“Not precisely, but I imagine it has something to do with her rotten childhood and how she doesn’t believe that Jesus would love her. Least that’s what it was last time I talked to her.”
“Seventy years ago?”
She nodded. “Seventy years ago.”
As informed as Sadie was, Percy’s Grocery and General Store was the place to be if you wanted the latest lowdown on the blizzard rampaging our way. I was there around noon buying a shovel when Guthrie Jones, a strapping Paul Bunyan-like man, stopped by for the obligatory gallon of milk and loaf of bread that all about-to-be-blizzard-survivors run to the store to buy.
Guthrie once spent a week north of the Mason-Dixon Line during January. That vast pool of meteorological expertise made him the resident expert on blizzards. I figured that was roughly akin to my being commissioned to sew the Queen of England’s wardrobe by hand because I had once seen a needle.
To hear him tell it, the storm had taken on a life of its own—a living, breathing entity whose sole purpose was to wreak havoc on the innocent townsfolk of Road’s End. Guthrie was a gloomy Gus, but I had a feeling he might be right about this one. He was out of luck on the milk, though.
“Sold every last gallon. Last one went out the door ’round eleven this morning,” Percy told him. “Truck’s not scheduled ’til tomorrow, but last I heard, he was stuck in the snow somewhere west of here.” Before I bought my shovel and hightailed it out of there, Percy, Guthrie, and four other milk-deprived customers had convinced one another the driver was wandering around on foot, dazed and delirious with snow blindness or crippled with frostbite and all the broken bones sustained when his milk truck cart-wheeled off a cliff. No doubt all the gallons of milk on board—those not smashed to smithereens by that falling off the cliff thing—had been carted off by hordes of hungry, club-wielding hijackers bent on saving themselves and their soon-to-be without milk families.
Word spreads fast and furiously around here, but the truth doesn’t always tag along.
Chapter Three
I trudged home. The gloom and doom was wearing me out, and I still had to start on my yard work, which took on an added importance with a blizzard on its way. We’d been in town for only a few days and could finally see the walls behind the boxes of stuff stacked ten high, stuff we’d gathered from twenty-seven years of traipsing around the world and living in thirteen different homes on eleven different bases on two continents. We were finally making some real progress.
Mel was ecstatic. While she unpacked, polished, and placed antiques in their appropriate rooms, I contemplated the grounds surrounding the house. This was to be my kingdom. Mel was the expert inside the walls, but outside, I reigned supreme. Move over Guthrie, there’s a new king in town.
I started with a walk through my realm. The yard was in great condition considering the house stood empty for several months. The flowerbeds were weeded, the plants mulched for the winter months, and the rosebushes were trimmed. I suspected Bristol was my phantom gardener, but I couldn’t get him or anyone else in town to admit to it.
The wind buffeted me. Some gusts pushed so hard I stumbled then listed suddenly in the other direction when I tried to straighten up. I was getting seasick in my front yard. The clouds spit little bits of ice and the occasional snowflake—small, mean-spirited hints of what was to come. I could see low-hanging clouds in shades of charcoal and purple approaching from the west, pregnant with the impending blizzard that churned and roiled inside the great belly of the cloudbank. The blizzard would soon break through its vapory womb, and I had a feeling that when it did, we wouldn’t soon forget it. I shivered, shrank down into my coat, and put my hands in my pockets.
The formal garden occupies the front half of the west side of the Inn. It’s enclosed by a wooden fence that runs along both sides of the corner lot. Its white pickets are worn and weathered and although I’ve offered several times to repaint it, Mel insists the worn, whitewashed look is more authentic. After all, she argued when I threatened to brighten it up with a new coat of Benjamin Moore, early Virginians didn’t have that option. She had me there.
A border of neatly-trimmed boxwood flanks the garden on all sides. Worn brick paths, probably as old as the house itself, work their way at right angles through the garden, forming six squares. Each square is enclosed by holly bushes; Sadie says tulips and daffodils bloom inside those squares in the spring. Since I don’t know a tulip from a tarantula, I’ll take her word for it. Smack in the middle of each square is a fruit tree—apple, peach, cherry, she says. I recognized the apple trees, but the others were going to have to surprise me.
The path is uneven in places where the earth has heaved or where countless garden wanderers have worn down the bricks over the nearly 250 years since it was painstakingly laid. The path continues through a gap in the boxwood hedge along the back border to the kitchen garden. The herbs were long past their prime, but I could still smell their mingled scents and despite the half dozen peanut butter cookies I’d disposed of earlier that morning, the earthy aromas made my stomach growl.
This place must be glorious in the springtime. Whoever planted this garden was a stickler for authenticity. According to Mel, the design is a blend of the many kitchen gardens found in Colonial Williamsburg just across the James River, and this one was a close approximation of the gardens the original owner of this house would have had. My very patient wife waited a long time to have the garden of her dreams, and lo and behold, someone planted it for her two and a half centuries ago.
The boxwoods in the formal garden dated to when the house was built. I wondered what stories they could tell me about the people who inhabited this small Virginia village during the Revolutionary War days. Who pruned the shrubs and trees in those tumultuous times? Who weeded the flower gardens and snipped the herbs? Who laid the brick paths and shaped the holly bushes, plucked the ripe fruit from the trees? Are these folks buried across the road in the church cemetery? Did they believe in the revolutionary cause or cringe at the audacity of the rough Americans who inhabited this land and rebelled against their English homeland?
I made a mental note to talk to Leonard Walling. He seems to know all there is to know about the early years in Road’s End. Maybe he has names and dates, something I can use to appreciate whatever part of history this little piece of land and the house on it played in our country’s turbulent birth. It would be great to know Melanie and I owned and lived in something that spoke eloquently of the past.
I walked through the second opening in the boxwood hedge that led to the dilapidated remains of several outbuildings in the yard behind the house—the section of our land that borders Emma River’s property. When this house was built in 1765, those buildings were used as a kitchen, dairy, smokehouse, maybe even a coach house. My ultimate goal is to renovate all of them to their former condition, but in the short term, I needed a gardening shed to display my collection of antique farm tools—and what better place than the building that teeters the least? My sentiments exactly. The henhouse it was.
Mel and I worked all day, she inside, me outdoors. We made good progress—she more than I, but in my defense, she had it easier. At least it was warm inside the house and the wind wasn’t tearing the skin off her face. I spent three hours cleaning out debris and sweeping down a couple of centuries of cobwebs, keeping a sharp lookout for their owners, and shivered while the gaping holes in the walls let in nearly as much wind as if I’d been outdoors. I managed to repair the worst gaps; that would keep the snow outdoors and the wind at bay for a while. The small building wasn’t exactly snug, but it was weather-tight and a far sight better off than it was earlier that day, not to mention the past two hundred years or so. I’d get to the restoration part of the project when the snow melted, but right now, I couldn’t wait to bring out my tools and introduce them to their new home. Mel’s been threatening to melt them down for scrap metal if I don’t get them off the library floor. She’ll be pleased to know she won’t have to go to all tha
t trouble.
As I worked, the snowstorm gained momentum, the wind rose and fell with an intensity that fairly screamed, “I’m coming to get you.” I could hear the sharp staccato of freezing rain thudding into the walls. The wind battered the building one second then retreated the next only to return from another angle almost instantly. I peeked out the door. The landscape with its slick covering of thin ice resembled a greased turkey.
A blast of wind tossed a giant fistful of icy needles into my face. I wiped my eyes and peered upward. The clouds were parked directly overhead now, low and leaden and menacing, hovering above Road’s End as if they knew something I didn’t. Maybe Guthrie Jones was right; maybe this storm was out to get us.
Chapter Four
I closed the heavy door and lowered the vertical iron bar into its slot. I hung a combination lock over it, but didn’t snap it shut. When I move my tools into it, I’ll secure it. For now, all it held was fresh straw; I could afford to leave it unlocked.
Just as I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with a permanent wind burn or drown in the onslaught of icy needles, I was saved by the need to get to the weekly planning session of the church’s finance committee. Twenty minutes later, I climbed the worn wooden steps of the church and noticed Roscoe’s dismal condition in the cemetery to my left. He was lying flat on his back in a muddy rut puddled with ice and slushy snow. He stared upward to a leaden sky.
“Roscoe seems to be in a bad way tonight,” I said to the man climbing the stairs beside me. It was Leo Walling, town historian. Nice guy. Tall, gangly—resembles a pipe-smoking praying mantis. He paused on the steps, turned to face me, removed his pipe, and exhaled a misshapen circle of smoke that quivered its way skyward. He pointed toward Roscoe with his pipe stem. “Yep.”
“But why? Can’t someone fix him?”
More smoke, more quivering. More pipe-pointing. “Tried.”
“Didn’t work?”
“Nope.”
Once Leo quit his incessant chattering, I took solace in knowing that Roscoe—or rather his headstone—didn’t care much one way or the other. For all practical purposes, he was dead to the world—for over two hundred years, in fact. The cemetery’s proximity to the front door of the church was the only reason anybody noticed him to begin with. I suppose he’s luckier than his cousin, Lawrence, who lies face down in his own muddy rut several feet away. At least folks talk about Roscoe; nobody even notices Lawrence anymore. The church cemetery is going the way of the church building itself, slipping slowly into ruin. Roscoe and Lawrence are just the outward signs of an otherwise invisible malady.
There are seven of us on the committee, including Pastor Perry Parry (what mother would do that to her baby?) and me. I’m the youngest and at fifty-five, that’s saying something. Leo, at eighty-seven, is the oldest. I know because he told me. Seems Leo is particularly proud of his age. He’s a lifelong resident of the county, but only sixty-eight of those years have been spent here in Road’s End, placing him just one step away from being the new kid on the block. He never married. Too bad; my wife tells me he’d have made a great husband.
The rest of the committee was comprised of Sadie Simms, the chicken-flinger from across the street, Winnie and Dewey Wyandotte (Dewey’s a former Marine and Winnie looks like one), and Frank Wiley, the patriarch of the town’s only gas station and repair shop.
The committee has two collective goals: to increase membership, which has dwindled to a dismal fifty members over the last thirty years—some of whom are likely dead since their recordkeeping is lackluster at best—and to raise enough money to salvage what’s left of their historic, dilapidated church. Each Saturday evening, somewhere between 6:00 and 6:30 p.m., depending on our supper schedules, the six of them—seven now, with me—assemble in the sanctuary of the Christ Is Lord Church to plot and scheme our congregation’s way back into the mainstream of Christianity. I joined them just a week ago, so I have yet to plot and scheme all that much.
Pastor Parry opened the meeting with a prayer then turned to Sadie and asked her to read the minutes from the last meeting. She leaped out of the pew, flipped open her stenographer’s notebook with a practiced flick of her wrist, and began to read.
“The meeting of the finance committee of the Christ Is Lord Church was called to order at 6:17 p.m. Discussion was held on how to raise money. Nobody had any ideas. Meeting was adjourned early because Winnie thought she left her stove on. Meeting ended at 6:33 p.m.” She threw herself backward to the pew and landed with a thud.
“Thank you, Sadie,” Pastor Parry said. “Let’s dispense of the approval of the minutes. I don’t think anyone is going to dispute them.” We all nodded. “Okay, then. Who wants to open tonight’s discussion?”
Winnie Wyandotte raised her hand and stood. “I’d like to announce to the committee that we’re moving along nicely on the live Nativity.”
Pastor Parry nodded. I thought I saw a pained look flash across his face but figured it was probably my imagination. “Well, that’s nice, Winnie. Have you sold any tickets yet?”
“That’s not my job, Pastor. Sadie’s taking care of that. Sadie and Leo.”
Sadie lunged upward again. “Well, I’d sell the tickets if Dewey’d print ’em.”
Dewey was Winnie’s husband, and now it was his turn to stand. “I’d print ’em if I knew what to print!”
Sadie looked to Leo for support. He sat with one leg crossed over the other, his elbow resting on his knee, pipe in hand. I wondered why folks didn’t put a stop to his smoking in the church building, but perhaps they realized he couldn’t function without it. Leo puffed out a couple of squiggles then nodded in Sadie’s direction. I guess that signified support, because Sadie looked triumphant.
Pastor Parry looked around at his committee, half of whom were standing like pegs in one of those children’s toys that you smack with a hammer. I wondered if God ever used a hammer. This would be as good a time as any. “Well, you may be seated,” he said, gesturing with outstretched hands, palms downward. “And thank you all. Does anyone have anything to add?” He looked at me. “Hugh, you’re accustomed to dealing with congregations, being a retired Air Force chaplain and all. Any ideas on raising some money?”
I started to stand and decided against it. I didn’t want to be the first smackee. “Yes. Well, I didn’t have to do much fundraising, Pastor. The military has its own sources, you know.”
Tee-hees sounded all around.
“But I do wonder if maybe we could try a car wash? Or a bake sale? Not very original, I know, but they always seemed to work when I was growing up.”
“Done that.” Puff, puff, squiggle, squiggle.
“Oh,” I said, looking over at Leo. “Recently?”
“July.”
That was before Melanie and I arrived in Road’s End. Fact is, we were still out-processing from the Air Force at that time and didn’t move into The Inn at Road’s End until the weekend after Thanksgiving. I was oblivious to most everything going on around me until we got our furniture moved in, unpacked two hundred or so boxes, and finally opened the doors of The Inn for paying customers. I joined the church’s finance committee shortly after I came out of hiding. I thought I could help both my community and my church. This was what I got for my trouble, tossed smack-dab into the middle of a senior citizen feud.
“Okay,” I said. “Make any money?”
“I have that.” Sadie said as she riffled through the pages of her steno pad until she found what she wanted. “Okay, over the past two years, we’ve raised a grand total of $1,220. That was after seven bake sales, six car washes, and our church carnival this past May.” She nodded her head once to punctuate her comments, set her pad on her lap, and folded her hands.
“Thank you, Sadie.” Pastor Parry looked over at me. “That’s the news, Hugh. We’ve tried everything we can think of, and even that $1200 is long gone. We had to put a new roof on the church and even with Bristol Diggs doing all the labor at no charge, we spent nearl
y every dime we had on materials.” He shrugged his shoulders and sank down to his chair facing the pews. “We’re back to square one, it seems.” He grinned and looked to the ceiling—and presumably the heavens beyond. “There’s always the lottery.”
Now these folks seemed smart to me, and it was apparent that they knew they could meet and argue and conspire and draw up tentative plans until the cows—or the chickens in Sadie’s case—came home, but they weren’t getting any younger and neither were the parishioners they represented. Besides, their idea of “young folks” meant anyone born after World War II. There were precious few of them left in the vicinity, and Mel and I were two of them. Their own children were either already members of the church or had moved from the area years ago. And as badly as they needed new blood, it was in very short supply. Winning the lottery, unlikely as that seemed to be, was the only thing they hadn’t discussed over the past one hundred weeks.
Pastor Parry slapped his hands on his knees, pushed off from his chair and stood before his committee. “Okay,” he said, “if nobody else has any ideas, I have an announcement.” Notice how he avoided mentioning that his announcement would drive me to the brink of insanity? Yeah, me too.
“As you know, dear brothers and sisters,” he said, “my wife Hazel has been feeling poorly for several weeks now.”
There arose spontaneous murmuring and head-bobbing, and a general consensus was reached that yes, Hazel had indeed been sick. Quite sick.
“Bless her sweet heart,” Sadie said. “I’ve prayed for her every day.”
The others nodded their agreement, bobbing like those wobble-headed creatures peeking out the back windows of cars all over town.
“Thank you, Mrs. Simms,” Pastor answered, pronouncing it “Miz” as any good southern preacher would. “But Hazel’s not the reason I’m making this announcement. I mention her ill health only to thank you for all your prayers and let you know she’s doing much better.” He took a deep breath and looked at each of us. “My doctor tells me I must slow down. In fact,” another deep sigh, “he insists that I resign from my position as your pastor as soon as possible.” He plopped down as though expecting that heavenly hammer.
Misstep (The Road's End Series Book 1) Page 2
