by BJ Hoff
He hadn’t remained a bachelor so long by choice. He simply hadn’t fallen in love. Well, once, when he’d still been little more than a boy. But she’d gone away to Europe and met someone else, ending their engagement. For years there had been no one else. Yet the never-quite-relinquished longing for a home and family created in him a reluctance to face the weekends when families normally did things together.
How long had he yearned for someone to be together with?
And then Maggie had come back to Skingle Creek. Maggie, his former student, later his friend, and at last the love of his life. Now he welcomed each Friday as the time of dismissal approached for the promise of time to be with his family.
And Maggie’s parents, of course. They almost always got together with Matthew and Kate on weekends, at least for a few hours. Both he and Maggie were keenly aware that her folks faced their own kind of loneliness these days. With Ray almost grown and choosing to spend time with his friends when he wasn’t working, and with Eva Grace no longer with them, surely the weekends must be difficult for them as well.
Jonathan hadn’t missed the shadow that fell across Kate’s face when he and Maggie bundled up Gracie and left for home on Friday evenings. Except for Matthew needing his wages from the mine, it was most likely good for Kate to have him home these days.
Although he hadn’t mentioned it to Maggie, Jonathan had also felt relief the past few days, knowing that Matthew was there with Kate and Gracie. It bothered him that he couldn’t be with Gracie all the time, given the fact that Barlow had threatened to come for her at some point. He consoled himself with the fact that, even with a broken arm, his father-in-law could be an intimidating man. Barlow would find more than he’d bargained for if he came looking for Gracie and found Matthew standing in the gap.
Jonathan looked up from his desk to see Maggie marching two of the six Conibear children—“the Conibear rascals” as she called them in private—into his office. The duo she had in tow were the twins, Willy and Billy. These all too frequent visitors to his office were the youngest of the tribe. Jonathan had the next three in age in his class. The oldest of the six, Jerome, was no longer a student, having left school for the mine at age fifteen.
There had never been a Conibear who didn’t cause trouble in or out of class, and seldom did any one of them act alone. What with five of them still in school, Jonathan’s—and now Maggie’s—patience was tested on an almost daily basis.
Part of his mind registered the fact that Maggie looked particularly fetching today with her starched white shirtwaist and green silk ribbon tied in a neat bow around her neck. The bun at the nape of her neck, as was more often than not the case, had failed to securely anchor her heavy hair. A few curls slipped free in places, giving her the look of a slightly carefree schoolgirl.
He stood as they entered, his eyes meeting his wife’s just long enough to note the blend of exasperation and grudging amusement in her expression.
“Billy and Willy have something to tell you, Mr. Stuart,” she said, her tone impressively stern.
Jonathan clasped his hands behind his back and waited. What this time?
“What’s going on, boys?” he asked.
They sneaked a look at each other. Willy grinned and Billy bit his lower lip as if to restrain himself. They somehow managed to lift a hand in unison and swipe a dark shock of hair off their foreheads, which promptly fell forward over their eyes.
“Billy?”
The six-year-old’s face flamed. He opened his mouth as if to speak and then thought better of it.
In the meantime, Willy peered at Jonathan from under the hair falling over his eyes. Jonathan lifted an eyebrow, and the boy stopped grinning.
“It seems that neither wants to speak first, Mrs. Stuart,” Jonathan said. “Why don’t you fill me in on the situation?”
Maggie sighed. “They put a toad in Livvie Ferguson’s desk and made her cry.”
The two boys shot a self-satisfied look at each other and then at Jonathan, who had all he could do to swallow down a wave of hilarity.
The last thing he needed, however, was to have them thinking he was amused by their behavior. He straightened to his full height and donned his most severe frown.
“Why would you boys do such a thing? Surely you knew you’d frighten Livvie.”
They looked down at the floor. In unison, of course.
“Well?” Jonathan said. “I’m waiting for an answer, boys.”
He saw Willy poke his brother in the back, and as if a button had been pushed, Billy poured out a stream of words that added up to a pathetically lame excuse. “We was just funnin’ her. We din’t mean no harm. We wanted to see her jump, that’s all.”
Beside him, Willy snickered. “And she did jump too.”
Jonathan darkened his expression still more and deepened his voice to a rumble. He must not look at Maggie. “You find it amusing to frighten a schoolmate?”
The two boys again stole a glance at each other, their expressions sobering.
“No, sir,” said Willy.
“No, sir,” said Billy.
“I should hope not,” Jonathan said, settling what he meant to be an intimidating look on first one and then the other. “Well, boys, you’ve had your fun. Now you’re going to have to face the consequences.”
Willy turned red, while his brother went pale.
“Mrs. Stuart,” said Jonathan, not quite meeting Maggie’s gaze, “you’d best go back to your class. The boys can stay here with me for the next several minutes while we consider a proper punishment for their behavior.”
In what Jonathan knew to be a deliberate ploy to make him meet her eyes, Maggie made no move to leave.
Finally Jonathan donned the face that his wife referred to as his “stuffed-shirt schoolmaster expression” and looked at her full on. Her eyes danced and her mouth quirked, but he thought he withstood her mischief fairly well.
She went back to her class then, leaving Jonathan to deal with the twins.
He watched her go, more eager than ever for the sound of the dismissal bell.
A mutual throat clearing reminded him of his mischievous young charges, and he turned his attention to the two scamps eyeing him across the desk.
Back at her desk in her classroom, Maggie admitted to herself that she loved Fridays. In fact, she looked forward to them so much that she wondered if she ought to feel guilty. She enjoyed being a teacher. She loved her students and loved everything about the school: the smell of chalk and schoolbooks, the sight of little girls in pigtails and pinafores, even ornery little boys like the Conibear twins, who couldn’t behave more than half an hour at a time, if that.
Lately though she welcomed the end of the school week more and more. Too often she found herself thinking about the weekend when it wasn’t Friday. It unsettled her, this preoccupation with the weekend, and she wondered if her earlier love and passion for teaching might be on the wane.
The truth was, she was beginning to not mind so much the fact that after March she would no longer be teaching. She hadn’t admitted this to Jonathan because she hated the thought that he might be disappointed in her. He made no secret of the fact that he was loath to even think of the time when she’d no longer be with him at the school every day. How would he feel if he learned she was beginning to look forward to the very thing he dreaded?
Her emotions were at war with one another. Although she wasn’t all that comfortable—at least not yet—with the idea of giving up teaching entirely, the reality was that she wanted to be at home with Gracie. On the other hand, she had to question how content she would be staying at home all day after so many years of being away, first at college and then in the classroom. She thought she’d still like to teach in some capacity—but not full-time.
She didn’t want to cause any inconvenience for Jonathan, but if he and the board set their heads to it, surely they could find another teacher willing to settle in Skingle Creek. And he did have Carolyn Ross, the highly effici
ent school secretary, to help out in the meantime.
In truth, there was something else prompting her increasing restlessness besides the desire to spend more time at home. She never doubted that Gracie was in good hands with her parents. They had raised four children of their own, after all, and they loved Gracie as much as if she were their own. But next week Da would return to work, and her mother would again be alone most of the day with the baby. What if Richard Barlow were to show up when there was no one with Gracie but Mum?
Even if her father were at home, would he make a difference? She knew Jonathan and her mother believed Da could halt any attempt on the part of Richard or his attorney to take Gracie away. And not so long ago, Maggie wouldn’t have doubted their confidence. But now? Da had a broken arm, a crushed leg, and a back that failed him when he least expected it. Would he really be able to stop Richard or anyone else?
Maggie had seen the heat and strength of her former brother-in-law’s rage for herself. She had seen the wildness in his eyes and the evidence of the brutality he’d wreaked upon her sister. And because she had seen, she couldn’t allow herself to be lulled into believing her father, in his present condition, would present any kind of defense against Barlow.
While she wasn’t so foolish as to imagine she could match Richard Barlow strength for strength, she couldn’t help but believe that, at least for now, she might be the only one who could offer any real protection to Gracie during the day.
She would die before she let anyone take away Eva Grace’s baby.
Her baby.
She could only pray that Richard wouldn’t come before the end of March. After that she would be at home with Gracie.
Please, Lord, don’t let him come before then.
Maggie thought about her prayer for a long moment and then revised it.
Better yet, Lord, don’t let him come at all.
Chapter Nineteen
Sunday Surprises
Love is the one constant of a heart…
God’s love is the one constant of a life.
Anonymous
When Jonathan walked into the Sunday afternoon rehearsal with his “Singing Miners,” as he’d dubbed the new choral group, the question foremost in his mind was whether or not he’d misjudged his own idea—and his father-in-law’s influence. At the first rehearsal the week before, no more than half-a-dozen men had shown up, including himself and Matthew. He had already steeled himself for an even poorer turnout today.
He hadn’t been in the church meeting room much more than ten minutes when he got his first surprise as Matthew walked in with four other men. Each wore a dubious, almost sheepish expression. They stopped, leaning against the back wall as if ready to bolt from the room. A few minutes later Tommy Byrne and Luc Penryn, a Welshman who hadn’t been in Skingle Creek more than a few months, came in and joined the others.
By the time Bernard Kelly and Nevan Flynn sauntered in, the men had begun to talk among themselves and appeared to be losing some of their uncertainty. The brightest moment for Jonathan was the appearance of James Egan, followed by Benny Pippino—“Pip”—a former student who had lost a hand in a machinery accident while still a child and working as a breaker boy. Jonathan had befriended the lad, convincing the school board to let Pip attend classes in exchange for doing odd jobs about the schoolhouse for a nominal wage. He’d gone on to graduate as one of the top students in his class, eventually working himself into a good job keeping books for Charles Ferguson at the company store.
Something that might not be known to everyone else but was well-known to Jonathan was that Pip possessed an achingly lovely tenor voice.
He walked up to Jonathan upon entering and grinned widely. “I know I’m not a miner, Mr. Stuart. But I was hoping maybe you’d let me sing anyway. You remember, I always did love to sing when I was still in school.”
Jonathan couldn’t reply fast enough. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you here, Pip! Of course you can sing with us.”
Before Jonathan commenced rehearsal, five more men arrived, making a total of sixteen besides himself. He was feeling downright jubilant when he walked to the front of the room and coaxed them to come forward.
He spoke only a few minutes, welcoming them all, and reviewing for the newcomers the type of music they’d be singing, as well as the main objective behind the group’s formation. “I’m simply hoping to provide something that, even in a small way, might help lift the spirits of our neighbors every now and then, and music has been proven to do that in a number of ways. So that’s what we’re about, fellows.”
There was no missing their skeptical looks. These men lived hard lives, lives in which the very act of survival was a struggle for them and their families. The monotony of their work, the grind of their everyday trials, could at times be enough to crush their spirits and dampen their hopes. Jonathan had no illusions about how difficult it would be for such men to trust the word of a schoolteacher who seldom got his hands dirty except to plant a garden, a man who knew next to nothing about never having sufficient wages to pay his bills. Yet that was exactly what he was asking them to do: trust that he was right in his conviction that they could make a difference for the town.
Watching them, taking in the way they were studying him, he decided it was time to dispense with words and turn to the music. “Enough talk,” he said. “Let’s just sing a song or two.”
A few heads nodded. This was definitely not the kind of group in which one “tried out” for placement, so he lined them up according to the kind of voices they told him they had: “low,” “not too low,” and a “little higher than some.”
Jonathan expected to have his work cut out for him in training the men to sing parts, perhaps even in singing unison. He couldn’t have been more wrong. What he had forgotten was that these men sang together nearly every day on the way to work, on the way home, and in church on Sunday. After a couple of verses of “Barbara Allen” and “Froggie Went a Courtin’ ” he was fairly bursting with delight. These men could sing! They harmonized almost as well as a professional group. They knew how to cue each other and sang with heart. And it came naturally to them. Even the words he’d so carefully written on the chalkboard of the meeting room proved, for the most part, to be unnecessary.
What pleased him even more than the musical ability evident within the group was the awareness that they were enjoying themselves. Gone were the diffident mumbles, the skeptical expressions, the slumped shoulders. Once they started singing, they stood tall, watching Jonathan intently for direction and smiling when he expressed his pleasure. Before long they were even calling out requests.
Jonathan discovered that Civil War songs were still popular among them, as were the tunes of Thomas Moore. Irish pride surged with Moore’s “The Minstrel Boy,” and after the Italian Pip Pippino’s tenor soared above the other voices on the final verse, the men declared him an “honorary Irishman.”
Then someone got the bright idea of naming Jonathan the same. “Aye,” cracked Matthew MacAuley, “seeing as how he married my daughter, let’s give the man a title to wear with pride.”
It wasn’t long before Jonathan could detect individual voices. Matthew’s rumbling bass could probably shake the timbers in the mine, and the Welshman, Luc Penryn, possessed a strong lead voice that would pull some of the others along and give them confidence. As for Pip’s tenor—well, as Matthew might say, it was a voice that could charm the birds from the bushes.
He couldn’t wait to get home and tell Maggie about his “Singing Miners.”
As it turned out, however, Jonathan had only enough time to begin his account of the evening before Ben Wallace paid an unexpected visit.
“I’m sorry to drop by like this,” the pastor said after hanging up his coat in the hallway and following Jonathan into the living room.
“You don’t ever have to apologize for dropping in on us, Pastor Ben,” Maggie told him from her place on the sofa, bringing Gracie up to her shoulder and rubbing her
back.
He declined her offer of coffee as he took a chair by the fire. “So, Jonathan, how did rehearsal go this afternoon?”
“Much better than last week.” Jonathan sat down beside Maggie and Gracie on the sofa. Still brimming with excitement, he recounted his experience with the newly formed choral group. Suddenly he realized he’d been completely dominating the conversation. “I’m sorry,” he said “I didn’t mean to go on like that.”
“But you’ve every right to be pleased,” Ben said. “I’m excited for you. I think this is going to be a good thing for those men. And for the town as well.”
“I hope so. But that’s enough about the miners for now. You said you had something to tell us, Ben.”
“Yes. Well—” The pastor’s expression sobered. “That’s why I came. I couldn’t put this off any longer.”
“Is something wrong?”
“I’ll just take Gracie to the kitchen,” Maggie said, starting to rise from the sofa.
But Ben stopped her. “No, Maggie. This is for you to hear too.”
Something about his friend’s pinched features stirred uneasiness in Jonathan. “Ben?”
The pastor leaned forward with a hand on each knee. “I’ll just come right out with it. I wanted you both to hear this from me first. I’ve accepted a call to another church just outside Louisville.”
Jonathan couldn’t have been more surprised if the older man had said he was leaving the ministry altogether. “Another church? But why?”
A faint smile relieved his friend’s earlier seriousness. “Because I believe it’s God’s will, of course. Otherwise I’d never consider such a move.”
