by Jan Karon
"I'll do it! And God bless you for all the effort you gave us here. It counted for something. Ron Malcolm said you were as plain as the bark on a tree in delivering the Gospel."
"A man has to stand out of the way of the Gospel, and that keeps us plain if we let it."
The rector sat smiling after he hung up. There was nothing, in fact, plain about the old man with the craggy brows and mane of silver hair. His tall, lean frame made a stunning sight in the pulpit, Cynthia said, with his blue eyes blazing like flint striking rock and a sprig of laurel in his buttonhole.
Greer, he wrote on the calendar for the third week of October.
He was walking home from the office in a misting rain when the heavens erupted in a downpour.
Drenched at once, he raced to the wool shop and stood under the awning that was drumming with rain, pondering what to do. Hazel Bailey waved to him from the back of the shop, signaling that he should come in and take refuge. Already soaked, he decided he would make a run for it.
He lifted his newspaper over his head and was ready to dash toward the next awning, when he heard a car horn. It was Edith Mallory's black Lincoln, which was approximately the size of a condominium.
The window slipped down as if oiled, and her driver leaned across the seat. "Father Tim," Ed Coffey yelled, "Miz Mallory says get in. We'll carry you home."
The water was already running along the curb in a torrent.
He got in.
Edith Mallory might have been Cleopatra on her barge, for all the swath of silk raincoat that flowed against the cushiony leather and the mahogany bar that appeared from the arm rest.
"Sherry?" she said, smiling in that enigmatic way that made his adrenalin pump. It was, however, his flight adrenalin.
"No, thanks!" he exclaimed, trying to do something with the sodden newspaper. A veritable cloud of perfume hung in the air of the warm interior; he felt instantly woozy, drugged, like a child of four going down for a nap.
That's the way it was with Edith; one's guard weakened when needed most.
"Dreadful weather, and you above all must mind your health..."
Why above all, he wondered, irritated.
"...Because you're our shepherd, of course, and your little flock needs you to take care of us." Edith looked at him with the large brown eyes that overpowered her sharp features, rather like, he thought, one of those urchin children in paintings done on velvet.
"Well, yes, you have a point," he said stiffly. He saw Ed Coffey's eyes in the rearview mirror; the corners appeared to be crinkling, as if he were grinning hugely.
"We want you to stay strong," she crooned, "for all your widows and orphans."
He looked out the window mindlessly, not noticing that they had passed his street. The awning over the Grill had come loose on one corner, and the rain was gushing onto the sidewalk like a waterfall.
"You might have just the weensiest sherry," she said, filling a small glass from a decanter that sat in the mahogany bar like an egg in a nest.
"I really don't think...," he said, feeling the glass already in his hand.
"There, now!" she said. "That will hit the nail on the jackpot!" When she smiled, her wide mouth pushed her cheeks into a series of.tiny wrinkles like those in crepe paper. Some people actually found her attractive, he reminded himself—why couldn't he?
He gulped the sherry and returned the glass to her, feeling like a child who had taken his croup medicine.
"Good boy," she said.
Where were they, anyway? The windows were streaming with rain, and the lights of the car didn't penetrate far enough to give him any idea of their whereabouts. They had just passed the Grill, but he couldn't remember turning at the corner. Perhaps they had driven by the monument and were on their way to Wesley.
"Why ah, haven't we gone to the rectory?" He felt a mild panic.
"We're going in just the weensiest minute," she said, blinking at him. He could not believe that her hand snaked across the seat toward his. He remembered the dream about the coat closet, and how he had pounded on the door and shouted for Russell Jacks.
He drew his hand away, quite unobtrusively, he thought, and scratched his nose. The sherry had turned on a small light in a far corner of his mind. Perhaps she imagined he'd be after her money for the Sunday school rooms and willing to do a little handholding to get it. It was going to take a cool two hundred thousand to turn that sprawling airstrip of an attic into the Sunday school Josiah Baxter had envisioned. But his own hand would most certainly not milk it forth. On his visitation meeting with the vestry, he had gone over a list of wouldn'ts, so no one would be aggrieved down the road.
He wouldn't, for example, participate in fundraising efforts outside the pulpit. Period. He would not personally court, cajole, preach to, sweettalk, or exhort anyone for money to build anything.
"Ah, Timothy," sighed Edith Mallory, rubbing the tweed of his sleeve as if it were a cat, "Ireland has done wonders for you, I can tell." She moved closer. "It's so lonely being a widow," she said, sniffing. "I sometimes just...ache all over."
When he was finally delivered to the rectory, nearly soaked to the skin, Puny was getting ready to leave. She stared at him with alarm as she put on her coat.
"You look like you been through somethin' awful!"
"Hell!" he exclaimed.
She was shocked to hear him use such language.
There was a red pickup truck parked in front of the office when he arrived on Monday. Someone inside appeared to be talking on a car phone.
The rector fished the key from his pocket as the man got out of the truck and slammed the door. He flipped a cigarette to the sidewalk and ground it out with a quick turn of his heel.
He was big, beefy, and heavy, wearing chinos stuffed into high boots, a flannel shirt under a quilted vest, and a hard hat.
"You the father?"
"Yes. What can I do for you?"
The man took a package of Lucky Strikes from his shirt pocket, shook a cigarette out, lit it, and inhaled deeply.
"Buck Leeper," he said, walking to the rector and extending his hand. The handshake lasted only an instant, but in that instant, the rector felt an odd shock. The hand seemed hugely swollen and red, as if the flesh might burst suddenly from the skin.
"I'm glad to meet you," he lied, hearing the words automatically form and speak themselves. Yet, in a way, he was glad to meet him; the deed was done. "Come in, Mr. Leeper, and have a cup of coffee."
"No coffee," he said, wedging through the door ahead of the rector. The rector hung his jacket on the peg, noticing how the man's presence had made the room suddenly smaller.
"Malcolm said to ask you about the garden statues."
"Garden statues?"
"Lyin' up there on the site. We dozed 'em up. Maybe a dozen pieces, some broke, some not. I don't have time to mess with it." He exhaled a fume of smoke.
"How extraordinary. Of course. I'll be right up. Give me an hour."
The superintendent took a quick, deep drag off his cigarette. "At fifty smackers an hour for dozers, I don't have an hour."
"Well, then. What would you suggest I do?"
Leeper's tone was insolent and hard. "Tell me I can doze that crap off the side of the mountain."
The rector felt ice water in his veins. "I'd appreciate it," he said evenly, "if you'd put your cigarette out. This small room doesn't tolerate smoke."
The superintendent looked at him for a long moment, dropped his cigarette on the floor, and ground it out with a turn of his heel.
He opened the door. "I don't have time to run errands for your building committee. If you want th' statues, come and get 'em," he said and was gone.
"Good grief," moaned Ron Malcolm, hanging his head.
"Well, I can't say you didn't warn me."
"Yes, but I guess there's no warning that really prepares you for Buck Leeper. I insisted he come down here, say hello, introduce himself, ask you about the statues. I thought you'd want to keep them, but I d
idn't know. I guess I'm to blame. I should have handled it."
"No. Stop right there. There's no blame now and there's not going to be. If this morning was any indication, we're in for a rough ride. The man is clearly a walking time bomb. All I want to do is stay out of the way and let him get his job done."
"Fine," said Ron.
His buildingcommittee chairman looked so despondent the rector put an arm around his shoulders. "Buck up," he said, without thinking.
They were still laughing when Ron pulled away from the curb in his blue pickup, headed for Lord's Chapel with the load of statuary.
"Whangdo," said Emma sourly, handing him the phone.
"I've invited the building committee to meet here on Wednesday evening." Edith Mallory sounded pleased with herself. "Of course, they loved the idea. Magdolen will do her famous spoonbread, but I'll do the tenderloin."
Tenderloin!
"I know how you enjoy a tenderloin. I've had it sent from New York."
"That's very generous of you. Of course, there's really no need to impose for a dinner meeting..."
"But life is so short," she said, sniffing. "Why have a dull meeting when you can have a dinner party?"
He didn't know why. Why, indeed?
"You can see the trump lloyd I had painted in the study. It looks just like old books on a shelf."
"Aha."
"I'll have Ed pick you up at a quarter 'til," she said. He could hear the little sucking noise that came from dragging on that blasted cigarette.
"No!" he nearly shouted. His car was still sitting in the garage with a dead battery. "Ah, no thanks. I'll come with Ron. We have a lot to discuss..."
"Of course, but Ron is coming with Tad Sherrill, he said, because his pickup...what did he say..blew a gasket, I think."
"Well, then, I'll just squeeze in with them. And thank you, Edith. It's more than good of you." He hung up at once, not surprised to find his forehead slightly damp .
"June," said Puny.
"No," sighed the rector.
"The fourteenth."
"But how will I get along without you? I've been dreading this."
"You don't have t' git along without me," she said. "After our honeymoon, I'm comin' back. I told you I would."
"Yes, but shouldn't you and Joe Joe move ahead with having children or...something?"
"Not right this minute, if you don't mind," she said archly, setting the mop bucket in the middle of the floor. He thought he had never seen his house help look more enchanting. Her red hair appeared suffused with a kind of glow; her very being radiated happiness. It was like having a wonderful lamp turned on around the place, and he certainly did not want the light to go out.
"Of course," she said, dipping the scrub brush in the soapy water, "we won't leave you hangin'. They'll git somebody else to look after things while I'm gone."
"I don't want anybody else," he said, feeling petulant.
"Oh, poop, eat your carrots. I made 'em th' way my grandpa liked 'em, with butter and a little brown sugar. And that's all the sweets you can have today."
"Thank you, Puny," he said. He couldn't help but notice that when she sassed him these days, she smiled. Looking at her on her hands and knees on the kitchen floor, in that earnest subjection he could hardly bear to see, he thought how he'd learned to love Puny Bradshaw like his own blood.
He wondered if she'd gotten the illustration finished, the one that had to be rushed to her publisher. When he called, he got only the last of her voice recording, "...the beep, thanks," and a sort of static that sounded like a transfer truck rolling along the highway.
When he hung up, he sat for a moment, looking at the rain lashing the office windows. He realized he hadn't wanted to talk with her, exactly. It was more like he had a longing to see her.
He skulked toward the rectory in a raincoat and rain hat, vowing to have Lew Boyd come and jump his battery tomorrow morning, first thing. Before going to his own door, he knocked on Cynthia's.
The roof over the shallow back stoop was hardly any protection. The wind and rain gusted around him violently.
"Cynthia!" he called through the roar. She had locked the screen, he knew, to keep the wind from catching it and tearing it off its hinges.
He shouted her name again. Only a dim light glowed in the direction of the stairs.
He rattled the screen door and pounded as hard as he could. He saw Violet leap onto the kitchen counter and peer at him as if he were the garbage collector.
"Madness!" he muttered at last, fleeing through the drenched hedge to the warm kitchen next door.
Magdolen greeted them at Clear Day, the Mallorys' vast contemporary house astride a ridge overlooking the valley. "Oh, good! Here's the father!" she said happily, helping him out of his raincoat. "We're so glad you're back from Ireland. You can never be too sure of your life over there. It's just tragic."
Tad and Ron left their dripping slickers in the foyer and went toward the library, where their hostess was serving canapes.
"We sure missed you during all the...well, you know," Magdolen sighed. "Miss Edith took it so hard and no children to comfort her. I thought you might like to see where I found Mr. Pat." She led him to the staircase.
"Right there," she said, pointing to the third step from the bottom. "He had landed there, half sitting up with his back against the banister. When I came into the hall, his eyes were wide open, staring straight at me. I thought he looked kind of offcolor. So I said, 'Mr. Pat, I made you a nice, big dish of lasagna, so come and sit down before it gets cold.'"
She shuddered and held tight to his arm. "That's when he...rolled down the rest of the way."
"Magdolen!" Edith Mallory said sharply, taking the rector by the other arm and drawing him toward the library. Five damp committee members huddled around a fire that snapped and crackled on the grate.
"Mud and more mud," Ron Malcolm was saying. "Rivers of mud."
Tad Sherrill grunted. "Oceans of mud."
"And more mud coming, if the forecast holds," announced Winona Presley, thumping her secretarial pad with her ballpoint pen.
Warmed by a cabernet from the Mallory cellar, the diners avidly discussed weather disasters they had known.
"I worked on a job in Kentucky one time," said Ron, "where the rain didn't stop for twentyone days." He was pleased to see he could cut the tenderloin with a fork. "Had four big Cats sittin' in mud up to the cab doors when it was over."
"What I hope I never see again," said Tad, "is a mud slide. Have you ever seen mud slide? It's as bad as lava out of a volcano. I've seen it cover houses above the roof line..."
"You know what I like about the French?" asked their hostess.
All eyes turned toward her in the great pause she designed to follow this question.
"When they dine, they talk only of food. The meal in front of them is the topic of their most earnest conversation. They would never think of ruining their digestion by talking of politics, and certainly not...mud," she said icily.
"But Edith, honey," said Tad, "mud is one of the things this meetin' is about."
Father Tim thought the look she gave her affable guest was needlessly patronizing. "This," their hostess informed them, "is dinner. The meeting about mud will be held in the library by the fire, with a glass of brandy." She drummed her fingers lightly on the table and smiled.
The rector could not avoid the thought that presented itself for consideration. It was that Pat Mallory probably threw himself down the stairs.
After the dessert of orange mocha cake with fresh cream, which, to the disappointment of their hostess, he feasted on with his eyes only, he excused himself to check his sugar. Diabetes was the sorriest of infirmities to drag to a dinner party.
In the guest powder room, awash with berry-colored chintz and black marble, he did what he had to do, then lowered the commode seat and sat there, wearily. To tell the truth, he would have preferred a meeting in the parish hall, with everyone drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups.<
br />
What if the rain drew on for another week? Worse yet, for another two or three weeks? It had been known to happen in Mitford, which had its own exclusive weather system. Since nothing could go forward on the nursinghome site, did they want to put Buck Leeper's crew to work in the attic?
This would mean a good deal of money up front, entirely separate from the construction budget for Hope House, and so far, not one cent had been raised for that effort. Also, the rain could stop, the crew would go back up the hill, and there the attic job would sit, leaving the sanctuary covered with a fine film of dust.
Beginning on the Sunday school now was untimely, he thought. Yes, his mind was definitely clearing on the issue. Mud was not a sound reason to initiate the attic project.
He got up and went into the hall and headed toward the library. Under the pounding of the rain on the skylights, there was an odd silence in the house.
"Where is everybody?" he asked Edith, who came to meet him.
"They thought they should go before it started pouring again, which of course it did. I told them to go ahead—Ed would take you home."
"I thought we were all going to see your trompe l'oeil in the study."
He felt as if a noose had slipped around his neck. Desperate, he looked for Magdolen. Hadn't she been standing near the dining room door when he came down the hall? If so, she had vanished.
Edith drew him along by the arm. "We'll see it later, just the two of us." The fire gleamed brightly on the hearth. He saw that someone had pulled the sofa closer to the fire and that the little table where he'd left his notebook now held a silver tray, two glasses, and a crystal decanter.
Dead meat. That's what Dooley would call him.
That she asked for counseling because it was his job was one thing. That she was holding him against his will was another.
As she moved closer to him on the sofa, he leapt to his feet and began pacing the floor. He couldn't emphasize enough, he told her, how some involvement with others would help her regain balance. The Children's Hospital in Wesley might be the best of outlets for her time and energy; he had supported it for years. They were currently anxious for funds to build a cancer unit, and he knew for a fact it was a responsible organization, capable of giving back the truest satisfaction.
