by Jan Karon
“So he goes up in this little plane and bails out, and down he shoots like a ton of bricks. He gets down a ways ... don’t you know, and starts pulling on his cord, but nothing happens. He’s really traveling now, still pulling that cord. Nothing. Switches over to his emergency cord, same thing—nothing happens; he’s looking at the tree tops. All of a sudden, here comes this other guy shootin’ up from the ground like a rocket. And the guy going down says, ‘Hey buddy, d’you know anything about parachutes?’ And the one coming up says, ‘Afraid not; d’you know anything about gas stoves?’”
Laughter and applause. This would be a tough act to follow.
Father Tim waited for the laughter to subside and stepped forward.
“A census taker was makin’ ’is rounds, don’t you know.”
A burst of laughter.
“I love this one!” Hessie Mayhew whispered to the mayor’s secretary.
“Well, sir, he went up to a house an’ knocked an’ a woman come to th’ door. He said, ‘How many young‘uns you got, an’ what’re their names?’
“Woman starts countin’ on her fingers, don’t you know, says, ‘We got Jenny an’ Penny, they’re ten.We got Hester an’ Lester, they’re twelve. We got Billie an’ Willie, they’re fourteen ...’
“Census taker says ...”
A large knot rose suddenly in his throat. Uncle Billy felt so near, so present that the vicar was jarred profoundly. And what in heaven’s name did the census taker say? His wits had deserted him; he was sinking like a stone.
Miss Rose stood, clutching a handbag made in 1946 of cork rounds from the caps of soda pop bottles.
“Th’ census taker says,” she proclaimed at the top of her lungs, “‘D’you mean t’ tell me you got twins ever) time?’
“An’ th’ woman says, ‘Law, no, they was hundreds of times we didn’t git nothin’!’”
Cleansed somehow in spirit, and feeling an unexpected sense of renewal, those assembled watched the coffin being lowered into place. It was a graveside procedure scarcely seen nowadays, and one that signaled an indisputable finality.
“Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother, William Benfield Watson, and commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ ...”
He’d always felt daunted by Rose Watson’s countenance, for it bore so clearly the marks of her illness. Indeed, it appeared as if some deep and terrible rage had surfaced, and hardened there for all to witness.
She wore a black cocktail hat of uncertain antiquity, and a black suit he remembered from their days at Lord’s Chapel. It was made memorable by its padded shoulders from the forties, and a lapel that had been largely eaten away by moths.
Betty Craig gripped Miss Rose’s arm, looking spent but encouraged, as people delivered their condolences and departed the graveside.
“Miss Rose ...”
He took the old woman’s cold hands, feeling frozen as a mullet himself. Though he believed he was somehow responsible for her well-being, he hadn’t a clue how to proceed.
She threw back her head and mowed him down with her fierce gaze. “I saved your bloomin’ neck!” she squawked.
“Yes, you did! By heaven, you did!”
He was suddenly laughing at his own miserable ineptness, and at the same time, weeping for her loss. “And God bless you for it!”
He found himself doing the unthinkable—he was hugging Rose Watson and patting her on the back for a fare-thee-well.
“Timothy, there’s a chicken at the back door!”
“Invite it in.”
“I’m serious.”
He walked to the screen door and looked out to the porch.
One of their Rhode Island Reds.
“The plot thickens,” he said.
He showed the swatch of cloth to Sammy. “Look what Barnabas brought home this morning at two-thirty.”
He thought Sammy looked oddly pale. A muscle twitched in his jaw.
“W-what about it?”
“Here’s what I’m thinking. When Barnabas went out to do his business, the poacher happened to be at the hen house ...”
“What’s a poacher?”
“It’s a British term for someone who trespasses on a property to hunt or fish, or steal game. So, Barnabas starts barking, the poacher starts running, and bingo! Barnabas catches up and nabs a piece of his shirt.”
“If chickens are g-gettin’ out on their own like th’-th’-th’ one this mornin’, there p-prob’ly ain’t any poacher. Th’ chickens’re jis’ somehow ...”—Sammy shrugged—“... f-flyin’ th’ coop.”
“I believe the poacher dropped the chicken,” said the vicar.
“Whatever,” said Sammy.
Chilly tonight.
He put a match to the paper; the flame devoured it, and licked at the kindling. As Cynthia worked at the kitchen table, and Sammy watched TV in his room, he had a few calls to make.
The smell of popcorn wafted from the kitchen. An open fire and popcorn! Blessings galore, he thought ...
“I need a favor. I understand how pressured you are, and this one, frankly, is huge.”
“I know you, Father; you’d do it for me.”
“Yes,” he said.
“If you hadn’t done me the greatest of favors, I wouldn’t be the happiest of men. What do you need?”
Father Tim outlined the plan.
“I’ll come in my scrubs; I’m hardly out of them these days.”
“I’ll meet you at noon—at the crossroads of Farmer and Bentley, in the parking lot at Kirby’s Store. I’m in a red truck, considerably faded.”
“I’m considerably faded, myself, but I’ll see you then.”
Lord, he prayed again, reveal the mystery; let it be a mystery no more ...
“Hey, son. I’m missing you; just wanted to hear your voice.”
Dooley had never warmed to such outpourings; nonetheless, Father Tim found it best to speak these things. The loss of loved ones always made him reflect ...
“I’ll be done with finals May tenth, and home on the eleventh.”
“We’re praying about your finals; don’t worry, you can nail them. You’ll never guess what I’ve been thinking. Remember the time we walked to Mitford School together—it was your first day. You went ahead of me, then thought twice about it and asked me to walk up ahead. You didn’t want anybody to think a preacher was following you around.”
Dooley cackled. “Yeah, well, I got over it.”
At the sound of the laughter he loved, Father Tim’s spirit lifted up. He would tell him about the money this summer. Maybe they’d trek out to the sheep pasture and sit on the big rock by the pond, or maybe they’d sit in the library—Dooley could have the leather wing chair for this auspicious occasion. Shoot, they might even haul around a few dirt roads in the new truck.
In any case, nearly two million dollars would be an astounding reality to grapple with.
Lord, he prayed, pick the time and place for this important revelation, and thank You for so constructing his character that he might bear the responsibility with grace ...
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Hungry and Imperfect
By four-thirty in the afternoon, peas, potatoes, onions, lettuce, and chard had been planted in the fresh-turned loam. Several rows sprouted red twigs wrung from a dogwood tree by the henhouse to give new pea vines something to climb.
At ten twenty-five in the evening, the rain began. It was a soft, steady rain that pattered on the tin roof of the farmhouse, and chimed in the gutters.
Father Tim listened to the music, contented. Every gardener’s dream, he thought.
“Are you sleeping?” asked Cynthia.
“Listening to the rain.”
“I’ve been thinking.”
“That’s scary.”
“Very funny. I think we need Sunday School at Holy Trinity.”
“I agree. Just haven�
��t gotten there, yet.”
“I’m volunteering to teach Sissie and Rooter.”
“That’s wonderful!” He was always thrilled when his wife volunteered in a church he was serving. “You’ll be a great blessing to them, to all of us.”
“And surely others will come.”
“Surely. And even if they don’t...”
“But I wish there was something for Sammy,” she said. “He’d never stoop to attending Sunday School with a five- and a nine-year-old.”
“Unless ...” he said.
“Unless?”
“Unless he was your teaching assistant.”
“How do you mean?”
“If there was something he could do with gardening to illustrate your teaching... I don’t know ... a seed, growth, the story of new life ... new life in Jesus ...”
“I like it,” she said. “Give me a couple of weeks, let me think it all through.”
He took her warm hand and kissed it and held it to his cheek. “Lord, thank You for sending Your daughter into this white field. Thank You for showing her Your perfect way to teach the love, mercy, and grace of Your Son. And help us become children, ourselves, eager to receive Your instruction. Through Christ our Lord ...”
“Amen.”
“Thank you,” he said to his deacon.
“Thank you back.”
“For what?”
“For being willing to serve at Holy Trinity. It’s my favorite of all your churches.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s so hungry and imperfect.”
Hungry and imperfect. “Yes,” he said, smiling in the dark. “Yes!”
He’d been in a pool hall or two when he was a kid, and they didn’t look like places to cultivate desirable qualities of character. Then again, didn’t the venerable English country house always have a billiards table? It did. And wasn’t billiards a game for gentlemen? Generally speaking, it was.
Maybe if he just changed the terminology, and possibly his long-prejudiced attitude ...
“Would it be possible for me to, umm, hang with you at the pool hall?”
He saw Sammy glance at his offending tab collar. Like Dooley, Sammy wasn’t thrilled with the idea of a priest following him around.
“I don’t have anything else to do in Wesley and I thought...”
“OK I guess.”
Father Tim noticed that the scar on Sammy’s face reddened, as it often did when he was uneasy.
“We’ll drop over to Mitford; I need to check on a couple of people. Then we’ll head to Wesley. Need anything for the garden?”
Sammy took a list from his jeans pocket; it was heavily penciled in capital letters.
“Thinking ahead! And I just remembered—we need to find you a haircut, buddyroe.”
“I can c-cut it, m‘self, if th’ s-s-scissors are sharp. S-Saturday.”
He was feeling proud, very proud, of Sammy Barlowe. But why was he afraid to trust that? Though he didn’t want to admit it, he was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
He let Sammy out at the grease pit and parked the truck at the rear of Lew’s building. J.C. wheeled in beside him in a Subaru van.
“How’s it going?” he asked J. C.
Didn’t look like it was going so well; J.C. appeared sleepless and red-eyed, and his pants were definitely on the baggy side.
“How’s what goin’?”J.C. snapped.
“You and Adele, of course. Did you go to the station and turn yourself in?” That had been a great idea, even if he said so himself.
“No way would I do that dumb stunt.”
“So, did you take her flowers?”
“No.”
“Out to dinner?”
“No.”
“Anything?”
“I tried.”
“What happened when you tried?”
“I can’t do that stuff. There’s no way.” Tears brimmed suddenly in J.C.’s eyes.
“Let’s get in the truck and talk,” said the vicar.
“What for?”
Because you can’t stand out here bawling in the parking lot, he wanted to say.
J.C. caught onto the strap and hauled himself into the seat.
Father Tim closed his door and took a deep breath. “I’ve laid off you all these years, buddy, but I need to ask you something. Do you pray?”
J.C. gazed out the open window of the passenger side. “One time, a long time ago, a guy called you up and asked you to recite that prayer.You remember?”
He did remember, and had often wondered who the caller was. Andrew Gregory had dropped by the rectory that day; Puny had served them tea. “That was before caller ID, so I never knew...”
“It was me. Disguising my voice.”
Father Tim swallowed down the lump in his throat.
“I got to tell you...” J. C. drew out his battered handkerchief and blew his nose. “It made a difference, I felt ... different after I prayed that prayer.”
“Different better or ... ?”
“Yeah. Better. For a long time. But I lost it. Let it slip away. For a while there, I was prayin’ my head off, I was ... I was, you might say ... gettin’ to know God for the first time. Then I met Adele, and...” J. C. shrugged. “And things changed. I guess I thought that was all I needed.”
“Is it?”
“No offense to Adele, but... I guess not.”
They sat for a time in silence. “That’s all I’ve got to say.” J.C. stuffed the handkerchief in his pocket. “And don’t be preachin’ me a dadgum sermon about it.”
Father Tim grinned. “Good timing. This is my day off.”
J.C. put his hand on the door handle.
“I have an idea,” said Father Tim. “If you’re interested.”
“I might be.”
“Maybe you’ve been trying to hold on to Adele on your own terms. And you can’t do it; you said so yourself. You know what I think?”
“What?”
“Give it up. Let it go. Ask God to help you say the things you can’t say ... do the things you can’t do ... feel the emotions you can’t feel.”
J.C. gave him a cold look.
“That’s not a sermon, buddy. That’s not even a homily.”
“Why would He want to help me do stuff I ought to be doing on my own?”
“Because He loves you.”
“No way am I believin’ that.”
“I felt the same for years. Why would He want to do anything for me, a spiritual basket case? But here’s the deal.You can trust that He loves you, and trust that He wants to do good things for you ... because He promises that in His Word.”
J. C. stared out the window.
“What do you have to lose by trusting Him?”
The Muse editor toyed with the handle on his antiquated briefcase.
“Seriously. What?”
“Nothing.”
Twenty years of hanging with this sourpuss, twenty years of putting up with each other’s peculiarities, twenty years of digging down, at last, to bedrock ...
“Maybe it’s too late,” said J.C.
“It’s never too late,” said the vicar, meaning it.
As he entered the lobby of Hope House, he decided he wouldn’t mention the money, unless asked. Though Louella could be forgetful, she’d been stubbornly mindful about the ninety one-hundred-dollar bills presumably hidden in the Plymouth Belvedere.
As he recalled, the bills had been stacked and bound with a rubber band. What kind of bulk would ninety bills create?
“I’ll have to get back to you,” the bank manager told him. “Nobody’s ever asked me to measure money.”
Louella was sleeping in her chair. A female cardinal helped herself at the bird feeder beyond the window.
Though he had no time to waste, he didn’t want to wake her. But then, he didn’t want to leave and miss this visit, either. He’d left Sammy at Lew Boyd’s, where Harley had offered Sammy ten bucks to give him a hand with balancing the tires on a Dodge Dart.
He coughed. Louella dozed on. The TV, turned to mute, flashed images of a morning talk show.
He walked around the room with a heavy tread. Louella sighed in her sleep.
“Miss Louella,” he intoned in his pulpit voice, “that’s a mighty pretty dress you’re wearing. Have you had your neighbor down the hall ordering off the Internet again?”
Louella opened her eyes and furrowed her brow. She adjusted her glasses and leaned forward. “Who’s that?”
“It’s me, Father Tim!”
“Honey ...”
Having flatly refused to call him Father, Louella had long ago elected to call him honey.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“What you doin’ ’bout Miss Sadie’s money?”
He thumped onto the low stool that seemed his very own. “Everything I can, but we couldn’t find it.”
“Who’s we? Who you tellin’ ’bout this?”
“Andrew Gregory, who owns the car.”
“You can’t be talkin’ ’bout big money aroun’ folks!”
“We looked everywhere we could without tearing it apart. We looked in the glove department, umm, compartment; we lifted up the floor mats; we pulled out the seats ...”
“Pulled out th’ seats? Miss Sadie couldn’t’ve pulled out no seats; she was a little bitty thing!”
“True! But my point is, we looked everywhere it was possible to look.”
Louella appeared reflective. “Is money goin’ up or is it goin’ down?”
“Going down at the present moment,” he said, having just spoken with Dooley’s money man.
“Miss Sadie sure wouldn’t like it if it was goin’ up an’ her nine thousan’ was layin’ someplace hid.”
“Did Miss Sadie hide things ... normally?”
“Did Miss Sadie hide things? Honey, she couldn‘t’ve found her little gray head if it wadn’t screwed on tight! She hid her pocketbook ever’ single night in case a bu’glar broke in. We’d git up ever’day, eat a bite, an’ go huntin’ for that pocketbook.
“I’d say, ‘Miss Sadie, why don’t you hide it in th’ same place so we don’ have t’ go chasin’ after it ever’ mornin’?’ She say, ‘Then ever’ body’d know where t’ look for it!’