“Here,” he said, giving J.C. two tens and a twenty. “Run one for me next week and sign it, ‘A Friend.’ ”
They stopped at The Local on their way to Meadowgate, to pick up a brisket for Marge Owen. While Cynthia paid their monthly bill, he inspected the contents of the butcher’s case.
“Father!” It was Winnie Ivey, carrying a ten-pound bag of flour.
“I’m glad I ran into you, I’ve made a decision! I decided to go on th’ cruise with Velma and not do anything about sellin’ ’til I get back. I told the real estate people to wait, just like you said, and I feel like a different person!”
She flushed. “Can you believe I did that?”
“I can! Well done!”
“They didn’t like it, they tried to push me, they said I might not get another chance. But then, guess what?”
“What?”
“They offered me another three thousand, but I said no, I’m goin’ to wait, and that’s that. Besides, thank th’ Lord, I’m up seven percent over this time last year!”
“You don’t mean it!”
“I do!” He thought Winnie Ivey looked ten years younger, all of which made him feel immeasurably better into the bargain.
“You know what?”
“What?” he asked.
“I’m gettin’ to where I don’t hardly want to go to Tennessee n’more. Joe said he thought he could get me a job at Graceland, but to tell th’ truth, Father, I never cared much for rock an’ roll.”
He didn’t have to be George Burns to know that timing was everything.
According to Buddy Benfield, the Malcolms would be getting back to Mitford around eleven o’clock.
He was waiting in front of their house when they pulled into the driveway.
Saturday night, and he was looking at a clean slate. No services tomorrow, no arriving early to unlock the church . . . .
Thank God he could rest in the morning. Why did he never know he needed refreshment ’til somebody hit him over the head with a two-by-four?
He ached all over with a weariness he felt even in his teeth.
Yet, how could he lie here like a hog in slop, when there was so much to be thankful for? He ought to be up and shouting and clicking his heels.
“How does it feel?” asked his beaming wife, sitting in bed against a stack of pillows.
“Wonderful. Amazing. Powerful!”
“Exactly how I felt!”
“I should have done something like this years ago,” he said.
“Maybe. But God’s timing is perfect.”
“Do you really think we should go ahead with . . . ?”
She nodded. “I think so. It’s a nuisance now, but it will pay off down the road.”
“Maybe a breezeway someday.”
“Maybe. But I’d miss popping back and forth through the hedge, wouldn’t you?”
“Ah, the hedge. Where I first laid eyes on my attractive new neighbor.”
She laughed happily. “Your doom was sealed.”
He sat up and took her in his arms and brushed her cheek with his. “Thank you,” he murmured.
“For what?”
“For being the woman you are, for putting up with me, for looking after me.”
“You mean you don’t think I’m a bossy dame?”
“Sometimes.”
“You know what tomorrow is,” she said.
“I do. Two years.”
“Two long years?”
“Not so long,” he said, kissing her ear. “But alas, I haven’t had a chance to buy—”
“Don’t buy me anything,” she said, leaning against him. “Don’t give me anything you have to wrap.”
“You can count on it,” he said, feeling the softness of her shoulders, the blue satin gown . . . .
She pulled away, laughing. “Maybe we should try to get some sleep, darling. It’s been a long day, a whole string of long days, and besides, now that you’re a home owner, you need to save your strength for all those little chores that crop up—like fixing the foundation where it’s crumbling, and mending the leak over Dooley’s room.”
“Aha. The vestry won’t be having that done anymore, will they?”
“That’s right,” she said, kissing him goodnight. “It’s just you and me.”
“And Harley,” he said, brightening.
She turned out the light and rolled on her side, and for a time, he listened for her light, whiffling snore.
He missed his dog and prayed for him, thankful he was mending. He wondered about Dooley, and thought they should call him at school tomorrow, though it might be a trifle soon.
What’s more, he was concerned that Father Douglas would leave out The Peace—which he was known, on occasion and for no good reason, to do.
And how would he fix the foundation, anyway? He supposed Harley would know, but what if he didn’t? Probably a little mortar; and some new stones where the old had crumbled and fallen out . . . .
He rolled on his back and looked at the ceiling—his ceiling, their ceiling, the first ceiling he had ever owned, as soon as the papers were signed. Now she had a house and he had a house. Bookends. After the work on hers was finished, they would live there and rent this.
“To someone with children!” Cynthia hoped.
He had liked handing Ron the check for a hundred and five thousand dollars, though it had taken his breath away to write it . . . .
“Timothy?” she said.
“Yes?”
“You’re thinking.”
“Right.”
“Stop it at once, dearest.”
He chuckled. “OK,” he said.
He knew the truth, now, of what Stuart Cullen had written to him several years ago:
Martha has come in to tell me it is bedtime. I cannot express how wonderful it is to be sometimes told, rather than always doing the telling . . . . There she is again, my friend, and believe me, my wife does not enjoy reminding me twice. That she monitors my energy is a good thing. Otherwise, I would spill it all for Him and have nothing left with which to get out of bed in the mornings. . . .
He reached for her, and she turned to him, eagerly, smiling in the darkness.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A Cup of Kindness
An early October hurricane gathered its forces in the Caribbean, roared north along the eastern seaboard, and veered inland off Cape Hatteras. In a few short hours, it reached the mountains at the western end of the state, where it pounded Mitford with alarming force.
Rain lashed Lord’s Chapel in gusting sheets, rattled the latched shutters of the bell tower, blew the tarps off lumber stacked on the construction site, and crashed a wheelbarrow into a rose bed.
The tin roof of Omer Cunningham’s shed, formerly a hangar for his antique ragwing, was hurled toward Luther Green’s pasture, where the sight of it, gleaming and rattling and banging through the air, made the cows bawl with trepidation.
Coot Hendrick’s flock of three Rhode Island Reds took cover on the back porch after nearly drowning in a pothole in the yard, and Lew Boyd, who was pumping a tank of premium unleaded into an out-of-town Mustang, reported that his hat was whipped off his head and flung into a boxwood at the town monument, nearly a block away.
Phone lines went out; a mudslide slalomed down a deforested ridge near Farmer, burying a Dodge van; and a metal Coca-Cola sign from Hattie Cloer’s market on the highway landed in Hessie Mayhew’s porch swing.
At the edge of the village, Old Man Mueller sat in his kitchen, trying to repair the mantel clock his wife asked him to fix several years before her death. He happened to glance out the window in time to see his ancient barn collapse to the ground. He noted that it swayed slightly before it fell, and when it fell, it went fast.
“Hot ding!” he muttered aloud, glad to be spared the aggravation of taking it down himself. “Now,” he said to the furious roar outside, “if you’d stack th’ boards, I’d be much obliged.”
The villagers emerged into the sunshine that
followed, dazzled by the spectacular beauty of the storm’s aftermath, which seemed in direct proportion to its violence.
The mountain ridges appeared etched in glass, set against clear, perfectly blue skies from horizon to horizon.
At Fernbank, a bumper crop of crisp, tart cooking apples lay on the orchard floor, ready to be gathered into local sacks. The storm had done the picking, and not a single ladder would be needed for the job.
“You see,” said Jena Ivey, “there’s always two sides to everything!” Jena had closed Mitford Blossoms to run up to Fernbank and gather apples, having promised to bake pies for the Bane just three days hence.
“But,” said another apple gatherer, “the autumn color won’t be worth two cents. The storm took all the leaves!”
“Whatever,” sighed Jena, who thought some people were mighty hard to please.
Balmy. Like spring. It was that glad fifth season called Indian summer, which came only on the rarest occasions.
He was doing his duties, he was going his rounds, he was poking his nose into everybody’s business. How else could a priest know what was happening?
He rang the Bolicks. “Esther? How’s it going?”
“I’d kill Gene Bolick if I could catch him, that’s how it’s goin’!”
“What now?”
“Haven’t I been bakin’ since the bloomin’ Boer War, tryin’ to get ready for Friday? And didn’t I tell him, I said, ‘Gene, don’t you mess with these cookies, there’s three hundred cookies I just baked, and I’m puttin’ ’em in these two-gallon freezer bags this minute, so you’ll keep your paws off.’ Well, I zipped up those bags and stacked ’em in th’ freezer and first thing you know, I came home last night and who was sittin’ at the table with his head stuck in one of those two-gallon bags, goin’ at it like a fox in a henhouse? I ask you!”
“You don’t mean it!”
“Frozen hard as bricks and him hammerin’ down on those cookies like they’d just come out of th’ oven.”
“Aha.”
“It’s a desperate man who’ll do a trick like that.”
“I agree. But try to forgive him,” he said, knowing that Gene Bolick had not had a cookie to call his own since this whole event began brewing several months ago.
He rang off, assuring her that he’d do his part on Friday, down in the trenches with the rest of the troops.
He flipped quickly through the Muse, looking for another batch of Stickin’ ads.
“Looks like Esther’s pullin’ ahead,” said J.C., totally convinced that his small-space ad idea had done the trick. It was generally agreed that the full page of Mack Stroupe’s face had been a dire mistake by the other camp. It was one thing to look at Mack’s mug on a billboard, but somehow seeing it right under your nose had been a definite turnoff, according to the buzz around town.
Along with a growing number of others, the rector was beginning to feel upbeat about the outcome of the election just one month away. The wife of a deacon at First Baptist had planned a preelection Stickin’ With Esther tea, and the mayor would also be riding down Main Street in a fire truck during a parade for Fire Awareness Day.
Things were definitely looking up.
Coming into the kitchen to make a pot of tea, he noted that Violet had descended from her penthouse atop the refrigerator and was curled up on his dog’s bed under the table.
Thank God Barnabas was coming home on Saturday, the day after the Bane. Hal had kept him at Meadowgate nearly a month, just in case.
He’d still have the splint on for a couple of weeks, but the chest wrap had come off. The job of healing could be finished up neatly by close confinement for five or six months, with no running, chasing, or stick-fetching.
“There’s certainly a lot of hilarity going on in my house,” said Cynthia. She stood at the kitchen door, her head cocked to one side.
“What do you mean?”
She listened intently, as if to the music of the spheres. “Somebody’s laughing!”
“What’s wrong with laughter?”
She didn’t answer, but came and stood by the stove, her brow furrowed, as he put the kettle on.
“Elton used six blocks t’ build a model of a staircase that has three steps . . .” Harley’s voice drifted up to the kitchen.
“Poor Harley,” said Cynthia. “I hope he makes an A this time.”
“That B-minus cut him to the quick.”
“I think Lace is too hard on him.”
“And you’re too soft! Delivering his breakfast downstairs on a tray, for Pete’s sake.”
“You’re jealous because I don’t deliver yours, much less on a tray, but then, dear fellow, you have never, ever once cleaned out and organized my attic so that it looks better than my studio!”
“True.”
“Nor have you ever hauled the detritus from said cleanup to the Bane, and brought me back a form which makes it all tax deductible.” She turned and went quickly to the door.
“Good Lord, Timothy! Listen!”
He heard a woman’s hysterical laughter coming from the little house next door.
They went out to the back stoop. The high-pitched laughter continued, followed by a crash that sounded like breaking glass.
“What on earth?” she asked. Her alarm was evident.
“I’ll go and see.” He didn’t want to go and see; he didn’t want anything out of the ordinary to be going on next door.
He darted through the hedge and up the dark steps to the screen door. He looked into Cynthia’s kitchen and saw Pauline Barlowe standing at the sink. She was throwing up.
“Pauline,” he said.
She retched into the sink again, then turned and stared toward the door, her eyes swollen, wiping her mouth.
“What?” she said. Her voice was cold, coarse; the stench of warm bile and alcohol permeated the room.
He opened the door and went in. “What’s going on?” He tried to keep his voice free of anger, tried to make it a simple question, but failed.
“Ask y’r big high an’ mighty in there what’s goin’ on, and if you find out, let me know, that’s what I’ve been tryin’ to do, is figure out what’s goin’ on.”
She laughed suddenly and sank to the floor, leaning against the cabinets.
He walked down the hall and into the living room, where Buck Leeper sat in a Queen Anne chair, asleep and snoring, an empty vodka bottle on the lamp table and a glass on the floor at his feet.
He cleaned the kitchen and swept up a broken glass on the back stoop, while Pauline sat in a chair with her head in her hands. He sensed that she was crying, though she made no sound. Then he turned off the downstairs lights, except for the lamp in the living room and the light in the hallway. Buck didn’t stir and he didn’t wake him. He would deal with this tomorrow.
He drove Pauline home and they sat in the car in front of the house where her father, son, and daughter were sleeping.
The hilarity and weeping had passed; she was silent as a stone, her face turned away from him.
“We need to talk,” he said.
She nodded.
“Sunday afternoon, if you can.”
She nodded again. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
He got out of the car and opened her door and helped her up the sidewalk. The temperature had dropped considerably and she was shivering in a sleeveless dress. “Will you wake anyone?”
“Don’t worry,” she said, still avoiding his gaze. “I won’t let nobody see me like this.”
When he came in from the garage, Cynthia met him in the hallway.
“It’s Esther!” she said. “She had an accident, and they say it looks bad. They want you to come to the hospital at once!”
Esther! He raced to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, took his jacket off the hook in the kitchen, and once again backed the Buick out of the garage, tires screeching.
There were many ways to lose an election. He prayed to God this wasn’t one of them.
?
??What happened?” he asked Nurse Kennedy in the hospital corridor.
“She fell off a ladder, broke her left wrist, broke the right elbow, and . . .” Nurse Kennedy shook her head.
“And what?”
“Fractured her jaw. Dr. Harper is wiring her mouth shut as we speak.”
“Good Lord!”
“But she’ll be fine.”
“Be fine? How could anybody be fine with two broken limbs and her mouth wired shut?”
“It happens, Father.” Nurse Kennedy sighed and continued down the hall.
He wound his way along the corridor to the waiting room, where Gene Bolick sat on a Danish modern sofa in shock.
“Where’s Ray?” he asked Gene. Why wasn’t Ray Cunningham here? Didn’t he know his wife had had a terrible accident?
“Ray who?” queried Gene, looking stupefied.
“Esther’s husband!”
“I’m Esther’s husband,” said Gene, as plainly as he knew how.
“You mean . . . you mean, the mayor didn’t fall off a ladder?”
“I don’t know about th’ mayor, but Esther sure did, and it busted her up pretty bad.” He appeared disconsolate.
“Good heavens, Gene, I’m sorry. Terribly sorry.” He sat beside his parishioner on the sofa. “How is she?”
“Not so good, if you ask me. She was down at th’ parish hall on a ladder, puttin’ up signs—you know, Kitchen Goods, Clothing Items, such as that, and went to step down and . . .” Gene lifted his hands.
“And crashed.”
“Where is everybody?” Usually, when someone was rushed to the hospital in Mitford, a whole gaggle of friends and family showed up to pray, make a run on the vending machines, and rip recipes from outdated issues of Southern Living.
“They’re down at th’ parish hall, I reckon, where they’ve been for th’ last forty-eight hours.”
“I’ll get the prayer chain going,” said the rector. He sped along the hall to the phone, where he called his wife to put the chain in motion.