Not a Sparrow Falls

by Linda Nichols

  Bob

  It was signed with a flourish. Lorna squinted her eyes at the far wall and finally remembered Bob Henry. He’d been in seminary with Alasdair but had withdrawn before graduation and was now obviously in the inner circle at the administrative offices in Richmond.

  She put both letters back into their envelopes and carefully placed them where she had found them. She’d forgotten all about the tea. It was black as tar. She poured it out, then sat down at the table again and tried to think.

  So. The rumors were true. Those who were unhappy with Alasdair were taking advantage of Bill’s leaving to make a move against him, and it was no mystery why they were going in through the back door. If Alasdair were reassigned rather than being asked to leave, the damage would be contained. There would be no rancor, no name-calling, no angry MacPherson loyalists leaving the church and taking their tithes with them.

  Without wanting to, she recalled the tittle-tattle she’d heard. It always got around. They were saying that Alasdair was more interested in his empire than his church. More concerned with writing books about apologetics than shepherding the flock that had been entrusted to him. “If I want to hear my pastor’s voice I turn on the radio,” one had quipped at the last congregational meeting. “His office door is always closed.”

  “I feel pulled in too many directions,” Alasdair had confided to her after the meeting was over. She had thought of a hundred things to say. Perhaps you should readjust your priorities. Maybe they need you, Alasdair. You are their spiritual leader, after all. She tried to remember what she had said and remembered with a grimace that she had offered him a cup of tea and changed the subject.

  That wouldn’t do now. There would be no avoiding this. No changing the subject this time. Still, for all the urgency, her mind was blank. The only thing she could think to do was pray. She dropped her head, more in dejection than reverence.

  “Oh, Father,” she began, then faltered and stopped.

  Her sisters were right. She was slow-witted, not quick and smart. After all, she had never gone into the world, never done anything important. Fiona and Winifred would know what to say, how to help.

  “Oh, Father,” she repeated, “help my brother. Help Samantha. I don’t even know how to pray.” But the thought had scarcely dawned before a verse of Scripture she’d learned long ago popped into her mind. “The Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” She thought about that for a moment, took heart and a deep breath, then went on.

  “You work in ways we cannot see,” she finally managed to wring out. “Make a way through this problem for Alasdair. Ease his burdens, Lord. Heal his heart.”

  She felt as if she ought to at least offer the Lord a few suggestions as to how He might accomplish the task. Fiona would have a list of them, she was sure. She thought of her—intelligent, teaching her classes at the university, so smart and quick. She could call her.

  No, said a quiet voice.

  Winifred, then. Winifred, who could organize anyone to do anything, even if she pulled them along by the ear.

  No. She felt the blank wall of refusal again.

  “Oh, Lord,” she whispered. “Surely someone must do something.”

  You are someone, the voice said, bypassing her ear.

  She felt a stir of something. Fear.

  “I’m not …” She paused, and any number of adjectives competed to fill in the blank. Smart enough, quick enough, brave enough.

  I am, though, the voice answered back, implacable.

  “You are,” she agreed, but the sentiment didn’t seem to reach to her stomach, which was still twisting.

  I can use you, the voice insisted. May I?

  “Anytime or anywhere,” she whispered back, her heart sinking. “I only wish you had more to work with.” But then she remembered a sermon her brother had preached years before, before the darkness settled. He’d said God uses ordinary people, fallible and imperfect, to accomplish His purposes. God writes straight with crooked lines, he had reminded them. She covered her face with her hands.

  “If you can use anyone, Lord, maybe you can use me,” she said. She suddenly remembered David, the shepherd boy, the one God chose to be king, the one who had battled the giant Goliath. “Everyone who watches will know that it is not by the sword or the spear that the Lord saves; for the battle is the Lord’s,” she recited from memory. She nodded. Of course. She saw now why He had chosen her. She held out her hands on the table, open.

  “If you can use anyone, Lord, you can use me.” She repeated the words, this time with faith, but even as she said them, she remembered Samantha’s troubles, her brother, walking though wounded, the motherless babies. The thoughts felt like small sharp darts aimed at her weak resolve.

  “If you can use anyone, Lord, you can use me,” she repeated again, stubborn now. He could prevail, even against darkness this thick. For that is what the light loves to do. Pour through the darkness and clear away the shadows.

  She had a sudden blinding image, almost a vision, it was so real. Of Alasdair, face open and smiling. Of Samantha, playing and laughing like a child again. Of the twins, being loved and cared for.

  Then the voice, in a final benediction, delivered one last message. I’m going to do this, it pronounced. And you may help.

  “Thank you, Lord,” she exclaimed, and no sooner had she finished speaking than one of the babies cried, sounding hoarse and congested; then the other’s voice joined in. The front door slammed, and Samantha came in and stomped up the stairs. Lorna rose and hurried up after her, wondering what would happen next, from which direction reinforcements would arrive.

  Four

  Mary Bridget rounded the bend in the gravel road, and there it was. Home. A white clapboard house with a sloping tin roof, wide front porch, glossy boxwoods, and huge pink and red azaleas nestled up against its foundation. Farther out on the wide, cool lawn were two big oaks, dogwood and redbud underneath, and off to the side a stand of white pines. Beyond it were the misty blue mountains. She stepped onto the graveled driveway. The screen door screeched open, and she strained to make out the face of the one who stood there. It was familiar and loved. Her hesitant steps quickened into a run.

  She startled awake and stared into the dim light of her room. It took a moment to orient herself. She was here in Alexandria in the apartment she shared with Carmen. This was home now. She sat up and checked the clock, felt gooseflesh rise on her arms from the chill in the air. It was nearly seven. She turned off the alarm, which would have gone off in just minutes, pulled her housecoat from the foot of the bed, stood up, and put it on. There. That was better. She slid into her slippers, opened her bedroom door quietly, and stepped into the hall. Carmen’s door was closed. She went to the living room window and peeked through the slit in the curtains. Newlee’s car was gone. She let the curtain drop and breathed a sigh of relief. It made her nervous having him around, even though she knew there was no way an Alexandria police officer would know about a drug raid over a year ago in a different part of the state. No way he could know about the one who’d gotten away.

  During those tense first days, she’d searched until she’d found a newsstand that carried the Charlottesville Daily Progress and had scanned it religiously. There had been nothing that first day, and she hadn’t known whether to feel relieved or terrified. She thought she saw Jonah everywhere. She would glimpse an angular jaw disappearing into a crowd, whip her head around, and see that it belonged to someone else. She would catch the sound of a similar voice, and her heart would freeze. See a long, lean body coming toward her in a familiar lope, and her tongue would stick to the roof of her mouth. Even after she knew the truth. That Jonah couldn’t come after her.

  The article she’d waited for had finally appeared. It had actually been three days. It had only seemed like an eternity. It was a pretty big spread, in fact. “Drug Enforcement Task Force’s Efforts Yield Results,” the headline had announced. The story had gone on to say that the Nel
son County Sheriff and Virginia State Police were working on busting meth labs and targeting the places dealers bought their ingredients. She’d darted through the two-page story until she’d found what she was looking for. There, along with a mention of several other raids, were two beautiful paragraphs about an anonymous tip that had led to the shutdown of a huge lab, location right on target. There was even a photo of the rusty trailer and falling-down shack. She’d held her breath until she read the article twice and ascertained that Jonah and Dwayne had both been arrested, though Dwayne had been picked up downtown trying to sell to an undercover cop. Figured.

  She’d clipped that article and put it in her Bible, which served mostly as a safe deposit box these days. She reread it occasionally, but only when her fears got the best of her, for at other times it filled her with remorse.

  You did what you had to do, she reminded herself, but it was thin comfort. She could only imagine what torment prison would be for a man like Jonah—someone who couldn’t breathe in the city, who had to be traipsing through the woods to feel alive.

  That Jonah doesn’t exist anymore, she told herself. The Jonah you knew is not the man who’s locked up. She could barely remember the old Jonah. She tried to recall him now, and her mind peeled back the layers of years. He’d been raw, roughhewn, inscrutable, and remote, but his passion for the land had burned like a pure, hot flame. He would have been perfectly happy to find some fold in time and step through to long-ago days. To live without cars and factories and people polluting his mountains.

  His differences had been the fuel for her infatuation with him. She’d been fascinated with him for as long as she could remember. In junior high she’d frequently walked up the road past his house, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Most days she’d had to be content to look at the pie-eyed cows grazing the sloping pastures, the fields of mountain cabbage, the orchards full of apple trees.

  When she did find him, they went walking through the woods—actually Jonah strode and she scrambled to keep up. He didn’t chatter like everybody else, but when he spoke it was usually something worth hearing. He knew all about the plants and trees and animals and their ways, and he had a good solid common sense about him. But he didn’t play the games of polite society; that much was for certain.

  “That boy’s downright unfriendly. It must be his mother’s side of the family coming out. She was a Crawford, you know,” Mary’s aunt Brenda would say, lifting her chin and taking that little sniff. “And crazy as a coot, besides.”

  Which had irritated Mary no end. It wasn’t right how everybody talked about his family, saying they were sorry and no-account. It wasn’t Jonah’s fault his papa couldn’t keep a job or that his mother had whatever problems she had.

  She supposed she and Jonah were two lost souls and that’s why they’d finally ended up together. Their families had certainly met similar fates. Jonah’s mother and father had divorced, and the bank repossessed their house. One of his brothers went into the navy. The other moved to Lynchburg and took a job at a furniture store. Jonah had already been living with his old uncle. He was working at the towel mill, but they’d gone to laying off, and Jonah was last hired. But he probably could have even survived all of that if his uncle hadn’t died. Joshua Porter had gone out to feed his birds, broken his hip, and gotten pneumonia. And after that it just seemed as if Jonah didn’t care anymore. That’s when he’d started on the drugs. That’s when he’d set out to be as bad as he could be.

  She’d known all of that when she’d run off with him, of course, but she couldn’t exactly afford to be choosy. Jonah had offered her a way out of what had become an intolerable situation. She shook her head now at the bitter irony. Out of the frying pan.

  Well, she was safe now. He couldn’t come after her. Nor could he watch the sun come up over the mountains, or hear rain pelt the leaves, or smell that loamy smell after a good drenching.

  She hardened herself and reviewed the facts. Jonah hadn’t seen a sunrise in years. He’d been too busy cooking meth. Besides, this Jonah, the meth-eaten Jonah who existed in reality rather than some girlish fantasy, likely wanted to kill her, she reminded herself, and she felt the familiar chill of fear.

  She did her best to shake it off and made her way to the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee, dropped a piece of bread in the toaster, then sat down at the table. Carmen was proud of that table, yellow Formica with chrome all around the sides. She’d gotten it for fifty dollars at a garage sale. “I could sell it for four times that—any day of the week, Bridie.” She smiled, thinking about the way Carmen’s Brooklyn tongue tried to curl around her name.

  Bridie, she realized. She thought of herself as Bridie now. She had finally eased her way into her new persona, though it had been like a game at first. Whenever she was faced with a decision, she would ask herself, “What would Mama do?” and then do it. When a customer at the Bag and Save got testy, she would ask herself, “What would Mama say?” and unfailingly her words would come out kind and patient. She even turned without hesitation when someone called out the name. She had everybody fooled. Everyone thought she was a kind, sweet, innocent girl from the hills of Virginia.

  “Act a way long enough and it’ll become who you really are,” her grandmother had been fond of saying, and for a moment a tiny hope flared inside her heart. It flickered out before she could warm herself by it, though. Jonah wasn’t the only one who’d changed. She knew the truth. She might talk like Mama, act like Mama, even think like Mama, but the shadow of Mary Bridget Washburn still trailed along behind her wherever she went.

  There was a curl of paper beside Carmen’s cigarette case. She picked it up. It was a strip of pictures from one of those booths that snap four or five shots in a row. She smiled. There was Carmen, big eyes and dark bubble of hair, wide smile and white, even teeth. Behind her Newlee stood guard, looking like a soldier with his crew cut and steady eyes. She felt a stab of loneliness, dropped the pictures back down onto the table as if they’d burned her, then got up to take a shower. She was clear into the hallway before she heard the spring of the toaster and remembered her breakfast. She left it, showered, dressed, and caught the early bus to work, not even taking a cup of coffee after she’d gone to the trouble to make it.

  Five

  Alasdair skirted the patches of ice on the walkway, barely visible in the dusk, and slowed his pace. It wouldn’t do for him to fall and break a bone. Then what would happen to the children? He picked up the soggy Washington Post lying on the brick walkway and retrieved the mail spilling from the letter box. He barely took note of it. His mind was on this month’s column for his magazine, which he had just mailed, and the subject of his next series of radio broadcasts. That would be tonight’s project, as well as going over the publisher’s contracts for the study Bible. He also had a speaking engagement coming up in December. He felt as if they were all spinning plates, and he was the circus performer. He gave the first one a twist, then made his way down the line, coming back to the beginning just as the momentum was failing and the china beginning to tipple. The secret was to keep moving, he told himself.

  He turned the key and let himself in. Samantha was waiting in the dark hallway, though it took him a moment to make out her shape. She thrust Bonnie at him even before he could take off his coat.

  “She’s been whining for an hour.” Her voice sounded angry and defiant.

  He took Bonnie and handed Samantha the mail, which she promptly tossed onto the stairs. A few envelopes slid through the railing to the floor. He decided not to make an issue of it. “Where’s Lorna?” he asked.

  “She took Cam to the doctor.”

  Alasdair nodded and felt a twinge of concern. Cameron had been running a fever for days now. A surge of appreciation for Lorna filled his heart. She had given up her only afternoon off to help him with the children. What would he do without her? He shifted Bonnie higher onto his shoulder. Her little face felt hot against his own. She was becoming ill, too. He closed his eyes and took a
deep breath.

  “All right,” he soothed. “First things first. All things decently and in order.”

  He aimed himself up the stairs toward the bedroom, his daughter struggling against his arms, still whining. He eased her gently onto the bed and took off his coat. Bonnie slid on her stomach to the edge of the bed. He caught and righted her just as she began to pitch down. Finally he had her right side up and on the floor. He led her to her own room, changed her diaper and wiped her nose, then took her small hand in his, and they toddled back down the stairs to the kitchen. He put her in the playpen and gave her a few toys. Samantha was sitting on the couch watching television. He sat down beside her, since there was no other furniture, and patted her knee. He attempted conversation.

  “Thank you for watching Bonnie. Do you have homework you should be doing?”

  She pulled her leg away and didn’t answer. His fault. He shouldn’t have combined his praise with nagging.

  He tried again. “How was your day?”

  Samantha didn’t answer, just pushed a button on the remote control that changed the station and landed on Jerry Springer.

  He stared at her for a moment. When had they become enemies? He sighed. “Find something else to watch, Samantha, or better yet, turn it off. This is unsuitable for a twelve-year-old child.”

  She ignored him and stared straight ahead. He frowned and leaned toward her. She was wearing makeup. Quite a lot of it, mostly clumped around her eyes. He had never given permission for that. “Samantha—” he began.

  “I’m thirteen.” She punched the remote again. The news this time, a report of a fatal collision between a car and a semitrailer.

  “Turn it off,” he said sharply, his voice rising.

  She stared at him coldly, tossed down the remote control, and stalked off. He turned off the television himself and was about to call her back to deal with her disrespect, but Bonnie began to cry, and the telephone rang. He debated for a moment, then went to the phone.

  The caller ID said anonymous. It could be a solicitor. It could be someone complaining about the choice of hymns last Sunday. Or it could be someone in the congregation who needed him. And what help can you offer? a familiar, hateful voice whispered. He clenched his teeth and picked up the receiver.