by Amy Sorrells
His dwindling congregation needed more, too.
Dr. Wilcox had told James that he’d save people, congregations, towns. Two decades later and he had a dead wife, a dying church, and a wayward daughter. He was supposed to be the caretaker of the flock and the lost sheep, the one who loved everyone despite their sins. But he needed Scriptures that spoke of what happens when the shepherd gets lost, what happens when a church is forced to close and a pastor can’t find his way. “Waiting on the Lord,” and Scripture’s promises of the souls of the diligent being richly supplied, didn’t comfort him anymore. The only words that felt true these days were those of his father, the tire-factory man, who’d said he’d never amount to anything.
Though warned by fellow seminarians and pastor friends about the ebb and flow of faith in most everyone—including and perhaps especially church leaders—he wasn’t prepared for his church to die. For a while, stories of the Israelites in the desert, the widow at Zarephath providing for Elijah, Ezekiel and the dry bones coming alive buoyed him. But now, after losing Molly, he was near plain exhausted. His own eyes and those of his congregants had long been glazing over with boredom as he delivered his sermons. Words flowed from his mouth, the same stories he’d told before with a different, dispassionate spin. Afterward, were it not for his notes, he would often be unsure of exactly what he’d said. He shuffled out to his car like the rest of them, shoulders weighty with discouragement and an absence of inspiration, let alone joy. If he were completely honest, he was cynical, skeptical, and almost to the point of being perfectly fine with closing the doors of the church for good.
For five years straight, when the elders met for his annual review, he’d offered to resign. And yet each time they voted unanimously for him to stay, refusing to accept it. After Molly died, he considered moving back to her hometown of Atlanta for Shelby to be close to her grandparents. But Shelby had begged him to stay. Besides that, he knew a physical upheaval so soon after the loss of Molly would not help Shelby. Still, each time James woke in the middle of the night and reached his arm around the cold side of the bed, he wanted nothing more than to escape from that drafty house, from the smallness of Sycamore that tightened his throat, and from the calling he so often doubted he was worthy of anymore.
He tried to push all this, and the worry gnawing at him about where Shelby was and when she’d be home, out of his mind as he trudged up the creaky steps to his bedroom. Sunday was coming, and he still had a sermon to write.
7
Noble pushed three bales of hay down the ladder of the haymow, and they landed with a thud on the floor of the barn below. He was glad he and Eustace had done all the cutting and baling the week before since the unusually wet weather seemed determined to stay for a while, according to the weather reports. His arms burned from the work of moving bales, and as it wouldn’t be milking time for at least another hour, he decided to take advantage of the quiet afternoon and sit for a spell in the loose hay. The rain fell soft and steady outside the hatch, and leaning against the side of it was one of the few places where the ache of the work felt worth it. The straight rows of the crops and the edges of the land appeared so distinct that the landscape looked more like a painting than something real that he’d worked and sweated over all day. He’d sown the seeds, and dirt caked permanently under his fingernails. The pads of his hands were thick and yellowed with calluses. Still, the gentle roll of the corn tassels and crisp lines he’d cut across the alfalfa field looked perfect enough to have been shaped by hands much greater than his and Eustace’s. He’d almost forgotten how green the land could get, practically glowing, after the three years of intense drought that had caused all the bluegrass and even some of the toughest weeds to brown and go dormant.
At least it’s not storming, he thought. As grateful as they’d been for all the rain this year, the storms that had come with it had been as intense as the drought. He thought about what was left of the Whitmore herd. From the mow, he could see the tops of the grain elevators and dryers a few acres away from where Whitmore’s cows grazed. Though he knew they were fine alone in their pastures, he and Eustace needed to move them over within the next week or two. He stared up at the thick trusses and beams that held the barn together and wondered at how a tornado could knock them down in the blink of an eye, how things like a father leaving a family and a few cells of a child growing wrong in the womb could do the same.
Noble had realized the fragility of life for the first time in the mow years back, when Shelby used to traipse across the fields and the three of them—Noble, Eustace, and Shelby—played in the creek and hid in the mow and pretended the great loft was their pirate ship sailing across the ocean to places they only wished they could go. Places with sand instead of dirt and manure pressing up between their toes; places with palm trees instead of cottonwoods to nap beneath; places where princes escaped the awful, terrible rule of unfit kings and rescued orphaned princesses. Noble and Eustace ran around thrusting and swinging swords made of fallen tree branches, and Shelby flitted about in sundresses and rain boots. The three of them played in their otherworlds for hours, their adventures stretching into days. The cows became royal subjects over which they ruled (with kindness only), and the cats and their frequent litters of kittens became their serfs to protect from barn owls and raccoons, the villainous pillagers of their land.
A lot of barn cats roamed around the farm. Some they’d see once and never again, and others would hang around for years growing fat from barn rats and milk dripping from empty calf bottles and machinery waiting to be cleaned. As they did with the cows, Eustace kept track of all of them and Noble named them.
When they were young, no older than grade school, there had been an especially friendly black-and-white cat named Clyde, who quickly became Eustace’s favorite. Eustace knew where Clyde slept, brought the cat pieces of lunch meat, and generally spoiled the feline until it had become a shadow following Eustace around at the heel wherever he went. One day when the three of them were playing in the mow, Clyde appeared, ears unusually flattened and groaning a low growl of annoyance. When they’d approached and peered over the bales of hay where the cat sat hunched and ready to pounce, the cat batted its paws at them and they understood why: Clyde had kittens. Correctly identifying the gender of a cat was not something they’d completely understood, and so they did not bother renaming her.
Eustace woke Noble early every morning so they could check on Clyde and her four babies—two black with white paws, one all black, and the fourth patterned like her mother—before they started their milking chores. They watched as the babies suckled at Clyde’s milk-laden belly, coaxed Clyde into letting them pick the babies up and pet them as their fur thickened and their eyes cracked open for the first time.
Eustace loved on those kittens as hard as he loved on the cows. Once, Noble had caught him with one in his pajama shirt pocket when they were getting ready for bed. They’d had to wait until Dale passed out in his threadbare recliner, David Letterman and his audience making enough of a racket that he wouldn’t hear the screen door click open and shut, so they could get the kitten outside and back to nursing at its mother.
Then came the rainy afternoon when everything changed. Noble remembered it like like an old movie, Shelby waiting for him on the front porch in a peach dress with puffy sleeves and blue ditsy flowers (he’d remembered because she wore a blue kerchief knotted on the top of her head holding back her black curls, and which matched the blue of her eyes), and the brown rubber boots caked in mud from their last excursion.
They figured Eustace had gone on up to check on Clyde and her kittens first. Wouldn’t be the first time he’d beaten them to it. But as they headed toward the barn, they knew something was terribly wrong. The wailing sounded like a siren, louder and more awful as they ran toward it. By the time they reached Eustace in the mow, he was curled in a ball next to the bales behind which Clyde and her litter lived. He covered his head, his face with his arms, which muffled his moaning but
not his distress.
Noble and Shelby looked at each other and back at Eustace, then at the bales of hay. Shelby stood fast by the hole in the mow up through which they’d climbed, her jaw slack with panic, and Noble peered over the bale.
Not one kitten—not even Clyde—had survived the attack, which must have come from one or more of the several barn owls that lived high on the rafters. It appeared as if Clyde had fought a good fight, her body limp and covered in open wounds as she lay over the remains of the four kittens, what was left of them that the creature hadn’t plucked clean. The hay was a bloody mess from the massacre.
Thankfully Dale had been on the road, or he’d have smacked them around, Eustace especially, and made fun of them for their grieving. Mama had given them a boot-size shoe box and padded the bottom with a pretty dish towel. Noble, with Shelby’s help, scooped Clyde O’Malley and her babies up with gloved hands and placed the lot of them in the box, and the four of them had a funeral for the family of felines out under the cottonwood tree on the hill that dropped down to the creek. Shelby brought her Bible and officiated, on account of her dad being the preacher and all. But she cried the hardest, too. And Mama hadn’t cried at all, just stood holding Eustace’s crazy arms to his sides and rocking him back and forth like she always did, even though he was already grown clear up past her shoulders.
He remembered Shelby, tears streaming down her cheeks, eyes red and swollen, which made them all the more blue.
He remembered putting a hand on Eustace’s shoulder, gently so as not to start him into fits of arm flailing. “You know there’s nothing you coulda done.”
Eustace had only moaned and closed his eyes real tight as if trying desperately to block out the real.
“It’s just the way things are, the weak being scooped up by the strong, the ones who aren’t bothering anybody getting snuffed out for no good reason at all.”
It wasn’t the owl’s fault he was doing what he needed to do to survive. But still, their belief, buoyed by the naiveté of childhood, in dreams and saving the weak ones was shattered and they were changed.
The whole incident had been like looking out the haymow only in reverse.
Everything beautiful at a distance looks pretty ugly up close.
8
James heard the screen door squeak and Shelby’s footsteps padding up the stairs at 12:22 a.m. He’d fallen asleep with his cell phone on his chest and the house phone on his bedside table in case Sheriff Tate called, or worse. Feigning sleep, he listened as she settled herself, grateful for no sniffles or other sounds of possible emotional distress from her room across the hall. Her bedsprings creaked, and that was the last sound he heard from her until he woke her for Sunday services. He was grateful that she did not balk about going to church. Not that it would have mattered much, since there were only a few more left to fight over.
As the two of them left the house, James watched Shelby rub her finger across the face of her smartphone, communicating more with her friends than the two of them had communicated in months.
“You have a nice time last night?”
“Mmm-hmm.” She glanced at him, then back down at her phone, the pink case embedded with pink rhinestones.
“A little past curfew when you got back, wasn’t it?”
“I guess.”
“You guess?”
She did not move her eyes from her phone. “Fine, yeah, so I was about an hour late.”
“An hour and twenty-two minutes.”
“What do you do, stare at the clock the whole time I’m out?”
Determined to keep calm and not lose his temper, James focused on the country road ahead of them and the neatly sown fields of corn and beans on either side. “No, Shelby, I don’t. But I do notice when you’re late, and I do know that nothing good happens after eleven in this town.”
“I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”
“What were you doing, then?”
The corn was way past knee-high. He guessed it would approach his shoulders if he stopped the car and stood alongside the stalks.
“We were just talking. We were on the swings at the playground in town. Ask Sheriff Tate. He drove by and waved. Did you send him out looking for me?”
His neck grew hot at the snark in her voice. “No, I didn’t. Shelby, look. All I’m asking is for you to respect your curfew. Can you do that for me?”
Her phone chirped with incoming texts and she grinned, but not at James. “Sure, Dad. Whatever.”
“And about yesterday—”
She sighed and turned her phone facedown on her lap. “Look, Dad, I’m sorry. Sorry about the curfew. Sorry about our fight. Is that what you want to hear?”
He gripped the steering wheel harder. “You know I’m only concerned about your safety.”
“Dad.” She pulled a hair tie off her wrist and collected her long curls, twisted them, piled them on top of her head, and secured them. “You can’t be scared all the time for the rest of your life. Isn’t that what you tell me? About the peace that surpasses understanding? About trusting the Lord with all your heart and he’ll make our paths straight?”
“Yes, but—”
“But what?” She picked her phone back up and rubbed the screen again, focusing hard on the soft glow in her hand.
It was his turn to sigh. “The accident aside, it’s hard for a father to trust a boy with his daughter. I was a boy once myself, you know.”
“Dad!”
“What?” He glanced at her, glad he’d caught her full attention. Wasn’t it his job to mortify her?
“I’m fine.”
“Remember what I said about hands-to-hands and lips-to-lips, and you won’t have any trouble.”
“Yes, Dad. I remember.” She slunk down in her seat and pulled her phone closer to her face.
He noticed a hard blush in her cheeks.
Molly had been so good at anticipating Shelby’s needs, responding to the ups and downs of the teenage girl’s moods and angsts like a musician reading a score. Sure, there were difficult seasons, and Molly and Shelby had argued about the length of shirts and skirts, and on the reasons why she was not allowed to wear leggings without a tunic that covered her behind. But for the most part, the two of them had gotten along better than most mothers and daughters. While other parents complained of silent treatments and brooding moods, Molly and Shelby had attended mother-daughter retreats, shopped together, read books together, even crafted together, working for hours, sanding and painting and refurbishing, in the detached garage. Molly had explained to James that Shelby opened up to her when they worked on their art in ways she wouldn’t at the dinner table or otherwise. And they’d been so grateful for that lifeline into Shelby’s life.
Now that Molly was gone, James struggled to find a similar connection for the two of them. He had thought perhaps singing and church might be a possibility, but then Shelby stopped singing. He couldn’t blame her. He knew she’d felt that her singing was the reason for the accident, even though the police, rescue team, and the whole of Sycamore tried to assure her otherwise. But once a person has decided to own the blame for something, the shame of that is a hard thing to shake.
James turned the radio to the pop station out of Lafayette, hoping to subtly show Shelby he was not only interested in her, but also that he cared enough to try to encourage her interests. Sweat trickled down his back before the car reached the outskirts of town, the morning was so thick with humidity. The sun shone, but the wind blew fierce, upturning the maple leaves, their silver underbellies a sure sign they were in for a storm sometime that day.
Sunday mornings in downtown Sycamore seemed the only thing unmarred by the technology and greed of the twenty-first century. The full width of the brick street, void of teeming weekend tourists and shop patrons, welcomed them. It was as if every building and every tree, every bench and every sidewalk had a chance on Sunday mornings to exhale, a chance to gird itself with the rest needed for the week ahead. Though the population w
as only a few hundred, Sycamore prided itself—in the spring, summer, and fall, especially—on attracting hundreds of folks from surrounding counties to its burgeoning farmers’ market, antique shops, and boutiques.
As they passed the antique store, he noticed a dresser still for sale that Molly had refinished in robin’s egg blue. James nodded toward the store. “I see they still have a piece of your mom’s. Have you ever thought about selling some of your string art there?”
Shelby craned her neck to see as they passed.
“You’re still making them, aren’t you?” He thought about the one hanging over their front door that read Home Sweet Home in bright-yellow yarn letters. The color of their siding. Molly’s favorite color.
“Haven’t for a while. But maybe.”
“Think about it. I bet folks would buy ’em faster than you could make ’em.” He felt her looking at him and turned to meet her gaze.
“Thanks, Dad.”
He patted her knee and returned his focus to the street, where nothing stirred except the bricks shifting under the wheels of their car.
9
A yellow butterfly landed on James’s windshield, fanned its wings a couple of times, and then flew off as he maneuvered the older-model Chevy sedan that had replaced Molly’s Honda into the spot with the sign in front of it that read Reserved for Reverend Horton. No one would have threatened the spot anyway since there were plenty of spaces left empty in the crumbled asphalt lot, during service time and otherwise. Shelby lingered over her hair and lip gloss in the passenger-side mirror before following him inside the church.
That morning James had an odd feeling of being an observer rather than the orchestrator of the Sunday morning activities. He realized it was the same feeling he’d had as his friends guided him through the motions of preparing for Molly’s funeral. No doubt Kernodle’s baleful declarations two days prior were to blame.