A New Song

by Jan Karon

  He eyed the other letter, propped against the base of the lamp.

  Dear Father,

  Avery Plummer is a harlot.

  Look up the true meaning of this word if you don’t already know it which you probably do. Several months ago, she ran off with another woman’s husband and God have mercy on the children in this mess, much less the church that helped them do it.

  You ask how a church could help anybody commit a sin, and I say the church helps by seeing what is going on and turning its head the other way when certain steps might be taken that would solve the matter once and for all. Read Matthew 18 if you don’t already know it which you probably do.

  Somebody said that Jeffrey Tolson, our former choir director and the scoundrel that cares for nothing but himself, wants to come back to St. John’s because it is where he grew up, and this is to let you know that if he ever sets foot in our narthex again my husband and I will be gone and so will a lot of other people. What this means is that more than half the annual church budget will walk straight out the door and never look back.

  We are looking forward to meeting you at the luau at our home this evening.

  Regards to you and Mrs. Kavanagh and I hope you have a successful time in Whitecap.

  Yours truly,

  Marlene Bragg

  “Here’s what you do,” said Otis Bragg, waving his fork as he spoke. “If a hurricane’s gonna hit, everybody shows up at th’ church basement. Built like a oil tanker down there. Everybody in th’ parish knows about it, we even got a little stash of canned goods and coffee.”

  “Thinking ahead,” said Father Tim.

  “We don’t have coffee down there anymore,” said Marjorie Lamb. “We ran out for the bishop’s brunch last spring and had to use it.”

  Otis grinned. “Have t’ bring your own, then.” Otis Bragg was short, thickset, and balding, with a fondness for Cuban cigars. Father Tim noticed he didn’t light the cigars, he chewed them.

  They were sitting at picnic tables in the Braggs’ backyard, behind a rambling house that looked more like a resort hotel than a residence. The water in the kidney-shaped pool danced and glinted in the sunlight.

  Cynthia furrowed her brow. “Has a hurricane ever hit Whitecap?”

  “You better believe it,” said Otis. “Whop, got one in ’72, blam, got a big ’un in ’84.”

  “How bad?” she asked.

  “Bad. Dumped my gravel trucks upside down, tore the roof off of my storage buildin’s.”

  Leonard Lamb looked thoughtful. “I believe it was Hurricane Herman that took your roof off, but it was Darlene that set Sam Fieldwalker’s RV in his neighbor’s yard and creamed half the village.”

  “Nobody on Whitecap’s had any kids named Herman or Darlene in a real long time,” said Otis. “By th’ way, I hear th’ Love cottage over by where you’re stayin’ has a good basement; same thing at Redmon Love’s old place. Hard to dig a good basement around here, but that part of the island’s on a ridge just like St. John’s. You have t’ have a ridge to dig a basement.”

  Father Tim peered at his wife and knew it was definitely time to change the subject. “Do we get home mail delivery, by any chance?”

  Otis helped his plate to more coleslaw and another slab of fresh barbecue. “You mountain people have it soft, Father, we have t’ haul to th’ post office over by QuikPik.” Otis dumped hot sauce on the barbecue. “Th’ mail usually comes in about two o’clock, just watch for th’ sign they stick in th’ window, says ‘Mail In.’ Course, if th’ bridge is out, th’ ferry runs it over.”

  “Is the bridge fixed yet?”

  “Prob’ly, don’t usually take long. It’s one thing or another ’til a man could puke, either the rain causes a short, or the roadbed and bridge expand in th’ heat, or the relay switch goes out. I remember th’ good old days when my business didn’t depend on anybody’s bridge, we made our livin’ right here.”

  “What’s your business?”

  “Commercial haulin’—gravel, sand, crushed oyster shell, you name it. Plus we offer ready-mix cement for all your concrete needs—be it residential or commercial.”

  “Aha!”

  “Today, you’ve got a Bragg’s on Whitecap and Manteo, not to mention five locations on th’ mainland.”

  “Cornered the market!”

  “You got it!” said Otis, flushing with pride.

  Marlene Bragg was an intense woman with long, fuchsia nails, a serious tan, and a great mane of blond hair with dark roots.

  “We’re real glad to have you and your wife—and you brought your cool weather with you!”

  Father Tim smiled at their hostess, who had just toured him through her home. “Actually,” he said, “I believe I did feel a mountain breeze this morning!”

  “It’s usually awful hot this time of year.”

  “I’ve heard that,” he said.

  “But I know you’ll love it on Whitecap, just like we do.”

  “Have you been on Whitecap long?”

  “Seventeen years, we’re from Morehead City. My husband has worked very hard, Father, to make a name for himself in this area.” She pursed her mouth. “He’s been mighty generous with the diocese, not to mention St. John’s.”

  “I’m sure.”

  She smiled. “We’d like to keep it that way.”

  “I’m sure,” he said. Too bad he’d just said that.

  Jean Ballenger was a small woman with bangs that appeared plastered to her forehead. At the dessert table, she looked deeply into his eyes and pressed his hand.

  “Thank you for your wise consideration of all the matters contained in my letter,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” he replied.

  “Who in the world is this ?” asked Father Tim. A child who appeared to be around three years old was making a beeline toward him with no adult in hot pursuit.

  “This is Jonathan Tolson!” said Marjorie Lamb, beaming.

  Jonathan fell against Father Tim’s legs and clasped them tight, gazing up as if they were old acquaintances.

  He squatted and took the youngster’s hands in his. “Hey, buddyroe!”

  The blond toddler sucked his lower lip and gazed steadily at Father Tim with blue, inquisitive eyes. Then he turned and raced back the way he’d come.

  “He just wanted to tell you hello,” piped Marjorie, looking pleased as punch.

  The message light on their answering machine was blinking.

  “Hey,” said Dooley. “I hate answerin’ machines. I hope you got there OK. I mowed a yard after work and got fifteen dollars. Avis’s truck is cool, it came today.

  “Well . . .” Deep sigh. “Harley got the hornet nests down.” Long pause. “I miss ol’ Barnabas. Talk to you later. ’Bye.”

  Click. Beep.

  “I heard there was a terrible storm down there,” said Emma. “I hope it didn’t blow you in a ditch. You hadn’t hardly left town ’til Gene Bolick keeled over and they had to carry him to th’ hospital. I called Esther and th’ doctor said he’s keepin’ him awhile for tests.”

  Crackling sounds, as if Emma had her hand in a potato chip bag.

  “I hear that young interim at Lord’s Chapel has been passin’ out song sheets, they’re not even usin’ a book, plus they say two or three people lifted up their hands while they were singin’, I bet I can guess who.” She snorted. “I hear your old choir director’s lower lip is stuck out so far he could trip over it.”

  Emma crunched down on a couple of chips.

  “I saw that woman tenant of yours the other day, she was scurryin’ along like a mouse, oh, an’ I saw Dooley at Avis’s, he looks even better than when you’re here, so don’t worry about a thing.”

  Chewing and swallowing, followed by slurping through a straw.

  “Snickers has ear mites, I hope Barnabas is doin’ fine in all those sandspurs, I hope to th’ Lord you’ll check his paws on a regular basis.”

  Emma was running her straw around the bottom of the cup and suckin
g with great expectation, but not finding much. He turned the volume down on the answering machine.

  “Oh, by th’ way, Harold got a real raise, the first one in a hundred years, I wish th’ post office would get its act together. Well, got to run, this is costin’ a war pension.”

  Click. Beep.

  “Timothy! Bill Harvey here. How do you like the pounding surf? I know you’re going to love every minute with the fine people at St. John’s. You’ll be just what the doctor ordered. All they’re looking for is Rite Two, a sermon that doesn’t rock the boat, and a little trek across the bridge to Cap’n Willie’s Sunday brunch.

  “I’ll be there on the eighth to plug you in. Barbara’s not coming—the grandkids are here from Connecticut—she sends her regrets. I’ll bunk in with Otis Bragg and Marlene, as usual.

  “Well, listen, call me if you need me, you hear? And be sure and eat plenty of spot and pompano, they’re probably running pretty good right now. But I wouldn’t eat anything fried if I were you; broiled is how I like it, better for the heart. Oh, be sure and do right by Otis, now. He and Marlene are mighty generous donors, wouldn’t want to lose them, ha ha. Well! Felicitations to your beautiful bride! See you on the eighth.”

  Click. Beep.

  “Let’s go find the beach,” he said, after returning Dooley’s call.

  “Now?”

  “It’s only ten o’clock.”

  “Nearly everyone in Mitford is sound asleep,” said his wife.

  “This isn’t Mitford.” He put his arms around her and drew her close and nuzzled her hair.

  “But I’m already in my nightgown.”

  “Wear it. Nobody’s looking.”

  “And barefoot.”

  “Perfect,” he said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Long Shining

  Whitecap Island loosely duplicated the shape of a Christmas stocking with a toe full of nuts and candy.

  In the toe, Otis Bragg had stationed an extensive system of gravel, rock, and crushed oyster shell inventories, custom cement facilities, and sprawling hangars of grading and construction equipment.

  In the heel, the lighthouse stood comfortably surrounded by a hedge of yaupons, an abandoned corral for wild ponies, and a small museum. The remainder of the island was chiefly comprised of high dunes, white beaches, canals and marshes, maritime forest, and a small village of homes, shops, inns, and restaurants, woven together by narrow lanes. The acreage on which St. John’s in the Grove sat was located in the top of the stocking.

  Increasingly, Whitecap attracted tourists from as far away as Canada and California, swelling the ranks of island churches every summer. While many churches on the mainland cranked down, the churches on Whitecap cranked up, both in numbers and activities.

  Even so, a carefree sense of remoteness insinuated itself almost everywhere.

  Sandy lanes wound under the heavy shade of live oaks, past summer cottages with picket fences and pleasantly unkempt yards.

  Egrets could be seen standing in the marshes, as poised as garden statuary, their black eyes searching the reedy places from which alligators slithered onto banks and sunned themselves.

  Early on, St. John’s new interim learned that island culture made Mitford look like a beehive of cosmopolitan activity. Time seemed to pass more slowly on Whitecap, and then, even with a calendar, a watch, a phone, and a fax machine, the days began to blend into one another like watercolors. Wednesday might as easily have been Tuesday or Thursday, had it not been distinguished by the midweek celebration of Holy Eucharist.

  Sam Fieldwalker chuckled. “This sort of thing soon passes,” he said. “You’re still in the honeymoon phase.”

  Father Tim laughed with his affable senior warden. “It all seems like a holiday, somehow, a vacation!”

  “You’ve been going pretty hard, Father, I wouldn’t call your first few weeks here a vacation. Truth is, I recommend you take a day off.”

  Sam looked at his watch. “Good gracious! Got to run by the Reader and hand in a story on the Fall Fair, then go across with Marion to the eye doctor and take my fax machine to be fixed. Hope I can get back in time for the planning meeting on the fair.”

  Even on a small, peaceful island, thought the new priest-in-charge, everybody was going at a trot.

  “By the way,” said Sam, “glad to hear you’re working with Reverend Harmon. The Baptists sure do their part to make the fair the biggest event on the island. We raise a lot of money for needy people.”

  He went with Sam to the office door that led to the churchyard. “Speaking of needy people,” said Father Tim, “I’ve been counseling Janette Tolson.”

  “Glad to hear it. When Jeff walked out, Janette didn’t feel she could go to Father Morgan, because he was friendly with Jeff. She’s gone through the worst of this thing with no priest to turn to.”

  “She’s suffering badly, as you know.”

  “This has come against us all in a hard way. Not to mention how the choir has fallen into disarray.”

  Recently, their best tenor had stepped forward to direct the choir and, profoundly disliking such a wrinkle, the lead soprano had quit in disgust and was now teaching Sunday School.

  “It’ll come right.” It was what his mother always said of a rotten situation. “The first thing we need to do is stop thinking of it as a performance choir, and be pleased with how well they lead the congregational singing.”

  Sam nodded. “Good point.”

  “You know we’re auditioning an organist next week.”

  “I dislike the thought of a paid organist at St. John’s. The Lord has always provided us with somebody in the congregation.”

  “It may be for the best, Sam. No ties to the church, no axe to grind . . . that’s how we handled it at Lord’s Chapel for the last few years, and it worked.”

  “Well, brother . . .”—Sam shook his hand—“hold down the fort while we’re across. Oh, my goodness! I forgot the banana bread. I’ll just run out to the car. Marion wouldn’t be pleased if I come home with it still sliding around in the backseat.”

  Early on, Father Tim had learned that Marion Fieldwalker was right—the parish really did like to spoil their priests.

  He and Cynthia had been treated to brunch at Cap’n Willie’s every Sunday, and to dinner at Mona’s Café with the Lambs and Fieldwalkers.

  They’d received a bushel of hard crabs and clams from the Braggs, and were regularly inundated with bread still warm from parishioners’ ovens, not to mention sacks of snap beans and tomatoes.

  For performing a baptism, he’d been given a free-range chicken and a pound of butter from the Duncans’ little farm, while a wedding ceremony he conducted under the oaks had swelled the Dove Cottage larders with a honey-baked ham.

  Thank goodness he was running three days a week, and Cynthia was riding her Schwinn from the post office to the dry cleaner’s to the grocery store. She might have been a tanned schoolgirl, wheeling along with carrot tops poking from the grocery sack in her bike basket.

  The light on the answering machine blinked as he came in from a meeting with Stanley Harmon at Whitecap Baptist.

  “Hey, this is Puny, how y’all doin’? Ever’thing’s goin’ jis’ great up here, hope it’s th’ same with you. Th’ girls wanted to say hey . . . Sissy, come back this minute, come back and say hey to Miss Cynthia and Ba!”

  Sounds of small feet storming up the hall, amid shrieks and laughter.

  “And there goes Sassy, oh, mercy! Hold on, y’all, ’scuse me. . . .”

  Sounds of Puny chasing the girls into another room of her small house. “No, no! Put that down! Ba and Miss Cynthia are waitin’ for you to say hey! Oh, Lord help, I can’t believe this, come out from under there, Sissy!

  “All right, then, I’ll let Sassy say hey. What a good girl your sister is! Come here, Sassy.”

  Clattering noises along the hallway to the phone.

  “Here, now say hey to Ba and Miss Cynthia.”

  Heavy breathing. />
  “You wanted to say hey, you cried to say hey . . . now say hey!” spluttered a frustrated Puny.

  “Kitty?” said Sassy.

  “Sassy, honey, stay right there and talk to Ba while I get Sissy! Sissy! I see what you’re doin’, get your hands out of th’ toilet this minute!”

  Bawling from the bathroom. Heavy breathing on the phone. Puny’s footsteps hurrying along the hall.

  “Did you say hey yet?”

  “Dog!” said Sassy.

  “Here, f’r pity’s sake, give me th’ phone. Well, y’all . . .”

  Loud wailing. “Want to say hey! Want to say hey!”

  “Not ’til you say somethin’ else first,” commanded Puny.

  “Ple-e-ease!!!”

  “All right, here’s the phone, say hey and get it over with!”

  Deep breath. “Hey, Ba!” Giggling.

  “Now go find your cookie! Ba, I mean, Father, I saw your tenant yesterday, she was standin’ on ’er tiptoes lookin’ in your study window on th’ hedge side. I guess I scared her half t’ death. I wadn’t supposed to go to your house yesterday, but I needed to take in your mail an’ all. She said she was lookin’ for her cat that run off, and just took a little peek in your window to see how nice it was, said she didn’t think y’all’d mind. Well, anyway, Joe Joe says t’ tell you hey, and Winnie at Sweet Stuff—

  “Sissy, put th’ mop down this minute! Oh, law . . .”

  Click. Beep.

  The next message was clearly from a dog, who was barking furiously.

  “Hush up!” shouted Emma. “Go get your sock!

  “I guess you know your phone call meant th’ world to poor Esther. I’ve never seen her like this, practically wringin’ her hands, and she’s not th’ hand-wringin’ type, but they still can’t find out what’s wrong with Gene. They’re goin’ to run more tests on Monday, you ought to see ’im, he looks bad to me, I hope you’re prayin’ is all I can say.

  “Snickers! Get away from there! Snickers is tryin’ to eat th’ meat-loaf I just made! Oh, shoot, hold on a minute. . . .”