by Jan Karon
He found himself grinning all the way down the hall.
Something was stirring in him; something strong and deep and definite. Suffice it to say he was beginning to know that Christmas was coming—not just on the calendar but in his very soul.
This morning, Cynthia’s reading had explained everything:
“ ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen His glory.’ ”
“I’m sorry,” Helen said. “I know you wanted it badly, but really, Hope, you’ve dodged a bullet. Look how we’ve struggled over the years! Why you’d want to perpetuate such misery is beyond me.”
“Yes, but things are beginning to change. And this is our best Christmas season ever.”
The phone line crackled sharply as it often did during their daily talk after locking up Happy Endings; it was Helen’s cell phone as she strolled about on her terrace overlooking the pool.
“Come to Florida, for heaven’s sake, where the sun kisses your cheeks and sea breezes ruffle your hair. I always thought that little knot thing you do with your hair makes you look like an old maid. When you get here, we’ll cut it short and highlight it—I have just the person. . . .”
“No,” said Hope. “I’m not coming to Florida. It’s settled—I’m going to live with Louise.”
“You know what I have to say about that dead end.”
She did indeed know, and could not bear to hear it again. “Customer!” said Hope. “They’re knocking on the door, I must run.” She and Helen were in agreement about one thing: Customers rule.
She ran to the door and unlocked it, and felt at once a shiver of happiness. Scott was wearing his usual good-humored smile and a toboggan that made her burst into laughter.
“Are you a customer?” she asked.
“Absolutely!” He withdrew a piece of paper from his jacket pocket. “And here’s my list to prove it.”
“Oh, good!” she said, relieved that she hadn’t deceived Helen. “I was just going up to turn on the tree lights. Want to come with me?”
“I do! Several people are out front waiting for the lights to come on—it’s becoming a special Main Street attraction, I think.”
“Our tree!” she said, incredulous. “A special attraction!”
He held out his hand, and she took it, and together they walked across the creaking floor and up the stairs to the room above the shop.
Instead of heading to the monument, he walked south with Barnabas to the Oxford, where, in the glow of the streetlamp, he unlocked the door and stepped inside.
“ . . . unto us a child is born,
Unto us a Son is given,
God himself comes down from heaven.
Sing O sing, this blessed morn.”
Someone had left the CD player on. He went to the cabinet to turn it off, but chose instead the glad company of music.
Though he seldom made a visitation at night, he felt oddly at home in this dark and wax-scented room, secure somehow against the vagaries of a world where wars and rumours of wars perpetually threatened, and hardly anything seemed dependable.
His work, however, was practically calling his name. With Barnabas at his heels, he quickened his step to the back room, eager as a child to see what he and Fred and Andrew had accomplished, and how far they’d come. . . .
Though what he was doing had no deep or earthshaking significance, God seemed to care that he didn’t blow it; He seemed to be guiding his hands, his instincts, his concentration.
Sometimes he and Fred would work for an hour or more without uttering a word, so deep was their absorption. When he regained consciousness, as it were, he often felt he’d been somewhere else entirely, where he felt entirely at peace.
Perhaps this was the benediction of working with one’s hands instead of one’s head. Indeed, he had hotly pursued the life of the mind nearly all his life. His mother had ardently believed in a healthy balance of physical, mental, and spiritual activity, but as he’d gone away to school and entered into the fray of the world, the balance had slipped, and activity of the mind and spirit had triumphed. His hands, except for gardening, cooking, and washing a dog the size of a double-wide, had engaged in little more than turning the pages of a book.
And look what he’d missed! The figures in a row on the shelf were a marvel to him. Though he was hastening to get it all finished, he would be sorry to see it all end. . . .
Thanks be to God, he’d completely released the anxiety that his artistic wife would find the work amateurish or heavy-handed. It was amateurish! It was heavy-handed! But, by heaven, it was also something else, something higher, though he couldn’t say what.
He shucked off his warm jacket and gloves and picked up a brush and studied it carefully, wondering if he should choose a larger size, which would cover the surface faster.
But, no. He didn’t want the Holy Family to go faster. He’d developed a special tenderness toward the last of this worshipful assembly, and wanted to give them his best effort, his deepest concentration.
Indeed, it seemed to be the wont of most people in a distracted and frantic world to blast through an experience without savoring it or, later, reflecting upon it.
For him, working on the figures had slowed him down, forced him to pay attention and to savor the work of his hands. This also reminded him daily that Christmas hadn’t begun the weekend after Halloween, as the shops in Wesley and even Mitford would have one think. The time of preparation was yet under way, as the crèche was yet under way—the darkness before the light was still with the world.
His heart lifted up as he dipped his brush into the glaze that would deepen the hues in Joseph’s robe. . . .
“Lord,” he said aloud, “thank You for being with me in this. . . .”
“Come out of there, Kavanagh! It’s ten-thirty, for Pete’s sake!”
“Go stand in the kitchen so I can open the door!”
He went to the kitchen and heard her lock up the workroom, which contained the mysterious creation that, sight unseen, already gave him a certain joy.
Oddly, he couldn’t wait to see her, he was famished to see her. Her angel-tree project was a bear, and she was handling it, together with Olivia Harper, like a trouper.
She breezed in and gave him a hug and rubbed her warm nose against his cold one and looked into his eyes with frank and happy pleasure.
“Your eyelashes are going up and down, and little stars are coming out of you,” he said.
They were leaving the room when Hope saw it.
It was the smallest bit of paper sticking up between the old pine floorboards, where boxes of out-of-date schoolbooks had sat for years.
Hope knelt on one knee and removed a pin from her hair, using the pin to catch the paper and ease it upward. It was an envelope, brittle with age and bearing no postmark.
“Look!” she whispered. Scott knelt, too.
The pin slipped from her fingers and fell into the crack, along with the envelope. She took another pin from her hair, engaged the envelope once more, and pulled it from the crack.
“Good work,” said Scott.
She lifted the flap and saw that it contained a letter.
“ ‘For my little sister at Christmas,’ ” she read aloud from the faded inscription on the envelope.
They stood and walked into the circle of light cast by the tree, where she lifted the flap and removed the letter. The message was written on a single sheet; the once-black ink had paled to a faint reddish color, like the stain of berries.
Slowly, and with reverence, she spoke what was written in a careful hand on the yellowed paper.
Christmas, 1932
My dear little sister,
I am thinking of you this year with special feeling. I know how you enjoy having notes from me, and I must admit you are a very fine note-writer yourself.
I would like to take this opportunity to say that you are dear to me, and I am proud of you. You please me very much with your fine reading, which I can say from experience is a hard thing to grasp.<
br />
It is my fond hope that you will like your gift. Please know that it was chosen with much affection, and hope for your bright future by
Your devoted brother
“Oh,” she said, moved. She held the letter as if it were something deeply personal and long desired.
“Hope.”
“Yes?” She felt her hair slipping loose from its careful bun.
“It’s amazing that this letter says some of the things I’ve been wanting to say to you.”
“Really?”
He stood behind her and put his arms around her and held her close; the lights of the tree turned the empty room into a prism of color.
“I’d like to take this opportunity to say that you are dear to me, and I am proud of you.”
She felt a slow warmth rising in her, a quiet and surpassing joy.
“It is my fond hope,” he said, reading from the letter in her hand, “that you will like your gift. Please know that it was chosen with much affection, and hope for your bright future by your devoted friend and brother in Christ.”
She held her breath, unspeaking; her hair fell to her shoulders.
“I’ve been wondering how to say it,” he told her. “And someone said it for me, all those years ago.”
He placed a small box in her hand. “Please don’t open ’til Christmas,” he whispered, holding her in his arms as if there were all the time in the world to stand in this room with the glittering tree, and the letter, and the sense of promise that lay ahead.
He wasn’t much on checking his e-mail these days, and was flattered and mildly thrilled when he saw a queue of sixteen messages waiting.
Where to begin?
Where any priest with common sense would begin—with his bishop.
<†Stuart
. . .
. .
“Miss Betty, what if I was t’ walk aroun’ in th’ yard?”
“The doctor said you can, Uncle Billy, but only when spring comes. It’s too cold now.”
He peered over her shoulder and into the cook pot. Collards! His all-time favorite. An’ a big, fat hen a-roastin’ in th’ oven! Maybe he’d died in th’ hospital a few months back an’ went to heaven.
“If I was t’ dress warm, how’d that be?”
“I don’t think so, Uncle Billy. Wait ’til May when th’ flowers start to bloom, that’d be a good time.”
May?
A man oughtn’t to have t’ wait ’til May t’ leave ’is house! He had important things t’ do. Besides, he could be dead an’ gone by May.
“What would you like best of anything?” Father Tim asked Sissy and Sassy, who flanked him on the study sofa.
“Books!” they exclaimed as one.
His order was waiting by Hope’s cash register, gift-wrapped and ready to go. “What else?”
“Goldfish!” said Sissy, who looked at him with the inquisitive green eyes he loved.
“Ice skates!” said Sassy, whose infectious smile had always done him in.
Why had he asked such a question? Why couldn’t he leave well enough alone, and make do with books? The answer was simple—these were his grandchildren!
“Consider it done,” he said, patting a bony knee on either side.
Sassy poked his arm. “What would you like best of anything, Granpaw?”
“Ah. A fine question. Let me see.” He dropped his head and put his hand over his eyes.
“He’s thinking,” said Sissy, nodding with approval.
Peace on earth, that’s what he wanted.
“Healthy siblings for you two!” he said, naming another front-runner.
“What is siblings?” asked Sassy.
“A sibling is a brother or sister.”
“One of each,” said Sissy. “That’s what I prayed for.”
“So how about a trip down the street?”
“Sweet Stuff!” they chorused.
He had just delivered the girls home from Sweet Stuff and was on his way to the Oxford when the phone rang.
“Father Tim?”
“The same!”
“Lew Boyd, Father, I need somebody to talk to.”
“My time is yours.”
“Is there any way you could drop by the station?”
“Ah. Well . . . let’s see. Sure thing! I’ve got to get gas, anyway. How about—thirty minutes?” Afterward, he’d pop down to the Oxford and work for a couple of hours. . . .
“I ’preciate it. I’ll sweep you out good and give you a car fresh’ner—Ripe Peach, it’s called. On th’ house.”
“Thanks, Lew. I’ll pass on the Ripe Peach, but I’ll see you in a half hour.”
. . . and after the Oxford, he’d zoom to the Wesley mall and pick up a couple of goldfish and a pair of skates. Make that two pair. Then home again with the stuff to bake the chocolate pie for tomorrow—it was better if it sat overnight—and back to the Oxford for a final hour before making dinner with his good wife.
He was fairly giddy with all that had to be done, not to mention the blasted haircut he was forced to get somewhere, somehow. . . .
He had no intention of answering the phone when it rang again, but his hand shot forth like an arrow, and there he stood, saying, “Hello!”
“Father Tim?”
“Is that you, Esther?”
“It is. Father Talbot’s a busy man, you know.”
“Ah, yes. Packing for Australia as we speak, is my guess.”
“So could you give me some advice?”
“If I can. Be glad to.” He checked his watch.
“I’m only human.”