A New Song

by Jan Karon

  “Violet?” he said.

  “In the kitchen, having a tin of Mr. Love’s sardines.”

  He regretted that both he and his wife were tearful with happiness, but what could he do?

  They saw Morris turn from the reunion in the foyer and stand by the window. There was suffering on his face in profile, something that snatched away the joy in their hearts.

  “A nail,” said his wife, explaining the bandage on her hand. “Right in the palm.”

  They sat in the cavernous kitchen lighted by candles in a silver stand, and waited for the teakettle to boil over a can of Sterno. Not seeming to know his kitchen, Morris had been unable to provide anything more than the Sterno and a kettle already filled with water. Cynthia had helped herself to his cabinets and found tea, along with a bag of Fig Newtons, which Morris said belonged to Mamie, but urged them to help themselves. Seeing their reluctance, he ate one himself, out of courtesy.

  They all fell to.

  “Milk!” said Jonathan. “My mommy, she gives me milk and cookies.”

  “No milk, dear,” said Cynthia, hauling the boy onto her lap with one hand. “And no water in the taps, just what we have in the kettle.”

  “There’s apple juice,” said Morris.

  “I’ll get it!” said Father Tim.

  “No. I’ll get it.” Morris rose stiffly and went to the refrigerator; he removed a container and poured juice into a glass.

  “Say thank you,” urged Cynthia.

  “Thank you,” said Jonathan, gulping it down.

  “When the winds became so terrible,” she said, “I remembered my bicycle and was afraid it would be blown off the porch like our rockers were last August. So I went out to bring it in the house and it wasn’t there, and you know how I love my bicycle. I mean, I could never replace it, it’s old as the hills.”

  “More,” said Jonathan.

  “More, please,” counseled his wife.

  “More, more, more, please, please, please!”

  Morris took the glass and got up again, obviously with considerable difficulty, and refilled the glass.

  “Thank you,” said Jonathan.

  Cynthia beamed with pride, and continued her report. “And so, I peered off the porch and saw that my bike had been blown into the side street. I ran down to get it, and all of a sudden, things were flying around in the air, and I realized it was pickets off our fence, they were just showering down, and I raised my hand in front of my face and a picket with a nail in it . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, taking her bandaged hand.

  “Just boom. Nailed. Ugh. Now you finish, Mr. Love.”

  “Please call me Morris.”

  “Morris!”

  “I had looked out from the music room and seen the tree go over. Fortunately, it fell away from the house, and I had a view of the street. The rain was very heavy and visibility wasn’t the best, but I thought I saw your wife, and she appeared to be in distress. I remember you said you were leaving town and I thought she may need . . . help.”

  “And so he came out to me,” said Cynthia, “and at just that moment we saw the porch break off the front of the house. It was awful. I thought—”

  Jonathan nodded energetically. “I was, I was in th’ house!”

  “Yes, you were, and so Morris ran to the house with me and we got Jonathan and Violet and Barnabas and he brought us all over here and we stood in his music room, sopping wet, to see if the rest of the house was going, but it didn’t, and then Morris saw that I was dripping blood on his carpet. I’m terribly sorry about that, your housekeeper won’t be a bit happy—”

  “It’s a dark Oriental, no one will never know.”

  “And he washed my wound and put antibiotic cream on it and bandaged me up.” His wife beamed at Morris Love, who visibly blanched at the warmth and directness of her feeling.

  Father Tim cleared his throat. “Thank you, my friend.”

  “I was scared,” said Jonathan, whose nose was running like a tap.

  “I was cryin’.”

  He wiped Jonathan’s nose and smoothed his hair, feeling a rush of affection. “And what about the bicycle?” he asked his wife.

  “Mr. Love—I mean Morris—went back out into that awful storm and retrieved it. It’s under his stairwell.”

  Morris shifted in the chair, looking uneasy.

  “There goes the kettle!” said Cynthia. “Now please sit still, Morris, this is my job.”

  “I’m hungry,” said Jonathan.

  “I’m starved,” said Cynthia.

  His own stomach was growling. “We must get home and see what’s up, anyway. What do we have in the refrigerator?”

  “Nothing. Zip. A salami, a tomato. We’re going to Mitford, and so I didn’t want to leave anything.”

  “A salami and a tomato. It’s a start,” he said, cheerful.

  “You’re welcome to look here. I don’t know, Mamie brings everything. . . .” Morris lifted his hands as if bereft of a solution.

  “Bingo!” cried Father Tim.

  “Bingo!” repeated Jonathan, slapping the table.

  “It just occurred to me, I have just the ticket. Homemade lasagna! Velvety blankets of pasta layered with fresh spinach, fresh ricotta, mozzarella, a thick tomato sauce sweetened with chopped onions, and veal ground from the shank. Precooked, freshly thawed, and ready to roll.”

  “Mercy!” said his wife. “That sounds like my recipe. Where on earth did it come from?”

  “The floor of my car,” he replied, feeling as if he’d just hung the moon. “Morris, will you break bread with us?”

  “Be thankful for the smallest blessing,” Thomas à Kempis had written, “and you will deserve to receive greater. Value the least gifts no less than the greatest, and simple graces as especial favors. If you remember the dignity of the Giver, no gift will seem small or mean, for nothing can be valueless that is given by the most high God.”

  Father Tim remembered what the old brother had said as he ate his portion of the lasagna with gusto, and set some on the floor for Barnabas.

  He thought it was the best thing he ever put in his mouth. His wife, who had always possessed a considerable appetite, was hammering down like a stevedore. Even Morris Love appeared to enjoy her handiwork, and Jonathan ate without prejudice or complaint.

  Further, Ella Bridgewater had saved the day. In the packet with the sea bass, which Violet devoured, was the small jar of plum wine, which, to conserve water and washing up, they poured into their empty tea cups and drank with enthusiasm.

  They went across the street with Morris Love’s flashlight, and into the cold kitchen of Dove Cottage. He thought their house felt as if all life had gone out of it, as if the terrible assault had wounded it in some way that was palpable.

  He was walking into the hall when the floorboards creaked and he saw a shadowy figure coming toward him.

  “Good heavens, who’s there?”

  Jonathan let out a howl.

  “It’s Otis!” said his landlord, beaming his flashlight up. “You’re in a bad fix here.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Looks like that sorry porch wadn’t nailed onto th’ house for shoot. I can’t tell what all’s goin’ on ’til I get some daylight and a couple of men out here, but I want you and th’ family to come stay at my motel. We’ll fix you up with a choice room and king-size bed.”

  “Oh, no, that’s fine, we’ll just set up camp right here.”

  “No water here, no power, no heat, an’ I don’t know what’s under these floors that might go next. When th’ porch tore off, looks like a rotted floor joist or somethin’ gave way in your front room.”

  Cynthia looked at him. “Otis is right, dear. Jonathan is sick, and the house is a terrible mess. Besides, we need our rest for tomorrow’s trip.”

  “We won’t be going to Mitford,” he said.

  His parish needed him here. God would work out the details.

  Holding the sleeping boy in his arms, he
stood on the back steps with Otis while Cynthia did some hurried packing with the aid of a flashlight.

  “Not a scratch on my place,” said Otis, “save for somebody’s deck furniture bobbin’ around in th’ pool. When I heard what was goin’ on up here, I run home lookin’ for Marlene and couldn’t find her. It like to give me a nervous breakdown, she was supposed to be home. Well, in two or three hours, here she comes, paradin’ in like th’ Queen of Sheba, complainin’ of th’ rain ruinin’ her hair. She’d been across havin’ her roots touched up.”

  “Aha.”

  “Where trees blow down, they sometimes take out th’ water lines, and course, th’ water lines is takin’ out th’ roads. Thank th’ Lord she was drivin’ th’ four-wheel.”

  Jonathan stirred in his arms and put the warm palm of his hand on Father Tim’s cheek. “What about power?” he asked Otis. “How long to get everything back up?”

  “Th’ whole island’s lost power. That’ll prob’ly take four to five days to get goin’ again. Water, I don’t know, maybe two days. And it’ll take a week of hard haulin’ to get th’ roads graded and asphalted.”

  He thought the whole thing seemed a dream. “How long ’til we can hold services?”

  “The church looks pretty bad. Shingles are poppin’ off like corn. But we got tarps on ’er, three of ’em. I had one, Larry brought one, Sam scrounged one. I’ve got people comin’ tomorrow to look it over, see what it’s goin’ to take, an’ how long.” Otis heaved a deep sigh. “Th’ water runnin’ in turns plaster to mush, then when it dries, it turns to powder.”

  The tenant echoed his landlord’s sigh.

  “But this’ll bring us together,” said Otis, adopting a positive view of what lay ahead for the body of St. John’s.

  Father Tim felt a drop of rain on his cheek. “Oh, boy,” he said, stepping onto the back porch.

  He heard his parishioner draw a cigar from his pocket and remove the cellophane. There was a moment of silent consideration.

  “Dadgum if I ain’t goin’ to smoke this sucker!”

  In the flame of a monogrammed lighter, Father Tim saw the face of a happy man.

  Cynthia stood inside the door of Number Fourteen at Bragg’s MidWay Motel and peered at their room, which was lighted by a kerosene lantern.

  “Ugh!” she said vehemently. “Shag carpet!”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Jericho

  His wife looked utterly downcast as he dressed the following morning. She sat on the side of the bed in her nightgown, shod in his leather bedroom shoes, refusing to make any direct contact with the carpet.

  “You could take me to church and keep the car,” he said, desperate to be helpful.

  “I can’t be dragging Jonathan around in this rain.”

  They had eaten a breakfast of cheese sandwiches, which Otis had made himself and delivered at six a.m. with scorching coffee in a thermos. The paper sack included a side of bananas, apples, raisins, and oranges, juice and crackers for Jonathan, and packaged brownies from the convenience store.

  “I hate to leave you. You can go to the Braggs’, you know. Otis invited us.”

  “Not in a hundred years,” she said, setting her mouth in a profoundly straight line. “Make that a thousand!” Marlene Bragg had suggested his wife stop highlighting her own hair and see a professional; further, she proclaimed that fuchsia wasn’t becoming to Cynthia’s skin color, and recommended another shade of blusher to bring out the blue of her eyes. This had not set well.

  “Marjorie and Sam begged us to come.” Sam had shown up at the motel last night at eleven, hoping to rescue them.

  “But their guest room has a leak in the ceiling and there’s no water. Sam says they’re using his grandmother’s chamber pot.”

  “There are worse things than chamber pots,” he said, trying to console.

  “I can’t imagine what.”

  He didn’t want to say it, but how about being trapped in a motel room with no power, no phone, and a three-year-old?

  He buttoned his shirt, surveying the scene. The kerosene lantern glowed against the dusk of the rainy morning; the oil-fired heater hissed in the corner; Jonathan slept soundly, clutching a pillow; Barnabas snored in the vinyl armchair; Violet snoozed on a mat in the bathroom. Cozy as it all appeared, he would not want to spend the day here. No, indeed.

  “How’s your hand?”

  “Throbbing.”

  “Do you think you need to see a doctor?”

  “I don’t think so. Morris poured something on it that was absolutely scalding before he put on the cream. I think it’s fine, dearest, don’t worry. I’ll have a look under the bandage before you come home with lunch. Ugh! Did I say home?”

  “Home is anywhere you are, Kavanagh.”

  She fell against the pillows, sighing.

  “What do you think of our neighbor?” he asked, putting on his shoes.

  “The strangest, yet loveliest sort of man. I feel that underneath his pain is the deepest tenderness. Then again, is it pain, Timothy? I don’t know, perhaps it’s something more like anger, a terrible, corrosive anger.”

  “Odd that he would be so adept at home doctoring.”

  “He said he learned from Mamie.”

  “Aha. Well. I’ll be back around twelve. Maybe the rain will let up and you can drop me at church and take the car.”

  “Where would I go?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. The library?”

  “The library isn’t open today.”

  “The grocery store?”

  “And watch mold grow in the dairy case?”

  He had a great idea. “I could bring you some pot holders to finish up for the Fall Fair.” There! Just the ticket to keep her mind occupied.

  “Pot holders?”

  She looked at him as if he were something that had crawled through the pipes and into the kitchen sink.

  As phone service was up in other parts of the village, he drove two blocks and stood in a queue to make calls from a pay booth at the rear of Whitecap Drugs.

  When the Hope House switchboard answered, he asked for the dining room.

  “Pauline ...”

  “Father! We saw on the news you had a bad storm last night.”

  “Yes. And Pauline . . .” He’d rather be shot than say it. “I . . . can’t come. I can’t come for the wedding on Sunday. I’m calling to ask if you can . . . cancel, that is, postpone it for two weeks until we get cleaned up here.”

  There was a moment of silence. The disappointment on the other end was palpable.

  “Or,” he said, and he really despised hearing these words out of his mouth, “you could get someone else to officiate, someone else to—”

  “Well, no, Father, I mean that’s fine, we don’t want anybody else, you know we were goin’ to keep it really simple, anyway, so it’s . . . not much trouble to postpone it.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you how sorry . . .” He was literally nauseous over the whole thing, especially hating that Jessie’s, Poo’s, and Dooley’s glad excitement would have to be put on hold.

  “Well, but don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll set another date. We didn’t even run it in th’ newspaper, but I did tell everybody in the dinin’ room, and Miss Louella, she was goin’ to come, but . . . they’ll all understand.”

  “What about Buck? How will this affect his plans?”

  “Oh, he’s not goin’ back to Alaska. He’s finished up his part. He’s goin’ to try an’ set up his own business in Mitford.”

  “Hallelujah!”

  “So, I understand,” said Dooley’s mother, “really I do.”

  But he could hear the sadness in her voice. He was good at hearing sadness in people’s voices. . . .

  “Two weeks,” he said. “No matter what, we’ll be there. And we’ll talk again in a few days, all right?”

  “Yes, sir. How bad is it down there?”

  “No lives lost, as far as we know, but power out, and phones down in places,
and no water on the north end. The church has taken a hard hit, part of a big tree fell across the roof and . . .”—he felt suddenly close to tears—“and our cottage had some damage.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice husky with feeling. He knew that she, too, was good at hearing sadness in others.

  He was able to reach Buck in Harley’s basement apartment; Buck would go with Dooley to court on Monday, and Harley would return Dooley to school, as planned. They would reschedule the wedding for mid-November.

  He took a deep breath and went through yet more telephone rigmarole—access code, the number he was calling, his calling card number, his PIN number, then through the switchboard, where, it was declared, there was no answer in the room, and so up to the fourth-floor nurses’ station, and down the hall to the sitting room with the cordless. . . .

  “Hello?”

  “Janette ...”

  “Oh, Father, I’m so glad to hear your voice, I saw about the storm on TV. Is Jonathan . . . ?”

  “He’s doing great! A bit of a cold, that’s all. Our house is torn up for a few days, but everyone’s safe. We’re at Otis Bragg’s motel in the village.”

  “Thank heaven! And Father, I’m so happy about coming home.”

  “We’ll be over to get you on Tuesday as we discussed. Around two o’clock. Is that still good?”

  “Oh, yes. Perfect! I’ll be ready.”

  “If you’d like to call, we’re in Room Fourteen at Bragg’s Mid-Way Motel. Uh-oh, I forgot. Phones are out over there, but should be up and humming in a day or two.”

  “I’ll be so happy to see my baby. Has he been . . . good?”

  “Better than good!”

  Her laughter was music to his ears.

  “We’ll take you home and get you settled in with something hot for your supper. We can bring Jonathan on Thursday,” he said, following the doctor’s advice. “That will give you a chance to—”

  “Oh, no, Father, please bring him Tuesday. I’ve missed my children so much. I can’t wait to have my children home.”