A New Song

by Jan Karon

  He still didn’t know why he did it, he didn’t remember wanting the money especially, perhaps he did it because he was the scrawny one, the geek, the one who loved to read and write and think and ponder words and meanings.

  Without caring, he just did it; he burst through the doors running, and hit the piles and skidded down the hall as if he’d connected with a patch of crankcase oil. Just outside Miss McNolty’s classroom, he lost his balance and crashed to the floor.

  He heard the boys screaming with laughter at the front door as he got up, stinking, and tried to scrape the slimy stuff off his shoes. It was slick as grease. . . .

  He walked toward them, his heart thundering. He had never picked a fight or been in one; he would have run first, not looking back.

  But this was different. His friend had betrayed him.

  They watched him coming toward them and backed down the steps.

  Hey, Slick! somebody yelled. Three boys who were laughing and holding their noses suddenly turned and ran to the oak tree, where they stopped and peered from behind it. Lee Adderholt and Tommy Noles stood fast near the bottom of the steps, looking awed, mesmerized.

  What had they seen on his face? He would never know.

  I . . . I’m sorry, Tim, Tommy said.

  He felt something building in himself, something . . . towering. He seemed to be suddenly six feet tall, and growing.

  I really am! wailed Tommy.

  He never remembered what happened, exactly, he just knew that he plowed into Tommy Noles without fear, without trembling, and beat the living crap out of him.

  Then he was sitting in the principal’s office—thank God it was Mr. Lewis, who was too tenderhearted to whip anybody. Mr. Lewis had looked at him for what seemed a long time, with what appeared to be kindness in his face, but the young Kavanagh couldn’t be sure.

  He knew, sitting there, that he had liked beating the tar out of Tommy Noles. But most of all, he had liked making him cry in front of the people who had hooted and laughed, holding their noses.

  Your father will never hear this from me, Mr. Lewis said. But if anyone tells him and he asks, I will, of course, be required to . . .

  For the first time in his life, he had been glad, thrilled, that everyone he knew, his classmates and friends, were terrified of his father, and wouldn’t dare speak to him, much less reveal the dark transgression of his son brawling in a fistfight.

  What happened, Timothy? asked his mother.

  He dropped his head. He had never lied to his mother.

  I beat up Tommy Noles.

  She studied him. I’m sure he asked for it, she said, simply.

  Yes, ma’am.

  But don’t ever do this again.

  No, ma’am.

  He hadn’t ever done it again; he hadn’t needed to. It had been the fight of his life, the Grand Inquisition. In his rage, he had taken on the very world with his two hands, and somehow, oddly, won.

  The scrawny kid with the scrawny arms and the penchant for reading large books and making straight A’s had been suffused with a new aura. They gave him a wide berth when they called him Slick, for they had seen his rage, and witnessed his consuming power, and hadn’t understood it and never would. He was Timothy Kavanagh, not to be messed with.

  Period.

  He grinned, pulling around an RV from Texas. After that incident, Tommy Noles had become the best friend he had in the world, even if he had failed to hand over the nickel. Sometime, when he had nothing else to do, he’d calculate what Tommy would owe him today, given fifty-six years of accumulated interest on a nickel.

  “I’m growing older,” said his eager wife, “just waiting to hear your nickname.”

  “Slick,” he said, looking straight ahead.

  He wasn’t surprised that she nearly doubled over with laughter. “Slick! Slick?” Clearly, that was the funniest thing she’d ever heard in her life.

  “Slick! That’s too wonderful! I can’t believe it!”

  Ha, ha, ha, on and on. He would nip this in the bud. “So what was your nickname, Kavanagh?”

  She stopped laughing.

  Bingo, he thought.

  “Must you know?”

  “Cynthia, Cynthia . . . need you ask?”

  “You won’t laugh?”

  “Laugh? I’ll kill myself laughing. So tell me.”

  She sighed deeply and tucked a strand of blond hair under the ball cap. “Tubs.”

  “Tubs?” Marriage was a wonderful thing. It produced all sorts of ways to get even with somebody without necessarily going to jail. But seeing the look on her face, he couldn’t laugh.

  “Tubby to begin, then shortened to Tubs. Fatter than fat, that was me.”

  He couldn’t imagine it.

  “You couldn’t even imagine,” she said. “When I was ten years old . . . do you remember those photographers who traveled around with a pony?”

  He remembered.

  “One took my picture and I waited for weeks for it to come in the mail. When we opened the envelope, I couldn’t believe my eyes, nor could anyone else. They all said I was . . . they said I was bigger than the pony.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, yes, they raved about it ’til kingdom come, Tubs this and Tubs that. My mother and father loved having their picture taken, so they’d dashed in the house and come out looking like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. I, on the other hand, had been popped onto that sulking pony in a hideous dress, looking precisely like W. C. Fields.”

  She peered at him. “If you ever mention that hideous name to a soul, I’ll murder you.”

  “If you ever mention mine, same back.”

  “Deal,” she said, shaking his hand.

  “Deal,” he said, seeing a sign that said Williamston, 10 miles.

  He was looking at his watch when a raindrop hit the crystal face.

  Two-thirty, they should be there around six-thirty or seven o’clock, with plenty of daylight to unload the car and check out their new home.

  The suddenness of the downpour was shocking. Without warning, a sheet of wind-driven rain was upon them, thundering out of darkened skies. He veered off the road and careened to a stop, the engine running. Dear God, he knew how to put the top down on this thing, but Dooley had been the one who put it up. He fumbled with the button on the console, but nothing happened.

  “Timothy!” His wife was drenched, sopping.

  “What do we do?” he shouted.

  “I don’t know!” The wind carried her voice away.

  He lunged to the right and felt in the glove compartment for the owner’s manual, as Barnabas, quaking with fear, leaped into Cynthia’s lap, which was already occupied by Violet.

  “Back! Go back!” She was almost wholly concealed by his mass of streaming fur. Barnabas went back.

  The force of the rain was unbelievable. It thudded against their skin and heads like so many small mallets. He shoved the manual under the dashboard on Cynthia’s side, his glasses running with rain. Index, page 391, not under “Top,” not under . . . there it was. “Convertible,” page 213. He managed to see the words Engage the parking brake before the book absorbed water like a sponge and the instructions ran together in a blur.

  He pulled the brake, then pressed the button repeatedly, to no avail. Dear God, help. . . .

  “The boot!” Cynthia cried.

  He leaped out, dangerously close to the highway on which cars were still racing, and fumbled to remove the side edges of the boot clip from under the side belt moldings. It took an eternity, and they were drowning.

  Back in the car, he pressed the button, and the top began rising. They were taking on water like a bottomless canoe.

  The top rose midway and, like a sail on a boat, was instantly filled with wind and driving rain. The top appeared to freeze in midair.

  “We’ll have to do it manually!” he shouted above the roar. “Get out!”

  Help us, Lord, he prayed, as they hauled the thing over, straining against the terrible force of
the wind, then brought it down and opened the doors and sloshed into the brimming seats. They turned the levers and secured the top, and sat back, panting, daunted now by the deafening thunder on the roof.

  “The towels!” she shouted. “In the back!”

  He strained around and reached behind her seat and found the wrapped bundle of a dozen terry towels, which had been cunningly advertised as “thirsty.” They were sodden.

  Violet howled in Cynthia’s lap.

  “If we wring them out, we can mop our seats!”

  They wrung the water onto the floorboard at their feet, afraid to open the windows, and swabbed the leather seats. It sounded as if the pounding rain would tear through the canvas and swamp them utterly.

  Then the lightning began, cracking over their heads.

  Barnabas returned to the front in a single leap, and landed in Father Tim’s lap, trembling.

  The windows were fogged completely, his glasses were useless. He took them off and put them in his shirt pocket. As he held on to his dog, all he could see from their red submarine were the stabbing streaks of lightning.

  The rain that began so violently at two-thirty stopped at three o’clock, then returned around three-thirty to pummel the car with renewed energy, as lightning cracked around them with a vengeance.

  Sitting on the shoulder since the last downpour began, they briefly considered trying to get back on the highway and drive to a service station, a bridge, anything, but visibility was zero.

  Pouring sweat in the tropical humidity of the car, they found the air-conditioning was no relief. Its extreme efficiency made them feel frozen as cods in their wet clothing.

  If only they were driving the Buick, he thought. The feeble air-conditioning his wife had so freely lambasted would be exactly right for their circumstances. In fact, his Buick would be the perfect security against a storm that threatened to rip a frivolous rag from over their heads and fling it into some outlying tobacco field.

  The temperature in the car was easily ninety degrees. He remembered paying ten pounds for an hour’s worth of this very misery in an English hotel sauna, without, of course, the disagreeable odor of steaming dog and cat fur.

  “When life gives you lemons . . . ,” he muttered darkly.

  “. . . make lemonade,” said his wife, stroking her drenched cat.

  “Four o’clock,” he said, pulling onto the highway. “We’ve lost nearly two hours. That means we’ll get into Whitecap around dark.”

  “Ah, well, dearest, not to worry. This can’t go on forever.”

  He hoped such weather would at least put a crimp in the ridiculous notion of wearing grass skirts tomorrow night.

  The aftermath of the storm was not a pretty sight. Apparently, they’d missed the worst of it.

  Here and there, billboards were blown down, a metal sign lying in the middle of the highway advertised night crawlers and boiled peanuts, and most crops stood partially immersed.

  “Our baptism into a new life,” he said, looking at the dazzling light breaking over the fields.

  At a little after seven o’clock, the rain returned and the wind with it. No lightning this time, but a heavy, insistent pounding over their heads that clearly meant business.

  He stopped and did a glucometer check to make sure he wasn’t in a nonketotic hyperglycemic coma, thanks to Esther’s cake, and was fairly pleased with the reading.

  “What do you think?” he asked, parked by the pump at an Amoco station. “Should we look for supper or keep moving?” When he was tired, he still referred to the evening meal as “supper,” as he had in childhood.

  “It’s a wasteland out there. Where would we find supper unless we catch it off a bank?”

  “Now, now, Kavanagh. You were thinking wild asparagus with spring lamb, while I was thinking hot dogs all the way.”

  “I don’t know, darling, I feel we should get there and settle in. After all, we have to make the bed when we arrive, and here we are, hours away, and I’m already dying to be in one!”

  “No supper, then?”

  “Maybe a pack of Nabs or some peanuts while we’re here. I mean, look what you’ve got to drive through for who knows how long.”

  The Mustang shuddered in a violent crosswind.

  “You’re right,” he said, getting out of the car.

  He trudged into the neon light of the service station, feeling like a garden slug in his still-damp clothes.

  “This is endless,” she said as they crept through the several blinkers of a business district that they presumed to be Roper—or was it Scuppernong? The blinkers danced wildly in the wind, on electric wires strung above the street.

  It seemed the wind and rain would hit them for twenty or thirty minutes, slack off or let up altogether, then hit them again with another wallop.

  Violet snored in Cynthia’s lap, Barnabas snored on the backseat.

  Father Tim hunkered over the wheel, staring down the oncoming lights. “Marry a preacher, Kavanagh, and life ceases to be boring.”

  “I’d give an arm and a leg for a boring life,” she said grimly, then suddenly laughed. “But only for five minutes!”

  There was a long silence as he navigated through the downpour.

  “Dearest, what exactly did you say to God in your discussions about what to do in retirement?”

  “I said I was willing to go anywhere He sent me.”

  “Do you recall if He said anything back?”

  “He said, ‘That’s what I like to hear.’ Not in an audible voice, of course. He put it on my heart.”

  “Aha,” she said, quoting her husband.

  “Look,” he said, “there’s a sign for Columbia. Do we go on to Columbia, or make a turn somewhere?”

  “On to Columbia,” she said, squinting at the map.

  His wife had never professed to be much of a navigator; he hoped they didn’t end up in Morehead City.

  When they reached the bridge to Whitecap, the wind and rain had stopped; there was an innocent peace in the air.

  A sign stood at the entrance to the bridge, which had been closed off with a heavy chain and a soldierly row of orange cones.

  BRIDGE OUT

  FERRY 2 Blocks

  & Left $10

  No Ferry

  After 10 P.M.

  “Good heavens,” said his wife, “isn’t it after ten o’clock?”

  “Five ’til,” he said, backing up. He made the turn and hammered down on the accelerator.

  “That’s one block . . . ,” she said.

  Going this fast on wet pavement didn’t exactly demonstrate the wisdom of the ages. “This is two,” he counted.

  “Now turn left here. I’m praying they’ll be open.”

  He turned left. Nothing but yawning darkness. Then, a dim light a few yards ahead, swinging.

  They inched along, not knowing what lay in their path. A sign propped against a sawhorse revealed itself in the glare of the headlights.

  Ferry to Whitecap

  Have Your $ Ready

  A lantern bobbed from the corner of what appeared to be a small building perched at the edge of the water.

  He’d read somewhere about blowing your horn for a ferry, and gave it a long blast.

  “Lord, is this a joke?” his wife inquired aloud of her Maker.

  A light went on in the building and a man came out, wearing a cap, an undershirt, and buttoning his pants.

  Father Tim eased the window down a few inches.

  “Done closed.”

  “Two minutes,” said Father Tim, pointing to his watch. “Two whole minutes before ten. You’ve got to take us across.” He nearly said, I’m clergy, but stopped himself.

  “You live across?”

  “We’re moving to Whitecap.”

  “Don’t know as you’d want to go across tonight,” said the man, still buttoning. “ ’Lectricity’s off. Black as a witch’s liver.”

  Father Tim turned to Cynthia. “What do you think?”

  “Where wou
ld we stay over here?”

  “Have t’ turn back fourteen miles.”

  Cynthia looked at her husband. “We’re going across!”

  “Twenty dollars,” said the man, unsmiling.

  “Done,” said Whitecap’s new priest.

  Leaving the tropical confines of the car and clinging to the rail of the ferry, they looked across the black water, and up to clouds racing over the face of the moon. They were leaving the vast continent behind, and going to what looked like mere flotsam on the breast of the sea.

  The ferry rocked and labored along its passage, belching oily fumes. Yet, quite apart from the noxious smell, Cynthia detected something finer, “There it is, Timothy! The smell of salt air!”

  “Gulls wheeling above us,” he muttered lamely, noting that a few gulls followed the ferry, even in the dead of night.

  She leaned against his shoulder, and he put his arm around her and took off her cap and nuzzled her hair. She was his rock in an ocean of change, no pun intended.

  “Look at the stars coming out, my dearest. The sky is as fresh and new as the fourth day of Creation. It’s going to be wonderful, Timothy, our new life. We’re going to feel freer, somehow, I promise.”

  That was a very nice speech, he noted, as only his wife could make.

  “Absolutely!” he said, trying to mean it.

  Their car had been unchained from its moorings, and the ramp to Whitecap cranked down. The ferry pilot stood by the ramp, a cigarette in his mouth, holding the gas lantern and signaling them off.

  “Would you look at our map?” Father Tim leaned out the window. “We’re trying to get . . . here.” He pointed to the location of Dove Cottage, marked by a red arrow. “Since we’re not approaching from the bridge . . .”

  The lantern was lifted to light the hand-drawn map. “No problem,” said the pilot, leaving the cigarette in place. “I’ve been around in there a few times. Go off th’ ramp, take a left, drive about a mile and a half, turn right on Tern Avenue, go straight for about a mile, then take a left on Hastings. Looks like your place is on th’ corner . . . right there.”