhausted her, and she closed her eyes. Maggie could hear the wheeze and rattle coming from deep inside Summer’s chest, and she worried that all the talking might bring on another bad coughing fit.

  But after a moment, Summer opened her eyes and said, “I can’t always think what Jesus would do. Sometimes I don’t even know where to look in my Bible to find out. Those times, I just watch Mr. Stuart real close and try to imagine what he would do.”

  At Maggie’s frown, Summer twisted onto her side toward her. “See, I think Mr. Stuart lives like Jesus wants us to live. Sometimes I almost think I can see Jesus…living…in Mr. Stuart and looking out from his eyes. So I reckon if I do what I think Mr. Stuart would do, then I’ll most likely do the right thing.”

  Maggie’s stomach knotted. Now it was she who was plucking at the bedclothes as she sat watching her friend.

  “I expect,” Summer went on, “that Mr. Stuart would give whatever he had to someone who needed help.”

  She appeared to be exceedingly tired and ill, and her voice had taken on a rasp. But she smiled, brightening a little, as if a thought had just occurred to her. “Why, even if we was to give him a brand-new flute, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he didn’t just…sell it and put the money in the collection plate for the Widow Hunnicutt and the Crawfords.”

  As Maggie watched, Summer’s smile broke apart and her eyes seemed to lose their focus. “That’s what he would do, I expect. Feed the hungry…heal the sick…that’s what Mr. Stuart would do…just like Jesus…”

  She started coughing then, hard, and they both remained silent. For a long time after the coughing subsided, Summer seemed to doze, but Maggie didn’t leave right away. Instead, she sat studying her friend’s labored efforts to breathe, thinking about Summer’s words. “Feed the hungry…heal the sick…that’s what Mr. Stuart would do…just like Jesus…”

  Maggie didn’t doubt but what Summer was right. She knew her Bible well enough to know that Jesus did indeed feed the hungry and that He also healed the sick. But why, then, didn’t He heal Summer… and Mr. Stuart?

  Her mother said they ought not to question why the Lord healed some and not others, that He had His reasons and it wasn’t for them to puzzle over His will. But it was hard—powerful hard—not to question why when two of the people who meant most to her were in such fierce need of healing.

  And they were good people—people who always did what Summer called “the right thing.” Mr. Stuart was kindness itself, and Summer—well, here she was, too sick to get out of bed and yet all she could think of was doing the right thing.

  Guilt crept over Maggie at the thought of Summer’s resolve to do what Jesus would do in any situation. The truth was that, unlike Summer, she sometimes just plunged straight in to doing a thing without considering whether it was right or wrong.

  Sometimes she simply did what seemed easiest. For her.

  Mr. Stuart had once told them that doing the right thing wasn’t always easy. That it was sometimes very hard indeed, so hard it might make a body feel heavyhearted, even sorrowful. And heavyhearted was exactly how Maggie felt at that moment, sitting on the bed beside her sick friend, trying to digest Summer’s words. The awareness of the “right thing” to do in the present situation slowly, reluctantly settled over her, and just the knowing made her feel as if one of the enormous old stones from the river bank had rolled over onto her heart.

  This pressing burden, combined with the undeniable evidence of Summer’s worsening condition, suddenly began to hammer
at Maggie with a vengeance. Dizziness swept over her, and for an instant, she thought she’d be sick to her stomach.

  Somehow she managed to say a proper goodbye to the drowsy Summer, but she fairly bolted out the kitchen door before Mrs. Rankin or one of the other children could delay her.

  Outside the darkness was relieved only by the falling snow, heavier now, with the promise of several inches before morning. It was colder too, with icy patches forming on the path leading away from the Rankins’.

  When she was almost home, she stopped, letting the damp cold and snow wash over her, cooling her skin as if to wash away the gnawing panic that had been building inside her throughout the evening.

  From the direction of the mines on the Hill came the lonely sound of a dog howling, while the white pine trees bordering both sides of the road soughed in the wind. A tree branch snapped from the weight of the snow, and Maggie hugged her arms to herself, shivering, but not from the cold.

  She felt the loneliness of the town and the night press in on her, stirring an old, familiar dread that hinted of bad things, sorrowful things…and setting off a near desperate longing to escape whatever was coming, perhaps to escape Skingle Creek itself.

  Now she turned and ran, stumbling over the slippery stones, nearly falling in her haste to reach the faint light that seeped through the curtains of the front windows of home.

  Nine

  Maggie and the Angel Touch

  More like the Master I would ever be…

  Charles H. Gabriel

  As it turned out, the vote planned for the next morning had to be postponed until later in the day. The snow of the night before had given way to a freezing rain, making for such a miserable morning that no one wanted to tarry outside.

  The dark and dismal day fit Maggie’s mood. She slugged through the early classes, attention lagging, her heart still heavy. She hadn’t realized until today how much the collection and all the activity surrounding it had occupied her. In truth, it had kept the entire class humming while it lifted their spirits. The additional odd jobs to raise money, the stolen moments of whispered ideas and plans had given them all something to look forward to—a spark of excitement and warmth in the cold and dreary days. Now all that had changed, and Maggie knew only a leaden sense of defeat and disappointment, coupled with a vague feeling of dread for the days to come.

  So morose had been her state of mind throughout the morning that she didn’t notice anything different about Mr. Stuart until almost noon. The teacher was standing at the blackboard with his pointer, marking off decimal places for Maggie’s arithmetic group. After a moment he reached for his pocket watch—and withdrew his hand—empty. He glanced down over his vest, his expression confused, but his gaze quickly cleared as he dropped his hand back to his side.

  In that moment, Maggie knew what had escaped her until now: Mr. Stuart’s gold pocket watch was gone! She had seen him make the same gesture two or three times throughout the morning, each time with the same reaction, but she’d been too absorbed in her own low spirits to register the significance of his actions.

  Now it came to her all too clearly.

  He sold his watch! Mr. Stuart has sold his fine gold watch!

  The sudden realization brought Summer’s words of the night before rushing in on Maggie: “Why, even if we was to give him a brand-new flute, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he didn’t just sell it and put the money in the collection plate for the Widow Hunnicutt and the Crawfords.”

  Maggie stared at the teacher as if she had never seen him before. Summer had been right. She had known exactly what Mr. Stuart would do: “Feed the hungry…heal the sick…that’s what Mr. Stuart would do…just like Jesus…”

  Maggie continued to watch Mr. Stuart, and as she did, she was seized with an urgency she had never known before—an urgency to pray. Never mind that she wasn’t on her knees and that her eyes were wide open. In fact, she squeezed them shut, right there in the middle of class, without caring whether anyone noticed or what they might think if they did.

  Shut off from her surroundings in a way she could never understand, Maggie prayed. She prayed that somehow—though she didn’t know how in the world such a thing could ever be—she, too, would be able to live like Mr. Stuart lived.

  Like Jesus would want her to live.

  I know what I’m supposed to do now, Lord—what I have to do. And if anyone else is still on the fence about this collection, then give them a push too, like You just did me. We’ve all got to do the right thing here, but some of us find it harder than others, and I reckon I’m one of them. Just help me and all the rest of us do what we know we need to do, no matter how much it hurts. And it does, Lord. It does hurt. But probably nothing like it hurt Mr. Stuart to sell his good watch.

  The vote was taken at noon, the weather having relented long enough that they could tolerate the outdoors for a brief time.

  It went just as Maggie had known it would. Indeed, as soon as she called everyone’s attention to Mr. Stuart’s missing gold watch, they voted—to the last student—to turn the entire amount over to the Crawford family and Mrs. Hunnicutt.

  There was no arguing, no fussing. Even Lily Woodbridge kept quiet—until Junior Tyree raised the question of who did they think might have purchased the teacher’s watch.

  For once, Lily spoke in a quiet voice instead of the smug, know-it-all tone Maggie disliked so much. “My father,” she said. “Mr. Stuart came to our house last night, and my father bought his watch. I heard them talking.”

  Her gaze darted from one to the other. Maggie’s mouth burned with the taste of bitterness, but Lily’s uncharacteristic nervousness and total lack of gloating quickly squelched any antagonism. Selling the watch would have been Mr. Stuart’s decision, after all. It wasn’t as though Lily’s father had had to twist his arm. Obviously, this was what Mr. Stuart wanted, and who else in Skingle Creek, other than Kenny Tallman’s father, could have afforded to buy it? There was no point in holding bad feelings toward Lily.

  The others in the group seemed to take their cue from Maggie, and as things turned out, they actually appointed Lily to present the money jar to Mr. Stuart on behalf of the entire class.

  If Maggie had had any doubts beforehand, Mr. Stuart’s response to the collection made it blazingly clear that they had made the right decision.

  The instant Lily walked up and thumped the jar down on the teacher’s desk—with considerable flourish, Maggie noted—Mr. Stuart’s face brightened with the biggest smile they had seen from him in weeks.

  Clearly taken aback, he studied Lily and then the money jar. “Lily? What is this?”

  At her desk, Maggie held her breath, hoping Lily would manage to get through her speech before Mr. Stuart could ask too many questions.

  She needn’t have worried. Lily was beaming, and, just as she’d been instructed, proceeded to hurry through an explanation. One thing about Lily: She was a born speechmaker. “This is for the Widow Hunnicutt and the Crawford family,” she announced. “It’s not from the class alone, of course. We couldn’t raise so much money on our own. Our parents helped too.”

  The teacher rose from his chair and, turning the jar around by its neck, stared at it as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. “This…this is wonderful. Lily…class…I can’t think how you managed it, but I am very proud of all of you.”

  He looked around the room, for a moment almost appearing his old self again. He actually seemed happy, Maggie thought—if a bit stunned.

  The teacher lifted the jar then and held it up to the class. “I shall deliver this to Pastor Wallace this very evening,” he said, still smiling broadly. “He and Father Maguire will be so pleased and grateful.”

  Carefully, he set the jar down, and then he came around to stand in front of his desk. “I can’t begin to tell you,” he said quietly, his gaze resting on each student for a second or two before going on, “what this will mean to Mrs. Hunnicutt and the Crawfords. I know it represents a great sacrifice for you a
nd your families, but I hope you realize that you have brought much delight to God’s heart today. And to mine.”

  He stopped to clear his throat, blinked, and then glanced around the room once more. “Well,” he said with a small nod, “let’s get back to work now, shall we?”

  Was she imagining it, Maggie wondered, or did Mr. Stuart have a little more spring to his step when he returned to his desk and began to review the day’s spelling words?

  As she sat there, only vaguely aware of the teacher at the blackboard, Maggie was surprised at how good she felt about the way things had turned out. Despite the fact that they no longer had any hope of restoring the stolen flute, they had obviously made Mr. Stuart proud of them. And happy.

  She supposed it was a mark of the kind of man the teacher was, that he could sacrifice something as valuable as his fine gold watch and still be happy, and happier still because his students had done something good for others.

  With all her heart, Maggie wished there were a way to do something nice for him. If ever a man deserved a special gift, Mr. Stuart did.

  If only there were a way to give him back his music.

  They could at least give him a birthday party…

  Whoa!

  Maggie caught a breath. She didn’t know where the thought had come from, but excitement suddenly swept over her like a waterfall. That’s exactly what they could do all right: They could give their teacher the best birthday party anyone had ever had! They could make him a special card. Bake him a cake. And perhaps they could still come up with some sort of gift. A surprise.

  She sat there, staring at but not seeing the spelling words on the blackboard. Instead she pondered what kind of a surprise they might concoct for Mr. Stuart’s birthday. Again she recalled what he had said to them about giving something of themselves…and “giving it with love.”